The Evening Hour

by A. Carter Sickels

  “I’m Cole.”

  “Who’s your people?”

  “Freemans, up in Rockcamp. My granddaddy is Preacher Clyde Freeman.”

  Warren didn’t say if he knew his family or not. His hands were shaking too badly to hold the spoon, so Cole sat beside him and fed him the lukewarm oatmeal, dabbing at the corners of his mouth with a paper napkin. After a few bites, the old man’s eyes closed, and Cole pulled the blanket up to his chin and watched him. He looked harmless and near dead, hollowed out by too many years.

  As Warren slept, Cole peeked out into the hall. Nobody was coming. He closed the door partway. Then he opened each dresser drawer, sifting through neatly folded underwear, T-shirts, dress pants, and plaid shirts, all of which Warren would never wear again. This is what he found:

  Silver wristwatch, ticking, which he slipped in his shirt pocket.

  Worn brown leather wallet with twenty bucks, a driver’s license, and a faded picture of a woman, all of which he put back, intact.

  In the bottom drawer, under a stack of threadbare undershirts, a knotted hunting sock.

  Bingo.

  He untied the thick knots and pulled out a roll of fifties. He stared at the money for a second, then returned it to the sock. Two aides walked by. Cole froze in the shadows. He waited until their voices died out, then he tucked the sock under the waistband of his jockeys and wheeled the breakfast cart out of the room.

  As he drove around the county, his headlights reflected on the scarred places where trees had been cleared for mining, like giant razor gashes across the land. He sold most of what he had in a couple of hours, then went to the Eagle. Drank a couple of beers, watched a fight break out in the parking lot, and lost a game of pool. He was on the lookout for Charlotte Carson. A couple of months ago at a party, he’d found himself nibbling on her tiny ear. “Ohh, I like that,” she’d said.

  When she didn’t show, he drove to her place in Pineyville. The Carson family had been smart and sold their land early on to the coal company, when the offer was still good. Charlotte lived with her three older brothers, large, sloe-eyed, dimwitted boys with reputations for short tempers and heavy fists. Their parents had been killed in a car accident a few years ago, so it was just the four of them. They lived in a double-wide up on a hill. Although they talked about building a house, all they had done so far was dig a pit for the foundation, which was filled with rainwater.

  He felt relieved that Charlotte’s piece-of-crap Neon was the only car in the driveway. He knocked once, then let himself in. A Rebel flag hung over the door, and framed family pictures and curling posters of beer ads were tacked to the walls. A new-looking big-screen TV sat on a low stand made from a pine board and cinder blocks, with various video games, mostly sports stuff, scattered on the floor around it. He called out over the shrieking music, and Charlotte yelled that she was in her room. A jumble of clothes and dirty glasses and CD jewel cases. She was perched on the bed in the midst of the mess like a mother spider on her web.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you.”

  “You making a special delivery?”

  “If you’re lucky.”

  She wore faded, shredded-up jeans and a tight baby tee, her peroxide-dyed hair shooting out like toxic weeds. A few weeks ago, she’d convinced Cole to bleach his hair too, and when he looked in the mirror, he’d been startled by the towheaded reflection: “Goddamn, I look like an albino.” By now he was used to it, even if his grandmother wasn’t, and didn’t think he’d ever go back. With their fiery blond hair, they looked like brother and sister.

  Cole snapped off the stereo. “That shit you listen to gives me a headache.”

  “Sometimes you’re such an old man.”

  He knocked the lacy black bras and mismatched socks onto the floor, and reached for Charlotte. He touched her slightly moist underarms, breathed in the baby-powder scent of her. Laughing, she pushed him away. “You bring me something or not?”

  She looked at him with cola brown eyes and pursed her lips until they crinkled like crepe paper. She was not exactly pretty. Freckles swarmed over her face like red ants, and she had a hard boyish face. But when she looked at him in this way, he felt as if he were floating along a river, and he liked the thrill of the currents and unexpected drops. He searched his pockets, handed her twenty milligrams of Oxy, not much. She licked the tablet, crushed it, and put her nose to the mirror like she was giving it a kiss. Then she came up smiling, the entire twelve hours of pain relief shooting to her bloodstream all at once.

