Ash Falls

by Warren Read

  “Maybe I ought to just stop, too,” she said. “My brother Nels says I’m turning into a old hippie. Says I’m gonna get myself in trouble if I’m not careful.”

  Hank didn’t have a response. He had always worked to assuage Susanna’s nerves—her fears and the fears of all the others. It was low risk, he’d told them. “Nobody cares about a little friendly trade between an old guy and a few people needing a little help with their aches and pains.” But Nels had a clear point. A person could be careful as hell and still have word get out to the wrong person.

  “He’s always telling me what to do,” Susanna said, picking up the baggie and holding it up in front of her face. “He’s been taking stuff from the house. Taking it out to his truck and then going to the dump. He does it when I’m asleep in the bed.”

  Hank made a move toward the door. “Sneaky guy, too.”

  “Not so sneaky,” she said. “He thinks I don’t notice, but I do.”

  The open door brought in the crispness of winter air, a clean he could feel rushing from the snowy ground on up. Toby’s silhouette popped up in the window, ears perked in a crown on his head, and Hank envied him at that moment, his cozy seat, freedom from obligation and error, nothing to worry about except food and all the things there were in the world to piss on.

  Coming into town, Hank came to a stop at the intersection near The Sleep Inn, its reader board still advertising fall rates over the humming green neon vacancy sign. A housekeeping cart sat parked in front of one of the units, the room door wide open, just letting all the room light out and all the December cold in. The truck heater was cranking now, and Hank twisted to work himself free of his jacket. He was embarrassed that he should feel suddenly anxious, that he would be looking for a particular face to emerge from that open door. A flash of white appeared in the doorway, but the woman who appeared, who took hold of the cart, was a stranger. She was a big gal with thick, bare arms dark as coffee against a stark white short-sleeve. She picked at the cart, hugging bottles and towels to her ample chest, and just as Hank lifted his foot from the brake, she turned and went back inside.

  The neighborhood streets that pulled from the downtown core were packed with sand-peppered snow, a contrast to the salted sheen of the main drag. Hank drove on, reaching to his sleeping passenger, running his hand over the soft coat and working his fingers between the ears. Toby’s eyes fluttered, and his mouth curled at the edges, and Hank serenaded him from far back in his throat.

  Everybody loves somebody, sometimes.

  Everybody loves somebody, somehow.

  A half-dozen metallic holly strands straddled the length of Main Street, the final one supporting a banner that screamed “MERRY CHRISTMAS!” in giant Old English script. Hank looked into the rearview, at the long, stretch of roadway that divided the downtown storefronts. They were shops and owners barely clinging to life, facing one another with their freshly painted sandwich boards and paper signs and twinkling lights begging for shoppers, anyone, to come inside. Glancing images of figures dashed from one side to the other, jumping over slush-filled potholes, carrying bags too small to hold anything really significant. He thumped Toby’s back before taking the wheel with both hands, stepped on the gas, and cruised under the sign, launching himself into the stretch of road leading up the mountain.

  Ahead on the left, a tiny forest of freshly cut Noble and Doug Firs huddled under a necklace of multicolored lights. For as long as he could remember, the Christmas tree lot had been the boy scouts’ domain, a good twenty years supplied by Ole Olson’s tree farm just down the highway from Hank’s place. He had helped out three or four times in the early years, giving the troop a hand with felling the little ribbon-marked trees. He couldn’t recall why he’d done it—maybe Ole had called him, or someone from the school had roped him into it. But they were always good kids, the kind of boys he’d have liked to raise if things had been different for him. But then Ole passed on, and the farm and the scouts moved on elsewhere. Hank didn’t even know who was supplying trees for them, now, but he did know that the trees they hawked were godawful scrawny and overpriced. A muddy Fifth Wheel trailer stood at the edge near the highway, the blue screen of a portable television flickering through the translucent curtains.

