Ash Falls Page 3

  Bobbie Luntz

  Bobbie Luntz finished what she had to say and leaned against the door with arms folded across her chest. She glanced up at the clock that hung over Jerry’s head and scratched at her elbow through her sleeve.

  It was out now, and she could stop sweating about it. The late night rehearsal in front of the mirror hadn’t resulted in much since the news dumped out of her in a completely different way, in pieces, one half of it tangled into the other half. Just the same, it was done, and that was all that mattered.

  Jerry sighed and thumbed through a stack of papers on his desk, eyes fixed on his clumsy hands. The desktop was a collage of invoices and student folders, pink detention slips and half-sheet memos. A mug of sharpened pencils sat adjacent his brass nameplate, which Jerry always kept turned toward himself. As if he might forget who he was.

  “Okay,” he said slapping the paper and looking up at her. “What am I supposed do about it?”

  “You’re the principal. I figured you should be in the loop.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Just in case, I guess.”

  “Just in case?” Jerry Brewster labored a heavy sigh and worked his fingers over his temples. “So, you’re saying he could just show up here?”

  Bobbie sucked in her breath and tightened her fingers over her arms. The door began to warm against her back. His voice was getting louder, which meant that the conversation was probably spilling over to the secretary’s desk on the other side.

  “I don’t know,” she said. It occurred to her then that maybe she should have kept her mouth shut about it. Just gone straight to her office like usual, doling out Midols and Ritalin all day without saying a word. She stared down at her Keds. They had been white when she started the year, but now they were gray at best, with black smudges edging the toes. “I don’t know what the hell I’m saying, Jerry. Never mind.”

  Bobbie Luntz turned and walked back to the door in a nauseous fog. Jerry stayed in his seat, filling the space in his office with the noise of rusty springs, as he shifted his fat self from one cheek to the other. The whole thing, this conversation, should have lifted the weight in her stomach—that’s what unloading heavy news was supposed to do. If anything, it was worse. It all still sat there like a sack of rocks.

  Connie stood behind her desk and tipped her cocoon of hair to her shoulder, and raised a penciled eyebrow at Bobbie. It was a look that suggested sympathy, but Bobbie knew better. Secretaries were cut from the same cloth everywhere. Bobbie faked a smile and moved past without a word.

  She went quickly to her own office, where she began the busy task of Friday inventory. She pulled down the prescription bottles and drugstore counter painkillers that crowded the labeled, plastic crates like pharmaceutical Easter baskets. In the ledger, the names of various students fronted long rows of her own handwriting, and she ran down the midday column, scratching her initials into a half dozen boxes. She fought to keep herself focused, but the whole thing blurred to a blue haze as her fingers drummed over the page. Someone had come that morning for a Benadryl, she knew, and there were a couple aspirins that had gone out. But she’d forgotten to write them down, and now she couldn’t even remember which kids got what pills.

  “Jesus God,” she said. “Your mind is all over the damned place.”

  Bobbie closed her eyes and sucked in her breath. She held it behind her teeth. Get it together, she told herself. There’s not a damned thing you can do but wait and see how it plays out. Her fingers massaged her eyelids, and she tried to force her head into the present day, to remember who had been in to see her that morning. There was a girl in glasses and a red hair clip, but it wasn’t someone she knew.

  He could show up at her door tomorrow, and then what? What’s the worst that could happen? He’d show up is all. It wouldn’t be like him to hurt her. The letter had been a long one, but it wasn’t angry. Emotional, of course. Accusatory, here and there. Maybe now you can take time out of your weekend to bring him to see me, he’d said. He’s my son just as much as yours. But he hadn’t made any threats. If he showed up, she’d just tell him to go on back, that she was calling the cops, no two ways about it. There had been an accident. Maybe he hit his head and he hadn’t been thinking clearly. The best thing to do was to turn right around and see the rest of his sentence through. The whole interaction, whether it happened on her porch or outside the school, or even at all, could be done and over with in ten minutes.

  “Oh, screw it,” she said. She grabbed the pen and simply wrote out the names of three girls she knew who played on the softball team.

