American Rust

1.

Isaac’s mother was dead five years but he hadn’t stopped thinking about her. He lived alone in the house with the old man, twenty, small for his age, easily mistaken for a boy. Late morning and he walked quickly through the woods toward town—a small thin figure with a backpack, trying hard to keep out of sight. He’d taken four thousand dollars from the old man’s desk; Stolen, he corrected himself. The nuthouse prison-break. Anyone sees you and it’s Silas get the dogs.

Soon he reached the overlook: green rolling hills, a muddy winding river, an expanse of forest unbroken except for the town of Buell and its steelmill. The mill itself had been like a small city, but they had closed it in 1987, partially dismantled it ten years later; it now stood like an ancient ruin, its buildings grown over with bittersweet vine, devil’s tear thumb, and tree of heaven. The footprints of deer and coyotes crisscrossed the grounds; there was only the occasional human squatter.

Still, it was a quaint town: neat rows of white houses wrapping the hillside, church steeples and cobblestone streets, the tall silver domes of an Orthodox cathedral. A place that had recently been well- off, its downtown full of historic stone buildings, mostly boarded now. On certain blocks there was still a pretense of keeping the trash picked up, but others had been abandoned completely. Buell, Fayette County, Pennsylvania. Fayette- nam, as it was often called.

Isaac walked the railroad tracks to avoid being seen, though there weren’t many people out anyway. He could remember the streets at shiftchange, the traffic stopped, the flood of men emerging from the billet mill coated with steeldust and flickering in the sunlight; his father, tall and shimmering, reaching down to lift him. That was before the accident. Before he became the old man.

It was forty miles to Pittsburgh and the best way was to follow the tracks along the river—it was easy to jump a coal train and ride as long as you wanted. Once he made the city, he’d jump another train to California. He’d been planning this for a month. A long time overdue. Think Poe will come along? Probably not.

On the river he watched barges and a towboat pass, engines droning. It was pushing coal. Once the boat was gone the air got quiet and the water was slow and muddy and the forests ran down to the edge and it could have been anywhere, the Amazon, a picture from National Geographic. A bluegill jumped in the shallows—you weren’t supposed to eat the fish but everyone did. Mercury and PCB. He couldn’t remember what the letters stood for but it was poison.

In school he’d tutored Poe in math, though even now he wasn’t sure why Poe was friends with him—Isaac English and his older sister were the two smartest kids in town, the whole Valley, probably; the sister had gone to Yale. A rising tide, Isaac had hoped, that might lift him as well. He’d looked up to his sister most of his life, but she had found a new place, had a husband in Connecticut that neither Isaac nor his father had met. You’re doing fine alone, he thought. The kid needs to be less bitter. Soon he’ll hit California—easy winters and the warmth of his own desert. A year to get residency and apply to school: astrophysics. Lawrence Livermore. Keck Observatory and the Very Large Array. Listen to yourself—does any of that still make sense?

Outside the town it got rural again and he decided to walk the trails to Poe’s house instead of taking the road. He climbed steadily along. He knew the woods as well as an old poacher, kept notebooks of drawings he’d made of birds and other animals, though mostly it was birds. Half the weight of his pack was notebooks. He liked being outside. He wondered if that was because there were no people, but he hoped not. It was lucky growing up in a place like this because in a city, he didn’t know, his mind was like a train where you couldn’t control the speed. Give it a track and direction or it cracks up. The human condition put names to everything: bloodroot rockflower whip- poor- will, tulip bitternut hack-berry Shagbark and pin oak. Locust and king nut. Plenty to keep your mind busy.

Meanwhile, right over your head, a thin blue sky, see clear to outer space: the last great mystery. Same distance to Pittsburgh—couple miles of air and then four hundred below zero, a fragile blanket. Pure luck. Odds are you shouldn’t be alive—think about that, Watson. Can’t say it in public or they’ll put you in a straitjacket.

Except eventually the luck runs out—your sun turns into a red giant and the earth is burned whole. Giveth and taketh away. The entire human race would have to move before that happened and only the physicists could figure out how, they were the ones who would save people. Of course by then he’d be long dead. But at least he’d have made his contribution. Being dead didn’t excuse your responsibility to the ones still alive. If there was anything he was sure of, it was that.

Poe lived at the top of a dirt road in a doublewide trailer that sat, like many houses outside town, on a large tract of woodland. Eighty acres, in this case, a frontier sort of feeling, a feeling of being the last man on earth, protected by all the green hills and hollows.

There was a muddy four- wheeler sitting in the yard near Poe’s old Camaro, its three- thousand- dollar paintjob and blown transmission. Metal sheds in various states of collapse, a Number 3 Dale Earnhardt flag pinned across one of them, a wooden game pole for hanging deer. Poe was sitting at the top of the hill, looking out toward the river from his folding chair. If you could find a way to pay your mortgage, people always said, it was like living on God’s back acre.

The whole town thought Poe would go to college to keep playing ball, not exactly Big Ten material but good enough for somewhere, only two years later here he was, living in his mother’s trailer, sitting in the yard and looking like he intended to cut firewood. This week or maybe next. A year older than Isaac, his glory days already past, a dozen empty beer cans at his feet. He was tall and broad and squareheaded and at two hundred forty pounds, more than twice the size of Isaac. When he saw him, Poe said:

“Getting rid of you for good, huh?”

“Hide your tears,” Isaac told him. He looked around. “Where’s your bag?” It was a relief to see Poe, a distraction from the stolen money in his pocket.

Poe grinned and sipped his beer. He hadn’t showered in days—he’d been laid off when the town hardware store cut its hours and was putting off applying to Wal- Mart as long as possible.

“As far as coming along, you know I’ve got all this stuff to take care of.” He waved his arm generally at the rolling hills and woods in the distance. “No time for your little caper.”

“You really are a coward, aren’t you?”

“Christ, Mental, you can’t seriously want me to come with you.”

“I don’t care either way,” Isaac told him.

“Looking at it from my own selfish point of view, I’m still on goddamn probation. I’m better off robbing gas stations.”

“Sure you are.”

“You ain’t gonna make me feel guilty. Drink a beer and sit down a minute.”

“I don’t have time,” said Isaac.

Poe glanced around the yard in exasperation, but finally he stood up. He finished the rest of his drink and crumpled the can. “Alright,” he said. “I’ll ride with you up to the Conrail yard in the city. But after that, you’re on your own.”

From a distance, from the size of them, they might have been father and son. Poe with his big jaw and his small eyes and even now, two years out of school, a nylon football jacket, his name and player number on the front and buell eagles on the back. Isaac short and skinny, his eyes too large for his face, his clothes too large for him as well, his old backpack stuffed with his sleeping bag, a change of clothes, his notebooks. They went down the narrow dirt road toward the river, mostly it was woods and meadows, green and beautiful in the first weeks of spring. They passed an old house that had tipped face- first into a sinkhole—the ground in the Mid- Mon Valley was riddled with old coal mines, some properly stabilized, others not. Isaac winged a rock and knocked a ventstack off the roof. He’d always had a good arm, better than Poe’s even, though of course Poe would never admit it.

Just before the river they came to the Cultrap farm with its cows sitting in the sun, heard a pig squeal for a long time in one of the outbuildings.

“Wish I hadn’t heard that.”

“Shit,” said Poe. “Cultrap makes the best bacon around.”

“It’s still something dying.”

“Maybe you should stop analyzing it.”

“You know they use pig hearts to fix human hearts. The valves are basically the same.”

“I’m gonna miss your factoids.”

“Sure you will.”

“I was exaggerating,” said Poe. “I was being ironic.”

They continued to walk.

“You know I would seriously owe you if you came with.”

“Me and Jack Kerouac Junior. Who stole four grand from his old man and doesn’t even know where the money came from.”

“He’s a cheap bastard with a steelworker’s pension. He’s got plenty of money now that he’s not sending it all to my sister.”

“Who probably needed it.”

“Who graduated from Yale with about ten scholarships while I stayed back and looked after Little Hitler.”

Poe sighed. “Poor angry Isaac.”

“Who wouldn’t be?”

“Well to share some wisdom from my own father, wherever you go, you still wake up and see the same face in the mirror.”

“Words to live by.”

“The old man’s been around some.”

“You’re right about that.”

“Come on now, Mental.”

They turned north along the river, toward Pittsburgh; to the south it was state forest and coal mines. The coal was the reason for steel. They passed another old plant and its smokestack, it wasn’t just steel, there were dozens of smaller industries that supported the mills and were supported by them: tool and die, specialty coating, mining equipment, the list went on. It had been an intricate system and when the mills shut down, the entire Valley had collapsed. Steel had been the heart. He wondered how long it would be before it all rusted away to nothing and the Valley returned to a primitive state. Only the stone would last.

For a hundred years the Valley had been the center of steel production in the country, in the entire world, technically, but in the time since Poe and Isaac were born, the area had lost 150,000 jobs—most of the towns could no longer afford basic services; many no longer had any police. As Isaac had overheard his sister tell someone from college: half the people went on welfare and the other half went back to hunting and gathering. Which was an exaggeration, but not by much.

There was no sign of any train and Poe was walking a step ahead, there was only the sound of the wind coming off the river and the gravel crunching under their feet. Isaac hoped for a long one, which all the bends in the river would keep slow. The shorter trains ran a lot faster; it was dangerous to try to catch them.

He looked out over the river, the muddiness of it, the things buried underneath. Different layers and all kinds of old crap buried in the muck, tractor parts and dinosaur bones. You aren’t at the bottom but you aren’t exactly at the surface, either. You are having a hard time seeing things. Hence the February swim. Hence the ripping off the old man. Feels like days since you’ve been home but it has probably only been two or three hours; you can still go back. No. Plenty of things worse than stealing, lying to yourself for example, your sister and the old man being champions in that. Acting like the last living souls.

Whereas you yourself take after your mother. Stick around and you’re bound for the nuthouse. Embalming table. Stroll on the ice in February, the cold like being shocked. So cold you could barely breathe but you stayed until it stopped hurting, that was how she slipped in. Take it for a minute and you start to go warm. A life lesson. You would not have risen until now—April—the river gets warmer and the things that live inside you, quietly without you knowing it, it is them that make you rise. The teacher taught you that. Dead deer in winter look like bones, though in summer they swell their skins. Bacteria. Cold keeps them down but they get you in the end.

You’re doing fine, he thought. Snap out of it.

But of course he could remember Poe dragging him out of the water, telling Poe I wanted to see what it felt like is all. Simple experiment. Then he was under the trees, it was dark and he was running, mud-covered, crashing through deadfall and fernbeds, there was a rushing in his ears and he came out in someone’s field. Dead leaves crackling; he’d been cold so long he no longer felt cold at all. He knew he was at the end. But Poe had caught up to him again.

“Sorry what I said about your dad,” he told Poe now.

“I don’t give a shit,” said Poe.

“We gonna keep walking like this?”

“Like what?”

“Not talking.”

“Maybe I’m just being sad.”

“Maybe you need to man up a little.” Isaac grinned but Poe stayed serious.

“Some of us have their whole lives ahead of them. Others—”

“You can do whatever you want.”

“Lay off it,” said Poe.

Isaac let him walk ahead. The wind was picking up and snapping their clothes.

“You good to keep going if this storm comes in?”

“Not really,” said Poe.

“There’s an old plant up there once we get out of these woods. We can find a place to wait it out in there.”

The river was a dozen or so yards to their left and farther ahead the tracks bordered a long floodplain with the grass bright green against the black of oncoming clouds. In the middle of the field, a string of boxcars swallowed by a thicket of wild rose. At one end of the floodplain was the Standard Steel Car factory, he’d been inside it before, the plant was half-collapsed, bricks and wood beams piled on top of the old forges and hydraulic presses, moss and vines growing everywhere. Despite the rubble, it was vast and open inside. Plenty of souvenirs. That old nameplate you gave to Lee, pried it off that big hammer forge, polished the tarnish off and oiled it. A minor vandalism. No, think of all the people who were proud of those machines, to rescue a few pieces of them—little bit of life after death. Lee put it over her desk, saw it when you went to New Haven. Meanwhile this rain is coming in. About to be cold and wet. Bad way to start your trip.

“Christ,” said Poe, as the rain started to fall. “That plant doesn’t even have a roof. Course with your luck I should have figured.”

Isaac pointed: “There’s another building back there that’s in better shape.”

“I can’t wait.”

Isaac walked ahead; Poe was in a foul mood and he wasn’t sure what to do about it.

They followed a deer path that led through the meadow. They could see the smaller building beyond the main factory; half- hidden in the trees, it was dark and shaded. Or sheltered, he thought. A brick building, much smaller than the main plant, the size of a large garage, maybe, the windows boarded but the roof was intact. It was mostly grown over with vines though there was a clear path leading to it through the grass. The rain swept over them and they began to run and when they reached the building Poe shouldered the door. It swung open without any trouble.

It was dark inside but they could make out it had been a machine shop, maybe a dozen lathes and milling machines. A gantry and series of grinder stands for cutting tool bits, though the grinders themselves were missing and the lathes were missing their chucks and cross- feeds, anything a person could carry. There were empty bottles of fortified wine scattered everywhere, more beer cans. An old woodstove and signs of recent fires.

“Jesus H. Christ. Smells like about ten bums are taking a dirtnap under this floor.”

“It’ll be alright,” said Isaac. “I’ll get a fire going so we can dry off.”

“Look at this place, it’s like Howard Johnson’s for bums; stacks of wood and everything.”

“Welcome to my world.”

“Please,” Poe snorted, “you’re a fuckin tourist, is all.”

Isaac ignored him. He knelt in front of the stove and began to build a careful fire structure, tinder and then kindling and then stopping to look for the right- sized sticks. Not the best place but it’ll do. Better than spending the rest of the day in wet clothes. This is what it’ll be like being on the road, prioritizing the small comforts—simple life. Back to nature. You get tired of it you can always buy a bus ticket. Except then it won’t mean anything—you could just buy another ticket and come back. The kid is not afraid. More to see this way—detour to Texas, the McDonald Observatory. Davis Mountains, nine- meter telescope, Hobby- Eberly Try to imagine the stars through that—no different than being up there. Next best thing to astronauts. Very Large Array, New Mexico or Arizona, can’t remember. See it all. No hurries, no worries.

