American Rust

1. Poe

It took him, he didn’t know, half an hour to walk home from Lee’s house. Two miles, give or take. He passed through town, the long main drag, it was even darker than normal, no lights on anywhere except for Frank’s Tavern. It seemed like forever since they’d been there but it had only been a few hours. It was long after closing time now, but the lights were still on. Everyone knew why that was. Poe was careful to not look in the windows as he passed, you didn’t know who might be in there. The bar had nearly gone out of business for back taxes but somehow Frank Meltzer came up with a bunch of money, claimed it was some aunt that gave it to him but most people said he’d flown down to Florida and driven back in a minivan full of dope. Ten- thousand- dollar paycheck, if you had a clean record you just had to call the right people, but only if your record was clean. Being a mule, they called it. But it was just like the movie said: once you were in, they didn’t just let you out. He wondered if Frank Meltzer was sorry he’d done it. There was another place like that, Little Poland, supposedly the Russian mob had bought it but meanwhile the food was still good, people would drive all the way down from the city to eat there, pierogies and kielbasa.

He was making good time. He had long legs—a fast walker. He was thinking a lot. He thought you’ll follow her. You’ll follow her to Connecticut. Plenty of schools up there you’ll get a scholarship. Except Christ what was wrong with him. She had moved in with her boyfriend, husband now. It was all a fantasy what he’d just had, it was not the last time they’d sleep together it didn’t have that feel, it didn’t have that tragic, sitting around crying feeling. But it was close. They would do it one more time and it would be horrible, sex followed by five or six hours of intense bawling and holding each other and complete and utter misery. And then he would never see her again. She would not come back to the Valley he could be sure of that. Four years gone, down the tubes. Only Christ it wasn’t four years, it had never been four years, it had only been fun and games that had gone on four years, it was not the same as being together. They had never been together properly except the one Christmas break three years back when she came home the whole week. One week of walking down the street and holding hands and all, kissing games, all your standard boyfriend- girlfriend activities. The rest of the time it was just sex. That had seemed good at first, a pretty girl who just wanted sex and not much else. You did not think those girls really existed. But now it didn’t seem good at all. She would go back permanently to her other life, because that’s what it was, she had two lives and this one, the one here in her hometown, this was the life she was trying to get rid of. It was another world entirely she had out there, he had not seen it but from the way she talked he could imagine it, that new world, mansions, educated people, a butler involved. It was not even doctors and lawyers, it was another level entirely. It was the level of having butlers. Only maybe those were only from movies. Butlers were outmoded, probably. He guessed it was all robotics now.

And look at him here now, walking down a dirt road, an actual dirt road, he imagined her new husband driving his BMW or whatever it was down the road, look honey, we are driving on an actual dirt road. How quaint. Well yes. He had seen a picture of the new husband once, back when he was still just a boyfriend. He looked queer. That boyfriend of hers looked like an actual homosexual. Wearing a pink oxford. Maybe that wasn’t queer in Connecticut but still, that pink shirt, it had given Poe a good deal of satisfaction to see it in that picture. Though here he himself was on his dirt road, walking home as he had no functioning vehicle, his own home, not mansion but a doublewide trailer, just ahead of him. He could see the porch light just ahead. It was nearly five in the morning. Before going inside he took a leak in the bushes so as not to wake his mother with the bathroom noises. He was careful to be quiet—his mother she wasn’t a good sleeper and if there was anyone who needed it, about three years of good sleep, it was her.

He made it into the house quietly and into his bed. Falling asleep he had to remind himself that bad things were happening to him, but that wasn’t how it felt. This will all blow over, he decided.

It was late in the morning when he woke up, clearheaded, the best he’d felt in weeks, he checked the clock and knew his mother had already gone to work. He was thinking about Lee again, lying there in his bed in his room with the sun shining on him. The south- facing window, he hated it, you didn’t get good sleep once the sun came up. He needed to fix the curtain rod, it’d been broken for weeks now. And the tape was coming off his old posters, Kiss, why had he ever liked them anyway, plus Rage Against the Machine, someone said they were communists. The good thing was that with no curtain over the window he could see a long way, almost to the river, and on account of the sun it was already hot in the room. It felt good though he hadn’t slept well. The warmth.

He would go to the library and fill out the applications for schools, April 10th now, another day advancing, it would not stop until he died. Only even then it would not stop, the day he died would be like any other day. He hoped that was a long way off. He got up and went outside in his boxer shorts, it was another beautiful day the kind that reminds you how good it is to just be breathing, no matter if nothing else is going right. You are breathing, he thought, more than many can say. He looked at his car, his 1973 Camaro, last of the small- bumper models, before the government came in with its five- mile- per- hour bumpers that ruined the lines of the car. He would never own one newer than 1973. You would have to be an idiot. The Camaro was sitting where the tow truck had left it a month earlier, off to the side of the driveway. Leaves and dirt on top of the new paintjob he’d paid for. He’d dropped the transmission racing Dustin McGreevy in his new WRX Subaru, Dustin going on and on about pop- off valves and turbos and then Poe had smoked him the first time but the second time Poe’d dropped the tranny, the original Turbo-matic, torn the inside of it all to pieces and they’d had to leave the Ca-maro in the ditch and Dustin had given him a ride home. So much for American steel, said Dustin. Least it isn’t my mom’s car, Poe told him, flicking the Jesus air freshener.

That was a lesson, he decided, McGreevy’s Japanese car, it had only won because it hadn’t destroyed itself. They knew what they were doing, the Japanese—plenty of steel still got made there. Special alloys. You wanted to believe in America, but anyone could tell you that the Germans and Japs made the same amount of steel America did these days, and both those countries were about the size of Pennsylvania. He wasn’t sure about that last fact, but he guessed it was true. Pennsylvania was a big state. Not to mention all the expensive cars were made there—overseas—Lexus, Mercedes, the list went on. Happening to the whole country, he thought, glory days are over.

Anyway he’d put almost eight grand into the Camaro, punched- out 350, Weld rims, new paint, much of it on a credit card he’d stopped making payments on. He’d probably get three or four grand all told. Maybe thirty- five hundred. Speaking realistically. It had rust. It was not a good investment. It was not like putting your money with Charles Schwab. Get something cheap, good on gas. Toyota or something. He tried to think but no, the car, that old Camaro, it hadn’t gotten him any pussy he wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. Pussy magnet is what the guys at the hotrod shop called that car of his, but that was a bunch of bullshit. You could not trust people who told you things like that. The car was a loser, through and through. As his mother had said it would be.

He would put an ad up on the Internet to sell it, do it at the library when he went to do his college applications. Some stupid kid would buy it same as he had. He’d pick up an old Civic or Tercel, good on gas. Listen to yourself, he thought. Buying an actual little car like that. Unthinkable even a month ago, you are changing. You are changing in front of your own eyes. He got a hose and bucket and sprayed the leaves and dirt off and got his special car soap from the house and sudsed the Camaro so it wouldn’t look so bad for a buyer. He was still wearing his boxer shorts. It felt good being out there in the sun like that, practically naked, he could feel the heat all over him.

Then he heard someone coming up the road. It sounded like his mother’s Plymouth. He didn’t think his mother would be back that early, but maybe so—her hands were getting worse every day. That was another thing he hadn’t considered—that soon his mother would not be able to work, at least not much. Winters were hell on her. She pulled in next to the trailer and there she was, his mother, dressed for church and him standing in his underpants in the driveway, nearly one o’clock in the afternoon. She shook her head, but not in a friendly way. She was not happy to see it.

“I’m selling it,” he said, by way of making up for being caught like that.

She just looked at him.

“The car. I’m getting something that runs. I’m going to college. In September, if I can.”

She didn’t say anything.

“I’m gonna call that coach at Colgate College,” he continued. “He said I could check in with him anytime. And there’ll be other places. Either way I’ll be in school by this September. And not any California University of Pennsylvania, either.”

“Okay,” she said. She went up onto the porch. She didn’t believe him.

“I’m serious,” he said.

She went inside.

He followed her in. He looked around for a pair of pants to put on, as if it would make him seem more serious.

“Are you really going,” she said. “Or are you just saying that so I don’t start charging you rent.”

“I’m going,” he said. “I’m going to the library to get the applications. Get them in the mail soon as possible.”

“What about letters from your teachers and copies of your transcript?”

“Right,” he said. “I’ll do that, too.” He had forgotten that part.

“Billy?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re a good boy.” She hugged him but still, he could tell, she didn’t believe him. Who could blame her? He was hungry and he went to the fridge, there was nothing he wanted. He checked the chest freezer on the porch, but it was nearly empty as well. Some venison wouldn’t hurt anything. He would go and get a deer—poaching—it ran in the family. There were too many deer now, they kept on extending the hunting season but never enough to catch up with the deer population, a little poaching it was no big deal. Fifty pounds of venison, it was free money. Though his mother wouldn’t touch it.

After getting dressed he took his .30-30 off its rack, his Winchester 94 from before Winchester went to shit, the gun was fifty years old. Top-eject the way God wanted and no scope—that was for people who couldn’t shoot. An original Lyman peep. Someone might have guessed it was his father’s or grandfather’s rifle but neither one of them knew or cared to take care of anything this nice. He’d saved and bought it himself, passing up the clunky newer models, mostly plastic, that cost half as much.

He dropped a few cartridges in his pocket, three was the right number, then walked down into the field, it was definitely spring now, that rich green smell was everywhere, he wondered where it came from. After slipping into the small blind he’d built, he drew in the air, even the damp soil in the blind smelled rich, it was just the smell of things growing. Smell of life, really. He pushed a pair of blunt- nosed rounds into the magazine. It was all a cycle. It would continue long after he was gone. It was turning out to be a good day. Though already he’d nearly pissed it away, he wouldn’t get to the library before it closed. It’s Sunday, he thought. Probably closed anyway. He would get it done tonight and still mail the apps tomorrow. But for now it was a nice day and you did not piss away days like this in the library.

The field had not been mowed in a year and the grass was high and the goldenrod was taking over. He would have to mow it soon. He would do that tomorrow as well, a field unmowed did not stay a field very long. He would stop being the kind of punk that put everything off till tomorrow. No excuses it was time to grow up. In his way he was still a momma’s boy. He admitted that now. He was good at some things but not at others. He looked out over the land, rolling off in all different directions as far as the eye could see, it was all ridges and hollows, deep wrinkles in the earth as if God had taken a great armful and squeezed it in on itself. Like when you play with the skin on a dog’s face, it all wrinkles up. He had not even bothered to get another dog, he thought about that. He was still mourning Bear. But Bear had been dead two years. Was that mourning or being lazy? He went back to the rolling terrain. Of course God was not the explanation. Isaac would know why it did that. Underground plates, probably.

The field descended gradually to a stream and then the land went uphill again, a hundred different types of green, the pale new grass and new buds on the oaks and darkness of the pine tree needles, the hemlocks. Spring—Christ even the animals loved springtime. You called it all green but that was not correct, there should have been different words, hundreds of them. One day he would invent his own. The air was cool and the sky was very blue. Christ it was a nice day. It could have been back in Indian times, a day like this, with the land all greening up and beautiful. He did not see why people would ever want to leave here. It was a beautiful place and it was no exaggeration to say it. It was because of the job situation. But that was changing as well. The Valley was recovering. Only it would never be what it had been and that was the trouble. People couldn’t adjust to that—it had been a wealthy place once, or not wealthy but doing well, all those steelworkers making thirty dollars an hour there had been plenty of money. It would never be like that again. It had fallen a long ways. No one blinked at taking a minimum- wage job now. He had not been old enough to see it fall is why it didn’t bother him. He just saw the good parts of it. That is a gift, he decided, to only see the good parts. Because we’re the first ones to grow up with it like this. The new generation. All we know. But things are improving in different ways. Right now, right from where he was sitting, there were patches of woods that he remembered being overgrown fields when he was younger. Oak, cherry, birch, the land going back to its natural state.

He looked at the area he was hunting, the strip of woods at the edge of their property, a long thin funnel of trees that ran along the edge of the field down to the creek. There were creeks everywhere, that was the other thing about this land. It was rich with life only most people went by it without noticing, as he often did himself. The deer would break from the end of the treeline into the small opening before the creek. He would take the smallest one. He sat and let his mind empty out.

Time passed, he was just watching, he was in his trance, his body was all numbed out he couldn’t even feel it, he hadn’t even twitched in an hour at least, just his eyes. That was the trick, disconnect your mind from your body. It felt very natural, his father had taught him, you watch any nature show and you know all animals do it, it was not possible to sit still for any length of time otherwise, to just completely blend in. You put every part of you to sleep except your eyes. But people didn’t have to do that anymore. You did not have to be a part of your surroundings. You just went to the drive- through. He decided there was something wrong with that. He himself couldn’t eat a McDonald’s hamburger, he could taste the chemicals in it, he had a delicate stomach. He could eat a pile of vension, or rabbit or quail or anything that lived in the woods, just anything where he knew where it came from. Any wild meat you could tell, it gave something back to you. But Christ, McDonald’s. Not to single them out. It was not that their product was inferior. Burger King, Wendy’s they were all just as bad. They gave him diarrhea. It was most likely the chemicals. He checked his watch again and only a minute had passed. That’s what you get for thinking, he thought. Time won’t move if you think. He let himself focus again. He thought about the deer. Taking a nap under those trees where you’ll hear anyone coming in after you. But soon you’ll want to eat and maybe take a sip from that cool stream and you’ll have to cross that little opening. He sniffed and turned his head slowly and sniffed again to check the wind. It was still favorable, coming from the direction of the treeline, blowing toward him. The deer couldn’t smell him.

Wait for them to come get a nice cool drink from this stream. He thought about Lee. That will be fine, he thought. Even if she’s married she still loves me. He wondered if he would see her that night. It didn’t have to be so tragic, their ending. They loved each other but the stars were not in favor of it, so to speak. She was doing what was best. He thought about Isaac then, and the dead man in the factory. He shivered, it was not a good thought and he put it out of his mind. Harris had taken care of it anyway. It was a big fuckup and he’d caused it but Harris had taken care of it.

He heard another car come up the road and then pull into their driveway. One of Mom’s friends. He wondered if he should go check. And waste all your two hours sitting and letting the woods forget you’re here. All the squirrels and birds are feeding again like you don’t even exist. Little Mrs. Whitetail’s guard will be down. Sit like an Indian, wait them out. They’re probably bedded down a hundred yards from here.

Twenty or so minutes later there was movement at the top of the field. He moved his body slowly in that direction but didn’t raise his rifle. Then he saw it was not a deer. A person—Harris—appeared at the top of the hill next to the trailer. Poe could see the sunlight on his bald head. Harris was looking all around the field. Christ he’d get busted for poaching. First he catches me yesterday and now again today. He felt sweat run down his armpits all of a sudden, he could see Harris scanning the field, he could practically watch the man’s mind working; Harris saw where the treeline funneled to the stream and then spotted the small thicket and the brush pile that gave good vantage on the opening. It was the best place to hunt that funnel and Harris began walking down the hill toward it, right toward him. Poe knew he couldn’t see into the thicket, the sun was in Harris’s face but still Harris was coming right for him. It was not for poaching. He would not have come all this way for poaching. He couldn’t have known besides. It was that Isaac had been right—Harris was only biding his time and Christ he didn’t know, he’d barely slept he couldn’t think straight. Harris knew, you were not going to pull the wool over on Harris. Lee she would never talk to him again, getting her brother in trouble like that, the last one who needed trouble was Isaac English, tried to kill himself in the river like his mother did. He felt the weight of the rifle. It was two hundred yards to Harris, maybe one eighty, it was all he could think about, there were plenty of places to brace it was maybe a six- inch holdover at that distance. Only chance you’ll ever have. You or anyone else Harris he was a fucking machine everyone knew it. He looked at Harris and thought that way for a long time. He had a strange feeling in his bowels, it was fear, he thought let this be over quickly. By the time he set down the .30-30, Harris was only seventy paces away. Christ. Christ you’re a fucking lunatic an actual insane lunatic thinking about shooting a law enforcement officer you’ve known since you were a kid. As if that will make your problems go away.

He slid the gun under the brush pile and crawled for a while behind the brush so that when Harris saw him come out, he would not be near the gun.

Harris waited for him to stand up.

“Billy,” said Harris.

“Afternoon, Chief Harris.”

“Go on and fetch your rifle back up to the house so it doesn’t rust.”

Poe looked at him.

“Go on,” said Harris. “We’ve got bigger things to worry about.”

2. Isaac

He picked his way along the creek, the new moon, he thought, the night was very dark. Soon enough the ravine had shrunk to a flat streambed and he was on the grounds of the steelmill just south of town. He made his way north, past the long empty buildings, each a quarter of a mile long and twenty stories tall. He passed the four remaining blast furnaces and their powerhouses, the furnaces were rusted black but still rose high above even the buildings, hundreds of enormous pipes snaking over and around each other, intricate windings. There were dozens of slag cars still on their tracks. He passed under the ore crane and then passed stacks upon stacks of I-beams and T-beams, other structural members. They’d run out of money during the dismantlement. No one wanted to buy an old steelmill. Too much liability.

