“What’s wrong?”
“Go on home,” he said. “Just go on.”
She pushed her hair out of her eyes. “You sure?”
“Next time, no money, no pills. That’s how it works.”
He waited in his truck until she drove away. The ten-dollar bill sat on the dash like a discarded tissue. He felt clammy and short of breath. He got out of his truck, and inhaled deeply. He took another deep breath, and then he turned and kicked the front tire. Goddamn it. He wanted different people in his life. A different life. He kicked it again, and this time pain shot through his toes. Goddamn. He didn’t want to go home alone. He straightened himself and walked back into the Eagle.
“I thought you left,” Lacy said.
“I should, but I’m still here.”
“You want another drink?”
He shook his head. “What are you doing later tonight?”
“You mean after I get off of work? I’m going home.”
“You want to come over to my place?”
“You drunk?”
“No.”
She studied him for a while, then smiled. “I didn’t think you would ever ask. I thought I was too old for you.”
“No, that wasn’t it.”
“See how you feel in the morning,” she said. “And then if you still want to, you can come over to my place tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
Smiling, he turned to go, but Terry found him first. “Cole.”
“Man, leave me alone.”
As he crossed the parking lot, Terry came after him. “Look, she don’t mean nothing to me, she’s used goods.” His grin slowly faded. “Come on, bro.”
Cole spit between his teeth. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
Terry hesitated. He started to talk, then stopped. He shook his head.
“Nothing. Fuck it. Just, nothing,” he said.
Cole turned up the stereo loud, blasting an old Metallica song that he used to listen to back in high school. Suddenly, when he was almost home, he pulled over, tires squealing. The slam of his truck door echoed like a gun shot. He tramped through the moonlit woods along the creek until he reached the swimming hole where he and Terry used to go, and he looked out at the still water, a mist rising above it and a night bird he didn’t recognize calling from the woods. It was his birthday. He was one year older. The swimming hole no longer looked the way it used to. It was too shallow, cluttered with rocks and debris. Now he could have walked across it. He thought of Terry laughing, I saved your ass. It wasn’t true. Terry stood right here on this bank on a spring day and said he was getting married and that was the end of it. Cole looked but could not see through the thick white mist. Fear them not therefore: for there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known. Nobody ever saved anybody else. Nobody. And now, not even the dead could save them.
Thorny Creek had a reputation for wildness. There were people here who were related to the families that had been part of the old-time feuds. Ex-cons, a crazy Vietnam vet, and a witch who was said to be over a hundred years old, who rarely stepped foot out of a shack that was overgrown with vines and weeds. Thorny Creek was a place his grandmother had always told him to stay clear of, but Cole had several customers up here and a supplier. It was also where Lacy Cooper lived.
This morning he’d woken up a year older and thinking of Charlotte and Terry with their arms around each other, and he’d picked up the phone and dialed Lacy’s number. She told him to come over around six. Sara Jean would be staying with her grandparents.
Now he drove past her modular one-story house, her black pickup parked out front, and continued on to Arie Webb’s. Arie lived in a clean, sparkling double-wide near the creek. She used to be a schoolteacher. She’d never married, and now she took care of her sister, Janice, who was blind and diabetic. Arie gave her sister insulin shots and read books to her. Except for her arthritis, Arie was in good health. Cole never had to check to see if she had enough food or if the milk had gone sour. She drove into town once a week to run errands and paid all of her bills on time. She wanted to move to the coast of North Carolina, and saved every penny that Cole paid her.
“You ought to come by more often,” she said.
They sat on the loveseat, draped in doilies, while the sister slept in a recliner. The room was neat and uncluttered; books lined the pine shelves, and framed pictures of landscapes—the ocean, snow-capped mountains—hung from the walls. A small TV in the corner of the room was turned off.
“I was just reading to Janice before she dozed off. The Good Earth. You ever read that, Cole?”
“You know me. I don’t read too much.”
“Except the Bible.”
He grinned. “That’s true.”