“Don’t look so happy,” said Poe.

“I can’t help it.” He found some more small pieces and went back to building his fire, using his jackknife to shave splinters for tinder.

“You take for goddamn ever to do anything, you know that?”

“I like a one- match fire.”

“Which, by the time you get it lit, it’ll be dark and time to go, because I ain’t spending the night here.”

“I’ll give you my sleeping bag.”

“Fuck that,” said Poe. “We’ve probably already caught tuberculosis just from being in here.”

“We’ll be fine.”

“You’re useless,” Poe told him.

“What do you think you’ll do when I’m gone?”

“I imagine I’ll be extremely happy.”

“Seriously.”

“Quit it. I want someone to nag me, I’ll talk to my mother.”

“I’ll talk to your mother.”

“Yeah, yeah. You bring anything to eat?”

“Some nuts.”

“You would.”

“Hand over your lighter.”

“What would be perfect right now is a pie from Vincent’s. Christ I was up there the other day, the house special—”

“Lighter.”

“I’d order us one but Nextel turned my phone off.”

“Uh-huh.”

“That was a joke,” said Poe.

“Extremely funny. Give me your lighter.”

Poe sighed and handed it over. Isaac got the fire going. It grew quickly. It was a good fire. He kicked the door of the stove all the way open and then sat back and looked at his work with satisfaction.

“You’ll still be smiling when this place burns down on top of us.”

“For someone who put two guys in the hospital—”

“Don’t go there,” said Poe.

“I wouldn’t.”

“You know I think you’re an alright guy, Mental. Just wanted to throw that out, in case you could consider my opinion.”

“You could probably walk onto any football team out there. They’ve got lots of colleges, it’s like Baywatch.”

“Except everyone I know lives here.”

“Call that coach from the New York school.”

Poe shrugged. “I’m happy for you,” he said. “You’re gonna make it, just like your sister. Right down to the rich guy you’ll end up marrying. Some sweet old man, you’ll do the circuit in San Francisco…”

There was a pause as they looked around the hideout. Poe got up and found a piece of cardboard and set it down again to lie on. “I’m still drunk,” he said. “Thank God.” He lay back on the cardboard and closed his eyes. “Ah Christ, my life. I can’t believe you’re doing this.”

“Boxcar Isaac, that’s my new name.”

“Loved by sailors.”

“Duke of all hoboes.”

Poe grinned. “If that’s your way of apologizing, I accept.” He rolled onto his side and wrapped his football jacket around him. “Might rest my eyes a minute. Make sure you wake me up the second it stops raining.”

Isaac kicked him: “Get up.”

“Just let me be happy.”

Isaac went back to watching the fire. Seems to be drawing—won’t die of carbon monoxide. Kick him again. No. Let him be. Probably pass out. Anytime he sits still. Not like you—barely fall asleep in your own bed. Wouldn’t even close your eyes in a place like this. Wish he was coming with. He looked around at the old machines, old rafters, cracks of gray light through the boarded-up windows. Poe is not afraid of people, that’s the difference. Except he is in his way. Not physically afraid, is all. Meanwhile, look at you, already worrying, wondering if the old man’s alright. When you know he’ll be fine. Lee has a rich husband—they can get a nurse whenever they want. No reason as long as you lived there, but now that you’re gone, a nurse will be found. Lee will buy her way out again. You put in five years and she puts in a couple of days every Christmas, her and the old man acting like it was fate. But still—look at it—somehow you’re ending up the bad guy. The kid turns thief, abandons his father, his sister remains the hero and the favorite.

He tried to make himself relax but couldn’t. The kid would like a triple dose of Prozac. Or something stronger. He took the money out and counted it again, it was not quite four thousand dollars, it felt like an enormous sum, though he knew it wasn’t. Things will only get harder, you’ve got Poe right here and you’re still in familiar territory. Thought you’d planned for everything, your notebooks and school transcripts, everything you need to start over in California. Made perfect sense on paper, but of course now it’s ridiculous. Even if the old man doesn’t call the cops. Just pride keeping you out here.

There was a noise at the other end of the building and Poe sat up groggily and looked around. There was a door they hadn’t noticed. Three men appeared, stomping their feet and dripping, wearing backpacks. They were standing in the shadows, two tall men and one short one.

“Y’all are in our spot,” said the biggest of them. He was substantially taller than Poe, thick blond hair and a thick beard. The three of them made their way around the machines and stood a few feet from the fire.

Isaac stood up but Poe didn’t move. “This ain’t anyone’s spot,” Poe said.

“No,” said the man. “This one is ours.”

“Dunno if you’ve been outside recently,” said Poe, looking at the puddles the men were making on the floor, “but we ain’t moving.”

“We can go,” said Isaac. He was thinking about the money in his pocket and he looked away from the newcomers. He thought the big blond lumberjack one might say something more but he didn’t.

“Who gives a shit,” said another of the men. “Least they got the fire going.” He took off his pack. He was the smallest and also the oldest, somewhere in his forties, a week’s stubble, a thin nose that was very crooked, it had been broken and never reset. Isaac remembered that Poe had been messing around at practice once without his helmet, taken a hard hit that broke his nose, but he’d just grabbed it and straightened it himself, right there on the field.

The three men looked like they’d been on the road a long time. The older one wrung out his watch cap and set it near the fire and his wet pants clung to his thin legs. He told them his name was Murray and they could smell him.

“Do I know you?” he said to Poe.

“Probably not.”

“How would I know you?”

Poe shrugged.

“He used to play ball,” said Isaac. “He was tight end for the Buell Eagles.”

Poe gave Isaac a look.

The man noticed Poe’s football jacket draped near the stove. He said: “I remember that. I used to change oil at Jones Chevy and we’d watch the games after work. Thought you’d be outta here. College ball or somethin.”

“Nah,” Poe said.

“You were good,” Murray said. “That wasn’t that long ago.”

Poe didn’t say anything.

“It’s alright. Otto over there was Golden Gloves in his younger days. Coulda gone pro but—”

“I was in the army,” said Otto. He was the tall Swede. Most of the people in the Valley were ethnic in some way or other: Poles, Swedes, Serbs, Germans, Irish. Except for Isaac’s people, who were Scottish, and Poe’s, who had been here so long no one knew what they were.

“Otto is on leave from the VA.” Murray tapped his head.

“Fuckin Murray,” Otto said.

Isaac glanced over but Otto had gone quiet and was staring at the ground. As for the other man, he was dark and Hispanic- looking and a little smaller than Poe, he had a tattoo on his neck that said jesús in bubble letters. All three of the men were much larger than Isaac; the Swede, it now appeared, was close to seven feet.

“You’re lucky it was us come in,” said the Hispanic one. “They got some real lunatics around here.”

“Jesús,” said Murray. “Stop being such a fuckin Mexican.”

“Murray might want to shut his mouth,” said Jesús.

Otto, the Swede, added: “Pretty soon it’s a fuckin convention in here.”

“These two ain’t like that, they’re locals.”

The room seemed dark and small and the Swede picked up a long piece of lumber and rammed the end noisily into the stove. Isaac wondered how he’d get Poe to leave. The embers popped and shot across the floor and by the shadows on the wall all five men looked like sitting apes. This won’t get any better, Isaac thought. Jesús jerked something from his pocket and Isaac flinched and Jesús burst out laughing. It was just a bottle of whiskey.

“I gotta take a piss,” Isaac said. He didn’t have to piss; he wanted to leave and he looked at Poe but Poe didn’t get it.

“Go on,” Poe said.

“Those two usually piss together,” said Jesús.

Isaac waited but Poe stayed where he was, staring at both Jesús and the Swede, he noticed Poe’s jacket sitting there on the floor along with his backpack. Poe was in a definite mood, thinking he was indestructible. Isaac picked up the backpack, he could not afford to lose anything inside it, he held it by a strap and felt everyone watching him. He didn’t know how to tell Poe to bring his coat. Finally he went out alone.

It was nearly dark and the storm had broken temporarily, though more clouds were coming in—across the meadow he could see the trees swaying by the river. He wondered again how he’d get Poe to come out. Thinks it’s still school. No consequences. As for the field, it was full of scrap metal, tall grass grown up around piles of train parts, huge engine blocks, wheels, driveshafts and gears. A handful of bats were cutting and darting over the piles of rusted steel.

There was a patch of high clouds in the bloodorange light and he watched until the sun faded completely. He didn’t know whether to go back and get Poe or if Poe would come out on his own. Poe was always doing these things. He’d nearly gone to jail for beating up a kid from Donora, he was still on probation for it. He can’t resist a fight, not something you understand. Probably it’s not his fault. Probably you can’t be as big as him without having some kind of robot mentality.

Suddenly there were raised voices from inside the building, then shouting and banging around. Isaac tightened the straps on his pack and picked an escape route across the field and waited for Poe to come running. But Poe did not appear. Keep waiting, he told himself, just sit tight. The shouting and noises stopped. Isaac waited a while longer. Maybe it’s okay. No, something is wrong. You have to go back in.

His hands were shaking but he took the money from his pocket and stuffed it deep inside his backpack and then quickly hid the pack under a piece of sheet metal. This is fine. The kid’s got this under control. Don’t go in empty- handed. He saw a short length of iron pipe but it would just get taken away from him. Underneath the other scrap—he reached his hand carefully through the stack of rusted metal to where a dozen or so industrial ball bearings were scattered in the dirt. He picked one up. It was the size of a baseball, or larger, cold and very heavy. Maybe too heavy. He wondered if there was something else. No, there’s no time. Get in there. Don’t use that same door.

After coming quietly through the back door he could see what was happening. Murray was laid out on the ground. The Mexican was standing behind Poe holding something to Poe’s neck; his other hand was down Poe’s crotch. Poe had both hands in the air like he was telling the man to calm down. They were standing in the light from the fire with their backs to him. Isaac was in the dark, invisible to others.

“Otto,” the Mexican shouted. “I ain’t got all fuckin day.”

“Your little buddy ain’t outside,” said a voice. “He must of already took off.”

The Swede came back from the other side of the building with his face shining in the firelight, grinning at Poe like he was happy to see him. Isaac found his grip on the bearing, felt how heavy it was, five pounds, six pounds, he rocked to his back leg and threw as hard as he could; he threw so hard he felt the muscles in his shoulder tear. The bearing disappeared in the darkness and there was a loud crack as it hit the Swede in the center of the head, just at the top of his nose. The Swede seemed frozen in place and then his knees went loose and he seemed to fall straight down, a building collapsing on itself.

Poe broke loose and went running out the door; Isaac stood frozen for a second, watching the man he’d hit, the hands and feet were twitching slightly. Go, he thought. Murray was still lying on the ground but Jesús was now kneeling over the Swede, talking to him, touching his face, though Isaac already knew—knew from how heavy the bearing was, knew from how hard he’d thrown it.

They could barely make out the train tracks in the darkness. It was raining again. Isaac’s hands and face were slick with mud and his shoes were heavy with it and he was soaked through but from sweat or rain he didn’t know.

You need your pack, he thought. No, you can’t go back there. How bad is that guy hurt? That thing was really heavy, your arm hurts just from throwing it. You shouldn’t have hit him in the face.

Up ahead, they could see the lights from Buell; they were getting close. Poe turned suddenly and began to make his way through the brush toward the river.

“I need to wash myself,” he told Isaac.

“Wait till you get home.”

“He touched me right on the skin.”

“Wait till you’re home,” Isaac repeated. His voice sounded like it was coming from somewhere else. “That water won’t clean it anyway.”

The rain was turning into sleet and Poe was wearing only his T-shirt. Soon he’ll be hypothermic, Isaac thought. Neither of you are thinking straight, but he’s in worse shape—give him your coat.

He took off his coat and handed it over to Poe. After hesitating, Poe tried to put it on, though it was too small. He handed it back.

Isaac heard himself say: “We should run so you can get warm.”

They jogged for a while but it was too slippery. Poe went down twice in the mud, he was in bad shape, and they decided to walk again. Isaac could not stop thinking about the man lying there, it had looked like blood coming down his face but it could have been the light, or anything. All I did was knock him out, he told himself, but he was pretty sure that wasn’t true.

“We need to get to a phone so we can call 911 for that guy. There’s one at the Sheetz station.”

Poe didn’t say anything.

“It’s a payphone,” said Isaac. “They won’t know it was us.”

“That’s not a good idea,” said Poe.

“We can’t just leave him.”

“Isaac, there was blood coming out of his eyes and the way he was moving around it was just reflexes. If you hit a deer in the spine it does the same thing.”

“We’re talking about a person, though.”

“We call an ambulance, the cops will be right behind them.”

Isaac could feel his throat get tight. He thought again about how the Swede had gone over. He’d made no effort to stop his fall, and then the way his arms and legs kept moving afterward. A person knocked out didn’t move at all.

“We should have gotten out of there when those guys showed up.”

“I know that,” said Poe.

“Your mom is friends with Bud Harris.”

“Except technically the guy you hit wasn’t doing anything. It was the guy holding me.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” said Isaac.

“I dunno,” Poe told him. “I can’t really think right now.”

Isaac began to walk faster.

“Isaac,” Poe called. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“I won’t tell anyone. You don’t have to worry.”

“Hold up a second.” Poe grabbed him by the shoulder. “You did the right thing, we both know that.”

Isaac was quiet.

Poe nodded up the road. “Anyway I need to cut off here to take the back way to the house.”

“I’ll walk you.”

“We need to split up.”

Isaac must have had a look on his face, because then Poe said: “You can go back to the old man’s for one night; it won’t kill you.”

“That’s not the point.”

“You did the right thing,” Poe repeated. “In the morning when our heads are straight we can figure this all out.”

“We need to be figuring it out right now.”

Poe shook his head. “I’ll meet you at your place in the morning.”

Isaac watched as he turned away and made his way up the dark road toward his mother’s house. He paused once and waved. Once Poe was out of sight, Isaac continued down the tracks in the darkness, alone.