It was dark and he was comfortable. He followed the train tracks out of the mill, past the town and his old school, past the road to Poe’s. All of it went quickly out of sight. The railbed was dark and narrow and winding, cut into the side of the hill, the woods dense on either side, the sound of his footsteps seemed to carry a long way. The kid begins his journey for real. As alone now as when he came into the world. Deadest time of night—the day creatures still asleep and night creatures bedded down. A kid afoot. Bound for California. Warmth of his own desert.

There were a few hobo camps in the woods along the tracks and he kept his eyes out for fires. The kid will be fine, he thought. King of the snakes and duke of all hoboes. He watched a light move quickly across the sky high above him. A satellite. Comrade to Arab traders and astronauts. All wanderers.

Gradually the sky began to expand with a pale gray light and the few minutes before the sun rose properly he thought: right about now, and shortly after he heard a single chirp and then another, and within a few seconds the bushes and woods were rustling with movement, the sound of birdsong and fluttering wings, tanagers, grosbeaks, orioles. All on the same clock. Live by the same rules, never changing. Not like the kid. He makes his own sun. Decides he prefers the night.

On the opposite side of the river the sun was hitting brightly and the shadows on his side seemed to get darker. Ahead of him he could make out the tall smokestack and rotting water tower of the traincar plant. He began to feel nervous. No, he thought, the kid relishes any test. Pits his wit against any who tell him thou shalt not. Decides to retrieve his backpack and belongings just for the sake of doing so. Only this time he will approach the plant from the rear.

Leaving the tracks, Isaac followed a small stream up the hillside, a canopy of alder, the bark white against the green of everything else, moss dragging in the clear fast water. Flowering plants. White ones bloodroot, purple ones don’t know. Mayflowers, too—nearly extinct— too pretty for their own good. At the top of the hill the stream came out of a hole in the ground and he lay in the damp moss and splashed the cold water into his mouth until his stomach was full. After that he moved slowly through the woods, slipping from tree to tree until he could see the clearing where Harris’s truck had been parked the previous night. The clearing was empty. He stayed in the woods anyway, walking parallel to the fireroad until he reached the meadow and the machine shop. It had taken a long time and the sun was well up now. He looked into the open dark doorway of the shop. Guilt and another feeling. Place of victory. Shouldn’t be proud but I am. Thinking that he had an even stronger guilty feeling and went to look for his backpack in the field.

This calls for further reflection, he decided. How many people do you know who have never struck a person in anger? Only you. Which includes what happened the other night.

Meanwhile here’s your pack, just where you left it… money and notebooks still inside. Though slightly damp. A sandwich bag of raisins and peanuts. A nice breakfast. It occurs to the kid that he has not eaten in two days. No worries—food can be found anywhere. After consolidating the things he needed into the larger army surplus pack, he left his smaller schoolbag in the field and made his way back toward the train tracks, finishing off the raisins and peanuts.

Two hours later a short train passed him in the middle of a long straightaway and all he could do was watch in frustration as the cars sped by, too fast to grab hold. Tired and hungry anyway. Might have gone under the wheels if you even tried. What would it matter? Speeding up the natural process. Beings in time, moving toward our expiration. It’s cowardly, he thought. That’s why it matters. Of all the sperm and eggs that ever existed, here you are, moving under your own power. Odds of you existing—one in ten trillion, no, smaller. One to Avogadro’s number: 6.022 times 10²³. Meanwhile people throw it away.

He decided not to think about it—sadness too much for him. He calculated where he was, and his speed. On flat ground he makes 3.5 miles per hour. Slightly slower on this gravel. Tires the ankles. Plus the tracks follow every curve in the river—the roads would be shorter. Except the land here is flat and the river will take him where he wants to go. The kid knows that the roads will just get him lost. He tunes himself to the rhythms of the cosmos. Slow and steady.

Belle Vernon was the next major town downriver. There’d been development there recently, a shopping mall, a Lowe’s home improvement, a Starbucks, places like that. Traveling properly on foot, the kid is now beyond the places he knows anyone. His material comforts falling away, no place will be foreign. The world is his home. He teaches these lessons and sends them through the ether for others to soak through their skins. A child speaks his first words, a mother conceives a daughter. An old man in India and his deathbed realization—that’s the kid.

He came around a sharp bend in the river, a retaining wall to keep the hill from sliding down over the train tracks, and surprised two men standing at the wall with their shirts off. It was an isolated spot, and the two men had cans of spraypaint in their hands. One had a shaved head and a tattoo of an eagle that spread across his entire chest. Isaac wasn’t sure whether to turn around and go back the way he came or to keep going. Then he recognized one of them—Daryl Foster. He’d been a year behind Isaac but he’d dropped out. He worked at the Dollar Store in Charleroi. Isaac relaxed some.

“Isaac English?”

“Nice to see you, Daryl.”

“Yeah,” said Daryl, “been a while now, hasn’t it?” He was smiling; he seemed genuinely happy to see Isaac.

“How you doing?” said Daryl’s friend with the shaved head.

“Good,” said Isaac.

“It’s Nietzsche,” said Daryl, pointing at what they were spraying.

Isaac nodded. They’d written, in tall neat block letters: OUT OF LIFE’S SCHOOL OF WAR, WHAT DOESN’T KILL and there he’d interrupted them.

“Alright then, brother,” said his friend, giving Isaac a nod.

“Take it easy,” said Isaac. He took the signal and began to walk again.

“Hey,” called Daryl. “You still taking care of your dad? Shit I thought you’d be long gone, doing science experiments or something.”

“Making my escape,” Isaac called back. “If anyone asks about me…”

“Won’t say a goddamn word, brother.”

Isaac waved and kept going. That was the good thing about the Valley. There was a serious anti- authoritarian bent. Being a rat was lower than being a murderer. Even two like this are the kid’s allies, he thought. He chooses equally among heroes and murderers. Among the rich and the helpless.

He continued walking. As for Daryl hanging around the white supremacists, it was not unusual. Stormfront, they called themselves. They’d come in when the mills went under and Pennsylvania was now full of them. More than any other state, he’d read. All the hills—they can meet without anyone knowing. Still, no one took them seriously. Never heard of them hurting anyone. Of course it’s easy to say that when you’re white.

Shortly after, he passed Allenport on the opposite side of the river, the Wheeling Pittsburgh steelmill still running there, though everyone knew it was bound to close soon—they were down to one shift, only a few hundred people. There was a long train pulling out of the yard carrying sheetmetal rolls.

Next he passed through a long section of forest and then a few miles later he saw the towboat station across from Fayette City, the piers and enormous white storage tanks, a handful of towboats tied up, smokestacks and pilothouses and stubby square bows, empty barges moored along the opposite bank. The trees and brush, the green was pushing out everywhere, it was an uprising, it was above him and around him and over the water, there was not a single bare spot except for the trackbed gravel. Patch of white in the brush. Styrofoam? Legbone. Stripped and bleached, stray or suicide train jumper. Phosphorus donor. Old bones make new blooms. Regeneration. The kid has been here before. The kid has ridden Viking prows, hunted polar bear. Attempting to save his comrades, he is among the Fallen at Omaha Beach. Struck down, he rises again. Lives with honor—one of the few. The people retreat shamefaced from him and the kid stands alone. Accepts the company of the best and the worst. Accepts the company of himself.

The kid will rest a minute, he thought. The kid has not slept in seventy- two hours. He found a place along the riverbank in the heavy brush, lay out on top of his sleeping bag, and passed out quickly. It was near dark when he woke up and started walking again. You slept eight hours. Recharge. It was completely dark when he came into Fayette City, the low square houses and empty shops, the train tracks ran right at the river’s edge, a woman’s dress in the gravel. The tracks passed small white houses with manicured lawns. He was hungry again, he figured he’d come about ten miles, and he left the tracks and walked over to the main drag in search of food. There was nothing. All the stores had moved to the strip malls outside town. It’s fine, he thought. Go thirty days without eating. Long way from today. He made his way back to the tracks.

The river was black and the stars were very clear. Feels like a long time since you’ve talked to anyone. Ignore that feeling in your stomach. Sharp pain then dull pain back to sharp again. Think about something else. Closest star is twenty- five trillion miles. Proxima something. Burning before the dinosaurs. Burning still when there isn’t any human left on earth. Different galaxies, a trillion stars. However small you feel you’re nowhere close to the truth, atoms and dust- specks.

Weak thinking, he thought. Of course it’s true. Like getting depressed about your own death. Your only duty—make the best of it. The only true sin—not appreciating life. Meanwhile there’s Charleroi on the other side, making good progress. Those cranes must be Lock Four. Wake up. He slapped his face. Felt that. On the other side of the river he could see the lights of Charleroi blanketing the hillside. He got closer to the cranes—it was the spot they had found her. In the actual lock channel they spotted her, it was only because of the contrast against the light cement walls. Lee told you that. How did she know? No one knew where she went in, only where she came out. Was taken out. Missing two weeks. Old man sure she was murdered, must have been skinheads, but then the autopsy: lungs full of water. I thirst. Found drowned, woundless otherwise—miracle she was noticed at all. River stones in her coat pockets, eleven pounds. Your educated guess. Filling your pockets with rocks from the field and checking the scale. Eleven pounds take anyone under, even Poe—precious balance keeps you afloat. The old man caught you doing it, weighing yourself. Imagining your mother walking along the river, collecting those rocks, humming. Had her own pain. Worst kind internal. Eternal. Let her off.

He began to walk faster, looking straight ahead, walk all night, put some miles between us. Sleep in the day. He was going past an old building, maybe a warehouse, when a car turned onto the small road alongside the tracks. He stepped into the bushes without knowing why and then saw a searchlight shine from the car—a cop. He squatted in the weeds until the cruiser went past, the light shone in the branches just overhead. People in the houses must have called. Hate just the sight of you. Then he thought you could just go ask him for a drink of water, but he didn’t get up until the car was long gone.

He pushed through the brush making his way toward the old building. Mouth very dry now—fixating. Mental game and you’re losing. Find a stream again. But there would be no streams—it was an industrial zone. Several minutes later he was walking down the gravel road toward the warehouse; off to one side there was an old front- end loader, abandoned and grown over with devil’s tear thumb. He picked his way through the thorns and went to the bucket and it was full of rainwater. Brushing the leaves aside, he cupped his hand into it, it tasted tannic and like metal but he swallowed it anyway just to wet his throat, then took another palmful. Might be sorry about this later, he thought.

He was nearly to the building when he had a sudden urge to use the bathroom, he barely had time to squat in the ditch by the road. Nothing to wipe. Good- bye Mr. Clean. Something in that water? Too soon for that, just shock of something in the stomach. Can’t remember the last time you felt this dirty.

He went around the warehouse, trying the doors, they were all locked but one. Shining his penlight around, the floor of the warehouse was filthy, piled with debris, people had been scavenging the copper wire and pipes. Right next to the door he’d come in through was another door that led to a small room, it looked like the office, it was cleaner and less dusty than the rest of the building. There were old file cabinets and desks. This is the spot, he thought. Smell of old piss. He took his sleeping bag out and spread it on a desk, it might have been a workbench, he couldn’t tell.

It was hard but he kept getting warmer and then he was actually comfortable and warm but he lay there and couldn’t fall asleep. Can’t stop the mind from going, try the old trick. He put his hand down his pants and pulled for a while but nothing happened. Too tired. He thought about Poe and his sister he had heard her cry out once, a stifled muffled holding your breath noise, and after a minute of thinking about it he was hard, it was a disgusting thought, his own sister, but fine he’d take it, it was the closest he’d been to actual sex in two years, not since he and Autumn Dodson had done it after her graduation party, he still was not sure why she had done it, she’d gone off to Penn State after that. Because you were the only one with a brain in the entire school. That was not the only reason—the kid took over that time, too. The kid made it happen, saying things old Isaac English never would have had the balls to say. Then you’re down on the couch in her den, she lifts up that cute little rear of hers to let you get her pants off. Then, look at you, a naked girl in front of you with her legs spread. Put your finger in her and watched it go in and out for a long time, seemed a miracle the way it was slippery like that. Lying there in the dark with his hand down his pants he thought about that, it was old material but good enough, he finished and fell asleep right after.

Sometime later he was dreaming, there was a car and then he heard voices and he was wondering if he could wedge the door closed when the voices got much louder and he realized he wasn’t dreaming. There were people in the factory with flashlights.

“Someone cracked that door. It wasn’t like that before.”

“Come on, Hicks.”

“You gotta look. You don’t look from over there.”

The next voice was loud: “If there’s any piece- of- shit bums down there you might as well come out now and save us some work.” People were laughing. Someone said: “You’re a goddamn dumb- ass, Hicks.”

Isaac began to disentangle himself from the sleeping bag; the room he was in was small, the office maybe, there was only one way out of it and he was only partially out of the sleeping bag when the door swung open and light swept around the room. He put his hand on his knife but he saw them and they were young people, high schoolers. He let go of the knife.

“Hold up,” he said, but he’d barely gotten off the workbench when one of them walked directly up to him, looked back briefly at his friends as if to make sure they were paying attention, and punched Isaac in the face.

“I went to Buell Memorial,” he said, but the others were on top of him and he was knocked to the ground. He tried to protect his head but something caught him on the jaw anyway and then in the stomach and then his ribs and back and he tried to protect his sides and got kicked in the mouth again. He covered his head and they kept kicking. His wind was knocked out and he couldn’t breathe, he was choking. Then the light was in his face and the kicking abruptly stopped.

“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 Poe 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.

There were some pressing decisions as well. The city council had just come out with the new budget, the infrastructure was crumbling, and the EPA had ordered the city to repair the sewer system, which had been spilling sewage into the Mon during heavy storms. The Buell PD’s share of the budget had gone from $785,000 to $541,000—the biggest cut in the department’s history. In addition to cutting back training and keeping the department’s already clapped- out vehicles in service indefinitely, he would have to lay off three of his full- time guys. Which was nearly everyone.

He looked at his six- by- six elk and wondered when he’d be able to get to Wyoming again. Not till after retirement. As of next month, the department would consist of him, Steve Ho, Dick Nance, and twelve part-timers. Bert Haggerton was gone for sure. No one would miss him. But Harris would also have to get rid of Ron Miller, who had kids in college. Miller, who he’d known twenty years. But Miller was lazy, a clockwatcher, if Miller got a call in the middle of lunch, he would order dessert. Jerzy Borkowski, who was also going to get cut, was no better. They were small- town cops but things were changing, you needed a different attitude, the Mayberry days were over. He felt another surge of relief at keeping Steve Ho—he’d thought the council would make him keep Miller, who was the most senior officer. He could probably lie to Borkowski and Miller—tell them the council had made the decision on who to fire and who to keep—but in a town this size they would hear the truth soon enough. Neither one of those men would ever speak to him again. He would have to accept that. Haggerton wouldn’t, either, though he didn’t care about Haggerton.

The steak, he thought. He went out and flipped it. All was not lost.

“Beat it,” he told Fur, who was inching closer to the grill.

Eventually, everyone knew, the department’s budget would be cut again and the Buell police would cease to exist—they would have to merge with the Southwest Regional out of Belle Vernon. Three years before there had been another budget crisis; the city ran out of money in late November and for the last four weeks of the year all the city employees went to the Mon Valley Bank and took out loans in lieu of paychecks. On the first of the New Year everyone took their loan slips to the city cashier’s office and the city paid them off. Harris was pretty sure those things did not happen in other places.

The Valley’s population was growing again but incomes were still going down, budgets still getting smaller, and no money had been put into infrastructure for decades. They had small- town budgets and big- city problems. As Ho said, they were approaching the tipping point. Most of the other Valley towns, with the exception of maybe Charleroi and Mon City, were over the edge and would never come back. The week before, a man had been shot in the face in broad daylight in Monessen. It was like this all up and down the river and many of the young people, the way they accepted their lack of prospects, it was like watching sparks die in the night. Just to get an office job you had to go to college and there were not enough of those jobs to go around—there could only be so many computer programmers, only so many management consultants. And of course those jobs were moving overseas now at the same rate they’d once shipped the steel jobs.

He didn’t see how the country could survive like this in the long run; a stable society required stable jobs, there wasn’t anything more to it than that. The police could not fix those problems. Citizens with pensions and health insurance rarely robbed their neighbors, beat their wives, or cooked up methamphetamine in their back sheds. And yet, everyone wanted to blame the cops—as if the department could somehow stop a society from collapsing. The police need to be more aggressive, they would say, until you caught their kid stealing a car and twisted his arm a little hard—then you were a monster. Civil rights violator. They wanted easy answers, but there weren’t any. Keep your kids in school. Hope those biomed companies move down here.

In the meantime, enjoy what you can. He fixed his plate and gave Fur his two cups of kibble. The dog looked longingly at Harris sitting there with his plate in his lap, his steak and his chive potato. Harris shrugged and went on eating.

There would be time later for a nice fire, maybe he would finish that book. James Patterson. He would forget about Billy Poe.

“Get over here, meathead.”

Fur came and sat down next to Harris, knowing he was about to get some steak.

When he went into the office the next morning there were already messages. The important one being from the DA—they’d found a witness in the case who claimed to have been present at the time of the murder. The witness was fingering a football player whose name he couldn’t remember, but he was positive he’d know him in a lineup. Did that ring any bells?

