The Evening Hour (8 page)

“I got an AC in Ruthie's room. One of the perks of living with an old lady on her deathbed.”

The TV was insanely loud, just like in the old folks' home, drowning out the humming air conditioner. Also in the room were an air filter, a vaporizer shooting out clouds of cold air, and an oxygen concentrator. Equipment for the dying. None of this was new to Reese. In prison he'd helped out on the AIDS ward, he told Cole, “I seen the toughest boys wasted down to nothing.” But Cole wondered how long Reese would be able to keep this up. He looked like he hadn't slept in days, and Ruthie was skeleton-skinny, her mouth pulled back in a wide, harrowing grimace, her jawbones practically visible through the skin. Cole took her hand in his, felt nothing but bone, but she looked at him with alert eyes. The first time she'd met him, she said she had no use for Bible thumpers, then Reese had told her, “He ain't like his granddaddy,” and she'd softened.

Now she said, “He's handsome, Reese.”

“He ain't my type, you should know that by now,” Reese said, laughing.

Cole started to remind her of who he was, but she closed her eyes.

Reese turned down the TV. “You got any Oxy?”

“You don't have any for me? Ain't that the way it usually works?”

“Something's screwed up with Ruthie's Medicaid.” He added, “I'll pay you, buddy. She needs it.”

Cole hesitated, then tossed him a bottle. Reese woke Ruthie up long enough to place a tablet on her tongue, holding a plastic cup to her mouth. A few drops of water dribbled down her chin, which he wiped away with his thumb. He shook out another one for himself. “I been all speedy,” he explained.

“My wig.” Ruthie's eyelids fluttered. “I can't let this handsome feller see me like this.”

“Who do you want to be?” Reese asked.

“You pick.”

Reese dropped an armload of wigs on the bed and chose one with blond hair and soup-can-size curls. He adjusted it on Ruthie's nearly bald head and held up a hand mirror for her. “Nice to meet you, Miss Marilyn.”

Ruthie's throaty laugh turned into a coughing spell. “I look a fright,” she managed to say, gasping. Cole silently agreed. With the wig perched crookedly on her skull and the curls cascading around her wrinkled face, she looked like a demented clown, like Norman Bates.

After Ruthie drifted off again, Reese turned to Cole. “Saw your ex the other day,” he said.

“I thought maybe she'd run off to New York by now.” Cole had seen Charlotte a couple of times since that night at the Eagle, but they didn't have much to say to each other. There were some days he missed her, but also long stretches of time that she never even crossed his mind.

Reese snorted. “That girl ain't going anywhere. She was on the Oxy hunt.” He twisted open a bottle of bright pink nail polish and started to paint Ruthie's fingernails. “I also met your buddy Terry Rose,” he added. “That motherfucker is about to go over the edge.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was all speeded up, talking to me about how he wanted to start cooking his own. Trying to hook me up. He ain't a narc or anything, is he?”

“Nah, he's all right.”

“Well, he talks too much.” Reese blew lightly on Ruthie's fingers. “Listen, till I get this Medicaid shit worked out, I might not have anything for you. I got morphine, but I'm holding on to that for when things get bad.” He looked up. “I ain't gonna let her suffer.”

Cole nodded in sympathy, but his mind raced with numbers and figures, what he stood to lose if Reese stopped supplying him with Ruthie's cancer cash-crop. He didn't think that Reese was selling, so he must have been using the Oxy harder than Cole thought, a way to come down from all the speed he was shoving up his nose. Asshole. Maybe it wouldn't hurt his business too much, since he already overpaid Reese. He didn't know why he was making all this money anyway.

He was on the road when the fireworks started. He heard them from his truck but couldn't see them, only a few flashes of light. Once, when he was a kid, his grandfather had begrudgingly taken him and his grandmother to see the show. She'd been so excited, oohing and ahhing every time another one hit the sky, but his granddaddy complained about the crowd and made them leave before the finale. Cole thought about his grandmother, in front of the TV, alone, worrying. I should have taken her to see them tonight, he thought, I should have done that for her.

Instead he turned up Muddy Ridge and pulled in front of Taylor Jones's single-wide. Taylor was a twenty-five-year-old Marine who was up to 160 milligrams a day. Cole rapped on the door, and Taylor yelled for him to come in.

“Happy fucking Fourth of July.”

He'd grown a bristly mustache and his shaved head gleamed. He wore a pair of camos cut off at the knees and no shirt. He looked scary. He was sloppy and overweight. Cole had never seen him eat anything other than red licorice and Snickers. A sweet freak like most Oxyheads. Taylor collected disability for getting his hand blown off in Iraq, but his VA doctor would not prescribe the higher dosage. “Fucking asshole,” he raged. “Does he know what pain is, motherfucker?”

