by Warren Read
He stood at the edge of old Mrs. Gilman’s yard and scraped his boots at the loose dirt that had spread from her flowerbed onto the sidewalk. Looking up at the school, he imagined Bobbie Luntz near the back of the building, just down the hall from the main office. She’d be sitting in her rolling chair, her eyes glazing over a thermometer that jutted from some pockmarked kid’s trembling mouth, probably holding his clammy hand, the boy green in the gills, her telling him, “Now then, you’ll be all right.” And all the while she’d be praying he wouldn’t throw up on her floor, if he hadn’t already.
Hank turned in his resignation three days after the murder. The trial kept Bobbie tied up for the next month or so, going back and forth to Everett, probably spending most of her days sitting in court listening to testimony, or couching in the waiting room of the county jail, maybe going in to visit Ernie, sometimes not. Hank had wanted to call her, but every time he imagined the conversation that might unfold between them, the whole thing fell apart. He wanted to tell her how sorry he was, for everything. Maybe he was wrong but it pounded at him over and over again like the unrelenting litany of fireworks that night. If he had stepped back, his head told him, just left her the hell alone—none of it would have happened.
A few weeks into the new school year, Hank sat at his kitchen table tying trout flies and working on his second pot of coffee when Bobbie phoned. It had been three months since Ricky’s murder and more than a month since Ernie had been shipped off to Walla Walla.
“I miss seeing you around here,” she said. Every bit of distance between them hung in those words.
Her voice washed over him like a bore tide, and he walked the telephone across the kitchen to hang by the window, where he could see the top floor of the high school rising over the Main Street rooftops. Under the gray clouds the bricks were cut layers of rust.
“Do you think there’ll ever be a time when we can sit down together?” she said. “Just talk?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He chose his words one at a time. “We could shoot for it. I suppose.”
There was a heavy sigh at the other end of the line, then silence. The flag that stood at the school’s corner lolled in and out from the pole.
“You there?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing,” she said.
He went back to the table and sat heavy in the chair. He swept the thread and beads and hooks from the center of the surface back to the edge of the tackle box. The phone was warm against his ear.
“The thing is,” he said, “I’m just sitting here on my ass, staring out the window doing nothing, day after day. And I can’t stop thinking about that boy and his family. Lyla’s not talking to me and might never again, which I guess has its own sliver lining. But Christ, something’s gotta give. Cause I think this whole thing’s trying to eat me from the inside out.”
“God damn it, Hank,” she said. “It’s my baggage, not yours. I brought it here with me.”
“It’s killing you, too,” he said. “And I just feel so goddamned bad about it all.”
His throat felt as if it were being strangled. He wanted to be there with her, to hold her and tell her that he didn’t give a damn that she’d brought it with her. Wouldn’t it be easier if they shared the burden together?
“I just don’t know what happens from here on out,” he said. “It’s like I’m caught underwater and I can’t make my way up. I’m pushing sixty. I ought to know better.”
She said, “Stop it, Hank.” Then there was a beat before she spoke again.
“You can’t have it,” she said.
“Can’t have what?”
“I said it’s mine. I won’t give you my blame.”
There was a silence then, and he felt his legs ice over, as if something had come loose and drained everything from his lower half.
“Are you there?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Well, Hank. I’m gonna hang up now.” There was a long pause before he finally heard a click.
Hank and Lyla
Hank was ready to be home now, away from Ash Falls and the plum and cherry trees, and the open sidewalks where anyone could see the rusty walk of this man who wore his self-loathing down to his boots. He cinched his coat to his neck and stepped up his pace. Tipping his head back, he took a look at the sky, and the cool air whispered over his eyes. It was barely two o’clock, but it sure felt like dusk was already coming down.
Lyla’s house smelled like frying butter. She stood at the stove with her arms folded, a greasy spatula jutting from her hand. Eugene sat at the dinette with his back to Hank, hunched over like a Neanderthal in tarry coveralls, with cropped, grimy hair. Lyla looked up at Hank.
“Let me finish this up and then we can go.” She flipped the cheese sandwich from the pan to a plate and laid it on the table.
“I’ll wait outside.” Hank turned back toward the door.
“Hold up.” Eugene picked up the sandwich with a blackened hand and bit off a good-sized portion in one take.
Hank took hold of the doorknob as Eugene chewed slowly, and he felt himself shrink in the waiting. He turned the knob, and Eugene held up his hand.
Hank asked, “What do you want?”
“You should know your gear assembly’s fucked.”
Hank watched as Lyla tore a square from a roll of paper towels and draped it next to Eugene. She brushed her hands over the front of her pants, looking at the partially eaten sandwich on his plate.
“What do you know about it?” Hank asked.
“What do I know about it? That’s what Benny said. He said it looked like that tranny ain’t seen a drop of clean fluid since the day it rolled off the line.”
“That’s a bunch of bullshit.”
