Ash Falls

by Warren Read

  The back of the building was still unpainted, crusty and dropping sooty flakes on the dandelion-pocked ground like dead, molted skin. Some years earlier, Marcelle didn’t know when, Melvin White had simply run out of paint when he’d only gotten through the street-facing half of the place. And then for one reason or another he never drove himself back to the Coast to Coast to get another couple gallons. So there it sat, half-dressed but cleaned up on the only side that really counted anyway.

  Marcelle settled herself into the wicker chair against the office wall, listening to guitar and static on the small dial radio, and the clatter of dishes and cupboards coming from the room behind the front desk. She swiped a Kleenex and cleaned the fog from her glasses. She kept her hands on her stomach and studied the paintings of men on horses, cattle drivers climbing sloped trails that hugged wildflower-covered mountainsides. There were snowy peaks beyond them, and snaking rivers below, and Marcelle wondered if such scenes really existed anymore, or if ever.

  The dribble of brewing coffee falling into its glass globe gave an idea of warmth, even though her pink hands were still ice. She heard his footsteps at last and then Melvin came through the door into the office. He gave Marcelle a dismissive look and a heavy sigh before swiping a cup of coffee from the still running stream. He flipped open his ledger and began scratching pencil to paper. His hair was combed over his head in a limp white ducktail and the soft blue legs of a voluptuous tattoo woman poked out from the cuff of his shirtsleeve, ankles crossed like she had simply drawn blankets over the wrong half of her body. He wrote and wrote, and thumped a chunky stamp onto the paper three times before closing it and taking hold of another booklet where he started the whole thing again. After carrying on like this for another a minute or two, he finally spoke to her.

  “Are you going to just sit there all day, Marcella?”

  “It’s Marcelle, Mister White.”

  “Marcella. Marcelle. Are you going to sit there all day?”

  “Well, no.”

  He continued on with the business, shuffling papers and punching numbers into a desk calculator. He wasn’t doing anything really. Marcelle knew. She’d stood behind the counter once before, when Melvin had to run to the Red Apple for smokes and there was never anything to do but stare out the window or sometimes answer the phone. He clicked his tongue at her.

  “There’s rooms need cleaning,” he said.

  “That’s what I needed to know.”

  “Marcelle, you been here two weeks now and every time you come in here it’s the same thing. You gotta take initiative. Don’t sit there waiting for me or Roxanne to tell you what to do.” He pointed a knuckly finger at the wall to his right. “If there’s no key on the hook then the room’s either occupied or it was till this morning. Go get your cart and start knocking. Jesus Christ girl, it ain’t rocket science we’re talking about here.”

  Roxanne’s cart was parked outside room number three, and she was stripping the bed and singing to herself. Marcelle didn’t know the song or even recognize the tune but she was going at it like she was on a stage, loud and full-throated. She moved like a machine, with much more energy and intention than Marcelle ever felt in her life. Roxanne was old enough to be somebody’s mother but there was nothing the least bit motherly about her. She was snippy as could be and showed an impatient streak if Marcelle didn’t move fast enough or if she cut corners with the wipe downs or got the cleaners mixed up. And when they worked together, Roxanne didn’t split the tips fair.

  “Number five is all yours,” she said. She talked through her teeth with her jaw clenched tight. Her lips barely moved. “It sure would be good if you could get here on time for once.”

  “I had to walk.”

  “From where? It’s not more than eight blocks to anywhere in this town, honey. It’s not like you came all the way from Everett.”

  “Well I wasn’t planning to walk.”

  “You live with Eugene Henry. You should plan for anything.”

  Marcelle knew full well about plans, she had been making plans around Eugene since the first overnight up at the quarry. When he laid her down on the sleeping bag and slid his hands beneath her shirt, put his tongue against her neck and that first wash of electricity rushed through her—from that moment on she was his, completely. The quarry became the place where things could happen at their own pace, without fear of slamming car doors or footsteps on the ceiling, and it got so that she hungered for it, if not the words, then the touching, his fingers moving over a body that she could not bring herself to even look at in the mirror.

