Lucky Strikes

by Louis Bayard

  “They put a tube in,” explained Dudley.

  A tube.

  I leaned over and saw a squat metal tank below the bed.

  “It’s oxygen,” said Dudley. “You took in a lot of smoke, Melia. The tube’s to help you breathe till you can do it on your own.”

  Oh, the strangeness of it. Not able to call your air your own.

  “It’s only for another day or two,” said Dudley.

  I laid there, stunned, all the same. Then Dudley handed me a legal pad and a pencil and said, “Write down whatever you want to know.”

  I set the pad in my lap. My fingers curled round the pencil, then jerked across the paper.

  What day?

  “Monday.”

  Which meant the day before was Sunday. Which meant the day before was … what?

  I glanced up at Dudley.

  Your head?

  “Aw.” He give it a shy rub. “It’s all right. I still get blurry, but they say it’s gonna pass, so…”

  I stared at the pad. I watched the pencil form the names.

  Janey

  Earle

  “They’re fine. Staying with the Gallaghers. Janey’s setting up and being bossy.”

  I scrawled another name and was surprised to see whose it was.

  Gus

  “Giving Mrs. Gallagher plenty to clean up after.”

  I paused. Then I wrote …

  House

  He drew in a breath.

  “Your front porch is a goner, but the rest of it’s still standing. There’s a lot of smoke damage and stuff, but y’all should be able to move back in before too long.”

  But what if we don’t want to?

  “Anything else?” asked Dudley.

  I swallowed. Tried to get the pencil to write, but it wouldn’t.

  “Hiram,” he guessed.

  I nodded.

  “He’s hanging on, Melia. They sewed him up right pert, but there’s some healing still to do.”

  See him?

  “He ain’t woken up yet,” said Dudley. “Soon as he does, I’ll come find you, okay?”

  Without even thinking, I scrawled …

  Thanks

  “Well, if that don’t beat all. I just got me a thank-you from Melia Hoyle. Tell you what, I’m gonna take that goddamn paper home and frame it.”

  Shut your yap

  “Now that’s more like it,” he said.

  I think I must’ve dozed off not long after. Slept on and off through the afternoon, then woke to voices in the hallway. I could hear Dudley saying, “She ain’t ready!” And some other voice, quieter and deeper, till at last it rose into hearing.

  “Son, I’m gonna say this one more time. Step aside.”

  Next thing I knew, Sheriff Claude Motherwell was standing in the doorway with his white-blond hair and his raw face and his dyspeptic belly.

  “How are you, Miss Melia?”

  I made a circle with my pointer finger and thumb. A-okay.

  The sheriff dragged the chair over to the side of the bed and dropped himself in it.

  “I wanted you to know how sorry I was to hear about your latest losses. God is my witness, I believe y’all have took more punishment than Job.”

  There was a stretch of silence. Then the sheriff give his fat thighs a slap.

  “Hey, now, got something needs clearing up, you don’t mind.” He picked up the legal pad from the floor. “Seeing as you’re able to write.” He tossed the pad in my lap. “What do you know, here’s a pencil, too. Makes things easier, don’t it?”

  He was smiling everywhere.

  “Now, Melia, we in the Warren County Police Department pride ourselves on being thorough, know’m sayin’? So when Mr. Blevins’s remains come in, we didn’t just shove ’em in some drawer somewhere, no, we called in a medical examiner, and we got a postmortem done. You know what a postmortem is?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, it’s a peculiar thing, Melia, seems there was a—a bullet hole in Mr. Blevins. Passing all the way through. You still with me?”

  I nodded.

  “Now I know, what with everything going on, you had a lot to trouble your mind that night, but … I was just wondering if you could tell us who fired that bullet? You can write it down if you don’t mind.”

  I had to stop now and then to keep the pencil from flying ahead of me. When I was done, I angled the pad toward the sheriff.

  Mustve been same varmints

  shot Hiram

  The sheriff frowned.

  “You get a good look at them varmints?”

  I shook my head.

  “License plate? Uh, body type? Coloring?”