“Well, that’s nothing to be ashamed of.” Arie patted his knee. “The Bible is a good source of literature.”
Arie was the only old person Cole knew who did not seem at all religious. His grandmother said Arie Webb was a Communist. Cole didn’t know about that, but it was true that she held different views than most of the people around here. Nobody would guess that just by looking at her. She looked grandmotherly and soft. She wore granny eyeglasses and pressed dresses, and her hair was as white as snow.
“You still thinking about nursing school?”
He told her he was not sure.
“Now Cole, if you want to be somebody, you got to get an education. I didn’t have the support of my family when I went off to teacher’s college. But it gave me a freedom I never would have had otherwise.”
“If you were so free,” he said, “then why did you come back here?”
“I thought I could change things, help the children who didn’t have a chance. And I wanted to come home. These mountains, they got a hold over me.”
“Yeah, they’ll do that to you.”
“But now I want to spend the rest of my days where it’s warm and quiet. Nobody will mess with the ocean the way they’re doing to the mountains.… At least people are trying to stop it. Trying to do right. Organize.”
Cole stayed for a while, listening to Arie talk books and politics, but then Janice woke up and stared with her glassy eyes and said she was hungry. It was almost six; Cole said he had to go.
“I got a date.”
“Don’t be a heartbreaker.” Arie gave him the pills and he handed her the cash and she said, “I’ll add this to the cookie jar.”
At exactly six he pulled in and Lacy held open the door. He stepped into the warmth, rubbing his hands. “Cold out there.”
“I’m glad you wanted to come over.”
“Hell yes.”
He dropped his leather jacket on a chair. The living room was small, tidy. A picture of a baying wolf hung on the wall, and all shapes and colors of candles were arranged on the coffee table and on the top of the TV.
Lacy handed him a beer. She was wearing snug black jeans and a blue sweater and socks with pink balloons on them. A little white cat ran up to him, curled around his ankles.
“That’s Snowball, a stray. Somebody dumped it a couple of weeks ago.”
She put in an old Aerosmith CD and asked if he liked it and he said he did. Then she sat next him on the sofa, but not so close that they were touching. They smoked and drank and talked.
She pointed to a magazine on the coffee table. “Did you see this?”
“No.”
She opened it to a picture of Dove Creek. There was also a picture of Lacy and Sara Jean. Arms around each other, faces grim. On the next page, a picture of a mining site: a gray mass hacked into a forest of green. Michael’s name appeared in bold print under the title: “Almost Heaven, Almost Gone.”
“Any good?” he asked.
“Yeah, it’s good. Take it home with you.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“You should read it.”
Cole flipped the pages and stopped on a picture of the old woman who
’d been up at Big Bear. He tapped the woman’s face with his index finger. “I seen her in some kind of protest,” he said. “Your kid was there too.”
“Yep, that’s Blue Tiller.”
“Who is she? What’s she want?”
“She used to fight for the union, way back. Her daddy was a miner, her husband too. Later, she fought the strip mines. She lives alone, way up there at the head. I never saw her before, but one day she was knocking on doors, trying to get people to come to a meeting. Denny had just taken off.” She paused, took a drag on her cigarette. “I guess Blue said the right thing to Sara Jean. At first nobody went to the meetings except the two of them, but now they got a handful of people. She got me to go to a few. You should go.”
“I’m pretty busy.”
“Well, you should at least talk to Michael when he comes back. Maybe you can be in his book.”
Cole laughed, shook his head.
“Why not?”
He drained the rest of his beer. “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s just not me.”
The light outside had disappeared, and Lacy lit a few of the candles. She asked if he was hungry, but he said he was not.
“Me either,” she said, smiling.
He asked if she wanted another beer, and she said she did. He got two more out of the fridge, and just stood there for a few seconds, happy and nervous. On the refrigerator hung Sara Jean’s drawings, and snapshots of her and Lacy. He did not see any of Denny, the ex.
