The Hollow Ground: A Novel (33 page)

Flashlight in hand, I rushed out onto the lawn and into the cracked and splintered street. I wasted no time getting to The Shaft. The entire sidewalk was roped off though, so I was forced to enter through its back door. As soon as I stepped through, I saw Star. Her gaze slowly went down the length of my body before meandering its way back up. Bear was standing next to her and when he leaned to whisper in her ear, she pushed him away, saying, “I told you, I ain’t talking to you till you apologize.”

Joe stepped out from behind the bar and steered me right back out the door. We stood in the side lot and Joe told me that Daddy had just been in and had left. Joe gripped my shoulder and lowered his head to talk against my ear. “I should never have told the cops what I heard that day. I just figured Sully’s wife and girl had a right to know. That’s all I was thinking.” Joe’s breath was hot and felt sticky on my skin. “Frank and Sully had been dead so long, you understand? That’s all I was thinking. The girl and the wife should know. But your daddy came in here talking crazy. He said
he
killed Frank. You need to get him home before he does something he’ll—” But Joe didn’t finish the statement. He just stared down at the dirt beneath our feet.

Fast I circled round the building and slipped underneath the rope that blocked off the sidewalk. In just a few steps I was at the lip of the pit. The air was an even brighter pink now that the night was darker and I saw Daddy right away. He was there on one of the upper ledges, just like I’d seen in my vision. Steam and smoke whirled around him and there was what looked like a dead German shepherd at his feet.

“Daddy?” I called, but he didn’t seem to hear me. The slope down to the ledge was rocky, jagged with tree roots that in the eerie pink light seemed to shift and move. I searched for the best place to make my way down, but since no one spot looked better than any other, I sat where I stood, my legs dangling over the edge.

“Girl! You crazy?” I heard Joe shout. “Get back up here!”

Quick, I turned around and started backing down the slope the way I would down a ladder, but I lost footing and slid several yards, jarring my hip against a boulder. Dirt and gravel rained down, pelting my eyes and making it impossible to see if Joe was coming after me.

“Daddy?” I shouted, glancing to where he’d been on the ledge and not finding him there. I reached for a tree trunk that stuck out from the slope like a gigantic battered limb and found sure footing. Still in a crawl position, I kept backing down. The slope gradually began leveling out and it wasn’t long before I finally reached the ledge.

The heat was fierce. “Daddy?” I called as I walked in the direction he’d been. Ahead of me something appeared to be rising up out of the mist but as I stared at it, I saw that it was only an old icebox that someone had chucked down the slope.

I wiped my face on my sleeve, not sure if it was raining or if my skin was soaked from the damp of the steam.

“Brigid!” I heard, and there was Daddy, only a few feet from me, as if he’d just formed out of the smoky air. Daddy looked sicker than I’d ever seen him. The skin on his face sagged like it was melting. Littered at our feet were some broken brown bottles and part of a cat.

“My God, you shouldn’t have come down here,” he said, and for the first time in my life I saw fear blacken his eyes.

An explosion from farther down below shook us and a roar of hot air blasted up from the mouth of the pit. “I think it wants us,” I cried and Daddy nodded. We held each other and I squeezed his waist as if I could find what I needed to say somewhere within his bones. When I finally spoke I didn’t know where the words came from or how I knew the truth they held. “Daddy, you didn’t mean to kill your brother and hide him in that monkey shaft. You did it to save your life.”

“So what?” he said and stepped away from me. “That doesn’t make it right.” He turned toward the pit and gazed down at the smoke-filled abyss as if he were looking for something within it.

I searched his face for clues of what to say next. I knew I needed to speak from the place his love had formed inside me, but that place was aching and silent. In desperation I repeated Ma’s words to me, “Sometimes right ain’t possible.” But soon as I said it my mouth went stiff. “I love you, Daddy,” I said. “No matter what you’ve done. No matter what you’ll ever do.”

Daddy’s eyes nearly squinted shut from the smoke. My own eyes teared uncontrollably.

“You’re meant for better than this world can give, princess,” he said. “Don’t ever forget that.” Daddy pressed me hard to him and it took us a few moments to realize someone was calling down. We stared up through the clouds of steam that were flecked with coal ash and cinders and for a moment could make out a blurred face and a waving hand.

