Deep Down (Hallie Michaels)

by Deborah Coates

  Hallie lowered her arms. The dog looked like it was already asleep, like it spent its life riding in trucks with girls. After a minute, she shrugged and put the truck in gear and headed down the drive. This was obviously the way things were now. And what else was she going to do?

  It was almost noon when she got back to the ranch, the sky full of low gray clouds that hinted at a winter that had not yet come. The air was damp when she got out of the pickup, and though it felt a dozen degrees colder than the forty-three the thermometer showed, it was still unseasonably warm.

  The dog slipped out the truck door while she was closing it and followed her up to the house.

  “Jesus,” she said, irritated. “Why are you here?”

  “Told you,” the dog responded. “Watching.”

  “Don’t you have someplace you need to be?”

  The dog looked at her. “No.”

  She entered the house on a rush of warmer air, the kitchen smelling like hand cleaner and straw. The dog didn’t follow.

  Her father was in the dining room with a set of blueprints spread out in front of him, making notes along the edges.

  “You want lunch?” she asked.

  “I could eat,” he said.

  Hallie pulled out bread, milk, sliced roast beef, some chips from on top of the refrigerator, and lettuce that was not quite too old. With the silence of long habit, they stood side by side at the counter and made sandwiches. Her father took his plate back to the dining room table and the blueprints he’d been working on. Hallie followed, sitting down across from him.

  After a couple of bites of sandwich and a few more penciled notes, her father set his pencil aside and looked at her, which, for him, was a question: Yeah, do you want something?

  “Do you remember Pabby’s mother?” Hallie asked.

  Her father took a long swallow of milk, set the glass down, and tilted his head back, like it would make it easier to remember. “Oh, hell,” he said, “she died—I don’t know—it must be forty years ago now.”

  “Did you know about the iron rails?” she asked.

  Her father had started to lean back in his chair, but he stopped at Hallie’s question and leaned forward again. “The hex?”

  “That’s what Pabby calls it,” Hallie agreed. “How come I never heard anything about it?”

  Her father shrugged and this time he did lean back, plucked a potato chip from his plate, and chewed on it before answering. “Not that much to tell,” he said. “She was always a little—different, I’d guess you’d say, Pabby’s mother. Kind of—” He paused, like he was searching for the right words. “—I mean, she was always a nice lady. Gracious. You don’t see that much around here.” He stared at the framed pictures above the dining room sideboard. “Well, I mean there’s no call for it. Gracious doesn’t get the calves out of the rain, does it?”

  Hallie unbuttoned her shirt cuffs and rolled up the sleeves, stuck her elbows on the table, and leaned forward. “Did you help build it?” she asked.

  “Oh, yeah.” Her father drained his milk, then set the glass down with a thump on the table. “Was a hell of a thing. Montifall—her husband, you know. That was Pabby’s name before she got married—Montifall. Anyway, he’d died the year before, and everyone thought she’d move to town. Then one day she came driving over and asked Davey and me if we wanted to earn some extra money.” He looked toward the kitchen as if he were looking at something much farther away. “Well, hell—we did, you know. I was only sixteen. Davey was, let’s see, twenty—getting ready to go in the army come fall and not enough here to keep both of us and your granddad busy.”

  “So you buried a bunch of iron rails in her yard.”

  “Didn’t hurt anybody.” He sniffed. “She paid good and she was easy to work for. It wasn’t iron, though. Not exactly,” he added. “You can’t put pure iron in the ground like that and expect it to last. Steel rails with a high iron content. But basically steel.”

  “Did she ever tell you why?”

  “Said it was a hex. Keep things out. Hell, I don’t know. People can do what they want, as far as I’m concerned.”

  He looked at Hallie. “What’s Pabby want, telling you that old story?” he asked. “I haven’t heard anyone even mention those rails in twenty years.”

  “I don’t know,” Hallie said, because what was she going to tell him? That there were black dogs circling Pabby’s yard? “You know she likes to talk.”

