The Fallen: A Novel

by Dale Bailey

  “Did he say why?”

  “Money like that, a man don’t have to say why. But he was strange somehow. Panicky like. I don’t have the word.”

  Wood popped in the stove, and Henry watched a single spark tumble from the grate and wink out. On the television, they were talking about snow.

  “Up the Tipple a few nights back, I ran into this fella. They’re up there diggin again, excavatin that patch of tunnel I brought down.”

  “Who?”

  “I won’t tell you that.”

  “Why?”

  “Same reason I did tell you all the rest of it.”

  Grimacing, he fumbled at the buttons on his shirt for a moment. Then he stood, his shirttails falling back to reveal the sagging and bruise-swallowed flesh underneath. Henry gasped. Every breath must have been pure agony.

  “I ain’t got no love for Harold Crawford,” Ostrowski said. “You want to dig into this, it’s your own lookout. But there ain’t no cause to drag others in, I guess.”

  Buttoning his shirt, he turned to stare out the window.

  “You’re the one sent him up here. I got that figured right?”

  “I’m sorry,” Henry said, standing. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Yesterday evening, it was. A warning, that’s what he told me. I been layin for him ever since.”

  Henry glanced over at the old man. Ostrowski’s eyes glimmered in the shifting light, and now Henry could see what he was staring at: the dog run, half obscured by the shadows under the trees.

  “When I heard your car pull up,” Ostrowski said, “I was up there near the kennel, diggin a grave.” He shook his head sadly, and Henry thought abruptly of the discarded sack he’d seen in the far corner of the kennel, of the way the dogs had scattered suddenly, as if they were afraid.

  “Them dogs is all I got,” Ostrowksi said. “Man killed one of my dogs, said I should take it as a warning. I won’t forgive him that.”

  Sauls Run

  The Present

  Chapter 17

  Storm mantled the high ridges, gravid with the kind of weather that wrecks things. Cold that cracks stone and sheaths pavement in ice the color of the midnight sky. Wind that splinters oak and snaps powerlines. Snow that drifts shoulder-high, locking the narrow mountain passes. A hundred-year blizzard, a killing snow.

  Nestled far down in the valley, her benighted streets steeped in storm presentiment, Sauls Run dreamed unquiet dreams. Gusts rattled windowpanes, and a dozen sleepers turned, crying out their night fears. In her wedding house, Cindy Cade dreamed young the man she had married these forty years gone, dreamed smooth his brow and his deep-set eyes untroubled. Not more than ten miles away, in the Crook’s Hollow house where she had grown to have a woman’s cares, Emily Wood churned her covers, chasing phantoms, dream mothers, dying as they fled. Benjamin Strange dreamed of death as well, and woke suddenly in his musty apartment over the Observer, afraid to be alone. His hand shook as he reached for a cigarette, and the floor was cold under his bare feet as he sat up to brush aside the curtain and gaze into the square. A single light burned in the courthouse, but the windows of the county jail were dark, and they, too, were filled with dreamers, he supposed, dreaming of their freedom.

  Every life a prison, every dream a dream of freedom.

  What kind of life is this I’ve led, he asked himself, to die alone, unwived and without a child?

  So the long hours wore on, the dreamers thrashing in their beds. Prosaic nightmares, the bitter fruit of stale anxieties, the bitter fruit of care.

  But there were other dreamers, too.

  And stranger dreams. Dreams of awe and fear that came to men who had plumbed that ancient mountain well. Dreams of haunts and spirits such as their fathers’ fathers must have dreamed, dazzled with the cast-off sparks of an ancient and uneasy sleeper stirring restless in its first death agony as they scratched their puny legacies in earth and stone.

  Asa Cade shifted in his bed, blew out the breath of whiskey that bought him sleep but no respite from dreams, and crying grieved a dying light, a beauty that he could not save. And Perry Holland dreamed as well, restless in his house atop its tongue of stone.

  Dreamers, all of them dreamers. Henry in the house on Widow’s Ridge, in flight through labyrinths of sleep. Ray Ostrowski out on Breedlove Road, alone and aching in his sour sheets. A handful of others, Perry Holland’s handpicked crew of miners, uneasy sleepers every one, with a cold dawn waking and rubble waiting to be moved.