“Hey, I’m just saying what he told me.” He took another bite of the sandwich. “Anyway, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Lyla looked at Hank and shook her head. Christ how he wanted to reach over and take him by the hair. That filthy, greasy hair of his that always hung in his eyes, that he tossed to the side constantly as if he couldn’t just take a pair of scissors and cut it out of the way.
Hank walked out to the driveway and began circling Lyla’s car, sweating through his shirt, his heart working its way up into his throat. His head told him he was being weak, that in letting the boy push his buttons again, he was giving up the battle. Benny could hire whoever the hell he wanted to suck oil from cars, who was he to question it? But Christ. He’d sooner run his truck into a tree before he’d let that shitpile put his hands on it.
At some point he leaned against the side of the car and allowed the coolness of the window against his back to bring him down. Lyla was at the door, keys in hand, her blue windbreaker open to her waist. She stared at him through her giant owlish lenses.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” she said. She came to him and put her hand on driver’s side door handle. “You know how he is. You act like you’re the only person in the world who’s ever had to put up with him.” She opened the door. “Now get in, so I can take you home.”
She climbed in and swept her seatbelt over herself like a sash. “I have a few errands to run first,” she said, leaning into the ignition with the whole right side of her body. “It won’t take long.”
There were always a few errands. A stop at the grocery, the bank, a friend who needed something that Lyla was more than willing to loan out. These were the tracings of the next hour, periods of time when Hank sat in the passenger seat with his feet growing cold, studying the veins on his hands and running a budget in his head as he waited. It was getting late and he needed to get home. By the time they were on the open highway, heading to his house on the mountain, it was already past four.
“What’s the matter with you?” She stole glances at him as she drove exactly the speed limit, her hands glued at ten and two. “It’s a truck, for goodness sake.”
&n
bsp; “I don’t like being stranded. I need a working vehicle.”
“You’re the one who put yourself out there in the middle of nowhere. Living on that land like a hermit. Not to mention the little side job you’ve decided to keep.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“People talk, Hank.”
“Oh Christ almighty, I’m getting tired of being reminded of how this town can’t keep its mouth shut.”
“Well, you don’t have to hear it like I do.”
They came to the three corners, where the Tollefson farm stretched over both sides of the highway and Jeffries Road wove down to the old lumber mill. Lyla came to a complete stop, even though there was not a single car in sight. A tractor sat abandoned in the middle of the field opposite the house. Two Australian cattle dogs jumped down from the porch and started running down the long drive toward them.
“What you need,” she said, “is a woman to occupy your time.”
“Yeah well I tried that,” he said. “And it didn’t work out so good.”
She looked at him. “Well, one would hope that you’d be smarter about the next one.”
She punched the accelerator and plunged them into the cover of the forest. Hank stared out the window into the stands of Doug Fir and spindle alders that raced past them. The trees stood like bristles on a brush, evenly spaced with a floor almost entirely of salal. Half the mountain at this point was third growth, planted by hand like lettuce starts, regimented according to someone’s master plan. These trees were living and breathing and providing homes and food for many. But they were waiting. Waiting to be felled again, to be run through the saw and cobbled into somebody’s cheap furniture, or toilet paper, or the guts of the sort of matchbox houses that had begun to sprout along the lower highway like fungus.
Lyla pulled the headlights.
“There goes the day,” Hank said.
“It’s November,” she said, not looking at him. “It’s worse up here, though. Always under shadows.”
“You’d get used to it.”
Lyla laughed. “Never,” she said.
She slowed at the bend and turned into his drive, and by now the headlights washed along the trees and over the mottled road like paint. It always set his nerves on edge, the sight of his empty house, unguarded, just waiting for him. There were times that his mind got the better of him, and he saw things. Flashes of movement in the trees. Probably an owl, he’d tell himself. Or a squirrel, up late. Now and then he caught a glint of something against the window glass and he imagined that there must be someone in his home. And in those moments, he was glad for the rifle in the back window of his pickup.
“Wish you had a gun in here,” he said to Lyla, knocking on the dashboard.
“Well, keep wishing,” she said.
He thanked her for the ride and she reminded him that Benny would be out the next day to get him but when Hank asked her what time, she couldn’t remember if Benny had given a time.
“It’s fine,” he said. “I’ll be here.”
He leaned over and gave her a kiss on the forehead and let himself out. She stayed where she was until he was up on the porch, and the door was open, and the dog had bounded out and slapped his paws upon Hank’s stomach. And only when he turned to wave her off did she put the car in reverse and hook around. She rolled back almost to the big maple stump, then she straightened out her wheels, gave a tap on the horn, and drove off down the drive, out of sight.
Lyla and Jonas
It had been uncharacteristically warm that spring day, when Jonas Henry showed up at Lyla’s church in his slick blue suit, his hair clipped short and stiff like a parched lawn. He had come to town by way of Tacoma, an Army buddy of somebody’s brother, Lyla couldn’t remember whose. But there were the whispers from the pew behind her, one of the Snyder sisters telling the other what she knew about this new face who just sauntered past everyone, showing his teeth and smelling like English Leather. He had fought in Korea, she said. And he was single.
