Ash Falls Page 9

  “Oh. Well, it’s nice.” Hank leaned back against the afghan. He laid his hands over his knees and looked around the room, at the portraits with spotless glass and gilded frames, glossy photos of Lyla and Jonas perched behind a plastic fence rail, or crowded into a swanlike wicker chair, their arms entwined like a prom couple.

  He swallowed and formed the word. “Eugene?” he said, his throat tightening. “How are he and that girl doing? What’s her name again?”

  Lyla tilted her head and rolled her eyes. “Why do you always do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “You know good and well what. Like I don’t spend enough time thinking about those kids when they’re here underfoot,” she said. “For crying out loud. This is my time. My time to lend my thoughts to other things. I don’t want to talk about them.”

  Hank knew the sequence that came with a flare up like this. Lyla held her hands out in front of her, fingers extended and spread out, like the preening tail feathers of a peacock. She pinched her eyes closed for entire sentences. And then, just as quick, she leaned back in her chair and ran her finger over the pleat of her pants.

  “I went to lunch with some ladies from church,” she said. “They all asked about you.” She went over their names like roll call—Ruby, Mary, Diana One, and Diana Two—and then she proceeded to fill him in on what she deemed the most important items in their lives. She listed various maladies, the gout and glaucoma, and joint replacements, and updated him on the many places the grandchildren had flown off to, parts beyond the mountain.

  “It’s nice to know that there are those who do eventually leave the nest,” she said. “We’re making a quilt for the First Baptist Church of Haysville, outside Wichita.” She looked up from her hands. “The tornado.”

  Hank stared at her, unblinking.

  “Hank. You must have read about it,” she said. “It was all over the news.” When Hank shrugged his shoulders she said, “I can’t believe you haven’t heard about it.”

  “I don’t get the paper anymore, Lyla. If it doesn’t come in over the radio, I don’t know it.”

  “I don’t see how you even manage,” she said, shaking her head. “Anyway, the whole thing was absolutely horrible. Cut through half the state, apparently. Janet said it came into Haysville and just…crushed the whole town. Oh, there was a house here and there all by itself, because you know that’s how those tornadoes work. Drop down to destroy things and then all of a sudden pick right up again, just like that.”

  She was leaning in toward him now, her hands cupping her knees. “But here’s the amazing thing,” she said, almost in a whisper. “When it finally went, there was nothing left. Nothing except, get this: the elementary school, a couple of stores and the Baptist church.” She sat back in her chair and folded her arms over her chest.

  “Can you believe it?” she said.

  “Believe what?”

  “God. Was. Looking out for them.”

  Hank lowered his head and gave a gentle laugh. If there was the chance of finding the smallest shred of divinity, even in the most unlikely of places, Lyla would find it. She did it when they were children, when two classmates had been taken by the river. She did it when their father’s heart suddenly stopped and before dying, he somehow managed to steer clean through traffic, putting the truck in a deep ravine. And it was what brought her solace when Ernie Luntz killed the boy, Ricky Cordero, who had been seated under a leafy chestnut tree alongside her son Eugene that muggy evening. God took some, and spared others.

  “Well,” he said. “A quilt is a nice gesture. The church folks will appreciate it.”

  Lyla stared at him for a moment, and Hank could see the dissatisfaction pulling at the edges of her mouth. But she pushed through it and rubbed her hands on her knees.

  “How is that dog of yours,” she asked. “What’s his name?”

  “Toby,” said Hank. He sat up straight on the sofa.

  “They got a spaniel across the street,” she said. “One of those nasty things with matted ears and no tail. I’ve chased that thing off of my lawn no less than a dozen times this week. Jonas told me the perfect birthday present for him would have been seeing the dog pound truck parked at our curb.”

  “Jonas had a birthday this week,” Hank said.

  “Oh, don’t worry about missing it,” she said. “We didn’t do anything. You know how he is. He says that each passing birthday is like the passing of a kidney stone. A necessary pain along the path to the final exit.” She curled her lip in a wry grin.