2. Poe

He went up the muddy road toward his mother’s trailer. He’d tried to keep his head on in front of Isaac, the last thing Isaac needed to see was Poe going batshit. But it was a definite possibility. At least it was dark, it was comforting, there was no one to see him like this, he thought about the way the knife had felt to his neck and the man’s hand on him. The rain had picked up again, back into sleet and then flurries. He was extremely cold, he’d left his jacket at the machine shop where the big one named Otto was lying dead. He was so cold he would have given anything for a jacket or even the shittiest hat you could even imagine, he would give a gallon of blood for just a shit wool hat and good Christ anything for a coat, a plastic garbage bag, even. He thought he ought to run to get warm but he could barely manage a walk. He thought he would make it to the house. It occurred to him he had not split any of the wood for the stoves, as always he’d left it to the last minute then gone off with Isaac and the house would be freezing, out of wood and the electric heaters costing thirty a day, his mother would never turn them on and with her hands all rheumatoid she couldn’t swing the axe.

He hoped his mother wasn’t too cold for having a shit son like him. Sitting in that doublewide with her hands all clawed up from the arthritis you are a shit a genuine shit who cannot even keep your own mother warm, a fucking chickenshit punk can’t even keep his hours at a goddamn hardware store. He wondered what Isaac had thrown at that prick, something heavy, a big rock, it had smashed his face in he’d seen it. Pushed his forehead back into his skull. Puke if you remember it too much. Big fucking rock it must have been. Isaac and Otto, a match from heaven. Thanking Christ for his arm like that. Saving my life. Getting cockhandled by those bums and pissing your pants the cherry on top.

Now the one night he needed the house to be warm it would be freezing, needed that heat for being an accessory to murder, really self-defense only it was murder now, walked away from the body but good Christ if anyone thought he would call the cops on those fucks with that dead one Otto a smile on his face wide as a goddamn stadium walking toward me, walking toward me while I had a knife to my neck and someone’s hand crushing my nuts, not much question on what he was thinking about. Yes he thought this is what girls must feel like when a stranger puts hands on them. Not a feeling that goes away in a hurry.

The thought of Otto lying there rotting a goddamn coyote eating his face it made Poe feel almost warmer, if you’d asked him that morning he’d never hated anyone but now by Jesus he hated the dead one Otto the way he smiled seeing Poe getting held literally by his balls and even more he hated the one with the beard who’d cut his neck and held him like that and as for the third one, the older one, he had not meant to kick him so hard. He couldn’t remember his name, the older one who had tried to keep the fight from starting, the older one who smelled so bad. He wished he hadn’t kicked him so hard. Yeah he was the good one. The one you hit hardest.

It was not murder but what they were doing it did not look good. He knew he had started it. He knew when Isaac went out to piss he wasn’t really pissing. It was the old Billy Poe fire going and it was not the first time it had caused a predicament. He’d wanted to lay hands on those fucks. Thought I’ll take all three of them, thought that will be fucking something I’ll take all three, only they’d nearly killed him and it was little Isaac English who ended up on top, literally killing and not even just hurting that big Swede. With the stone and not the sword, as they said. Christ he thought they will give you the goddamn chair. Don’t give a shit, wish it was both of those fucks dead, the one Otto and the bearded Mexican who cut my neck and goddamn cockhandled me, felt his fingers on my penis. He touched himself between his legs, it was very tender and even jostling it sent waves up into his stomach and he had to stand still a second. He would clean himself with soap. Soap and hot water. Hot bath and soap. It was a big fucking knife but Jesus it was a serious knife. You’re alright now. He saw the lights of the trailer up ahead. He thought he would make it.

He got closer and saw his mother’s shape watching for him in the window and he realized he would have to tell her what happened, how his pants got reeking like piss and his neck cut and his walking in a snowstorm nearly frozen to death in a T-shirt. He moved slowly off the road into the trees at the edge of the yard, he would wait until she went to bed, can’t tell her those things. She’d tell his father though Christ this town he’ll hear anyhow. He thought his mother might be letting that old bastard move back in. Seeing him out with that fucking math teacher, twenty- four fucking years old. He winks at me. Didn’t tell Mom about it only I should have because now she is letting him back. Only she is in a bad state and maybe it is what she needs, the other assholes she’s bringing home aren’t any better, that older guy was fine but the rest of them sitting on the goddamn couch watching TV while she cooks their dinners, acting like king of the castle, couple of those I should have beat with the axe handle for treating her like that. Look on their faces like they thought they could do better. Told that fat one with his Honda motorcycle this ain’t your fuckin house and he stopped smiling when he realized I’d break his jaw. Should have done it but Jesus the look on her face when she heard me say that. Didn’t speak to me for days. Mental note if you make it to forty remember on how all those fucks treated her. Stop being an asshole while you’re still young.

He sat down under a tree. He watched the flurries land on the grass, had a faint awareness that time was passing and he began to feel warmer, sitting there under the hemlock. The miracle being it was Isaac who’d saved him. He didn’t look like much, his wrists and hands were so thin. Delicate, that was the word you would use for Isaac, his face as well, he was light- boned, it was not a man’s face. It was the face of a boy bugeyed, people teased him about his eyes. He was an easy target but Poe had always defended him, he had a much easier time because of Poe. Poe was king back then, glory days. Two years gone by since. Now Isaac was the only one who didn’t look down on him. The others were all happy to see the king come back to earth, he had been someone and now he was not—that was a story everyone liked to hear. The human race—they despised anyone they thought was better than them. The sad thing being it was all in their own minds, he didn’t think he was better than anyone. He had no such illusions. He had always known it wouldn’t last. He had made friends with Isaac, who had no other friends—and why? Because he liked him. Because Isaac was the smartest person in the Valley, maybe the entire state, Pennsylvania—it was not a small place. Though possibly, he could admit it, he’d known that hanging out with Isaac would get him points with Lee.

The wind, he thought. Getting out of that wind was all it took. He kept sitting and felt warmer. He felt better and he thought it must really be warming up now, it was definitely warming up, so why could he still see the flakes swirling in the porchlight. He had not always defended Isaac, that was the truth of it. Isaac did not know about those moments but they had occurred and there was no undoing them.

Except that things equaled out. Two months back the river had been frozen over, skim ice, Isaac had looked at him and said you dare me and then stepped off the rocks and only made it a few steps before he broke right through and disappeared. Poe had stood panicked for a minute and then jumped in after him, crashing through the junk ice, he’d dragged Isaac out of the water, both of them soaking wet and nearly frozen to death, Isaac who had gone swimming in the river like his mother. If that wasn’t a sign, he didn’t know—he had saved Isaac and now Isaac saved him. It showed you there was a reason for all of it.

He looked at their trailer, his mother had not wanted to buy it but there was a lot of land and his father had wanted the land. Somehow he won that one, but then they split up and his mother was stuck with the trailer in the boonies. His mother, who talked about moving to Philadelphia, who’d done several semesters at college. Who used to roll out of bed looking good but now goes shopping in dirty old sweatpants and her hair tangled up. That and her husband leaving her. Your own situation not doing much to ease her mind, either, should have gone off to college if only for her. He decided to think about something else: all this wetness and sun the grass will be fresh tomorrow and the rabbits will be out. Wild meat heals you. Stew and a beer for lunch. He thought maybe there was some of last year’s venison in the freezer but nothing was as good as a fresh rabbit, stew it a couple three hours falling off the bone. Or pound it flat and dip it in Bisquick and fry it. Yes it was the wild meat, before the games he ate it and now it would sort him out as well. So get up. He watched himself from a great distance. English won’t tell anyone they grabbed you like that but so what, saved you—owe him now. Whatever he says you have to do. Probably tell his sister about it. She won’t care, though. He didn’t want to think about Lee. He had trouble thinking about Lee anyway but especially right now, not to mention she’d gotten married, she hadn’t told him, she hadn’t told him a goddamn thing about that, even though he’d always known it was just fun and games between them. He watched the flurries in the light, it was warm under the tree watching the snow come down, something is wrong, he thought, he couldn’t quite put his finger on it, everything was quiet.

Grace Poe was sitting in the trailer in the shapeless gray sweatsuit she wore nearly every day now, even when going to town. She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there, staring at the brown panel walls inside the trailer. She’d turned the TV off to let herself think, it might have been nearly an hour, recently she’d come to prefer it to the television, just sitting and thinking, crazy thoughts, she was imagining herself on a trip to the Holy City, a trip she knew she would never take. She imagined herself on a steep rocky coast in Italy, all the old castles and the hot sun, hot and dry. Easy on the bones. Lots of wine and everyone suntanned.

Outside it was not quite as dark as normal, the storm clouds carried light from the town. She thought she’d seen her son coming up the road. Maybe she’d just imagined it. You’re turning into an old lady, she thought, you’re going a little bit crazy. It was either tragic or funny. She decided it was funny. She was annoyed at her son—they were out of firewood and she was wrapped under two blankets and it wasn’t so much to ask, keep the wood split and the house warm. It was okay to be angry about that. It wasn’t as if they were going to freeze, there were electric baseboard heaters but they cost a fortune, it was out of the question to run them. The best thing would be installing propane or oil heat, but she hated living in a trailer and for years she’d been hoping to move out of it. Buying a real furnace, sinking money into the trailer, was like giving up. It was better to be cold. She got up and went to the window, looking through her reflection, but nothing was moving in the road or the field, just the quiet emptiness that was always there. She had never expected she would live in a trailer, never expected she would live in the country.

She looked back at her reflection. Forty- one and her hair had gone mostly gray, she’d stopped dying it when her husband moved out, to spite him or herself, she didn’t know, but she’d put on weight, too, it was bunching up under her chin. She’d always been a little heavy but it had never showed in the face. It seemed to her that even her eyes were going dull, burning down like old headlights. Soon enough she would have the kind of face you saw and could not imagine as anything but old. Cut the pity party, she told herself. You could take care of yourself a little better. She was right to let Virgil come back. Virgil would not have let the stoves sit empty.

As for Virgil, she had her hopes but it was getting not to matter—the ones her age, if they had jobs, would stay around a few weeks, months at most. Each time she’d gotten her hopes up and each time it’d spoiled, they all wanted to be taken care of, for dinner to appear in front of them, it should have been a joke but it wasn’t. Half of them didn’t even put any effort into sex, you would have thought there’d at least be the dignity of that, but not even. At the library she’d signed up for an Internet dating service, but all the men her age were looking for women much younger, and even in the bars it seemed there was nothing for her but the fifty- and sixty- somethings, men expecting to screw women they could be the fathers of. So at least Virgil was coming back. Yes, she thought, now that it’s convenient for him, quiet little mouse that you are.

The snow was beginning to fall harder and she saw someone moving at the edge of the yard, drunk, she thought, playing around, pissing his name in the snow while the stoves are out of wood. Years earlier, just after Virgil left, she’d gotten a job offer in Philadelphia and she’d nearly taken it but Billy was doing so well in school, playing football, and she’d still had hopes that Virgil would come back to her quickly. She knew what that life would have looked like— thirty- five, apartment in the city, night school, single mom—like a movie. She would have married a lawyer. Finished her own degree. Instead she was living in Buell in a trailer with her spoiled child, man, whatever he was now, her son who had nearly had everything, a football scholarship, but had decided to stay home with his mother, going hungry if she didn’t cook his dinner. She wondered why she was in such a bad mood. Maybe something was happening.

She decided to go out to the porch. Her feet got cold and wet but it was beautiful outside, it was all white, the trees, grass, the neighbor’s empty house, it was like a painting, really, a spring snowfall, a month out of season, you could see the green underneath, it was very peaceful. “Billy,” she said quietly, as if her voice might disturb the scene. He was sitting under a tree at the edge of the yard. Something was wrong. There was snow in his hair and he didn’t have a coat. She leaned over the porch railing. He didn’t look up.

“Billy,” she called. “Come inside.”

He didn’t move.

She ran out into the yard in her bare feet. When she reached him his eyes moved slowly, focused on her, then looked at something else. His face was white and there was a gash on his neck and blood had come down onto his shirt and stained it. She shook him. “Get up,” she said.

She tried to pull him up but he was dead weight, no, she thought, this is not fair, she got an arm under him but he still wasn’t helping her, he was so heavy, she wouldn’t be able to lift him, he barely seemed to know she was there. He was so cold he could have been a log or a rock. “Get up,” she shouted at him, her voice muted by the snow. He pushed weakly with his legs and then they were standing and she told him we are going to walk now, we are going to walk to the house.

She got him to the bathroom, set him in the bathtub in his clothes. She ran hot water into the tub and took his shoes off.

“What happened,” she said, but his eyes were somewhere else. The hot water was pouring into the tub but he stared numbly ahead. He didn’t know her. The water turned the color of mud. There was a strong odor; she wondered distantly when he had washed himself last, he had not been taking care of himself, she knew that, getting laid off from the hardware store had sent him into a tailspin, she should have done more. She had decided to let him find his own way. She had made the wrong decision. His skin was white and icy to the touch and she pushed his shoulders deeper under the water.

The steam filled the room and the scab on his neck loosened and his cuts were running and the water nearly black from dirt and blood. She was kneeling and splashing the warm dirty water on his face. His body had cooled it and she drained it partially and ran more hot in. After a few minutes he began to shiver as he warmed up. She couldn’t remember if you were supposed to warm a person this fast. She knew there was something you were not supposed to do, you warm them too fast and they die. She sat him up and wiped the scratch on his neck with iodine, the brown stain ran down into his shirt.

“Let’s get these clothes off,” she said, the soft mothering voice she hadn’t used in years. He let her take his shirt off. She undid his belt, undid the button on his filthy jeans, tried to get them off but he was holding them up with both hands—he would not let her take his pants down.

“Billy.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Let go,” she said.

He did and she took the pants off with some difficulty, careful to leave his underwear in place. The cut on his neck was bleeding again, it was straight and deep, done with a knife, she realized, like a piece of cut meat, she saw a hint of whiteness, unnatural- looking, she knew it must be the tendon or some other kind of tissue. She tried to remember if she had locked the door. Virgil had left a shotgun but she didn’t know where the shells were.

“Is someone coming after you?” she said. She shook him. “Billy. Billy, is someone going to be coming here?”