Harris returned the call but the DA was out somewhere. He sat at his desk and rubbed his temples. His little stunt with the jacket had not mattered one bit. It was still there, for all he knew, but it was no longer relevant. Murray Clark—the name of the witness—Harris ran him in the computer. DUI in ’81, another one in ’83, an arrest in ’87 for disorderly conduct. Nothing since. He rubbed the stiff muscles on his neck. A man who had, most likely, turned himself around. Not enough to discredit him on a witness stand. He switched off the computer monitor. He couldn’t let himself think about this anymore—it would turn him inside out.

The office felt hot; he opened all the windows and sat down in his big leather chair, looking over the river, leg bouncing. He deserved a cigar. It would clear his mind. The humidor was right there. The air currents were good—the smoke wouldn’t bother anyone. After finding the one he wanted and lighting it he eased farther into the chair, savoring. A glass of whiskey would top it off. You’re going a little far now, he told himself.

It was a good place, his office. More of a clubroom, really. Everyone hated the new building and he didn’t blame them, cinderblock and fluorescent lights, but it was all what you made of it. The old building had cost a hundred grand a year to keep in operation. Of course, it had also been a piece of artwork—towers and gables and wood panels inside, high ceilings, open spaces. You felt like someone working in a place like that. The new place, everyone rightfully said, looked like a garage.

He turned the smoke around in his mouth. He thought about Grace, looked at his own skinny legs and scuffed ropers on the desk, then around the office again. He’d salvaged a few things from the old building, this big oak desk, table lamps, leather furniture, a few impressionist paintings of the Valley as it had been in the old days, men poling flatbot-tom boats up the Mon, the night sky glowing orange above a steelmill. There were deer heads, another elk, a moose he’d shot in Maine. One of the deer was a little spike that the taxidermist had been embarrassed to mount. But Harris had carried that deer from deep in the woods, it was the last day of the season and he’d walked in four miles and got his deer and then carried it out, four miles, the others on the wall had similar stories, none of them were trophies but they all reminded him of times he liked to think about, times that had turned out better than they should have.

As for Billy Poe he’d dealt with this a million times—it was the downside of working in a small town, knowing who you arrested, knowing their mothers. In this case, sleeping with their mother, though obviously it was more than that. There was a mountain of paperwork as always but he decided to let himself watch the river for a while, twenty minutes to sit and watch the sky change, the river just flowing, it had been there before man laid eyes on it and it would be there long after everyone was gone. It was a good way to clear his head. Nothing mankind was capable of, the worst of human nature, it would never linger long enough to matter, any river or mountain could show you that—filthy them up, cut down all the trees, still they healed themselves, even trees outlived us, stones would survive the end of the earth. You forgot that sometimes— you begin to take the human ugliness personally. But it was as temporary as anything else.

Only a few minutes had passed since he’d started the cigar but he went down his to- do list anyway, both the one on his notepad and the real one he kept in his head. He banished Billy Poe from his mind for good—the boy had built up a good head of steam but he was about to run out of track. He felt bad for Grace but that was all.

So why was his headache coming back? In eighteen months he could retire, had always presumed he would, though the closer it got the less sure he was about how he really felt about it, he liked coming in to work every day, liked his job. An extra day or two off a week would be nice, but seven days off might kill him—he couldn’t spend the whole time hunting. It suddenly struck him what an enormous mistake it had been to move into the cabin: once he retired, he’d be completely alone. Steve Ho and Dick Nance, Dolly Wagner and Sue Pearson who worked in the city council’s office, Don Cunko, even Miller and Borkowski—those people were the closest thing he had to a family. Everything, all of it, seemed like a mistake. He had done it to himself.

He stood up quickly and went to his bag to get a Xanax, shook one into his hand but didn’t take it. He put the pill back and did three sets of situps and pushups. If you took care of your body, your mind would follow. So they said. He was not doing badly. Well, in fact—enough money had been put away, he wouldn’t end up like Joe Lewis, the Monessen chief who’d had to work as a school security guard when he retired. And, as he reminded himself constantly, he did good work, he could be proud of what he’d done. Despite being one of the poorest, Buell was still one of the better towns in the Valley to live in, the kids didn’t spraypaint so much, the dope dealing was not public. But it was only a delaying tactic. A young woman’s body had been found a few weeks back, she lived in Greene County and her system was full of methamphetamines, no one knew what she was doing in Buell. There had been six other bodies in Fayette County this year as well, half of them gave up no leads at all. The newspapers were onto this and the new DA was on the defensive. And the last two are in your jurisdiction, thought Harris. He’s gonna need to bang this one out of the park.

There was a knock and Harris unlocked the door to see Ho, carrying his big belly in front of him. He had strangely small hands and feet. His parents were from Hong Kong and they owned the Chinese Buffet in North Belle Vernon. He came into the office, pushing past Harris and sniffing the air, and, upon finding the cigar in the ashtray, picked it up and pitched it out the open window.

Harris grimaced. It was a seven- dollar cigar.

“It’s ten in the goddamn morning,” said Ho.

“I’m a grown man,” said Harris.

Ho shrugged. “We might be getting a complaint,” he said. “Last night I got a noise violation at the Sparrows Point Apartments and ended up deploying my carbine. Twelve rounds.”

Harris blinked and then he thought no, if it was bad I would have heard about it already. Either way he was glad for the distraction. A good number of their problems came from Sparrows Point, a block of HUD apartments at the edge of town.

“It was just a pit bull,” Ho continued. “You know that little bald-headed dude, the one with all the tattoos on his face? He let the dog go on purpose to come after me, like I’d jump on the roof of the car or something, act like a funny Chinaman.”

“Did anything get hit besides the dog?”

“Hell no. But you should have seen all those motherfuckers, diving behind cars and shit. Wish I had it on tape.”

“What were you doing with the rifle for a noise violation?”

“There was like seven or eight of them. What the fuck was I supposed to do?”

“Do you know what our insurance costs,” he said to Ho.

“Fuck the insurance,” said Ho. “What about shock and awe? Those fuckers are cooking up crystal in the units back there. It’s a fuckin environmental hazard.”

“They don’t bother the citizens,” said Harris. “People will get it somewhere.”

“That’s just your liberal politics talking,” said Ho.

“Libertarian.”

“Whatever.” Ho grinned.

“You better watch your mouth if you want to keep that rifle.”

“Yessir.”

“You do the paperwork yet?”

“I wanted to ask you first.”

Harris rubbed his temples. All in all, it was better if there was no record of Ho shooting a dog with an automatic rifle. But if a complaint was ever filed… “Lemme think about it. In the meantime, around eleven o’clock why don’t you get some Dairy Queen for Billy Poe.”

“That boy’s fucked, ain’t he? Heard about Carzano’s witness.”

“We’ll see.”

“Sorry, Chief Like I said before, looks like it’d be better if that prick Cecil Small was still the DA.”

“Alright,” said Harris. “I got work to do.” He gave a little wave and Ho left him alone in the office.

Ho was right. Cecil Small, who’d been DA of Fayette County longer than Harris had been a cop, had come looking for Harris’s help in the election last year. Harris had demurred and Cecil Small had lost by fourteen votes. Cecil Small could have made something like this go away—in fact, he’d already allowed Billy Poe to plea down an assault charge. But Harris had never liked Cecil Small—he enjoyed playing God a little too much. It was undignified, a seventy- year- old man still getting high off locking people up. Expecting people to buy him drinks every time he won a trial. Like he was a key player in the battle between good and evil. For thirty years he’d been the emperor of Fayette County, though finally it had caught up to him—the voters got sick of it. The new DA, who was only twenty- eight years old, and who Harris had both voted for and essentially put in office by not making the requisite phone calls for Cecil Small, needed to prove himself and was now tripping over his own feet to be getting a case like this. There were consequences to voting your conscience.

He wondered what Ho thought about all this, about his protecting Grace’s son. Most likely he just accepted it as natural behavior. Ho was very realistic. He did not think he could change things. He was part of the new generation, his stubby assault rifle went with him everywhere, he dressed like he was walking into a war zone, whereas Harris rarely even bothered to wear his bulletproof vest, his “duty boots” being these cowboy ropers he’d bought on a Wyoming trip—not a good choice if he had to run someone down. But Ho was right. If something went wrong, backup in the form of the state police was at least half an hour away, things were changing, the kids were all on speed now, they were cooking it up themselves and you didn’t know what they might do. No, he thought, even thinking that way is a problem. Puts you and them on opposite sides before the word go. He shook his head at himself. There’s probably never been an old man who didn’t think that all the young people were degenerate. Nature of youth and age. Painful to see the world changing without you.

Still, he couldn’t blame Ho for not wanting to walk into those situations with only a sidearm. Not to mention Ho was still here because Harris made the job fun, gave him carte blanche. The feds were getting rid of all their old M16s, giving them away to police departments, and Harris had ten of them, free except for shipping costs. They’d also gotten binoculars, night vision, riot shields, old ballistic vests, all free. They had more weapons and gear now than they had cops, they had more gear than Harris had had when he’d gone to Vietnam with the marines. It was all because of Ho, who had spent weeks of his own time filling out the paperwork, then thousands of dollars of his own money to customize his rifle, a ten- inch barrel and holographic sight. At the moment, Ho was happy living in his parents’ basement, doing gunsmithing on the side, but someday he would decide to move on. Sooner than later if Harris made the job boring. He would miss Ho. But he was getting ahead of himself again. Ho wasn’t gone yet.

He tried to remember what he was supposed to be doing but then Billy Poe was on his mind again, and what this would do to Grace. He vaguely remembered the man Ho said was the owner of the dead dog, he’d just moved to town from West Virginia, typical toothless speed freak, had relatives here. He wondered if the man deserved a special visit. But probably watching his dog get machine- gunned was enough.

After an hour more of catching up on paperwork, he decided he couldn’t stand it. He went and got Billy Poe from the cell. Billy looked depressed. That was a good sign.

“Let’s talk in the office,” said Harris.

Billy Poe followed him into the office and stood politely until Harris motioned him to a chair. It occurred to him that the kid had been through this plenty of times before, called to the principal’s office and lectured. Called to this very office and lectured. He tried to recollect what he’d said last time. He hoped he didn’t repeat himself—they all remembered.

“I watched you play ball,” he said.

Billy Poe didn’t say anything. He was looking at the floor.

“You should have gone to college with it.”

“I was sick of school.”

“Won’t tell you that’s smart. I know other people did, or just didn’t say anything. But I won’t. That was one of the dumbest moves you ever made.”

Poe shook his head. “You ought to be able to grow up in a place and not have to get the hell out of it when you turn eighteen.”

Harris was slightly taken aback. “I might agree with you and I might not,” he said, “but either way it doesn’t change a goddamn thing.”

“I’m gonna call up the coach at Colgate.”

Ho knocked and Harris told him to come in. He was carrying a box from Dairy Queen and Harris went through it and set a hamburger and French fries and a milkshake in front of Poe. They could all see the steam coming off the food.

“Vanilla shake?” said Harris.

“No, thank you.”

“Go on and eat.”

“I can’t,” said Poe. “That stuff gives me problems with my stomach.”

Harris and Ho looked at each other, then at Billy Poe.

“He didn’t eat what I brought him last night, either,” said Ho.

“It’s the chemicals,” Poe said. “That stuff isn’t fresh.”

“What do you think prison food is gonna be like?” said Ho. “You think they offer organic?”

Harris grinned but waved him out of the room, and then faced Billy Poe across the desk again. He decided to push the boy a little. “No job,” he said. “No skills to speak of, no car, if you’re counting ones that actually run. Mostly likely headed to get some girl in trouble, if you haven’t already. And now you’re a cunt hair away from a murder conviction and I do mean a cunt hair, too.” Harris held up his fingers. “So whether some college football coach remembers you or not, that’s pretty much the least of your worries.”

Poe didn’t say anything. He began to pick at the fries.

“Tell me about this man,” said Harris.

“Don’t know anything about it.”

“I saw you there, William. Returning to the scene of the crime to…” He nearly mentioned the jacket but stopped himself. “The only reason I didn’t take you in right then was because of your mother. Plenty of kids like you get out but the ones that stay, I’ve seen what becomes of them.”

“You’re here, if it’s so good to leave.”

“I’m an old man. I’ve got a boat and slip and a cabin on top of a mountain.”

“Big deal.”

Harris rummaged in the broad oak desk and came out with a manila folder, from which he took several printouts of digital photos. He passed them to Poe. From the way Poe dropped the papers, he recognized the scene pictured.

“Otto Carson, if you want to know the guy’s name. The DA over in Uniontown is a brand- new guy as you may or may not know, he’s got a dead woman in a dumpster with no clues and here you are dropping this in his lap. The staties want me to confiscate your goddamn shoes.”

Poe looked at his sneakers.

“Thing is, Billy, the now- deceased Mr. Carson was a piece of shit. Been locked up for all kinds of crap, some stays in mental wards, two outstanding warrants for assault, one from Baltimore and the other from Philadelphia. Sooner or later he was going to kill somebody. Most likely he already had.”

“What’s your point,” Poe said.

“If it were up to me, if you’d come to me right away, this would have been an easy self- defense plea. Or it might have just gone away on its own. But that’s not what you did. You ran. Now you got a guy who was there with you in that machine shop claiming you killed his buddy.”

Harris leaned back in his chair, into the sunlight. Usually he liked to watch people in these situations, every tic on their guilty faces. But he did not want to look at Billy Poe. “You need any coffee?” he said.

Poe shook his head.

He waited for Poe to comment, or make a gesture, but he didn’t. Harris got up and walked to the window and looked out over the Valley. “I’m guessing there were five of you in the machine shop. You, someone else who was probably Isaac English, Mr. Carson, and two of his friends—”

“Then why haven’t you picked up Isaac?”

“Isaac English is not a suspect,” Harris said, “because the DA doesn’t know who he is, and the more the DA knows, the worse off you are going to be.”

“Like I said,” Poe told him, “I don’t know anything about it.”

Harris nodded. He decided to try nice cop. “You did the right thing, Billy. You need to tell me what happened, and who else was in that plant with you, so we can make sure this goes to trial as self-defense. Because if all the jury sees is that you killed a man and fled the scene, even a bunch of good ole boys are gonna vote to hang you.”

“His buddy had a knife to my neck and the dead guy was coming at me to finish the job,” said Poe.

“Good.”

Poe looked at him.

“Don’t stop now.”

“It was dark,” Poe said. “I couldn’t see the rest of their faces.”

“No.”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“Billy, I goddamn caught you going back to the crime scene.” Again he resisted mentioning the jacket he’d found. “I got your footprints everywhere. Size fourteen Adidas—know how many people wear those?” He looked under the desk at Poe’s feet. “Most likely blue in color, right?”

Poe shrugged.

“If you’re lucky this is going to put you in jail until you’re fifty. If you catch a bad break it’ll send you to the injection booth.”

“Whatever.”

“Billy you and I know that the truth, the one that matters, is that this man was killed by his own choices in life. That for all practical purposes, you had such a small part of it as to mean nothing. But you need to help me now.”

“I couldn’t see their faces.”

Harris shook his head. He motioned Poe to stand up.

“Am I gonna be booked now?”

“For your mother’s sake I’m letting you go home tonight to get yourself in order. Tomorrow I’m going to come by your house and pick you up before the staties do. Make sure those shoes don’t exist anymore, and if you still got the box, or any kind of receipts, burn them, too. And don’t get any ideas in you. They’ll send you up for sure if you run.”

“Fine,” said Poe. “I’ll be there.”

“This witness,” said Harris. “Claims he saw the whole thing. Tell me about him.”

“I need to go home,” said Poe. “Give me a day to think about it.”

“You gonna run if I let you go?”

“I ain’t goin anywhere.”

What does it matter, he thought. Then he thought: don’t be stupid about this. But they had nothing to hold Billy Poe on anyway. Or at least nothing the DA knew about.

“I’m guessing you got a day, maybe two, before they put a warrant out for you, so I’m gonna come by your mother’s house tomorrow morning. Make sure you’re there.”

Billy Poe nodded.

Well, thought Harris, as he walked Billy Poe to the station’s front door. You might have just made your life a lot more interesting.

5. Lee

Isaac had been gone almost two days and she’d been calling Poe’s cellphone ever since but all she got was a message saying the number was out of service. He’d been late again paying his bill. The sorts of things Poe did—not paying his bills on time, driving an old car that was always breaking down—she’d always found them rebellious and somehow admirable but now they seemed immature and frustrating. She needed to find her brother. What kind of person doesn’t pay their phone bill? Then she thought: a person who can’t afford to. She was angry at him anyway. She was angry at herself. She put her head down on the table and counted slowly to ten. Then she got up to find her father: he had an appointment at the hospital in Charleroi and they needed to get moving.

From Buell they headed north along the river and her father, piloting the Ford Tempo he’d outfitted with hand controls, drove too fast for the narrow road. But soon enough she was distracted by the beauty of the Valley: the opposite riverbank rising steeply from the water, thick with trees and vines and sheer outcroppings of red- brown rock, the untamed greenness cascading over everything, tree limbs stretching for light over the water, a small white rowboat tied in their shadows.

