Ash Falls

by Warren Read

  Marcelle coughed a weak laugh and wiped at her nose again. “I don’t know what that means,” she said. “Martyr.” She looked up at the fat wood burl clock that was mounted on the wall over Lyla’s head. It was almost 1:30.

  “I suppose you’re off to work soon,” Lyla said. “It would be a good idea to start socking your money away, somewhere safe. If you haven’t already been doing it, I mean.” She walked over to Marcelle and patted her forearm, then touched her hair, just on the edge of her face, where it was still wet from crying.

  Marcelle took in a breath to say something, though she wasn’t sure what it might be. But Lyla just picked up the grocery flyer and walked away, flipping through the pages and talking softly to herself as she moved down the hallway to her and Mister Henry’s bedroom.

  Patrick Luntz

  Patrick sat in the passenger seat, not fully awake yet, buttoned into an oversized flannel shirt, the scent of his father’s cologne and beard like a scarf over his face. Ernie squinted into the orange glow of the dashboard and punched the radio selector, finally settling on an old country station with a woman’s bell-like voice warbling under the tinny sway of a slide guitar.

  “Kitty Wells,” Ernie said with a snap of his fingers. “Goddamn, that woman could sing. That’s real country, son.” He drummed on the steering wheel with his fingers and sang along with her.

  How far is heaven, when can I go. To see my daddy, he’s there, I know.

  He sang in a deep tone, his chin pressed to his chest as they cruised down Main Street, well under the speed limit. The heater blew cold air up over the dash into Patrick’s face, and his father reached up with his sleeve pulled over his hand to wipe the fog from the windshield.

  Along the street, shop windows were dark, the doorways like the mouths of caves. A&M Electronics, the attorney and bookkeeping offices, Annie’s Fabrics—all of them were hours away from opening. Even the Red Apple lot was only visible through a gauze of light, thanks to a single stuttering fluorescent. A dark sedan sat at its base, draped in a frosty layer of dew. Ernie thumbed the lighter into the dashboard. He pulled a pack of Winstons from his shirt pocket and gave it over to Patrick.

  “Draw one of them babies out for me,” he said. Patrick took the pack and picked at the opening with useless, chewed fingernails, and Ernie said, “No. Tip it over and smack it against your palm.” He clapped the heel of his hand against the steering wheel. “Bam, like that.”

  Patrick thumped the pack against his hand and launched a few cigarettes from the pack to the floor. His father laughed softly and held two fingers out in a V. He said, “I didn’t know you had a problem with cigarettes.” The lighter popped, and by the time the cab was filled with a blue haze of swirling smoke, Patrick was wide awake and leaning over the back of his seat, fishing through the cooler for something to drink.

  They drove up the mountain, the high beams illuminating a snapshot of trees in an unnatural glare. Mile markers were winking jewels. Patrick watched the dark spaces for coyote eyes.

  “Talk to me,” Ernie said.

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. Tell me about school.”

  Patrick shrugged his shoulders. “School’s boring.”

  “How about girls? Any girls in your life?”

  Patrick sighed and played with the dial on the radio, scanning waves of static. His feet were starting to cramp in his boots.

  “What about that Marcella girl that came by the other day?”

  “I don’t like her that way.”

  “Really. Huh. What’s her story?”

  “I don’t know. Her mom and her live over the furniture store.”

  “The Gamble Apartments? Damn. That’s some major welfare.”

  “She’s nice.” The air was blowing hot now and making him sweat under his shirt. He turned down the thermostat.

  “All right. I been there.” He leaned back in the seat and held the steering wheel at arm’s length.

  “Back in the eighth grade,” he said. “Just like you. This girl’s name was Angela Jackson. A real beauty, and man she was all over me. I could have had her before I even knew what having was all about. But Angie was a black girl, and back then, that was not okay. Black and white. I could be her friend and all that. But if anyone ever got the idea that it was anything more than that? Shit. I’d have been a dead man.”

  Patrick said, “No one cares if we go together.”

  “So what is it?”

  Patrick took a drink from the can of orange soda that had been pressed between his knees. He looked over at his father, whose beard quivered from all the grinning.