  The familiar sensation began to rise in him, the monster again, hot and suffocating, rolling up and over his entire body. He was trapped with her, two children pressed against clammy windows of their clapboard house, this same house, both of them waiting for their mother to come home from the grocery store, cigarette in her lips yet not a single bag of groceries in sight. Conversation flowed from Lyla in a torrent, as if she had been locked away from human interaction for so long that she was afraid of never having the chance to talk to another person again. She moved from one story to another like a prisoner set free in a buffet, with only her need to take a breath allowing for interruption.

  “Are you feeling okay, Lyla?” Hank jumped in.

  She sat up straight and her eyes narrowed at him. “Something wrong with how I look?”

  “Just wondering—with the rain and all.”

  Lyla looked down at her hands resting on her knees. She bent her knuckles upward, stretched out her fingers and laid them flat again. “It’s not so bad right now,” she said. “But it’s autumn. I know what’s in store for me.”

  “It doesn’t have to be like that.” He looked up at her with his chin to his chest, pensive and wary.

  At first Lyla said nothing, and the air hung between them like stagnant coal smoke. Her eyes were tiny glistening marbles and her jaw clenched and ground against itself.

  “Henry Kelleher you know I won’t ever touch that stuff,” she said. “I wish you’d quit trying to push it on me. Mama would roll in her grave if she knew you were back messing with that. And haranguing me.”

  “Hell, I don’t think Mama would’ve given one minute’s thought to it.”

  Lyla stood up from her chair and went to the window. The drapes had been pulled closed and she drew them to the side and peered out into the daylight. She kept her back to him and said nothing, but Hank could sense what was in the back of her mind. It was the stench, the strain of the damned wake, all over again.

  He leaned over the coffee table and thumbed the corner of one of the magazines. Lyla glanced over her shoulder at the noise.

  “You know what I think?” he said.

  “What do you think?”

  “She was just lonely, that’s all.”

  “Who was lonely?”

  “Our mother. With Dad up at the camps half the time. The two of us, always fighting each other. She just got lonely.”

  “We didn’t always fight,” she said. “We didn’t always do anything.” Lyla kept her back to him, and her body began to sway on skinny, precarious legs.

  “You can’t tell me you never thought of that, Lyla. That Mama wasn’t grocery shopping. Not every time, she wasn’t.”

  She turned sharply, a deer catching the snap of a twig. “I don’t know if you heard,” she said, “but Ernie Luntz broke out the other day.” She stared at him, her head tilted back in self-satisfaction.

  Hank leaned his elbows onto his knees. “I did. But from what I hear, it was more a walk-off. Not that it matters much.”

  “It matters that he’s probably on his way here right now,” she said. “I don’t know how you feel about that, but it gives me cause for concern. And I have a lot less reason for it than you do.”

  Hank shook his head slowly and smiled. He said, “I’ll be fine, Lyla.”

  Just then the telephone rang. She let go of the drape and walked quickly to the kitchen. He heard her answer sharply, then soften. “No,” she said. “I can do it. No, it’s n
ot a problem, why would it be a problem?” Hank walked into the kitchen, and Lyla stepped into the hallway, the coiled cord straining around the corner and out of sight.

  He stood at the counter stirring honey into his coffee, letting his eyes roam the cluster of canisters that lined the tiled countertops like rotund soldiers and specked fruit that tumbled from the same wooden bowl their own mother had used for bananas and apples and plums when they were in season. He gazed at the fading floral wallpaper that still clung to the kitchen walls, remembering the long weekend of helping his father and his Uncle Tin lay that paper. He could smell the sweet, wheaty scent of the paste that dripped and clotted over his forearms as the men laughed at his efforts and crackled emptied cans of Rainier beer in their callused hands. There was not one ounce of appreciation that existed within those walls now, not for any of it. Not from his sister Lyla, or anyone else in that family of hers.