“No,” he said. He was waking up.

“Look at me.”

“No one is coming,” he said.

She saw spots in front of her. It is too hot in this room, she told herself. Her head was getting light. Next time you see him like this won’t be in this house, he’ll be laid out on a table in a hospital basement. She picked up his wet pants and began folding them, he had pissed his pants when they cut him. Now he was lying there flushed and awake and looking at his pants in her hand.

He sat up and reached and she leaned over the tub to hold him. He took the pants from her hand.

“I can wash them myself,” he said.

When she left, Poe stripped his shorts off and scrubbed himself where the bum had grabbed him. The cut on his neck stung and he remembered knowing Isaac had left him, for a second all he’d thought was fucking Isaac he left you here and then he’d felt the cutting burning on his neck. He’d felt the cutting and he’d gone loose, done what was expected of him. Would have cut me all the way, Jesús his name was, Jesús the cocksucking Mexican who is still alive now somewhere, he was not a cruel person but help me Father I’ll find him I’ll put a stick through his ankles and hoist him up and skin him. Poe could imagine him screaming and the thought of that, of old Jesús screaming as Poe skinned him alive it nearly gave Poe a hard- on or maybe he would gut him first, field- dress him, as it were, leave his guts all hanging out so old Jesús could get a long look. Christ, he thought, listen to yourself. Your fucking brain is out of adjustment. He splashed water on his face. The Mexican had squeezed on his balls so hard he’d tasted the puke come up. That was when he pissed himself. I ain’t kiddin, said Jesús. I’ll cut these off you don’t settle down quick. He’d felt the air going in and out of him and the man’s heart beating against his back the way you feel a girl’s heart beating when you’re on top of her it was fucking disgusting and he’d let it happen, he wanted to sink back under the water and never come up.

He remembered that enormous fucking crack, though, it sounded like a pistol and the Mexican let go and Poe took off toward the door. He saw Otto, the eyes all bulged out Otto was crying blood and it was swelling from his mouth and ears. Isaac was waiting for him by the door, he was a good man Isaac no doubt about that, a fucking standup human man. Though he might say otherwise he was not sure, when the moment of truth came, that he himself could have done that for someone. He was not that kind of person, that was the truth of it. That was a thing he knew about himself. Whereas Isaac—Poe would have wanted to but he might not have been able. Might not have been capable of making his feet take him in the direction. He had always suspected that but now he was sure. Except I would have gone back for Isaac, he thought. Maybe not for someone else but definitely for him.

He knew Otto must still be right where he fell. They wouldn’t try to bury him—burying a dead body, you’re fucked if you get caught doing that. He wondered if they would go to Harris, everyone knew Harris hated bums but maybe these guys didn’t know. Maybe they would tell him and Harris would have no choice but to check it out. Went with Mom for a while. He wondered if his mother had done it with Chief Harris. There was no question about it. Bud Harris had gotten Poe out of an assault charge. Everyone knew about that—that Poe had gotten a free ride for what he’d done to the kid from Donora. This time Harris would not be able to help him.

After a time he got out and dressed and went into the living room. He was so exhausted he could barely keep his head up. The house was dark, she’d turned nearly all the lights off, but it was warm and he could tell by the singed dusty smell that she’d turned the baseboard heaters on. He felt guilty but also relieved.

She said: “Was anyone else with you?”

“Isaac English.”

“Is he okay?”

“Better than me.”

“Your father is coming over.”

“Did you tell him?”

“No. I just thought I should warn you.”

“Does that mean he’s back for good?”

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “We’ll see.”

He sat on the opposite side of the couch from her and then she pulled him over and he laid his head in her lap. His head was against her belly. He let his eyes close and he stopped thinking about the Mexican, he could hear her breathing in her belly and everything was going to be fine and he fell asleep immediately.

He slept like that for half an hour and then they heard his father’s truck in the driveway. Poe got up and his mother gave him a hurt look and he tried to smile at her but he didn’t think he could stand taking any shit from Virgil right now. He went to his room.

He could hear Virgil and his mother talking. Soon they would either be yelling or screwing. He figured the yelling would come soon enough— he’d seen enough of his father to know where this would go. But the next sound Poe heard was the maul ringing against the wedges, the sound of Virgil splitting the wood that Poe himself was supposed to split. Shit he thought shit shit shit, it should have been him going out there and doing it but it was too late, he’d fucked it up and now the old man would get the credit.

He thought about Otto again, thought you should call Chief Harris, he got you out of the last scrape, only it was too late for that, too—now they would look guilty. It was not that simple anyway. Technically, the big Swede hadn’t been doing anything. He was about to, that was for goddamn sure, but really all he’d done was toss a couple of punches. He thought about him there on the floor of the machine shop with his head all bashed in and he felt guilty. He was supposed to be in college right now, going to class, his coach at Buell High, Dick Cannedy old Dick had gotten Poe into three colleges, that one Colgate in upstate New York looked good but he wasn’t ready. No, the truth was he’d been plenty ready, if they’d left him alone he would have gone. But when everyone is shouting at you to do something… He’d flipped them all off, given the entire town the middle finger, turned down college for a job at Turner’s Ace Hardware. And he’d flip them off again when he disappeared suddenly and went away to college. The coach at Colgate had told him to call anytime, anytime you change your mind, Mr. Poe. Well, he thought, I have changed my mind. I am going to call him.

It seemed his head was getting clear, things would be alright. Then he thought: my coat. My letter jacket is sitting in that machine shop with my name and player number on it, right next to a dead man and probably covered in blood. They would find the body it was only a matter of time and it would not be Isaac English they’d come after. It would be him, Billy Poe, the one who had a reputation, he’d nearly killed that boy from Donora, it was self- defense but that was not how anyone else saw it.

They would get his jacket and the body as well. We will drag it to the river, he thought. How many deer had he dragged out of the woods—it would be no different. Only he knew it would be. But there was no choice about it. They would have to go back.

3. Isaac

Isaac didn’t sleep and in the morning he could hear the old man moving around downstairs. When he’d come in the previous night, he and the old man had looked at each other and nodded and the old man hadn’t said anything about the stolen money.

From the window of his second- floor room he could see that the snow had already melted on all the hills. He remembered looking out this same window in the dark when the mill still ran and the night sky was enormous with fire. It was a faint memory from youth. It was not the first dead bum that year. The other they found in that old house, January. Froze to death. Except this one didn’t die—was killed. That was the difference. This is the one they won’t let go.

It was a strange time of year, not quite spring and not quite winter— certain trees were already leafed in while others were still bare. It would be a warm day. All the hills and hollows and nooks—it felt comforting. There wasn’t a flat piece of land for a hundred miles. Hidden away wherever you were. That will not help you with the Swede, he thought. They will find the Swede eventually and they will not be on your side—see a dead man, think mother father brother sister man. Think I am a man like him. Don’t let dead men lie without asking why. Dog left to rot—man is different. Do dogs look at dead dogs and wonder? No, you’ve seen it, they walk by without looking. Nature of a dog to accept a dead dog.

He could feel things were changing. This is your room but soon it won’t be. A picture of his mother over his desk, smiling, young and pretty and bashful. A few awards from the science fair, first prize in seventh, eighth, ninth grade. No more after that—they didn’t understand your projects. You knew they wouldn’t but you went ahead anyway. Quarks and leptons, string theory, and then you learned your lesson. Half of them think the earth is four thousand years old. The others aren’t much better—Colonel Boyd telling the class that humans had once had gills but the gills disappeared when we stopped using them. Actually, you tried to suggest, that’s classic Lamarck. I’m not sure people believe that anymore. Gave you a C for making him look stupid. Only C you ever got. Naturally Colonel Boyd loved your sister. Why? Because she tells people what they want to hear. Didn’t care if all her classmates were being taught things that weren’t true.

He went back to looking out the window. He had always admired his sister for her easy way with people, tried to learn from her. Only now you see the cost—she lies more easily than you do. Same as the old man. No, he thought, the old man is different. Doesn’t understand or have interest in anyone but himself. Meanwhile ask yourself if you’d act any better in his shoes—spine broken at L1, progressive neuropathy. Or take Stephen Hawking—your favorite crippled genius abandons his wife. Twenty- six years of changing his bedpan and then—sorry, honey, I think it’s time for a newer model. He and the old man would understand each other well.

He looked at the clock and tried to remember when Poe was coming. Did we set a time? He couldn’t remember. That was unusual. He made a note of it.

There was the sound of a car turning up the driveway and he jumped up and ran to the window to see a white sedan—cop? No. A Mercedes. Lee’s car. She must have left Connecticut in the middle of the night to be getting in now. He watched her park next to the house. Knows you stole the money, is why. Christ. He began to feel even worse. I don’t care, he said out loud. She’s done a lot worse herself. But had she? It was hard to explain exactly what she’d done. Left you here, he thought. Promised she’d come back for you but she didn’t. Meanwhile that car she’s driving is worth more than this house.

He heard her come into the house and greet their father downstairs and a few minutes later he heard her on the stairs, coming up to see him. He slipped quietly under the covers and pretended to be asleep.

She hesitated outside the door, listening for a long time before opening it silently, just slightly. He felt the air coming in. She stood there, she must have been looking at him, he didn’t open his eyes. He felt himself choke up but he kept his breathing even. He could imagine her face, nearly the same as their mother’s, the same dark skin and short hair and high cheekbones. She was a very pretty girl.

“Isaac?” she whispered, but he didn’t answer her.

She stood a minute or two longer and then finally she closed the door and went downstairs.

Was that right? he thought. I don’t know. How many promises can someone break before you stop forgiving them? There had been a time, most of his life, really, when it had been very different. When he and his sister could finish each other’s thoughts, when at any given time each would know exactly what the other was doing, whether at school or just in a different part of the sprawling brick house. If he had a bad day, he would go to his sister’s room and sit on the foot of her bed while she read or did homework. He went to her before he went to his mother. The three of them, Isaac, Lee, and their mother, had been like a family within the family. Then their mother had killed herself. Then Lee went off to Yale. His one visit, she’d taken him around the campus, all the tall stone ivy- covered buildings, and he knew it was where she belonged, and where he would someday follow her, but here he was, twenty years old and still living in Buell. And now, he thought.

None of it was permanent. The Swede will go back to the soil, blood goes from sticky thick to dust, animals eat you back to the earth. Nice black dirt means something died here. The things you could trace— blood, hair, fingerprints, bootprints—he didn’t see how they would get away with it and there was a picture fixed in his mind of the Swede with his face shining and the bloody color of the light on him. He had never stopped looking at the spot between the Swede’s eyes, even after the shot was gone from his hand. Made it go into him. With my mind I made it hit him there. He tried to call back the Swede’s hands to see a weapon but he couldn’t. His hands had been empty. Unarmed man, worst words there are. Why did you throw that thing at him? Because he had a look on his face. Because I couldn’t get at the Mexican—might have hit Poe. The Mexican had a knife to Poe’s neck but that was not the one you killed. The dead man was the one standing there doing nothing.

Basis of everything, he thought. Pick your own over a stranger. Dead Swede for living Poe. Ten dead Swedes or a hundred. Long as it’s the enemy. Ask any general. Ask any priest—millions die in the Bible, no problem if God says thumbs- up. Babies, even—dash em on the rocks say Jesus made me do it. The Word of God and the hand of man. Done the deed now wash your hands.

In the early afternoon he saw Poe come up to the edge of the field, two hundred yards away, and he dressed quickly and put on his shoes and coat and went out the window, hanging by his fingertips before dropping the rest of the way to the ground. His sister had come up to check on him but he’d locked the door.

As he looked back at the house, a big Georgian Revival originally built for one of the steelmill’s managers, he saw the old man sitting on the back porch in his wheelchair, his broad back and thin arms and white hair, looking out over the rolling hills, forest interspersed with pastures, the deep brown of the just- tilled fields, the wandering treelines marking distant streams. It was a peaceful scene and he wasn’t sure if the old man was sleeping or awake. Like an old planter looking over his plantation— how much overtime he worked to buy this house. How proud he was of the house, and look at it now. No wonder you’re always feeling guilty.

High- stepping through the tall grass he made for the stand of trees at the bottom of the property where the spring came out, he knew them all—silver maple and white oak and shellbark hickory, ash and larch. There was the redbud he and his father had planted, in full bloom now, pink against the green of the other trees. Judas tree. Fitting name. Poe was sitting there, waiting for him in the shadows.

“You get any strange knocks on the door?” he said.

“No,” said Isaac.

“Whose car is that?”

“Lee’s. The new husband’s, maybe.”

“Oh,” said Poe. For a second he looked stunned. Then he said: “E320—goddamn.” He was looking at the house.

They made their way through the woods toward the road, kicking up last fall’s moldering leaves, the sweet smell from them.

“This is stupid,” Poe said. He looked at Isaac. “I mean, I don’t see a way around it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not stupid.”

Isaac didn’t say anything.

“Christ,” Poe said. “Thanks.”

They crossed the road and picked their way down to the stream through the alder. Except for a slight coolness there was no hint it had snowed the previous night and they walked along the gravel banks or over the dark mossy rocks, the sky blue and narrow above them, vegetation spilling into the gulch, honeysuckle and chokecherry an old rock maple tilted overhead, the ground eroding beneath it.

They passed an old flatbed truck, doorless and half- sunk in the sand. It occurred to Isaac that there might be blood on him, he hadn’t taken a shower or washed or anything. It wouldn’t spray that far, twenty or thirty feet. Still, he thought. That was extremely stupid.

They took the long way around town, through the woods where they wouldn’t be seen. It was late afternoon when they could just make out the shell of the Standard plant through the trees.

“Let’s just go in and get it over with.” Poe found his cigarettes but took a long time to fumble one out of the pack, and though it wasn’t hot, patches of sweat were showing through his shirt.

“We need to wait till it’s almost dark. It’ll probably take us half an hour to get him to the river.”

“This is insane,” said Poe.

“It was insane staying in there yesterday.”

“You know we’re half a mile from the nearest road. It’ll be months before anyone else stumbles in there, maybe years.”

“Your coat will still be there.”

