Ash Falls

by Warren Read

  “They are mean,” Tin said. “Get too close to em, they’ll show you just how mean they can be.”

  Probably being kept like this, she thought to herself. Walled off from the world. Fed and watered, just kept alive so they can wind up stitched to the collar of some rich bitch’s ski jacket.

  “How come they have to be so small?” She asked, nodding at the row of boxes. “The cages, I mean.”

  “A den in the wild ain’t no bigger than these. Food and shelter on top of it all. They ain’t got it so bad.”

  “I heard you had a couple get free.”

  “Free?” He gave a phlegmy laugh, kicked up a real cough and spit a quarter-sized wad into the sawdust. “These things won’t last two, three days out in the world. They got no skills for these woods. Spend their whole their life in this barn. If a coyote don’t get ‘em the first night, a logging truck will the second.”

  The door creaked open and Patrick came in, dragging a plastic garbage can behind him. He went to the cages at the far side of the barn and began sliding out trays and dumping the soiled wood chips into the bin. He kept his back to them. A thin cord ran from his jacket pocket to a pair of headphones that cupped his ears.

  Tin gave a nod toward the door and began walking. Bobbie followed. When they got outside he continued walking from the barn, across the open space toward the river, where he stood at the high bank and stared off into the current.

  Bobbie said, “I’d like to thank you.”

  “Thank me? What for?” he said.

  Bobbie’s breath seemed to dodge her, each word a labor. Her brain, working a tangle inside her head. “I guess I’d say that there ain’t a whole hell of a lot of people in this town who would give that kid a chance. Either of us, really. But especially him.”

  “‘Cause of you being Ernie’s gal?”

  The sound of that name, so sudden, nearly buckled Bobbie’s knees. She looked over at Tin, at his searching eyes. Big, white eyeballs that hovered atop sagging folds of thick, ruddy skin. And then he gave her a smile. Gums pink and as shiny as the gaping trout.

  “I’m not Ernie’s gal anymore,” she said. “Haven’t been for a long time.”

  “Didn’t mean it like that. Word is he got out, though.”

  “You heard that all the way down here?”

  “This ain’t the middle of the earth. And I do go up that hill sometimes.”

  Bobbie caught herself smiling at that. This was a man who didn’t mince words.

  “That was something else, that thing at the fairgrounds,” he said. “Stirred up a lot of coals in the fire.”

  “I know.”

  “Do ya?” He cocked his head at her.

  She held him in her gaze for a good five or so seconds, an ungodly amount of time to stare and say nothing. He kept himself fixed on her as well, big eyes misted, his lips framed the edges like hard parenthesis.

  “Well anyway,” she said finally. “I hope that doesn’t create a problem for you. Him working here, I mean.”

  “Long as he works, I don’t give a goddamn what his old man did. It ain’t his cross to bear.”

  Bobbie glanced back toward the mink barn, then squinted at Tin. The sun had come from behind the clouds, just breaking off the edge of the old man’s crown.

  “Patrick doesn’t know yet. About his dad.” Tin dipped his chin and peered at her, and Bobbie said, “I know it’s bad. And I will tell him. I just can’t seem to find the right moment. Every time I think it’s there”—she sucked in her breath—“I just freeze up.”

  He moved back from the bank and began to walk back toward the barns. “Well,” he said. “Christ knows I ain’t raised nothing, not unless you count them minks, which I sure as hell wouldn’t. But like I said, people around here can’t keep their mouth shut to save their lives. The boy ought to hear it from his ma.”

  “I know that.”

  As she steered to the top of Tin’s drive she thought of Patrick still down there, burlap sack in hand, walking up and down those endless rows of sharp teeth. From her window just before she’d left, she looked over and saw him standing in the doorway, and he glanced back her and gave her a quick wave. And for a moment, in spite of the squalling and the stench and the low, filtered light she could see the boyish face that she missed so much. That face that she remembered from before. Before she or Ernie—she wasn’t even sure who to blame anymore—had ripped their lives apart.

