Ash Falls

by Warren Read

  “Just got off work.” She nodded back to the motel.

  “You work for Melvin?” Hank waved her in. “Hell. You deserve a ride home.”

  She climbed in and drew the seatbelt over her lap, then stretched her hands over the defroster vent to catch the warm air. “I sure appreciate this,” she said. “It’s so damn cold out there I thought my fingers were gonna fall off.” She kept her teeth together when she talked, and Hank thought it was an odd thing, but perhaps it was because of the chill.

  He said, “My place is just past the big clear cut.”

  She said, “Just a little bit on this side of me. I’m up at North Fork Road.”

  More than a little bit, Hank thought to himself. The North Fork was a good eight miles past his gate. He hesitated, and she said, “I can give you a couple bucks for gas.”

  Hank settled back in his seat and worked the pedals. “That’s not called for,” he said. He let out the clutch too fast, and the pickup leapt from the shoulder out onto the roadway. She grabbed hold of the dashboard, her fingernails scraping the metal.

  “Sorry about that,” he said. “This new clutch still has me a little whipped.”

  He tapped his boot to the highbeams and opened up the throttle. In minutes, they were climbing the mountain, heading into thick clouds of feathery hemlock and red cedar boughs. His lights panned the blacktop, reflecting the oncoming road delineators. Every hundred yards or so a mouse or a vole would appear from the shoulder and dart into his path. Sometimes it would make it to the other side, sometimes not.

  She laughed. “That is some crazy shit.”

  “What’s that?”

  “These little guys. The mice. They got all night to cross over. But the second a car comes and the headlights hit the road—Bam. Off they go.”

  Another one darted from the shrubs, scurrying over the roadway. It halted for a second, backtracked, then took off for the opposite side again. Hank drove straight over it, a faint tick under his tires.

  “See?” she said. “I just don’t get it.”

  “Well,” Hank said. “They’re in a panic. They’re in the bushes; they can’t see a damned thing. They think something’s coming. They sense the light. It terrifies them. Since they don’t know which way is up, they run out in the open, where it looks the safest.”

  “Well, looks can be deceiving.”

  Hank smiled and said, “Yes, they can be.” He turned the heater down a notch and adjusted the rearview mirror. From the edge of his sight, he could see her staring at him. He looked over, and she raised her eyebrows.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” she said. She leaned her back against the window and grinned at him through sugar cube teeth. “Roxanne Dugard. Ash Falls, class of ‘64.”

  Hank slid closer to his door. This kind of thing happened too often, an out of the blue recognition, some student’s mother or father, and him never knowing if there was a statement of appreciation coming or an ass-chewing for a failing grade.

  “Give me a minute,” he said. “How were you so sure it was me?”

  “I wouldn’t have gotten in your truck if I wasn’t. Well, probably not, anyway.” She took out a pack of Winstons and tapped them against the palm of her hand. “Care if I smoke? I’ll crack the window.”

  She punched in the cigarette lighter and slid one from the pack. “It’s okay if you don’t remember me. It was a long time ago.” She rubbed at the crease between her eyes, seemingly deep in thought. “Be twenty years,” she said. “Jesus. You gave me and Doreen Finkbeiner after-school detention for calling that Chinese girl a gook.” The lighter popped out, and she retrieved it, and pressed it to the tip of her cigarette. Her cheeks collapsed, and her skeletal face disappeared behind a veil of smoke.

  “It’s probably good you don’t remember,” she said. “Otherwise you’d have never stopped.” She leaned her hand to the window and held the cherry near the opening. “You probably would’ve run my ass over instead. I was kind of a bitch back then.”

  “Well, it looks like you turned out fine. Whatever the outcome of the detention was.”

  “Yeah,” she laughed. Her teeth pressed together when she did this. “We never showed up.” She nodded and took another drag from her smoke. “But I am doing okay, all things considered. Got a boyfriend. He’s in treatment right now, but he’s supposed to be done in a couple weeks. We got a decent place by the river. I’m working steady there at the Sleep Inn. It’s a shit job, but it’s work, and these days that counts for something.”

