Summer of the Dead

by Julia Keller

  “How about Sharon’s husband—Whit Henner?”

  Rhonda shrugged. “Been out of the picture for years. Comes around occasionally for photo shoots. Sharon and her son live with Riley Jessup. Ever seen that place? Believe me, he’s got the room.” Her expression changed. She looked troubled; something else was on her mind. “You know what?”

  Bell waited.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Rhonda said. “I feel for the family’s troubles. I do. But if you ask me, Riley Jessup’s a first-class, ring-tailed hypocrite. Lives in a palace. He’s got more money than God. When he was in office, though, and had the chance, he didn’t do a damned thing about the falling-down schools. Or about the roads that’re so bad, you can’t even find ’em again after a hard rain. Lined his pockets with corporate money and then let those thieving bastards run the state as they saw fit, year after year, dumping poison in the rivers, taking shortcuts with safety regulations and cutting off mountaintops like a bored kid with a stick in a field of dandelions. You’ve seen that bumper sticker—‘Almost level, West Virginia.’ Not even funny anymore, thanks to the Riley Jessups of this world.”

  Bell was surprised. Rhonda didn’t usually talk politics with such vehemence; her passion was generally restricted to new clothes and fresh gossip.

  “Anyway,” Rhonda concluded, “Jessup is trying to make amends, I suppose, with the MRI thingy. First we’ve ever had. Kind of amazing, really, that we even have an X-ray machine. Surprised they don’t just rely on somebody poking you in the gut to see if you yell. And way over there,” she said, inclining her head toward the lobby entrance, and toward a tall, slender man in an artfully tailored gray suit, “is the fella who persuaded Jessup to pay for the MRI—although I hate to have to give him the credit.”

  Bell turned. It was Bradley Portis, a man to whom she had taken an instant dislike when she met him a few months ago. The CEO of the Raythune County Medical Center was the only person present who seemed unfazed by the heat. His thick chestnut hair had lost none of its luster. His eyes were unreadable, as glazed-over and generic as his smile. Hands clasped behind his back, he looked mildly bored as he surveyed the crooked trail of people inching feverishly toward Riley Jessup. In his posture, which Bell would’ve sworn had been perfected with the help of a laser level, and in the slight but perceptible lift of a black eyebrow, she sensed a massive distaste for these people and their second-rate clothes. Their second-rate lives.

  “Yeah,” Bell said. “I know Portis. Met him at a county commission meeting last fall.”

  “Well, he’s never actually moved here,” Rhonda muttered, lowering her voice, as if the accusation were too heinous to be discussed in polite company. “Commutes two or three days a week from D.C. Bet he’s never even stepped foot on county soil outside the premises of this place. And if you ask me—”

  She was interrupted by another ruckus at the governor’s chair. Three women screamed, one right after the other, as if they were handing a package down the row. In the midst of the handshakes and the nervous curtsies, the line had abruptly broken open; there was a mad scramble as people scattered like dropped marbles, grabbing their kids and tugging at elderly relatives by their belt loops.

  A thin-faced, big-eared man with a wilted-looking Fu Manchu mustache, gray tank top, and baggy shorts had bolted from his spot well back in the line and—arms extended, legs churning, the words Hey Gubner, Hey Gubner! dropping from his mouth along with strings of saliva—was barreling toward Riley Jessup, bumping other people out of the way with a mean sashay of his bony shoulders. The governor was startled, the grin frozen on his face. Sharon gasped and staggered backwards.

  A security guard leaped at Fu Manchu, knocking him flat on his back, flipping him over like a crispy-edged pancake and then linking his wrists with a zip tie while he bucked and he flailed. A third guard wedged a boot against the side of his neck. A fourth leaned over and jammed the chunky snout of a Glock behind his right ear.

  Fu Manchu was drunk, a fact that became immediately apparent when he was hauled to his feet and promptly sent vomit rocketing onto the black shirtfront of the closest guard. “Jush wanna,” Fu Manchu muttered, swaying back and forth, smacking his lips to get rid of the sticky yellow flecks of puke, “say hi to Gubner Jezzup. Thazall. Thazall.”

  In the heat, the smell of the regurgitated alcohol was irresistibly sick-making. Several people lurched and stumbled out of the lobby, heads bent, hands cupped over mouths.

