by Julia Keller
During the day you could stare at the bottles for as long as you liked, and nobody thought you were coyly avoiding eye contact with some potential hookup. Nobody thought it was a ploy.
She didn’t order a drink. She almost never did. She wasn’t an alcoholic; that wasn’t what stopped her. She disliked the sensation of alcohol moving hotly through her body, turning the hard parts of her into something softer, more pliable. She wanted to stay hard.
The bartender—at midday it was usually Jerry Snell—had a small, harmless crush on her, which she knew about but would never speak of, knowing that he wouldn’t, either. Their ritual was this: She paid for her first Diet Coke. After that he topped her off with no charge. If the Creek’s owner, Charlie Blunden, had ever caught him doing that Jerry would have been in big trouble. Blunden was a notorious skinflint, and the thought of missing out on a couple of bucks from Shirley Dolan—from anybody—would have sent him over the edge. Jerry risked it, though, because he liked Shirley’s company, mostly silent as it was.
“Hey,” Jerry said. She had just settled onto her regular stool. Hooked her heels. Settled in.
“Hey.”
Shirley waited for him to go away—he was bending over and ducking his head under the counter to fetch a tray of clean glasses—and now she lifted her eyes to the bottles. God. They nearly took her breath away. Who needed stained-glass windows if you had liquor bottles all lined up on a lighted shelf?
“Feels like it’s getting to be fall out there already, don’t it,” Jerry said. It was a statement, not a question. He was visible again, standing up, his stubby hands gripping either side of the plastic tray, thumbs hooked over the ridge. “Coolest summer I can remember.”
Shirley shrugged. There must be a law somewhere specifying that bartenders had to spend a certain percentage of their interaction with each customer discussing the weather. Jerry was a decent guy, though, and so her unspoken observation didn’t come with any meanness attached to it. He was in his late forties or early fifties and he had, somewhere in the deep undisclosed background of his life, several children and an unspecified tragedy involving one or more of those children. Shirley had heard the rumors, but never pursued the particulars; she liked to keep the world at arm’s length these days, and not knowing about somebody’s woes made that easier.
Jerry had a red, pitted nose, a droopy eye, and a pair of fat black eyebrows that did not seem to fit with the rest of him. Most of the hair on his head had fled the scene. He combed the remaining gray threads—the total was in the single digits—across the top of his scalp. They looked like seaweed reaching over a rock.
“Yeah,” Shirley said.
“You ask me—cooler’s better. Can’t stand those days when you start sweating before you even leave your bed in the morning, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“Hope it don’t mean a bad winter, though,” Jerry said, tilting his head in a philosophical way. “Sometimes it’s like that. You don’t get much summer but the winter’s a sonofabitch. It’s kinda like the seasons’re trying to balance themselves out again, remember what’s what.”
Shirley nodded. He moved on down the bar. He never pressed her to talk more than she wanted to, and she never wanted to. That was his pattern; he would utter a sentence or two and then go on about his business, washing glasses or drying the ones he had already washed, wiping down the bar, sweeping the floor with the broom he kept in the corner, its bristles so bent and twisted that he might as well be doing the job with an armful of dried-out sticks he had gathered on the bank of the Bitter River. Busywork is what it was.
She had been in a lot of bars. During the years when she and Bobo Bolland were together, she had gone with him on most of his gigs, and most of his gigs were in bars. She had learned to shrewdly assess each one at a glance. She knew by looking at the main area what the ladies’ room was going to be like. If the proprietors allowed lipstick-rimmed glasses and wadded-up paper napkins to stack up on the tables, and peanut shells to pile up in crunchy mounds on the floor, then the bathroom would be a disaster. You could just tell. Conversely, if the bar itself was clean, if the stools looked sturdy, if the paneled walls had been washed down more than once a decade, you could count on a fairly decent bathroom. Not that you’d want to touch anything more in there than what you absolutely had to.