  And in a lonely farmhouse east of town, Delbert Grubb dripped his cup of nightmare into Harold Crawford’s sleeping ear. In near three decades on these streets, Crawford had been a good cop: Men owed him; men feared him. Soon enough, he’d have word from such a man on Perry’s gang. Meanwhile, Delbert Grubb bided his time.

  The mountains brooded over them all, ancient, wreathed in storm, shelter to a sleeper of their own. Buffeted by agony, that sleeper stirred toward waking—and fell once again into its own uneasy dreams.

  Dawn comes slow to the mountains, and work won’t wait. Mose Cavanaugh started his pickup in darkness and turned it toward the old Holland mines. On a work day, Cavanaugh might not see the sun at all, and indeed it had barely brushed the ridges when he led his six-man crew into the more permanent gloom under the mountain. Five miles across the ridges, the kitchen help at Ridgeview was already at it, too, mixing batter and setting tables while the nursing staff distributed six o’clock meds. By nine, Ben Strange was at his keyboard, Asa at his rounds.

  By ten, the day was well under way.

  But the dreams lingered—with Perry Holland in his third-floor library, gazing down at the Run like a jeweled toy in the deep cleft below; with Emily Wood, already at her mother’s bedside more than three hours when the clock struck eleven; with Henry Sleep, thumbing through his father’s notes and nursing Raymond Ostrowski’s words—

  —he’s in it all right—

  —into cold certainty.

  They lingered with Harold Crawford, too.

  Just after four o’clock, he leaned over a sink in the courthouse to splash cool water across his face. When he straightened up, Delbert Grubb was staring back at him from the rust-stained mirror.

  “I’m done with you,” Crawford said.

  But Grubb only laughed. “I’m your own true self,” he said, and Crawford felt that black tide drag him out. His mind reeled, all the faces he had tried so hard to forget leering at him. So much blood. Dear God, so much blood—

  “You want it,” Grubb whispered.

  “No, I don’t. I don’t want to be like you—”

  He closed his eyes, clapped his hands over his ears like a child. But still the voice was there—

  —you want it you know you want it—

  —it would always be there, it was in his head—

  “You’re not there you’re not there you’re not there—”

  He opened his eyes.

  His own weathered face gazed back at him, his own raw eyes. “Nothing there,” he whispered. He adjusted the water until it was scalding and scrubbed his hands raw. When he could stand it no longer, he dried them and tapped the mirror with his fingertips. “Nothing there,” he said again and let himself out into the corridor.

  But he was fooling himself, he knew. An unseen other walked beside him. Everything he thought or did these days wound back to Delbert Grubb.

  Even his instincts as a cop had betrayed him, leading him to Perry Holland’s operation in the old mines. Crawford had heard the same talk as everyone else, but the rumors rang false to him. Not a single document had come across Crawford’s desk from the EPA. And not many federal dollars came into the Run without coming through the courthouse first. Curious, he’d taken a drive up to Holland Coal, just to check things out. The old adversary had risen up inside Crawford that morning, and Perry Holland could not stand against him. So they had gone down together—Holland and Crawford and Delbert Grubb within him—down and down into those crumbling passages—

&nb
sp; Crawford stepped into the sheriff’s office. He had vowed not to think of that strange journey, yet he couldn’t help it somehow. It explained so much—the sense that the Run had stilled those hungry currents within him, the sense that even now that black tide was rising to reclaim him, this time for good.

  He filled a cup of coffee from the percolator behind the counter, sugared and creamed it with trembling fingers, and turned to take refuge behind the door with his name etched on the glass. Thank God for the privacy of that office. It had been a calculated risk, running for sheriff—the solitude of that inner sanctum versus the possibility that someone would link his face in the paper to Delbert Grubb—

  He laughed bitterly to himself.

  For it had brought him full circle once again, hadn’t it, this labyrinth of thought? All roads to Rome, Delbert Grubb looming up at every turning of the way. Once again, Crawford felt the lure of that ominous tide.