  “Yes it does.”

  It figures, Hank thought. Bounce this girl from the classroom twenty years ago and she winds up right back in his stead, mouth running all over his cab like a busted faucet. He turned up the radio, and when the slow tide of slide guitar rolled from the speakers he asked her if she liked country or if she wanted to hear something else.

  “You know,” she said. “I always wondered about something. I wanna ask you, but you gotta promise you won’t get all mad and throw me out.”

  “I promise not to throw you out, but that’s it. What do you want to ask me?”

  She took a deep drag and blew it from the side of her mouth, out the window. “I just always wondered what the deal was with you and that nurse.”

  Hank lifted his arm to take a look at the speedometer. He gave the gas a little more weight.

  She said, “I got a little cousin, well, he ain’t so little anymore. His name’s Cal. Anyway, Cal used to run with Eugene Henry back in the day, who I know is your nephew. It was always the story from Eugene that you and that nurse were having this heavy thing. And he said that when this gal’s husband found out about it, he went crazy. And that’s why all that shit went down at the fairgrounds.”

  “Eugene told you all this?”

  “Not personally, no. I said my little cousin used to run with him. But then I asked Eugene’s wife Marcelle, who works with me at the motel, and she said that wasn’t it at all. She told me that Eugene said it was about that kid of theirs, that Ricky said something to him, or about him. And the dad, he just snapped like a rubber band.”

  Hank turned down the radio. “She said it was about Patrick?”

  “Well, she said that, but I wouldn’t take it as gospel. Marcelle, she’s her own piece or work, but that’s a conversation for another time. Anyway, it just always had me wondering is all.”

  “Yeah, well there’s a lot of things in this world that don’t make sense,” Hank said. His voice began to tremor and he held it in place before speaking again. “Like the fact that the people in this damned town have to pick apart every goddamned detail until it looks like someone threw a hand grenade into it. Just leave things the hell alone, I say.”

  Roxanne shook her head and sucked another drag from her cigarette, then flicked the remaining stub out the window. She blew out, the silver train sucked through the gap.

  “Don’t have an aneurism over it,” she said, cranking the window closed. “That was a big deal, and don’t pretend that it wasn’t. Lots of people knew you, and they knew that lady, too. And Ricky. And hell, everybody and their mother knows that fucking Eugene Henry, and he was right there in the middle of it all. No, it was a huge deal. Still is, like it or not.”

  The highway opened up, where the asphalt runway reached uphill to Colby Ridge, the southern edge of the Weyerhaeuser seed boundary. This was the halfway point between Ash Falls and Hank’s property. A pair of lights drifted down the slope toward him, the only other vehicle Hank had seen so far on the mountain. At the base of the ridge, the lights suddenly turned off the road, disappearing from view.

  The base of Colby Ridge was where the old Granite Quarry service road switched back from the highway. In a few months, when spring arrived, this would be the spot to watch as cars braked without notice and turned in, never a signal to warn of the last minute decision. Convoys of pickups would snake in and out, kids stacked in the beds, howling like wolves and flashing ridiculous signs with their fingers, likely obscene. Bu
t now, here in November, with the pond frozen but too thin for skating, nobody went up there.

  Roxanne drew the zipper down from her parka, and Hank looked over at the sound. She had turned in her seat to face him. She was wearing a loose smock beneath the jacket, and he could see the lacy pattern of her bra breaking through the fabric.

  “You heard he’s out, right?” Even as he heard his own voice it didn’t make sense to Hank, that he should throw Bobbie out of the conversation only to replace her with Ernie. But it was the track his mind took, and he was stuck with it now. He looked back to the road and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.

  “Who? Not the crutch guy.”

  “Yeah, the crutch guy.”

  “No shit. When?”

  “About a month ago.”