  She checked her supply of gauze, bandages, and Ace wraps, and tampons and pads and then she looked up at the analog clock that was inset into the wall above the door. It was two minutes until second lunch. She refilled the cotton ball jar and took a couple Tylenol for herself, then re-tucked her blouse into her blue jeans. She pulled back her red hair and re-clipped her barrettes before locking the whole cabinet down and going to the door that opened from her second floor office out into the long hallway.

  The bell was original to the building, and it was mounted to the wall directly over her head. And even when she was ready for it, she was never really ready for it, the moment the thing screamed at everyone to get into their classrooms or get out of their classrooms or go to lunch or go home or get to whatever lousy after school job might be waiting for them. Then at last there was the nerve-jarring alarm and piles of students poured out from flung doors.

  They swirled all about in a river of flannel, and denim and moussed hair framing acne-specked faces and flashes of metal on bricklike smiles. Bobbie stood on the banks against the wall with her leg now beginning to ache. Maybe it was the phone call the night before that was making it worse than usual. More likely, though, it was the constant mist or rain or thick fog that had held such a tight embrace on the mountain for the past two weeks, because God knew her leg was in a constant throb. This time of year, everything was wet. Always. Even the air in the hallway lent a distinct clamminess to her bare arms. She stood waiting, the toes of her tennis shoes mere inches from the tumultuous flow.

  From behind a wall of fluttering lockers he appeared, tossing a glance in Bobbie’s direction. The rocks in her stomach tumbled, and her hands began to needle, and then everything washed to a kind of numbness, like they often did when she saw her son in the hallway, in his element.

  Patrick was uncanny handsome. But with his noodle arms and legs and the goofy puppet-like way he moved from one place to the next, it was clear that he just hadn’t grown into himself yet. He was a late bloomer, she told him. Some people took longer than others to reach where they would eventually be. It was all just a frustrating requirement of the teenager phase. He seldom mentioned girls to her anymore, and she’d stopped going there long ago. But she still found herself wishing that he would find someone—anyone—that he could share himself with. So he wouldn’t feel like he had to shoulder everything all by himself. But she had to believe things would turn out the way they were supposed to and her task was to be patient with him. He was a stunner, with his shock black hair, and that custard-yellow bleached stripe he had down the bangs, and hard, steel-cut cheekbones. Like his father, those chiseled cheekbones, and that one fact ripped Bobbie Luntz clean down her middle, straight from top to bottom.

  Today of all days, she wanted to go to him, just bear straight through the thickness right there in the middle of the school hallway and take him into her arms until he disappeared from the world. It took every bit of herself to stay by that door and keep her hands to her sides. He was so helpless, so alone among the crowd of jocks and braniacs, and rockers with ratted hair and torn black t-shirts who passed by him as if he were nothing. She could turn away, she thought, but in the next second he might be gone forever. It was her pathological fear to lose her son again, and on this day it was worse than ever, as if a coming storm could suddenly appear and sweep him from her at any moment. She waved to him, and he turned away quick and shouted down the hall
to someone Bobbie couldn’t get a bead on. A round-faced girl with big, moon glasses and a stack of books mashed protectively against massive boobs stood next to him. She elbowed his arm and leaned into his ear.

  Patrick nodded, rolled his head to one side and stepped off from the edge, falling into the current, crossing over to where Bobbie stood.

  “What’s up?” She tried to be casual. She shoved her hands into her jeans pockets.

  “I was gonna go up to the quarry this weekend.”

  “Are you asking or telling?”

  He tossed his bangs aside and rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “Asking. Can I go to the quarry this weekend.”

  Bobbie knew well that the chances of Patrick actually going to the quarry were questionable at best. He could be headed there or he could be off to Seattle again, to that Mama Whats-her-name’s place and those castoff kids that she gave shelter to. Bobbie didn’t care for either possibility. Still, she knew the kinds of things that went on up at the quarry, and the idea of him spending a night or two at an old woman’s house, rather than drinking beer and burning campfires and leftover fireworks, didn’t seem so bad. If that’s what was going to happen.