“Guess I should have remembered to grab it on the way out. It was probably the guy with the knife to my neck that distracted me.”

“I know that.”

“It’s freakin me out goin in there again.”

“The great hunter. He shoots the guts out of a deer but when it comes to a guy who was actually trying to kill him—”

“It’s a lot fuckin different,” Poe said.

“Well, you should have maybe worried about that yesterday.”

“The only reason I was anywhere near this shithole was you,” Poe told him.

Isaac turned away and walked off into the trees along the river. He found a rock by the water and sat down. It was average for a river, a few hundred yards across and in most places only nine or ten feet deep. Nine feet under. Good as five fathoms. Good enough for your mother and the Swede both. Drained of heart and freed of flesh. Listen to you, he thought, just turn yourself in. Thought you’d be the one saving people.

Sometime later Poe came and found him and they watched the water in silence, there was the sound of leaves shushing, the squawk of a heron, a distant motorboat.

“You know he isn’t just gonna disappear. Some fuckin Jet Skier’ll run him over by lunchtime tomorrow, guaranteed. Shit doesn’t just magically evaporate because you stick it in a river.”

“It doesn’t take much to sink a body,” said Isaac.

“Jesus, Mental. Listen to us.”

“It’s already done,” said Isaac. “Pretending we can walk away is just going to make it worse.”

Poe shook his head and sat down a good distance away.

The sun was getting lower over the hills on the other side of the river, it was a pleasant quiet scene, sitting there looking over the water, but that was not how it felt. You’re just a visitor here, he thought. Look at the sun and feel like you own it but it’s been setting behind those hills for fifteen thousand years—since the last ice age. Glacial period, he corrected himself, not ice age. When those hills were formed. This area was the edge of the Wisconsin glaciation. Meanwhile here you are. Temporary visitor on the sun’s earth. Think your mother will be here forever and then she’s gone. Still sinking in five years later. Disappeared in a day. Same as you will. Nothing you can see that won’t outlast you—rocks sky sun. Watch a sunset and feel like you own it but it’s been rising without you for a thousand years. No, he thought, more like several billion. Can’t even get your head around the real number. You’re the only one who even knows you exist. Born and die between the earth’s heartbeats. Which is why people believe in God—you’re not alone. Used to, he thought. It was my mother that made me believe. And it was her that made you not believe. Stop it. You’re lucky to be here at all. Don’t be a weak thinker.

They’re simple facts is all. Your only power is choosing what to make of them. She stayed under two weeks with a few pounds of rocks in her pockets. There is your lesson from that. No different this time. They’ll find him at the lock, hook him out with a pole. Or he’ll slip by them— Old Man River, a long journey drifting. Catfish doing their work. Victim none the wiser. Roof of water, bones beneath. Judgment day he’ll rise. No such thing, he thought. And not possible even if there was. Once you lost your water, most of your weight was carbon. Your molecules scattered, were used again, became atoms and particles, quarks and leptons. You borrowed from the planet which borrowed it from the universe. A short- term loan at best. In the eyeblink of a planet you were born, died, and your bones disintegrated.

They waited until the sun went down before getting up from the rocks. Everywhere there was a bruised purple light. They heard the clicking of bats and looked up and the sky was full of them. They were several weeks early.

“Global warming,” said Isaac.

“You know I’m sorry, don’t you?” said Poe.

“Don’t worry about it.” He began to walk through the grass and Poe followed reluctantly behind. They crossed from the darkness of the river trees to the clearing along the train tracks and back into the trees again. In the meadow they stayed hidden behind the old boxcars and the long thicket of wild rose; they were well concealed but Isaac felt his legs getting shaky. One in front of the other. Close your mind for a while. He won’t smell yet. But don’t look at his face. Except you’ll have to—won’t be able to move him without looking at his face.

He checked back on Poe, who was grinning nervously, his skin pale and his hair flattened and damp with sweat, his hands shoved in his pockets as if trying to make himself smaller. When they came to the edge of the thicket and stopped to survey the open ground ahead, there was a smell like cat piss in the air. The smell didn’t change and Isaac realized it was him. Smell of your own fear. Adrenaline. Hope Poe doesn’t notice.

Around the machine shop everything looked different. The grass was crushed and beaten, the ground rutted with tire tracks. Leading up the hillside was an overgrown fireroad they hadn’t noticed the previous day, but had since been churned into mud by heavy traffic. At the top of the hill they saw Harris’s black- and- white Ford truck. Harris was inside, watching them.

4. Grace

The main road south of Buell angled away from the river to cut through a steep sunless valley, it was a narrow fast road with the trees tight along both sides. She passed vacant hamlets, abandoned service stations, an exhausted coal mine with a vast field of tailings that stretched on forever like sand dunes, gray and dry and not even the weeds would grow on them. Her old Plymouth wallowed and clattered over the potholes, she thought about Bud Harris but she didn’t know if calling him would make things better or worse for Billy. She wondered if Billy had killed someone.

In recent years she’d developed her grandmother’s arthritis and nearly any change in the weather hurt her hands; she could only manage five or six hours a day sewing before they fixed themselves shut into claws. Once, a union organizer had come poking around the shop, waiting outside the front door at closing time, he was the one who’d suggested that her condition might have been a repetitive stress injury—not arthritis. That’s common, he said. Arthritis at your age isn’t. Unfortunately the organizer had given up on their shop, as none of the other women would talk to him—they all knew they’d lose their jobs immediately. And the truth was Steiner wasn’t so bad to work for. She knew that with her strange hours she would have been fired from a bigger company, but Steiner, the shop owner, let her do whatever she wanted. Flex-time, he called it. As long as she kept making him money. He paid Brownsville wages but sold his wedding dresses in Philadelphia, got city prices for them, was expanding to New York. Grace’s only question was could she afford to keep living that way—everything kept getting more expensive and the only part- time jobs were fast food, Wal- Mart, or the Lowe’s supercenter—all of which required her to use her hands and only paid minimum wage. Not to mention you had to wait awhile to get one. Once people got jobs, even crappy ones, they tended to stay in them. Just to try it, the year earlier she’d taken a second job at Wendy’s, but she’d only lasted a week.

She would take things as they came—her mother had worked three jobs before getting an aneurysm at fifty- six and Grace, unlike her mother, was determined to live with a little dignity. That did not include coming home soaked in rancid grease, getting bossed around by teenagers for five- fifteen an hour. It was a reasonable thing to ask—a life with a little bit of dignity. She didn’t take up much space otherwise.

She came into Brownsville along the river and the road climbed up past the bridges and then she was downtown. It was easy to find parking. The city had once been promising but now it was mostly abandoned, ten- story office buildings and hotels, all empty, brick and stone stained dark by soot. The downtown had a European feel, at least from what she’d seen on the Travel Channel—narrow cobblestone streets winding and dipping, disappearing quickly among the buildings. She liked that. Continuing down the steep hill toward the old warehouse, she passed the Flatiron Building, there was a historical marker on it and she knew there was another one like it in New York City, though she guessed that one wasn’t empty.

By one o’clock her hands ached so much she knew she had to stop. Christ, she thought, it’s Saturday. We shouldn’t be here anyway. But as always she felt guilty and worked slightly longer, more than she should have, waiting until she’d finished both long seams of the dress she was constructing for a bride in Philadelphia. The dress would sell for about four thousand dollars, the mortgage on Grace’s trailer for an entire year. Nervous, she walked across the shop floor to tell Steiner, having the feeling, as she occasionally did, that he might tell her to not come back. But Steiner, thin and unseasonably tan in his golf shirt, his few remaining white hairs combed across the top of his head—he looked up from his desk and smiled and said: “Get better soon, Gracie. Thanks for coming in.” He wasn’t angry. He was happy they’d all come in on a weekend to get rid of the backlog. Keep making him money, she thought.

Walking back across the shop floor she was already thinking about the hot towel she would wrap around her hands when she got home, how good it would feel, her body began to relax just in anticipation of it and a thought occurred to her: this is what it means to get old, you don’t look forward to pleasure so much as easing pain. She said good- bye to the dozen or so women at their workbenches, the old wide- open factory floor with its brick walls painted white for cleanliness, it was a space much larger than they needed, cold, they all ran space heaters under their benches. The material they worked with was expensive, it wasn’t like they were sewing blue jeans; only Jenna Herrin and Viola Graff looked up to say good- bye, the others nodded or raised a pinkie. They all knew what the dresses sold for but it didn’t do any good to talk about it; most of the work they did could be done for a few dollars a day in South America. Not the same quality, but close enough. It was only that Steiner was too old and lazy to go down there and set up shop.

After taking the freight elevator downstairs, she walked up the narrow street that was permanently in the shadow of the tall empty buildings, finally emerging into the sunlight. By the time she reached the top of the cobblestone hill where she’d parked her car, she was out of breath. At the top of the hill was a big vista, the whole valley was green and full-looking, the gorge, the river cutting between sheer cliffs. She stood a while longer and watched a long tow of barges, a dozen or fourteen of them, pass under the two tall bridges that spanned the gorge. It was a beautiful place to live. But that did not put any more money into her pocket, and besides, Steiner could wake up tomorrow and move his operation somewhere else.

The year previous she’d visited the university across the river at California, talked to a counselor who had figured it would take her four years to get a bachelor’s if she went to school at night, that was taking two classes a semester, a load she was not sure she could manage. And how to pay the tuition? You only got loans if you went full- time, and she was falling behind on bills as it was. Snap out of it, she thought. Choose to be happy.

She got into her car and was quickly out of Brownsville, onto the winding road through the woods that separated Brownsville from Buell. She passed a big black bear standing on the ridge overlooking the road, its spring coat full and glossy. It watched lazily as she passed. The bears were definitely coming back, as were the coyotes and deer. They were about the only ones that seemed to be doing well.

As she came into Buell and the wide riverflat, the few old mill buildings still standing, she passed the house she’d grown up in, now abandoned, the windows broken and the shingles blown off the roof. She tried not to look at it. She remembered when the whistle blew and shiftchange clogged the streets with men, their wives, other workers, even twenty years earlier there had been so much life in Buell it was inconceivable, it was impossible to wrap your head around the idea that a place could be destroyed so quickly. She remembered being a teenager and being sure she would leave the Valley, she had not wanted to end up a steelworker’s wife—she would move to Pittsburgh or even farther. As a kid, she would get out of school and some days the air was so heavy with soot the streetlights would be on, the middle of the day and all the cars driving around with their headlights. Certain days you couldn’t hang your laundry outside for how dirty it would be when it came off the line.

She had planned to leave, that was always the case. But at eighteen she’d come home from her high school graduation and found a new Pinto in the driveway and a book of pay stubs. Whose car is that, she asked her father. Yours, he said. You start at Penn Steel on Monday. Bring your diploma.

Both then and now, she thought, it’s some man making half of your decisions. She’d done a year on the rolling line, which was where she met Virgil. Then she was pregnant and they got married. She half- wondered if she’d done it to get out of the mill. Nothing to wonder about, she thought. She’d started going to school right away, first pregnant, then dragging a baby around with her, was nearly through her AA when the layoffs came. Virgil had made it through six rounds but then his number was up. You had to have whiskers to keep a job in those days—at first ten years’ seniority then fifteen. Virgil had five. He had been so proud of that job—doing better than the rest of his family they were hill people, coal- patch people, their father had never worked a day in his life.

Things had been lean. They had waited and waited for the mills to reopen. But the mills just kept laying people off, all up and down the Valley, and then they were closing, and Grace had a young child and that was the end of school for her. There was not a single job to be had. Not two nickels to rub together. Meanwhile Virgil’s cousin, who had nine and a half years in the mill and big payments, a nice house with an inground swimming pool, he’d lost his house, his wife, and his daughter on the same day. The bank changed the locks and his wife took the daughter to Houston and Virgil’s cousin broke into his own house and shot himself in the kitchen. Everyone in the Valley had a story like that—it was a horror show. It was when Virgil started talking to his family again. Which was when he began to change, she thought. When he started thinking he wasn’t any better than what he came from.

Dark days. Things had not been that bad for a long time now. The trailer had gone into foreclosure but gradually people started picketing the sheriff’s sales, deer rifles in the trunks of their cars, and when one of the bankers had come down to insist the sheriff take action, they had turned his Cadillac over and burned it. To keep people from getting shot, the judge put a moratorium on the foreclosures. Eventually it had become the law. So they had managed to keep the trailer, living on what they could get from the food bank and the deer Virgil poached. That was why she couldn’t stand the taste of venison. For two years it had been all they ate.

Virgil had done two years of job training to learn robotics but that hadn’t gone anywhere—those jobs had never materialized. Then he’d done the stint at the barge- making plant but that had closed as well— most ships and barges were now made in Korea, where the government owned all the industry.

Keeping that trailer might have been a curse, she thought. At least we might have moved somewhere else and started over. But it was hard to make those calculations, figure out where to go. Men went to Houston, New Jersey, Virginia, lived six to a motel room and sent money back to their families, but plenty of them came back in the end. It was better to be poor and broke around your own people.

A hundred fifty thousand unemployed men didn’t leave room for the good life but neither she nor Virgil had relatives anyplace else. You needed money if you wanted to move; you had to move if you wanted money. The mill had stayed closed, and then it had stayed closed longer, and eventually most of it was demolished. She remembered when everyone came out to watch the two- hundred- foot- tall and almost brand- new blast furnaces called Dorothy Five and Six get toppled with dynamite charges. It was not long after that that terrorists blew up the World Trade Center. It wasn’t logical, but the one reminded her of the other. There were certain places and certain people who mattered a lot more than others. Not a single dime was being spent to rebuild Buell.

At the end of the dirt road she turned in next to their trailer. Virgil had promised he’d be home by two but it was nearly four. He was breaking his promises already. You knew this would happen, she thought. She called the women’s shelter in Charleroi to tell them she wouldn’t be coming in to volunteer the rest of the week, had a pang of sadness, it was her lifeline to the rest of the world, all sorts of people worked there, a teacher, a pair of lawyers from Pittsburgh, a financial adviser, all women, they would sit around listening to the public radio stations you couldn’t get in Buell. That was what she planned to do, if she could ever afford to finish her degree—become a counselor.