  “Sheriff?”

  “Yeah, Abby?” He turned to look at the receptionist, a matronly graying woman, her eyes blinking owlishly behind her thick glasses.

  “Henry Sleep came in—”

  Crawford sighed. “I don’t have time for him today, not with this weather coming in.”

  “He’s in your office,” she said.

  Henry Sleep was looking out the window when Crawford closed the door and put his coffee down on the desk.

  “You wanted to see me, Mr. Sleep?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, those clouds are supposed to dump a couple feet of snow, so I don’t have a lot of time right—”

  “I don’t care.”

  In the charged silence that followed, Henry Sleep turned around. Crawford thought once again of that grief-stricken boy in the July rain, struck anew by a continuity of feature, of attitude. They shared something unformed about the eyes, boy and man—a certain hesitancy and sadness, a certain—

  —cowardice, Delbert Grubb hissed inside his head—

  —but that wasn’t the right word either. Detachment might be more accurate—as if Sleep refused to embrace the world, it having wounded him too grievously, too soon. Yet something else glimmered in those eyes now. Determination, maybe. Or maybe anger.

  Something that set Delbert Grubb on edge within him. Crawford stifled the urge to lash out. He sat down. “Is there a problem, Mr. Sleep?”

  “I was hoping maybe I could see that file now.”

  “The file on your father’s suicide.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I think we already discussed departmental policy.”

  “Maybe you could make an exception.”

  Crawford shifted the stapler on his desk to get at the stack of papers under it. “Look,” he said, glancing up at Sleep, “we can talk about that later, but I just don’t have time right now, not with this weather coming in.”

  Sleep ignored the hint. He crossed the room and stood on the other side of the desk. Close up, Crawford noticed how tired he looked, how worn. A muscle jumped at the corner of one bloodshot eye.

  “Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time. I don’t care about that.”

  Crawford felt a surge of anger, that oily undertow, anxious to suck him down. Standing, he took a deep breath. He placed his hands flat on the desk and put his face close to Sleep’s. “I understand your frustration, Mr. Sleep, but there’s no call to talk to me like that. I’ve been doing everything I can to help you—”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Delbert Grubb laughed. Audibly.

  Crawford jerked like a man shocked, dashing the coffee across the reports lying on the desk. He stared dumbly at the spill for a moment. When he looked up, he saw Delbert Grubb over Sleep’s shoulder, lounging against a row of file cabinets in his LAPD blues. Crawford could even smell him, seaweed and brine, dank things rotting along a broken strand. Yet Sleep just stood there, as though he had heard nothing at all.

  Because he hadn’t, Crawford told himself. Grubb’s not there. There’s nothing there—

  But this time the little invocation didn’t work. Del Grubb didn’t disappear. He just smiled mockingly and aimed a finger at Crawford, his thumb jutting up like the hammer of a pistol. Henry Sleep shot a glance over his shoulder, as if to see what had captured Crawford’s attention. Crawford wrenched his gaze away. With trembling fingers, he snatched up the Styrofoam cup and dropped it in the wastebasket.

  “Now look what you’ve gone and made me do,” he said, his voice slipping away from him, sounding too loud in his own ears. Reining it in, he went on. “We’ve been working on your case every da—”

  “Then why can’t I get a straight answer out of you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Sleep.”

  “Bullshit!”

  A long time ago, in another life, Del Grubb had gone hiking with a friend, a climbing enthusiast, in the Sierra Nevada. He had tried a fifty-foot rock face, working a guide rope anchored by his buddy. Maybe two-thirds of the way up—thirty-five or forty feet from the ground—he had slipped, swinging free into space, the rocky shale below wheeling under him for a single heartrending instant before the safety harness yanked him to a stop. That was how he felt now. Like a man who has inadvertently stepped into an abyss. Like a man in free fall, about to hit the rocks.

  “Do you think I’m stupid?” Sleep was saying. “You never wanted to know who broke in that night. All you wanted to know was what I might have heard from my dad or Asa Cade. That’s all you ever asked about.”

  “This is ridiculous, Mr. Sleep.”