  “We should get married,” he’d said one night, simple as that.

  It was within a conversation about something she couldn’t recall, inside a two-person tent in the shadow of the sheer granite cliff, surrounded by empty beer cans and the smoke from a dying campfire. It just came out of him, from nowhere. He said it and she pictured it, clear as daylight. A little house somewhere that she kept tidy for him, a wife there for her husband, there for him like nobody else would or could be. She would fix everything in him that was broken, like he said that only she could do. She answered then, “If you want to, sure,” and then the chain kicked in and just like that, the roller coaster was on its way, no stopping it even if she had wanted to.

  Roxanne stood up at the foot of the bed with her hands on her bony hips. She arched her back and gave a low grunt. Her ponytail dropped down to her shoulder blades and moved in circles as she rolled her head from side to side and said, “Criminy I’m sick of this.”

  She dressed herself in shapeless jeans and a plain blue smock every day, and she was skinny in a way that Marcelle never wanted for herself. Boobs like tangerines, and nothing at all in the way of ass, just an empty sack of denim back there. Marcelle wasn’t a beauty, and she never claimed to be. But at least she had some meat for a man to grab hold of. Roxanne was a scarecrow, grizzled and spindly, and lonely in her place at the foot of the stripped-down king-sized bed.

  Marcelle creaked her cart two units down, to the lacquered blue door. She rapped the paint and called out, “Housekeeping,” but there was no answer. She keyed it open and called again, and stuck her head inside. It was dark and moldering, and stank of underarms and cigarettes, and of spilled beer on old carpet. The cheap linty bedspread tumbled down over the foot of the bed and both pillows lay on the floor side by side as mates. On the nightstand were three dented cans of Rainier and an opened yellow bag of potato chips. There was no suitcase.

  “Housekeeping.”

  A thin line of yellow crept through the base of the bathroom door but again there was no sound, and she had called out twice and both times had gotten no answer. And she was already running late. So she swung the room door full open and loaded her arms with cleanser and spray bottles and rags and made her way to the bathroom where she pushed her way in.

  The man was in the bath, with the yellow plastic curtain drawn wide open and the water crystal clear, no cloud of soap or bubbles or even so much as a washcloth to cover his business that stood straight up through the surface like it was the periscope of a submarine. He held it as such, too, so that there would be no mistaking his intentions when whichever housekeeper happened to stumble into the unlocked bathroom. Marcelle froze on the tile with her hand still on the door and the bottle of Fantastik pointed like she might shoot him dead right there in his bath.

  “I’m sorry sir,” she managed to cough out. “I said housekeeping. Twice.”

  “Hey, no harm no foul,” he said. “Don’t let me stop you from your work.”

  He was old enough to be her father and as he talked his furry round stomach rolled, and the water sloshed around him as his tool bobbed one way and then another. Marcelle hadn’t seen many in her life and this one looked pretty much like the others, though there was a little crick to it that she wasn’t sure was supposed to be there. He pushed himself to the back of the tub and sat up.

  “I can close the curtain if you want and you can just clean around me
.”

  Marcelle stumbled back from the doorway and slammed it closed, and then she rushed out from the room into the walkway under the eaves. Roxanne was standing at her cart pushing dirty bed sheets into her hamper. She looked up at Marcelle.

  “What the hell’s the matter now?” she said. “You find a rat in the toilet?”

  Marcelle rested her hand on her cart and took deep breaths while the stacks of towels and baby soaps and shampoos rattled. She was surprised at how keyed up she was, it didn’t seem like such a big deal at the moment but of course it was very much a big deal, anyone would say as much. She had walked in on a stranger in the bath, a man who was in the middle of working himself over, or maybe just at the beginning, and besides she wasn’t so stupid that she didn’t know full well what that whole scene was all about. She imagined what Eugene would do if he found out, if he would come and give the guy a piece of his mind or knock him clear off the mountain, or if in the end it would all be her fault for being dumb enough to put herself in a situation like that. “You must not have heard him,” he would say. “Jesus Christ, Marcelle, sometimes you are so fucking ignorant.”