  I shook my head. Then I wrote …

  Dark

  “Well, here’s where I’m having trouble,” the sheriff said. “I can’t rightly figure what Mr. Blevins was even doing there. Seeing as you and him wasn’t on the best of terms. I mean, why would he even be hanging round Brenda’s Oasis at such an ungodly hour?”

  I stared out the window. Purple shadows was bleeding down from the mountains. A monarch butterfly was dozing on the ledge.

  “Melia?”

  Tryin g to

  put out f ire

  “You’re…” The sheriff’s eyes squeezed down to lumps. “You’re telling me Harley Blevins was trying to put out the fire?”

  And when I nodded, he set back in his chair.

  “How would he’ve known there was a fire to put out?”

  I shrugged.

  “Melia, I’m gonna need more than that.”

  So I wrote the words for him. Neat and slow and even.

  Mustve been driving by

  The sheriff give a soft chuckle. “Just driving by, huh?”

  I nodded, kept writing.

  Miracle

  “Well, yeah,” said the sheriff. “That would’ve been a miracle.”

  Very slow, taking care with each letter, I wrote …

  Harley Blevins = hero

  Saved us

  Tell the world

  The sheriff read the words to himself. Read them a few times more.

  “So that’s your story?” he said quietly. “You’re abiding by it?”

  He leaned in and give me the searchingest look a body ever give another. Didn’t make a whit of difference, though, ’cause there weren’t an X-ray in the universe was gonna see through me.

  Abiding

  His head dropped a little. Then he set back up and, with delicate fingers, pulled the sheet off the pad. Folded it in three and tucked it in his shirt pocket.

  “I assume Mr. Watts will confirm your account when he comes to.”

  I nodded.

  “Reckon I’ll be on my way, then.”

  He was near to the door when he turned round one last time.

  “Ol’ Harley sure underestimated you, didn’t he?”

  I went without the oxygen tube for an hour that afternoon. Two hours next morning. Morning after that, I was walking. Dragging the tank for the first two laps round the floor, then going without.

  What I hadn’t done yet was speak. But when Dudley come round Thursday morning, he made a point of asking me how I was, and not having any legal pad nearby, I went ahead and answered.

  “Fair to middling.”

  I could see him wince, but I believe my shock was greater. That desperate creak of a voice. Like something that’d been living in a cave all its life.

  “Don’t you stew,” said Dudley. “Voice is the last thing to come round, that’s what the doc says. Here’s the thing, though—I hear Hiram’s ready for visitors.”

  “Give me an hour.”

  I went back in my room and practiced speaking in that new voice of mine till it stopped scaring me. By the time Dudley come back, I was very near to resigned.

  Hiram’s ward was at the end of the hallway. There was ten beds in it, but only two was filled, one by a TB patient, who lay with his face to the wall, coughing up what was left of his lungs. Three beds down lay Hiram, in a gown
very like mine.

  All I saw at first was a gray head and a pair of long, lank, veiny legs. The rest of him was blocked by the woman who set alongside his bed and rested her chin on his arm. Such a private pose that I flushed and started back, but Hiram’s good eye cut our way, and he raised his head a fraction, and the woman jumped to her feet and swung round.

  It was Ida. Her hair wrapped like ermine round her neck, her hand already reaching for Hiram’s.

  “I should be going,” she said.

  She give us each a nod as she passed, then vanished into the hallway without a look back.

  Which left the three of us stuck in place, awaiting orders from on high. Then Dudley said, “How ’bout I leave you two be?” and ducked out of the room, and it was just us two.

  “Don’t know as I ever seen your legs before,” I said, circling round the foot of his bed. “Bare nekkid.”

  “Ain’t they pretty?” he said.

  I angled my face a little to the right of him so I wouldn’t have to look at him head-on.

  “You sound just like Greta Garbo,” he said.

  “Like hell I do.”

  “Without the accent.”

  “You’re a liar,” I said. (Though, for a second, he had me wondering.)

  “Everything okay with Ida?” I asked, trying to keep my croak light.

  He sheathed his hands cross his forehead. “Ida,” he said, “has got other fish to fry. I believe we’ve seen the last of her.”