  “Jesus,” Bell murmured, as much to herself as to Rhonda, “if that’s how they react to some shit-faced fool, wonder what the hell they’d do with a real threat?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Business was brisk at the station that night. Cars came in bunches, in twos and threes and even fives, and the little chimneys of exhaust fumes rising from the crooked line gave the hot air a dense, quilted texture, like something you could stroke or nuzzle.

  Lindy, standing at her post behind the front counter, watched through the window. Across the road was a dark unremarkable scramble of woods, so there wasn’t much else to see except the slow flotilla of dusty chrome. As one car departed, another would inch up to the pump. The moment the vehicle intersected with the dribble of light, everything was revealed: Dirty fender. Mud-colored tires. Dented-in door. Sunburned, grumpy occupants packed in behind the smeary windows. The driver—usually it was the driver—would wrench himself up and out to take care of the business at hand. Credit card punched in the slot, pulled out, repocketed. Gas cap twisted off, nozzle jammed in the black hole with the kind of modified violence that spoke of the heat of the day and the degree of accumulated frustration. Then he’d finish up and clear out and the next car would roll forward and the new driver would initiate the ritual all over again, the punch and the pull, the twist and jam. The scowl.

  “Looks like the whole county’s out for a drive tonight,” Lindy said.

  The top of Jason’s blue ball cap wobbled, which meant he was nodding. That was all she could see of him right now, because he was lost in the wilds of the chip aisle, restocking the slick crinkly bags after a recent assault on the supply of the barbecue-flavored kind.

  “Yep,” he replied. “Looks that way.”

  The Lester station was one of only two filling stations left in the area. The other was Highway Haven, a truck stop out on the interstate. But if the hour was late and you needed gas and you didn’t want to go thirty-eight miles out of your way, you either brought your car here or you got out and pushed it home.

  Sometimes customers at the pumps required Lindy’s assistance. They’d spot her through the big plate glass window and move their arm in a high arcing wave, rising onto tiptoes and mouthing whatever it was they wanted to say. Invariably they’d be startled by the sound of Lindy’s voice when it crackled out of the perforated metal pad on the side of the pump: “May I help you?” Most of the customers forgot about the two-way communication system until she talked, although it was alluded to on the sign above the pump, right next to the prices for Marlboros, a gallon of milk, Hershey Bars: PRESS BUTTON TO TALK TO ATTENDANT. Hearing her, they sometimes jumped as if bitten.

  “Yeah,” they’d say, leaning toward the speaker. “Pump don’t work. Ain’t giving me no gas.”

  The pump did work. The pump worked just fine. The problem, Lindy knew, was not with the pump. The problem was with their credit card. The problem was that they’d run out of money, run out of luck, run out of prospects. Running out of gas was just the latest item on the list of things they’d run out of. Children—they never seemed to run out of those—were jammed together into the backseat, pushing their lips against the window like curious fish in a dirty fishbowl.

  “Try another card,” she’d say, wondering how her voice sounded when it came through the speaker system, wondering if she’d even recognize it herself after it was roughed up by all the static and distortion. At her end, the customer’s too-loud voice always sounded blurry and mechanical, like the voice of a cartoon robot.

>   “Ain’t got another card.”

  She was required to stick to the script laid out in the Lester employee handbook, and so she said, “Well, you’ll have to come inside then and pay cash.” If she’d had her way, she would’ve said, Listen, I’ll override it. Just take the gas you need, okay? And then go. Just go, okay?

  Sometimes they came in. Sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes the driver stared at her through the plate glass window for a good long minute—she was in a lighted space and the driver stood in a spotlight, too, courtesy of the bug-bedeviled bulb hanging over the pumps, and so they could see each other with penetrating clarity across the dark interval of asphalt—and at that point he might lean over and carefully articulate an obscenity directly into the speaker. He would say, “Fuck you, bitch”—so that there would be no mistaking his mood or the extent to which his pride had been decimated. Then he’d fling himself back in the car and punch the accelerator as if it, too, had insulted him, bulling his way off the lot, swerving wildly around a car trying to enter from the other side and barely missing it, and all Lindy could think about were those kids in the backseat, unsecured by anything as emblematic of forethought or caution as seat belts, rattling around in that backseat like gravel in an empty pop can.

