American Rust

  “Christ, Hicks. It's a fucking kid.”

  Isaac stayed where he was, covering himself.

  “Shut the fuck up,” said Hicks. “All of you.”

  One of the others said: “Fuck yourself, Hicks. The car is leaving, you can walk home if you want.”

  The person he knew was Hicks squatted down next to him and said: “You'll be alright, buddy. We got you confused with someone else. You want a beer or anything?”

  “Don't touch me,” said Isaac.

  Hicks knelt there a few more seconds, unsure of himself, and then Isaac heard him stand and walk quickly outside. He heard car doors slam and then heard the car pull away. He was afraid to touch himself for what he might find. He stood up and walked outside to the dirt lot. It was empty. It hadn't taken more than a minute. Most of his face was still numb and he went back inside and repacked his things and finally he stopped heaving. He found a rubber welcome mat and carried it outside to sleep on. The kids had been sixteen, seventeen, maybe younger. Good, he said out loud. Now you know. He walked through the tall brush toward the river until it seemed no one would find him. When he crouched down there was no wind. His heart was still racing and his mouth tasted like blood. You could have stopped that, he thought. If you'd cut even one of them, the rest would have taken off. He decided it was fine. Fool me once. He took out the knife and set it next to his head. It took a long time before his heart slowed down enough for him to fall asleep.

  3. Poe

  He was in the back of Harris's truck and they pulled into the police station. It was not the first time he'd been there, it wasn't even properly the police station, in fact, it was called the Buell Municipal Building on account of there were other offices, the mayor's and the city council's. According to the newspaper, the mayor now slept in his office because his wife had kicked him out. It had been a minor scandal, the mayor living out of his office. The municipal building was white cinderblock, three stories with a flat roof, it looked like a big repair shop of some kind, not the headquarters of a town. The inside was painted yellow. It was not old but it looked that way. The original city hall had been condemned years ago and several times Poe had broken in and walked around inside; it was a large red brick building that looked like a castle, iron windows, wood paneling inside and dental molding, it looked like the home of a rich person, a place you could respect yourself. But the city did not have the money to maintain it.

  Inside the new building Poe saw the pudgy Chinese officer, he was watching Fox News, it looked like he was having a conversation with the television. Harris took Poe downstairs to the holding cells, Poe had been there before, a long hallway with what looked like big steel firedoors every ten feet or so. The cell had a butcher block for a bed and no mattress. The light fixture outside flickered like it would give him a seizure. There was one window that looked up from the ground toward the parking lot, but the plastic was hazed over.

  “I'll be back for you in a bit,” said Harris. When he wasn't busting heads he had an open, easygoing face, eyes that forgave you, like he was meant to be something else, maybe a schoolteacher. Which was probably the reason he had to bust so many heads, to make up for the way he looked.

  “How long do you think—” Poe said, but Harris closed the door on him.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” he heard Harris tell him. He heard other doors slamming after that.

  He had no coat and there seemed to be a vent blowing cold air directly onto him, not to mention there was a puddle from the leaking toilet; water covered most of the floor. Here he was, you didn't think they could do this to you—put you in a locked room—but they could. There was no way around it. It was a tragedy of life. In fact that was how he'd felt the first time they'd locked him up, that there had been no way around it, but in hindsight that hadn't been true. It wasn't true now, either. It was his own choices. They never felt like choices while he was making them, but nonetheless they were. It was nice to think it was a vast conspiracy of others but the truth was something different.

  The last time he was locked up it was the boy from Donora. Big, though not quite as big as Poe, and aside from the pimples all over his face and neck there had been nothing wrong with him. A B student, people said. But when Poe got through with him it was different. He remembered holding the boy down, they were both bleeding some, girls watching. They were in a dirt parking lot at night and it was very quiet, everyone had stopped talking to watch them, there was no one even cheering them on, just the sound of their heavy breathing and grunting. The boy was pinned and Poe knew he should not let the boy up. Stay down, he whispered, but he knew the boy wouldn't, he could tell the boy did not want to lose, the boy did not have it in him to lose. It would be the downfall of both of them. Stay down, he said again, quietly into the boy's ear, but he had to let him up, they couldn't lie there all night. He should have choked him out, it would have been for the boy's own good, but others would have gotten involved if he'd done that. It was no win either way, and finally he had to let the boy up, though he knew what would happen. Obviously he did not know exactly what would happen, he only knew the situation would not improve.