  A couple of kids in canvas jackets wrestled with a fat Noble, hoisting it onto the roof of a white Japanese car. Their jackets were open to the waist, khaki shirts and colorful patches and bright red bandanas showing through, and they were all teeth and scrub-faced and freckled, as if they had just jumped out of a Norman Rockwell scene. Hank liked to think that such a thing existed in the world, that level of innocence and unaffected optimism. But nothing he had ever experienced in his life told him it was possible, not with kids in his classroom, certainly not with any kids he’d ever seen raised around him. But the way these kids laughed, as they stretched twine over that hideous tree, working with the care of budding craftsmen, he felt a little hope was there. Hope that there might be a few young men left to keep this town from falling down around itself.

  At the base of the Fifth Wheel steps, a woman stood with her back to him, fussing with a bulky leather purse. He recognized the sturdy posture at once, the squared shoulders, the dry, sagebrush hair that brushed at the quilted parka. He slowed to a stop in the middle of the street and wound down the window, tapping the horn.

  “That you over there?” he called to her.

  She turned around. “Depends on who you think it is.”

  “You still working at the motel? I just saw some other gal there.”

  “They got gals besides just me.” Roxanne put her hand to her forehead and bent slightly at the knees. “Kelleher?” she shouted. “What the hell are you doing? You’re blocking the road.”

  He looked over his shoulder and cranked the wheel, crunching into the gravel lot. He parked the truck along the edge of the lot and climbed out, meeting her halfway to the tree line.

  “That your car under that little fir?” he asked.

  “Maybe. What brings you out into the daylight? You ever figure out who busted up your place?”

  “I got a pretty good idea,” he said. “It’s a bigger can of worms than I want to deal with, though.”

  “Really.” She raised her eyebrows in faint surprise, and with a trace of disappointment.

  He looked over at the scouts wrestling the twine over the rear bumper of the white compact. “Shouldn’t your fella be here doing this for you?”

  “My fella walked out of rehab a week ago.” Her smile buckled.

  Hank pulled back, stung. “Oh hell,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Fucker called me from a payphone, wanted me to Western Union some bus money so he could come home. Shit. I told him he could either march his ass back into rehab or start walking the other direction.”

  Hank tucked his hands into his jeans pockets. An unexpected coolness crept up his back and over his shoulders. Her smile was there again, a perfect row of white behind rose-pink lips. She wore no makeup as far as he could tell, and her skin was pale and a little dry in the snow-licked wind, but it sure looked as soft as any he’d ever seen. He could reach over and brush his hand against her cheek and it would feel like silk.

  “You’re one tough little girl,” he said.

  “Please. It’s been a long time since I was a little girl.”

  A grin stretched tight over his face, and he put a hand to his mouth. “So,” he said, smoothing away the smirk. “You gonna tell me whose car that is?”

  “Jesus, Kelleher. You’re persistent. It’s mine, if you gotta know. Melvin’s letting me make payments on it.”

  “It’s a shame, them boys getting sap all over it. Next time give me a call, and I’ll throw it in the back of my pickup. I’m in the book.”

  The edge of her mouth drew up again, and she nodded heavy, as if there was no possible way she could agree with him any more than she already did. “I will remember that,” she said. “Next time.”

  “Anytime,” he said.
“Doesn’t have to be a tree, either.”

  “I figured that’s what you meant.” She took a pack of gum from her purse and stripped the paper clean before popping it in her mouth, then held the package out to Hank.

  “I’m not much of a gum chewer.”

  “God,” she said. “Live a little. Hank.”

  Then she pushed it at him, and he obliged, drawing one from the pack. He turned it over with his fingers, examined the yellow and black label, taking in the smell of sugar and fruit, a scent that had no existence in natural form, anywhere.

  “You already got your tree?” Roxanne asked.

  “I got trees all around me.”

  “Smart ass. You know what I mean.”