  “Oh don’t tell me that’s Trucker Otis’ room,” Roxanne bellowed. And then she leaned back on her scarecrow legs and laughed with her clench-jawed face to the sky. “Holy Jesus, you got to meet Trucker Otis.”

  She wound her arm in a giant sweeping motion and Marcelle looked back at the door and then she ran over to Roxanne. The older woman took the younger’s arm and dragged her into the empty room behind her. It smelled of lemon and bleach and even in the midst of all of what was happening, Marcelle wondered how she could possibly manage to get these rooms smelling so clean in the time it took Marcelle to probably lose her job.

  “What did he do?” Roxanne crowded her, hissing into her face. “Was he on the bed or was he hiding in the bathroom? Oh I’m sorry hon, I should have warned you but this isn’t even his usual day.”

  Marcelle’s whole body was shaking now and her mind swirled, thoughts bouncing around in her head just like Trucker Otis’ business in the bathwater and all the while Roxanne laughed and held her ribbed body and said “Oh my God I gotta pee so bad,” and she broke loose and ran back into the bathroom. “Don’t say anything to Melvin by the way,” she called out. “He don’t want to hear it.”

  “But the guy’s a pervert,” Marcelle hollered back. “He’s just sitting there waiting for us to come up on him.”

  “He’s harmless,” Roxanne said. “Really, girl, you need to grow up. All he wants to do is lay there while you clean the room around him. Just pretend he’s not there, he won’t touch you or even talk to you. And he’ll leave a huge tip.”

  “That’s being a prostitute, Roxanne.”

  At this the woman laughed, full-throated. She leaned forward on the toilet, her contoured face tilting into view in the open door of the bathroom. “Oh give me a break, Marcelle. It’s nothing at all like that. Don’t think you can stand there at all of seventeen years old and try and explain life to me, kid, you haven’t experienced enough of it to even have a learner’s permit.” The toilet flushed and Roxanne stood in the doorway doing up her jeans. “Fine then. If you don’t want to do his room, I’ll do it.”

  Marcelle leaned out the door and looked down the walkway at the blue door two units down. It was still closed and her cart still stood blocking it. A baby bar of soap was on the ground and one of the towels had somehow come unfolded and was hanging down over the edge.

  “I’m doing number 8,” she said, and then she closed the door behind her and walked the long stretch to the far end of the building.

  Bobbie

  Bobbie liked to think it would surprise people to know that she sometimes sat alone on her back porch singing quietly to herself, far away from the glare of the streetlamps and rattle of cars filled with people returning home from the swing shift. She preferred the old country-western songs, the ones that had played on her father’s old radio with an echo and crackling like they could have spilled through the open window of a roadside tavern.

  She also collected salt and pepper shakers, one of the few silly hobbies she allowed herself to waste time on. At first it had been a kind of investment; she only wanted ones that she thought might go up in value one day. But the oddities gifted to her over the years from Patrick and Ernie, and well-meaning friends, eventually widened her collection to include tiny twin mushrooms, windmills, outhouses, telephones and other objects that any decent person would never place on his or her kitchen table, but were fine to be displayed in a smoke-glass curio as complete kitsch. They were ridiculous and a little embarrassing, but now and then she’d go through them anyway, just to make herself laugh.

  Bobbie was still smiling as she climbed out of her car and took the shopping cart closest to her, one that had been left right out in the open so anyone could have run into it. She walked it up to the front doors and passed the bag boy with the earring, who stared at her as if it was the first time she had ever walked into the place. Just the same, she had the sense that every single eye was on her, watching her as she strolled through the fruit section, then over to the cereal aisle. It wasn’t so much that they were all looking at her, but they were watching her just the same. If such a thing was possible.