  “What do I owe you?”

  “I’ll think of something,” he said, scooting closer.

  But she told him she had to leave for work soon. She had just started at the Walmart in Zion.

  “What kind of hours are those?”

  “On the night shift, I can get as lit as I want to, nobody’s around to notice.”

  “That’s something,” he agreed.

  “Guess who’s one of the new managers?”

  “Who?”

  “Your old buddy, Terry Rose.”

  Cole looked up.

  “You didn’t know he was back?”

  The last he’d heard about Terry was that he was still in Kentucky with his wife and kid, working at an RC warehouse. Cole lit a cigarette, playing down his surprise. “Walmart? What a fuckin’ loser.”

  “Well, we all got to make money.”

  “I guess.”

  Charlotte reached up and took the cigarette out of his mouth. “Maybe I’ve got time for a quickie.”

  She shucked her jeans and red panties, stripped off her T-shirt, her body adorned in an assortment of tattoos. She unbuckled his belt. Her breath was hot, and the sharp points of her hair tickled his thighs. It suddenly seemed too quiet, just the noisy sound of her mouth on him. He pushed her face away. “Where do you want me then?” He got behind her and watched the inky dreamcatcher on her lower back arch up, then flatten beneath him. He squeezed his eyes shut, disappearing, and yet was still here, inside of her. She moved against him, and he grabbed on to her hips as if to keep himself anchored, finding that secret place beyond everything else. Right before he came, he pulled out, heard himself whimper. When he opened his eyes, Charlotte was smiling at him.

  “That was nice,” she said.

  “Yeah.” He reached over and flipped the light switch. Although he never stayed the night, he liked to lie beside her and look up at the plastic glow-in-the-dark stars clustered all over the ceiling. He never worried about falling asleep; he survived on very little of it. Charlotte said it was like he had his own special kind of speed.

  “You make me feel good,” she said.

  “You’re just high.”

  “You could be too.”

  But Cole rarely used the drugs he sold, and when he did, he was more likely to drop a Xanax than to snort Oxy, which frightened him with its bright blue promises. Anything that felt that good would only lead to trouble.

  Charlotte tapped his chest. “What are you thinking?”

  “Nothing,” he said, but he was still mulling over the news that Terry Rose was back in town. And he sure as hell didn’t want to be thinking of him. Instead, he tried calling up Bible verses. It was a game he played. He never forgot the scripture his granddaddy drilled and seared into him, and it was times like this, in the darkness and quiet, that the words sometimes returned, ghostly and pale like the Indian pipes hidden in the woods.

  “You’re so quiet.”

  “It’s just how I am. You know that.”

  All his years of stuttering had taught him something about silence. He spent most of his childhood too terrified to speak. Kids laughed, teachers looked at him with pity. He learned to bite down on his tongue until people forgot he was there—and he heard everything that way. But he couldn’t play that trick with his granddaddy, who demanded he speak, and whenever Cole stuttered, his grandfather’s eyes brightened with a mix of fury and satisfaction: It’s your mother, her sins led God to cur
sing you. The praying, the Bible lessons, all of it was supposed to heal Cole’s twisted tongue, but did he deserve such light, such healing? For the most part, he’d lost the stutter—but it had nothing to do with God.

  Charlotte rested her head on his chest. “I can hear your heart. You hear it?”

  He used to believe what his grandfather said, that the stuttering was a punishment from God, but around twelve or thirteen, he began to secretly reassure himself with the story of Moses, but I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue, whose brother Aaron spoke for him to lead his people out of Egypt. Except that Cole was an only child and the closest he ever came to having a brother was Terry Rose.

  “No,” he said, rolling over. “No, I don’t hear nothing.”

