by Patrick Lane
Hand on the door of his truck, Tom watched the cloud of Eddy’s dust drift out over the fields. Mother always said that they were a family, and to her that meant the Starks looked after their own. What happened in the family, stayed in the family.
Tom got in the truck and sat there staring through the crack in the windshield. He reached out and brushed the dust off the sun-blistered dashboard. His father had bought the truck in 1939, the year after Tom was born, with money he’d got setting forest fires for logging outfits that needed to put their equipment to work.
The far mountains had become shadows among pale shadows. The forests on their flanks seemed to go on forever. He remembered the years his father had driven away in the early hours, not to return until dusk and sometimes not then. Father had loved the truck, the flat dashboard with its round gauges, the stick shift with the black bulb, and the engine, especially the engine. He always said the V8 was the best motor Henry Ford ever built. They forgot how to make one after the war. The truck was a three-quarter tonner with an oval grille and an empty rack on the side running board, the tire long gone from it, torn off on a tree limb, Father used to joke, when he was chasing a moose to see how far it could run down a bush road before its heart gave out.
Tom turned the key, the engine sputtering through its changes until it caught. He pushed down on the gas pedal, feathering it as he waited for the motor to mumble its way to smooth. Then he put the truck in gear and rolled up the driveway on the nearly bald tires, taking the long way across the east side of town to Priest Valley Road. He thought of the times he and Eddy took turns on Sunday mornings driving the truck when they were kids. They were barely old enough to see over the dash when they’d drive it across the creek by the well and out into the orchard where they turned and counter-turned, in a skid on the hardpan or cutting deep ruts in the soft earth down by the creek. Week after week, Father had driven it into the mountains to work and over the years the truck body had gone from shiny black to streaks and dents and rust, the grille cracked and the headlamps hay-wired to the fenders to hold them straight, but the motor thumped along as it always had, Father changing the oil and spark plugs, working on the brakes, tinkering with the trans mission and carburetor whenever they needed tuning. It was the first Tom knew how much machines meant to his father, and to Eddy too. When there was a problem, Eddy worked on the car and truck, the tractor too, when it was still useful. Now it sat rusted against the fence, a nesting place for mice, the sun-hardened tires perches for magpies.
When Tom went to work summers picking in the fields on valley farms around that time, bringing his meagre pay home to Mother, Eddy always refused to go unless he could work machines, driving fruit sprayers or tractors. Tom picked beans and peas and tomatoes, and then, when he was a year or two older, he picked apples in the orchards. Later, the green-chain. Five years now at the sawmill. With Father dead these past years, the money Tom made put food on the table, his brother little help at best.
It was dark now, the headlights sweeping along the bare yards of the Hundred Homes. They’d been built after the war for the returning soldiers and the families they’d started. The houses were all the same, the paint peeling away from most of them, a few small trees trying to grow in the dense earth.
He cut down north hill to where Priest Valley Road began, Silver Star Mountain looming ahead of him. He and Eddy had hiked up there each spring when they were boys, so they could look down upon the world they came from, and there they’d buried themselves in the alpine meadows, the flowers so bright it hurt their eyes to look at them. Those were days when they ranged the back country, animals no less or more than coyote, hawk, or cougar. They’d slip out of the house at dawn, chunks of bread and baloney in a ruck-sack, the .22 in Tom’s hand and Eddy with Father’s hunting knife. They’d be gone for the day, returning late for supper, Father pushing his plate back and Mother dishing out whatever she’d made to her boys, slices of overcooked venison or mutton, white flour gravy, and summer spuds exploded from their jackets. As they sat at the table and ate, she’d complain about them, saying there wasn’t enough wood in the stove box, the garden wasn’t weeded, something, anything, Father reaching out to whichever son was close with a slap up the side of his head. The next day they’d duck out again at dawn, heading east into the Coldstream Valley to shoot gophers in the orchards, out to the lakes or up some nameless creek to fish for cutthroat trout. The crumbling stone escarpments high above the valley held everyone he knew, each of them born like himself to the valley under the same blue shoulders of stone and snow, ice and cloud holding hard above the desert floor, gullies and arroyos like old wounds cut into their sides.