  Hank put the stick of gum in his pocket and looked over her shoulder. The boy scouts had finished with the car and were now rolling twine around a wheel-sized spool, their teenaged voices tumbling over the lot like the notes of a bell choir.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not really set up for something like that.”

  “I’m not set up for something like that,” she repeated. Her voice was gruff and mocking, but Hank didn’t get riled over it. She was teasing him, and he felt a lift in his stomach. “If I didn’t do Christmas,” she said, “I wouldn’t make it through winter without killing myself. I got Christmas decorations like you wouldn’t believe. I could set you up good if you wanted.”

  He never had any kind of desire to put a tree up in his house, needles littering the floor, tinder dry and ready to go up with the slightest spark. He’d had no kids wrap presents for or to let crawl around the trunk and rifle through presents, so what was the use? But she was standing here staring at him like some imploring teenager, her hand on her hip, snapping her gum while she waited for him to give in—he couldn’t think of a single way out where he didn’t come off like a complete jackass.

  A sudden movement, some thirty yards behind her in a grove of white-patched alders, broke the moment. He put a hand on her arm and pointed over her shoulder. “Take a look at that,” he said.

  A yearling stepped carefully between the naked alder stands, over snow-covered undergrowth. He was a young black-tailed, maybe four points and a promising buck. He dug at the ground with his foreleg, pulling at the groundcover with his teeth and chewing slowly, head low and almost out of sight. Now and then he’d raise his nose and snuff at the air, and look over toward Hank, at the goings on under the lights, maybe. Then he’d stare out and over the open field just beyond the grove and poke his nose back among the salal and sedge cover.

  “He’s a beauty,” Roxanne said.

  “Yeah, he is. But he won’t last long if he stays this close to town. Between the logging trucks and teenaged drivers.”

  “Logging trucks and teenagers exist all the way up the mountain,” Roxanne said. “If anything, being this far down will keep him clear of the weekend K-Mart hunters.”

  At that, Hank had to laugh. Many a hunting season began and ended with cameos of idiots wandering onto his property in newly bought flannel jackets and stocking hats, price tags barely plucked free. “Can you point me to the road?” the guy would say, his gleaming rifle held in such a way that the slightest stumble would surely take his own head off.

  “Nothing wrong with an eager hunter,” he said.

  “I never said there was.” She circled around him and began walking toward his pickup, and he followed. “I went hunting with my dad all the time,” she said. “You ever field dress a deer?”

  “Sure,” he said. “A couple times.”

  “Well, I’ve done it more times than I can count. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but some of my best memories are coldassed weekends out in the woods with my dad, trying to get a big old buck in the crosshairs.” She stopped at the truck and rested her hand on the roof. “Even so, I always thought they were a lot prettier out walking in the woods than hanging upside down from a tree branch, no matter how tight they might fill a freezer.”

  She opened the driver’s side door and sat with one leg still hanging down to the gravel. Toby was up in his seat, already pawing at her jacket.

  “He remembers you,” Hank said.

  “Hell yeah, he does. I’m a pretty unforgettable gal,” she said, scratching the dog on his muzzle. “Good or bad.”

  Hank leaned his arm against the open door. When she had been with him at the house after the break-in, she walked around that place like she belonged there, as if she owned it. Digging the broom from his closet, sweeping up busted glass and loose coins, retrieving scattered knickknacks and setting them where she thought they should go, in all the wrong places. Places where, to this day, they still sat.

  He turned and looked back up the highway, where the open sky broke through the trees, at the spread of dirt-colored spec houses had once been a playground thick with sword fern and cedars and hemlocks for Hank and his buddies. “Those houses there,” he said. “My buddies and I, we got together one summer and built a tree house right in the middle of that place. It was a dangerous piece of shit, cobbled together with some old pallets and rotten fence boards. But it was something else, for a twelve year-old.”

