Ash Falls

by Warren Read

  “It’s you, right?” His voice was that of a man’s, low and firm from deep within in his chest. There was only the smallest hint of a tremor in his words.

  “How’d you know?”

  Patrick lifted his arm to the side, the silhouette of the open padlock hooked over his finger, the tiny key jutting from the bottom. He closed the door behind him.

  Ernie forced a laugh, desperate, then he stepped forward, leaning against the workbench. His head began to swim. He slipped the duffle from his back and let it drop to the floor, but the weight of it lingered in him, buckling his knees and threatening to drag him down with it. He had imagined so many things he could say to Patrick if he saw him, him and Bobbie, but he hadn’t really planned on saying any of it. In the end, it was best for everyone if he just went in, took what he wanted, and got the hell out. What they didn’t know would not be able to hurt them.

  “Are you okay?” Patrick said. “You’re not hurt or anything?”

  “I’m fine.” He took hold of the duffle again. “I’m not sticking around, son. In case you were thinking I might. I just came to get some things and get out of here.”

  “So you were just coming to steal a bunch of stuff. Not even say hi or anything.” He came closer to Ernie and raised a hand to his own face. “You look really different. You shaved your beard.”

  “Yeah, well. Circumstances.” The backlight from the window darkened the silhouette even more, and Ernie strained to make out a face in the figure moving toward him. He wanted to see him, to take the image with him of this young man who was not a boy anymore. “I’d say I’m sorry, but I guess you already know that.”

  “Yeah.” Now he stopped and leaned against the side cabinetry opposite Ernie.

  The window light illuminated Patrick’s face now, the hard lines of his cheekbones and the thin-cut lips. His eyelashes reached out like feathers they were so thick. There was a good amount of himself in that face, he could see now, and there was a surge of pride at that, that this boy standing there so handsome might bear some resemblance to his old man.

  “Who’s the codger?” Ernie said, nodding to the door. “With the truck.”

  “A friend.”

  “What do you mean, a friend?”

  Patrick stiffened. “Well, technically he’s my boss.”

  “Your boss,” Ernie said. The conversation was continuing, and Ernie wanted it to continue, but he knew it couldn’t. He couldn’t stay here and risk Bobbie coming in, the inevitable hysterics, and then the cops. “You’re a working man now.”

  Patrick nodded, but said nothing.

  “That’s good.” His head felt heavy on his shoulders. Any second that door was going to open again, and she would be there. “Listen,” he said. “I don’t want to leave you hanging, but I can’t stick around.”

  “You already said that.” Patrick bounced against the counter and chewed on his thumbnail. “Probably all kinds of people looking for you, so you gotta go.”

  He said, “I don’t want you to worry about me,” and he meant it, though it sounded cold, forced. There was comfort in the idea that his face might pass through Patrick’s mind now and then while he was on the run. But what could something like that bring anyone other than pain?

  “It was selfish, you know,” Patrick snapped. “Taking off like that. Not calling or letting us know anything. You could be dead.”

  “But I’m not.”

  “You will be.”

  A rush of irritation, of frustration flared up in Ernie. This was exactly what he had wanted to avoid, why he’d known he was supposed to just get in and get out and not say a word to anyone. But here he was anyway, barely an arm’s distance from his son. And Christ, it was too damned far away.

  “I don’t want to fight with you. Let’s just say our goodbyes and I’ll be on my way. And when I get a chance I’ll call, okay?” He stopped himself, took a breath, and held it. He let it out slowly. “How about I call, and if you answer I’ll tap the phone a few times. And then you’ll know it’s me and I’m okay. How’s that?”

  Patrick closed his eyes and clenched his jaw, biting down as he breathed in deeply. Finally, he moved from the cabinet to the dryer and stood with his hands on the surface.

  “I’ll come see you,” he said suddenly. His voice was tightening now, and he was looking at Ernie. “I can take the bus. It’s only in Monroe. I can come visit you every month if you want.”

  “Jesus, just stop.” Ernie slapped the wood on the workbench, the loose tools rattling and clanging against one another. His temperature was climbing. He worked his knuckles back and forth and listened to the sound of breathing on the other side of the shed.