“Joe saw me—” I said but couldn’t finish the sentence because of a coughing fit.

“Pull your shirt up over your mouth,” Daddy instructed, turning his head and pulling his collar up to the bridge of his nose so he could breathe through the cloth. I did the same, telling myself that none of this was real, that me and Daddy were outlaws, like the type we saw in TV Western shows, bandits with handkerchiefs tied across our faces, but my eyes and throat stung so bad that pretending got me nowhere. Through a sliver of opened eyelid I watched a fireman climb down to us by holding on to a rope. As soon as the man reached the ledge Daddy pushed me toward him. “Take my girl,” he pleaded as if the man had come down for some other reason than to rescue us.

The fireman crouched and told me to ride him piggyback with my arms looped round his neck. “Hold on tight,” he said and before I could say anything else to Daddy, me and the man started up the gentlest part of the slope. “Daddy?” I called, looking back over my shoulder.

He waved to me. “Hold on, princess. Hold on with all your might!”

The fireman grunted and snorted and snuffled like a wild, angry animal. “You’re doing good,” he’d call out to me each time he had to heave us up and over a particularly dangerous crag. My arms grew so tired that more than once I pictured myself letting go and tumbling backwards into the abyss. My brain must have gone sick from the smoke and the fumes because I started to imagine that the pit was merely the pothole in Pothole Park. Sometimes I pictured it as the sinkhole that swallowed Auntie. By the time someone pulled me off the fireman’s back and stood me on solid ground, I was confused as to where I was and what had happened. It took a few minutes of listening to sirens and staring at fire truck lights to snap me back into the moment.

Someone had wrapped a blanket round me and was trying to guide me to an ambulance, but I refused to budge. “Daddy,” I said.

“The fireman went right back down to get your daddy, sweetheart,” the person said.

But it took so long for Daddy and the fireman to come back up that two more firemen went down. I could hear the shouts of the firemen calling back and forth to each other but no one would tell me what was going on.

“Daddy?” I yelled. “Daddy!” But my throat was so coated with ash and soot that I don’t think anyone could hear me.

Night turned into morning and morning into afternoon. I’d been to the hospital and back, and by the time the sun sank behind West Mountain, me and Gram had been sitting on the front stoop of The Shaft for hours, watching firemen and volunteers make their way down to the ledge of the pit to search for Daddy.

Mr. Gilpin, the fire chief, had been over to talk to us twice already but there was something in the tense, hunched way he approached us this time that told me he wouldn’t be coming over to speak to us again.

“I’m sorry to report, Mrs. Howley, that our search into the pit is through.”

Gram’s expression hadn’t changed since she’d arrived. All her features had gone slack with the shock of everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours and she looked older than the hills surrounding us. “You found him?” she said.

“No, ma’am. Sorry to report.” And his eyes cut apologetically toward me, then lowered to the ground.

“So then what?” Gram said. Her gaze stuck to the same spot of ground the fire chief stared at. “He fell in?”

“It’s a possibility, Mrs. Howley.”

“Jumped then?” Gram’s voice jumped slightly as she said it.

The fire chief made the sign of the cross. “God willing, he did not.”

Slowly Gram’s eyes moved from the ground to the fire chief’s face. “What are you sayin’, Mr. Gilpin? And remember I known you since you was a boy and sprinkled dirt on both your mama’s and daddy’s coffins. I ’spect you to be straight with me, with me
and
the girl, and tell us the truth.”

“Yes, ma’am. What I mean to say is, it’s a long ledge. It goes clear across to the other side of the pit. He might have climbed up somewhere along the way and with all the steam and smoke—” Mr. Gilpin shrugged.

“I don’t get what you’re sayin’,” Gram said. “That he just done walked off and left us?”

Mr. Gilpin sucked his teeth in a sort of whistle. “That’s just what I’m saying, Mrs. Howley. We don’t know.”