  “I just don’t like her that way,” he said.

  “Fair enough.” They rounded a bend in the highway, and Ernie nodded to the road ahead. “This is it right up here.”

  He let off the gas and coasted the last distance into the graveled turnout. Through a small grove of trees sat the old Trout Creek Station House, a boarded up shack that had once been the entrance to the old Kelleher logging camp. Patrick had gone past the place before, with his mother, on the way to pick up a cord of firewood from Hank Kelleher’s property. “That little shed,” she had told him, “is more than eighty years old if you can believe it.”

  By the time they gathered the tackle box and the cooler and made their ways to the switch-backed trail that descended behind the shack, the sky was beginning to break with color. Through the stand of trees, Patrick could make out the soft palm of a lake at the base of the trail. The air was waking up with the pepper of chickadees and warblers, and the serrated call of an obnoxious crow. A thin cotton fog blanketed the water. At the edge of the shore, a ruddy old rowboat stood tipped against a tree.

  “Pretty sweet, huh?” His father laid the boat into the water and waved Patrick in. “Buddy of mine took me up here a couple weeks ago.” He tossed the oars into the boat, and set the cooler and tackle box down on the floor at Patrick’s feet. Patrick held on to the sides, and his father pushed off, and the boat cut through the mist, a reversed panorama of the mountain rippling off the bow.

  “Are you ready?” his father asked, settling into the seat.

  “For what?”

  “Let’s liberate some fish from this pond.”

  Patrick stood in the dark at the kitchen counter, stirring a cup of warm instant cocoa he’d made from the tap. The streetlights outside were still on, and all the windows along the block were black. He didn’t like waking up so early, but he did like being up. At times like this, when everything around him was quiet and still sleeping, he liked to imagine that he was the only person in the world left alive.

  He heard his mother’s door open, and the sound of her feet shuffling down the hallway toward him. She came into the doorway and turned on the overhead lamp, and he turned around, shielding his eyes from the light. She was wearing her blue bathrobe, and her hair was bunched on one side of her head like a sunburst.

  She said, “Are you ready for today?”

  “Yeah,” he answered. It didn’t really matter whether he was ready or not. Tin would be here in a half hour.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m gonna go back to bed. Call me when you’re ready for me to come pick you up.”

  He had dressed himself for the frost, canvas pants and a thermal shirt under his father’s old flannel. His mother bought him wool socks when he’d complained of cold feet, but they itched. So he layered them over the top of a pair of cottons and laced his steel-toed boots over the whole thing. He waited in the dark living room on the sofa, peering out the window, not hungry but thinking of the food he’d packed for the day, and wondering if it would be enough. He pictured the minks waking up to the sudden light, blinking their black eyes and rattling their whiskers, looking up for food and stupid to the reality that this morning would be their last. A horn sounded in two, short pinches. Tin’s pickup rolled up to the curb.

  Patrick jogged down the driveway, sliding on the ice before coming to a stop against the passenger door. He took
hold of the handle, but it gave way, and the door swung open on him.

  Staring at him from the passenger seat, bleary-eyed and dopey, was Eugene Henry. Eugene Henry, with the lumpy red plaid hunter’s cap, earflaps hanging down like a hound’s. Eugene, bragging a bottom lip fat with chewing tobacco, clutching a dented beer can to his chest with his oil-stained hand.

  “Make room,” Tin snapped, knocking him on the shoulder. Eugene flinched and mumbled. He grabbed a large grocery sack at his feet and crowded over, next to the old man. Patrick climbed in and closed the door tight to his hip. Eugene was looking at him, his breath smelling of menthol, and his leg warm against Patrick’s. Tin punched the gas and broke away from the curb, taking a hard corner at the end of the block. Eugene’s body leaned into Patrick’s, and objects that couldn’t be seen slid from one end of the dashboard to the other.

  “So what’s up, Luntz?” Eugene took off his hat and tucked it between his legs.

  “You two know each other?” Tin practically shouted.