  Patrick’s shoulders slumped and the bones in his legs looked to have turned to jelly. Ernie took a step toward him, but he pulled back, and stepped away from the dryer.

  “I love you, kid,” Ernie said, “but goddamn it.”

  Patrick took a breath as if to say one more thing, likely one more attempt to try and turn the tide toward surrender. But he didn’t. He just sighed, shrugged his shoulders and turned around, lifting himself on his toes to look over the washing machine, out the window toward the house. “I don’t want you to worry about me, either,” he said.

  “I’ll try not to. But you know that’s what parents do.”

  “I got a job, now.”

  “Yeah, you told me.”

  “At a mink farm.”

  “Minks? Well, what do you know?”

  Patrick turned to Ernie again, and the light was behind him now so his face disappeared, but Ernie pushed himself to see the young man with the cheekbones and the soft dusting of whiskers needing a shave. There was a time when Ernie could have gone to him and wrapped his arms around him, and Patrick would have folded into him, and they would have sat together on the floor and laughed and told stories, and no matter what Ernie had done or said, it would have been all right. He felt himself being pulled toward him, but something held his feet to the dirt, as if stakes had been driven straight through them into the ground.

  Patrick slid the door open, and the light shone for an instant as he squeezed through and closed it behind him. There was the rattle of the garbage can lid lifting and resealing, knocking against the shed wall, and then it was quiet.

  He tossed back the duffle flap and went to the back of the shed, retrieving the raingear, the same jacket and pants that he had worn when Patrick had not wanted to go fishing with him but had relented upon the promise of a hamburger, French fries, and chocolate milkshake afterward. He added it to the duffle, tossing in a couple screwdrivers and a hammer, the hammer Patrick had used when he cracked his thumb while building a ramshackle tree house in a friend’s old maple. The nail had turned full blue and fell off on its own about a week later when Ernie was not at home. He cinched the pack to his shoulders again. The porch light was suddenly extinguished, and the shed went dark.

  Ernie made his way to the door carefully. He waited for a time, standing against the wall with his hand on the grip, listening to the sound of his own breathing and of the noise under his shoes, the friction of tiny grains of dirt grinding against one another as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

  He had expected some resistance; the door was heavy after all. He had anticipated the sounds of creaking and of springs straining as the door slid on its track. But what he had not planned on, what gripped his chest and drained the blood from his arms, was the fact that the door slid nicely all of a single inch before it caught, refusing to budge any further. He leaned in close and peered through the sliver, and he could see it clearly.

  It was the padlock. That damned padlock gleamed in the moonlight like it was electric, its stainless steel shackle extending at a perfect arch from one end of the lock through the metal loop that pushed through the clasp that he had screwed on so tightly that day, that first Saturday he and Bobbie and Patrick had lived there. He could not see if the shackle was sunk fully into the guts of the lock, holding to them with its
teeth until it could be released by the key, or if it had merely been slid through and was hanging open, not locked at all. It didn’t matter though, as it was doing its job just as it should, keeping the prisoner inside, no way for him to reach through that slender gap to get hold of that lock and pull it free.

  What he felt came in flashes—rage, disbelief—aimed direcly at Patrick. He could see him looping the padlock over the latch and walking away as if it were nothing, and the betrayal was a giant hook, cold and rusted, and it gouged at his chest and pulled him down to his knees. He sat there breathing in the smell of mold and dust, and there quickly came a frantic energy that cut his breath and lit the room on fire. He stood up and pulled on the door again, his jacket constricting his chest and his neck, his arms and wrists crawling as if riddled with spiders. He dropped the duffle and stripped off his coat. His heart racing, he began to pace the perimeter, digging through boxes and pulling out drawers, looking for anything, he didn’t know what, since nobody had bothered to keep this shed organized, not in the years he’d been gone, or before. Tools were thrown in crates and left on shelves and some probably in the house, nothing where it should be. He found a crescent wrench loose on the countertop and scrambled to the washing machine. Climbing onto the lid he held tightly with one hand and took a sharp swing with the other, striking the lower right pane, breaking a single square loose in a bell-like ring, where it landed silently on the snow below.

