Ash Falls

by Warren Read

  They went next door into a space that was about half the size of the mink sheds, warm with the smell of pinewood. Dozens of wooden boards ran the perimeter in short stacks, like weathered fence pickets made of old skis. Eugene stood halfway down the length, shuffling through the stacks, a pile of newspapers strewn at his feet. He cast an annoyed glance over his shoulder, tipped a board from the wall and wrapped a layer of paper around the upper half. From his pocket, he took a swatch of masking tape and secured the paper, then moved to the next board.

  Hank said, “These here are the stretchers. When the pelts get brought in here, the girls slide them over the tops.”

  “Like putting on a rubber,” Eugene called out.

  Hank shook his head. “The newspaper soaks up the fat.” He went on casually, and Eugene wrapped the wood like he was dressing wounds, every tear of the tape a chore in and of itself. The air felt thick in the room, and the humiliation seemed to radiate from Eugene, humiliation that Patrick should be standing at the door watching him work, watching as he carefully layered paper over the ends of those boards.

  Behind them, the door opened, and a rainfall of high-pitched laughing broke the soberness.

  “About fucking time,” Eugene hollered to the ceiling, his hair crushing against his collar. He pitched the roll of tape to the floor. “I am so done with this.”

  They were girls from the reservation, around Patrick’s age. They had tucked their hair under knit hats and written on black eyeliner and rosy lip-gloss that was greasy under the overhead lamps. Likely they had shared the makeup in their car, using the dome light to put on the final touches before coming in. One of them was big in the hips, with jeans that pinched at the flesh on the sides of her thighs. She stared at Eugene, a faint smile breaking.

  “Hey there,” she said. “I brought you a carton of Winstons.”

  “Winstons?” He said, pulling his chin back. He reached up and took his jacket from a nail on the wall. “I told you Marlboros.”

  “Winstons are cheaper,” she said.

  The other girl took off her coat and put it with her purse on the floor against the wall. She was thinner than her friend, with a ruffled blouse that she wore tucked into her pegged jeans. “What’s it matter?” she said. “Cigarettes are cigarettes.”

  “Shows what you know.” Eugene stomped past them. “Winstons are shit. If you think they’re so good, smoke ‘em yourselves.” He punched the door with both fists and it slammed open, crashing against the outside wall.

  Hank nodded to the girls and led Patrick out. By now there was a swirl of activity near the pelt barn. The window lights showed a big, double-wheeled pickup parked across the way, a flatbed trailer hitched behind. On the trailer bed was a giant metal box the size of a Volkswagen. Patrick could see Tin standing with a few others. One of them was a good foot taller than the rest, noodle-thin, and rocking back and forth on his feet.

  Hank stepped in front of Patrick and touched a hand to his shoulder. “Why don’t you go wait inside,” he said. “Warm up by the heater. We’ll give you a holler when we’re ready.”

  Patrick stepped from under Hank’s hand and walked to the shed. Eugene was the only one inside, and he stood rubbing his hands over the heater, green flannel untucked and draping to the ass of his jeans. The red bud of his hat poked from his seat pocket. He looked back over his shoulder.

  “You’re still here.”

  “Yeah.”

  Eugene motioned with his head. “Stand over here if you want,” he said. “I ain’t gonna hit you or nothing.”

  Patrick came and stood opposite Eugene. He kept his hands in his pockets, and the warmth began seep through his jacket, and it stole the moisture from his eyes and the insides of his nostrils. Eugene was staring at the drum of the heater, his face corrugating in the rising heat.

  “So the other night, when you were talking to Marcelle outside Rexall’s. What did she say about me?”

  “Nothing.” He looked down at Eugene’s hands. They were pink now, and he worked at them like they were under a faucet.

  “Don’t bullshit me, Luntz. I wanna know what she said.”

  “She didn’t say anything about you.”

  “You sure about that? Cause she’s been acting real weird lately.”

  Patrick looked up at Eugene. He continued to stare at the stove and show the yellowed band of his front teeth, and Patrick wondered when the hell they were going to come and tell them it was time to bring the minks to the truck.