She missed Bobo. She told people that she had broken up with him, that she wanted him to get a regular job and he wouldn’t, and that was that. But it was a lie. The truth was that his ex-girlfriend, Leila Francone, had resurfaced and—according to Bobo—the only reason he and Leila had broken up in the first place was because Leila thought she was pregnant and Bobo had been a total jerk about it, only as it happened she really wasn’t pregnant, but by then she had seen what she called his “true colors.” When Leila had showed up again at the start of the summer, Bobo realized he still loved her. Shirley didn’t know what to say to that. Living with Bobo was no picnic, but it was what she had decided to do, and so she did it. Now, all at once, she had to find somewhere else to live, and another focus for her life.
The worst of it wasn’t so much the loss of Bobo. The worst was his parting shot. She was a hot mess, he told her on a night in early June that would end up being their last real conversation. The metallic scent of coming rain was in the air. They sat on the stoop of their garage apartment. He told Shirley that she was unstable and erratic, and he was frankly tired of putting up with her “emotional bullshit.” She lived too much in the past, and in her case, he said, the past was such a crappy place that only somebody “totally batshit crazy” would want to go back there. This was a few weeks before Shirley found out she was dying of lung cancer. It felt as if the world was piling on.
And it feels that way, she told herself, because it is.
The only person she had told about the diagnosis—before her visit to the Rising Souls Church that morning—was her friend Connie Boyd. She did tell a few people about the breakup with Bobo. She had to, because she was moving. Her mailing address would be changing. Her landline number would be changing. Bell’s reaction was subdued: Okay, well. Let me know if I can help with anything. Shirley knew why her sister was being that way; she and Bobo had broken up a few times previously, but they had always reconciled. Bell didn’t want to get caught in the middle—caught saying something negative about Bobo, only to have things be awkward later on when Shirley showed up with him for, say, Thanksgiving dinner. Bell didn’t like Bobo. Not one little bit. But she tucked that behind a façade of abstract cordiality. Bell was good at tucking things out of sight.
You were right about him all along, little sister.
Bell was always right these days. That had taken some getting used to. When they were kids, Shirley was the one who was right. She was ten years older than Bell, and she was the one who knew more. The one who was savvy and calculating and effective. She had taken care of Belfa, protected her, watched over her, made sure their father never touched her. Except of course that he did, after all. They lived in desperate fear of him, a fear that made the trailer a charged and volatile place.
Dead as he was, his handprints were still visible all over their lives.
“Another Diet?”
Shirley reluctantly shifted her eyes down from the beautiful bottles. Jerry Snell had come back to her end of the bar. There were only two other customers in the Creek right now, both of them male, each of them sitting at one of the little round wooden tables that cluttered up the laminate floor. Jerry had done his duty and freshened their drinks, leaving him free to return to Shirley.
“Yeah,” she said. “Thanks.”
Jerry’s eyes made a quick circuit of the room, as if he suspected surveillance. “You can smoke if you want to. I can dig up an ashtray. Still got one, from back when it was okay. Not supposed to let you—but that don’t matter.” He lifted his chin to indicate the other two customers. “Those fellas won’t give a shit. Trust me.”
“No, that’s okay.”
&n
bsp; “You quitting?”
She shook her head. “Just taking a break.” The truth was, she had pretty much lost her taste for tobacco. The impulse this morning in the minister’s office had been just that—an impulse, arising out of long habit rather than present desire. From the moment of her diagnosis, something had shifted inside her, and no longer was she susceptible to the blissful release provided by systematic drags on a Pall Mall, a release that was like the spreading-open of a flower bud. But she did not want to discuss that with Jerry. Or with anyone.
“You want some popcorn? I can make some.”
Again she shook her head. An overwhelming sadness had sneaked up behind her and put a heavy hand on her shoulder, almost as if one of those strangers sitting at a table had abruptly gotten up and crossed the bar and accosted her. She wished it had been a real person. Then she could have shoved his hand away and told him to go screw himself. But sadness—sadness was different. You couldn’t get rid of it in ordinary ways. Sometimes you couldn’t get rid of it at all.
