The Fallen: A Novel Page 7

  “Five nights a week. She’s running tables tonight.”

  “She didn’t make the funeral.”

  “Didn’t she? You stop in to scold her?”

  Henry sipped his beer.

  “Been a while, hadn’t it?” Frank said.

  “Coming on three years.”

  “Maybe I wouldn’t be so hard on her. Her mother’s taken a bad turn just lately.” Frank rapped on the bar. “Better get busy before some thirsty redneck throws down on me. It’s good to see you, Henry.”

  “Frank.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I got a question for you.”

  Frank tilted his head.

  “If I wanted to know something about the old Holland coalfields, who would I ask?”

  “Something on your mind, Henry?”

  “Something I heard, that’s all.”

  “See the old fellow in the corner?” He nodded at a man sitting at the far end of the bar, by a countertop peanut dispenser. A stack of quarters stood on the bar before him.

  “Ray Ostrowksi,” Frank said. “Ray’s your man.”

  “What’s Ray drinking tonight?”

  “Same thing he drinks every night.” Frank reached a bottle off the rack. “Turkey, the high-octane variety.”

  “Expensive taste,” Henry said.

  “Funny thing, that,” Frank said. “Old Ray, suddenly he can afford it.”

  Halfway around the bar, Henry ran into her.

  One moment he was shouldering through the crowd, holding his beer in one hand. The next, some weight-room hero in a skintight T-shirt and a Red Man cap stepped aside, and there she was, clearing a table. A shock of recognition, almost imperceptible, passed through her when she looked up. He could see it. Then she nodded, a time-lapsed photo of the woman he remembered from three years back, the high school girl he had dated more than a decade ago. What was it Frank had said? Her mother had taken a turn for the worse. Maybe that accounted for the fine wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, the first strands of gray in the mass of dark hair at her shoulders. Yet the sinewy lines of her body were the same, and the frankly appraising look in her eyes.

  Otherwise they gave nothing away, those eyes.

  “I was wondering when you’d be in,” she said.

  “I wanted to see you.”

  She put her tray on the table and stood before him, maybe five-four, a hundred fifteen pounds, drying her hands on a towel. The hands were chapped, the nails clipped short and unpainted. “I guess it didn’t occur to you to wonder what I might want.”

  He let that ride.

  The guy on the jukebox was singing about how his wife done up and left him, she took his pickup and his dog.

  “Well,” she said. “Now you’ve seen me.”

  She picked up the tray and slipped past him toward the bar.

  “Emily.”

  She glanced back at him.

  “I was hoping we could talk,” he said.

  “I close tonight.”

  “I can wait.”

  She stared at him expressionlessly for a moment, and then the crowd shifted, swirling her away.

  “Ten High, that’s what I used to drink,” Ostrowski said, his tongue sliding over the hard consonant in that’s to the sibilant beyond. He glanced over at Henry, leaning against the bar beside him. “You ever drink Ten High?”

  The voice was high and girlish, at odds with the man it belonged to, a squat, grizzled toad with rheumy eyes and blunt, capable-looking hands. He wore work boots and jeans, a faded flannel shirt tight over his gut.

  “No,” Henry said.

  “Life’s too short to drink bad liquor.” Ostrowski lifted the glass, took a slug, and set it into the ring it had left on the bar. He studied Henry. “Strangers buying you drinks usually want something, that’s my experience.”

  Henry smiled into the grizzled face. “I was hoping you would answer some questions for me.”

  Ostrowski didn’t smile back.

  “About what?”

  “Holland Coal.”

  “What’s there to know?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  Ostrowski thought that over while he plugged a quarter into the peanut dispenser and twisted the handle. Lifting the door, he scraped a handful of peanuts out of the slot. “You want to know about Holland business, maybe you ought to ask a Holland,” he said.

  “Perry?”

  “Can’t ask Zachary, now can you?” Ostrowski said. “Old Zach is just as dead as a doornail.”