Why not, she thought. Even if it takes six or seven years, you could just start now. She went into the kitchen to prepare her heating pad, put the pad into the microwave oven and turned it on. While she waited, she took a pile of newspaper and started a fire in the woodstove, piled kindling on top and one thicker piece. The timer beeped and she went and got her towel from the microwave, scorching hot, she let it cool for half a minute and sat down on the couch and wrapped her hands. It burned at first but a few seconds later the relief came. She leaned her head back and focused on the feeling. It was almost like sex. She felt good all over. She felt herself get sleepy. She knew if she drifted off she would wake up with the towel cold and damp but it was worth it. She thought about Buddy Harris, a strange and guilty thought now that Virgil was back. The K-Y stayed under the bed with Bud, they’d been on and off for years, two different times she had nearly left Virgil for Bud Harris, but in the end she hadn’t been able to do it, he was too awkward and quiet and she hadn’t been able to imagine a life with him. She wondered if she had used him, poor Bud, though she didn’t think so. Ten years ago he’d become chief of police, though, as he was always pointing out, it wasn’t like being chief in a real city, there were only six full- time officers, and with all the financial crises, half of them were due to be laid off. At any rate here she was, still thinking about him, she and Virgil had broken up so many times that she’d dated a dozen other men, only somehow she was still thinking about skinny old Bud Harris.

She heard a truck come up the road and pull into the driveway. Virgil came inside. He was drunk, maybe stoned, she could see that. That would suit her purposes. She kissed him on the neck, took his hand and put it between her legs.

“What a good day,” he said.

“What’d you do?”

“Went fishing with Pete McCallister.”

She put the towel aside and laid against him. She rubbed his leg.

“I thought you said you’d be out looking for something,” she said.

“It’s a goddamn Saturday,” he said.

“Well, that’s what you told me.”

“I forgot what day it was when I said that.”

She shrugged. “I heard U.S. Steel is doing aptitude testing next month. You could put in a call up there.”

“Goddamn hour and a half in traffic each way.”

She could smell the booze on him. “We could move closer in to the city, live in an actual house.”

“We ought to be moving further away. Live a real country life instead of trying to pretend we’re gonna move up in the world.”

He looked at her. “What are you laughing about,” he said.

She shook her head and stopped smiling. They looked at each other awhile longer and there was something about his face. She was looking at him and he had a strange look and then she knew.

“What,” he said.

“Virgil,” she said.

“What?”

“The mortgage is due this week, plus it’s April and we still owe taxes from two years ago. I’m on a payment plan with the IRS.”

“Danny Hobbes owes me three hundred bucks. We can always make more money.”

It was quiet and she kept rubbing his leg. “Remind me again why you came back,” she said.

“You know I’ve got money.”

“What about your disability this month?”

“That’s what I lent to Danny.”

She nodded.

“What about getting other money from the government.”

“We ain’t gonna pass the asset test for welfare. Plus they sign you up for some shit job now so you’re fucked if you think you’re gonna have time to look for a real job. There’s no goddamn point if it don’t lead to actual wage-paying employment.”

“You should apply for it anyway,” she said. “Your son isn’t working, either.”

“I already looked into it,” he said. “Between the house and my truck we’re not even close to qualifying. It’s the asset test.”

“Your truck is six years old and I make nine- fifty an hour.”

“Well it’s too much,” he said. “You still giving away your time at that shelter thing?”

She looked at him.

“Maybe for a little while you could do something else that paid instead, I mean if you’re so worried about all this.”

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

“I was just thinking out loud,” he said. “Don’t get all mad, now.”

“We’ll get by,” she said. She still had her eyes closed.

He leaned over and kissed her.

“Let’s have a drink to get this out of our heads.” He grinned and went out to the truck.

Give him some time, she thought. Be a little more generous. He came back inside brandishing a half- empty bottle of Kentucky Deluxe and, after finding clean glasses, poured one for her and one for him. She wanted to tell him about Billy coming home hurt last night but something stopped her. She took down her shot of whiskey and so did he and then he started kissing her.

Then he unbuckled her jeans and slid them down.

“You don’t want to go to the bed?” she said.

He shook his head. He slipped inside her and she lifted her legs around him. Soon she could feel it building and then she forgot where she was, she was pulling him in and in and trying to get closer, they could not be close enough. He was still going and she hoped the feeling wouldn’t end. She felt him get very hard and his whole body went rigid and it started to build up in her again but then he stopped moving. She rubbed his back and he was not looking at her, or at anything, he was just still. She found a comfortable position for her legs and they were like that for a long time. She dozed awhile, had strange thoughts, if Virgil was able to take home some money she’d be able to go back to school, here he was, then she thought you could probably plant the tomatoes soon, take them off the windowsill and get them into the garden, the peppers as well. She decided she could spare a few dollars and plant more herbs this year. Virgil began to move again inside her.

“Let’s go to the bed,” she said. “I don’t want Billy coming home and seeing us like this.”

She got up and walked to the bedroom; Virgil followed after her carrying the whiskey bottle. Worry about tomorrow’s problems tomorrow, she reminded herself. They sat in bed and Virgil took a long pull from the bottle and then another, and then passed it to her.

“Drinking that whiskey like you stole it.”

He mumbled something in response—there was something going on. He didn’t look at her; when she reached between his legs again he wasn’t interested and then she didn’t think she was, either.

“What’s going on with you?”

“I’ve just been thinking.”

“I’m sure you have.”

“Maybe we should take it slow,” he said.

She thought about that. In the old days she wouldn’t have dared say it, but now she told him: “You just want to fuck, in other words.”

“We don’t have to put it like that.”

“Except that’s how you’d put it to someone else, right? What you told Pete when you went fishing today.”

“Nothing’s changed with you, has it?”

She wiped between her legs with the sheet and pushed it away, her stomach got tight but then she didn’t feel anything, she was just looking out the window. The day was nearly over. She could have been lying next to anyone. There was still time to get the tomatoes in the ground. She felt herself choke up.

“You leaving?” she said.

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

“Maybe you better.”

“This is still my house.”

“I’ve made every payment on my own since you left, and a couple hundred dollars here and there doesn’t make a dent.”

“Come on.” He rolled toward her and she felt the frame give under his weight. They had never been able to afford a proper bed. Then there was the trailer with its fake wood paneling. She had never wanted to live here—she’d let herself be talked into it.

“I talked to a lawyer from the shelter.”

He looked at her, half- grinning.

“She said the house is legally mine until you pay your share.”

“That’s a bunch of bullshit,” he told her.

He was right—she hadn’t talked to any lawyer. But she was surprised how angry her own lie made her feel. She believed those words. They might not have been the truth but they should have been.

“Go talk to someone,” she said. “See for yourself.”

“You’re a fucking nightmare, Grace.”

“Get out. Bud Harris said it’s a felony, you still owing so much on child support.”

“Our kid isn’t a child anymore.”

“It doesn’t change what you owe. The court still ordered it.”

“You would bring a cop into it, wouldn’t you?”

“I would. I will.”

“Well, that figures.”

She was quiet.

“Petey’s wife said your cop boyfriend takes enough pills to kill a steer—Xanax, Zoloft, the whole routine. Biggest prescription in Fayette County.”

“Maybe CVS ought to know their employee is going around talking about people’s business.”

“Most people think that Barney Fife motherfucker is queer.”

She thought, he’s got a bigger pecker than you do, but she kept her mouth shut. She suppressed a giggle.

“What,” he said.

“Go on and take everything you brought last night.” She watched him dress and walk out, he was shaking his head the whole time. When his truck pulled out she thought she might cry but she didn’t. She forced herself to get out of bed, knowing that if she didn’t she might end up stuck there, wallowing. She wondered who she could call to find out for sure but it didn’t matter, she knew, knew he’d run out of money, maybe gotten dumped by one of his girlfriends so he’d looked her up. It was what the girls at work had told her was happening, they’d been watching it go on forever, but she hadn’t wanted to believe them. That was when she started crying. Not too much, though. She picked up the bottle of whiskey he’d left, undid the cap but it seemed distasteful that his mouth had touched it. Into the trashcan.

The sun was getting lower. She hoped Billy would come home soon but what if he didn’t? She should get a dog, maybe. It wasn’t too late to go to the shelter, they could always use extra help. She could call Harris.

It hit her suddenly how cruel Virgil was, he was an empty shell, he’d gotten by his whole life on his looks, but that would change for him as it was changing for her, and what would be left—-just the mean streak. The parts of Billy she worried about, the quick temper, it all came right from Virgil. She wondered how she’d never seen it before, but then she knew she’d always seen it, she’d chosen to ignore it. She was making another decision now, or it felt like it had been made for her, it felt impossible at that moment that she’d ever loved him. You’re probably just in shock, she thought, but then no, it was like a switch had been turned off.

The tomatoes were there in the window, she carried them out and got a shovel from the shed, out behind Billy’s half- done projects, a parts car he’d bought to keep his other car running, riding lawn mowers, the four- wheeler. Worrying about him again, coming home last night with the cut on his neck. But things like that had happened many times before, never that bad but still, he was a magnet for trouble. She should have taken him out of this place a long time ago.

Kicking the shovel hard into the dirt, she planted all six tomatoes and the peppers as well, setting the trellises and stepping on them to set them firmly. It was nice standing in the breeze, her hands dirty, looking at the plants and the freshly turned soil, looking out over the rolling hills, it was a good view. Forty- one was not so old. It was almost too young to be president. She would call Harris. He was a good man, she’d always known that.

Of course she could just keep going like this, being alone, but there was no point to it. You felt strong for about a week and then you were just alone. And Bud Harris, he was a good man, uncomfortable but what did it matter, the ones that had the easiest time talking also had the easiest time screwing around behind your back. That was a lesson you didn’t learn until it was too late. But it was not too late. Harris, he was respected, there was a reason she’d nearly left Virgil for him, two different times she had thought seriously about it, and Virgil, Virgil was not respected by anyone and there was a reason for that as well. I will sleep with Buddy tonight, she thought, it will clean me out, it was a giddy notion. Virgil had done worse, he’d come to her smelling directly of other women. She wondered if he’d given her any diseases. She had been checked, though most of the time she’d made him use condoms, that was the one smart thing she’d done in her life.

She walked around the inside of the trailer. When they bought it Virgil swore it was temporary, that they would build a house soon enough. She wondered why she’d listened. It was an old trailer, at least it was a doublewide but it leaked air everywhere, fake paneling from the 1970s, she’d splurged to replace the carpets but with the boy in and out of the field so often they were quickly ruined again. Virgil had wanted to put plastic covers on the couch but she hadn’t permitted it. She sat on the couch and could feel herself drifting away, thinking about things, but there was no point in it, she needed to get a handle on life instead of spending her time daydreaming. At least the garden was done. That was an accomplishment, it would pay off the rest of the year.

She nearly called Harris’s cell phone but then she thought about how he would feel if he found out that Virgil had just been over. It wasn’t fair to him. Not to mention Harris probably had other girls himself. Not to mention she had burned him twice, now. She would have to ask him gently. She would have to allow him his dignity. He wouldn’t just come at her beck and call. She could wait, collect herself, have some dignity of her own. She went to the mirror, pulled her hair back in a tight ponytail. That was the way she should wear it, tight and away from her face. She would get a haircut, no one wore their hair long anymore, it was stringy. She still had her cheekbones, she’d always had good bone structure. Half of it was the way you carried yourself, she had been depressed, there wasn’t any question about that. She would take baby steps. With a little mascara things would be fine, she’d run out months ago, she would get more tomorrow. She fixed herself a small dinner and watched the sun go down from the porch, there was no moon and the stars came out very bright. She went back inside and watched an old scratchy yoga tape the director of the shelter had given her, she liked all the stretching, it felt as if the poisons were coming out. After that she fell easily into sleep.

5. Harris

Harris and Steve Ho had been sitting in the black- and- white Ford Explorer about three hours. It was Harris’s idea—he just had a feeling. The state cops, the county coroner, the DA, everyone else was long gone. From the top of the ridge they could see over the meadow, the half-collapsed remnants of the main Standard Steel Car factory, grown over with vines, the small machine shop where they’d found the body. There were old boxcars in the field and a peaceful, pleasant air about the place. Nature assimilating man’s work. In his much younger years, he had seen things like it in Vietnam, abandoned temples in the jungle.

Harris glanced at Steve Ho. Steve Ho was off duty; he was not being paid to be there, which was not unusual. Ho looked comfortable, young and comfortable, a short stout man, a full head of black hair, resting his hands on his big belly. An M4 carbine across his lap—like many other younger cops, Ho had an inclination for things like that, body armor and such. Ho was only three years out of the academy, but Harris was overjoyed to have him on the force. Steve Ho was easy to work with and left his radio turned on even when he was off the clock.

By comparison, Harris felt old and bald. He reminded himself that he was not—not that old, anyway. Fifty- four. Anyway this feeling had nothing to do with being old, it was just that this was turning into a very bad day. He wanted to be at home, sitting in front of a fire with his dog and a glass of scotch, maybe watching the sun go down from his back deck. He lived by himself in a small cabin, the compound was how he referred to it, a high place overlooking two valleys. The sort of place a boy would dream of living, but then reality, in the form of a wife and kids, would set in. Harris had talked himself into buying it a few years back. Though well built, the cabin was remote and depended on a pair of woodstoves for heat, had little radio or television reception, was accessible only by four- wheel drive. Not a place any woman would ever want to live. It was another excuse. Another way to keep an even keel, cowardice pretending to be independence. Though Fur, his malamute, loved it.

He’d been first to arrive at the crime scene—there’d been an anonymous tip—and he’d felt relief when he saw the body. Clearly a transient. No painful phone calls, no horrible visits to people he liked. Those things got worse with age, not better.

He was still standing near the body, absorbing things, when he saw a familiar jacket. Then heard another vehicle—the state trooper—bouncing down the old access road. He scooped up the jacket and stuffed it behind a workbench. The young state trooper walked in just after and Harris had tried to conjure his name. Clancy. Delancey He couldn’t think straight—he knew this man. But Delancey was oblivious to what Harris had just done. He nodded his greeting, then looked at the body. He’s a big one, huh?