  “A whole month? That fucking Marcelle. She never said one word to me about it.” Roxanne shook her head and glared out the window. “See if I tell her another goddamned thing.”

  Hank said, “Well, everyone’s on edge. Thinking he might come back.”

  She spit a puff of air from her lips. “Shit, he ain’t coming back.” She furrowed her brow and jerked her bony chin back.

  “You think not?”

  “I know not. Come on. If the guy’s got half a brain, he’ll leave this whole corner of the country behind. Get his ass to L.A., or Mexico, or someplace like that.”

  When Hank’s drive came into view, he knew something was wrong. The gleam of the metal gate that always peeked from the dogwood reach wasn’t there. And there was a sense in his core, nothing he could explain if he were asked. A kind of pressure working from the center outward, holding heavy just behind his skin. As he got closer to his drive, he let off the gas pedal.

  “That don’t look good,” he said. He pulled off the road and came to a stop at the entrance.

  The gate was open, swung to the trees, its rusty chain hanging loose like entrails, tangled among the ferns. On the ground near the post lay a two-inch padlock, the bolt snapped clean in half.

  He heaved a deep sigh and ran his hand over his face. He popped the gearshift to neutral and let off the clutch, then looked over to Roxanne.

  “I ought to run you home first.” He said this, but made no move to do so.

  She was turned toward him, with her back against the door. Something about the way she looked weakened him, compressed his body, and drew his skin from his clothes. Perhaps she thought he was a coward, too afraid to face what lay at the end of the drive. Maybe she just wanted him to take a stand and make a decision.

  He said, “You want me to take you home now?”

  “I guess,” she said. “I can stick around if you want, though. Make sure everything’s okay.”

  “I don’t want to put you at risk.”

  She shook her hair from her face and reached up, patting the stock of the rifle that was bolted to the rack over their heads. “Isn’t that what this is for?” she said.

  Hank considered that she smiled as she hooked her hand over the butt, not like it was something dangerous and unpredictable, but a tool she would and could use if she had to. That she had shot a gun before was a likely assumption, since she held onto that thing with a confidence unlike any he’d ever had. But what kind of a man was he to even suggest dragging a woman into his mess?

  “To be honest,” he said, “I’m reluctant to go down this drive. Guess that makes me something of a coward.”

  “No, it makes you normal. You want to turn back? We could go back into town. Or we could drive up to my place. You could call the sheriff from there.”

  “I’d just as soon not.” He snapped on the dome light and took the rifle from behind her head. “Can you go in there and grab the cartridges?” he asked, nodding at the glove compartment.

  She reached in without a word and took out a small box of Remingtons. It had been there for a year, unopened, and he took it from her, and the cardboard fought against his jittery fingers as he pulled one, then another shell from the tidy array, and he was painfully aware of his clumsiness in front of her. As he fumbled with them something caught his eye. He looked down the drive, at a small bit of movement caught in the beam of his headlights.

  “That dog yours?” Roxanne said.

  It was Toby. He paced frantically from shrub to shrub, ears flattened against his head, his tail tucked stiffly between his haunches. Toby had always been a porch greeter. Hank pushed the cartridge into the chamber and slid the bolt back. He swung open the door and gave a whistle. The dog’s ears perked up, and he came running to the truck, leapt over Hank’s legs onto the passenger side, and coiled himself on the floor at Roxanne’s feet.

  They rolled forward at a snail’s pace, rifle lain across Hank’s lap, the barrel nosed through the open window. Even in normal circumstances Hank felt a certain unease when coming upon his house at night. Headlights on a forested drive always brought out creatures that did and did not exist in his world. Naked salmonberry branches reached out from either side like giant blooms of electricity, while the fissured trunks of young hemlocks lurked ominously in the deep shadows of the understory. He pulled back from the trigger and worked the cramp out of his finger.

