Well, that was how Mary imagined it from the news she heard at the dinner table. In fact, her mother insisted that Gerry liked it up there in the middle of nowhere, had friends, and didn't miss the money or the success that he'd once hoped for.
Driving up in the bus, however, Mary couldn't see it that way. Here it would be an event if a cat crossed the road, she thought, looking out the window at the remains of an old post office, the tatty flag outside swinging listlessly in a cold breeze, the columns of its once fancy wooden portico flaking green paint into the wind. A few yards further on, outside a bar called The Blue Moon, a yellowed sign advertised a Saturday clam bake to a broken-down old Chevy that had died next to it.
Clam bakes. For God's sake. Everything about these mountains was creepy. The places were choked with weeds and man-made remains: machinery rusted in stacks, tractors sank into the fields they'd once worked, farmhouses slumped into the earth, tiles, tires, old iron, gut lengths of electric cable, rubble, kids' toys, plastic containers, and household rubbish sat everywhere in hillocks, grave mounds for the spirit of the coal industry. She couldn't stand looking at it all. What a mess. What a God-awful, pitiful, shit heap. And in its midst, scratches of life—a hair salon, a car wash. A clam bake. Pennsylvania and Transylvania had more in common than a few syllables.
In the valley below the place with the post office, which once had been pretty, the scars of old rough-cut clearance were growing new coats of healthy trees. A little white church and a few headstones stood alone there, overlooking the wealth of empty silence in a long, narrow valley. Nobody was about. Mary hoped that Gerry would get to rest somewhere like that, decent and forgotten. She wanted to forget him and intended to, instantly, as soon as the return bus hit Pittsburgh.
She glanced at Shelagh, who was humming the aimless repeated phrase of a chart song, her dreamy gaze focused inwardly on Mack, no doubt; Mack of the surveyor's building downtown, who had to stay in the office over the weekend and was going to pay for their wedding on a loan he'd work off for the next three years. Mack and Shelagh were going to have children (raise a family, as Shelagh put it) and settle down to obscure deaths on carefully paid-up Medical Plans, which Mack would have already set in place at some pathetic weekly rate of pay under the names Mr. and Mrs. M. Smith. Shelagh had Gerry stamped in her soul.
Mary looked at her sister with suppressed anger and resentment, with a pity that robbed her of the power of speech. She felt the same when she looked at her mother, her father, their house and their neighbourhood with its credit-card debt and its small-time dreams and its grinding sense of dead ends, as though everyone who'd come to live there was the losing player in a game where they'd never figured out the rules. She wanted to forget them all.
The bus came to a halt at last with a toad's-death croak of brakes, and Mary and Shelagh stepped out for the first time onto the steaming hot asphalt of Centralia, Pennsylvania. The journey had taken almost a day and they were exhausted and aching, but they forgot that in the first moment that they set eyes on the place: Centralia had burned out, big-style and long ago, and it was still burning.
Aware of the danger it was in, the bus hastily turned around and left them on the town's edge, where a large yellow sign advised: Public Notice—Danger from Subsidence and Toxic Gases, State Liability Ends Past This Point. Two black cars were parked a little further along beside an empty space where the church of St. Ignatius had stood, before it was torn down for its own safety. Anxiously waiting were the rest of the family, who'd travelled up to stay for a few days, and the priest. Mary saw them jigging from foot to foot on the scalding earth, their figures mere shadows wreathed in flitting smoke as the listless breeze sent sulphur vapour and other poisons on a tour of the town.
There were no buildings at all. Mary looked across the cracked tarmac and then across a narrow slot of grass, pitted with holes where smoke and steam rose. The grass was nearly all dead. By the church's old site the blackened and bleached trunks of birches leaned sideways in all directions and Mary saw that the gravestones had nearly all fallen and been absorbed into the fire below.
She knew then that she could do whatever she wanted in her life and not have to feel guilty. The dues had already been paid in this wasteland through the immolated lives of the living dead.
Shelagh took a tentative step towards the others and Mary followed her into the stinking steam. She tucked her face behind her coat collar, pretending not to like the egg-reeking smell but really hiding the fact from the others that she was grinning fiercely from ear to ear.
After the very brief ceremony, and the subsequent undignified and hasty exit from hell, Mary found herself taking a liking to the area, although her plans to go skiing and whitewater rafting there would never come to anything. At the lawyer's offices in Mount Carmel she found to her surprise that Gerry had left her something personal, something of his own, besides the insurance and compensation payouts from the gas company that were going to send her to college. She received it by post a few days later on her return to Charlottesville—a small, lead-crystal replica of the space shuttle Columbia, the one and only remaining element of Gerry's once-powerful ambition.
She kept it close always.
Ian was a casual believer leading a relatively unexamined life. He attended church three times, once when he was christened, once when he was married, and at his parents' funeral. His own small family of self, wife Dervla, and daughter Christine struggled most of the time against debts for the car and the house and a yearly holiday. But they didn't struggle too hard and by the time he was forty Ian had paid off most of his troubles except for a vague dissatisfaction with life that religion might palliate but wouldn't solve. He didn't want a sop for his soul. He wanted something more permanent and genuine. Sometimes he lay awake as Dervla snored quietly at his side, thinking, trying to figure out if there was more to life than market-town living somewhere out beyond the galactic rim of Halifax, Huddersfield, Batley, and Dewsbury where his building work took him on regular tours of lives like his own.