  Bobbie

  She hadn’t imagined that Ernie would want to go to the fairgrounds. Everything that he hated, standing shoulder to shoulder with other people, all in the middle of smoke bombs and bottle rockets going off everywhere, would be there. It was why he wanted to move to the mountain in the first place, to get far away from the crowds and the chaos.

  “Everyone in town’s going to be there,” she said. “It’ll be a sea of blankets and Styrofoam coolers.” But Patrick had asked, and Ernie was feeling good.

  “Sure, buddy,” Ernie had said, pouring another bowl of cereal for himself. “We can go watch the fireworks.”

  Bobbie didn’t remember thinking about Hank then, though it was hard to imagine that she wouldn’t have. Her mind was on Eugene. “He’ll probably be there,” she warned Ernie. “If you see him, you have to promise you won’t say anything.”

  “I didn’t last time.”

  “Yeah well, he was by himself then,” she said. “He’ll probably be with friends this time. And they’ll be drinking, I’m sure. He’ll get cocky like he does.”

  Ernie looked over Bobbie’s leg, plastered and scrawled with smudged messages of sympathy. Ouch. Hang in there. Cast-Away.

  “Yeah, well he’s just a dumb ass kid, right?” he said. “And he already got smacked over it. You said ‘Let it go.’ I’m letting it go.”

  Bobbie kept quiet then. She had said a lot of things in the days after the break, unsure how Ernie would take it, not sure what she wanted done about it, or what could even be done. Anyway, she was healing now, it was summer, and Eugene would not be at school when the term started again in September.

  Under the hazy apron of lamplight, Bobbie skirted the edge of the huge chestnut canopy, Ernie and Patrick on either side of her. Her head throbbed and her armpits were killing her. She was convinced that by the time she got the hang of those fucking crutches, the cast would be off. It weighed her whole left side down, and it felt like an army of ants had found its way inside and were devouring her leg. She was already sweating down her back.

  So the last thing she either wanted or needed at that moment was to hear Eugene Henry’s donkey laugh. A commotion of sorts arose at the chestnut, some jostling and hushed laughter. She could make out a small crowd of teenagers crouched together on an outspread quilt. Heads bobbed in and out of the huddle, hands slapping backs.

  Ernie looked at her and smiled, and gave her a quick wink. “It’s gonna be a great show, Peanut,” he said. And the way he said it, crisp and singsongy, Bobbie imagined that it actually could have been.

  Then somebody said, “That’s him right there.”

  “Say it, Eugene.” A different voice.

  “Shut up, Allen.” This one was Eugene, shaky though, not like him.

  Ernie slowed his pace. Bobbie told Patrick to walk next to her. “Ernie,” she said. “Let’s just keep going.”

  There was another punch of laughter, and Ricky Cordero’s nasal croak floated above all the noise. It was a voice Bobbie could pull from a crowd as well, the kind of voice that could strip paint from walls. She’d once heard another teacher describe it as something like an old woman’s who’d lived her whole life on whiskey and Camel non-filters.

  “Hey dude,” he called out. And then he said something that Bobbie didn’t hear, something that resulted in a momentary hush in the group. A girl said, “Damn, Ricky.”

  Ernie faltered. “Ernie, you promised,” Bobbie reminded. But he wouldn’t look at her. He just stared back over his shoulder, to the crowded spot under the tree.

  “W
ho said that?” Ernie called.

  There was a pause, and the burst of air escaping from a popped can.

  Patrick reached out and took Ernie’s sleeve. “Dad, let’s just go.”

  Ernie snatched his hand back and repeated, “Who said that?”

  “Nobody, man.” Eugene said. “It’s nothing.”

  “Nothing, my ass.” This time it was Ricky again. “She needs to find her boyfriend, wrap a little blanket around the two of them and cuddle under the fireworks. Love, American Style!”

  Bobbie stopped and pivoted on her good leg so she was facing the chestnut tree full on. Ernie still hung back, his jaw pulsing, his fingers moving at his sides. She reached out with the tip of the crutch and tapped his leg, and he glanced almost nonchalantly down at it. When he looked up at her again, his eyes were almost transparent, as if she could see through him, right out the other side at the clot of boys that ringed the trunk of the massive tree. He blinked his lids, so slowly. As if he wanted to feel the soothing wash over his eyeballs, one last time before he looked back.