  “That was Benny,” Lyla said, returning the phone to the receiver on the wall. “He’s keeping your truck till tomorrow. I’ll drive you home.”

  “You don’t need to do that, Lyla. Benny’ll take me. He said he would.”

  “He can’t get away till four.” She sighed and put a hand to her forehead. “Let me think a minute.”

  This was something he hadn’t prepared himself for. A car ride to the cabin. With Lyla. “You want to just go now, then?” he asked.

  She looked at him and said nothing. She seemed to be studying him, looking for a solution somewhere in his face. “Why don’t you go and get a haircut,” she said finally. “You’re starting to look like a hitchhiker.”

  He put a hand through his hair. She might be right about his needing a trim. “Lyla,” he said. “Let’s just—”

  “Eugene’s going to be home for lunch any time now.” She reached for her purse sitting on the kitchen table and pulled out a ten from her billfold. “I’m not in the mood for the two of you in the same room,” she said. “Now go get a haircut.”

  Patrick and Mama T

  His mother used to try and hide it from him, when he was younger. When she worked harder at keeping things from him. She probably thought she was being clever, slipping into the bathroom and flipping on the exhaust so she could smoke her bowl freely, the fan rumbling through the walls and the window left wide open whether it was June or January. He knew the smell then and the habits, even as young as twelve or so. As much as she and all the others seemed to think so, he was not so stupid.

  Now she lit up whenever she felt the need—which seemed to be practically all the time lately—although she usually kept it to the bedroom or the back porch. It would start with her massaging her fingers over her hip and then he’d hear her talking in a low voice, as if she were explaining it all to herself, justifying what she was about to do. Then she would walk out the kitchen door and sit on the steps, and the skunky smoke would rise in a hazy cloud on the other side of the window.

  Patrick was a month past his 15th birthday and standing in the alley behind The Sanctuary when he had his first hit of MDA. With fingers warm and salty Shadow placed it on his tongue, then gave him a bottle of root beer to wash it down with. They sat on the curb against the chain-link fence, huddled close to one another until the purple lights finally blasted from the steeple into the darkening sky. Then Shadow took him by the hand and stood him up, right there in front of everyone, and led him through front doors into the smoke and the pressing crowd. He took him to the place where the music was the loudest and the crowd was so dense he could barely move his arms from his sides. And the balloons overhead lifted and fell and held Patrick’s eyes as if they were calling him, and bodies pushed against his own while the pounding bass pushed at him and penetrated his insides, bodies shirtless and soaked in sweat and blistering hot. He raised his head to find the air above and for a moment his mind flipped from one side to the other, and then his mother was on him, her body holding him down while the fireworks exploded over them, and the sweep of police cruiser lights washed over the grass like a blue tide, her body convulsing in sobs and speaking words he could not understand.

  “You feeling it?” Shadow shouted into his ear, his arm encircling his waist, the smell of rawness in his breath as he mashed his face into Patrick’s. “Fucking amazing.”

  “I love this!” Patrick yelled it to the ceiling, and Shadow moved in and pressed his lips to his, and sqeezed him so tightly Patrick thought he might melt into him.

  He leaned back, and the music was infinite, blade lasers and archways, boomerangs that carried him from one end of the club to the other and back again. And hands on him, sliding along his stomach and down his back and finding the curve of his ass and working around his thighs, hands that must be Shadow’s but too many to know for sure, hands slipping under his shirt and over his chest and working the buttons of his fly, the sultry breath against his neck and the music lifting him from the floor and holding him in its arms like a mother, cradling him and rocking him gently with the kind of love that he had never felt in his life.

  “Patrick. I said how long you been out here?”

  He hadn’t heard the door open, or Mama T’s voice, not until she nudged him with the toe of her slippered foot. It was four months past his 15th birthday when he returned to her. To Shadow. His backpack was wedged beneath the small of his back, and his head was in a fog.

  “Why didn’t you ring the bell?” she asked.

  The truth was, he didn’t know. He remembered sitting down on the steps and thinking about ringing it, but then he must have fallen asleep.