  Her father looked at her close for several long seconds, then hitched one shoulder up and settled back in his chair. “Yeah,” he said finally. “She’s a talker.”

  They were still sitting at the table when the phone rang. Hallie didn’t even wait for her father, just got up and answered it. She wondered how often he’d just let it ring when he was alone, after she and Dell had both left.

  “This is Buehl over to the Templeton ag supply. Bearing kit for that Big Bear Vance bought off Cal Littlejohn come in. You can come pick it up anytime today or tomorrow.”

  “Thanks,” Hallie said.

  Having said what he’d called to say, Forest Buehl hung up without saying good-bye. He hadn’t said hello either; figured, like half the men Hallie knew, that the two were just wasted words tacked on to conversations to make them longer.

  “Buehl says those parts are in,” she told her father, who was deep in analyzing the blueprints again when she went back into the dining room.

  “Yeah, okay. Thanks,” he said. Like she had already told him she would pick them up.

  “I could pick them up,” she said. Because he could ask. It wasn’t so impossible.

  He looked up from his papers and grinned. He looked young, just-starting-out young, not-a-care-in-the-world young, like he hadn’t been in years. “If you have time to pick those parts up, that’d be real helpful,” he said.

  Hallie tapped the blueprints. “It’s just a pole barn,” she said, “not the Empire State Building.”

  “Might as well add a few improvements,” he said, tapping his pencil on the paper in front of him.

  She was halfway out of the room again when she stopped and turned back, shoved her hands in the pockets of her jeans, and leaned against the doorjamb. “Got a job offer today,” she said.

  Her father put his pencil down. “Yeah?” He waited.

  “Not around here,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said, like that was only to be expected. “Does it pay good?”

  “Pretty good,” she said.

  “You should take it.”

  “Yeah. I could leave it till spring,” she said, though she wasn’t actually sure that was true. “If you want help for the winter.” She gestured at the blueprints. “To rebuild.”

  Her father looked at her with something that almost resembled a scowl. “I’ll survive,” he said. He put his hands on the table, preparatory to rising. “You want to stay, stay. But this ranch isn’t going to get any bigger.” He went into the kitchen. Hallie could hear him grab a hat and jacket off the pegs by the door, heard the kitchen door open and close and the muted slap of the storm door.

  Yeah, she thought, okay.

  She went upstairs thinking about what she’d get if she stayed: cold sandwiches for lunch, picking up parts in town, and a ranch too small to support either one of them, let alone both.

  At the top of the stairs, something cold brushed the back of her neck—arctic-ice cold, blizzard-winter cold—she knew it was a ghost, but when she turned, there was nothing there.

  She grabbed her keys and a jacket, shoved her cell phone in her pocket, and realized on her way back down the stairs that Boyd had never called her back.

  Damn him.

  4

  A half-hour drive to Templeton and it took her five minutes to pick up the parts. No sign of the dog when she’d come back outside to her truck or on the drive over. Maybe it had decided she wasn’t all that interesting after all.

  Forest Buehl, who was maybe three years older than she was, claimed they’d never met,
which wasn’t true. He’d worked in the ag supply since he was fourteen, and she’d been there plenty of times before she left home.

  “Nah,” he said, “I’d remember.”

  “Think back,” Hallie said, waiting for him to hand her the last box.

  After a minute, as if he’d actually tried to think back, he shrugged and handed her the box. He wasn’t bad-looking—broad shouldered and tall—but maybe not the sharpest pin in the cushion.

  “Say,” he said, leaning against the side of her truck so she’d have to go around him to get to the driver’s door, not stopping her on purpose, just that he couldn’t imagine she wouldn’t take the time to visit a little, now that she was here. “We do a bowling and beer thing here most Saturday nights. Softball in the summer, of course. It’s great to get new folks, if you want to come.”