  “It was about my dad,” he said.

  “Your dad?” He finally looked up at Patrick. A crescent formed at the edge of his mouth. “About him busting out?”

  “Yeah.”

  Eugene gave a horsey nod and slid his hands into his jeans pockets. The ends of his flannel fell over his wrists like falling water. He dragged his toe along the ground, burrowing a small ditch in the spicy dirt. A low cloud of dust rose and settled on his boot.

  “You know, I could have told you,” he said. “Anytime. But I didn’t. Remember that.” He wagged a finger at Patrick. Then he said, “You think he’ll come back here?”

  Patrick swallowed, and it felt as though the dust had come straight from Eugene’s boot and found its way into his throat. The flesh seemed to cling to itself, and he worked his tongue over his teeth and the roof of his mouth, priming whatever moisture he could to quench the desert in his voice.

  “I hope so,” he croaked.

  Eugene’s face looked like a sudden fire had flashed in front of him. He drew his head back and repositioned his leg, standing as if he was in mid step.

  “Why the fuck would you say that?” he asked.

  “Cause he’s my dad.”

  “Your dad’s a goddamned murderer, in case you forgot.”

  Behind them, the door swung open, and Hank came in, followed by two other men.

  “Let’s move ‘em out, boys.”

  Patrick Anthony Luntz

  And then the people clamored in, six or eight of them, Patrick couldn’t be sure. It was a collage of overalls and boots, and canvas jackets, camouflage and denim. They shoved through and hoisted and hauled the cages like they were crates of eggs, groaning from the strain of the lifting and the sudden shift of balance as the minks threw themselves from one side of the cage to the other. And then the squalling came, and it was a needle deep into the brain. But the men just kept marching past Patrick, trailing the smell of cologne and tobacco and the sour odor of musk from the pissed off minks. Someone said, “Kid, don’t just stand there with your thumb up your ass, start moving.”

  In the cage nearest, amid the blur of colors and smells, a fat mink crouched in the far corner of his den, tight against the mesh. He was a pile of blue, and his eyes gouged into Patrick’s, black eyes, wide and glassy. And Patrick thought for a moment that with the light over his head the way it was, all white and brilliant, that he could see himself in those marble eyes, his own face looking back at him, his spidery hands reaching out to take hold of the crate. And then he was carrying it down the aisle, past men who swam around him and whooped at each other, and coughed, and knocked hard up against each other’s shoulders.

  One of the minks in a passing cage jumped up and ran to the other side. Its head swung wildly from one side to the other, maybe following the paths of its fellow mates, perhaps looking for a place where it could escape or targeting when the ride would finally come to an end. In the cage Patrick held, a small female stayed where she was in the far corner, her body curled into a loose knot, head buried into herself as if she was showing that she already knew what she was destined to be.

  Outside, the tall man stood with Tin at the back of the trailer, and the door to the big freezer was swung wide open. A half-dozen or more cages lined the floor of the box, and when Patrick approached them, the tall man reached out to take the box from him. His gloved fingers grasped the mesh, and Patrick’s held the mesh, and there was a tugging, but to his surprise Patrick could not bring himself to loosen his grip. H
e felt his heels leave the ground as the cage was pulled from him, and a final tug broke it free. The man slid the crate in the big freezer, and after a couple more found their ways into the space, the door was closed and cinched, the handle dropped like the airlock to a space capsule.

  They were gathering closer to the thing now, Tin and the others. Eugene was there among them. The tall man walked to the side of the big box and twisted the spigot atop a large canister, some kind of tank that Patrick had not noticed before. And then they waited, all of them. They waited and even though a couple people tried to make small talk nobody wanted really to answer them, and so they stood quietly, smelling a little of sweat and damp wool, and a couple guys stepped back from the group and lit up cigarettes. Patrick’s stomach felt like he had drunk a shot of whiskey—warm and unsure of what would happen next. Finally, the tall man said, “That’s it,” and he walked over and shut off the valve.