  The boy went to his car and came back and everyone stepped away. He had a knife, a military bayonet you might buy at a gun show, and the crowd made way for Poe to retreat but Poe had stood his ground, it would have been easy to walk away, the kid was insane at losing the fight, he was not really going to use the bayonet, he was the type who would go off to college, he was embarrassed, was all.

  But Poe had stood his ground. Because his fire was going. Because he'd won and now he didn't want to lose. He had stood there and no one knew what to do, not him, not the boy and then Vincent Lewis had put a bat in Poe's hand, a child's bat from Little League it was light and short, a good weapon. It was something out of gladiator times, knife versus club. Neither of them really wanting to do it, it was only because of all the people. The older you got the more serious things became. Your margins for fuckup disappeared. First there was the boy from Donora and now the Swede. It was getting worse. He wondered what would come next. Both times he should have known better but he hadn't. The next time Christ it would be someone he loved, his mother, or Lee, it would be something unthinkable.

  As for the boy from Donora, Poe had asked after him several times but he was not okay. He couldn't even work a cash register, couldn't keep the numbers straight on account of Poe hitting him with the bat. He hit him and the boy went down in the dirt and then he didn't know, he'd hit him once more in the head. Because he was still holding on to that bayonet. And yet that was why the assault charge—the second hit, they were teaching him a lesson. But you didn't learn it, he thought. You did not learn that lesson.

  He was always trying to see what he could get away with—that was why a man was dead. He was always trying to game it. See how far he could push. That was in the bloodstream and why he ever thought he'd escape it, who the fuck knew? Hiram Poe, his grandfather, the Valley's biggest poacher, had shot himself, no one knew why, because he was a crazy old fuck is how Poe's father put it. Don't worry, you ain't like him, is what his father told him, but Poe hadn't even been wondering. It hadn't even occurred to him that he was anything like batshit old Grandpa. Now, though. Now things were going downhill.

  His father had a talent for making things go his way, he'd worked on the towboats when Poe was younger, then gotten fired because he hadn't lashed the barges right and a storm came up and a fucking barge full of coal went floating off down the Mon, nearly causing a wreck. But still that weaselly old fucker, weaselly Virgil had managed to come out on top, something had happened to him on the boats, he jammed his back somehow, so he managed to collect a little disability from it, claimed he had something permanently wrong with his back when really it was fine. He still lost his job but now he got a permanent paycheck from it. He was always moving around, he'd come into town once in a while for a piece of pussy, mostly from young girls, but occasionally from Poe's mother. It was not something P
oe liked to think about, his mom in that position, but it was true, you did not have the luxury of thinking otherwise when you lived in a trailer. As for Virgil, he worked odd jobs once in a while, sat in the bars reading books so the girls would believe he was a great thinker, a rebel, when really he was just a lazy bastard who didn't give two shits for anyone. Probably holding the books upside down. Put his mind up against someone like Lee or Isaac, they'd crush him.

  He looked around—outside, it had already gotten dark. His cell was big for a jail cell, maybe ten by twenty feet, but the floor was soaking wet. And now that no light was coming in from the outside, it was even darker—the light fixture in the hallway did a poor job—you would have gotten eyestrain if you'd tried to read. He had nothing to read anyway. He tried to keep his mind moving so the boredom wouldn't set in, the death spiral. What got old Hiram—sit around long enough with nothing to think about eventually your mind locks into it—fact that this here, your breathing, is a temporary situation, and why bother pretending otherwise.