  Ricky laughed again and said something Bobbie couldn’t make out. An empty beer can rattled against something. “Dude,” he said. There was some jostling in the group and then Ricky said, “He ain’t gonna do a goddamned thing about it.”

  “Ricky, you’re drunk,” someone said. “Be cool.”

  “Everybody knows about it. Big fucking deal,” Ricky said. “I guess some people are into that kind of thing.”

  There was a sharp explosion. The fireworks had begun, blooming overhead in giant red and green globes. Bobbie could see the dappled light falling through the branches, passing colors, the boys crouched against the huge trunk of the chestnut. There were beer cans tucked against legs, and orange cherry tracers from cigarettes on the move. Ricky clutched a beer in his hand, sporting a grin so big his face was a skull.

  Patrick took shelter behind Bobbie. He was crying now, his sniffles bucking against her body as he held to her waist. Bobbie reached out a hand. “Ernie,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  “Don’t.” He jerked his arm away from her. His eyelids collapsed, his teeth clenching so that his beard seemed to retract into his face. “Don’t tell me what to do.”

  Another cut of laughter burst from under the tree. Ernie’s fingers knuckled against his sides. Ricky spoke again. Something. Bobbie couldn’t tell what. Then there was jolt at her arm, and she was spun like a top, arms flailing for balance until the weight of her cast dropped her to the ground. She lay on her side, stunned and out of breath, one crutch wedged beneath her ribs. Patrick knelt beside her, still crying, his fingernails digging into her arm. By the time her eyes found Ernie, he was almost to the tree, the second crutch jutting from his hands, its handle swinging in broad, preemptive loops.

  She screamed, a desperate push from her lungs that seemed enough to turn her entire body inside out. But it was all too much, the chaos raging from all around and the screams and shouting, and the rockets still blasting overhead, as if not a single terrible thing were happening beneath it all. The wash of red and green fell over the bodies scrambling from under the tree, lights flashing against aluminum as Ernie swung the crutch from so far behind him, over and over, like he was splitting knotted logs into kindling.

  She grabbed Patrick by the hand and pulled him to the ground with her. His body collapsed onto hers, his face buried against her neck, and she took in the scent of his hair, the smell of apricot and grass, and it mixed in with the choking smoke and the flash of colors against her eyelids, and the incessant racket of fireworks that seemed as if they would go on forever.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” she whispered. She locked her hand to her wrist and pulled him in even tighter. “Oh Jesus God.”

  Patrick and Ernie

  There was a stretch of time when Patrick would wake in the middle of the night to the tinkling of glass against glass, or the static of bunched cellophane, and chair legs scooting over linoleum. If the room were cold, Patrick would bring his knees to his chest and burrow deeper under the covers, cradling his pillow, safe knowing his father was in the next room making a snack, or fixing a drink of whiskey and Sanka. When they had lived in the city, in the shady half of the flat-roofed duplex, this routine happened at least once a month.

  On the Saturday before their last Christmas in the duplex, Patrick climbed from under his quilt and walked on rough wood floors from his bedroom to the living room. The red lights tacked to the neighbor’s eaves glowed through the windows into their home. It gave Patrick a feeling of warmth, though he had heard his mother once whisper to his father that it made the bedroom look like a whorehouse.

  His father was on the sofa in the darkened room, hunched over the coffee table, smoking down a blunt cigarette and humming. A fat mug and a soupy bowl of Corn Flakes sat in the middle of the table, the spoon sticking out like the handle of a shovel. His father’s beard was just coming in then. By the light of the outside porch lamp, Patrick could see the sandy outline of his jaw.

  “Hey kiddo,” he said to Patrick. “I thought I was being quiet.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Well, I was at it again.” His father nodded, and wiped a shaky hand over his mouth. “I hope to Christ it never happens to you,” he said, looking up at Patrick. “Wake up in some strange place, no idea how you got there.”

  Patrick never knew what he was supposed to say when his father talked to him about these. Sleepwalking. It gave him the creeps, like his dad was the walking dead, knocking around in the middle of the night with no idea he was even doing it.