  “What time is it?”

  “Eleven thirty-five. You was snornin.” She stood in the doorway of the stoop a cutout of brown paper with the faint glow of dreadlocks falling snakelike from her head. “Get inside before somebody calls the cops.”

  In the living room a broken conversation was happening, and it wasn’t until Patrick was in the doorway that he realized it was the television. Something in black and white, and the kids were all flat on their stomachs in a neat line of three. They were infantry soldiers, prostrate with hands cupped under chins, each of them staring at the flickering screen with glassy and unblinking eyes.

  “Hey,” he said. “What’re you guys watching?”

  “Outer Limits,” said Freddie, his voice seemingly deeper than the last time Patrick had seen him. Freddie was the oldest of the three who lay there and therefore the one closest to the television. He could reach the channel if he’d wanted. It was the rule, that the oldest have dominion over the channel. It was an honor Shadow had given over months earlier, when his time at Mama T’s started to be more static.

  “Hey Danny. Nicco.” Two little faces turned slightly to look at him, both giving a quick chorus of Hey before recalibrating themselves back to the show.

  “You hungry?” Mama T was at the fridge now, harvesting Tupperware containers into her full, lovely brown arms. She wore her flannel robe and the same faded pink headband up under her dreads. “I can heat up some leftover spaghetti. There’s some bread in the pantry if you want.”

  “Thank you, Mama T.” There was gunfire on the T.V. then and the boys’ toes were curling. Patrick said, “A little bit of spaghetti sounds real good.”

  He was halfway through his second plate when Mama T talked to him again. She had been sitting next to him the whole time, watching him with her olivine eyes steady on him, not saying anything. Once she pushed up his sleeve to look at his arm and rub her soft fingers over the bolt of veins that ran up to his elbow. “You sure you doing okay?” she asked.

  Patrick shrugged his shoulders and took a drink of milk. Looking down the hall from the kitchen to the bedroom door he could see the clutter of papers and colorful lettering still claiming territory. Mama T caught him looking and she patted his arm. “We need to talk about things.”

  “I know.”

  She got up from the table then and started putting the food containers back into the refrigerator. She hummed to herself as she cleaned up, but the knocking of gla
ss on glass was deliberate.

  “What are your plans this time?” she asked. She looked over her shoulder at Patrick. Not knowing what to say, he shrugged his shoulders again.

  “Well honey, you gotta have a plan of some kind.” She turned around and leaned against the fridge, her lovely arms folded across her full bosom. “Least of which you know we got to talk about things. You know you can’t be just comin and goin like this.”

  “I know.” Patrick’s voice was becoming strained now. He turned back to the hallway and looked at the bedroom door. Mama T said nothing, but kept her eyes trained on him. He looked back to the living room and Nicco had dropped off to sleep, his caramel-colored arm folded under his little face, mouth agape and drooling over his bare skin.

  Patrick asked, “Is Shadow around?”

  “Not at the moment, hon,” she said, “You know I always like to see you, but if it’s Shadow you’re coming for, you best call first.”

  Every noodle Patrick had eaten seemed to come to life then and begin to coil around the walls of his stomach and weave themselves into tight little complicated knots. He glanced at Mama T, and he could see that her green eyes were glassy now too, and staring off into the room where the boys still lay beholden to the strangeness of the unreal people who carried on, on the other side of the glowing screen.

  “Can I sleep in there anyway?” Patrick asked. “Just for tonight?”

  “Honey, you can stay as long as you need to,” she said, the slightest edge of hardness in what was usually her molasses voice. Now she swept the plate and glass from the place in front of the boy and brought them to the sink, where she began scrubbing it hard, as if she intended to remove any hint of his having ever touched it. “I got to tell you, though. Your mama, she called me some time back.”

  Patrick pulled away from the table. He looked up at her. Her shoulders shrugged as she worked, the ropes of black hair brushing against down as her head rocked back and forth.