People came and went all day but the jacket had remained, unnoticed, where Harris hid it. Now, sitting here with Steve Ho, he was extremely nervous, not so much that he’d hidden the jacket as much as that the jacket belonged to Billy Poe. He rubbed his temples; he’d gone off Zoloft a few weeks earlier, which was not helping things now. He tried to separate the things in his mind. Hiding the jacket was probably not bothering him. You didn’t arrest every kid you caught breaking windows. Or every citizen who drove home after a few too many Budweisers at happy hour. Good people got one free pass. Kids got two, though the second one might be a handcuffed ride in the Explorer. There was a role everyone played in the community, an unspoken agreement. Which was basically to do right. Sometimes that meant stopping people for a dirty license plate, other times it meant letting people go who were committing felonies. Which is what anyone did when they consumed three beers and put their keys in the ignition. You couldn’t say it but that was the truth—it was not the law so much as doing right. The trick being to figure out exactly what that was.

Listen to you, he thought. Trying to distract from the question. Which is whether you ought to be defending Billy Poe. Get out of this truck and go down there and discover that jacket. You should have already arrested him. At least that was one take on it—Even Keel’s. Even Keel had also made him buy a cabin on top of a mountain that no woman in her right mind would ever consider living in. Even Keel was a coward. Harris decided he would sit there. He would watch and see what happened. He would see which part of him turned out to be right.

Near sundown, they spotted movement at the far edge of the meadow near the train tracks.

“Now there’s two people who don’t want to get seen,” said Ho.

Harris got an even worse feeling. He lifted his binoculars. He couldn’t make out the faces on either of the two people in the meadow but he could guess from the size and the strange bouncing walk. Coming back to get his jacket. A tightness was growing in his chest. As the two got closer, he could see clearly that it was Billy Poe and one of his friends, the short kid whose sister had gotten all those scholarships. He thought about Grace. He felt sick to his stomach.

“You okay?” said Ho.

Harris nodded.

Ho was looking through his own binoculars, an expensive Zeiss model.

“That who I think it is?”

“Believe so.”

“You want me to go down there?”

“Just hold on.”

It was quiet for a few seconds, then Ho said: “You better make sure this doesn’t burn you, Chief. The whole town knows you put in a good word for him last time. You’ve said yourself—”

“Do me the favor.”

“You know all I’m saying, Chief. This ain’t the old days.”

Harris turned on the light bar for a few seconds to let the two in the field know they should come up. They both froze.

“They’re gonna run for it.”

“That kid’s sister is at Harvard. He isn’t running anywhere.”

As predicted, the two began to walk glumly up the hill toward the Explorer.

“You ought to take a look through these glasses, Chief. I can see every last goddamn zit on their faces.”

“Later,” said Harris.

But it was a clear enough picture. Billy Poe and some friends had come out here to drink, maybe score some meth, and things had gone bad. Meaning Billy Poe had beaten one of them to death, then panicked and took off, and was now coming back to clean up his mess. The saddest part being he’d gotten this other kid mixed up in it. Harris wondered if there was a way to keep that one in the clear. People like him still had a chance.

It was not Billy Poe he really worried about. He’d known for years where the boy would end up. He’d bent over backwards, he had put his own name on the line, knowing the entire time what would happen. By a certain age, people had their own trajectory. The best you could do was try to nudge them into a different course, though for the most part, it was like trying to catch a body falling from a skyscraper. Billy Poe’s trajectory had been clear very early; it wasn’t Billy Poe he was worried about. It was Grace and what this would do to her.

Ho said: “You know I always hated that prick Cecil Small, but it’s bad timing with the new DA. Cecil Small might have been willing to float a break.”

“I never said a thing about it.”

“I know you’re worried about your nephew there.”

“He ain’t my nephew.”

Ho shrugged. They watched the boys walk up the hill. Young men, Harris corrected himself Billy Poe was twenty- one. Somehow that seemed impossible. When he’d first met Grace, her son was five years old.

“Here they come,” said Ho. “I’ll put on my mean face.”

6. Isaac

Looking up from where he and Poe had just emerged from the brush at the edge of the field, he saw Harris’s truck. But the same instant he wondered if they might be able to make it back into the trees, the lights at the top of the truck came on. Poe began walking through the waist-high grass, toward Harris and toward the machine shop. Isaac followed in a daze.

They were across the field and near the muddy torn- up ground by the machine shop when Poe slowed to let him catch up. “We’re good,” he said quietly. “He knows where I live and if he found my jacket he wouldn’t still be here.”

“You think he’ll see us being here as just a big coincidence,” said Isaac.

Poe nodded.

Isaac was about to discuss it further but then he wondered if Harris could somehow hear them, even from up there. Poe began to walk more quickly as they passed the building where the Swede was lying. Not anymore, he thought. The Swede is already gone. The coroner’s probably already been here, the DA, everyone. Half the town, judging by the tire tracks. What’s- her- name, coroner’s daughter, Dawn Wodzinski. Due to inherit the family business. Her father being both county coroner and funeral home director. No, knowing her is not going to help you. The DA is that new guy. What’s- his- name.

Meanwhile see how fast Poe is walking. Relieved he doesn’t have to look at what he did. Because of him a person is dead but he’ll forget that detail soon enough. He’ll remember he’s innocent. He’ll remember it was your choice to do what you did. Meanwhile it was him who wanted that fight, didn’t care what the cost was because the cost was not to him—it was to you and the Swede and he will not take any of that off you. Know him well enough for that.

They made their way up the fireroad through the trees, climbing the hill under a dark gray sky Their pants legs were soaked and stuck with burrs and grass seed and Poe climbed with long strides, staring only at the ground in front of his feet. Isaac nearly had to jog to keep pace, it was humiliating and he was angry at Poe for that as well. There was the sharp odor of crushed weeds and skunk sumac, a more pleasant smell of damp soil. They passed a dug- out mudhole where a vehicle had gotten stuck, clods of dirt sprayed up the sides of the trees. He could feel his face getting hotter and he tried to calm down. Sacrificed on the altar to others, presenting Isaac English. His own fault. Not the Swede you traded for Poe—traded yourself. You aren’t going to California. Aren’t going anywhere.

They reached the top of the hill and Harris stepped down nimbly to meet them. He didn’t look particularly threatening—around fifty, skinny legs and nearly bald, hair close- cropped around the sides and back of his head. Then a much younger cop got out of the truck, a barrel- chested Asian man only five or six years older than Isaac. He was wearing sunglasses despite the encroaching darkness, holding an M4 carbine at low ready. Isaac only vaguely recognized him. He was not one of the cops everyone knew.

“Y’all stay cool,” said the second officer.

Harris appeared to grin despite himself. He gave a signal and the man lowered his rifle.

“That Billy Poe?” said Harris.

“Yessir.”

“Come here a lot, do you?”

“No sir,” said Poe. “First time.”

Harris looked at Poe for a long time, then at Isaac.

“Alright,” he said. “First time y’all have been here.”

The other cop smirked and shook his head. In addition to his assault rifle, which had such a short barrel it might have been a submachine gun, he had a load- bearing vest with several extra magazines for the rifle, a baton, some other equipment Isaac didn’t recognize. He could have been a military contractor just out of Iraq. Harris, by comparison, had only his pistol, handcuffs, and a small police flashlight.

“Interesting place to spend the night,” the officer said.

“Sure is. Now Billy, you don’t have any strange proclivities, do you, coming out here at dark with another young man?”

“No sir. Not at all sir.”

“Well, I guess in that case I won’t arrest you.”

The two looked at him.

“That was a joke.”

“You want me to check them out?” said the other cop.

“They look fine from here,” said Harris. “I don’t think we need to lay hands on them. Maybe if they promise to stay out of trouble we can give them a ride home.”

“We can walk,” said Isaac.

“You ought to take the ride.”

“What are y’all doing out here, anyway?” Poe said.

“Let’s go,” said Isaac.

“You two are good boys,” said Harris. “Officer Ho, why don’t you take your fancy night goggles and go sit in those bushes. See who else comes onto the premises.”

“It’s still soaking wet down there, boss.”

“I apologize,” Harris told him. “Go ahead and wait till it’s to your liking.”

Ho scowled and collected his things and made his way down the fireroad cradling his assault rifle. The other three watched him go, looking down over the meadow and the river. In the distance most of the hillsides were nearly black but there were a few patches of errant light where the land shone a bright green. They stood quietly watching the colors change until the light was gone completely.

Harris said: “Like an advertisement for church, isn’t it? You wonder why people don’t notice what a beautiful place this is.”

“They’re all a bunch of freakin complainers,” said Poe.

Because none of them have jobs, thought Isaac, but when he glanced at Harris the police chief seemed thoughtful. It seemed likely he had already taken that view into consideration.

After a minute Harris motioned them toward the backseat of the Explorer and started it and, after flipping a switch to lock the differential, pulled a wide U-turn through the forest. This truck would not have gotten stuck in that mudhole, Isaac noted. There were plenty of other cars here besides this one. At the top of the fireroad Harris got out to open a gate and they turned south on the main road.

“You two stay out of that area,” he said. “I don’t want to see you there again.”

There was a Plexiglas divider between them and his voice came through muffled. He slid the panel open.

“Did you hear me,” he said.

“Yessir,” said Isaac.

It was dark in the back and Isaac couldn’t see much, just the back of Harris’s bald head and the glow from the computer between the front seats. They were driving very fast down the curving river road. Your money and notebooks are still down in the meadow. Unless someone already found them. Not likely. That place is covered with junk and what they wanted was in plain sight in the machine shop.

“Son, I can’t remember your name but I know your daddy. He was the one working in Indiana when that Steelcor mill caught fire.”

“Isaac English. My dad is Henry.”

Harris nodded. “I was sad when that happened,” he said. “Your sister is the one that went to Harvard, isn’t she?”

“That’s her,” said Isaac.

“It was Yale,” Poe said. “Not Harvard.”

Harris made a modest hand gesture. “Excuse me,” he said.

“No problem,” said Isaac.

“You all still live in that big brick house?”

“What’s left of it.”

It was quiet after that. Ahead of them, where the river bent, Isaac could see the lights scattered along the hillside that was Buell. He closed his eyes, heard the tires whirring against the road in the darkness, thought you can’t really be sure what you were thinking. How pure was that decision. What thoughts you were having without being aware of them, you can barely see the surface of your own mind, there’s lower layers running all the time. I just want to sleep, he thought. But you won’t. Meanwhile big Otto he’s sleeping all the time. What made you throw that bearing? He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember what thoughts he’d had, or if he’d thought anything at all. It will be first degree—you picked up that chunk of metal for a reason and took it inside. Premeditation. Lethal injection. They said it didn’t hurt but he doubted that. Knowing what it meant for you, that shot would hurt.

He pushed his fingers to his temples. Keep this to yourself, he thought. Need to convince yourself you didn’t do this. Except that is hopeless. That is not the kind of person I am.

Poe nudged him and Isaac opened his eyes. He saw they were passing the new police station, heading on toward the center of town. He craned his neck slightly as the police station disappeared into the darkness behind them. They passed Frank’s Automotive Supermarket, a new spinal rehab place, Valley Dialysis, Valley Pain and Wellness, Rothco Medical Supply. A barbershop for rent, a tanning salon in a dingy storefront that had once sold model trains. Then Black’s Gun and Outdoor, the closed Montgomery Ward, the closed pharmacy, the closed Supper Club, the closed McDonald’s, a Slovak Lodge, the Masonic Hall.

Then, more stores, their windows boarded, he would have to think hard to remember what had once been there. Stone buildings with their elaborate cornices and ornate iron windows, all covered with plywood, the walls plastered with posters for the Cash Five lottery. An unusual number of people stood on the sidewalks; it was Saturday night.

“If the welfare office ever saw where their money went,” said Harris. He stopped the Explorer in front of the first bar they came to; people were already walking away.

“I’m gonna give you two the option here—you can catch a ride home with me or you can get out and call for one yourselves.”

Isaac wasn’t sure but Poe quickly answered: “We’ll call.”

“Alrighty then.” He shrugged. “Go ahead and get out. Tell whoever’s workin there I said let you use the phone.”

“We can walk it from here,” said Poe.

“You get a ride,” said Harris. “Make your phone call. Don’t let me catch you around later.”

The two nodded.

“By the way” said Harris. “How’d you get that cut on your neck?”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t play with me, Billy.”

“Fell on some barbed wire, sir.”

Harris shook his head. “Billy,” he said. “Oh, Billy.” He turned all the way around in his seat. “Keep this up and it won’t end good for you. You hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You too,” he said to Isaac. “Both of you stay inside the next couple days. Stick around where I can find you.”

They went into the bar. The walls were wood panel with initials carved everywhere, the bar was dimly lit and much bigger than it needed to be; the only light came from neon beer signs. A keno game played on two of the televisions, a recap of a stock car race ran on the third. Outside in the hall there was plywood nailed in front of an elevator.

“This is all old- timers,” Isaac said quietly.

“You wanna go to Howie’s and have everyone in there see us?”

“We shouldn’t be out here at all.”

“Try explaining to my mother why I got a ride home from Harris.”

“That’s the least of our fuckin worries,” said Isaac.

The bartender made her way slowly over to them. She smoked her cigarette. She was a young, pretty girl that Isaac recognized as being a few years ahead of them in school.

Finally she said: “Just so you don’t waste your time, I just saw you both get out of that cop’s truck.”

“Emily Simmons,” said Poe. “I remember you.”

“Well, I don’t,” she said.

That was unlikely, Isaac knew, but there was no point in saying anything. “Harris said you’d let us use your phone,” he told her.

“Anything for Mr. Harris.” She set the phone in front of Isaac and stood watching as he called his sister.

Poe said: “Lemme get an Iron City while we wait for our ride.”

“You left your ID home, didn’t you?”

“I’m twenty-one.”

“Got us confused with someplace else.”

“You know I remember you from playing pool in Dave Watson’s basement. I’m Billy Poe. I was two years behind you.”

“I already said I don’t know you.”