Farther along she couldn’t help noticing the old coal chute stretching the length of the hillside, passing high over the road on its steel supports, the sky visible through its rusted floor; the iron suspension bridge crossing the river. It was sealed at both ends, its entire structure similarly penetrated and pocked by rust. Then it seemed there was a rash of abandoned structures, an enormous steel- sided factory painted powder blue, its smokestacks stained with the ubiquitous red- brown streaks, its gate chained shut for how many years, it had never been open in her lifetime. In the end it was rust. That was what defined this place. A brilliant observation. She was probably about the ten millionth person to think it.

As for her father Henry in the seat next to her, he was more content than she ever remembered, he was happy she’d gotten married, it soothed him, it made her less like her mother, who had not married until she was over thirty, who had been engaged to another man before she met Henry. Henry would never get along with Simon, she knew that. It was not possible for him to even comprehend someone like Simon. They had never met, she had always made up excuses, they had gotten married on the spur of the moment at a city office. She wondered if Simon understood why. Certainly he hadn’t complained about it. And yet Henry, knowing they were excuses, knowing the reason she must have had for making them, he had gone along, saying only: I suppose I’ll meet him someday. He had always held her in a certain awe, same as he had held her mother. It was a feeling he’d always needed to balance with a disdain for Isaac. There was only so much a man like Henry could give up.

The money Isaac had stolen had not been mentioned in several days and regarding Isaac’s second disappearance, all her father would say about it was he’ll be back soon enough. Somehow this made her certain that Isaac was not coming back, now or ever.

Outside the Charleroi hospital she waited in the sun, high up on the hill, looking out over the town, the immense cemetery across the river that occupied the entire hillside, stretching on as far as she could see. The cemetery seemed bigger than the town. She felt a surge of guilt.

But Isaac had stayed here of his own volition. That was the only explanation she could think of—he’d visited her in New Haven once, it seemed to have gone well, he’d even gotten a sort of patron there, her ex- boyfriend Todd Hughes, who had offered to help Isaac with his application and asked after him a half dozen times afterward. But Isaac had never taken her up on her offers of further visits, and finally she had stopped offering. Maybe it had put a certain pressure on him, visiting like that. She had not visited a single college, not trusting her own judgment at the time, which she guessed was provincial. And it was, she thought now. It really was better to not visit, to go by reputation. At seventeen, you’d pick a school based on the nice architecture, or that a professor had smiled at you, or that your best friend was going there—you made choices based on feelings, which were bound, especially at that age, to be arbitrary and ill- informed and rooted mostly in insecurity.

Still, she couldn’t make sense of Isaac’s choice to remain in Buell. He didn’t respect their father; his disdain for Henry precisely mirrored Henry’s disdain for him. But there seemed to be some contract between them that she did not understand, one Isaac seemed unwilling to break. Henry, though weakening, could shop for himself, drive the car with the hand controls, cook, clean, and bathe himself. Of course it was not safe for him to live alone—if there had been a fire or something. But the Mon Valley had an aging population and finding an inexpensive caregiver would have been easy—it seemed to her that if Isaac had gotten into a good college, Henry, out of pride, would have been forced to let him go. But Isaac had not done that. Maybe he had wanted to be released, instead of having to bully his way out. Or he had wanted to leave with Henry’s respect, and thought that looking after him all these years would earn him that. Not knowing that it would more likely have the opposite effect—that it would be difficult for a man, especially a man like Henry English, to respect anyone who amplified his feeling of helplessness. And eventually Isaac had figured this out, had been so desperate that he’d stolen the money from Henry, therainy-dayfund, Henry called it, the cash he kept hidden away to soothe his worry that his bank might fail, or that the country itself might fail. And now…

She sat down on the curb and smoothed her skirt and looked out over the Valley again: though she was sitting in an asphalt parking lot, around her the trees were all popping with spring and it was a pleasant view. In fact there were very few places in the Valley that did not offer a pleasant view; this had always been true, even when the mills ran. The terrain was interesting and it was very green, everywhere it was just little houses terraced up and down the hillsides, the mills and factories in the few flat areas along the river, like the pictures of medieval towns from school-books—this is where the people lived, and this is where they worked. Entire lives visible in the landscape.

She got up again. Really, her capacity for self- deception was enormous. Isaac’s decision to stay here did not require so much analysis. He had a stricter sense of right and wrong than she did. Than anyone else she knew, really. He’d stayed because he thought it wrong to leave their father alone, and it had taken five years to convince him otherwise. Five years— when you said it like that, it didn’t seem so long. But years were lived in days, and hours, and sometimes even a few minutes with Henry could be excruciating, at least for Isaac. Lee herself had felt very little guilt about leaving, you have to save yourself before you can save the world. And Isaac was only fifteen then. And to live your life in a way that you were not buried by guilt… Please, she thought. There has to be a balance.

She needed to call Simon. Naturally, her phone had no reception. She would call him tonight from the house, get Simon to call her back so her father wouldn’t complain about the long- distance. Boredom setting in— searching through Henry’s car she found there weren’t any books or reading material of any kind, maybe that was normal, though it seemed that she always had a few books or magazines under the seat, there were advantages to keeping a car messy. Since there was no way she was going back into the hospital to read Us Weekly, she sat listening to the Pittsburgh NPR station, then got a mischievous feeling and turned all the radio presets to it; her father had them all set for AM talk radio. For some reason that gave her a great deal of satisfaction.

When Henry was finished with his appointment, they made their way south again. In Buell they parked the car and ran a few errands; both the bank teller and the supermarket cashier recognized Lee, the cashier remembered that Lee had given the graduation speech both in middle school and in high school, she remembered that Lee had gone to Yale and graduated; she also remembered that Lee had been a National Merit scholar. Lee felt guilty—she didn’t recognize the woman at all, though she smiled and pretended to. She instinctively handed over her credit card to pay for the groceries but Henry clearly embarrassed, reached up from his wheelchair and took Lee’s card from the cashier. “I’ll be paying by check,” he said. Lee didn’t know whether to apologize or not. As they left the store it occurred to her that there were probably only a handful of people in New Haven who knew as much about her as the cashier did.

In the parking lot, a few people stopped to talk to Henry, though she could tell many of them simply wanted to say hi to her. She noticed how many retirees there were. More and more the population of the Valley seemed split between the very old and the very young, it was either retirees or fifteen- year- old girls with baby carriages, there was no one left in the middle. As she folded the wheelchair to put it into the trunk there was a deafening noise and a train carrying coal rumbled slowly down the tracks past the supermarket, then past the half- demolished steelmill that still towered over the downtown, the place her father had worked twenty- odd years. She remembered going with her mother to meet him at shiftchange, the whistle blowing and the streets packed with clean-looking men in overalls and heavy wool shirts carrying their lunchboxes in to work, another group of men, most of them filthy, walking out, their lunchboxes empty, the awe her mother commanded in the crowd despite being so small and quiet, the pride Lee had felt at looking just like her, she had never gone through an awkward stage, she had always looked just like her mother. Her father never touched her mother in public as the other men pawed at women, he kissed her respectfully and took up her small hand, he was a tall, fair- skinned man with a heavy nose and brow, not handsome but imposing, in a group of other men he stood out the way the steelmill itself stood out among the smaller buildings of downtown.

When they got home, Lee helped her father get out of the car but as he was lifting himself from the seat to the wheelchair he fell and she was unable to catch him—even old and shrinking, he was still twice as heavy as she was. It was not a bad fall but as she helped push his chair up the ramp to the house she was angry at herself for doing that with Poe, it had not been fair to anyone.

— — —

That night there was a strange noise outside and then she heard it again and a third time before she realized that someone was knocking on the front door. Henry was watching TV in his room. For a moment she thought it was Isaac but as she hurried to answer the door she realized Isaac would not have knocked. It was dark and she peered out. Poe was standing on the front porch.

He smiled but she only half- smiled back and he saw something had changed in her.

She opened the door and the first thing he said was: “I need to talk to your brother.”

“Let me get my coat,” she told him.

They didn’t say anything further until she’d come outside and they’d walked far enough down the driveway to be out of earshot of her father.

“Isaac left yesterday morning,” she said. “A few hours after you did. He had a bag packed.”

She watched his face go from confusion to fear and then to a face she hadn’t seen before, it wasn’t showing anything.

“Poe?”

“We need to talk,” he said quietly. “We shouldn’t do it here.”

She went and checked on her father. The TV was blaring.

“Pirates versus the Padres,” he said. “If you’re interested.”

“I think Poe and I are going out for a drive,” she told him.

He looked at her suspiciously, then nodded.

They drove to a park by the river, just at the edge of town. It was dark and everything looked overgrown and there were large patches of mud, she seemed to remember it being grass but it was hard to trust her memory. She had begun forgetting about this place, forgetting details about the town, the moment she’d left for college. There was one bench, lumpy with years of repainting, that looked out over the river and they sat down.

“He heard us the other night,” she told him.

“What did he hear?”

“Everything.”

Poe didn’t say anything and she looked out over the water. She’d been to this place many times. She remembered it being nicer, it was one of the standard make- out spots for kids in school. With her first boyfriend, Bobby Oates, she had come out here skinny- dipping, she’d been floating on her back looking up at the sky and then she’d looked around and he was gone, she’d turned around frantically looking but he had disappeared. Everyone knew there were undertows and she dove under looking but it was hopeless, it was too dark, she’d begun shouting for him, not caring if anyone heard her, she had been crying and was swimming back to the bank to get help when he popped up. He’d been holding his breath. Later that night she had slept with him, he was eighteen and she was sixteen, her first time. Yes, she thought, but then I broke up with him. At least I had some dignity about it.

“Are you there,” Poe was saying.

“Sorry.”

“Me and him are in some trouble. I got questioned today and tomorrow they’re going to arrest me.”

She looked at him—it didn’t make sense.

“We’re in some trouble,” he repeated. “Me and Isaac.”

“What happened,” she said. Her own voice sounded to her as if it were coming from someone else.

“That guy they found near the old traincar plant. It was in the paper, they found a dead bum.”

She could feel something tighten in her stomach, she closed her eyes and a numbness came over her.

“It wasn’t me.”

“Where’s my brother,” she said.

“I don’t know. I know he’s not a suspect.”

“He’s involved, though.”

“Yeah,” Poe said. “You could say that.”

She wanted to press him but she was afraid. Then she was thinking of the four home health care services in the Buell directory, she could call one and be back in Darien tomorrow afternoon, she felt herself closing off to everything here, to Poe, to her father, she imagined sitting in Simon’s backyard, looking at the fireflies over the pond, Simon’s parents somewhere in the background, entertaining guests. A place where nothing weighed her down. “I think I should take you home now,” she told Poe.

“I didn’t do it.”

“This isn’t something I can get involved in.”

“Lee, I swear I didn’t even touch that guy.”

“Let’s go,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“It was Isaac.”

She looked at him for a long time.

“It was Isaac,” he repeated.

“You’re lying,” she said, though there was something about Poe’s face. She believed him. It was quiet for a long time. Her scalp was tingling and she began to feel very cold, she was shivering, it might have been from the temperature, she didn’t know, it felt like all the blood had run out of her.

Poe leaned forward onto his elbows and didn’t look at her, he began to talk as if he were only telling himself what happened, or speaking to the river, he didn’t leave any of the details out and after a time she leaned into him, half because she wanted comfort, half because she was so cold. It seemed she should be crying but she wasn’t—the sensation of surprise had already passed.

He was telling her how he’d nearly frozen to death sitting in his yard because he couldn’t face his mother after what had happened. Lee was still listening but the doors were opening in her mind, she was thinking they will both need lawyers but they are not on the same side anymore. You will have to pick a side it is simple. It is Isaac against Poe, it is Isaac and your father against Poe. Prisoner’s Dilemma, Econ 102. If everyone cooperates, keeps their mouth shut, it turns out okay—Nash Equilibrium. Or was Nash Equilibrium when both sides didn’t cooperate? That was the point of the exercise—people rarely cooperated. Poe was still talking but she could no longer pay attention. The checkbook was there in her purse, hers and Simon’s names at the top, she had brought it home because she knew she would need it for the nurse, to fix things in the house, she could write a check just like that and get Poe a good lawyer, give him a chance to get out of this.

Except Poe having a good lawyer was not going to help Isaac. If anything it would be the opposite. He was still talking, telling her about his meeting with the police chief but it didn’t matter, the things Poe thought mattered did not matter anymore. He would not be able to afford a lawyer, he lived in a trailer. If she got him a lawyer and Simon ever happened to look at the returned checks, that was unlikely but still, if Simon or Simon’s father ever discovered she’d written a check for some ex-boyfriend’s lawyer, her lover who was accused of killing someone, it would be over. As simple as that. Poe had stopped talking. He was sitting in his own world, looking out over the river. She couldn’t believe how dark it was here.

“I’m not going to rat him out,” he said, misinterpreting her silence. “I hope you know that. I’d never do that to him or to you.”

“Don’t worry about me.” She rubbed his shoulder.

“I think he went to Berkeley, that’s what he always used to talk about.”

“Berkeley, California?”

“Yeah,” he said. “The college there.”

She shook her head—none of it made any sense. She tried to figure the probability that Poe was simply lying to her. She didn’t think so but everything was different now, she probably shouldn’t trust half of what he said.

“Is there anyone else who would know?”

“There was one of the old- timers at the library he used to talk to, but that’s about it.”

“So what happened the other night was he figured out the one person he really needed to trust has been fucking his sister and lying to him about it.”

“Lee.”

“I guess I’m just confused about why we went out drinking when you guys had just nearly gotten arrested. If you wanted to call me, you could have just done it.”

“How could I fucking call you? I didn’t even know you were in town.”

“We shouldn’t have done that,” she said. “That was so stupid I can’t even believe it. We’re supposed to be the ones protecting him.”

He looked at her, incredulous. “You don’t know anything about him.”

“He’s my brother.”

“You’ve been gone a long time, Lee.”

“Well, now I’m back.” She stood up. “I’m going to take you home now.”

Poe didn’t move. “About two months ago he went for a dive in the river. You probably didn’t know that because he would never tell you and because when I called to talk to you about it, you never called me back. But basically I had to jump in after him and pull him out. It was about twenty degrees and I don’t know how either of us even made it.”

She didn’t say anything. She vaguely remembered getting a message from Poe, of course she hadn’t called him back, she’d had no idea what it was about.

“It isn’t some mystery, Lee. You just pretend everything will turn out fine until you’re ready to deal with it.”

“Please stop.”

“What happened with that man is on me,” he said. “I know that. But I’m not the only reason.”

He looked at her for a long time and then he stood up.

“A couple years dicking me around and then you get married and don’t tell me. Tomorrow I’m going to get locked up for your brother.”

“I don’t think you really understand everything.”

“I understand you pretty well. You’re not any different from anyone else.”

She was quiet. Her mind seemed to have shut down.

“Your brother was right,” he said. “About you, I mean. I don’t know how I ever thought otherwise.”

He began walking toward the road. She watched him go and then she got up and ran after him.

“Do you have a lawyer?” she said, catching up.

“Harris said he knows a good public defender.”

“Stop. Please stop walking a second. Please?”

He did.

“Let’s go back to the car,” she said. She took his hand and he looked at her but he didn’t pull away. When they got in the car she turned it on and turned on the heater but left the lights off. She went to kiss him and he stopped her, he looked hurt, but then he kissed her back. Her mind was working on ten different levels, it was statistics, expected value: you had three people and one choice protected one of them and the other choice protected two of them, another part of her felt Poe’s hand between her legs, it was obvious the choice she would make. She pushed against him harder and felt herself go blank, then something else happened and she seemed to surface and was thinking again. Poe would need a lawyer, it felt like there was a flood of words building, she would need to hold them back, you did not get the public defender in these cases, you got Johnnie Cochran. The public defender would fall asleep at your trial, the public defender was just so the state could claim you’d had a fair chance, after they’d put you away for life.

“What’s wrong,” Poe said.

“Nothing.”

“Do you want to just lay here?”

“No.” She put his hand back.

Afterward she laid her head in his lap, smelled herself on him, and tucked her legs up. He traced his hand along her legs to her hips and back down again. The hot air from the heater was on her face. She had a brief feeling of lightness, of weightlessness, like the instant you’re above the diving board when gravity hasn’t caught you. She thought: I will do anything to keep feeling like this.

Poe was asleep, the warm air blowing on them, the faint light from the dashboard, she ran her hands across his legs, her fingers through the hair between them, then she touched the car window, the cold glass, outside it was very cold. She knew her decision. It was not like Romeo and Juliet. The floating feeling was gone and there was only the sensation of falling, she had to sit up, put her head against the window for the coldness, she couldn’t get a clear thought into her head. She had to call Simon. Simon was her anchor. Poe stirred and she rubbed his arm automatically, she felt sick again, she had to get out of the car, she dressed quickly, things were inside out, she took her purse and got out of the car and shut the door quietly.

Her phone had service. She looked back at the car, at Poe sleeping inside, then back at her phone, then pressed Simon’s number. There was the famous line: Granted, I am an inmate at a mental institution. It was ringing and then Simon answered. She walked a good distance away from the car, under the trees, she could hear the river.

“My love,” he said, “are you on your way home?”

“Not yet.”

“Did you find your brother?”