Ian drank a bit. He liked an occasion. He wanted to find something that he could only describe as “grand.” “Grand” was a day out at the seaside of his boyhood, kite in hand on the beach, running in the thin surf and splashing his legs with icy salt water as the kite string tugged him on, up, towards the sky.
Dervla watched television. Soaps mostly. She had a life inside the box, Ian always said. He'd come in from work and find her glued to it, making tea or ironing, her movements dreamy, remote-controlled. He couldn't get into that stuff. It was simply more of the same that he'd already had. House and car, buy the shopping, out with the lads on Friday and Saturday, rugby on the Sunday, a fortnight in Lanzarote, watching his belly grow year after year, inch by inch, keeping the books and putting up and pulling down pieces of homes; he tried to understand what it meant, because it had to mean something.
Christine liked to read. When Dervla watched the screen Christine had her face stuck between the pages, pushing her glasses up her nose with regular, precise movements of her index finger every two or three minutes. She told him all about her books. Fairies and elves, pixies and witches, some boy who was a wizard and had adventures at school. Ian didn't understand her either, although he thought he understood that both of them, each in their own way, was trying to fill in that vague empty place inside, the one they'd brought with them from wherever they came from, the one that never had quite enough.
When he was a lad Ian had wanted to be an astronaut, or fly a hang-glider—something that took you out there where freedom was. One wet Wednesday night, when Dervla was at her sister's, he saw a documentary on climbing Everest without oxygen. A reporter asked the man, “Why did you go up there to die?”
Dervla would say that.
“I didn't, I went up there to live.”
Ian wanted to be the person who would say that. As soon as he heard it said, he knew that the man on the mountain was filling up the dissatisfaction with real, solid stuff. Ia
n wanted to be a better, braver, more useful person. Someone who could say, “I have lived.”
Meanwhile, outside in the rain, the gales were only warming up to their night's performance, lashing the windows and bending his cypresses into sickles of writhing green. Tonight a slate will break and slip.
Tomorrow Ian will get out the ladders and climb up to fix it. The rain will make the slates and their slimy load of lime-tree sap as slippery as an ice rink.
Ian's used to roofs. But tomorrow he'll be thinking about climbing Everest as he reaches the top of the ladder and tests the guttering's mettle before trusting his feet to the tiles. The first slip is the failure of a crampon in the ice. Has he the resolve to continue in such harsh conditions? The camera crew and narrator standing behind him relay their feeble doubts to the awestruck audiences in a million homes. Ian sticks to the task.
The audience gasp at his daring.
As Ian places the slate and reaches for a new pin to hold it down, he's really fixing a bucking tent to the sheer North Face in a howling gale. Mallory's ghost has risen from its rocky cairn to give Ian a thump on the back for his courage in the teeth of the storm.
As it happens, however, Ian will place a foot on a mossy chunk stuck between two slates, lean down, and then feel a huge crevasse open up beneath him.
As he falls he'll look up and think, “I wish I—”
When he was five, his mother gave him a hat with a woolly tassel.
When his heart beat, the tassel moved.
In the corner of his eye he saw its shadow.
Wiggle. Wiggle.
In his ear, sheltered by the hat, he heard a sound very faint. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.
Ba-dum. Wiggle.
He laughed. He could see his heart beat.
All day, with the hat on, he kept this power.
At night the hat was put away in the closet in the hall.
At night he didn't see the tassel's shadow.
He didn't hear his heart.
He wondered if you were dead at night and alive in the day.
When he heard a story about vampires he saw they were the opposite.
They were Un-Dead. That made him the Dead.
The kitchen knife made a sound inside his skin like nails on a blackboard.
He didn't hear it with his ears, but with his mind.
The blood that came out made a sound, too, like the sea.
Deep inside it he could hear his heart. Ba-dum.
That was a huge relief.
They stitched him up into silence.
The quiet of enforced silence built like a distant wave.
Eventually he learned to silence himself, hiding in the closet like his hat.
Ha ha. That was a joke.
Funny Dan.
He looked for love.
He found it not.
He looked for love.
He found it not.
He looked…
Fuck this for a game of soldiers.
One day, a year later, Dan saw a vampire in the street.
He was old and hideous with age and neglect, beautiful as he glittered with his crisp shell of overnight frost. He had curled up beneath a bridge, after trying to cover himself in newspaper and boxes, like the mice at the pet shop. He had a hat on, quite a nice one, that some kind person had given him. It had five long tassels of gold, brassy and faintly ridiculous, like the Three Kings get to wear in a nativity play.
The tassels moved in the wind, across the man's crystalline, rat-coloured cheeks. Dan heard the vampire's Un-dead heart in the wind making a sound like cars whooshing past on a wet road. It sighed with the burden of things unsaid and undone, ashamed of itself.