When he walked back in, Lacy was looking at him and he stood in front of her and she grabbed his belt loops and pulled him down, beer spilling, cushions falling, clothes sliding off. They moved from the couch to the floor to the bed, and when he reached over to turn off the light, she stopped him. “Leave it on, I like to look at you.” She was naked and freckled and flushed and without a single tattoo. He put his mouth on her neck and she yanked down his briefs and told him what she liked, surprising him with her dirty talk.
With her smell all over him, he stretched out on his back. “You wore me out.”
“I could keep going,” she said, laughing, her hands wandering.
But eventually, she fell asleep with her head on his chest, and he reached over and switched off the light. He felt the heat of her skin and his breathing slowed and he sunk into his own bones and felt strangely at peace. But halfway through the night he awoke in a cold sweat, his heart pounding. He saw his grandfather, skeletal face and bony hands and prophetic eyes, and he looked at the woman next to him. “Charlotte,” he whispered. Then he remembered this was not Charlotte. This was Lacy Cooper. She was a married woman. She was a mother. He traced his fingers lightly along her spine, but her skin felt suddenly strange to him and he climbed out of bed.
The floor creaked under his light steps. He went into the kitchen and looked out the window and tried to remember his dream, but it was already starting to fade into confused images: a raging fire, the nursing home, his grandfather’s gnarled fingers reaching into Cole’s mouth. He turned on the faucet, splashed water on his face. He looked again at the pictures on the refrigerator, then nosed through a pile of papers on the table. Electric bill, a stack of coupons, a checkbook. The little white cat came up to him and he picked it up and tried to cuddle it, but it grew wild and jumped out of his arms.
He wandered through the house. He went into the living room and sat on the sofa and imagined how they used to be as a family, Lacy and Denny and Sara Jean, here together drinking hot chocolate and watching TV. Then he went in the bathroom and checked the medicine cabinet, but the only drugs he found were children’s aspirin and grape cough syrup. He turned down the hall and into the kid’s room and looked around at the computer and books and stuffed animals and sport trophies that were her father’s. He lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. He and this kid had something in common, not having a father. But it was different because she’d known her daddy, and Cole had never met his and did not even know his name. He smoked a cigarette, ashing in his cupped hand, and when he felt that the nightmare had finally disappeared from his mind, he returned to the bedroom and crawled in next to Lacy and she murmured something and wrapped around him and he put his hand on her moist thigh and felt as if he were the only one left in this world. What was this thing he searched for? He held on to her and wished her beauty would somehow fill him and later when dawn broke and she was still in his arms, he slipped out of bed without waking her, dressed quickly, and went out the front door into the cold.
Chapter 11
Christmastime in the mountains. Plastic reindeer, inflatable Santas, and strings of lights outlining trailer homes and satellite dishes. At the nursing home Christmas music played all day, and Cole couldn’t get the lyrics out of his head. “Deck the Halls,” “Joy to the World,” goddamn “Silver Bells.” There were more visitors during the holidays, and this morning, kids from the elementary school went down the halls, chanting “Jingle Bells” and looking scared; the old people stared listlessly and a few smiled and a few cried and still others reached out their crippled hands. Lacy Cooper’s kid was among them, and at first she pretended like she didn’t see him. He said her name three or four times before she acknowledged him. She was eleven and missed her daddy; she had no use for Cole.
He had been sleeping with Lacy for about two months. Usually, he saw her on the nights that she worked late, when Sara Jean stayed at her grandparents’. They would drink a few beers and talk, then they’d be at each other like teenagers. He no longer ran off in the mornings but lingered over coffee and cigarettes. The sex was good and he could lose himself in it, and for this he was happy. But, truthfully, Lacy made him nervous. She was not like the other women. She was clearheaded and strong and sober. “You’re my bad boy,” she liked to say, but she did not know. She believed that he would go to nursing school like he’d been talking about, and that he would earn a good living and be a daddy for her kid.