  “I fell out of bed once.”

  “Hey,” his father said. “I guess that’s far enough.”

  Broad shadows filled the room, swiping over the glossy family portraits and street market art, and the cracked glass curio that stored his mother’s chintzy salt-and-pepper-shaker collection. Near the window, the unlit Christmas tree stood in the corner, a shadowy Sasquatch. In the dark of the room his father looked years older than he was, cheeks hollowed as he sucked on his cigarette, face glowing orange, his eyes glassy, strained, and starving.

  “Twenty minutes ago I was all the way down on Fourth Avenue,” he said. “Woke up standing right there on someone’s lawn. Lucky I didn’t get shot.” He took another hit from his cigarette, held it in, then let it out slowly, controlled.

  “This one time, I came to right in the middle of the loading dock, way the hell over at the shipyard on Twenty-Fourth. I was standing in the pouring down rain in my long johns and slippers and no shirt. Can you believe that?” He laughed. “I couldn’t even find a way out that didn’t mean climbing the fence. Don’t ask me how the hell I got in there.”

  Patrick said nothing, and his father tapped the edge of his bowl. “You want some Corn Flakes?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Too late for a ten year-old to be up.”

  “I’m eleven.”

  Patrick padded in bare feet to the other side of the room, brushing against the tinseled branches to stand at the sweaty picture window that looked out over the street. Up and down the sidewalks the lawns were layered with frost, hard squares glowing blue under the high street lamp. The air was a thin mist, so close to snowing. Their driveway sat empty, a blanket of glitter.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  His father cleared his throat and got up from the sofa, stepping long over the coffee table. He dropped to his hands and knees and began crawling over the carpet toward the tree, humming a tune deep in his throat as he went. At the tree’s skirt he shoved packages aside, then moved further into the branches, fumbling with something in the far corner. Suddenly the tree was ablaze in lights, and the room was saturated with colors, winking a staccato of red and green and blue in the branches, along the walls, and across the sparkled popcorn ceiling.

  “Come on down here,” Patrick’s father said, patting a space beside him. There was a sharp crackling of paper as his father made room for Patrick. Lying on his back, he dragged his bo
dy beneath the lowest ornaments. “Make like you’re a present from Santa. One of them Misfit Toys.”

  Patrick looked out again to the empty driveway then turned back to the tree. His father still lay under it, unmoving. He lay there with his hands folded behind his head, and Patrick knew he would probably stay till daylight, whether there was the sound of a car driving up or not. He stared up into the lights, a sleepy grin drawn across his face. Patrick thought he looked like a toy himself, a life-sized puppet with his eyes blinking red and green, waiting for someone to push the button behind his ear to make him talk.

  Patrick crouched to the floor, then slid on his stomach into the branches, the needles of the fir crawling over the bare skin on his neck. The ornaments tapped together as he brushed them, and he finally reached his father’s side, curling against the flannel shirt. It smelled of cigarettes and sweet cologne.

  Then his father said, “See the lights?”

  Patrick rocked his head to the side and stared up through the branches. The colors went on forever, layered and hidden, some almost touching his face, others so far away they were almost invisible, entire strings disappearing and then suddenly appearing again. He relaxed his eyelids and let his vision blur, and he was drifting through a multicolored universe, farther than anyone had ever been before.

  “Maybe we’ll just drag our sleeping bags out here and camp under this tree, huh?” His father’s chest rose and fell against Patrick’s arm, a gentle rocking, and Patrick thought he could do that, just go to sleep right there, curled against this dad’s musky old shirt.

  Patrick said, “Where’s mom at?”

  His father sucked in a deep breath, then said, “She’s out. She had her office party tonight.”

  “What time is it?”

  His father’s hand reached up and touched a glass ball just above Patrick’s face. It was a white ball, with glitter stenciling stretched around it, of reindeer pulling a sleigh. It rotated slowly, catching red and green in its reflection as it went.

  “This time next year, we’re gonna have a tree twice as big,” he said. “You, me and your mom, we’ll go out in the woods and cut it down with our own hands.”