  His face was awash with the burst of cold, the glacial air spilling through the window and pushing itself down the open neck of his shirt, freezing the damp skin and bringing the life back into him. And this air was brand new, never having been breathed, and he pulled it into his lungs until his chest could not take any more. He swung his legs around and sat with his shoulder to the wall, and pressed his ear to the frame and stared up into the night. Above the roof and beyond the overreaching dogwood twigs, the sky yawned forever, and it was almost completely black, and stars poked through in tiny pinpricks, white speckles over the entire canvas.

  Things went on forever out there, just past this wall that wanted to keep him inside, held by his own son, and Ernie understood what it must have taken for Patrick to do that. He wanted to keep his father, that’s all. Scoop the net under him and toss him in the basket where he could take him home, instead of releasing him into the open water where he ought to be.

  The breeze slid through the branches and brushed over his ears, and the soft touch of Patrick’s breath came to him, his tiny body pressed against Ernie’s bare chest, infant fingers that played his beard like a harp. His own voice sounded in his head, the way he used to whisper poems to his son when he was too little to understand them, poems about nature and the valor of soldiers, as his own father had done, the weight of the old man’s body pressing down on the handmade quilt as he sat beside him. It came to him, how he once liked to stay up into the early hours of morning looking for Orion’s Belt and Gemini, from the upstairs window of his childhood bungalow and later from beneath wide-leafed palms on the night patrols, and the open moon roof of his souped-up Camaro, his sweetest girlfriend resting her head gently on his shoulder.

  In the distance, the faint glow of colored lights pulsed against the trees, but it was Christmas after all. Maybe Patrick hadn’t said a thing to Bobbie. Maybe she was in the living room watching television and Patrick was back in his bedroom, lying under the covers and staring at the ceiling, contemplating what exactly he ought to do next. Maybe they were standing over the telephone, their hands clasped together, rehearsing what they could possibly say when they finally picked it up and made the call.

  The remaining glass, he knew, would fall easily away. There was time to push the duffle out ahead of him and squeeze his body through the opening, first the shoulder and then the head. If he could get that far, the rest would be easy. It would be a short drop to the brush, with a roll onto the crusted snow, and he’d be in the back of a pickup truck or eighteen-wheeler before anyone could show up to stop him. He knew his way up the mountain, to the creek, and there would be no coming back, no sitting in the dim light of the living room of his own house listening to the sounds of his family waking up to another day with Ernie in their lives. Not now, not ever.

  He lowered himself from the dryer and took the wrench from the tabletop behind him. Red and blue lights flashed vivid against the fogged windowpanes now, and Ernie leaned back against the counter and considered how it was like the Fourth of July out there, as if fireworks were exploding silently in the night sky. He took up his duffle and held the wrench over his shoulder. He wasn’t ready yet. He climbed back onto the dryer and pressed his face against the edge of the window frame, the rough wood grabbing hold of his naked face like claws. He took in the clean, icy air and thought of how beautiful it was, the lights blossoming over that glass like that, the way the radiance pushed its way into the shed and washed everything in a warm, comforting glow. Patrick should see this, he said to himself. It’s that goddamned beautiful.

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, most especially my mentors, who encouraged me to trust in the vision that was “Ash Falls.” To my RWW colleagues and readers: Jessica, Sarah, Jenee and Jeb, thank you for your sharp insight and, when necessary, your blunt recommendations. To my intrepid writing group members, Lynn, Mary, Susan, Caryn and Tina, thank you for encouraging a wider world for those characters whose origins grew from random, “draw from the hat” writing prompts.

  Thank you to my incredible husband Shayne for allowing me the time to sequester myself in those moments when inspiration and deadlines just happened to coincide, and our youngest son, Dmitry, for the conversation that helped me form that final chapter. In addition, much thanks goes out to Chris Craggs, for his generous contributions of what would help me shape Patrick and Tin’s unique world, and to my mother Nellie, who helped me guide Marcelle through her complicated, often unforgiving journey.

  Finally, heartfelt appreciation goes to Kristen Radtke for her brilliant cover art, and to Robert Lasner and Elizabeth Clementson of Ig Publishing, for their partnership in getting these characters I have grown to love so much out into the greater world.