  “Okay,” Hallie said. He’d finally moved back two steps and her hand was already on the door. “Sounds good.” Though she wouldn’t actually do it.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t want to do those things or might not enjoy them; it was that everything, every new person she met and liked, every task she took on was like another nail in what wasn’t a coffin, but sure felt like a trap. And she wasn’t staying.

  She wasn’t. Maybe she hadn’t given Kate an answer yet, but it wasn’t because she didn’t know what the answer would be. What it had to be.

  Still, she had a week before Kate needed an answer. A week to work on Pabby’s problem. To work on other things, like what she’d leave behind and what that meant. Maybe it would be simple, the thing with Pabby. Right. Maybe all of it would just be as easy as pie.

  On the main street out of Templeton headed south, she noticed a faded sign. She’d seen it a hundred times before, but never stopped:

  BEYOND THE VEIL.

  FUTURES. FORTUNES. GLIMPSES OF THE AFTERLIFE.

  10–5 EVERY DAY. EXCEPT FRIDAY AFTERNOONS.

  ALL DAY SATURDAY. AND TUESDAY MORNINGS.

  Past the sign, set back at the edge of a large gravel parking lot was a 1940s ranch house with a shiny new blue tin roof and a front porch that slanted forward, like it was trying to separate itself from the house. Half the parking lot and a side yard of mowed weeds and three old oak trees were surrounded by a four-foot chain-link fence with a sign that read DANGER: PIT BULL next to the gate. There were three outbuildings behind the house, an equipment shed and a couple of grain-storage buildings, as well as some old automobiles, a school bus painted lime green, and an old red and yellow Case tricycle tractor with one front wheel off.

  She pulled in near the house and parked. Her truck was the only vehicle in the lot. As she walked up the dusty cracked sidewalk, a small white and tan terrier with a patch of black fur around one eye charged the fence and barked at her. The only other dog Hallie could see lay next to one of the oak trees. It wagged its tail without lifting its head. It wasn’t a pit bull either.

  COME ON IN, the sign at the door said. So Hallie did. She wasn’t entirely sure why she’d stopped or what use it would be. But the information she needed wasn’t the sort of thing that could be found on the Internet. She’d learned that in September. And maybe someone who claimed to see “Glimpses of the Afterlife” knew something that could help.

  The front door led straight into the living room, which was furnished with a love seat, two chairs, and a battered oak coffee table all on one side of the room. On the other side, on a brown sisal rug with purple stars stenciled in a border along the edge, sat a wooden card table and three folding chairs. Underneath the windows was an old metal lateral filing cabinet that looked like it had been freshly painted. The doorway to the rest of the house was covered by a thin red curtain that didn’t quite hang to the floor.

  She heard movement behind the curtain, and a man emerged. He was tall and thin, maybe in his forties, dressed in old jeans, battered work boots, and a dark brown work shirt. His hair was flat against his head, and though his face was mostly tan, his forehead was pale.

  “Fortune read?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Are you here to have your fortune read?” he repeated.

  “I just have some questions,” Hallie said.

  The man gestured her toward the card table. “Have a seat,” he said, and sat opposite her.

  Hallie looked at him. He wasn’t what she’d expected—not old or a woman or wearing an armful of bracelets and a shawl. Plus, he looked familiar. “Aren’t you Laddie Kennedy?” she asked.

  “Yup,” he said. “That’s me.”

  “And you read fortunes?”

  Laddie shrugged. “It’s a sideline.”

  The Kennedys had lived ten miles north of the Michaelses until their ranch went under six years ago. Laddie and his brother Tom sold up to someone from out of state just ahead of the bank, and Hallie thought they’d both left for Rapid City or Kansas City or someplace there were jobs.

  “Can you actually read fortunes or do you just make things up?” she asked.

  Laddie, who’d picked up a deck of cards and started shuffling them, stopped midshuffle and looked at her. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You don’t know?”

  He was quiet for a minute, not like no one had ever asked him that question before, though Hallie would have bet that no one had. More like, he was getting the words straight in his head, like that was just the way he did things.