“Sort of,” she said, “but then I lost him again.”

“Well I hope you find him soon,” he said. “I’m miserable without you.”

“I have to stay. I’m interviewing the nurses tomorrow.”

“Fine fine fine. You know I should have offered to come with you. I’m sorry I was being a baby. I should be there with you.”

She felt herself choke up, she could hear people talking in the background, she didn’t know, she was on the verge of telling him everything.

“Listen,” he said, “the boys and girls are all over, up from the city, can I call you later tonight or tomorrow?”

“Okay.”

“Everyone says hi. Say hi, everyone.”

She could hear all their voices chime in the background, the voices of her friends, nonsensical and distant.

“Our friend Mr. Bolton brought a case of Veuve Clicquot.”

“Simon, listen for a second. I may need some money. My brother might need a lawyer.”

“Is it serious?”

“I don’t know.” A pause. “It’s not really clear yet.”

“Lee,” he said. “I’m really sorry. I’m really sorry, I should have come out there with you.”

“It’s alright, I’m glad you answered. I’m going a little crazy out here.”

“I’ll fly in tomorrow.”

She had to swallow again. “No,” she said. “I think it’ll be fine. I’m just being neurotic.”

“I can be there tomorrow. What the hell, I’ll get Bolton to drive me there now, we’ll be there by three A.M.”

“No, it’s okay,” she said. “I just needed to hear your voice. I think I already feel a lot better.”

“Call me later. Or call tomorrow morning, whatever you want. Do you have the checkbook?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Use it. If it’s bad trouble I’ll ask my father to look someone up.”

“Don’t ask your father.”

“You don’t have to worry about him.”

“I know. I’d just rather you not ask him.”

“Alright,” he said. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she said.

After they hung up she stood there in the cold, it was very dark and the air was very clear, there were bright cold spots of light in the sky above her. She began walking back to the car. She would have to keep this inside her forever, there would not be any person she could ever talk to. Well, she thought, at least you know you’ll make a good lawyer.

6. Isaac

When he woke up it was morning and he was lying in tall grass behind the warehouse. He could hear several motorboats on the river. Why won’t that eye open? He touched it. Dirt and dried blood. Stay here till I’m better, he thought. Root and hibernate. Come out when the weather’s better. The locals friendly. He looked around him. It’s fine now, he thought. Get up.

It was a warm windy day and above him the sky was dry and deep blue and the clouds were blowing south, a V of geese flying against them. Original itinerants. As for the kid he’s not worried. Thinks back to his days in Vietnam—Special Forces—this is nothing. Back from the dead like Easter. Feel of a spear in his busted ribs, bone bruises, a nice day of walking ahead of him.

With the pain in his side and legs it took him half a minute to get to his feet. The ground was wet, his sleeping bag covered in mud; his clothes were filthy. He made his way back, the tall grass moving in the wind, flattening and standing up again, the warehouse was not nearly as remote as it had seemed in the dark—maybe two hundred yards from the main road. The dirt lot strewn with trash and beer cans, an occasional condom. Mark of communion. Wishing to repay his blood debt to Swede Otto, the kid visits the hideout of local delinquents, submits his holy vessel for redemption. Milk of his human kindness draws them in like blood, gets baptized in his own there’s the church of it. He looked up at the brick warehouse with its scarred facade, the high arched windows. Only see—still his hands are filthy—the debt still owed.

In the dirt lot he came on his own pile of scat from the previous night, stopped to kick dirt over it, thought possibly the kid should not compare himself to Jesus. Then he thought: least of my worries. If there’s Hell it’s so thick I’ll be standing on shoulders—hypocrites at the bottom, plenty of churchgoers. Special compartment for popes.

He limped across the field toward Route 906. There was a good deal of traffic and he could see it wouldn’t be a pleasant walk—the road was barely wide enough to hold the cars. He was moving very slowly. Pretty sure you broke a rib—hurts to inhale. Arms, legs, and back all bruised. He touched his face and could tell it was encrusted with a mixture of dirt and blood, his lips and cheeks and eyes swollen. It seemed like a miracle he hadn’t lost any teeth. You aren’t cut out for this, he thought. But as soon as he thought that he got a picture in his mind of the Swede standing there looking at something, his bulky army coat and his tan cargo pants nearly black from soot. Believe what you want but the evidence shows something different. The empirical data supports a different hypothesis. The kid seems to be quite capable—making mistakes but learning quickly. A certain amount of hard- wiring in evidence. Rusty, is all.

Route 906 sat along the edge of the floodplain that ran to Monessen. The side of the valley rose behind it, just woods, but along the riverflat there were old buildings, warehouses, factories. The traffic was heavy, all subcompact American cars and old pickups. There was barely enough pavement for the cars and not much space even in the weeds—the air shook even as the smaller cars passed. A half dozen people were walking at various intervals in the same direction as him—toward Monessen, which had once been one of the most prosperous towns in the Valley but was now one of the poorest. The remnants of a U.S. Steel coking operation still limping along, employing a few hundred people. Otherwise, plenty of Section Eight.

Half an hour later he reached Monessen, the main part of town looked like Buell, a riverflat blending into a steep hillside, neighborhoods terraced along the heights, stone churches, wooden churches, three Eastern Orthodox churches with gilded domes. Trees everywhere. From a distance it looked peaceful. Up close it looked abandoned—most of the buildings in complete disrepair, vandalism and neglect. He passed through the downtown, there were a few cars parked, but mostly it was empty buildings, old signs on old storefronts, ancient For Lease signs in most of the windows. The only hints of life came from the coke plant by the river, long corrugated buildings, a tall ventstack burning off wastegas, occasional billows of steam from the coke quenching. A scooploader big enough to pick up a semitrailer was taking coal from a barge and dumping it onto a conveyor toward the main plant. The train tracks were jammed with open railcars full of dusty black coke but other than Isaac, there was not another actual person in sight.

In the middle of town, he found an open restaurant. The waitress sat alone at a table by the front window, staring at something outside in the distance and smiling until she saw him come in. The sunlight was on her and she didn’t want to get up. He guessed she was about fifty, her hair was dyed blond.

“Hon,” she said. “I can’t have you looking like that.”

“I’ll get cleaned up,” he told her. “I got jumped.” He looked around the diner, restaurant, whatever it was, there was only one other patron.

She shook her head. “There’s a hospital across the bridge over in Charleroi,” she told him.

“I can pay.” He opened his wallet to show her. He could smell the food, frying potatoes and meat, he was not going anywhere. He was surprised to be standing up to her—in the old days he would have walked out immediately, gone looking for another place. “Put yourself in my shoes,” he said.

For a moment he wondered if he’d said too much, but then she sighed and pointed him toward the back of the diner, toward the bathroom. The other patron, a middle- aged black man with his lunch pail, looked up from his magazine at Isaac and then quickly back to his magazine. He sipped his coffee and didn’t look at Isaac again.

To get to the men’s washroom he had to edge by stacked boxes of paper towels and cooking oil, and once inside he locked the door and stood in front of the mirror. A corpse mucked up from the riverbed. Or a mass grave. His pants and coat were covered with mud and grass and his face was smeared with ashy dirt. He would not have let himself into a diner, or anywhere. One eye was badly swollen and his lip was split and it was hard to tell where the dried blood ended and the dirt began. After using the toilet he stripped and stood in front of the sink and mirror; his filthy brown face didn’t belong to his pale white body pink scrapes along his ribs, the faint purple of developing bruises. He washed his hair and face in the sink, splashing dirt everywhere, thinking man the most fragile creation—them more than you. Now the cold towelwash, way to clean a corpse. Body’s last bath. Special attention to crevices—probably they use a hose now, drip dry, automatic wash for bulk processing. Who knows who touches you after you’re dead? He took another handful of paper towels and wet them and continued to bathe himself. Shivering already, water cools quickly. A tub a warm womb we take for granted—the nature of wombs. My mother bathed herself. Wonder if they cleaned her after. Like the bogmen—preserved in peat. Not Swede Otto—no baths at taxpayer expense. Pauper’s grave too expensive. Incinerator his final warmth. Clear out your head, he thought. You’re not there yet.

When he was finished he took out his knife and carefully soaped down the blade, rinsed it and dried it, then dried himself with the last of the wadded paper towel, he had used two entire rolls. The place had been very clean before he came in and he carefully wiped off the floor and sink before going back out into the dining room. He examined himself in the mirror. From the waist up, it was okay. The coat had kept most of the dirt off his shirt and sweater. Don’t wear the coat into places, he thought. Take it off first.

When he came out of the bathroom the waitress was watching for him and she raised her bulk up slowly like her knees were going and brought him a menu and a cup of coffee. Sitting there in his booth, the entire back corner of the restaurant to himself, he was warm and clean and dry, it was a comfortable feeling. He added cream and lots of sugar and sipped his coffee and felt his head begin to clear. He would take his time. He would enjoy himself. He ordered country fried steak and hash browns, three eggs over easy, a slice of peach pie. She took the order and refilled his coffee and he adjusted it to his exact preference, sweet and creamy, almost like dessert. He looked around the diner, it was a nice place, it was really more of a restaurant, a few dozen tables with checkered tablecloths, they probably never filled it anymore but it was very clean and pleasantly dim, knotty pine paneling, a high ornate tin ceiling. The walls were covered with team photos of the Monessen Greyhounds football team, photos of Dan Marino and Joe Montana, the Valley’s biggest NFL stars, and a few framed posters from bullfights in Spain, souvenirs of a trip someone had made twenty years before. The waitress came back with his food.

“Get any licks in?” She indicated his face.

“Not really.”

“That bad, huh?”

“There was a bunch of them.”

“You ought to just go home,” she said. “It won’t get any better.”

“You always this nice to your customers?”

She smiled at him and he found himself smiling back. She had braces on her teeth.

“There you go. Don’t take that crap off me.” She went slowly back to her table, leaving two plates of food in front of him. “I’ll bring the pie in a minute,” she said.

He cut his steak into small pieces, the crispy fried outside and the meat inside rich and dripping juice, it was the best food he’d ever eaten. He forked some hash browns, fried hard with onion, mixed one of the eggs into it, it felt like he’d never eaten before in his life, he wanted to take small bites and make it last forever but couldn’t help shoveling huge forkfuls, she brought his pie and refilled his coffee and the sharpness of the coffee was good with the rich food. When the plate was finally empty he went for the pie.

He sat back with his eyes closed, though he knew he couldn’t fall asleep. It is a good life, he thought. It is a good life to walk into someplace and eat food. The waitress appeared again with a bowl of ice cream.

“On the house,” she said. “You clean up pretty good.”

After sitting for a while he could feel himself drifting off, it was so warm, he decided not to push his luck. He looked at the bill. She’d only charged him for the eggs and coffee, two dollars and eight cents. He looked up to thank her but she was already back at her table, daydreaming.

He thought about a tip, he needed his money to last, but left her ten dollars. Poor to the poor. He was going to spend it anyway.

Back on the street his bruises hurt less and he hadn’t felt so good in years, he wanted to lie in the sun and take a nap. Once past the town he left the road and crossed the field to the train tracks again and then found a grassy secluded spot on the riverbank. It was sunny and he took off his shirt and shoes and sat out in just his pants. You need to keep moving. He shook his head. I might be dead tonight. Enjoy the nice things as they come.

He lay there and felt the sun on him. Simple pleasures we’re wired for. A million years of evolution—appreciate a sunny day.

You are being tested, he thought. What’s going to happen with the Swede? I can’t think about that now, he decided. I’ll get to Berkeley and I’ll see. If something happens, at least I’ll have done that. Eventually they’ll find out what you did. Poe will talk. It’s just the way he is. He can’t help it. Even so, he thought. He’s the best of them.

He closed his eyes. He wondered if his sister was still in Buell. What if she just drove by right now? I’d go with her. Have everything I need right here. He tried to will it, get into the car, Lee, and drive. Meet you by the side of the 906. But of course it was ridiculous. She couldn’t hear him.

At her graduation he remembered how he’d felt sitting next to her. The principal had gone on for ten minutes, National Merit scholar, perfect SATs, got into Yale, Stanford, Cornell, and Duke. All four of you were there. That felt like the moment that everything seemed to make complete sense. You could see the exact moment you would be standing up yourself, felt like seeing through time. Very clear picture in your mind—watching her you imagined yourself. Remember that well. Then Mom was dead and Lee was leaving, you hoped she might stay, but of course. Who would—new life waiting—it became even more important to get out. Can’t blame her.

He saw a large hawk, no it was an eagle, they were coming back. Things were always changing. Sometimes good and sometimes bad. Your only job was to wake up until you were stopped. He would. His sister had had it easier but there was no point in worrying about it. He would make his own way. He would be living in the mountains in northern California, green and much taller than the hills around here, they were actual mountains. Near an observatory. An observatory in the house, look at the stars anytime, the house would have a long porch that stuck way out over a cliff so it felt like you were floating in space. Like Lee you won’t be on your own. Remember that visit to New Haven— everyone, in their way, was like you and Lee. It was difficult to imagine but his sister had done it and in most ways she had far less idea of what she wanted. He had always known what he wanted to do. Of course she’d still beaten him on the SATs. Forty points. Within the statistical error. In fact that was the first thing she’d said when he’d told her his score—well, it’s within the margin of error. Sympathetic human person that she is. Except there was the thing with Poe. That was what screwed it all up. It would not have been a big deal, he knew everyone else she’d slept with in the Valley, there were two others, it hadn’t bothered him, or not much, anyway. The thing with Poe somehow seemed like an indication of something much bigger. He couldn’t think of exactly why, but he was sure of it.

Change of subject, he thought. Feel that sun. In California it will be like this most of the year. Dose of the ultraviolet. Heals bruises and kills bacteria. Ultra means you can’t see it. No, it means very. Fuckin retard. He sat up and looked around. There were grass and trees all around and the river right in front of him. To the south was a big intermodal terminal, long piles of coal and cinders and other bulk materials, just to the south of that the three big bridges to Charleroi, and beyond the bridges he could still make out the cranes of the lock. There were barges log-jammed, waiting to pass through the lock chamber.

I’m past all that, he thought, to the north it’s just woods. The sun was bright, he could feel it on his skin, prickling like fingers running over him, he didn’t want to let himself fall asleep, it felt so good. There were four men fishing on the opposite bank and there was something about them sitting there, even across the river, he dozed off. Fishers of men. He woke up in the shade, the sun had crossed over the river and was low over the western hills, the fishermen were gone. Second day you slept through. You could just get a bus ticket, he thought, sleep and be moving at the same time. Right—leave a trail saying just where you’re headed. But in a railyard he would need to ask someone anyway, figure what lines ran south or west. It was better than buying a ticket. He checked his wallet and he still had twenty- two dollars, plus the nearly four thousand in the envelope in his cargo pants pocket.

Walking again, his legs had gotten stiff while he slept and he made slow progress. It was long after dark that he passed under the Mon City bridge, the train tracks ran through a long industrial zone with brightly lit warehouses and he walked the treeline, at the edge of the light, passing dozens of old shipping containers, a house sagging into the water, tractor trailers sitting with their tires flattened and their paint weathered away. Across the river were the towns of Mon City and New Eagle, brightly lit, he was happy to not be on that side of the river. Ahead of him was a long dark stretch through high forest, the polished railtops caught what little light there was from the stars, glowing faintly. As soon as he was in the darkness he felt safe again. A few owls hooted but otherwise it was silent except for his footsteps and the drumming of a passing towboat and its barges. He thought he should feel thirsty but for some reason he was not. He would have to get a container for water.

On the other side of the river an enormous plume of smoke and steam rose from the West Penn Power station, its stacks several hundred feet high and the steam plume bright against the night sky. Dark piles of coal next to it, they might have been minor pyramids, several dozen barges coming and going in the river next to the plant. A few miles later, again on the opposite side of the river, he passed the Elrama power plant, even larger, well lit by yellow sodium lights, the main stack maybe five hundred feet tall, the billow of steam blotting out an entire section of the sky, clean and white- looking. Except it’s burning coal, he thought. It is definitely not clean. Shortly after that he passed through a dark mine complex with a railyard and big coal tipple, the ground was black with it, the coal crunched underfoot. There were endless railcars loaded with it sitting motionless on the tracks, empty barges tied to their landing cells. Later he came to a brightly lit industrial park and to avoid being seen he cut up the hill into the woods away from the river until he reached a dark road that ran parallel.

There was a small dark hamlet, a fire station, empty and closed for the night. A few houses with aboveground pools, a porch light here or there but otherwise it was pitch black. The road was quiet and he could make out the stars well. Farther along he came to a bonfire in a yard next to one of the houses, two dozen or so people, probably half the town, standing around drinking. Someone was about to jump into a swimming pool, he could see by how white they looked that they weren’t wearing any clothes, though it was cold out. He kept his head down and tried to pass quickly but they noticed him.

“Hey,” someone shouted from near the fire. “Come on down and have a beer.”

He ignored them but they called out again. He waved and put his head down, hoping he would quickly be out of sight.

“Who the hell is that,” he heard someone shout to him. “Is that Brian Foote?”

Isaac waved again and kept walking.