  “Is it?” They stared at each other in silence for a moment. “I think you were in something with him, something to do with the Holland mines. You and Perry and maybe Asa Cade. And somebody killed him to keep him quiet. Maybe it was you.”

  “You got no right to walk in here and accuse me—”

  “No right? No right? You have the guts to talk about rights? I’m not even close to being done with accusations.” Sleep jabbed a finger over the desk. “You’re not going to get away with this. I’m putting in a call to the attorney general—”

  “Now wait a minute here,” Crawford said. “Just wait a minute.” He dragged in a breath, swallowed. “Now listen—” he said, aware suddenly that his voice sounded desperate, sounded guilty. He didn’t know what he was going to say, knew only that he had to speak, had to say something. “Now listen here—” he started once again, but this time Grubb interrupted him—

  You’ll have to kill him, Grubb said.

  The shock of the phrase was so visceral, so intensely physical, that for a single panicky instant Crawford believed it had been spoken aloud. He actually stepped back, sending his chair whirling away on its metal casters. It fetched up against the radiator with a clang.

  “I won’t do it,” Crawford said. “I told you I was done with you—”

  Sleep whipped his head around, scanning the room. “Who are you talking to?”

  You’ll have to kill him like you did his father, Grubb was saying from over by the filing cabinets. You’ll have to blow his brains out the back of his head. You’ll have to gut him like a fish. You—

  “Shut up,” Crawford begged, squeezing shut his eyes. “Shut up shut up shut—”

  But he felt that dark tide seize him—

  —skin him flay him gouge his eyes out—

  —those words like oily water drag him under—

  “Shut up!”

  Silence.

  Crawford took a breath. Opened his eyes.

  Del Grubb had disappeared.

  Henry Sleep had stumbled back a step, his face stricken.

  “My God,” Sleep said, and looking down Crawford saw the stapler in his thick hand, felt the density of it, comforting and heavy, like a stone kicked up from the Marianas Trench, a hole so deep the light had never plumbed it.

  “My God,” Sleep said.

  Kill him, Delbert Grubb hissed inside Crawford’s head, but he opened his hand instead.

&n
bsp; The stapler thumped to the desktop, and for a moment they both stared at it, mesmerized. Then Harold Crawford looked up.

  “Get away,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Get away from here. Get as far away as you can—”

  Then the door slammed, and Henry Sleep was gone.

  Far down under the mountain, it was quitting time.

  As his work gang started back, Mose Cavanaugh lingered for a moment. They had punched through the slate fall today, opening the tunnel into the galleries beyond—galleries Perry Holland had explicitly told him not to enter. Still, he could not help peering into them at least, probing the moted cone of radiance thrown by his cap light. But there was nothing there, just that old rubble-strewn tunnel sloping away at a gentle curve. Yet he shivered—and from more than the damp, clinging cold.

  Cavanaugh had never liked the work, never liked the sense of all that earth looming above him, but when his time had come—he was twenty, then—he had gone down in the mines like his daddy and his daddy before him. It was what a man did. Seventeen years he gave to Copperhead Coal, riding the cage four thousand feet into the abyss, the weight of the planet itself bearing down upon him and the roar of the continuous miner in his ears. He used to dream of it coming down upon him, all that crushing weight.

  He spat into the dust.

  Three years short of his UMWA pension, Copperhead had laid him off. Yet as much as it angered him, it was almost a relief, not having to deal with the crushing pressure of the claustrophobia, all that swimming dark. But work was hard to come by in the Run, and when Perry Holland had come round, Cavanaugh hadn’t been in any position to refuse. Besides, he remembered consoling himself, those old Holland shafts had been slope mines, only half as deep as what he had gotten used to up at Copperhead. Closer by half to sunlight, he had told himself. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

  But it had been. It was worse.

  “Hey, Boss! You comin?”

  The voice echoed, doubled and redoubled by the endless tunnels, sourceless and somehow disquieting. For a moment he longed for the metal-screeching discord of a working mine. Something to disguise those echoes. He glanced back at the cluster of figures, their cap lights bobbing in the distance, and raised a hand.