  “So now Perry controls the mines.”

  “Controls? Hell, them mines is closed up forty years gone. Nothin there to control.”

  “I heard Perry was opening them up again.”

  Ostrowski finished his peanuts and bought another handful. “Fuckin nuts,” he said. “Got a spot on my right lung the size of a quarter. Spent forty-seven years in the mines and never had a problem. And now I got black lung.” He shook his head. “Quit smokin, the doctor says. So I sit here and eat fuckin peanuts and the doctor bitches about my blood pressure instead.”

  He swiveled in his stool to face Henry.

  “What did you say your interest in all this was?”

  “Just curious.”

  “Nothing to be curious about there. That’s just idle talk.”

  “Talk?”

  “That’s right. A speck of truth and a whole raft of bullshit. What’s your name again?”

  “Henry Sleep.”

  “That was your daddy ate the barrel of his own gun the other day?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Hell of a thing,” Ostrowski said. He waved at Frank and pointed at his glass. “Let’s have another one.”

  “Put it on my tab,” Henry said when Frank came back with the drink.

  Ostrowski raised the whiskey in silent toast. “You been away for a while?”

  “Most of a decade.”

  “Maybe you forget what it’s like around here, you been away so long. People in the Holler, they never had nothin but those mines. When they closed up, there weren’t nothin left.”

  “That was forty years ago.”

  “Don’t tell me how long ago it was. I was there. Spent the next four decades workin up Copperhead, little bitty bug holes where a man can’t even stand up. And I was one of the lucky ones. I had a job.”

  Henry sipped his beer. “So what’s your point?”

  “People want to believe them mines are opening up again, that’s all. But that’s just wishful thinkin. Nothing there to mine anymore.”

  “So that’s the raft of bullshit. Where’s the speck of truth?”

  Ostrowski took another drink of whiskey and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Well, there was a little work up there a month or two back.”

  “Mining?”

  “Nah. Turns out old Jeremiah—that was Zach Holland’s father, the one what lived to be about a hundred—did a half-ass job of shuttin down them mines. Just slapped up a fence and blasted the mountain without even bothering to see was the tunnels closed. Never saw such a thing. Anyway, with his dad gone, Perry got to worryin about kids foolin around up there.”

  Henry swallowed. “Kids?”

  Ostrowski waved his hand. “Kids,” he said. He fumbled another quarter into the slot of the peanut dispenser and twisted the handle. Peanuts spilled across the countertop before him. “I guess the EPA—the … what’s the name of that thing … the Environmental Protection Agency?”

  Henry nodded.

  “I guess they done some kinda inspection and told Perry to clean up the site. Anyway, I’d just started collecting my pension from up Copperhead, so one thing led to another.”

  “He hired you?”

  “Me and a few other fellows. We fixed that fence up there, pushed a little of the dirt around, that’s all.”

  Henry turned his glass thoughtfully. “Asa Cade was telling me—”

  “Who?”

  “Asa Cade.”

  “The doctor?
What’s he got to do with this?”

  Henry tracked his finger through a ring of condensation on the bar. “He said he put some money into the mines—”

  “In Holland Coal?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Nothing there to put any money into,” Ostrowki said.

  “I got the sense my dad might have put some money in it, too.”

  “Is that what this is about?”

  Henry said nothing.

  Ostrowski shook his head. “I know you’re grievin, son, but that don’t make any sense at all.”

  “I thought maybe—”

  Ostrowski lurched toward him, one elbow propped on the bar, his face solemn behind its three-day growth of beard.

  “Thought what? Ain’t nothin left up there to mine. Why do you think old Jeremiah shut em down in the first place?”

  He slumped back in his seat. He picked up his glass, sloshing Wild Turkey across the bar.

  Henry straightened. “Mr. Ostrowski—”

  Ostrowski waved his hand. “There weren’t nothin to it,” he said. “Just a little make-work, that’s all it ever was.”