They were blasting not far from Taylor's, which was making him even crazier. Sometimes he talked nonstop. He described how it was over there, the dust and heat, how he'd seen strange body parts and splattered brain; other times he was as silent as a rock. Tonight was one of those nights, and Cole was glad. He spoke only to ask about Cole's cousin Ricky, the one in Afghanistan.

“Haven't heard anything lately.”

Taylor took the tablets from Cole and washed one down with grape Gatorade. He didn't snort like most of Cole's customers. Taylor legitimately needed the Oxy for his pain. But he was still an addict.

“It's a fucking mess over there,” he said.

“That's what I hear,” Cole said. Wasn't the whole damn world a mess? He waited another minute, but there wasn't anything else to say. He told Taylor he'd catch him later and let himself out. The door banged behind him. As Cole was getting in his truck, Taylor leaned out a window, waving his stump arm. “Here too,” he yelled.

“What?”

“Over here. It's a fucking mess over here too.”

Cole looked at Taylor, stoned and fat and screaming out the window, and did not know what to say except, “Yes it is, man, it's a fucking mess.”

On his drive, as he crested a hill, a spray of red and blue scattered in the sky, pretty and far away. Lacy and her kid were watching from the fairgrounds, and Ellen was probably there too with her fiancé. But if Cole went, he'd be behind the bleachers with all the burnouts and pillheads and glue-huffers and speed freaks and fuckups. What do I have? he thought. Pain pills, stashed cash, and jewelry he'd stolen from old doddering ladies. A stack of postcards. And a thousand useless Bible verses.

Chapter 6

The first of the month was always a busy time. Disability and Social Security checks arrived, prescriptions got filled. Cole loaded up his truck with groceries and headed toward Stinkweed Hollow, at the end of the county line. Even speeding, it took him forty-five minutes to get there. After he passed the last shack on the right he went up a one-lane dirt road for two miles, trying to avoid giant ruts and potholes that the coal trucks had left behind. Low-hanging branches scratched the sides of his pickup. He rolled up his window to keep out the dust. It was August, thick and sticky.

Like his grandfather, Cole knew all the back roads. For thirty years his granddaddy had worked for the electric company, carrying a paperback King James in his tool belt. “There's only two kinds of people,” he liked to say. “The saved and the unsaved. Ain't no in between.” When he occasionally took Cole with him, Cole would watch his grandfather scurry up an electrical pole that looked like the cross that Jesus died on. He pretended his grandfather was magical. He was like God—he gave people light. Even better, he gave them television. After he left his job to preach full-time, they sometimes went without heat because he believed nobody should make money off the word of God. He preached the Gospel to the homebound and the unsaved. He brought plates of food wrapped in foil that he left on front porches, telling Cole, “Never make a man feel below his worth.”

When Cole reached the dilapidated four-room house where Tiny Williams had lived for nearly all of his eighty-three years, a pack of mongrel dogs ran out and surrounded the pickup. Tiny came out and called off the dogs. He was reed-thin and stood about six-four. He'd started working in the deep mines when he was sixteen years old. His wife, Lottie, not much over five foot, stood next to him, waving.

“It's good to see you, son.”

“How y'all doing?”

“We're okay, right, Ma?” Tiny said, grinning, mostly toothless.

“We're hanging on.” Lottie wore a crumpled fedora, her face weathered and tough. “Except now the doctor tells me I got the sugar.”

“Diabetes?”

“Yup.”

“You taking insulin?”

“Yes. I hate a needle. But Tiny here, he's real gentle. He gives me the shots.”

They hardly ever left their home except for occasional trips to the doctor. Cole brought them food, jugs of water, twenty-four-packs of toilet paper, cigarettes, and back copies of the paper because they liked to work the crossword.

As Cole and Tiny unloaded the groceries, the dogs ran underfoot. Lottie, smoking a menthol, looked at Cole with appreciation. “I don't know what we'd do without you.”

“I like coming up here.”

“You're a good boy,” Tiny said.

The house was neat and sparse. Pictures of Bobby Kennedy and John Lewis the union leader hung prominently in the kitchen. Many of the homes Cole went into had the same pictures. His grandmother said Bobby Kennedy was the only politician who made it to heaven, even if he was a Catholic. He was one of the only ones who ever stepped foot in Appalachia, who talked to the people.