He decided to do something to help. At the Careers Centre they offered courses to tempt the unwary into new lines of work. Dan chose psychiatric nurse. It had a long training time, and college meant he could leave home.
The Universe rewards a good deed. His mother told him so. His father, who spent his life building cars on a production line as an overseer of robots, died of a heart attack in the pub when he was fifty-two, taking part in a steak-eating competition where you could win a tray of uncooked meat, big as a butcher's window, to take home. His last words for posterity—“Another sausage!”
Dan, remembering a broken arm, the closet, and too many clouts to count, figured his mother was right.
White Horse woke up in the middle of the night, choking on smoke. She opened her eyes and the hot, searing pain started tears running down her face. It was almost a relief. She'd been expecting something bad to come her way ever since she'd broken into that car in town. At last it had happened and she could deal with it.
She groped around in the ink-dark familiarity of her bedroom, and for the first time thought she was lucky to have had no electricity for a month—she knew her house and she could walk through it without sight. She found her bag first, just beneath her hand where she always left it. Inside it the machine she'd stolen from the car clunked heavily against her wallet and the snaplock holder with her Pad inside it. At the end of the bed she found her jeans, put them on, and slid her feet into her boots. Her jean-jacket was on the back of the hardwood chair. Coughing, she wriggled into it, on hands and knees, her face an inch from the floor as she crawled towards the door. She kept her face in the zone that was supposed to be less smoky and reached out for the handle but when her fingertips made contact with the thick wood panel the heat seared her skin. Now she could hear the fire, as well as smell it. From the narrow crack below the door a roaring, white-noise sound came, like the aftermath of an explosion, and as she hesitated there, she both heard and felt a part of the first floor crack and begin to give way.
Without warning she was sick, violently, and her next intake of breath was pure poison. She backed up as fast as she could and hauled herself over the bed to the window. The drop wouldn't be too bad, down into her yard grass, although the house was higher on this side where the land fell away into a dip.
Opening the window gave her a few moments to breathe. She couldn't stop coughing. It felt like the house had come loose from the ground and started to spin and buck, like a boat, but she was still moving. She got one leg over the frame, then the other. Her bag stuck, catching on the window lock. A gust of hot air and ash plumed up, from the outside this time, engulfing her in orange sparks. Sharp pain scored across her hands where it touched her and in surprise and fear she yanked the strap hard. It came loose, dislodging her, and she was only spared a head-first plunge to her death when the seat of her jeans snagged and ripped on the catch. She hung helpless for a second, thankful for the rivets and seams cutting into her flesh, and then began, very cautiously, to try and lever herself free.
As she wrestled with the tough material that was stopping her from falling free, she thought she heard someone outside shouting and crying, doing some kind of wild dance in her vegetable patch. Her head was spinning. The cloth gave suddenly and she slipped down, grating the front of her body against the sill, gasping with the unfair shock of this new pain in her breasts and ribs.
Deep within the house's old, dry innards, a fundamental element surrendered to the flames. She felt the wall and her window frame sway slowly inwards and heard the huge, crashing noise of the roof falling.
Gulping air, her hands shaking, White Horse tossed the bag out into the night. Her eyes streamed and seemed to bleed. She couldn't see anything properly. The air was thick as she pushed out with all her might, away from the house and into midair and the spiral of yellow and orange sparks.
She had her knees bent for the impact-and-roll but it was over before she expected. Her feet met the ground with the solid impact of two concrete blocks. Shooting pains darted into her knees and hips as she rolled, crying out, onto the cold earth. As she panted, trying to get her breath back to shout for help, she realized there was a strange smell all around her and that she was wet—soaking, in fact.
She tried to yell, but her voice was empty. Instead of her usual tough holler a
tiny frog croak came out of her throat, dislodged a bubble of spit, and scraped her gullet so sharply it felt as though a cat was clawing it. But someone had heard her.
Another voice from somewhere in the swirling clouds of smoke said her name in familiar Cheyenne.
“Vohpe'hame'e! I see you. Little devil. Get your butt out here and burn!”
White Horse couldn't recognize the voice, but she understood what it meant by the wet grass that wasn't alight yet and the smell of gasoline all over her.
A fear so deep it made her bones hurt shot through her. Gasping and trying not to breathe, but coughing all the time, red coughs of agony, she searched desperately for her bag. She had to get it. The machine, her evidence, was inside it. She looked everywhere, holding her eyes open in the stinging wind, but all she could see was a tiny pinprick, like a dying star, that she knew was the powerful beam of Red Hat's garage light. She was nearly blind.
Footsteps, heavy and with a kind of drunken doggedness, came closer. She heard them. She felt the tremor in the ground, muffled by the dying spasms of the house.
“At last!” said the voice. It was turned in and gargling on itself so it was an inside-out thing. “There you are!”
White Horse looked up at the same moment her right hand found the bulky shape of her bag. A shambling figure, silhouetted against the glare of the fire, veiled in drifts of heavy, poisonous smoke, stood in bearlike calm over her, its arms half spread.
Mappa Mundi Page 4