  At the far end of the aisle a man stood looking over the granola. He was familiar, with his receding brown hairline and lumpy shoulders, but it was only when he took out his glasses to read the label that Bobbie pinned him as the therapist who worked out of the offices of the old Hargrave Mansion. Patrick had seen him for a few sessions some years earlier, around the time that she was bringing him to the prison to see Ernie. She couldn’t remember his name to save her life.

  “Hi,” she said.

  He looked up, searched her face for some semblance of recognition. Finally he broke into a grin and said, “Oh, hello there. It’s been some time.” He stood up straight and beamed in that way people do when they are trying not to appear completely lost.

  “You used to see my son Patrick,” she said low, leaning in. “You’d remember him if you saw him.”

  “I’m sure I would,” he nodded. “And how is he doing? Well, I hope.”

  “He’s up and down,” she said. “But he is seventeen.”

  “That’s great,” he said. “Just great.” He smiled broadly but with his lips together, still holding the granola in front of his chest, and Bobbie could tell he was fighting the urge to look down at it, to continue what he’d been doing before she interrupted him.

  “Well anyway,” she said. “It’s good to see you.”

  “Nice to see you, too,” he said. “And please tell your son—I’m sorry, what was his name again?”

  “Patrick,” she said. “He’s working now.”

  “Working? That’s great.” He put the granola back on the shelf and nodded as he moved his cart from the aisle. “That’s just super.”

  Bobbie was also fond of driving her station wagon out of town up the highway, into the mountains with the windows rolled down and her flannel shirt unbuttoned halfway to her waist where she could feel the evening air rush over her skin and tug at her clothing, and maybe—just maybe—she would catch the eye of a logger on his way down from the clear cut to the mill. It was something she let herself do now and then but she told no one, not even Ernie. She liked to think that it wouldn’t have bothered him; it might have even given him some kind of thrill. Ernie was a guy who was full of surprises, that much was true.

  Like most young couples, she and Ernie had started off sexy. They could find it just about anywhere, at any time, drunk or sober. In the pool hall men’s room, behind Zeke’s Bait Shop at Lake Cassidy, in the middle of trout season. In the back of the station wagon, halfway through “Bonnie and Clyde.” But the leaves on that tree curled pretty quickly. Ernie went over and did his year in Vietnam, and came back different, like they all did. By then he was drinking an awful lot, and there were the nightmares. Ernie was better off than a lot of them,
though. Bobbie knew one gal whose husband beat her up one night and didn’t even remember doing it. They liked to say that part of them was still lost in that jungle somewhere. Ernie had his demons, but Bobbie had always felt like she could handle them. Then Patrick came along, and everything more or less settled into a world of routines, of pot roasts and babysitters and the occasional night of pool and darts at the local tavern. Somewhere in midst of all of it, she couldn’t remember when, she and Ernie came to an agreement. A kind of understanding.

  Bobbie nearly ran into Lyla’s cart before she realized it was her standing in the middle of the aisle, peering at a list in her hand, her head inches from the paper, lips moving as she went through it. There was no way to turn around without creating a situation more awkward than it already was. Bobbie looked down into her own cart. A bunch of bananas, a gallon of milk, Noxema and a bottle of red wine. Lyla’s cart was already half filled with several packages of toilet paper, a dozen or so boxes of pasta and a scattering of canned vegetables.

  She used to check her son Patrick’s things regularly, going through his room, never privately but publicly as he stood passively to the side. She did this in the guise of putting his clothes away, or “helping” him thin out his closet, or clearing pockets in preparation for the hamper. She always asked him what he was thinking and what he was doing when he wasn’t at home, but she seldom asked him what she could do in order to make him happy.

  That first winter, Ernie’s first in the state penitentiary, Bobbie drove Patrick down to Seattle where she splurged for a single weekend at the Westin. They took in the giant gingerbread house display, and watched The Nutcracker ballet, and stood back as the men threw giant fish from one person to another as if it was the most acrobatic thing in the world. She took him to the restaurant of his choice, a big place on the water with cloth napkins and lobster on the menu and when they were done, she had Patrick sit with the Nordstrom Santa for a portrait. On the way home, he told her he’d had the best time of his life.