  She remembered what her district manager had told her once. You can always tell when things are getting bad, you can tell when the already precarious economic situation in this part of West Virginia is worsening, by the numbers on the pump. Times like these, the numbers were low: $1.82 or $2 or $3.16. Never over five dollars. And never, God knows, a fill-up. People bought gas in dribs and drabs, waiting as long as they could between stops at the station. After a big event—Sunday church service, say, or a wedding or a funeral or a ceremony in a hospital parking lot—they’d be heading home and realize they couldn’t risk it anymore and finally would have to spend the last little bit of what they had on gas.

  At one point between 9 and 10 P.M., the line for the pumps was, Lindy noted to her astonishment, six cars long, with a hefty dump truck as the exclamation point. She called out that fact to Jason.

  “Yeah,” he answered. “Big thing out at the hospital. For a new MRI machine. Brought in some boring old fart to speak.” He’d finished with the chip aisle and was standing in front of the dairy case in the back, having repeatedly opened the door and leaned his head in for the clear purpose of cooling himself down, until Lindy told him to stop. “Ginormous crowd, my brother said,” Jason went on. “This’s probably just folks who stayed around to visit family and whatnot. Getting gas before they start home. Don’t want to run out—not with a murderin’ sumbitch out there somewheres.”

  Lindy nodded, as if she’d found his explanation helpful. But it was the sheer volume of customers, not the origin, that had perplexed her. She knew the origin. She read the papers. Hard not to, with the stack that lived right under her chin for a week at a time. She knew about the new MRI machine. She even knew what “MRI” stood for—which was more, she thought, than Jason knew. That certainty made her feel lonely, not superior.

  “Want me to get more coffee going?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Guess so. Folks’ve been hitting it pretty good tonight.”

  He answered her shrug with one of his own and headed over to that corner of the store. Along the way he passed the pastry case, giving it a quick obligatory frown. By this time of night, the contents arranged on the yellow slide-out trays looked battered and sagging and forlorn; the doughnuts and cinnamon rolls were delivered fresh every morning but steadily lost their confidence throughout the long humid day. Funny, Lindy always thought, how things could go from sparkly and inviting to rubbery and gross in the span of a few hours. Maybe it was the fact that they were trapped behind a little plastic door.

  While Jason fussed with the coffeepots, she dealt with an abrupt influx of customers who wanted more than gas. Pop. Cigarettes. Doritos. Skoal Long Cut Mint. A Little Debbie Swiss Cake Roll. She was asked, by an older man with an outrageously bad toupee and liquor on his breath, if she’d like some company later on, when her shift was over. “No, I wouldn’t,” she said, handing him his change. She looked him right in the eye. She didn’t look away, and she didn’t get mad. She’d learned a few things, in the time she’d been doing this job; yes, she had. The man waited for more from her, waggling his eyebrows, hoping for a wisecrack, maybe, or a put-down, something he could counter with his cleverness, and when it didn’t come, when she just looked at him, dead-eyed, he turned around and left. A little past midnight two teenage girls glided in on a moving cushion of giggles and asked if they could have the key to the bathroom. They hadn’t made a purchase, so technically Lindy was supposed to say no, but the fact was, the toilets for customers were out back in a separate building, a dumpy tar paper shack that was cleaned about once a decade. Allegedly. If somebody wanted to use the space for whatever, it was fine by her. She knew they wouldn’t linger.

  By 2 A.M. the number of customers had thinned considerably. The blackness of the nicked-up two-lane road that ran in front of the station was broken only sporadically by a pair of bouncing headlights. Once per hour, tops. After that the darkness would return, swallowing the road whole, as if the world were a birdcage and somebody had flung a hand towel over it.

  Jason was mopping up a spill on the floor by the coffeepots. The mess was the handiwork of a maybe-drunk-or-maybe-just-clumsy guy who’d stumbled in earlier that night, dumping an entire jumbo cup of Mountain Dew and crushed ice on his way to the counter to pay for it. Jason had put off the cleanup—with no customers around, it didn’t matter—but finally boredom, not necessity, pushed him to undertake the task.