  “I make things up,” he finally said. “But then, some of it happens. So”—he flipped four cards out in front of him—“I don’t know, you tell me. Am I just that lucky or is it something else?”

  Hallie had just that morning learned that Pabby’s mother knew when people were going to die; Boyd had dreams that turned out to be about the future, so she wasn’t going to say one way or the other, because in her experience either one was possible. “And glimpses of the afterlife?” she asked. “Fake or real?”

  Laddie picked up the cards in front of him and put them back in the deck, cut it, and left one half on the table. He shuffled the other half and laid out four more cards. “I heard you see ghosts,” he said.

  Hallie scowled. You didn’t even have to tell people things anymore. “I’ve seen a couple.” Which was almost not exactly a lie.

  Laddie gathered up the cards he’d laid out, put them on the stack on the table, then joined the whole set to the cards in his hand.

  “Do you know anything about black dogs?” Hallie asked.

  Laddie stopped shuffling. “Harbingers?”

  “Yeah, those.”

  He looked out the window, like he thought there might be a bunch outside. “Never seen one,” he said. “But I’ve heard that if you can see them, then the reapers are coming.”

  Hallie felt a sharp pain, like a skewer through her right eye. She rubbed her hand hard across her face.

  “You all right?” Laddie asked.

  “Fine,” she said. “Is there a way to make them go away?”

  “What? The reapers?”

  “Well, black dogs, for now,” Hallie said. “Just black dogs.” She hoped.

  Laddie shrugged. “I can ask,” he said.

  “You can ask?”

  Laddie turned away from the window. Hallie could see something that looked like desperation in his eyes. “Sometimes dead people talk to me.”

  “What, like ghosts?” Because they never talked to her.

  “Not ghosts. People on the other side,” he said. “Dead people.”

  “The other side of what?” How had she never known that people could predict death and talk to the dead and whatever else was possible? How could all that be right here and she hadn’t known? But then, maybe she just hadn’t looked and wouldn’t have believed it anyway.

  “The line between life and death,” Laddie said.

  Hallie sighed, like she’d stepped on soft ground and was still sinking. “Okay,” she said. “That’d be great. If you would ask.”

  He told her it might take a couple days and he would call. She gave him her
cell number and got his in return. She paid him twenty dollars, which would be a bargain if he actually found some answers. “I’m on the Internet too,” he said. “You can email.”

  She was at the front door when he said, “Hallie Michaels.”

  She turned.

  He seemed to be studying the name and number she’d written down for him. He looked up. “You should take that job,” he said.

  A couple miles outside Templeton, Hallie turned onto SR54, then a mile later onto old CR 7.

  You should take that job.

  Hallie was and wasn’t skeptical of the things she’d seen in the last several months. She’d gone her whole life not believing in ghosts or harbingers of death or blood magic. But when she saw them right in front of her, she didn’t spend much time denying them. What was the point? They were right there, cold or talking or trying to kill her. Accepting them was actually the easy route.

  But what Laddie did—or claimed he did—all she could see was him, not the dead people, all she heard was what he told her. It didn’t prove anything. It couldn’t.

  And yet, he knew about the offer from Kate, or knew something. It was like it had been when she stopped there in the first place, a chance, the chance that he actually did know what he was talking about. And she was taking it.

  There was a whine in the engine of the ten-year-old pickup, and she entertained herself for several minutes, trying to figure out what it was and when it was audible, more pleased than she should have been to have something concrete to tackle. She’d about decided it was the fan belt when she saw something in the intersection a mile up the road.

  She slowed, then stopped, pulled over onto gravel at the side of the road, but left the engine running. It looked as if a grain truck had T-boned a car, the side of the car buckled in and half under the front of the truck. A heavy one-ton truck and a small two-door red coupe. It never stood a chance—the coupe—but they should have seen each other. It was fall, everything gone brown, crops not tall enough to obscure the intersection—wouldn’t happen at this intersection anyway, county road to county road, wide shoulders all around.