And then he tried again to explain what might have happened, but I’d stopped listening. In my mind I was tall tale-telling with Daddy. We were back in Centrereach at Culver Lake, like we used to do so many summers ago, drifting into the water lilies, telling stories about the lake ladies who swam below us, trying to catch us up in the duckweed and turn our souls into liquid amber. Dripping, we walked up onto the shore and waved to Auntie who sat knitting in the shade of the willow trees. Daddy and me collapsed on the beach blanket as I told him about all the things I used to tell him about before we moved to Barrendale, before our lives got eaten away by fire, by the past, by our hate and love.

In my mind, I kept talking to him even after all the firemen and ambulance workers left and me and Gram were driven home in the back of a police car. I kept talking because I wanted to believe that wherever Daddy was, he was back to the way he used to be, to the Daddy he was when I was little—when the dark part of him was the smallest part and nothing made him happier than hearing what I had to say.

EPILOGUE

For nearly five years we’ve been living up on what’s called the East Mountain Plateau but what everyone around here just calls The Ridge. The house sits high on the foundation Gram had built for it. We’ve got a view of most of Barrendale and face West Mountain, which still steams and smokes like it might one day turn into the volcano we all suspect it once upon a time was. I don’t think anyone from around here would be shocked to see it erupt coal chunks and sulfur fumes.

Up on The Ridge we got a little creek and any number of apple and pear trees that bloom and fruit and shed their leaves all when they’re supposed to. The street has never cracked or shifted once. The birdcalls deafen us and each winter we’re amazed by how long snow lingers. That’s what living in the fire zone does to you. Makes the mundane marvelous and the extraordinary humdrum. I guess in a way you could say that was its gift. We’ll always see the world different from most. As Gram and me have come to understand, you learn a different kind of instinct when your feet tread on hollow ground.

It’s been more than five years now since we lost Daddy. That’s how me and Gram refer to it since we never found out anything additional about what happened to him. We hammered a wooden cross into the ground beneath one of the apple trees to mark his final resting place because, though we don’t speak of it, we both know in our hearts he’s dead. I reckon Gram also knows, just as I do, that it was facing up to what he’d done to Uncle Frank that struck the mortal blow. Gram’s got some of that facing-up going on herself. Detective Kanelous had to close the investigation into William Sullivan’s murder, but he said he had “probable cause to believe” Uncle Frank had done it. Gram said that meant she had “probable cause to believe” he hadn’t, but I think those were just empty words because not a Sunday in Lent passes without her voicing regrets over how she’d treated Daddy and Uncle Frank as boys. Every now and then she ends those regrets with: “If I’d felt different ’bout each of them maybe…” But she always leaves that “maybe” dangling, wanting, I guess, to leave all of its possibilities open.

Marisol and me are friends again. She felt bad for the way Daddy disappeared and she came to the house with the prayer cards and holy oils her grandfather had sent for me to get rid of the curse. So far, ever since, only good luck has followed. Due to Detective Kanelous’s help, Gram saw her Great Idea come to pass and was able to pay for the move and all the house repairs because the government finally came through with the money they owed us for Auntie’s house in Centrereach.

Often Gram likes to talk about seeing what she calls “the Great Idea come to life.” She likes to describe the house gliding down the hill on the back of a flatbed truck, just as she’d seen it in her vision. She especially likes to comment on how smooth the ride was, noting that the aspidistra plant remained in exactly the same position on the porch during the entire trip. That plant remains in that spot on the porch to this day, only a stone’s throw from Mrs. Schwackhammer’s house, which was moved on that same truck the following morning, trailing ivy vines behind it. Mrs. Schwackhammer has since rooted those vines and her house is once again wrapped around with the ivy she’d planted more than half a century ago from her bridal bouquet. We were especially lucky that both houses got moved because soon after the Redevelopment Authority refused anyone else’s applications, claiming the paperwork involved was slowing the demolition process. But we all knew they just didn’t want to be bothered with the hassle.

The fire beneath the west side of Barrendale still burns and the dig out continues. Some say it will take another five years to dig it out. Some say ten. It’s already forced more than a thousand people out of their homes and destroyed more than a hundred and twenty acres of houses and streets and landmarks that will now only exist in photos and memory. After they finish digging the fire out and fill in all the trenches, the west side will be just one huge flat piece of land in an otherwise jagged landscape because even its telltale slopes and dips and hills will be gone.