  They came to a stop some yards from his house and took in the scene, bathed in yellow spotlight. Yard tools had been left on the porch, leaning against the shingles—his hard rake, the digging shovel, and the transfer shovel. A rotting pumpkin sat under the front window. His rattan chair faced the east. At the center of it all, his front door hung by a single hinge, blocking the doorway at a crippled angle. The frame was split, white alder shards poking out like splintered bones.

  “Oh you got broke into all right,” Roxanne said. “That’s the shits. Rudy and I had two break-ins in the last year alone. But I guess that’s the risk you take living in paradise.”

  They sat there, just the two of them, and the dog panting on the floor. Hank’s window was down and the air was taut and cold and had that crystalline scent that comes only from water that spills from the mountain. Hank listened, straining to hear the noises beneath Toby’s breathing, but there was nothing except the flow of the river and the occasional tumbling of a rock in the current.

  “Doesn’t look like anyone’s here,” he said.

  “Probably not.” She pulled on the door handle and the dome light blazed the cab. Dropping a foot to the running board she said, “Let’s leave the headlights on till we get inside.”

  The walk from his pickup to his porch was a mile. Every rock dug through the soles of his boots, every whisper of wind through the understory raked over his nerves. He held the butt of the rifle against his hip and reached around through the open doorway to flip the lights.

  The first thing to hit him was the mottled pool of agates, olivine, and quartz that were fanned across the floor. It was a kind of collection, these minerals that he’d collected along the riverbed, the only bit of silliness with which he indulged himself. The pickle jar that had housed them lay broken on the hardwood, shards reaching up like claws. Through to the kitchen he could see canisters, boxes, cupboard doors. Anything that could hold something was inverted or opened or emptied. Countertops were painted with a mixture of flour and sugar and cornmeal, washed over the edge onto the linoleum floor.

  Hank kicked a path through sofa pillows and books and reams and reams of paper, and as he marched through the room, to the rear of the house, he couldn’t make sense of the incredible amount of shit that had found its way from bookcases and desktops and side tables onto his floor. Open books, sharpened pencils and unopened envelopes covered the floor, while dozens of small twigs, cloaked in puffs of pale green moss, and shelf fungus, and crusted pine cones—things that had seemed just right on the shelves now looked as if they had been swept in by a heavy storm.

  In the cramped space of the pantry, sauce jars and soup cans and cereal boxes littered the floor, a few broken but most lying peacefully against the cedar backboard that had been successfully jimmied from its place behind the dry foods.
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br />   His entire stock was gone, every last jar. It was a good three thousand dollars worth of medicine, maybe more, plus a couple grand in cash—several weeks worth of road trips and coffee table dealings. He tipped his forehead to the door, and his mind spun through a dozen possibilities, none of which had a chance of fixing this mess. It wasn’t so much the money and the waiting clients, though they were immediate problems that definitely needed solving. It was the violation, the savage rape of his home. The only thing that kept him from putting his fist through the wall was the sheer weight of shame and disgust that glued his arms to his sides. He had been warned. They’d all been hit before, every single grower and dealer, city or county. But he had been above it all, pretending that his spot carved in the side of the mountain would keep him immune. But the truth was there was no way to do it, no way to build a fence strong enough, and he knew that. He kicked at the cedar panel, driving it into a pile of boxes.

  “Everything okay back there?”

  “It’s fine,” he said. “What are you doing?”

  “Just cleaning up some.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” he called out.

  “Busman’s holiday,” she said. “It’s fine. Unless you want to keep it for the cops to look over.”

  Hank pulled the backboard from the rubble and reengaged it into the wall. He took the jars and cans and stacked them along the shelves, conveying a sense of normalcy. He kicked crescents of glass through mounds of rice.

  “Maybe I’ll call him later,” Hank lied. “I just want to pull my head together first.”

  “You think it was the crutch guy?” She was picking the glass from the floor and stacking it in her hand. “Maybe I was wrong about him not coming back.”

  Hank put the last of the boxes on the shelves and pulled the chain for the bare bulb. He went to the kitchen, closing the pantry door behind him.

  “No,” he said. “It wasn’t Ernie.”