Two blocks later at the edge of town he heard a bottle break in the street and turned to see a group of figures following him, silhouetted against the light. There were four of them. Instead of waiting to see what happened he began running immediately, holding his backpack tight against him, ignoring his ankle and the bruises in his thighs and the sharp pain in his ribs, he could hear people yelling things and his legs ached with each step and the pack slapped but he didn’t slow down.

When the road curved he jumped off into the woods and waited in the pitch black to see if he’d been followed. No one came. Many explanations—they thought you were someone skipping out on their party. Or they wanted to give you a repeat of last night’s treatment. Still… He relaxed. Chased by bandits the kid perseveres—this time without injury. Yet, knowing he is the most interesting part of their evening, he fears they’ll come after him with a car. There was a drainage that led up the side of the valley away from the river and he followed it. The stream was rushing with a good amount of force and he had to spend a lot of time finding dry footing in the dark. It wound up between steep hills and he quickly lost all sense of direction, felt a sense of panic and then relaxed again. Figure it out in the morning. Be able to see when the sun comes up. Soon enough he came out into a large clearing where the grass had been recently mowed. No lights or houses in sight. It was very soft and he lay down at the edge of it under a few overhanging branches to catch the dew.

Tucked into his sleeping bag he closed his eyes and saw afterimages, of what he didn’t know. It looked like people walking. He saw the road he’d walked on that morning and the people on it. He opened his eyes. His face was cool but the rest of him was warm. It was a cold clear night. He saw the Swede again, standing there by the stove, his face half in shadow now. This is normal, he thought. Lying in his sleeping bag he reached out to touch the soft grass again, it was cool and damp and soft. He watched the stars and tried to forget about the Swede.

Knew you shouldn’t stay here this long. Knew something bad would come of it. Told yourself you were biding your time but you knew. I had nowhere to go. Neither did Lee—she made a place for herself. Mr. Painter offers to introduce you to his father, professor at Cornell. A pretty sure thing, he told you.

I was not ready to leave yet, he thought. Different for Lee—easy for people to like her. Her mother dies and she leaves the place, the scar erased. Tells you she only thinks about home the way it used to be. Never occurred to her that you did not have that luxury. Beginning of sophomore year, suddenly you’re alone in the house with the old man. Meanwhile Lee had the whole family waiting on her. Our Daisy Flower. Quiet in the house if she was studying, a big deal over her report cards. Leave yours out for him but he never says a word.

If he were in your shoes he would have put you in a home. Asked him that once, what if I got hurt same as you. Wouldn’t answer. Still you stayed. Because that is not how I am, even to people like him. No, he thought, that is not the only thing. You wanted his approval. Because you wanted him to admit he needed you. No, I stayed because it would have been wrong to leave him on his own. But still you left. After five years, he thought. That was not a rational decision. That was not a decision that made any sense.

He closed his eyes. I am doing fine for myself, he thought. Better than yesterday. Tomorrow will be better than today. It was dark and peaceful and after watching the stars for a minute he found the ones he knew and fell into a fitful sleep.

7. Grace

She called Harris four times that day from Steiner’s shop, but each time got his voicemail. She was working faster than normal, forcing herself to concentrate; she could not let her mind wander. At one point, Steiner came by her bench, took note of her progress, and smiled at her. She nodded back grimly and put her head down. Billy had killed someone. It was obvious—the way he’d come home Friday, now Harris taking him in for questioning, holding him overnight. She had barely slept. Harris had decided he wouldn’t take her calls. She could try him from the office line, he wouldn’t recognize that number, but then someone might overhear. She would have to wait until she got home.

Sometime later she was aware of a touch at her shoulder—Steiner again.

“Closing time,” he said. “You look like you’re in another world.” He seemed concerned but she couldn’t bring herself to look at him. It was Steiner. You never knew. He’d slept with Barb and Lindsay Werner, she knew that much. But if somehow he could lend her money for a lawyer, save Billy—of course she would. Between her son and her dignity, it was no contest. It occurred to her suddenly that it was a luxury to not have to do those things.

“I’m alright,” she said. “Trying to get us caught up.” She smiled at him.

He smiled back at her and squeezed her shoulder and she got an uncomfortable feeling, disgusted with herself.

“See you tomorrow then,” she said.

Getting her things together, taking the freight elevator downstairs, walking up the hill to where she’d parked the car, she felt sick. It was not possible anyway that Billy had done that. And if he had—she would have to scrape herself together, keep her chin up. Once you lost your dignity, that was it. Dignity is life.

On the drive home her cellphone rang and it was Harris.

“I just let him go,” he said.

“This isn’t about that thing from last year, is it?”

“Come on, Grace.”

“Will you come over?”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“We’ll be alone.”

“Grace,” he said. “Grace Grace Grace.”

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Okay,” he said.

She drove quickly, she wanted to take a shower before he got there. Maybe she did mean it that way. Except they couldn’t—it would be a dirty thing now. She felt herself tear up and blinked her eyes to clear them. Come on, nothing is fair. Don’t get in a wreck. Eyes on the prize.

Twenty minutes later she was home, but no Billy. She undressed and tried to coax the shower into the position where it wasn’t scalding and wasn’t cold. Two years working at a hardware store, but Billy hadn’t learned, or hadn’t cared, to fix the faucet. Don’t be mad at him now, she thought. But she was. She couldn’t help it. Father’s son, she thought. Your old mistakes setting up shop. Always knew it would be this way.

She soaped and rinsed quickly with no special attention. She appreciated her life, all the little things. Went out of her way to help others. That was all you were supposed to do—God was supposed to look after the rest. It had all seemed like it would work, Billy had been so close to leaving, so close to being away at college, a new life it would be hard to screw up too badly, but he had chosen to stay. Maybe that meant he had never been close at all. But still it had never made sense to her, he had loved the game, had a chance to keep playing it. Because he wouldn’t have been the star, she thought. Because he knew he wouldn’t be the big fish. It had to be more complicated than that. Football had given him a direction, something she’d never seen in him, it had made him question and push himself, but as soon as high school ended he was content to return to the way things had been since he was a child. Satisfied with things, satisfied with being taken care of. The same at twenty as he’d been at thirteen. Maybe she had always known.

Even as a toddler he’d been too brave, she could tell the difference between him and the other kids, by the time he was eleven or twelve she was sure of it, she’d come around the side of the house just in time to see him on his bike, barreling full speed down the hill in their yard, going faster and faster heading for the berm by the stream. At first she thought he was out of control but it quickly became clear he was doing it on purpose—the speed carried him up and over the berm and then high into the air over the stream, impossibly high, he let go of the bike midair and she closed her eyes. When she opened them, Billy was on his feet on the opposite side of the water, taking note of his torn shirt, collecting his bike and carefully straightening the handlebars. He crossed back over the stream, carrying the bike now, looking pleased with himself. Please God, she remembered thinking. Please God, look after my son. Meanwhile, Virgil didn’t even want to take Billy’s bike away. He wanted Billy to like him.

Now she managed to change into a skirt and put her hair up and get a little makeup on. A deep breath and she looked herself over carefully, deciding that with the fading light she looked more like herself. Had she really thought for a second about George Steiner? She took a deep breath. There was no point in giving up yet. Not on her son, anyway.

When Harris pulled up next to the house she watched him, the way he jumped down from the tall truck, he was over fifty but he moved like a much younger man, the sight of him was comforting.

She went out to the porch.

“Hi,” she said.

She was hoping he might come up and kiss her but he made no move to. He stood at the bottom of the steps. He seemed preoccupied.

“I was hoping to save you some worry,” he said, “getting Billy before the DA got to him.”

“And…”

“It’s not good news, Grace, though something tells me you already know it.”

“He came home the other night hurt pretty bad.”

He shook his head. “The other guy got it a lot worse.”

“The homeless man.” She knew it didn’t matter if the man was homeless or not, but somehow it felt like it might.

He nodded, looked beyond the trailer at something far in the distance.

“I’ve always tried to protect him. You know that.”

“Well you can tell them I did it. They can take me instead.”

“Grace. Poor Grace.” He seemed to want to come up the stairs, but didn’t.

She crossed her arms, she could feel herself choking up. “I’m serious,” she said.

He finally came up onto the porch; unsure how to comfort her, he stood there. After a short time he opened his arms to hug her but she pushed him in the chest, suddenly she was very angry at him, his awkwardness, she didn’t know why but she was.

“I’ve always done what I can,” he repeated.

“What about Isaac English? He was there with Billy.”

“He’s not a suspect and it’s better for now if the DA doesn’t know about him. I’m going over tomorrow to talk to him.”

“Is Billy being charged?”

“They don’t have his name yet, but they will.”

She felt herself fading away from him, like she was receding inside herself, like she was a stranger looking out through her own eyes.

“Like I said—”

“This isn’t about you,” she told him.

“Alright, Grace.”

It felt like a pressure building up, she knew she shouldn’t say anything but she had to let it out: “Putting in a word with the judge, your fishing buddy, isn’t exactly bending over backwards—”

Suddenly he was angry as well. “It was a lot more than a goddamn word. He could have gone up for six, eight years for what he did to that other boy.”

“That boy had a goddamn bayonet, Bud. Off an M16.”

“That boy was on his knees, Grace.”

She glared at him, still didn’t know if she was angry or just wanted to seem angry, but he was done with her. He brushed past her and went down the steps and back to his pickup.

“Wait,” she called after him. “I’m sorry.”

He shook his head and got into the truck.

She ran down after him as he closed the door.

“I’m sorry, Bud. I’ve been going crazy about this all day.”

He seemed not to hear her. After a few seconds he said, “It confuses me sometimes, why I do things for you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You really have no idea.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to be hard to deal with.”

“You know six or seven years ago, right after you and Virgil broke up the umpteenth time, I caught him blowing through a stoplight with Billy in the passenger seat and two big spools of copper wire in the bed that he’d stolen off a job site. Not even under a tarp or anything, just sitting out in the open, four- hundred- pound spools of wire. This is back when they were putting in that industrial park up in Monessen.” He shook his head. “Didn’t even bother to put a goddamn tarp over it. So you can imagine what kind of position that put me in.”

“Bud,” she said quietly.

“I’ll bet Virgil never told you about that, did he? And of course in hindsight, it might have turned out better for Billy if I’d locked his daddy up right in front of him.”

“I know I made a mistake.”

“That was when I started making phone calls to try to find you something somewhere else.” He looked at her. “That job offer in Philadelphia. Put my neck out and gave you and Billy a chance and you threw it in my face.”

“That wasn’t what I was doing.”

He was on the verge of saying something more and she stood there, bracing herself. Instead he started the truck. “Well,” he said. “That’s probably enough for tonight.” She stepped up onto the running board and reached through the open window and put her arm over his.

“I didn’t want it to go here,” she said. “This isn’t why I wanted you to come over.”

“I know Virgil’s back.” He seemed frozen in the seat, looking straight ahead out the windshield.

“He’s out. He’s gone, it didn’t even last a day. It’s over for good.”

Harris was quiet.

“I want us to go back to the way it was.”

“Not possible,” said Harris.

“We could just try being friends again.”

“Grace.”

“I know how it looks. I don’t care.”

“You’re definitely right about how it looks.”

“I’ll call you.”

He shook his head and lifted her hand off his arm and she stepped off the running board. He turned his truck around and she watched as he disappeared slowly down the road.

8. Poe

It was daylight the next morning when Lee dropped Poe off at his mother’s trailer, they said good- bye but he already felt distracted, he walked quickly to his room and changed into his work boots. After that he went down to the field carrying the sneakers he’d been wearing the night the Swede died, the box they’d come in, a can of gasoline. He doused the shoes and set them on fire. Maybe somewhere there was a receipt for them but no, he didn’t save those sorts of things. Not that any of it would make any difference, if they had an eyewitness. He wondered if it was Jesús or the other one. There was no point thinking about it, he’d know soon enough.

He stood in the green field, waist- high in the goldenrod, looking out over things. The falling- down gray barn, way off on the far hill, he’d seen an old man go in it a few times, even glassed him through binocs once, but he’d never found out who the old man was. The man would be dead, probably, by the time Poe got out of prison, he would never see that old man again. He didn’t even know the man, but it felt like a loss from his life. He wouldn’t see the barn in the distance or these rolling hills either because if he went away any length of time his mother would sell the trailer and move. Things were changing right in front of his eyes, it would all stop existing, as far as he was concerned. He hadn’t thought about it that way before. If they gave him the full sentence, he’d be older than his mother when he got out, twenty- five years from now anything could happen, civilizations on the moon, the prime of his life. Only the dregs left over and he had to be honest with himself, from what he’d seen the dregs were not good. No one then or now would want a forty- six-year- old man who’d spent half his life locked up. He would be alone. Of no use to anyone or himself Not to mention how quickly things happened these days, twenty- five years it would be like coming out of a timewarp, like the movie where they resurrect the caveman. Nothing would make any sense. That was if they didn’t get the capital penalty. The injection. He didn’t know. He needed to be clear with himself— going in for this, for the killing of the Swede, he was giving up his entire life. Those words, he thought, they sound just like other words, but you cannot even understand what they mean—giving up your life, there should be some other thing besides words that would describe it. A machine that would plug into your mind and give you the feeling. But it would be too much. No one would be able to handle it. You could only handle it little by little, you could not truly understand what that meant.

I am giving up my life, he said out loud. But still the words brought nothing to his mind, no description, only a very faint feeling, he might have been saying I would like a glass of milk.

He was not even the one that had killed the Swede. And the Swede had not even been doing anything, just standing there. If Isaac had killed the Mexican one, sure, maybe Poe could do time for that. But the Swede was just standing doing nothing. Except that was a lie. He was lying to himself. He was lying to himself so as not to go to prison, he knew that if Isaac hadn’t killed the Swede then the other one, Jesús, would have cut his throat. There was no point pretending he didn’t remember their names. It had come down to him or the Swede. Billy Poe or Otto Carson, a dead rotting body. Otto Carson’s end being a necessary factor to his own continuation. Necessary condition, he thought. Meaning it is not on Isaac. It seemed hard to follow but it wasn’t. He understood it better than he could say it. The words were no good; if anything, the more he thought about it, the more he talked with himself, the more he’d justify his way out of it. The truth, the truth that mattered, was that he, Poe, was responsible for killing the Swede. There were other truths too, things that were just as true, but this was the one that mattered.

He wanted to sit down awhile, memorize the view from the field, he had never quite seen things well enough, he was not like Isaac, and now time was short. He went back up to the house. He knocked on the door of his mother’s bedroom. The room smelled of sleep and whiskey, she was lying on the bed in her nightgown, her thick legs slightly spread, the blankets twisted all around her. He rearranged the sheets to cover her more and then sat down next to her.

“Come here,” she mumbled. He lay down in the bed and turned his back to her and she hugged him like that. You’re acting like a little kid, he thought. He didn’t care. Then he must have fallen asleep because there was an insistent hammering sound that he didn’t want to think about and finally someone pushed the bedroom door open. Poe opened his eyes and it was Bud Harris. He was leaning over the bed, he put his hand on Poe’s shoulder and Poe flinched away from his touch.

“Come on, buddy,” said Harris. “Time to go.”

He could see Harris looking at his mother and he sat up immediately, then stood up so Harris had to move back and his view of Poe’s mother was blocked.

“I’ve been knocking out there five minutes,” said Harris.

“Alright,” Poe told him. “I’ll be out.”

He heard Harris go outside, the front door slamming, and he sat up and put his boots back on. There was no point in preparing—whatever he brought they would take. Maybe he should have taken a shower, probably be the last time he could shower alone, but there was Lee’s smell still on him, he’d heard stories about men in prison, a guy’s wife visiting and sticking her fingers down there and then offering the fingers to her husband to smell, or something like that, the closest the husband could get. He’d always thought those stories were exaggerated but now he could imagine that very clearly.

“You need to be getting ready,” said his mother. She was sitting up now in her oversize T-shirt. “You need to help him.”

“I will,” he said to her.

Outside, he found Harris was waiting by the Explorer.

“I’m ready.” But they couldn’t leave until his mother came out and said good- bye, and he wanted to be gone, in the truck and moving, get it over as quickly as possible, he did not want to look at this place any longer, it would only make things worse, it seemed as if he might start crying at any minute and he didn’t want Harris to see him that way. He tried to get into the truck but Harris said:

“Wait for your mother to come and see you off properly.”

He stood there, he tried closing his eyes but it didn’t make it any better. Finally his mother came out in sweatpants and a coat and hugged him again and he closed his eyes to try to dry them.

“Listen to him,” his mother said to Poe. “Do what he says.”

Poe nodded and choked something down. Harris fumbled with something inside the truck, pretended not to notice.

“Take care of him,” his mother told Harris.

“Call me tonight, Grace,” Harris said.

Poe watched his mother look at Harris, something passing between them.

Then Harris motioned him into the front seat. They were nearly to the main road when he pulled the truck over.

“You’ll have to ride in the back,” he said. “I didn’t want her to see you like that but the staties might be waiting when we get to the station so I’ll need to cuff you, too.”

Poe let himself be handcuffed and put in the passenger area of the truck, behind the partition. Somehow it calmed him down.

“You know how serious this is, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Did that English boy have anything to do with what happened? I went over there this morning and his father told me he took off two days ago and they haven’t seen him since.”