The darkness stretched ahead, mountain folding back into mountain, his brother and him living in a land without history. The trees and stones were without stories, the hills a vacancy, the creeks and rivers a white water sound he knew the Indians had always listened to. The Indians were strange visitors to town. They rode in on buckboards and wagons, their horses short-roped to trees at the end of Main Street, the animals waterless, standing in the sun, their children sleeping under the horses’ bellies for shade while their parents went to the bars. He remembered taking water to those horses, carrying buckets to them from the tap behind the New Dawn Café, the animals burying their noses in the cold. Sometimes he’d beg a half bag of wire-cut oats from Winning Chow, who’d scoop handfuls into the dented hubcap he’d brought, some horse under a dead tree lipping at it, nothing in its eyes but a brown waiting. He knew some of those people ended up getting placed on the Indian List by Judge Smythe. Barred from drinking, they bought beer from the taxi stand and drank it under lilac bushes and elms in the park down by the railway tracks.
He wound through the farms, here and there a yard light on, a window pale with yellow light. Just before the big hill on Priest Valley Road was the gravel pit. For years the town had mined it there, digging into the hill until they exhausted it all, turning the land into crumbling sidewalks and cracked basements, driveways and walls. All that was left were piles of loose stone, rocks too large to be of any use. The piles dotted the huge cut like burial mounds.
Tom turned in and drove over the broken chain that had once prevented anyone from entering, and saw the cars. He pulled up behind Harry’s Coupe. Crystal was standing beside it, its dented fenders and cracked windshield the measure of Harry’s driving. Next to it was the Studebaker. Eddy and Harry sat separately in their cars, two outlines in the dim glow coming from their muted parking lights. Beyond them was a derelict, rusted-out car and a scavenged dump truck, discarded, forgotten, parked among piles of rocks. He looked back the way he’d come. It was quiet, the road behind him deserted. There was no one else around, the unused field on one side dotted with porcupine grass and fescue, on the other a dying orchard, under the trees a tumbledown cabin, windows broken, the door hanging from a hinge. No one could see them here. He watched Harry’s arm push out his side window and flick at his cigarette, a worm of ash falling to the road, its flare a momentary light. Eddy and Harry stayed in their cars.
Crystal nodded at Tom, but said nothing. She had one arm folded across her chest while the other hand tapped a cigarette, the red coal slashing. She looked like she wouldn’t be getting back in with Harry anytime soon. Eddy’s head was leaned back against his seat, one hand up and hanging off the steering wheel with its braided leather cover.
Tom had seen this a dozen times: Harry and Eddy sitting in cars, separate or together, figuring things out while some girl or another stood around waiting to see whatever they were going to do. Tom knew nothing would happen here until Eddy said it could.
The three of them were a picture. He’d seen photographs of the Dirty Thirties that Mother kept in a shoebox in the crib room. Here they were, like the people in them, beaten down or beaten up, each of them alone in a mined-out gravel pit, the blue desert hills and the mountains, the edges of their world.
Crystal walked over to Tom’s truck, opened the door, and got in. Take
me home, she said, as she dragged her skirt down over her knees. They told me you would. She pushed at the waves in her blonde hair and said: Well?
In a minute, Tom said. He got out, went over to Eddy’s car, and leaned in.
So, what are we doing here, Eddy?
Eddy stretched, cracked his door, got out, and walked to the front of his car. Harry did the same. Shadows mottled their cheeks and chins. Eddy took out his Exports and tipped a cigarette into his lips. Harry slouched as he took one from the proffered pack, and they lit up.
Just up over the hill, there’s a house, tucked away into an old orchard, said Harry. It’s across from Garofalo’s butcher shop.
Don’t talk so loud, Eddy said. Crystal doesn’t need to know what you’re saying.
She’s in the truck with the windows closed, Harry said. She can’t hear a thing. Anyways, it’s some old man’s place, Harry said. He’s supposed to have money hidden in there.
Who says? asked Tom.
Wayne.
When did he tell you this? Eddy said.
At the pool hall a few hours ago, before I took off with Crystal.
