Heat and Light (38 page)

The touch warmed her, but it was the words that mattered. The words pierced her like an injection, a lifesaving antidote. In that instant the pastor's many transgressions, the slights and careless cruelties (the counseling appointments she'd canceled, the hospital visit that never was, the wasted and ultimately disastrous trip to Pittsburgh) simply unhappened. Shelby could actually feel the anger leave her, draining away like blood from a wound.

I had some personal business to deal with,
said the pastor.
But life is finally getting back to normal.

Shelby has a forgiving nature.

That's all right,
she said generously.
I understand.

A Thanksgiving miracle, a blessing she never expected: Pastor Jess has come back to her. In an hour she'll arrive on Shelby's doorstep. They'll hold hands around the table as the pastor says the blessing.

Shelby ties off Olivia's braids with blue ribbon. A mother is judged by her child's appearance. This is a known fact.

BUSINESS IS SLOW AT THE COMMERCIAL.
On Thanksgiving there is no lunch crowd to speak of. Rich Devlin wipes idly at the counter. Gia hangs silver tinsel in loops along the bar.

“Jesus, already? You can't wait till after Thanksgiving?”

She frowns, as though he's a minor irritation, a dog barking. “Another day? Seriously, that would make a difference to you?”

He studies her in the mirror above the bar. For a long time, years, she was his own personal definition of sexy. Lately, though, something has shifted. He can't put his finger on why, exactly; but Gia is looking bad.

She asks, “What's Darren doing for Thanksgiving?”

Has she always been this skinny?

“Beats me. I haven't heard from him in months.” His brother's life in Baltimore is a mystery. Once, long ago, Rich had gone there looking for him. For two days he walked the streets around Johns Hopkins, showing Darren's picture to strangers. Then, as now, Darren didn't want to be found.

Gia frowns. Her forehead is creased in a way he's never noticed, two diagonal lines like lightning bolts. She's ten years younger than he is; how can she possibly look old to him? Too thin, scrawny around the neck and shoulders. The word, he thinks, is
frail.

Are you okay?
he nearly asks. It's not a question he typically puts to women. He doesn't need to. Shelby keeps him constantly apprised of her own and Olivia's symptoms, the endless series of imaginary ailments. There's never any need to ask.

He glances at the television. The local news is playing: Andy Carnicella in his dress uniform, shaking hands with a man in a suit. A crawl across the bottom of the screen reads
POLICE CHIEF HONORED.

Gia shrieks with laughter. “Turn it up! I want to hear this.”

Rich fumbles under the bar for the remote.

In our local heroes department, Bakerton police chief Andrew Carnicella got a shout-out from the Saxon County commissioners, for saving two lives in the line of duty.

“Oh, for Christ's sake.” Rich hits the Mute button.

“No! Give me that.” Gia grabs the remote from his hand.

The chief was on an undercover mission at this farm supply store when two men, identified as Nicholas Blick and Robert Marstellar, both of Bakerton, were allegedly seen siphoning off fertilizer from an outdoor tank.

Two mug shots flash across the screen, Rich's old buddies. Transformed, now, into a couple of middle-aged thugs. He thinks, Don't make me see it.

The other two Duanes.

“Can we turn this off, please?”

“Not on your life,” Gia says.

The chief is credited with driving both suspects to the Emergency Room at Miners' Hospital, after the fertilizer tank was punctured during a shootout. Anhydrous ammonia is a hazardous substance that can cause serious injury if inhaled. Thanks to Chief Carnicella's quick action, no one was seriously hurt.

“Let me get this straight,” says Rich. “The idiot shoots a fertilizer tank, and he's a hero for taking the guys to the hospital?”

Gia's shoulders shake with laughter, her eyes actually tearing. The chief is beaming at the camera. It is, clearly, the proudest moment of his life.

The broadcast cuts to a commercial.
For forty years I've stood up for the little guy.

Rich studies the man's face. He looks better on television, slightly younger and healthier. The commercial might be ten years old, or twenty. Paul Zacharias has been chasing ambulances for a very long time.

“I need to get going,” he tells Gia. “Shelby's cooking Thanksgiving. She has a whole list of chores she wants me to do.”

“Tell her to call me, will you? I haven't heard from her in ages.”