  Chapter 2

  Cole drove up to Devil’s Pike, a mess of old strip mines, with a few trailers stranded there like lost ships. Orange acid water trickled like Kool-Aid out of a mountainside; probably an old underground mine had blown out. He parked in front of Harley McClain’s. The front yard was overrun by plastic and ceramic animals, like some kind of cracked-out cartoon world. Harley’s wife had collected the lawn ornaments, and now that she was dead, Harley couldn’t bring himself to get rid of them. They gave Cole the creeps. He walked up to the front door, careful not to bump into any of the geese or deer or wide-eyed kittens. The mountains cast a dark shadow over the property. He would have to be quick. He did not like to be in the old people’s homes after dark, when they were more likely to get nervous or confused.

  Harley, a World War II vet who collected disability, invited Cole in. He wore stained gray sweatpants and a T-shirt that said “Awesome” in glittery letters. He poured grape pop from a two-liter into a plastic cup for Cole, then drew himself a glass of water.

  “I told you, you ought not to drink that water.”

  “Oh, it won’t kill me.” Harley beckoned Cole. “I got something to show you.”

  All over the house sat models of churches and houses that Harley had constructed out of Popsicle sticks. He showed Cole the latest. “Look here. This is a cathedral I saw when I was flying over Italy.” Harley had been a pilot in World War II. Some days he liked to tell stories about the war, but other times he’d clam up and not say a word, his eyes wild with memory.

  It looked like all of the other models, but Cole said, “It looks like a castle.”

  “Yes, that’s what it looked like, a castle.”

  Harley was lonely, so Cole stayed for a while, shooting the shit. Before he left, he sniffed the milk to make sure it wasn’t spoiled, checked the bread for spots of mold. What divided the old people who still lived on their own from the ones at the nursing home was a thin, slippery slope.

  “Make sure you eat something,” Cole said. “And stop drinking that water.”

  Harley handed him a brown paper bag, clicking his dentures as Cole rummaged through the goods. OxyContin, Xanax, and nerve pills, all prescribed from a quack VA doctor.

  He took the cash out of his back pocket. “You did good, Harley.” The old man smiled, grabbed the green.

  Cole got in his truck and locked the bag in the glove compartment, then headed out to make a few more transactions. He felt satisfied, pleased. It was almost too easy. When he had first heard about the nursing home’s outreach program, where they delivered toiletries and food to the elderly and homebound, he knew he’d hit gold. Except for the occasional stray bottle, he never took meds from the nursing home—too risky. But this was different. Easy. Although the program had since been shut down because of funding, he didn’t stop making visits. He’d met the majority of his suppliers this way; others he’d known through his granddaddy’s church, or they were friends of residents. Almost all of them were poor and lonely and living out in the hills.

  But now some of them made over a couple grand a month. They used what Cole gave them to pay their bills—I need heat more than I do that old medicine—or to buy big-screen TVs or gifts for their grandchildren. They never asked Cole what he did with the medication; they liked to pretend that he was giving it to the sick and needy. But looking closely into their quiet faces, Cole thought most of them knew the truth. Just as they didn’t ask him what he was doing with the pills, Cole rarely asked them how they could go without them. He knew that some of the more savvy ones went to different doctors to get multiple prescriptions of the same drug. Others tried to get by on a substitute that was cheaper, less potent. Sometimes they sold him the Oxy in order to pay for their other meds, or they kept half for themselves and sold him half. Cole believed that he would be able to detect any signs of suffering. If they were in too much pain, then he would not make the deal. This was what he told himself. But it was better not to ask. It was better not to look too closely, or to think about it for too long.

  Cole moved his clothes from the washer to the dryer and dropped in a handful of quarters. Though his grandmother had a washing machine at home, the water turned his whites shit-yellow. He didn’t like to feel dirty. While his clothes were drying, he went next door to the Wigwam and ordered a coffee and a slice of butterscotch pie from a pretty blonde. It was quiet, nobody around except a cop smoking at the counter, and an old codger guarding his plate like a dog.

  The pie was sweet and gummy, and Cole ate slowly, taking small, even bites and following each one with a sip of coffee. He glanced out the window and watched a pickup pass by. Nothing else happened. He did not mind. Charlotte, who hated the dullness, had told him he was crazy to stay. After graduation, she’d moved to Cleveland, where she had lived until just a few months ago. Came back broke and a little broken. Already she was talking about leaving again.