Cole clocked out and went out the back door, but pulled up short when he saw a police cruiser parked next to his truck. He stood there stupidly, an easy target. An opal ring and two hundred bucks and a handful of Valium stuffed in his pockets. He thought of what was in his glove compartment. More pills, a roll of cash, the revolver that Reese had sold him.
The driver door opened and a tall, thick-muscled cop stepped out. He was in full uniform, minus the hat. His hair was cut tight and high.
“Hey,” he called sharply.
Cole was not surprised. Yesterday a doctor in Raleigh County was arrested for overprescribing medication; last week, a string of meth labs were busted.
“Buddy, you know if my wife is in there?”
“What?”
“Ellen.”
It took him a second, then Cole understood. He sighed with relief. Just as he started to answer him, Ellen walked through the doors.
“I’ve been wanting you two to meet,” she exclaimed. “This is my fiancé, Randy. Randy, this is Cole Freeman.”
“Hey,” Randy said.
“Hey.”
They shook hands. Cole barely reached Randy’s shoulders. He noticed the gun resting on his hip. Randy had a wide, empty-looking face and restless eyes.
“You a nurse?”
Embarrassed, Cole shook his head. “No. An aide.”
“Well, at least you got a job. Hard to find around here. That’s why I went to the police academy. Been a cop two years this Christmas.” Randy spit between his front teeth. “Pays all right. Not much action, you know. Domestic violence, drugs, robbery. Not much else.”
“Babe, you’ve been in some rough situations.” Ellen bragged to Cole, “He had a gun pulled on him.”
“A couple of times,” Randy added.
As Ellen looked up at Randy, her face sparkled. Nobody had ever looked at Cole like that, but Randy didn’t even seem to notice. He said they had to be going. Cole waited until the cruiser was gone, then he drove over to T-Bone Martin’s.
Usually, T-Bone’s wife, Patty, answered the door, but
this time T-Bone let him in. T-Bone had broad shoulders and a craggy face and thinning silver hair, and it was easy to see him as the bartender he once was. He’d had some kind of cancer, and now was in remission. These days, T-Bone rarely took the painkillers prescribed to him, instead favoring the white mule his son-in-law brewed.
“How you doing, T-Bone?”
“Oh, can’t complain.”
Cole usually spent at least an hour at T-Bone’s. Patty would offer him something to eat, and T-Bone would grill him about who was at the nursing home, his friends and enemies. But today he just stood there looking at Cole through his dark-tinted glasses. Behind him, two TVs were going at once. A basketball game on one, with the sound muted, and on the other, a celebrity gossip show.
“How’s Patty?” Cole asked, wondering if T-Bone was going to ask him to sit down.
“She’s all right. She’s over at her sister’s.” He shifted his weight. “Look, Cole, I don’t have anything for you today.”
“You think you’ll get it tomorrow?”
“No, I mean, I’m not gonna have anything else for you.” T-Bone chewed his bottom lip. “It’s just, well, we got a lot of bills,” he continued, his voice dropping off.
Cole looked at him, uncomprehending.
“It just seems like it makes more sense for us, financially I mean, to you know, take care of things ourselves.”
Then it dawned on him what the old man was saying. For a moment, Cole was speechless.
“Goddamn, T-Bone. You know what you’re getting into?”
“I think so.” He sounded nervous. “I been mulling it over for some time now.”
“Goddamn.”
T-Bone gave him a sad little smile, as Cole calculated in his head how much he stood to lose. “I guess that’s that,” he said.
“We’ll see you later,” T-Bone called after him.
Cole drove up the block and thought about the nerve of the old man. He was going to cut Cole out, sell directly to the pillheads. He ran through a list of his customers, wondering who T-Bone was stealing from him. He’d been betrayed. But he had to give T-Bone credit, it was a smart move. He’d make twice as much. Cole wondered if Patty was in on it. She was a smart lady—maybe it was her idea. Was this a sign? First, Randy the cop, and now this. He could walk away. It was something he’d been playing over in his mind lately, especially as he spent more time with Lacy. He parked, locked his truck. Told himself, You could let go.
The Evening Hour Page 14