  “Seems like you just went up there. Two weeks ago?”

  “Three.”

  “Who else is going?” She played along.

  He glanced over at his friend by the locker. She was talking to someone else now, and it looked as though they were both about to leave. “Just some guys. Greg Hardeman, and I don’t know. Vince Stewart, maybe. You know ‘em.”

  She didn’t know them, but she let it slide. It was sometimes easier to avoid asking too many questions, to dodge the holes that too often showed up in his answers than to press too hard. “Pick your battles, babe,” Ernie used to say to her, back when the battles were little ones.

  “You’ll be home before noon Sunday this time? I don’t want you dragging it out into evening.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “You’ll do more than try, sir, or you can forget about asking me next time. And don’t forget you have Tin’s, before you take off.”

  “I won’t forget.”

  “It’s a job. It’s important to be on time, every time.”

  Patrick’s voiced hardened off, and he said, “God, Mom. I’m not going to forget about Tin or the stupid minks. I’ve been there every day already, why would I forget now?”

  Bobbie said, “Alright, alright. Have fun, and be smart.”

  He gave her a smile that Bobbie knew was charitable at best. Then he broke from her, to fall back into the current with the rest of the fish.

  She watched the churning of bodies and sifted through the mental Rolodex of the various injuries, stomach and skin conditions, the heavy periods and the missed periods, and all the generally nonexistent sicknesses that made up the menagerie of teenagers that moved past her. After six years, she was still only a four-day-a-week nurse, and even then, most days amounted to little more than taking temperatures and writing gym passes for girls with cramps and boys who likely just didn’t want to shower in front of the other boys. There was the occasional parent meeting, carefully spoken phrases such “first term,” “next steps,” and “several options left,” shared across the small, kidney-shaped table. Now and then there might be a phone call to police or a jaded social worker, the divulging of telltale bruises or tearful stories involving uncles or new stepfathers. But for the most part, as far as Ash Falls High School was concerned, there were some days that Bobbie Luntz felt like nothing more than a glorified Band-Aid dispenser. And on most days, this was just fine by her.

  She locked the door to the health room and walked down the hallway, between students who darted past her or simply moved to the side, or didn’t move to the side, until she reached the staff lounge at the end of the hall. Already she could smell the menthol, and her teeth took on that veneer of chalkiness that came with sitting in a smoke-filled room. She never understood how people could eat their boxed lunches of warmed-over spaghetti and flaccid iceberg lettuce salads while bundled in blue, smoky filth. But there was a part of her that still ached for it, a need to belong on some level. So she found herself putting up with the nastiness without so much as a whimper. Christ, she thought. You’re just as much a lemming as any one of those kids.

  A swale of laughter rushed out from the lounge, and then someone said, “I’d have loved to be a fly on the wall for that one.” Then Bobbie swung open the door, and there was a hard freeze in conversation, and a half dozen faces bucked at her as she stood in the doorway. Fisheyed, all of them. Mike Walner, Tom Cowen, and Tina Reiter and all the rest of the math and science team stared at her as if she might turn right around and run back down the hall to find the principal and rat them all out. Then just as quickly faces set to neutral, and everyone seemed interested only in eating again. It was a scene she had gotten used to long ago. The dropped conversations. Averted glances.

  “Don’t everyone shut up on my account,” Bobbie said. She glanced at Tina who kept her back to her.

  “So yeah. I’m guessing we’ll get to the finals this season, but there ain’t no way in hell we’re going to state.” Tom Cowan was red-faced, jowly, and gin-blossomed as he sputtered through gobs of egg salad. “Don’t tell Jerry I said so, though.”

  Bobbie took a seat at a small round table by herself. Tina got up from the men’s table and carried the last of her lunch over to where she was.

  “Do you remember that night? Mike Walner said. “When they actually took state?”

  “Hell yes, I remember that night,” Tom choked. “Like it was yesterday, and let me tell you that son of a bitch Jerry owes more to Troy Bonneville than any chalkboard diagrams he ever scratched out.”