“You hear about what’s going on out there?” Jerry said. He nodded toward the door, to make it clear that “out there” meant the world beyond the Creek. “Bunch of overdoses. Them folks’re just falling where they stand. You ask me—I say ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’ Let ’em kill themselves. Anybody who puts that crap in their bodies doesn’t deserve to—”
“What?” She was only half-listening, catching every other word.
“Addicts,” Jerry clarified. “Bunch of ’em dropping like flies. All over the place. Heard about it on my way into work. Two of ’em died. No names yet, but we’ll be finding out pretty soon.” He picked up the bar rag and flipped it over his shoulder. “Something’s got mixed in, they say. With the drugs.” Perplexed, he elevated his black eyebrows. “Guess we shouldn’t care—I mean, nobody’s begging them to take the stuff, right? Nobody’s telling them to stick needles in every damned spot they can find. But still.”
Shirley didn’t say anything out loud, but Jerry’s bulletin made her think about Belfa. This news would mean more work for her sister. Her job as prosecutor automatically put her in the center of every bad thing that happened in Acker’s Gap.
That was why she hadn’t yet told Belfa about her diagnosis. Or the rest of it, either, or her decision that the truth must be told. That was why she had hesitated so far. She did not want to add one more piece of bad news to her sister’s load. That was all Shirley had to offer now: bad news.
But soon she would tell her. All of it. She had no choice. As hard as it might be, telling the truth showed respect for the other person. And love, too: It proved your love, especially when it would be so much easier just to let the lie live on in the world. You had to do the hard thing. The minister had helped her see that, as brief as their conversation had been. She had to tell the truth to Bell, every last particle of it. Now she just had to figure out where and when and how.
“Don’t know what’s happening to this town,” Jerry muttered. He pulled the bar rag off his shoulder and started polishing the flat surface, making the same lazy circle over and over again so he wouldn’t have to move too far away from her. She knew what he was doing. “I grew up here,” he added, “and I don’t hardly recognize the place anymore.”
He was still talking, but once again she had tuned him out. It was a trick she had perfected in prison: The art of looking as if you were paying attention, when in fact your mind had departed the premises a while back. The one thing the world could not control was your thoughts. People in authority could make you march or stop marching, could make you sit down or stand up, could make you do things that you didn’t want to do and that in fact made your stomach turn inside out and sour with disgust—but they had no power over your thoughts. Nobody did.
She had let the lie be. For thirty-five years, she had just let it be. When she realized, all those years ago, that the lie had worked—Belfa had no recollection of what had really happened—Shirley was relieved. It meant that Shirley could keep on protecting her. Shirley could stand between her little sister and the darkness. Belfa would have a future, or at least the chance to have a future. She would have her shot.
But now everything had changed.
“… and so I say, to hell with them.” Jerry finished wiping the bar. It looked the same as it did when he started. “If folks wanna kill themselves, wellsir, I say, ‘Have at it. Just stay outta my way. Don’t be messing in my business.’”
His attention was caught by something that was happening behind Shirley. The door had opened, letting in a sudden punch of daylight.
She twisted around on her stool. The new customer was an old man in a green Army fatigue jacket and baggy brown pants that dragged the ground behind his feet. His hair stuck out from his head in a spray of gray-white frizz and his beard picked up on the same theme; it, too, was copious and out of control. His gait was a slow, hunched-over shuffle. He paused in the center of the room. His skin—the tiny portion of which was visible—was red-brown and looked as tough as jerky. He was several feet away from her but Shirley could smell him; it was the rancid smell of body odor and turned-up earth and old, dead things.
“It’s coming,” the old man said. His voice had a fluttery edge to it, a gravely vibrato. “It’s coming. It’s coming.”
“Shut up,” one of the other customers snapped at him. He was young and heavyset, and he wore a flat-billed baseball cap with a Cabela’s logo on the crown. “Get the hell out of here. You and your crazy shit.”
The old man lifted his arms like a maestro in front of an invisible orchestra. “It’s coming!” he called out. There was desperation in his voice now, a kind of strangled fury.