After the groceries were put away, they spent the afternoon on the front porch. Lottie brought out iced tea and ham salad sandwiches. The maples and oaks shaded them from the heat, but sunlight trickled through to shine on the hundreds of tin cans that were arranged on fence posts and suspended from the clothesline. Lottie liked trumpery. From the fruit trees she hung ornaments made out of foil and bottle caps and glass that shimmered and twirled whenever there was a breeze.

“How's Clyde?”

“Still hanging on.”

“What about Dorothy? Don't she get lonesome?”

“I guess sometimes.”

Lottie and Tiny said they did not think they could stand to be without the other. They told stories about the old days. They talked about their children and the hard times they'd faced. At Cole's urging, they sang an old death ballad, their voices taut and sweet.

Before he left, he pointed to the porch's loose boards. “I could fix that for you.”

“Oh, it ain't no trouble.”

The coal company had been blasting the ridge behind them for the past year. Already, their well had dried up twice, and a piece of flyrock had busted their kitchen window. But the worst part was the valley fill, a two-hundred-foot wall of rock and rubble towering over them. There were no trees or roots left on the mountainsides to stop the rain, which ran down the face of the valley fill and into the holding pond below it and then flooded their land.

“They'll get out of here pretty soon,” Tiny said.

“They offer to buy you out?” Cole asked.

“I told them there are some things that just ain't for sale.”

“I could do without that blasting. It's ashaking the house. The pictures fall off the walls, the doors don't close right.” Lottie continued, “They ain't gonna pay for no damages either, and you might as well forget about the government helping you out.”

“That's true,” Tiny said. “And I do sometimes worry about that fill sliding.”

“I tell you what,” said Lottie, “there's a lot of politicians that one day are gonna bust hell wide open.”

Tiny said this was also true. He leaned back in his chair. “Don't worry, they'll get out of here before you know it.”

But the coal company didn't look like they planned on going anywhere. It seemed like just about every peak and valley had some kind of mining operation going on. Eventually, maybe the sites would connect like one long flattened roadway. Cole did not know what to tell them. He did not know the answer.

Though the sun had descended, the heat was still thick, and he considered going to the Eagle for a cold beer. Maybe Lacy was working tonight. But instead he drove home, parked in front of his grandmother's. Through the windows he could see the glow of the TV.

“Didn't expect to see you,” she said.

He hung up his ball cap. “Thought I'd stay over here tonight.”

“You hungry?”

“Starving.”

She looked pleased. “I haven't eaten yet either.”

While she busied herself in the kitchen, Cole went upstairs. His childhood room had barely changed over the years, the same plain furniture, the same lake blue walls. A bookshelf with the King James and a couple of model cars. On top of the dresser, a few trinkets: an owl's feather, a piece of quartz, an arrowhead, a snail shell, all taken from the land. He lifted the quartz, its cool, jagged edges pressed into his skin. He used to have more of the same, feathers, rocks, bones. When he was a kid, he was always picking things up.

In the bathroom, he studied himself in the mirror. He was gaunt and pale, and his hair resembled the color of mouse fur. He pinched his cheeks hard until blood rose to his skin. He looked at his face until he saw what it would look like without flesh, saw himself without eyes or lips or nose, the jutting bones and the skeletal outline of his face, saw beyond his reflection. Then he stepped into the tub under the cool stream of water, forgetting everything.

After he dried off, he pulled on a pair of raggedy cutoff sweatpants, which he would not be caught dead wearing in front of anyone other than his grandmother. On the shelf that was reserved for him, his deodorant and shaving cream and hair gel, he found a kit of dye. He mixed up the chemicals and, wearing a pair of latex gloves, fingered and combed in the gooey mix, the way Charlotte had taught him.

His grandmother had the TV trays set up. She was eating a small helping of spaghetti, and she'd served him an enormous bowl, along with store bread, salad, and a glass of milk. The twenty-four-inch screen TV wasn't the only thing that had changed about the room. She'd also added prints of flowers, tiny porcelain animals, and needlepoint wall hangings. For years she'd been waiting to decorate the house her way, without having to listen to her husband grumble about it. Now she had her chance.

“What do you got that plastic bag on your head for?”

“Bleached my hair.”

“I don't know why you've taken a liking to that towheadedness.”

He started to respond, but she shushed him. A rerun of
ER
was starting. The satellite TV gave her a couple hundred channels. At first she had watched indiscriminately, but now she mostly stuck with hospital dramas and a number of cop shows that Cole never would have imagined her liking.

On commercial break, she looked at him. “You reckon your hair's done?”

“Maybe.”

“You still seeing that girl?”