  I nodded. Looked down at my hands.

  “Listen,” I said. “If the sheriff ever comes and asks you who was—”

  “I’m to say it was too dark to see anything.”

  “Yeah.”

  Lord, it was quiet. Just for company, I found myself staring at the feller three beds down. Who wasn’t even bestirring himself now ’cept to cough.

  “You’ll have to forgive me,” said Hiram.

  “What the hell for?”

  “I didn’t play it smart, Amelia. I saw the fire go up and I went running at it. Without a thought. Fish in a barrel.”

  I come round the side of his bed, took his dry hand in mine. “Point is we survived.”

  “Brenda’s Oasis didn’t.”

  “Aw,” I said. “Who needs that dump anyway? Always more trouble than it was worth.”

  “I miss my counter.” He drew in a long breath, like he was sucking on one of his Luckys. “The one thing we always scrimped on was insurance.”

  “Premiums was too high.”

  “So we always said.”

  I set on the edge of his bed. Brought my other hand on top of his. “We had us a good run, Hiram.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Mama would’ve been proud.”

  “I suspect you’re right.”

  He put his other hand on top of mine, and we set there a good while. At some point, the other feller ceased his coughing, and a silence settled over us like snow. Then, from somewhere far off, come the sound of running feet.

  Very particular feet, I knew ’em soon as I heard ’em. Sure enough, when I angled my head to the doorway, there was Earle, bounding into view.

  “You gotta come with me!” he cried.

  “What for?”

  “Just the once, could you shut up and do like you’re told?”

  Chapter

  THIRTY-ONE

  Well, it didn’t take me but ten minutes to collect my bill and be on my way. Doc Brown give me an extra tank of oxygen, and the nurses popped a couple of oranges in my hands and opened the front door for me, and before my eyes had even got used to the sun, Chester Gallagher was pulling up in his Buick sedan.

  “Hop in,” he said.

  Earle was in the front, Dudley was in the back, and nothing seemed right.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I said.

  Not a word.

  “Chester, you’re my damn lawyer. You gotta tell me.”

  “I’m gonna have to plead the Fifth.”

  Nothing to do but drag myself inside and pull the door after. Oh, but I had the sinkingest feeling as we headed north out of town, and when we took a left on Strasburg Pike, my stomach swerved in clear the other direction.

  “No,” I said. “I can’t.”

  But the car bore on.

  “I said I can’t. I can’t go back.”

  “Shh,” said Dudley, giving my forearm a squeeze.

  How strange and terrible the road looked to me now. Like I’d last traveled it a million years ago. I tried to close my eyes, but they was still wide open when we hit that last turn and the sign come soaring out of the noon haze.

  BRENDA’S OASIS.

  “See?” cried Earle. “It never come down, Melia. Barely even got smudged.”

  He was right. The desert and the water and the camels, they was near as fresh as the night they went up. And that was the cruelest blow of all somehow. To have that sign looking down on all the waste and wreckage. Like a queen gazing on a dead kingdom.

  “Stop,” I whispered. “Please stop.”

  And when that failed, I shouted, best I could.

  “Will you stop the goddamn car!”

  That’s when Hiram’s porte cochere swum into view.

  I rolled down the window and leaned my head out, stared until I couldn’t stare no more. ’Cause, of course, I’d seen that porte cochere swallowed by fire. Seen it crumble and fall. The only way it could be standing now was if I was dreaming it.

  But there was the four columns, braced and firm and true. Just like I remembered. The only thing that didn’t fit was the man who lay sprawled atop the roof, raising a John Henry hammer to the clouds.

  Warner. Warner the trucker.

  “How you?” he growled down.

  “Uh. Okay.” I stared at him some more. “How you?”

  “Tolerable.”

  “What you doing there, Warner?”

  “What the hell’s it look like? Laying down shingles. Hey, watch your head there.”

  I spun round, and there was Joe Bob, carrying a length of ceiling vault. And there was Dutch, bending a gutter, and just beyond him was Elmer, and, to the left of Elmer, Merle.