  Hiram had got what was coming and he was not sorry Hiram was gone. When Poe was seven, he and his father and old Hiram had been sitting in a deer blind, and Poe had fallen asleep, and when he woke up there were deer in front of the blind, and he'd said look, a deer, and spooked them all, including a big twelve- pointer, and Hiram had missed his shot. Later he'd heard his father saying you ain't mad, are ya? He's just a kid. But Hiram was mad—at a small boy on his first hunting trip. Virgil had knocked Poe around plenty, but once, when Virgil wasn't around, Hiram had done it too. The thing is it was not Hiram's fault, or Virgil's, it was in the blood and it was the fault of someone way back before either of them. God, maybe.

  He stood up and banged on the cell door until his hand hurt, knowing the whole time no one would come. When he got bored with that he stood looking out the window, there were things moving but he couldn't tell what, a bird, a truck, a person walking. He himself was not going anywhere and he never had been. As for college the whole idea was a joke, if there was one thing he was bad at, one thing he'd never been good at in his life it was book learning. Let him do it with his hands no problem, rejet a carburetor, gut a deer, he was good at those things but stick him in a room with chairs and desks and he blanked out. He couldn't see the importance. He couldn't distinguish between what was important to know and what wasn't, he remembered the wrong things. It had always been that way.

  It was only when he was playing ball, competing against others and living outside himself, something happened then, it was like information coming through a firehose but he took it all in, he would literally float above the others, he knew more about people than they knew about themselves, the exact patch of grass where their foot would land, the holes opening and closing between the bodies, the ball hovering in the air. It was like seeing the future. That was the only way to describe it, a movie where he moved in real time and everyone else moved in slow motion. Those were the times he liked himself best—when he was not really himself. When it was some part of him in control that he didn't understand, when others couldn't see him.

  That was the truth—he was fucked. When it came down to it, when it came down to making life decisions, either his fire got going or he froze. He either went ballistic or came to a full stop, dead in the water, he needed to think about things too long, examine them from every angle. Like going to Colgate, it seemed they had not given him enough time to think, and then everyone telling him to go for it just go for it. And he froze—two years later he was still thinking. He should have just gone, then none of it—the boy from Donora losing his mind or the Swede being dead—none of that would have happened. If he had gone off to Colgate, it would not have been physically possible for any of that to have happened. It was a mistake and he had made it, only it had not really been. It was inevitable. There were men who would die heroes but he was not one of them. He had always known it.

  4. Harris

  He chose the worst cell for Billy Poe and decided to leave him overnight so the boy would figure out what was in store for him. Lying on that piece of butcher block. Which, when you thought about it, was fitting. Something big was going on at the DA's office, it wasn't clear exactly what, but Harris had a suspicion that however it turned out, it was not going to benefit Billy Poe. He locked his office and went to say good- bye to the night guy. It was Steve Ho.

  “You again?”

  “Miller called in.”

  Harris made a mental note to check how many times Ron Miller had called in.

  “You look like you ought to call in yourself, boss.”

  “I'm just tired.”

  Ho nodded and Harris walked out of the station and got into his old Silverado. It was a nice evening and there would be several hours of daylight left still, even by the time he got home. That was something to be thankful for. Another advantage of being chief—you worked the day shift.

  As he made his way south and west, eventually the paved road gave way to a rutted paved road and then a gravel road and then it was just dirt. His cabin was perched on top of a ridge, a thirty- acre inholding surrounded by state forest.

  Getting out of the truck and looking at his house, it never failed to make him happy. A squat log cabin, stone chimneys, a forty- mile view. You could see three states from the deck. No one had ever accidentally come up the road, not once in the four years he'd lived there.

  Fur, his big malamute, was waiting for him inside; Harris stepped aside to let the dog run but Fur just stood there, waiting to be petted. Fur's hips were getting stiff, his back sagging a little, the dog was shameless for attention, a prince. In the wild, Harris told him, affectionately shaking his neck, you'd be bear meat. Fur was too big for his own bones and there were nights Harris would sit in front of the T V, drinking whiskey and massaging the dog's hips. He gave him a final pat on the head and the dog leapt off the side of the deck, a five- foot drop, and took off full speed into the woods. Maybe he wasn't that old after all. Maybe he just has your number.