  The waitress refilled his coffee. Sharp, foxlike face, crystalline eyes. Her hair was long and honey-colored, twisted in a complicated swirl on the top of her head.

  “I’ve seen you before,” she said. “What’s your name?”

  He told her, and she said, “I was away for a few years, lost track of people.” She smiled. “I’m Lacy.”

  “Lacy what?”

  “Lacy,” she said. “Lacy Cooper.”

  “Cooper. You Denny’s wife?”

  “Was,” she said, raising an eyebrow. Cole had never met Denny Cooper, but he knew who he was, everybody did. Years ago he led the high school basketball team to the state championship, and people still talked about his three-pointers and record assists. Cole had never played on any team. He didn’t possess the skills or desire, and anyway, his grandfather thought sports were a waste of time.

  When the bells on the door jingled, he looked up, then slid down in his seat, pretending to study the laminated menu, the words a blur. He kept his head lowered as Terry Rose passed by with his wife and kid. He hoped they’d continue walking to the back, but they sat in the booth directly behind him. Cole’s mouth went dry, and it felt like pins were jabbing his chest. He quickly took a few dollars out of his wallet, slid them under the saucer, and started to get up.

  But Terry stood at his table, grinning. “Cole, I thought that was you.” He wore a starchy Walmart uniform with a manager button pinned to the collar. “It’s been a long time,” he said, sliding into the booth so they were facing each other. He folded his arms over his chest, looking him over. “I ought not to recognize you with those goldilocks.”

  Cole touched his hair. “It’s a good disguise.”

  “I guess it is, if you’re in the need of hiding.”

  Terry had always had a stocky, muscular build, but now he was twiggy, with a thin face, hollow cheeks. He’d lost his boyishness, and the expression on his face was a mixture of resentment and resignation, no baby fat left to soften the bitter lines. Cole wiped his palms on his pants and tried to act like running into Terry Rose was something that happened every day.

  “What are you? Some kind of doctor?”

  “What?” Cole remembered that he was also wearing a uniform. He told Terry what he did.

  “Nursing home? No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “I
guess it pays the bills. Hell, look at what I do.” Terry pointed to his vest. “I was laid off in Kentucky, and came back here a few months ago.”

  “I didn’t know you’d been back that long.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been around.”

  Cole fumbled with his cigarettes and asked if he wanted a smoke, but Terry said he’d quit. “Wife don’t like it.” He ran a hand through his hair. It was still curly and dark, but was cut shorter than he used to wear it.

  As Lacy walked by, Terry said, “How about bringing me a coffee?”

  “It’s coming.”

  He watched her walk away and said in a low voice, “I’d like to get me some of that.” Behind them, the boy asked who his daddy was talking to, and Kathy told him to hush.

  Lacy poured Terry a coffee, and he said, “Thank you, sweetie,” and she smiled in a forced way.

  “I work with some real dumb fucks,” Terry told Cole, stirring milk into his coffee with a butter knife. “But a few of them are cool. As a matter of fact, Charlotte Carson … I heard that you two have got something going on.” He set down the knife. “That true?”

  “It’s nothing serious.”

  Terry’s dimples appeared in each cheek when he smiled: so he hadn’t lost all of his boyishness. “Me and Charlotte saw each other a few times back in high school. Remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She still wild?”

  Cole shrugged. The restaurant was starting to get crowded and noisy. People talking and forks scraping plates and the crackling of the deep fryer. A popular country song about small-town love played over the speakers. Terry seemed eager to keep talking, to pretend like everything was the same. How long were they going to sit here like this? Cole started to ask Terry about where he lived, but stammered, stopped. Terry didn’t notice the stutter, never had. He seemed to intuitively understand the question; he told Cole that he’d sold the family land a few years ago, after his mother died. Now he and Kathy lived in a house with a big bathroom and a two-car garage on land where they didn’t have to worry about drainage seeping into the well.