  Eugene said, “Yeah, I know him.” He lifted the can to his mouth and spit into the opening again. His voice came from his sinuses, and it was dry so that it croaked like a frog’s. He said, “Him and Marcelle used to run around together.”

  Tin leaned forward. “That right, Skunk? You got history with his lady?”

  Eugene said, “No. They were just friends, unless she’s been lying to me all this time.” He jabbed his elbow into Patrick’s ribs. “Is that it, Luntz? She been lying to me? You get a little piece of that meat after all?”

  Patrick looked over to Tin then touched his forehead to the window. They were coming to Rexall Drugs, at the edge of town. The traffic light blinked red. Tin coasted through it.

  “Oh Christ,” Tin said. “Forget I even said anything.”

  They came through the gate and rolled down the drive, into the openness of the yard. The mink barns glowed white under the moon, with a single shed lit up through side windows like a passenger train car. In the open doorway, a figure stood, square-shouldered and holding something in his hand, one arm resting against the jamb. The pickup pulled to the side of the Quonset, and the man looked back at them. Tin cut the engine.

  “Here we be,” he said. “Skunk, you head on over to that fellow there. Eugene, you get going on the stretchers. The Whitehorse gals will be here in an hour to take over.”

  Eugene raked his fingers through his hair. “The stretchers? Come on.”

  “It’s where I need you, so quit your bitching. Jesus. Ain’t even light out yet and already you’re a pain in the ass.” Tin stepped out and slammed the door behind him.

  Patrick collected his lunch from the floor and got the hell out of the cab. The ground crunched under his boots as he walked, and he kept his eyes forward, doing his best to ignore Eugene. A stream of black juice splashed onto the ground beside him.

  “Yo, Luntz.” Eugene jogged to catch up to Patrick. His breath came in white puffs and hung heavy with the smell of tobacco. He slapped a hand on Patrick’s back and it reverberated through his whole body. Eugene said, “It is my duty to tell you that today you will leave this place a changed man.”

  Patrick quickened his pace. The shed and the man were a good fifty feet away. The air began to swell with the high-pitched complaining of the minks.

  Eugene said, “The shit you’ve seen and done here, dumping slop, digging out wood chips. Scooping shit. That ain’t nothing.”

  “I’m not doing any killing,” Patrick said.

  “It don’t matter.” He nodded to the illuminated shed. “Every single one of them in there, in two hours they’re gonna be dead as fucking doornails.”

  “Eugene!” It was Tin, and he was standing at the far end of the yard with a flashlight in his hand, waving the beam along the ground. His free arm swung a loop through the air. “Them stretchers ain’t gonna wrap themselves.”

  Eugene stomped off into the darkness, and Patrick cut to the barn where the figure stood alone inside the doorway, holding a clipboard in his hands. He was stooped over writing something, his clipped, gray hair poking out like metal shavings from under a baseball cap.

  It had been some time since Patrick had seen Hank Kelleher. Sometime after his father had gone off to prison, Hank had come by the house. Patrick answered the door. He’d acted strange, not looking at Patrick in the eyes, hanging back from the door, his heels almost to the edge of the steps. He wore cowboy boots, the toes pointed and shined to a glassy finish. He mumbled something that Patrick couldn’t make out and then asked if Bobbie was at home. Patrick yelled for her, and she came to the door, and then they talked outside while Patrick watched them through the picture window drape. They didn’t stand close to each other. Hank kept his hands folded in front of him and nodded over and over as Patrick’s mother did all the talking. Then Hank left, and she came back inside and gave Patrick a quick, hard glance before walking back to her bedroom, where she stayed for the rest of the afternoon.

  Hank motioned Patrick into the shed. They came into the light and stood within the warm reach of a hissing, kerosene heater. A mass of gray-blue fur skittered all around Patrick, in boxes up and down the rows. Two men milled around near the end, fingering tabs of paper that had been fastened to the mesh.

  This was it. Weeks earlier the full time guys had been doing nothing but moving cages, separating next season’s breeders from those destined for the fur auction. Countless boxes had had to be lugged to the pelting barn, and Patrick had helped with some, weathering the frenzied lunges and gnashing at the elbow-high welding gloves he wore. And now here they were.