  Lindy was busy as well. She finished sorting and racking the cigarette cartons. She had to stretch to reach the very top shelf, lining up the end flaps just so, making sure that the brand names were visible. Her father and mother had both smoked, once upon a time; Lindy had vivid childhood memories of being asked to find the open pack and bring it to the kitchen or the living room or the front porch, wherever they’d seated themselves, and handing it to her father or her mother and smiling, because they’d compliment her on her detective skills and the praise felt golden and wonderful, like sunshine on your birthday. “Never can remember where I leave ’em,” her father would say, “but this little girl, she’s smart. Sniffs ’em out, right quick. Don’t know how she turned out so smart. Nobody in my family’s anywhere near as smart as this one right here.” Lindy loved pleasing them. “She’s a real good girl,” her mother would add, sometimes touching Lindy’s face with her fingertips, the unlit cigarette poised between her index finger and her middle finger. Her mother always held off lighting the cigarette until she’d finished with Lindy, worried she might burn her. Her mother was careful that way.

  These days, her father didn’t smoke. Lindy wasn’t sure exactly when that had happened, there was no announcement, no grand renunciation; he just stopped. Sometimes she wondered if he’d just forgotten that he was a smoker. Maybe that was it. Didn’t matter, though. The damage was done. His lungs were black-scarred, tough as the hard bark on a long-dead tree. Every breath he had was a gift, the doctors said, because there weren’t very many breaths left. Not in lungs that looked like that.

  She turned back around to face the store, watching Jason work. The fluorescent lights that hummed overhead gave everything in this small space a crisp dimensional edge, outlined like the risen grain in a stained piece of wood: the narrow metal aisles, the dairy cases along the back wall, and, next to all four outside walls, blocking the bottom half of the tall glass, the stacks of plastic yellow containers of antifreeze and engine additives. Lindy had worked the day shift a couple of times, subbing for other employees, but she didn’t like it; when the world outside was light, the store looked dingy and sad. It looked, frankly, like the piece of crap it was. At night, however, this place was its own little island of light. There was magic in it, although Lindy would never have said such a thing out loud. Not to Jason, not to
anybody.

  “Hey, Jace,” she said.

  He stopped what he was doing. “Yeah. What.”

  “Nothing.”

  He went back to work, eyeing the row of coffeepots. Most were down to the noxious nubbins. The smell of old, overcooked coffee lurked in the air, a smell that, both he and Lindy agreed, bore an uncomfortable similarity to dog shit.

  “Want me to sweep up outside?” Jason called to her.

  “Leave it for now.”

  He shrugged and undertook his Cool Walk to the front counter. He leaned against it, standing in the same place where the customers waited for their change, his elbows angled, idly messing with the tins of Skoal and Copenhagen in the slanting wire rack.

  “Don’t get those all mixed up,” Lindy said. “People don’t like it.”

  “Shit, girl, don’t be gettin’ on my case.” Cool Walk, Cool Talk.

  She didn’t respond, because there was something she needed to ask him about. Something serious.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “The bad stuff that’s been happening around here,” she said, straining to sound casual. “That old guy who got killed in his driveway. And that guy they found by the side of the road—all cut up.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, what do you think? Is it outsiders, maybe?”

  “Don’t know. Don’t guess anybody knows.” He pressed a finger in the middle of a Skoal tin, as if he were ringing a doorbell. Pressed another one.

  “But it’s probably outsiders, right? Nobody around here would do anything like that. Right?”

  “Sure they would. Them drugs—it’s changing the whole state. Everybody says so.” Jason had another brother, too. Levi Brinkerman, three years older than Jason, was a tweaker. A meth head. His brain cells were fried, the way bacon curls up in a hot skillet, and now he sat on the front porch of the Brinkerman house and he itched and he shivered and he rocked back and forth and, when he could swipe enough change to swing it, he smoked the stuff that made him feel, he told Jason, and then Jason told Lindy, like that flame guy in The Fantastic Four—What the hell’s his name? Can’t remember. But like that. That’s what I feel like. Oughta try it, kid. You’ll see. Lindy and Jason rarely talked about Levi, just as they rarely talked about Lindy’s father. But when they did, it was serious and important.