“Nah,” said Poe.

Harris shook his head. “This DA is gonna eat you up. Knows what you’ll say before the words come out of your mouth.”

“I ain’t dumb.”

“Actually” said Harris. “You are dumb. You need to remember that before this gets any worse, if that’s even possible.”

“Whatever you say.”

“You should have come to me. None of this would be happening.”

He could see that Harris was angry. Then he was angry at Harris.

“I see you looking at me,” said Harris, “but if this witness gets you out of the lineup, and it sounds like he will, you’re up shit’s creek. Twenty- five years if you’re lucky but like I said this DA is hot for a capital case to get his career moving and he’s betting you might be his ticket. I’m not saying he’ll get it, it’ll be a hard sell to a jury but he’ll push for it. Just so you know, this is a very smart man who’s going to be working his ass off to get you into the death chamber.” He paused a minute. “You,” he said again. “Not someone else, but you. Billy Poe.”

“What’s the witness saying?”

“That the little guy, who I presume is Isaac English, saw a fight brewing and took off. That you stuck around and started a fight and smashed the witness in the head and when he woke up you’d smashed his friend Otto Carson in the head, too, only a lot harder. His friend who is now dead.”

“What about the third one, who was holding the knife to me?”

“There wasn’t any talk about a knife. And if there’s a third one, he’s probably in Kansas by now because there’s not many people dumb enough to get mixed up in this.”

“His name was Jesús. Like I said, he put a knife to my neck.”

“Well that ain’t what the witness saw.”

“Well what the witness is saying isn’t what happened but I guess it’s settled then.”

“For your mother’s sake you need to talk to me, because that’s the only way we’re going to have a chance.”

Poe was quiet and he thought all you’d be telling him is the truth but then he reminded himself that it would not be the truth.

They went along the river road, the glare coming off the water made it too much to look at, greenness everywhere there was so much growing, there was a person out trawling, a small boat, a retired person in his years of ease.

Harris continued: “You know I got her a job in Philadelphia. Senior executive assistant at the State’s Attorney’s Office. Which is kind of ironic, given your situation, but either way she would have gotten thirty-four thousand a year, pension, I got the job lined up for her but you were doing good playing ball and she wasn’t ready to separate you from your father. I tried to use logic on her, point out you could play ball anywhere and as for your father he’s made about two child support payments in his life. That was six years ago, when you were a freshman. She’d said she’d leave when you went to college but then you were still living at home, sponging off her, couldn’t even keep your hours as a stockboy”

“The owner laid everyone off,” Poe said. He was numb to Harris. They were coming into town. He didn’t want to be getting a lecture now, he wanted Harris to tell him what to say to the state police.

“Your mother is a good woman,” said Harris. “You got no idea how many chances you’ve gotten because of her.”

“My mother is married.”

“Please,” said Harris. “Your father’s diddled half the girls in town. Miracle you don’t have twenty brothers and sisters.”

“You’re a real piece of shit, you know that?”

They pulled into the police station parking lot but Harris didn’t move to get out. He said, “Billy, do you remember all those times you and your football buddies got arrested for public consumption?”

Poe snorted. “I never got busted for that,” he said.

“Huh. I wonder. What about the time one of my guys pulled you over doing seventy in a thirty, too drunk to even remember to throw your empties out the window? Or even, let me see if I remember this correctly—you hit a young man in the head with a baseball bat, after he’d already gone down and was no longer a threat to you or anyone else, but still you got off with probation.”

Poe didn’t say anything.

“Thought you were just that lucky, huh?”

“I don’t need to hear this right now.”

“You aren’t lucky. You’re spoiled and you’re stupid and I’ve been bending over backwards the last seven or eight years to keep you in one piece.”

“You’re just trying to make yourself feel better.”

“You got too much of your father in you. And that is a goddamn shame for all of us, especially your mother.”

“You’re lucky I’m back here,” said Poe. “You’re lucky there’s a fuckin wall right now.”

“Save that shit for the lockup,” Harris told him. “I’ll pretty much guarantee you’ll need it.”

Harris got out of the truck and opened Poe’s door and led him into the building. The fat cop, Ho, was sitting at the same desk, as if he hadn’t moved in the last twenty- four hours.

“The staties here?”

“No,” Ho said. “Their chief dickhead called and they want us to drive him to Uniontown.”

“Get his picture and prints,” said Harris, motioning to Poe.

Harris disappeared and the other cop led Poe into a small white room with a waist- high shelf. Poe expected the short Chinese cop to be rough but he wasn’t.

“Make your hands loose and let me roll your fingers. If you smear them I’ll just have to do it again.”

“I ain’t smearing them.”

Harris stuck his head in.

“Before you get this asshole’s picture send him to the bathroom to shave and get cleaned up. The other asshole’s gonna plaster it all over the newspapers, guaranteed.”

Harris looked at Poe: “From here on out if anyone tries to ask you anything, you say ‘Lawyer.’ They ask you if the sky is blue, you don’t say yes, you say lawyer. They ask you who the president is, you know what you say?”

“Lawyer.”

The deputy stood outside the bathroom while Poe shaved and then they took four sets of mugshots until Harris was satisfied with the picture. There’s the schoolboy look, he said. Then they got back into Harris’s truck and headed to Uniontown, the county seat. At least this time Harris didn’t make him wear handcuffs. They didn’t talk; he guessed Harris was doing him a favor now, taking the long way because he wouldn’t see any of it again. The valley got a little flatter as they got south of Brownsville, when they got to the ferry in Fredericktown the river was nearly clear instead of brown, it was strange seeing the Mon that color. Usually the ferry driver made you wait until there was a full boat, six cars, but they just drove Harris across, there was only one other car on the boat and the ferry driver looked Poe over, ignorant fucking hick he was just staring at him, he looked about seventeen or so Poe wanted to get out and beat his skull in but he noticed the people in the other car staring at him too, it was a father and some little kid, Poe could tell that the kid was probably getting a lecture from his old man about what happens if you don’t follow the rules. Poe being the example. He just looked at the floor of the truck, it was lined with rubber for easy cleanup. There was a bump as the ferry touched the other bank, and then they were driving again.

“Why are we going this way,” Poe asked. “Uniontown is on the other side of the river.” He said it and got a faint hope that maybe Harris was going to help him escape, let him out at the West Virginia border.

“I figured taking the scenic route might give us more time to talk,” said Harris. “Not to mention this might be your final chance to see this stuff before you turn fifty. Or at all.”

Poe felt his stomach sink.

“I already told you everything,” he said.

Harris shrugged.

Heading west away from the Mon it was more rolling hills, ancient barns and silos, it was farming and not industry. They were really taking the long way to Uniontown—they would have to cross back over the river again. The land changed quickly as you got away from the river, the old stone farmhouses, it reminded you people had been living here two, three hundred years, there were houses that old. His father claimed that was how long their people had been in the Valley, three hundred years, original founders, but it was more like the original drunkards. In the armpit of history there was always a horse thief Those were the Poes. He wished they had taken the shorter route. Then it occurred to him: this really is your last chance to see all this. That’s how serious this is.

Maybe the bum, it occurred to him now it must be Murray, the one who’d recognized him from the football team. Maybe he wouldn’t pick Poe out of the lineup but Christ what were the odds of that, he’d known him on a chance meeting and now that he thought Poe had killed his buddy he’d recognize him for sure. Not to mention Poe had given him a good ass- kicking—there was nothing like payback. Murray was going to pay him back that was for goddamn sure and when Poe thought about it that way he was in no hurry to get there at all, he was glad Harris had taken the long drive. He tried to look at every tree, memorize it all. He wondered what the bail would be, it would be steep, he was sure of that, they’d make sure it was too high to pay. They passed a yard where someone had a collection of tractors, forty or fifty of them on a big lawn in front of a little house, he would remember that, and then they came into a town. They must have crossed the river again without him noticing. How long had he been in the back of the truck? They were in Union-town already, it was about to be over, his final ride.

A few people in the street stared until they saw him staring back. There was a man, clearly crazy, walking down the street talking to someone who wasn’t there. Let me switch places with him, he’ll get three meals a day and a place to sleep. I’ll fend for myself, wear animal skins. He wondered where Isaac was. On the road somewhere. He thought maybe Isaac should be here for a while, too, not the whole time, just share a few minutes. Maybe they were even. He had saved Isaac and then Isaac had saved him. Were he and Isaac even or not? Harris opened the partition and passed back the bracelets.

“Make em tight so it looks like I did it,” he said.

A few minutes later they stopped behind a big brick building like the old police station in Buell. Harris led him inside.

There was a tall desk and a cop behind it and some other cops loitering, talking to a man in a suit, a short good- looking young man with a full head of blond hair, he carried himself like a politician. He looked Poe over carefully, as if Poe was a car he was thinking of buying. Poe nodded but if the man noticed he didn’t react at all.

Poe was put in a holding cell with two benches; there was a middle-aged man lying on one of them, his hair mussed, wearing khakis and a golf shirt. He smelled like he’d been sweating booze for a long time, he had circles under his eyes and he’d thrown up on himself at some point in the recent past and he smelled of that, too. He glanced briefly at Poe and must have decided Poe wasn’t a threat because he closed his eyes again. Poe felt slightly insulted.

After a time Poe was taken out and stood in a room against a wall with five other men who were approximately his age and height. One of the other men standing with Poe was a cop who’d been in the lobby when Poe came in; now he wore streetclothes. They all faced a mirrored window. After a few minutes, Poe was led back to the cell. Eventually Harris came to the cell and knocked on the bars so Poe would look up.

“Well,” said Poe.

Harris shook his head. “Didn’t take him long.”

“I guess that’s it, then.” He shrugged.

“There’s one good public defender around here. I’m trying to get her to take your case.”

“I appreciate it,” said Poe.

“I’ll be seeing you.”

“Wait,” said Poe. “Where are they sending me?”

“Fayette.”

“Not the jail?”

“Bail’s too high for the regular jail. Least that’s what our friend the district attorney is saying.”

“That’s great.”

“I’ll keep your mother informed.”

Poe shrugged.

“Stay out of trouble if you can,” said Harris. “If you can’t, just make sure the other guy gets it worse. First day’s always the hardest.”

After Harris left, the man in the golf shirt sat up and looked at Poe.

“Who do you have to blow to get that kind of treatment,” he said. “None of those fuckers has said a single goddamn word to me.”

“I doubt it’s the kind of treatment you want,” said Poe.

“I’m on my second DUI,” the man said.

“Well, I’m sure they’ll let you go again.”

“I dunno. I said some dumb things to the cop.”

“They got bigger things to worry about than you.”

The man sat back down on the bench.

“Christ,” he said. “I’ve got tenure committee next week.”

“What does that mean?”

The man looked at Poe. “I’m a professor. Actually I’m a poet.”

“At CU?”

The man shook his head.

“I don’t give a fuck,” Poe said. “It ain’t like I’m going there.”

“Why are you here anyway” the man said.

“Don’t worry yourself.”

“C’mon, man. I don’t care.”

“Supposedly I killed someone,” said Poe. “Except I didn’t.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Jesus,” said the man. But his mood seemed to brighten after that. He went to the sink and washed his face and lay down on the bench and closed his eyes.

Poe felt himself getting angry, he thought you should belt this guy in the face, consoling himself on your situation. Except he was done with that behavior. No that wasn’t true. Where he was going, most likely he was not done with that behavior at all. He watched the professor, smelling like puke but resting easily.

Finally a cop came and took Poe to a garage where they put him in a van with a cage in the back of it. He waited there a long time, the cage was like a cage for large animals, bear dogs or something, he closed his eyes. He doubted it was past two in the afternoon but it felt like a long time since he’d been home. He didn’t know how long he’d been in the van when he heard the driver’s door open and close and then the garage opened and they drove out into the light. The driver didn’t say a word and Poe didn’t feel like waking up anyway, he was thinking about Lee, the last night, it was hard to figure her out. They’d gone to a motel and done it until morning, but there was something off about her. A married woman, what did you expect? He could see it clearly in his mind, her face in the dark, it was as clear as looking at a picture, that was how you remembered things, by thinking about them over and over, only sometimes you’d begin to remember them differently. He began to feel carsick with all the narrow swooping roads; it was an old van. He had no idea where they were, woods and fields, fields and woods, a never- ending succession, country roads, dipping and turning all the time, he would be sick. When they finally stopped they were at a large compound with low buildings at the top of a hill, it looked brand- new, could have been a school except for the forty- foot chainlink and razor wire. There was a good view of the river, four squat gun towers, and a man driving a white pickup truck down the space between the fences, patrolling. Inside the inner fence, in what was clearly the prisoners yard, there was no grass, only dirt, prisoners standing around in blue shirts and tan pants, there were two separate areas, it looked like weightlifting benches.

The paint was fresh and bright white and the steel razors at the tops of the fences reflected the sun and the big windows on the guard towers were spotless. Someone came out to open the gate. Poe watched it close behind him and get farther and farther away. Inside one of the buildings they took the big manila envelope with his wallet and watch and counted the money again in front of him and made him strip. He stood naked facing the wall. There were two guards; both had their batons out. Here it comes, he thought.

“Open your mouth and lift up your tongue. Run your fingers through your hair, all of your hair now. Turn around and pull your ears forward.”

Poe complied.

“Bend all the way over and spread your cheeks wide.”

The men stood at a safe distance. Poe did everything they said.

“You got anything in them boots?”

“In what?”

“Your shoes, boy. You got anything in em?”

“No.”

“Do I have to cut them open to look inside them?”

“Please don’t cut up my shoes.”

Poe turned around. One of the guards was feeling around inside his shoes with blue latex gloves. Both guards wore gray uniform shirts and black pants, cheap material; their shirts were pilled from being washed.

“Turn the fuck back around,” said the short guard. “I won’t ask you again.”

Poe did.

“Alright. Now bend over three times quickly. All the way down to your toes.”

Poe did.

One of them rapped the baton against the wall.

“Do it quick,” he said. “Doubletime.”

Poe did.

“Nice form,” said one of them.

“What was that for?”

“In case you had a shank up your ass. You put something up there and you bend over too quick it’ll cut your guts open from the inside.”

“I don’t have anything,” said Poe.

“So keep it in mind for the future. That’s a regular part of the drill.”

They gave him his boots back and tossed him an orange jumpsuit that smelled like someone else’s sweat.

“I don’t have any socks or underwear,” Poe said. The men ignored him. They led him to another room where he was directed to stand in front of a large desk behind which sat a heavy- set black woman. He greeted her and she ignored him. She verified his name.

“Do you feel suicidal?” she said.

“No,” he said.

“Are you a homosexual?”

“No.”

“Do you have any medical conditions or allergies?”

“No.”

“Have you ever thought about hurting yourself?”

“I just told you that,” he said.

She gave him an exasperated look.

“Whatever,” he said. “What about my lawyer?”

She acted like she hadn’t heard him. He sat there watching her write. He could feel the anger building up inside him but he kept his head on, it would not help him to let his fire get built up.

The woman put his file aside and began looking at other papers that seemed to have nothing to do with him, then she was writing something in her day planner. He stood in front of her desk with his arms behind his back. He stood for a long time. He shifted from foot to foot; his leg fell asleep. Finally she motioned to one of the guards and Poe was taken into another room where an inmate trustee, a short gray- haired black man in his sixties, handed him a pile of sheets, a towel, and a pillow, and asked his clothing sizes.

When the guards had gone back into the other room, the trustee said, “How much you want for those boots, my man. Timberlands?”

“Red Wings.”

“Well tell me what you want for them.”

“They ain’t for sale.”

“Don’t test my motherfuckin patience, dawg.”

Poe didn’t say anything. The man left and came back and tossed Poe a pair of polyester khaki pants, two pairs of socks and underwear, and a blue denim button- down shirt.

“None of this is the right size,” Poe said.

“You are one stupid- ass fuckin fish, you know that?”

He could have picked the little man up and crushed his skull but for some reason the inmate was not afraid of him. He changed out of the orange jumpsuit and into the new clothes and one of the guards came back and Poe picked up his bundle of sheets and followed him down a long narrow hallway. They passed a guard station with inch- thick Plexiglas, were buzzed through a steel door and into a broad corridor as long as a football field. The corridor was empty except for a pair of guards patrolling and an inmate pushing a mop. The floor was highly polished and the smell of floor wax and solvent overpowering. Following the guard, Poe passed several doors and could see into the cellblocks, he could see men sitting around on chairs and tables, he could hear music blaring. Poe expected the guard to explain where they were going but he didn’t.

Finally they reached a door and the guard turned and the door clicked and they entered the cellblock. It was a long wide space with two tiers of cells on each side and a large common area in the center. Several televisions were turned up to maximum volume, blaring Jerry Springer and rap videos. There were tables on which men were playing games of some sort, checkers or maybe chess, some wore the same khakis and blue denim shirts as Poe did but most wore sweatshirts or pants that didn’t look state- issued. Immediately the noise died down in the room as people sized him up.

“I like them shoes,” called one of them.

“Look at that pretty- ass motherfuckin fish.”

“Some tight- ass Britney Spears booty down there. I be grabbin on that shit and…” Out of the corner of his eye, Poe could see one of the inmates making an exaggerated humping motion.