  “You’ll be helping to move these things out to the truck when he gets here.” Hank hung back from the heater and thumbed at the pages on his clipboard.

  “Okay.”

  “He told you that, right?” The arches of his brows pulled downward and he glanced only briefly at Patrick, then he looked over to the door. He wore jeans too loose for his body, bunched at the top of work boots that were caked in mud up to the laces. Overhead, the ceiling lights retreated in a shrinking row of white circles, all the way to the end where the men still flipped the paper tags and talked to each other out the sides of their mouths. Hank watched them, still not looking at Patrick, body stiff as a fencepost, his whiskers like coffee grounds around tight, drawn lips. He dropped his eyes to his clipboard again and looped a page back over his hand.

  “Did Tin say anything to you about fleshing?”

  “Fleshing?”

  He flipped another page back. “Hell,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  He mumbled something more under his breath, and lifted his cap from his head, and scratched at the thick, silver hair. None of it made any sense. Patrick didn’t know stretching from fleshing from anything. Tin hadn’t given any details, other than the fact that Patrick would not be doing the actual killing of the minks. He wasn’t expecting Eugene, that was for sure. Or Hank. Tin hadn’t said who else would be there, and Patrick hadn’t thought to draw out the family tree. All those days he’d trolled up and down the rows, warily brushing his glove up against the mesh and avoiding the black, glassy eyes of the frenzied mink as they hurled themselves at his hands, the only thing he thought he knew for sure was that he would not be there when the killings started.

  Hank drummed his fingers on the clipboard. He growled a heavy sigh, then reached up and hung the board on a nail beside the door. Turning to Patrick, he looked at him for the first time. He folded his arms over his chest and studied him closely, his eyes looking over his whole face as if he was counting each freckle and every zit. Patrick’s legs itched. The minks were getting louder. They would not be getting fed this morning.

  “Okay kid,” Hank finally said, walking a wide circle around Patrick. “Follow me.”

  The window light threw shadows over the frozen ground while the two of them walked, black forms that cut back and forth, finally fading into the dirt by the time they moved beyond the final building. Hank was probably taking him somew
here private, away from the eyes and ears of the other men. Maybe he wanted to tell him what he and Patrick’s mother had talked about on that day. It could be that he wanted to know things about her and this was a chance to dissect Patrick’s brain and find out things that his mother would no longer say to him herself. From somewhere up the hill, near the road, the quarrel of a truck engine sounded, rolling down at them through the trees.

  “That’ll be Jasper,” Hank said. “We got about a half hour.”

  From the corner of his eye Patrick could see Hank doing up his jacket and folding the wings of his collar. “Tin says you’re a good worker,” he said.

  Patrick became suddenly conscious of the ground beneath his feet, the uneven sod and loose gravel, all of it hidden by the dark. He faltered in his step. He knew he should have responsed to what Hank said, but nothing would come to him. If it was an attempt at conversation, Patrick wasn’t interested.

  “Anyway,” Hank said, “I thought you ought to know that.”

  “Thanks.”

  They came to a pair of twin gable-roofed sheds set back near the trees, like single car garages with latched double doors at the front. Light spilled through the cracked door of the left hand shed, and Patrick could hear the echo of boots on wood floor coming from within.

  “Those are the tumblers,” Hank said. “That’s where the pelts get cleaned. You don’t need to worry about that, but you might carry the pelts from there to the stretchers.”

  As he listened, Patrick felt an overwhelming urge to tell Hank to shut the hell up already, that he didn’t care about tumblers or what had gone on between Hank and Patrick’s mother, not anymore. The only thing that had been more humiliating than listening to stories about the high school nurse and the history teacher kissing behind The Flume was that they imagined they could somehow keep it a secret. Had they even tried to hide it? It was old news, and besides he was fairly sure it was all over between them. Still, it didn’t mean he needed to stand there and pretend that it had never happened. If he had to make a choice between spending the whole day with Hank or Eugene, suddenly killing the minks didn’t seem so bad anymore.