  “How’d you fellers even…”

  “Word travels fast in the hills,” said Warner.

  Then I heard someone calling my name. It was Frances Bean, in rolled-up sleeves. Her hands was stained with paint.

  “Hot enough for you?” she was saying.

  Directly behind her was a wall. A freestanding, load-bearing wall. Exactly where the front wall of the store used to be.

  And not far off, two other walls. Waiting to make corners with the wall that was standing. And, a few yards past, another wall, ready to make a fourth.

  And alongside each of these walls, a human being. Hard at work.

  It was like some veil was being peeled away, piece by piece, from my eyes. Suddenly I could see dozens and dozens of people—people I knew by sight—swarming across what was left of Brenda’s Oasis. Pouring concrete. Sanding floorboards. Carving molding. Laying down nests of wire.

  Basil Buckner was taking an adze to a ceiling beam. Farmer Stokes was pouring fresh gravel out of the back of his truck. Frances Bean’s husband was cutting sections of drywall. Maggie McGuilkin was screwing a knob onto a door, and Mrs. Hicks and Mrs. Buckner was carting away barrows of sawdust and wood chips.

  Ladders was rising to the sky, and hammers was ringing and saws grunting. Body after body was bent in the heat, bearing down and dragging up, and in that fog of sweat and toil, under the ministrations of a thousand hands, Brenda’s Oasis was rising from its ashes.

  Over there, by the garage, lay the remains of our old icebox, waiting to be hauled to the junkyard. But here, just a few feet from where I was standing, a carpenter was fashioning a new one, the same one, right down to the mirrored doors. On the far side of the road lay our old pickle barrel, a blackened stump of its former self. Here on this side, a cooper had made one even bigger than the last, and a blacksmith was girding it ro
und with iron hoops.

  Lewis Quint, the glazier, was fitting a new plate-glass window, and a crew led by Mr. Hicks was buffing down a slab of wood that, less my eyes deceived me, was going to be Hiram’s new counter.

  Why, you might’ve thought the whole population of Walnut Ridge had turned out for this very occasion. There was Minnie-Cora Harper and her newest beau. There was Lizabeth Shafer and Gwendolyn Davenport. There was Mrs. Goolsby, carrying a pitcher of sweet tea from worker to worker. Pastor Goolsby, using a hammer claw to pull nails out of charred wood.

  And there, on her hands and knees, was Mina Gallagher, scrubbing the last bits of soot from the store’s stone foundation.

  I was gazing out on truckers whose names I hadn’t even got down yet. On townsfolk I hadn’t seen since they got their palms read by Madame Ouspenskaya. On children who’d never done nothing more than climb into our tire swings. Here they all was, with their wrenches and pliers and planes and screwdrivers. I believe it was the closest thing I’d seen—will ever see—to a miracle. And so frail did it seem to me in that moment, I almost didn’t want to breathe on it.

  But then—one by one—the workers stopped what they was doing, set down whatever tool they had in their hands, wiped their brows, and looked at me.

  Someone—I think it was Chester—set down an old milk crate, then helped me stand on it. I must’ve spent a good minute or two just clearing my throat till I remembered that was how my voice sounded now.

  “Hey, y’all.…”

  Next second, I heard someone yell, “Speak up!”

  “She can’t!” shouted someone else.

  “Listen now,” I said. “My voice ain’t much—I mean, it never—I never was much of a public speaker.…”

  “Neither was Moses!” called Pastor Goolsby.

  There was some laughter at that.

  “What I mean,” I said, “is there ain’t no words. Not really. For what y’all have done. I mean, I can’t believe you’d—I never thought you…”

  I never thought you give a rat’s ass about us.

  And still they stood watching. Quiet as Quakers. Waiting for something I couldn’t dredge up. I think I might be standing on that crate this very minute if Warner hadn’t bellowed down.

  “Quit your yapping, girl, and get to work!”

  And so I did.

  I confess, being just out of hospital, there weren’t too much I could do. Anything too strenuous, my windpipe’d squeeze down on me, and I’d have to go trotting over to Chester’s car for a whiff of oxygen.