  Bobbie tuned it out as best she could. It had nothing to do with her, or with Patrick. Tina reached to the clamshell ashtray and stamped out her cigarette.

  “You going to The Flume later?” she asked Bobbie. “TGIF, you know.”

  “I’m not feeling up to it.”

  “You sure? If you’re not there I’ll be the only woman in the pack. You know how they can get.”

  “Then don’t go.”

  “Come on.” There was an edge of desperation in her voice now, and it was getting under Bobbie’s nerves. Tina was probably the closest thing to a friend that Bobbie had anymore at the high school, but she could also be an emotional drag, especially when she got a few drinks in her. Like Bobbie, Tina had arrived in Ash Falls by way of Seattle, in a limping station wagon overloaded with cheap furniture and a shitload of personal baggage. And like Bobbie, she was learning fast that baggage loves a small town.

  “So. Is it true?” Tina leaned in close to her, her lips barely moving as she spoke. “About Ernie?”

  Bobbie glanced over Tina’s shoulder to the men, who still mumbled to one another in the midst of all the blue haze. She tilted her head, looked back to Tina and took a spoonful from the small yogurt cup.

  “Oh God.” Tina froze in her seat. “So Connie wasn’t shitting. He really is out.”

  “Who’s out?” Tom Cowan piped up. “Not Ernie.”

  “Yeah, Ernie,” Bobbie said. “So what of it?”

  “You gotta be fucking kidding me,” Tom said.

  “Jesus, Tom,” Tina said. “Nobody was even talking to you.” She straightened herself, sat tall in her chair, and pushed her chest out, and the other men followed her posture as if she were dancing. Her rouged face cocked to one side, the neck craning to look out the window, toward the cars whose chromed grills jammed up against the curb in a gleaming line.

  Bobbie accepted that there was no sense in fighting it. From where they all sat, from the boxed in, smoke-sickened corner room on the second floor, they were equal prisoners—all of them. They were prisoners of the neglected two-story brick behemoth that contained them all, a building aged and grandly pillared and choked with a suffocating layer of untamed ivy and dying wisteria and steadfast tradition and, too often (if you asked the right people), a small t
own’s general inability to see the horizon beyond its own cracked and rutted streets. Did Ernie really want to come back to this?

  Tina asked, “So what happened? They didn’t let him out just like that?”

  “No they didn’t let him out. There was an accident, and I guess he ran off.”

  “Goddamn, Bobbie,” Tom said, looking over his shoulder at the door. “When did this happen?”

  It was out of the bag now, there was no use parsing words. “I got a call from the sheriff out in Monroe yesterday,” she said. “They were moving him out there from Walla Walla. The driver had a heart attack and drove off the road.” She rubbed at her eyes with her fingers, imagining again Ernie tumbling through a rolling car, jaw clenched beneath a shrubby beard, guards in the front seat, out cold. In some of her visions, he tries to help them, radio in somehow. Other times he just kicks the door open without a moment’s hesitation and crawls out. And just like that, he’s gone.

  Tina leaned in to her. “So you told Jerry.”

  “Yes I told Jerry. And it sounds like Connie started in on the phone tree as quick as she could get her fingers on the buttons.” Bobbie stood up from the table now and cut the blue air around them with her hands. “But who gives a shit, right? People are going to find out soon enough as it is.”

  Bobbie could see now that Tom was full-on sweating, tiny beads forming all down the slope of his neck.

  “Jesus Tom,” she said. “You look like you’re about to have a coronary.”

  “Yeah, well he made his presence known to more than a few lives here, Bobbie, mine included. I’m sorry to put it like that, but goddamn. That son of a bitch better not show his ass back here.”

  “You don’t have to worry, Tom. If anyone’s got a reason to sweat it’s me, okay?”

  “Not just you.” It was Mike Walner. Bobbie looked over to him, but he kept his eyes on his half eaten sandwich. He picked at a rippled edge of lettuce. “There’s a few others in this town that might have reason to worry.”