“She's had a lot on her mind.”

At that moment the front door swings open. The tattooed skinhead takes a last drag on his cigarette and drops it to the sidewalk.

“Hey, girl,” he calls to Gia. “What up?”

Gia looks suddenly alert. “Jesus, finally. I've been calling you all morning.” She steps out from behind the bar.

“Where are you going?” says Rich.

“Back in a minute,” Gia says.

A HAZE OVER SWEDETOWN,
what looks at first like fog but turns out to be woodsmoke. The Prines or Thibodeaux have built a bonfire. There is a smell of burning leaves.

Driving, Rich thinks again of the two mug shots: Booby dull and bloated, Nick gaunt and vacant-eyed, both obviously (obviously!) high. Nick, especially, looked wasted by meth, starved and not quite sane. And yet the last time Rich saw them, shooting pool at the Commercial, no such thought had crossed his mind.

In his line of work it's a question of survival:
Don't make me see it.
He thinks of the soldiers back from deployment, swapping their best stories around the bar at the Commercial, forgetting the rest with the help of drink. In this one way, the prison is not so different
from Afghanistan. If you looked, really looked, at what was going on around you, you wouldn't last a week.

A county sheriff's cruiser whizzes past, blue lights flashing, and rolls down Thibodeaux Lane.

Rich is dumbstruck. Jesus Christ, is it possible? Somebody called the law on Randy for burning leaves on his own property, out in the middle of nowhere? To Rich it's yet another example of government sticking its nose in. More and more, the government seems to be the source of all his problems. First the Department of Environmental Protection failed to protect his environment. Then a couple of county bureaucrats attacked his wife and threatened, for a terrifying moment, to break up his family. When you needed help desperately, government abandoned you. When you didn't, it wouldn't leave you the fuck alone.

His wife isn't perfect: an overprotective mother, a hypochondriac. In practical matters she has no more sense than a child. Her pessimism makes him crazy. She greets each new day by cataloging every catastrophe that could possibly happen, as if naming them will somehow protect her against the worst. But she would never in a million years hurt their kid.

She had a sister who died. Rich learned this only recently, by accident: Gia Bernardi mentioned it once in passing. (
Crystal. She was younger. Leukemia, maybe?
) Until that moment he'd believed Shelby was an only child.

If it's strange that she never told him, it's a type of strangeness Rich understands. There's plenty he's never told her—the humiliating way his first marriage ended, the wife who betrayed him. It's a subject he feels no urge to discuss.

Shelby isn't perfect, but she can be trusted.

He sees her, now, with different eyes. Her fears and failings, her vigilance against disaster, now seem logical. If a child could die, no one was safe.

Shelby isn't perfect, but she is his.

He passes his driveway and turns down the access road. Stripped of its function, it's a runway to nowhere, though it comes in handy as a parking space. Between Shelby's minivan and the water tank, there's no room in the driveway for his truck.

He heads into the house. The tank—his lawyer calls it a
water buffalo
—holds five thousand gallons. A plastic pipe connects it, through a basement window, to the house's plumbing. At the end of the month, a tanker truck will come to refill it. The service costs two thousand dollars a month. For now, anyway, Dark Elephant is footing the bill. The guy on the phone, Quentin somebody, called it
a good neighbor gesture
.

You're not my neighbor, Rich thought.

Infuriatingly, the company has admitted no wrongdoing. The water delivery implies no responsibility for the contamination of his well. Rich signed a paper to this effect, though only after checking with Paul Zacharias.

It doesn't commit you to anything,
his lawyer explained.
We can still negotiate for a real settlement. But in the meantime, you'll have water to drink.

In the kitchen he opens the refrigerator and pours a glass of something. “What is this stuff?” he asks Shelby, who stands at the stove studying a cookbook.

“Peppermint tea.”

“Tastes like toothpaste.”

She puts down the book. “Your dad will be here any minute. Can you put the leaf in the table?”

“Do we need it?”

Shelby does her Buddy Hackett grimace. “Us plus your dad, that's five already. My mother probably won't show, but you never know. Oh, and I invited Pastor Jess.” Defiantly she meets his eyes, daring him to ask the obvious question.

He asks it anyway. “What the hell for?”