Eddy and Harry smoked, the red sparks of their cigarettes carving the same curves in the air. Eddy flicked his butt at a cracked boulder jutting out of a pile of stones. It caromed off into a tangle of wild rose.
Wayne says he heard the old man’s gone to Kamloops, Harry said, to visit his sister in the hospital up there. He stared moodily at his butt as it missed the boulder Eddy had hit. I even drove by the place a little while ago. There’s no lights on. Like I said, there’s for sure money in there.
How does Wayne happen to know? Tom asked.
Joe told him, Harry said, rolling his shoulders and tucking his chin into his jacket.
Wayne, Joe, what’s the problem? Eddy said to his brother.
Tom stuffed his hands in his pockets and stared up into the night sky. I don’t like this. There’s something wrong with it. Why would Joe tell Wayne of all people?
Eddy ground his heel into the gravel.
It’s no big deal, Harry said, and he took a Sweet Marie bar from his jacket pocket and peeled the paper back. He took a bite and began to chew. Why’re you so worried?
Seems strange to me Joe would be telling Wayne about this and not Billy, Tom said. If there’s money in that house, then Joe would tell him and they’d break in and get it. He sure wouldn’t be telling Wayne about it.
Harry looked down at his boots, hunching there as if he was thinking his way into things. He pushed the last chunk of chocolate into his mouth, his jaws working steadily as he wiped the back of his hand across his lips. According to Wayne, Joe was drunk, he said.
That makes no sense, Tom said. Joe’s not a drinker. He turned to his brother. What do you think about all this, Eddy?
Seems to me that shit, Wayne, wouldn’t lie about it. He wouldn’t dare. Not to us.
There’s no lights on, Harry said again, rubbing his hand on the bullet nose of Eddy’s car. You drive by there and you’ll see.
You wouldn’t catch me going in there, said Tom.
Who’s asking you to, he said, as he tilted his head at the truck. Eddy smiled. Anyway, I can always use money, he said.
When Tom didn’t move, Eddy just looked at him. Tom kicked at a stone and said: What the hell. I know you’ll do what the fuck you want.
Look, Eddy said. You take Crystal home. I’ll see you later at the bar, and saying that, he walked around to the back of the Coupe, Harry following him. They stood together whispering.
Tom stared into the gravel pit at the rusty old truck, the small bits of forgotten machinery. Tom thought he’d seen the house they were talking about. He’d been at Garofalo’s before. When there was extra money around back when he was a kid, he would be sent on his bike to pick up meat. Jim Garofalo was famous in the valley for having frozen his toes off on a hunting trip one winter up in the Cariboo. Tom once asked him about it and Jim told him he’d been still-hunting for a whole morning and had forgotten his feet were sitting in slush. Jim had taken off his boot and showed Tom how he had only two toes on his left foot. Tom could picture the tired canvas awning over the front window and the red plywood cutout of a side of beef hanging from the iron post by the door. The different cuts were outlined in white paint, a map of the animal made to show a man where to place his knife or saw. Back then, he used to think it somehow had a meaning.
He walked over to his truck and slid behind the wheel. As Crystal sat there, her fingernails clicked on the door handle, her look telling him what had happened before he got there, Harry probably getting a hand job in exchange for a few pills, Crystal likely thinking it was a bad bargain, given Harry and his ways.
Tom started the truck, pulling out of the pit and heading back the way he’d come. Across the ditches, broken fences and wild rose stretched out in staggering lines down the long hill. He slowed to take a hairpin turn, bats flickering like cinders in the sky. Moths fled from them toward the moon, wings endlessly turning toward the light. A cat howled somewhere deep in the sagebrush and another replied. The cats sounded weary of battle, heavy-necked males slinking along the ditches, some female in estrus, hiding, wounds on her nape, her nuptial scream guttered in her throat. Casting his eye across the moonlit field, he saw a bicycle, the back wheel without a tire, its front forks stubbed into the dirt, the handlebars ratcheted up like horns.
Crystal was quiet. Tom moved the steering wheel with the heel of his palm as the truck tossed in the potholes. You okay?