  Someone tapped Patrick on the shoulder and said, “Let’s go.” And then the bodies tripped forward, snatching the cages from the cavernous space. They pushed past Patrick, knocking against him, and the minks lay in dark lumps on the bottoms like old, discarded socks. Eugene’s voice broke into Patrick’s head, telling him, “Grab a cage, Luntz, don’t be a puss.”

  Something seemed to nudge him then, an unseen hand to the chest, and he felt himself stumbling backward over the crisp, frozen sod. The voices came deep from all sides, and they lobbed over him like softballs, dropping past his ears and rolling around his tangled feet as he danced drunkenly under the haze of a breaking dawn. A camouflaged jacket rushed at him, and Patrick threw up his guard, but the man grabbed him anyway, looping his arms under Patrick’s and balancing the boy against his body. It seemed as if they stood like that for hours, this stranger holding him under a bleeding sky, as if they were in a waltz. A cold hand pressed against his forehead and cleared the cotton from his ears, and his legs discovered the ground again.

  Eugene stood near the trailer with a toothy grin, his eyes bugging like white stones. The tall man hung back and kept his head low, taking quick, nervous glances at Patrick, but mostly tapping at the canisters and fiddling with things that Patrick suspected were probably fine. Tin sidestepped them all and came over. He put his hand on Patrick’s shoulder and leaned in.

  “You okay, son?”

  Patrick sucked in a chest full of air and nodded.

  “What’s say we take us a little walk.” He turned over his shoulder and yelled, “Goddamn it Eugene, I’m gettin tired of seeing you standing around playing with your pockets. Get the rest of ‘em over to the fleshing before I throw you in there with ‘em.”

  The sun was cutting through the trees now, scattering gold over the cobble of rocks skirting the riverbank. Curls of water pressed into the shallow pool, and Doug Fir needle-draped Periwinkles crawled toward the edges, their tiny, spidery legs moving them slowly over the sandy floor. Patrick sat on a tuft of crabgrass, his knees pressed to his chin. Tin stood beside him and drummed his old fingers against his trouser legs.

  “Hell,” he said. “That wasn’t no big deal. I seen a two-hundred pound lumberjack give up his breakfast his first time out.”

  “I thought I’d be fine,” said Patrick. “I thought about it all week. It never bothered me to think about it.”

  Tin laid his hand on Patrick’s head. “You got nothin’ to be ashamed of.”

  They stood there, Patrick listening to the gurgle of the river and the sawing of the jays hiding in the feathery hemlocks on the far side of the water. The frost was melting under Patrick’s seat and was soaking into his jeans. Tin bent down and picked up a rock, and pitched it side-armed into the water. It skipped a couple times then disappeared below the surface.

  “Does it hurt?” Patrick asked.

  He had always wondered how it would be done. In the time since Tin had asked him if he would help, it had been the one question eating away at him. But he couldn’t for the life of him figure out how to phrase it, not without sounding either gun shy or bloodthirsty. He’d had formulated all sorts of ideas. Twisting them at the neck, injecting them with poison. Clubbing them. The first time he had gone fishing with his father, he became sick to his stomach when his father took hold of the baton and smashed it against the bass’ head. The dull thump, and the splatter of blood against Patrick’s naked arm. It had taken three hits to kill it, or at least that was what his father had decided it would take.

  “No,” Tin said. “I don’t reckon it hurts em much. It’s a CO2 gas. Puts ‘em to sleep.”

  “But they don’t like it,” he said. “It still scares them. I can tell that it scares them.”

  Tin lowered himself to the ground. His knees popped and he groaned some, down in his throat. But he took a seat next to Patrick and removed his hat, and picked at the plastic band with his fingernails. He folded the bill into a C shape, and slapped it against his knee.

  “Thing is, Skunk,” he said, “there ain’t no such thing as a nice way to kill something.” He leaned back and looked over at Patrick. In the sun’s gouge, his face was like the bark on an old tree. He said, “You can look at it any way you want, but that’s the God’s honest truth. It don’t matter if it’s a mink or a mouse or a mosquito. One minute there’s a life in front of you, and the next, it’s gone. By your hand.”