“Nah, we broke up a couple of months ago.”

“Well, for goodness sakes, you should have told me.” She hesitated. “You all right?”

“Yeah, I'm all right.”

She dabbed at the beads of sweat on her brow with a washcloth, and they talked about the stifling heat until her program came back on, then Cole went out for a cigarette. He listened to the trickling creek. The thrum of night crickets. He looked for the moon, couldn't find it past the hills and trees. When he was a teenager, he spent many nights sneaking out and wandering the woods with Terry Rose, smoking pot, sipping whiskey, making plans about leaving. It had taken Cole a while to figure out that Terry had never been to the places he'd bragged about, not Florida or Texas or California, but he still acted like he'd been everywhere, and soon they began talking about going places. Places where they could get away from Bible verses and rules, and ghosts of runaway mothers and dead fathers. When they were fourteen they studied a map of the country, tracing their fingers along rivers and state lines, until they reached the giant spaces of blue. At seventeen, they'd still been talking about it.

Cole took the plastic bag off his head. His grandmother was in the kitchen, washing dishes. When she turned, he saw that her eyes were red and puffy.

“Why, it's so light. You look like a ghost.”

“You know it'll grow back.”

“I didn't say I didn't like it.”

“What's wrong?” he asked. “You look like you've been crying.”

She went back to her scrubbing. Then she said, in an even voice, “I don't believe he would have ever done the same to me. He would not have stuck me in such a place.”

She was right. As terrible as he could be, he would not have put his wife in a nursing home—he would have fought off his daughters and the doctors to the very end. But Cole told her, “You did the best thing for him.”

“Till death do us part, that's what marriage is.”

“Well, you're still married to him. Unless you're planning on getting a divorce.”

“Why do you say such things?”

They carried bowls of butter pecan ice cream into the family room. This time when Cole sat down, he noticed that on top of the TV, along with the familiar family photographs, were a few that he'd never seen before.

“Is that Aunt Naomi?”

“No.”

“Who is it?”

“It's Ruby.”

He picked up the framed photograph. “How old was she?”

“Ten years old in that picture, I do believe. You see how you got her eyes.”

“They don't look the same to me.”

“Oh, yes. Hers changed color too, the way yours do.” She sighed. “I been praying for her. One of these days she'll hear me, she'll come back.”

He held the picture up to the light. His mother was in the backyard, in front of the forest, and the sun shone on her face and she was smiling and looked like she never wanted to leave that spot. Orange poppies and daylilies shot up all around her. She had not known fear nor sadness, not yet; she was still the apple of her father's eye. Six years later, when Cole was born, she named him before she ran off. No biblical name, no middle name, no lineage of his unknown father. Instead she named him for the black gold in these mountains that caused everyone so much grief. “You surely are your mother's child,” his granddaddy would say when he was angry. “You surely are her child.”

Somebody was knocking. Cole groggily looked out the window and saw a red SUV. The coal men. He yawned and let the curtain fall from his fingers and reached for his cigarettes. He'd stayed at his grandmother's last night, and he liked waking up in his childhood bed, the smell of the freshly laundered sheets, the openness of the room.

He pulled on Levi's. It was blazing hot, already felt like it was over a hundred. He padded down the creaky stairs, caught a glimpse of his white hair in the hallway mirror and stopped for a second, looking at someone who was not quite himself.

“Grandma,” he called, then remembered it was Sunday. One of the aunts usually drove her to church. She'd been trying out different churches, couldn't decide on which one she liked best. She told Cole she didn't care for the churches that her daughters now attended, which were some sort of Pentecostal or another, but that wasn't the same thing as the old Holiness way.

He walked out, surprising the man who'd been spying through the window, soft hands cupped around his face. Jeans and a crisp tucked-in polo shirt. Clean-shaven, hair parted to the side. He wore work boots, which meant he wanted to walk around the property. Cole looked to see if there were any others, but the man had come alone. The nice one. They sent different types, usually two at a time—friendly, wheedling, menacing. Lacy told him he was lucky they even wanted to buy; they usually only bothered buying out whoever lived at the head. “You must be sitting on a heap of coal,” she explained.

The man was smiling too much, but his eyes, nearly hidden under thick eyebrows, were mean, and Cole focused on them.

“How you doing, son? Joe Tuling, I work for Heritage.”

“My grandma's not here. She's at church.”

“You must be her grandson?” Smiling pleasantly. Eyes like a snake.

He told the man his name. Didn't offer him coffee or a cigarette. The man looked tired and hot, but Cole did not offer him a place to sit.