  After pouring himself a club soda he went back out onto the deck and leaned against the railing, just looking. Nothing but mountains and woods—Mount Davis, Packhorse Mountain, Winding Ridge. The land dropped steeply away from the house and continued descending to the valley floor, fourteen hundred feet below. It was a good place. His Waldo Pond. His Even Keel. Walden, he thought. Not Waldo. He grinned at himself. There were plenty of other squares he could have landed on, such as his brother's, a computer programmer in Florida, four children and a Disney subdevelopment. Harris had one word for that: hellhole. Got into computers early, mainframes, the old UNIVACs, made six times what Harris did. Still down on himself—might be that runs in the family. He was no Bill Gates. Those were his own words: Bud, I am exactly the same age as Bill Gates. You're doing pretty good, Harris had told him. Neither one of them had any college but every two years his brother got a new Mercedes. I do alright, said his brother, but it's good to be able to admit that—I am the same age as Bill Gates. Harris wasn't sure. You could make anything up you wanted, there were always stories to justify your choices. This house in the woods, for instance. Which both keeps you sane and guarantees you'll be alone the rest of your life. Those things should not be equivalent, he thought.

  He turned on the grill and took a steak from the refrigerator, though he knew what he had to do first. There were two messages on his machine, both from her. It was not a conversation he wanted to have. Well, he thought. You're the one who chose this.

  Grace answered on the first ring.

  “It's me,” he said.

  “I'm nervous,” she said. “Can we skip the hey how's it goings?”

  “Fine with me. I got my Netflix to watch same as you.”

  There was silence.

  “That was a joke,” he said.

  “What's happening with my son, Bud?”

  He wondered how he ought to answer that. After thinking a few seconds, he said: “Billy was hanging out in places that he would have done better to have
stayed away from.” He almost added, as usual, but didn't. Then there was something about the way she breathed into the phone— he didn't know how, but he got a feeling she knew exactly what her son had done. Probably she knew more than Harris. Harris felt himself get annoyed.

  “He hasn't been charged yet,” he continued, “but I have a feeling he might be.”

  “What about your friend Patacki?”

  “Grace,” he said.

  “I'm sorry,” she said. “He's my kid.”

  He felt himself pass from annoyance into anger and then Even Keel took over and he was just bored. It had never been any different from this, she was always asking for things.

  “It looks like Billy might be tied up with this dead man they found in that old plant,” he said. “How tied up, I don't know, because he's not talking.”

  “Should we be getting a lawyer?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Knowing Billy, you ought to be getting a lawyer.”

  “Buddy—”

  “I'm trying to help you,” he said. “I'll do all I can.”

  He got off the phone quickly. Why was he trying to help her? He didn't know. Resisting the urge to pour a tall drink, he glanced out over the deck, the colors were getting nice, it would be a fine sunset. Put a potato in the nuker. Cook your steak. Make a salad. He carried the steak out to the grill and felt himself getting into his routine again. Fur had come back from his adventuring, impeccable timing as always.

  “Not for you,” he told the dog. He closed the grill on the steak and went back in to fix the rest of his meal.

  There was plenty else to worry about besides Billy Poe. The state's attorney was investigating Don Cunko, Harris's good buddy on the city council, and soon enough they'd discover that the club basement and wet bar installed in Don's house had been paid for by Steelville Excavation, the same folks who'd won the bid to replace Buell's sewer system. Harris liked Cunko. Maybe he had bad taste in friends. No, he thought, Cunko had crossed the line, first by taking the money, then by having parties in the new basement. But it was not a good idea to get self-righteous—there was plenty they could get him on as well. He'd never taken any money, but he'd always taken other liberties, especially when encouraging certain townspeople to move to greener pastures. It was the reason Buell had half the crime rate of Monessen and Brownsville. There were a lot of people who could talk. None of them were particularly credible, but there were enough of them. The Cunko investigation brought that fresh to mind.