Cabela’s grabbed the amber-colored bottle of Bud in front of him and banged it back down on the table. Clearly, this was last-straw time. He stood up in a rush, the chair shooting out from under him with a squeal and a scrape. “I told you to shut up, asshole.”
“Hey, now,” Jerry said. “Come on, fellas. There’s no need for—”
“IT’S COMING!” the old man shrieked again, and now his body swayed in an erratic gyration. He stumbled forward in the direction of the bar. One hand dived under the folds of his coat.
“Look out—he’s got a gun!” the second customer yelled. He, too, was on his feet now, knocking over the table next to his as he lunged.
The two men tried to grab the old man, but both were overweight and further compromised by the number of Buds they had consumed. They looked, Shirley thought fleetingly, like a couple of bears roused too soon out of hibernation, lumbering and off-balance.
The old man pulled something out from under his coat. The two men ducked. It was only a stick. He waved it around and turned in a circle, as if dozens of marauders surrounded him. And then he seemed to lose track of whatever it was that had summoned him. He dropped his arms. The stick went back up under his coat. He turned and shuffled back out the door, mumbling a softer-voiced but no less agitated version of his warning: It’s coming. It’s coming.
Cabela’s sat down. He raked his chair back under the table, shaking his head. What a world: That was the plain meaning of the head-shake.
“Jesus,” Jerry said.
“Who’s that?” Shirley asked.
Jerry shrugged. “Don’t know. I’ve seen him around town. He started coming in here a few days ago. Screams a lot of bullshit and then leaves again. Crazy old bastard.”
She let her gaze drift back up to the bottles behind the bar. But the spell was broken. The old man’s rant had chased away the magic. And the beautiful scraps of glass that had brought her such solace just a minute ago faded back into reality, revealing what they really were: bottles of booze stacked on the shelves of a crummy bar in a small West Virginia town in the middle of an August day.
Jake
12:12 P.M.
The victims were long gone by the time he arrived at the apartment on Jackson Avenue, but there was still plenty of evidence of what had happened here. You didn’t
always need a body to know that someone had died. Death changed the air.
A clump of people blocked the hallway leading to apartment A-12. Jake had to shoo them away. At first he was polite about it—“Excuse me, folks, coming through”—but that did not work. One old woman flattened herself against the wall to allow him passage, but the rest of them just stared at him, truculently immobile. They were old and young, female and male, black and white, placid and agitated, but they shared a common hostility. So Jake grew less polite: “Step aside or I’ll search your apartments, too. You want that?”
No, they did not want that. They definitely did not want that. The crowd broke roughly in half and swung open like a gate. Jake moved through. He had to turn sideways—they left him only a narrow gap—but he didn’t want to quibble. The front door of the apartment was not a factor; the paramedics had had to break it down, and shards lay across the threshold in a crisscrossed scatter of cheap shellacked wood.
“Fucking cops.”
Jake heard the murmured insult as he passed the last bystanders, a couple of teenagers in T-shirts and cargo shorts. The black kid snorted; the white kid issued a loud cackle. Jake wasn’t sure which one had cursed at him but it didn’t matter; every single person here wanted to, he knew. Somehow, during the escalating daily race between order and chaos in Raythune County, law enforcement had ended up being construed as the enemy. He was the bad guy. Jake didn’t get it—he had done nothing to these people, and in fact the sheriff’s department had stopped arresting addicts a while ago, because it was pointless—but their contempt for him was like a bad smell that leaked from the pores of their skin.
Any other day, Jake would have laughed it off. Not today. He stopped and turned around.
“Shut the hell up,” he snapped, and he was saying it to all the people hanging around the hallway, but especially to the two punks in cargo shorts.
“You got no call to talk to them boys like that,” said an older man in a plaid shirt and sweatpants. A large chunk of flesh was missing from his nose, like sand scooped out of a sandbox. “We been through a lot today. All of us. So help me, Jesus.” He was barefoot and he reeked of booze.