  Chapter 8

  Last call was at one. At one thirty Frank killed the jukebox and turned on the house lights. Henry stuck around. He’d spent more than a few nights helping Emily shut down the Tipple during that final summer in the Run. Now, while Frank and Emily closed the bar, he racked the chairs and swept up, feeling once again that strange sense of time slipping around him, as though he had collapsed into a former life, a former self, the Henry Sleep who had left all this behind for a job he had known even then was nothing and nowhere, running away, just marking time. Maybe—just maybe, he thought—he could do things right this time.

  He went to stow the broom in the storage closet. When he came back, Frank was untying his apron. “I reckon I’ll get on,” he said.

  “I’ll lock up,” Emily said.

  “Good night, then.” Frank clapped Henry on the shoulder and held his gaze for a moment longer than he had to. Then he let himself out, and they were alone.

  Emily dialed down the overheads and slipped a disc into the house system. The room washed away on a velvet tide of tenor sax.

  Henry took a seat at the bar. “So you’re into jazz now,” he said.

  “Sonny Rollins,” she said. “There’s an actual song called ‘There’s a Tear in My Beer’—did you know that? I’m not kidding. It’s on the jukebox.” She shook her head. “God, I hate country music.”

  And that was vintage Emily. In high school, when most of Henry’s friends had been spinning scratched vinyl platters of Mellencamp and Springsteen, Emily was grooving on twenty-year-old Motown soul—Marvin Gaye, Mary Wells, and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles—artists so monumentally alien to kids in the Run that entirely by accident she achieved a kind of oddball mystique, a short-lived antimatter cool. Yet even then—especially then—she stood at the margins, wry and aloof, hungry for something more than everyday wonder.

  She had also stuck with the college courses long after the high school guidance counselors steered most kids from the Hollow into the vocational track. By all rights, she should have been an outcast, a thrift shop apparition among the designer jeans and Izod sweaters of the town girls. Yet she had a way of rising above all that, town kids and Hollow rats alike, serene and autonomous, watching silently from the perimeter of the classroom, the edge of the bleachers. When she and Henry went out together, they went out alone, and even now, that was how he always thought of her—self-contained and observant, with a smile that cut two ways.

  It was that smile she gave him now, rueful and mocking and all too self-aware. Wiping her hands on a bar rag, she said, “You want a beer, Henry?”

  “What are you having?”

  “Club soda.”

  “Make it two club sodas.”

  “I got a little too attached to my after-hours cocktail there for a while,” she said. “Cocktails, I should say. Half a bottle of wine to send me off to sleep.”

  “So you quit?”

  “That’s right.” She set the drinks down in the bar. “Last June.”

  “Was I—I mean, did I—”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Henry. I got used to you running away a long time ago.” She leaned her elbows against the bar and pushed her hair back, studying him.

  “I’m back now,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “So what’s it going to be, then?” he asked.

  She laughed. “You called this meeting.”

  “Because I do want to apologize. When I went away, I thought it was what I had to do. It had nothing to do with you—it never did. My feelings about you never changed. It was about me, me and Dad, and this”—he shrugged—“this place. The Run.”

  “The Run.”

  “Do you like it here, Emily?”

  “I don’t think about it like that. It’s just where I am, where I have to be right now, you know?”

  He nodded. He did know. Six months, a year ago, he wouldn’t have understood what she meant, could not have fathomed what forces might keep her here. But now … well, now he had something to keep him here himself, didn’t he? No matter what Harold Crawford or Raymond Ostrowski or anyone else had to say.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

  “Honestly?”

  “Sure, Henry. Let’s try honesty for a change.”

  He met her gaze squarely. “My father.”

  “The funeral go okay?”

  “I expected to see you there.”

  She lifted her eyebrows and gave him that smile again. “Things don’t always turn out the way you expect,” she said.