Just get me home, she said. When Tom didn’t reply, she said: I’m not scared of you. She said it like she thought she was. She took a cigarette from the pack in her purse and lit it. The radio Father had installed two years before he died was playing “Peggy-Sue,” the station tuned to Spokane. Tom figured she believed like every other girl in the valley that Buddy Holly was singing only to her. Her foot tapped on the floorboards and he imagined her dreaming of a love both rare and true. She twisted the rear-view mirror and prodded her hair into a shape she knew by heart. She glanced at him watching from the corner of his eye and said that after she got home she was going out again. When he asked her who with, she gave him a smug smile, and told him it was none of his business. Someone a lot more special than Harry, she said.
There wasn’t another word from Crystal. He dropped her off, the look from her one he’d seen before, a kind of magpie glance as if she’d caught some deeper scent in him. He eased the car away from the curb. The road wound under the bare acacia trees, maples beside them slumped inside their worn leaves. The town’s graveyard with its many stones slept in uneasy peace as the truck rumbled on, iron gates locked, the hill dry with its pines and red-tipped junipers struggling in the gravel, tilted white crosses and pitted angels waiting for a sign, the startle of salt growing on headstones as plastic flowers glowed dully on the plots, shoved like broken sticks into the ground.
The road slid past the high fences of the rich on the hill as the pavement sloped toward town, everyone getting ready for bed or already sleeping, curtains pulled, doors locked, shutters closed. Even the gardens by the sidewalks looked exhausted.
Closer into town the houses got smaller and meaner. The truck had crossed the line between the old rich and the old poor, there being next to none new to either, and no one in between. The trees on these streets had been stunted by axes and saws, girdled by blades. He’d seen children throw hunting knives and hatchets into the trunks as they practised their art of movie death, their imitation of the war their fathers never spoke of, Nazi and Jap deaths in every throw, John Wayne slogging forward on the sands of Iwo Jima, or riding the desert plains to Fort Apache, Henry Ford somewhere out there waiting. Elms pushed at the sky, their tops crowned, long scars up the trunks. Lilac hedges twisted below windows, leggy and bloomless. The town began to die as the truck neared the core. The last poor lived there. Fences leaned unpainted with missing pickets like the teeth of the veterans who sat on the Post Office steps, yard gates leane
d open, cats sliding through the gaps on their nightly rambles.
He pictured Eddy breaking into the dark house, Harry somewhere ahead of him, Eddy stoned, mumbling to his friend to go slow. Tom had seen Eddy shoot up. Each time he’d watched, helpless, as Eddy tied himself off, finding a vein, the needle slipping in, and then his head dropping to his chest as the heroin obliterated him. Resting on his knees, he’d stare at Eddy’s fluttering eyelids and try to think himself into his brother, but he never got deeper than his skin. Eddy said the moment the heroin hit was like a warm explosion inside his skull, soft arms holding his brain, a thick quilt wrapped around his heart. No one can touch me there, he said. His body would sag away, nothing left in the muscles, nothing in his bones.
He remembered a month or so ago when Eddy had gone to town to make a buy from Billy. He’d shot up in the toilet at the pool hall and Sergeant Stanley had cornered him as Eddy was shambling along in search of his car. He came home pale and angry, a tight grin on his face. He went outside again some time later and when Tom didn’t hear him come back in, he went to look for him, finding him in the root cellar, his belt loose across his arm, the needle leaning by a bruise like an icicle fallen from a rain gutter. When he laid his ear against Eddy’s chest, he could hear his brother’s heart beating slow, his lungs screaming for a breath. Tom blew into his brother’s mouth, the air battering the sacks behind his ribs, until Eddy’s mouth whimpered a reply. Tom raised him to his floppy feet, and walked him out into the orchard. As they stumbled over the grass and stones, he told Eddy that he’d grown in the basket of his mother’s belly, listening to blood songs, saying to him: For thou art thy father’s son, tender and only beloved in the sight of thy mother.
He remembered how the creek had muddled its way as a cock pheasant peered from behind a clump of bunch grass. Confused by the end of the moon, blue light breaking above him and his brother, the bird began looking for food in the shadowed grass around its nest. Tom’s eyes were wet with salt. He’d trudged beside Eddy in the great circle they had made of the field, trying to talk to him, hoping that words might be enough to keep his brother alive.