“Bullshit nigga,” said another. He called to Poe: “I’ma take care of you, baby. Don’t let these other motherfuckers worry you. You too pretty for them.”

There was loud laughter and competing catcalls about what they would do to him.

Poe looked to the guard to say something to quiet the inmates down but he didn’t.

“Don’t you worry, fish,” said someone, “that punk- ass CO won’t say shit to us. Will he. Cause that nigga is next in line after you.”

The corrections officer was staring rigidly ahead. He waved his arm at a group of inmates blocking the stairs but they only stepped out of the way at the very last second. The CO, who was not much older than Poe, didn’t make eye contact with any of them.

All the cell doors were open and finally they got to one that wasn’t. The guard checked his keyring and found the correct key and turned it. They stood there until Poe figured he was supposed to slide the door open.

The cell was maybe six feet wide and ten long. Two steel bunkbeds were bolted to the wall and took up half the width; opposite the door was a stainless steel toilet without a seat, a sink with a pushbutton faucet. Only one person would be able to stand up at a time inside the cell.

“This like the place you stick new guys or something?”

“What’d you expect?” said the guard.

“Be a little bit bigger for having two beds.”

“You think this is bad,” he said, “most of the time the fish get stuck in the hole a couple weeks for processing. Least you’re going right in the general population. Plus your cellmate’s in the hole right now so you got it to yourself a few days.”

“Which bunk,” said Poe.

“The one where there isn’t anything on it, shitbird.”

Poe took the top one, set his bundle on it.

“Lockdown’s in five minutes,” said the guard. “Don’t fuckin go nowhere.”

“What about dinner,” said Poe.

“You missed it,” said the man. He shrugged and walked away.

Poe made his bed, looked for things to occupy himself. There was nothing. He drank water from the faucet. He lay down. There was a pressure inside his head, like the motor up there was spinning too fast, the bolts and screws holding him together were about to let go and he’d end up torn to pieces, he’d choke himself, there would be no stopping him. It was a mistake, is what it was. That was it. It was a mistake. He was not supposed to be here. There was no way he was ever supposed to be put in a place like this.

9. Isaac

The faint light of dawn woke him and he opened his eyes quickly. He thought he might be back in his bed. No. In the sleeping bag at the edge of a lawn. He turned his head. Goes on a ways, out of sight. Fairway of a golf course. Soft bed. Easy on the bruises. He checked the air with his breath, watched the vapor drift up. Cold and not a sound anywhere, could be the only one alive on earth. Used to like being up this early. Back to sleep.

He closed his eyes again and waited until the sky brightened enough to wake all the birds, a single chirp and then a spreading chorus, twitters and warbles, cooing pop pop pop piit piit piit sreeeel sreeel sreeel. Something fluttered just over his face, a gray- and- white flash: kingbird. Bee eater. He put his arms behind his head and lay there for another ten minutes, listening to birdcalls and watching the sky change color as the sun rose.

He sat up quickly and the pain startled him—rib cage. Did I get jumped again yesterday? No. Sunday leftovers. Internal pain, turns the stomach. Better to break an arm. Depends. Good rib- break better than bad arm- break. Leg- break the worst—can’t move—done for. Plus lose a quart of blood per femur. Reason they break your legs on the cross—act of mercy.

It took him a long time to get his bag packed, there was no way to move that didn’t hurt. Worse than yesterday, he thought. The second day after you get beaten is worse than the first. Body won’t let you know you’re hurt until you’re out of danger—waits till you can handle the news. Preserves your mental outlook.

Finally he stood feeling the sun on him, head down, getting the light directly to the brain, cheering, pineal gland. Also the feeling of danger— they can all see you. See how hurt you are. Sleep by day, move by night. Oldie but goodie—reason animals see in the dark. Night eyes reflect light but also absorb it. Think on that a while, Watson.

Shouldering his pack he made his way back into the forest, down the rocky hill along the drainage, his legs hurting more than yesterday. He walked hunched and with small steps as if carrying an enormous load. He wanted badly to lighten the pack but there was nothing inside it he wouldn’t need. There were strange, brightly colored flowers along the stream, but even his slow movement took all his effort; he passed without looking. What’s on the day’s menu. Broken back, maybe. Fight the old man for his wheelchair. He’d win—special tactics. Wheelchair warfare. What he’d say if he saw you now: ungrateful shit, the strong survive. Send your poor your tired and your hungry. Stick em in a grinder, sausage for the king. Dirt for dinner. How far to the next town.

He reached the ridgetop and looked down over the river flowing in its valley, green and winding, thick with trees. The Elrama plant dominated the skyline on the other side, the stack was bright orange and maybe fifty feet in diameter, five hundred feet tall. The steam plume a mile long. It’s only three or four miles to Elizabeth. Only, he thought. Take all day at this pace.

He picked his way slowly down the steep hillside. He could see the road he’d left the previous night and just beyond it the train tracks and the river. Each downhill step hurt his legs. Except the kid is not worried. Knowing how easy the journey will be with two good legs, he prefers to get gimped up. Empty stomachs make for clear heads. Bored with walking he grows gills, swims upriver, comes out downtown. Crowd swoons. Mermaids revere the defeater of Swedes.

Every few hundred steps or so he would stop and rest. He was hungry again. He passed a few small clusters of houses and then a shipping facility of some sort. There was a vending machine outside one of the buildings so he limped around the fence and he found a dollar bill and put it in and got a Dr Pepper. He drank it quickly standing in front of the machine, and immediately felt better. He spent another dollar on a second can for later.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw someone in uniform crossing the parking lot toward him and made his way quickly back into the woods. That’s right, keep moving. Good—he’s not following you. A short while later he felt sufficiently alone to rest by a small stream that ran down toward the river. There was no one around. He sat against his pack, dozed for a while, then got up and kept walking until he was back on the train tracks.

Eventually he could see a bridge over the Mon and he knew he was getting close to Elizabeth. The kid perseveres. Chased by man and beast alike, he worries he’ll finish his journey with no sense of accomplishment. Complains his legs are only bruised, not broken. The Atlas of his country he’s the new Paul Bunyan. A moral emperor—his people renounce popes priests and presidents. He’s five foot five and rising. Walking on feet while he’s got em.

Approaching Elizabeth the terrain was hilly and wooded though there was a long riverflat with yet another power plant with a tall orange-and- white smokestack, a mountain of coal piled nearby, itself at least a hundred feet tall, barges tied up, unloading more coal. Farther downriver he passed a chemical refinery, another river lock. There were many houses noticeable along the hillside. At the Elizabeth bridge there was a small pier and two kids about his age were sitting on it.

“Spare a cigarette?” the boy called.

Isaac shook his head and went slowly past.

“You sure?” the girl asked.

“I don’t smoke,” Isaac replied, louder than he’d meant.

“I believe you,” said the boy grinning.

There was a gas station near the bridge with a food mart. The kid strikes gold, he thought. He does fine alone.

Inside the counterman stared at him. Feeling superior. Indian or Pa kistani—own all the hotels and gas stations. Wonder why. He ignored the man’s stares and filled a basket with Slim Jims, several tins of Vienna sausage, a carton of milk, a half dozen candy bars, two large bottles of water. Just holding all the food in his hands his mouth got very moist, it was all he could do to not tear open the packages. He put it on the counter and the clerk scanned his items. On the map rack he found a road atlas and put it on the counter as well.

“What’s up ahead?” Isaac said.

The clerk stared at him.

“What town? Clairton?”

“Clairton is across river. Glassport is next town on this side. Eighteen and seventy.”

He paid the clerk and noticed he had only a dollar left in his wallet. Plenty in the pants pocket though. He put the food into his pack and stuffed the atlas in as well and then had a thought, went to the napkin dispenser by the hot dog rack and took a thick handful of napkins. The clerk watched him, making a mental tally of the napkins, but didn’t say anything.

A little over thirty dollars now he’d spent, coming twenty miles. He had to get onto the trains. He drank the milk immediately for the vitamins, the entire quart, and began to feel much better. You could actually live off this stuff, he thought. The only liquid that satisfies hunger. Where had he read that? A hangover from infancy.

Elizabeth was as run- down as any other place in the Valley, unpainted houses dotted the hillside, a steel- frame bridge crossed the river, the only for ten miles. Just to the north was Glassport, one of the wealthier towns. He would stand out there and there would be police. He went back toward the bridge. Traffic was heavy—he was getting closer to Pittsburgh. Downriver, toward Pittsburgh, he could make out the long barns of the Clairton coke works, building after building as far as the eye could see, dozens of smokestacks. The plant itself was several miles long—bigger than the town. He passed the first parking lot, newer model cars, men milling about in dark blue mechanic’s coats. It was a good job—seventeen an hour to start. Along the river maybe forty or fifty barges in various states of unloading, a huge trainyard. Still, the city was run- down, abandoned houses on the main boulevard. Biggest coke works in the country couldn’t stop the city from going to shit. Niggerton the old man calls it now. Don’t even repeat that, he thought. Don’t be like him. Resting on a grassy hillside, he watched the river and the coke works, the Valley was steep here, on both sides the land rising sharply above the river. Careful you don’t get jumped—lots of heroin comes from Clairton. Nursery rhyme. He watched the barges unload their coal for processing. From darkness we pull light—black oil and coal. Carbon the reason—burn your ancestors.

He drifted off and it was near midnight when he woke, he was very cold, he’d left his coat unzipped. It was dark. The only light came from the coke works, small dim safety lights outlining every building and smokestack, as far as the eye could see. In the dark it looks like connect the dots. Several miles long. How many feet of pipe—millions, easily. Hundreds of buildings. Coke ovens, cranes, conveyors, who knew what all those buildings did, steam rose from every pipe and building. Heat and steam and blackness of coal. Underworld.

Walking down a dark street he passed a man wrapped in a blanket sitting against a fence. The man looked at him, then looked away. Isaac passed but then stopped and reached into his pants pocket and tried to fumble a bill out of the envelope in his pocket. It was hard to get just one out. Just give him the entire wad, he thought. If you give it to him you can just go home. He stood there thinking. No. Have to keep going.

He walked back and handed the man a twenty, and looking up at him, the man hesitated before accepting it. He was a young man, Isaac saw. A dirty face, maybe a junkie. “Appreciate you,” he said to Isaac.

“No problem,” Isaac told him. He continued down the road. Time to catch the train, the great escape. Collecting himself he made his way toward the coke works, the wind shifted and the smell was intense. city of prayer the sign called it, more nice old buildings boarded up, dark streets, detritus of an older way. What was the joke? A boy and girl are making out in his car, and finally she can’t take it anymore. Kiss me, she whispers. Kiss me right where it stinks. So he drives her to Clairton.

Ahead of him along the hillside he could hear a murmuring he knew must be a gathering of people, there was light coming from behind an old building, a school, maybe. There weren’t any houses around it. Probably not locals. Maybe someone to tell you a train schedule.

Two enormous fires in trash cans behind the school, nearly two dozen people sitting or standing in groups against the walls, around different fires, a few shelters made of salvaged plywood or corrugated tin. Sitting against one wall, a dreadlocked teenager was beating on two white sheetrock buckets, a stick in each hand, the rhythms syncopated, he was not an amateur, a school band dropout. A drum major gone native.

Isaac stood behind some overgrown bushes, watching. The people were a mix, half local wino types and half younger people, kids in their teens and twenties. It was chilly but a large- breasted girl took her shirt off and danced around the courtyard in her bra and a few whoops went up. Eventually she went and sat down again. A few people were doing something over a candle and he realized they were shooting up.

Just go in there, he thought. You’re no different than any of them. But he couldn’t bring himself to. A fight broke out suddenly, a big man and small man swinging wildly but neither connecting and finally a few people went and separated them. The big one with the shaved head was younger and he went and stood with his group. The older smaller man went and stood by himself. A few more people came around the end of the building and Isaac saw it was the boy and the girl he’d seen earlier under the bridge. The boy was carrying a case of beer in each hand; the girl carried a grocery bag.

Isaac had just gotten up the nerve to join the group when the skinhead and the older man were fighting again, but this time the skinhead tripped and the older man hit him in the head with a stick and the skinhead fell over and was hit several more times as he rolled around on the ground. The small man who’d done the hitting picked up his backpack and walked immediately out of the area of the loading dock and people watched him, he nearly walked straight into Isaac.

“I can’t see you,” the man said, crashing through the dark brush, “but I ain’t who you want to be worrying about.” He was about Isaac’s size and Isaac relaxed slightly.

“This ain’t a good spot,” he continued. “There’s a couple of bad seeds in there, dopeheads, and when they take a look at the big bald bastard I was hitting they’re gonna be out for serious.”

The man was wearing a backpack with a sleeping bag strapped to the bottom of it and he headed downhill toward the train tracks. Isaac hesitated, then decided to follow him.

After a hundred yards or so the man slowed to let Isaac catch up.

“We might as well either fight it out or not.”

“I’m not fighting,” said Isaac.

“Okay then, so walk together and stop making me nervous.”

He started down the dark street again and Isaac kept up with him.

“Some real troublemakers in there,” said the man. “Sometimes it goes like that.” He had a good deal of blood on the side of his face. He saw Isaac looking. “Christ,” he said. “Got me good, didn’t he?”

“Looks like it.”

“It’ll heal, they always do. You know it around here at all?”

“I’m from here.”

“You headed out?”

“Somewhere south.”

“That’s bass- ackwards. Summer be here before you know it—time to head north.”

“I’ll be alright.”

“A rebel, huh?”

Isaac shrugged.

“After my own heart,” the man said.

They walked toward the coke plant. When the man stopped to piss in the middle of the tracks, Isaac adjusted his knife and the sheath. You’re just being paranoid now, he thought.

“What’s your actual destination?”

“California.”

“How you getting there?”

“No idea,” said Isaac, and then he realized why the question had been asked, was immediately sorry he’d answered it.

“Ah shit, I’ll point you the way. Head that way myself for a while.”

Isaac didn’t say anything.

“Be good for you. Always good to have a mentor around. I don’t mind doing it.”

“I’m doing fine on my own.”

“Well just give me the word and I’ll take off then,” he said. “If you’re one of those loner types that can be a pain in the ass.”

Isaac shook his head and grinned. “I got no problems.”

They were coming up the north end of the coke plant. Isaac still couldn’t get over the size of it, it was bigger even than the mill in Buell had been, but the man seemed not to notice and they stood in the brush at the riverbend, looking at the trainyard. There were at least a dozen different tracks. There were several long trains loaded with coke.

“You wanna go find a rail and ask which is which.”

“What do I say to them?” said Isaac.

“Same as anyone else.”

Isaac shrugged.

“You don’t even know what to ask, do you?”

Screw this guy, he thought. He met his eyes in the dark.

“Alright, I’ll do it for us. Sit tight.”

The man started to walk off, then stopped.

“My name’s Winston, by the way. But most people call me the Baron.”

Isaac told him his name, then wondered if he should have made one up. No, he thought, this is what you’ve wanted. You can give this guy the slip if you need to. At the moment you need his help.

Shortly after that the Baron was back. “It’s the big one there with the four units. The one on the end is just going upriver a little ways, but the big one is going to a place near Detroit. All kinds of shit comes and goes from there—it’ll be easy for you to find something.”

“When’s it due to get rolling.”

“Any minute is what he said. Usually that means a couple hours.”

Just then the triangle of lights came on at the front of the train and there was the sound of diesel engines turning over and then running at high idle.

The man grinned. “Christ, you’re bringing luck to me. I’d been wanting to bash that boy in the head for three days. And now we got our taxi coming. You just watch what I do.”

“I know how to get on a train,” said Isaac.

“Suit yourself then, tough guy. I’ve been doing it thirty- seven years but I’m sure you can’t learn a damn thing from me.”

“I’ll pay attention.”

“Good man.”

The train began to move slowly and the headlights swept over them, blinding, and as soon as the engines passed they ran across the other tracks until they were alongside it, Isaac’s footing was loose in the gravel, the Baron was running ahead of him and threw his backpack up onto the platform and grabbed the ladder and disappeared between two cars. Isaac tossed his pack up onto the rear platform of a different hopper car and pulled himself up the ladder.

He sat on the small metal platform facing the car behind him. It was still dark but by the grit on his hands he could tell the small platform of the coke car was filthy. He didn’t care—you’re moving and not lifting a foot to do it. Feels like a miracle after all that walking. See why people make lives out of doing this.

He sat with his legs outstretched, feeling the train gradually pick up speed, the noise from the train doubled then doubled again.

He watched the scenery pass, lights on the other side of the river. They were going faster and faster and it was getting cold in the wind. Get even colder once we get out of the Valley, once the tracks aren’t bending around a river. He started to take his sleeping bag out, then he stopped himself—it would get sucked away. You’re pretty much just gonna freeze your ass off. No, crawl in that hole. He felt around with his hands, there was a tall slot, a sort of porthole in the back of the car but he couldn’t imagine the space inside was very large. At least it was more protected. He decided to wait.

After several minutes he could see Pittsburgh, the skyscrapers, the power plant on the island, and then the train slowed and began to turn left, west, he grabbed onto the railing and grabbed his pack with the other hand so it wouldn’t slide off under the wheels. Then the city was receding as well, the tall buildings, the bridges and the river, gone.