  Patrick looked down at Tin’s fingers, and the knuckles were like marbles straining against thin tissue. “So you just get used to it?” he said. “And it doesn’t bother you?”

  Tin fit the cap over his knee. He turned his palms up and held them there, as if he might catch the sunrise in his hands. “I look at it this way,” he said. “If it ain’t this farm, it’s the forest. We cut ‘em down, chop ‘em up, use ‘em to make our houses. Use the pieces to keep us warm. You ever hear a four hundred year-old Doug Fir come down? It’s like a old man. It groans and it cries, and it creaks and snaps all over the place. It never feels good to take something that’s lived so long and end it, just to make things better for you. But you put some more in the ground, and maybe in a hundred years, some Joe’ll come along and do it all over again. And between then and then, all a fella can do is show respect and take care of em the best you can.”

  “So it doesn’t bother you.”

  He put his hand on Patrick’s shoulder and heaved himself to his feet.

  “Kid, I learned to live with it,” he said. “And someday, it’ll be my turn to go. And when it happens, I hope someone makes it as quick and easy as I did for them. I’d say that’s about all that any man can hope for.”

  Marcelle and Eugene

  She went to the kitchen for the third time that morning, this time stopping in the entry, where she slumped against the edge of the wall and pressed her hands over her stomach. It pained her, like broken glass was tumbling around inside there. She was so hungry. She was hungry and sick of everything, of the wallpaper that always screamed around them, and how the tins and bottles cluttered up the counters and the way the scribbled papers and snapshot photos stuck to the refrigerator like confetti. She hadn’t even walked out the door yet, and already she wanted to crawl into a closet and just disappear.

  Lyla Henry was up to her elbows in suds, pressed against the sink, shoulders working broad circles. “The nurse was clear,” she said without turning around. “No food after midnight. Nothing.” She ran a plate under the stream of water and slid it into the rack at her elbow. “Go in the living room. Watch T.V. or something. You’re driving me crazy with all your pacing.”

  “What time do we go?”

  Lyla tipped her head back and released an exhausted sigh. “I told you. Eleven.”

  The clock had no numbers, only dots. But it was clear enough to tell there was still well over an hour. She rolled from the wall and retreated to the sofa where she forced her herself to lie down, lifting her feet to the armrest. Eyes closed, she concentrated on the path of her own blood as it traveled down her legs and collected at her chest and her head, making her feel warm in the
face and amplifying the beat of her own heart. The sounds of clattering dishes and silverware chimes echoed from the kitchen. She stared up at the ceiling, at the diamond flecks almost hidden within the cottage cheese texturing. This time tomorrow, she thought, it’ll be done. She moved her hand over her stomach again then quickly brought it to the back of her head, touching the dampness still left from her shower. An engine growled outside, heavy and mean, revving two, three times, rattling the old, loose-paned windows before cutting to silent.

  “Were you expecting Eugene this morning?” Lyla’s voice was strained and tremorous.

  Marcelle said nothing but leaned from the sofa to get a better view into the kitchen. Lyla had her wrist to her forehead.

  The kitchen door raked open. Marcelle bolted from the couch and stood in the center of the room, her hand cupped over her mouth. Of course it was him. That car, that deep growl that she had once hungered for, that had once meant summer heat blowing through open windows, cruising up the mountain at sixty miles per hour, now sent her scrambling to look busy whenever she heard it. He thumped his hand against the kitchen door as he shoved it open because as usual, the entire house had to be made aware of his arrival.

  “Marcelle?” His voice was low and hard, and even though he was out of view, Marcelle could see him there, greasy shirt, hands blackened up to his elbows. There would be a handprint on the door. “Marcelle get out here.”

  It didn’t seem as if anything at all in Marcelle’s life could possibly go the way it was supposed to as long as Eugene could find a way to get involved. She slid her fingers into her waistband sat down again on the edge of the sofa. Her stomach began to roll and pinch at her.

  Lyla said, “What are you doing here?” She walked past the alcove and glanced into the living room at Marcelle, her hands wringing a dishtowel at her waist. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”