  She let that sink in for maybe two measures of Sonny Rollins on tenor sax, and then she reached across the bar. Delicate as a butterfly, her hand alighted for a moment on his own, and then she drew it away.

  “Jesus,” she said. “I used to think about this. How I wanted to be the next time you walked through that door. I always knew you would. But it’s not easy being a bitch, you know.” With one finger, she fished a chunk of ice out of her drink and sucked it thoughtfully.

  “I wish you had come,” he said.

  “Yeah, me too.” She laughed softly. “I had every intention of coming, even though I want to be angry at you.”

  “You have every right to be.”

  “I do. But somehow it’s hard all the same. And a funeral isn’t really the place, is it? So I was set to come. I had an outfit picked out and everything, and then …” She shook her head.

  “Then what?”

  “You really want to trade sob stories, Henry?”

  “Seems like the only kind anybody has to tell just lately.”

  “Well, you probably know most of this one.”

  “Your mother?”

  “Frank told you?”

  “He mentioned it.”

  She looked at him, but he had the sense she was looking right through him, at something else, he couldn’t say what.

  “I’m not really an alcoholic, I don’t think,” she said. “Things just got so hard with Mom there for a while. It just got to be a way to … get away.”

  “So how is she?”

  “I put her in Ridgeview last November. November the twenty-first.”

  “What happened?”

  “The emphysema took a turn for the worse. This was not long after you left. There had been bad patches before, but it always seemed to improve in a month or two. This time it didn’t. Her mind started slipping about the same time, got to where I couldn’t leave her alone. I was afraid she’d burn the house down or something. It was like somebody turned a switch, she got old all at once.” She paused, studying the bar, then shrugged. “I looked into private nurses, but …”

  “Too expensive?”

  “Unbelievable. And Ridgeview’s no bargain. Between Medicare and what I make here, I can just barely manage.” She drummed her fingers on the bar. “I had started taking some classes, over at Sau
ls Run Community. Just your basic requirements, you know? I couldn’t decide on a major.” She looked up at him, a self-mocking smile flickering on her face. “I’m thirty years old and I don’t even know what I’m interested in. Anyway, I had to give it up when Mom got bad.”

  “And then Ridgeview?”

  “Right. Mom’s had some trouble adjusting. She forgets where she is. The other day I started for the funeral, but the phone rang just as I was walking out the door. I ended up at Ridgeview most of the evening, barely made it to work.”

  “She okay?”

  “She’s well taken care of. I keep telling myself that.”

  He nodded.

  “So anyway, how did the funeral go?”

  “About what you’d expect.” He paused, uncertain whether to continue. “You read about … what happened … in the paper?”

  “Yeah. But it didn’t make much sense.”

  “It doesn’t make much sense to me either.”

  “Did he leave a note or anything?”

  “No. But there was someone in the house when I got in Thursday night—”

  “Like a burglar?”

  “Like a burglar.”

  “That’s weird.” She ran her finger around the rim of her glass. Then she looked up. “Any idea who?”

  “No. Whoever it was, he ran when I came in. Nothing’s missing. And I had this bizarre conversation with Asa Cade.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He hesitated a moment. And then: “Asa acted like I’m accusing him of something. Cindy says she thought he and Dad might have been mixed up in something.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “In Sauls Run, West Virginia?”

  “That’s what I keep telling myself. She mentioned Perry Holland. I thought maybe he had opened up the mines again.”

  She shook her head. “Not that I know of—and I would know, working in this place. There was some short-term stuff up there in November—”

  “Yeah, I talked to a guy tonight.”

  “Ray?”

  “That’s right.” He sipped his club soda. “Well, I can’t believe Dad was involved in anything either, but I’m going to stick around for a while, look into it.”

  “Henry Sleep, amateur sleuth.”

  He laughed. “Something like that.” He hesitated. Then: “I was thinking maybe we could spend some time together.”

  The succeeding silence seemed brittle, a razor-thin sheet of ice with Sonny Rollins skating his sax lightly over the surface.