“She doesn't have anywhere else to go. And, well, I get the
feeling she's under a lot of stress.” She covers a pot with a lid and wipes her hands on her jeans. “Can you give this a stir once in a while?”

“I guess. Remember, Shel, don't say anything about—”

“I know, I know,” Shelby says.

Rich heads out to the garage and comes back with the leaf. He isn't ashamed of the lawsuit, exactly; but he feels no urge to broadcast it. He's never considered himself the kind of person who would sue.

Dark Elephant contaminated his water and stole his future. No question, he has been well and truly screwed. Still he can't shake the feeling that he's responsible for his own predicament, that his greed and gullibility made him an easy mark. Nobody forced him to sign away his mineral rights. That was his own cursed decision, motivated by fear of poverty or simple greed. Where one began and the other ended was not clear.

At the time it had seemed a simple choice. There was the Bakerton of his father's day, a thriving boomtown that reeked of its bony piles; or the Bakerton his own generation had inherited and largely fled, a ghost town that was perfectly clean.

Bakerton Coal Lights the World.

He turns the dining room table on its side and slides in the extra leaf, thinking of his father. At Rich's age he'd been lost, jobless, hopeless. Compass north—mine and Mine Workers—was gone forever. Dick's generation had lost its stars. And yet, against tall odds, he'd built something, a business to pass on to his children. This is the official version of events, the Devlin family gospel father and son repeat to each other, forgetting, always, the other character in the story: Rich's uncle Pat, wasted by mesothelioma. The settlement from Erie Door and Window let him buy the Commercial on his deathbed, just in time to leave it to his brother. All their lives, Dick and Pat had been working stiffs—a coal miner, a factory slave. Pat's lawsuit is the sole reason the Devlin family now owns a busi
ness. For a long time Rich had resisted drawing certain conclusions, which now seem indisputable.

The only way to get ahead is to be grievously wronged.

He still keeps, in his glove box, a grubby slip of paper:
Honiger 8 yrs old 40K.
Exactly why he keeps it, he isn't sure. He will never be a farmer. When his settlement comes—
if
it comes—he could, in theory, buy another farm. He knows he never will. The point was to work
this
land—Pap's land, bought and paid for with his own hard labor, ten years of overtime at Deer Run. With the pain and suffering—entirely self-inflicted—of his very foolish little brother.

Who'd been the bigger fool, Rich or Darren, was impossible to say.

MORE THAN MOST PLACES,
Pennsylvania is what lies beneath.

Accidents of geology, larger than history, older than scripture: continents colliding, seas encroaching and receding, peat bogs incubating their treasures like a vast subterranean kiln. In the time before recorded time, Pennsylvania was booby-trapped. Blame the gods for what lies beneath—the old pagan gods, discredited now, vaguely disreputable, the unwashed old men who struck a backroom deal before Jesus was invented.

What lies beneath.

Rich Devlin recalls, often, a famous TV commercial of his childhood: the Indian chief looking out over a trash-strewn highway, a single tear sliding down his cheek. A public service announcement, designed to make people stop littering; but the ad hadn't turned him into a tree hugger, as it was clearly meant to do. It sparked, instead, his fascination with American Indians—who, he discovered, weren't the villains the old westerns had made them out to be. At nine years old, for the first and last time in his life, he read voraciously: adventure stories, encyclopedias, anything with an Indian in it. Apache, Seneca, Cherokee, Chickasaw. How he loved the sound of those names, the cascading syllables. Reading, he imag
ined waking up in a teepee or a pueblo to a different life entirely, in which boys weren't forced to take spelling tests or deliver newspapers or learn catechism, the daily gauntlet of responsibility that had already begun for him and wouldn't end until he was too old to hunt or track or fish, too old to do anything but watch TV commercials and fall asleep in his chair.

How the world must have looked then, in Indian times: his own corner of the world before roads and bridges, tipples and steel mills, the sprawling strip mines that blackened the earth like char. As a boy he imagined it, vividly. As a man he learned it didn't matter. If not for the mines he'd be someone else, somewhere else. He'd never know this place existed, and so, for him, it wouldn't. His great-grandfather came here the way everyone did, washed up in Bakerton like so much flotsam: a man who owned a single pair of shoes, a man willing to mine coal.