The sermon had been a long one, about keeping faith in the moment of despair. The Soviet Union was already in outer space, and they were testing missiles. There was a man running for president who was unlike anyone who had run before, and for the first time in memory Lyla was excited to be able to vote. But he was so young and unproven, Lyla’s parents liked to say, and on top of it all he was a Catholic, so what could be expected in the way of foresight and temperance? It seemed like every day they were predicting the end of everything, one minute begging her to hurry and find a man already (she was thirty, after all), the next minute shrugging their shoulders and lamenting, “What’s the use?”
When the minister finally finished, Lyla followed the congregation as it spilled out into the yard, where the idle gossip always rose up, people chattering about everything but the sermon. Jonas was down the slope near the old drain pond—a handsome fellow standing beneath the big willow with a group of people Lyla knew from her high school years, though she hadn’t spoken with them in some time. She took her purse from her shoulder and clutched it in her hand, and walked on down to the tree like it was the most natural thing in the world for her to do. She was almost upon the group when he looked up at her.
“Who are you?” he asked. He spoke loudly, and Lyla shrank in the anticipation of turning every head in the yard.
“I’m Lyla,” she said.
“Lyla,” he echoed. “Lyla.” He repeated it twice more back to her, as if it was a brand new word, a sound he’d never heard before in his life. And now the eyes of those gathered around the tree were upon her. These old schoolmates who’d been talking among themselves and not paying her the slightest of notice were suddenly interested in what might happen next, and Lyla drank in the attention as if she’d been famished her entire life.
The next months were something of a heady time for her, a blur of spaghetti dinners and live music in the basement of The Elks Club, and of church women leaning into one another, nodding in twitches as they peered at the two of them from across the room. Jonas got a job at the Coast to Coast hardware store in Lake Stevens, and right away moved into an apartment over the Gamble furniture store on Main. Sometime later, a few months maybe, he asked Lyla to marry him. She had a clear memory of his proposal shouted over the noise of a brash number the swing band was playing downstairs at The Elks. He’d recall it differently when asked, saying it had been in the parking lot afterward, the two of them nuzzled together while the car radio played in the background. What they both agreed upon, the memory that each recalled to perfection, was that Lyla’s parents were in near ecstasy over the engagement, practically packing her bags for her the moment she and Jonas broke the news to them.
“I wonder what Hank will have to say about this,” she said aloud later that evening, as they left the club and walked arm in arm between the cars in the parking lot. She had said “yes” and had already begun to think about the wedding, if not the marriage.
“What does Hank have to do with anything?” he asked. The way he stared at her then—that half-cocked smile and single raised eyebrow—it was as if she had suggested the family dog should first give permission. She had approached some line that was not to be crossed, she realized. If she wanted the proposal to stand, she had better leave her brother out of it.
Today, as any other day, they sat on opposite sides of the table, each with a different section of the newspaper folded neatly in front of them. Lyla worked her crossword puzzle more out of routine than desire, writing out the easy ones, stealing glances at the wall clock every few minutes. Jonas thumbed through the sports pages. Now and then he’d tap the page and remark on something Lyla knew nothing about, like which team was headed for the playoffs and who was not earning his salary, or which coach was probably on his way out at the end of the season. These things didn’t interest her, but she’d stop what she was doing when he spoke anyway, nod or raise her eyebrows for him in feigned surprise. Between them, coffee steamed from matching cups.
“She was up again last night,” he said. He held his eyes on the paper. Lyla lifted her pen and looked up at her husband. There was a yellow smear of egg yolk along the edge of his lip. He said, “I could hear her walking around.”
Lyla shrugged her shoulders. “She sneaks food,” she said. “I thought you knew that.”
“I didn’t know that.” He took long drink from his coffee, peering over the rim at her. He seemed to be studying her, searching her eyes for some indication that she was feeding him a story. “I thought maybe he was keeping her up,” he said finally.
“Keeping her up with what?” Now she sat up straight in her chair, her back rigid.
“The noise. The talking.”
“You mean, in his sleep?” She pushed air through her teeth. “He hasn’t done that since he was a boy.”
“Oh come on, Lyla.” Jonas turned the page. He went on, reminding Lyla of the middle-of-the-night shouting, the phantom conversations through the wall that woke both of them, right up until he finally moved his bedroom to the basement. “It hasn’t been that long,” he laughed.
It was hard to believe that there was ever a time before Eugene, when he didn’t dominate every part of her life: her pocketbook, her emotional bank, even the very air she breathed each day. From the moment he was born, Eugene fastened himself to her, a kind of emotional parasite that seemed to need her constant presence in order to survive.
“I saw a ‘For Rent’ sign up at the Gamble building,” he said. “It might be a good idea to talk to the two of them again.”
Lyla felt herself tense. “Good lord,” she said. “Anywhere but there.”
“You forget I lived there when we were starting out,” he said. “It’s fine for a young couple.”
“A lot’s changed in twenty years, Jonas,” she said. “It’s squalor now. Nothing but alcoholics and welfare recipients. Something with turn up eventually.”