  “I remember when it was all just trees,” she said. “There are places all over this town that used to be trees. Things change.”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  She squinted up at him, chewing that gum she still had in her mouth. She shifted in the seat so that she faced him, propping her heels on floor edge. “Why unfortunately?” she said. “You think things ought to stay the same, forever?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Some things.”

  She shook her head. “What’s behind us is gone, Kelleher. It’s out of our hands. The only thing any of us have control over is maybe the shit that’s waiting around the next corner.”

  She turned slightly, and reached back to find Toby again. She scratched at his ears, and he rolled onto his side to show his stomach, but she didn’t notice. Her eyes remained on Hank’s, studying him, it seemed, to see where he might be taking this conversation.

  “It’s just reminiscing is all,” he said. “It’s what happens when you realize there’s more years behind you than there are in front of you.”

  She swung her leg out and tapped him against the shin. “You ain’t as old as you let on. You’ve got plenty of good years left ahead. Whether you live them up there on the mountain, or down here in Ash Falls, or wherever the hell you want to—just live them. Don’t spend your whole life staring at the rearview mirror.”

  She got up from the seat and brushed off her jeans. “The way I see it, if things never changed, I could be stuck at seventeen, wearing patched-up bellbottoms and working at the Burger Hut, God forbid. And you’d still be trapped in that classroom, trying to teach science to a bunch of kids whose biggest care in life is when the next party is. And then what?”

  “And then what?” he repeated.

  “Then we wouldn’t be standing here,” she said. “And I’m kind of liking right now, aren’t you?”

  She reached up and gave his shoulder a squeeze with a hand that was twice as warm as it should be, a hand so warm it might well have been skin on skin.

  “Now quit being a Scrooge and go buy a goddamned tree from those boys. They’re dying out here.”

  “I will,” he said. “If the ornament loan offer still stands.”

  “I’ll be there at nine o’clock sharp,” she said, giving him one of the best smiles he’d ever seen in his life. “I like my eggs scrambled and my coffee strong.”

  She walked the whole way without looking back at him, and even when she turned and opened the door to her car and her body was facing him, she kept her head down. It was only when she lowered her purse from her shoulder and tossed it into the passenger seat that she glanced up. It was quick, hardly more than a second or two. But that was plenty.

  Hank climbed into his truck and cranked the engine, and turned down the music that seemed to just spill out of the radio. Roxanne rolle
d past him and gave a wave through the mud-spattered window, and as she pulled up to the edge of the highway, he noted that the left tail light of her car was out. It wasn’t good for her to be driving with a dead bulb, he decided. Benny’s garage was still open, and he’d have one in stock, probably. The Sleep Inn was on the way to Benny’s, too. Mel would tell him just what kind of car it was that he sold her.

  Ernie

  It crept low to the ground, hugging the edge of the brush, its eyes peering at him as it slunk back and forth and sniffed at the air. It was a female coyote, a new mother, well fed, with a coat healthy and full, not ragged and patchy as he had seen so many times on the packs that hunted farther up the mountain. He sat on the railroad tie, the medicinal scent of creosote mixing with cigarette smoke, and he watched the coyote as she searched the ground and tore at scraps of discarded paper, and nosed around the garbage cans, her beanbag teats swinging as she moved back and forth. At one point she rose to her hind legs and hooked her paws over the edge of the bin, tipping it to the ground. She yelped and sprang back, and after skulking a good-sized arc around it, she dove in and pulled out a full bag, dragging it backwards into the brush.

  Ernie took another pull from his cigarette and tipped the bottle of beer to his lips, a bottle he had walked in and bought himself not ten minutes earlier from the Ash Falls General Store. He didn’t know the young gal working behind the counter, but it was the same mom and pop store that had always been there, its phony brick asphalt siding and swaybacked porch roof, an old hillbilly left to rot alone at the edge of town. Anyone could have seen him in there but the girl barely looked at him, keeping most of her attention on the snowy 12-inch black and white propped against the side wall. Nonetheless, his heart drummed in his head. The cigarette was the best one he’d had all week.