She poured them both sodas. Poe took the cherry from his drink and threw it on the floor. The people in the bar watched with amusement. They were mostly older men in satin union jackets or hunting coats, faces thick from working too close to the blast furnaces or working outside or not working at all. Some of them went back to talking, a few had nothing better but to watch Poe and Isaac.

Isaac saw one of his father’s friends from the mill sitting by himself, D. P. Whitehouse, he used to hang out Monday nights watching football, took Dad bird hunting after Dad moved back from Indiana, after the accident. But that had been a long time ago—D.P. hadn’t come around for years. Now D.P. didn’t recognize him, or didn’t want to.

“Maybe we should wait outside,” said Isaac.

“No shit. Least go where we can get a fuckin beer.” He gave the bartender a hostile look but she ignored him.

Outside, there were too many people milling around so they decided to go into the alley to wait for Lee. When their eyes adjusted they saw two men sitting in a dark pickup truck, waiting for something. The driver motioned for them to leave the alley and they did, returning to the street to stand awkwardly.

“Were those cops?” said Isaac.

“Fuck no. Don’t get paranoid now.”

“Harris knows. Not to mention you aren’t the one in trouble.”

“Come on,” said Poe.

“You’re right, this isn’t really a big deal.”

“If he knew, we’d be getting beat with a rubber hose right now. He thinks we’re just a couple of kids and plus they found that lady in a dumpster last week—they’ve got bigger things to worry about.”

They watched cars drive slowly up the street; then come back a minute later, going the other direction.

“He found your jacket,” said Isaac. “Not to mention if he did any real investigating he’s got our fingerprints and shoeprints and your blood all over the place.”

“You’ve seen too much TV,” said Poe.

“Dunno if you noticed how torn up that ground was, because that wasn’t just from his truck.”

“Mr. MacGyver.”

“Why are you acting like this?”

“Harris’s probably knocked off a few bums himself, and as far as we know he’ll be braggin on this one and takin credit for it. Plus either of those other ones probably ran off with my coat to wear, it ain’t like they were dressed exactly warm.”

“The witnesses, you’re talking about.”

“The two bums.”

“The older one who lives around here, who already recognized you.”

“Go ahead and think yourself to death, Isaac.”

A few minutes later, Lee’s Mercedes came slowly down the street. She was looking for parking. They watched her stop and back the car easily into a small space.

“She’ll be lucky if someone doesn’t key that thing,” said Isaac.

“It’ll be alright.”

They walked toward the car and waited. When she got out, Isaac said: “You’re late.”

“Sorry,” she said. She smiled guiltily. “I had to get ready.”

She had gotten dressed up—a long fitted skirt and an open- necked white blouse and when she hugged Isaac he could smell perfume on her neck. She did not look like someone from the Valley. Isaac noticed she was wearing makeup—unlike her. Then he saw how she hugged Poe, the light touch at Poe’s waist. He felt a surge of confusion and wasn’t sure what to make of it.

“What’s our plan,” she said.

“I think a drink wouldn’t kill us,” said Poe. He was standing at his full height now, grinning self- consciously, blushing, he couldn’t take his eyes off Lee. Nothing good is going to come of this, Isaac thought. He regretted not asking Harris to take them home.

“We really have to go,” he said quietly.

“We can get one drink,” Poe insisted. “We can all just visit a minute.”

“What’s wrong?” said Lee.

“Your brother’s just tired.”

Poe nodded to Lee and started ahead of them down the street, then stopped to smoke a cigarette while they talked.

“Well,” she said to Isaac.

“I’m fine,” he said. He wouldn’t look at her.

“You wanna talk?”

He didn’t answer.

“Buddy,” she said.

“Since when do you call me ‘buddy’?”

After standing there a minute Lee seemed to make a decision. She turned and began walking quickly to catch up to Poe. Isaac followed slowly after them.

7. Poe

Lee was walking ahead and he caught up and stayed close to her, he didn’t care if Isaac followed them or not, he accidentally brushed against her and she let him and, as for Isaac, he’d always been like this, he was afraid of everything. Small wonder how they’d treated him in school, he was Ralph Nader Junior, an old fucking man. Harris could have locked them up but he hadn’t, he’d taken care of things, old Harris had definitely taken care of it. Everyone knew Harris didn’t give two shits about dead bums he’d burned all those old houses down hadn’t he, he’d burned down an entire block of houses where the bums were living, Serbiantown it was called and Harris he had burned the entire thing, it had gone all night, eight- alarmer. He did not give two shits about a dead bum in a factory. Anyone could tell you that much.

Lee had gotten all fixed up to meet him. Eight months now she hadn’t called, it had never been anything but fun and games to her and now she was married. He had heard it from Isaac, she had not even bothered to tell him. Only—here she was looking her very best, she didn’t wear much makeup but she was wearing it all tonight, she had taken care to look her best for him. Turning heads walking down the street like this, they know she’s in a different league, they would never recognize her. A giddy feeling overwhelmed him, he wanted to grab her up and hold her, hold some part of her in his mouth. Even being this close to her, if he could keep this feeling it would be enough.

They passed Howie’s, there was no way they were going in there, Christ knew the things his friends would say in front of Lee. He decided on Frank’s Tavern instead. A slightly older crowd, usually, though not by too much. Inside it was dark and humid and people were dancing. Empty drink glasses everywhere. Isaac sulking back behind them. Go on, Poe thought. Lee brushed his hand it was not accidental, he took her hand and squeezed it, in the crowd no one could see him, he looked at her she was blushing, she had that crooked smile, she only smiled that way when she couldn’t help it. He would ignore Isaac, he decided, for the entire night. For his entire life. Inside the bar it was the aftermath of a wedding, a young couple, he recognized a bunch of people, spotted James Byrne across the room and turned quickly the other way. Jimmy Byrne who used to bring his girlfriend to the games only she started coming by herself, she used to give Poe rides home, they would park in the bushes. Did Jimmy know? Poe wasn’t sure. Jimmy was one of those types who got his permit to carry a handgun as soon as he turned twenty- one, he used to pass the permit around at parties so everyone could look at it.

Everyone was dressed up, all the girls in church clothes and their boyfriends in new shirts. Getting a thrill rubbing on each other. Someone left their baby in the stroller, it was sitting there by itself, watching things.

“It’s like old times,” Lee said, but Poe wasn’t sure if she meant good or bad. They decided she would have a better chance of getting a drink and he watched her make her way to the bar, they were all jostling, she crossed her arms she was very small, a few dark hairs coming out of her ponytail, she looked, he didn’t know, she looked like she was from someplace else, from Spain, she looked like a girl in a bar in Spain, a girl from a picture. He almost went in after her but he made himself stand there. He leaned against the wall, hands in pockets, took them out, crossed his arms, finally he put his hands behind him. She brushed her hair behind her ear and turned back and smiled at him. He smiled back at her and they looked at each other for a long time, across the room. He felt as if he could breathe and breathe and still never get enough air. His neck was tingling and he didn’t want the feeling to go away, and then there was a commotion, the bride and groom came downstairs from some secret place, the bride’s dress no longer on quite right and a cheer went up and the bride looked down and the groom raised his hand in the air like some kind of general, big deal Poe thought we all know you fucked her. But when he looked at Lee, he got a sick feeling—she had just been a bride herself. He was sick, literally sick for a second, he could feel things rushing up from his stomach and he took a swallow of someone’s beer, someone’s half- finished beer just sitting there, to push it back down. Look at you he thought you are not thinking right you should not even be here with her. She’d gotten sidetracked in the people dancing and she caught his eye and waved for him to come out and dance but he wasn’t sure now, he didn’t know what to do he just stood there. She was only doing it to be nice.

Isaac was standing in the corner with his arms still crossed. Poe went over and clapped him on the shoulder. “Relax,” Poe told him, but even to him his voice sounded strained and uneven and Isaac wouldn’t look at him. “You want a beer?” Isaac still wouldn’t look at him. He turned back to Lee. She was dancing. She danced with a fat older man in his baggy church suit, sweat pouring down his face, it was Frankie Norton’s dad, Frankie who was still away at Lehigh. Then she danced with a freckled kid who looked about fifteen and then a guy in Marine Corps dress blues who was taking it a little easier. Lee and the marine danced for a while, it seemed like a long time, he twirled her around slowly. Poe hated this song it was Faith Hill, he hated new country. The marine tried to put his white hat on Lee, being playful. Then Frankie Norton’s dad came back and handed her two beers and Lee stopped dancing and pushed her way back to Poe. He could see the marine sizing him up from across the room and then the marine turned away, Poe saw he had a scar across the back of his head where the hair didn’t grow, a surgery scar. They had done something inside his head. After graduation a lot of people had signed up and three kids from the Valley had been killed in the last month alone. One of them was a girl he’d fooled around with, she was a little weird, everyone thought she was a dyke. He’d fooled around with her a few times but he hadn’t defended her. She was driving a truck and an IED got her, it was what got all of them over there. All she’d done was join the Reserve. He hoped the Arabs that did it were dead, hoped they’d been gutshot by some hucklebuck sniper who’d grown up with a deer rifle in his hand, hoped those Arabs thought they were safe and meanwhile that sniper was judging his windage and boom—they were holding in their guts. Christ, he thought, what happened, a second ago you were happy.

Lee handed his beer over and said: “They wouldn’t let me pay for drinks.”

“You got that on someone’s SSI,” Isaac told her. “Or their welfare.”

Lee got a look on her face. Poe wanted to throw Isaac through the window. She opened her mouth to say something but the marine had come over next to her. He didn’t look more than twenty or twenty- one, short brown hair that looked as soft as a boy’s, acne on his neck and temples.

He said: “You ain’t gonna sit out long, are you.”

“I’m finished dancing,” Lee told him.

“Come on.”

“I came to see my friends here.”

He looked over Poe. Then he took her hand up lightly.

“No, thank you,” she said.

Poe stepped in front of her, squaring himself to the marine.

“Husband to the rescue, huh?”

“That’s right,” said Poe.

“Except you ain’t her husband.”

“Yes he is,” Lee said.

“Bullshit he is.”

“Go back to your friends,” said Poe.

“We’re leaving,” Lee said.

The marine took a step forward but Poe was already backing away. Then the marine kept walking after him but he stumbled on something and went over hard. He was drunk. He began to shout something from the floor, just lying there shouting. Poe kept backing up. Lee and Isaac were already out the door.

Poe backed away without taking his eye off the marine, people were starting to notice, the kid’s medals were flopped awkwardly on his pressed blue coat. Poe felt bad for him, stand up, he thought, just stand up. Then he noticed something strange, one of the kid’s legs was twisted and longer than his other leg, Poe saw something shiny underneath and he felt all the heat go out of him, and kept looking at the leg, where the sock didn’t cover it, it was pale brown plastic with a steel bolt for the ankle and Poe couldn’t stop looking at it, his head felt light, you might have hit that kid, he realized, in the old days you might have hit him and for a second he thought he’d pass out, there was a slight space in the crowd and Poe shoved people aside and pushed through to the door.

Outside a state trooper was parked and Poe steadied himself against the wall but someone was already in the back of the car in handcuffs and the cop was writing. Christ he thought something is happening to your life, your mistakes are piling up. He wondered how he’d never seen it before. And now the thing in the factory with those bums. He had to get out of this place, away from this town. He had thought he would be okay staying here but it was the opposite, people had tried to tell him but he hadn’t listened. He couldn’t remember where Lee had parked, he’d only had two beers but his head was spinning. There was an ambulance at the other end of the street, its back doors wide open, bright inside, two people being treated. He saw Lee and Isaac waiting. They had Lee’s car idling in the street when he got there and Poe checked as he got into the car, a half dozen men had come out of the bar looking for him.

“Took your sweet time,” said Isaac.

“That guy had a fake leg.”

“You didn’t punch him,” Lee asked.

“I didn’t touch him,” Poe said. “Jesus Christ.”

“Good thing we had that drink,” said Isaac.

“I’m sorry,” Lee said. “I shouldn’t have talked to him for so long.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“The fuck it’s not,” Isaac said.

Isaac was quiet the rest of the way home. When Lee parked he got out and went inside without looking at either of them. Poe and Lee watched Isaac go and then looked at each other and he braced himself for her to say good night. He would walk home. He needed to get his head clear.

“Do you want to come in for a drink or something,” she said.

He hesitated for a long time. “Alright.”

She squeezed his arm gently. “You can’t stay over, though.”

“I won’t.”

They sat on the back porch on the couch with a blanket over them, faces cold but the rest of them warm, they could hear a stream running down to the ravine where it met the other stream and then the river. And from there, he thought. From there it met the Ohio and the Ohio met the Mississippi and then down to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic, it was all connected. It’s all connected, he thought. It all meant something. He drank more wine. He was just drunk.

It was warm under the blanket, they were holding hands and he closed his eyes and let the feeling sink in. There was a dark patch where the neighbor’s yard began, it was a thicket now, the empty house obscured by brush.

“When I left, someone still lived there,” said Lee. “Pappy Cross.”

Poe finished the bottle of wine, held it above his lips for the last drops. It was a new moon, a dark night, it seemed like anything could happen, it felt like the old days, he wondered if he was just kidding himself.

“We might as well talk about it.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” she said.

“It’s fine.”

She laid her head against his shoulder.

“It’s the same one from before, isn’t it?”

“Simon.”

“The one who was with all those other girls?”

“I’m sorry. I’ll say it as many times as you need to hear it.”

“He changes his mind so everything’s different. That’s pretty much the story.” He didn’t know why he was saying these things, they were having a good time, from the way it was going he guessed there was a good chance she’d sleep with him if he would just pretend it was like the old days, like he forgave her.

She tensed and it was quiet for a while but then she said: “There’s a reason I was with him in the first place, you know, he wasn’t all bad. Anyway, now that we’re married, they feel better about helping to take care of my father. Things are about to get easier for all of us.”

“Hope you got that in writing.”

“Poe.” She shook her head. “Poe, you have no idea how easy it is for you to say that.”

“I was defending you to your brother but now I think I shouldn’t have.”

Still he didn’t know why he was pushing but it seemed like she’d been prepared for it, for him to act like this, she’d always been fine with having different sorts of feelings.

“I hope you didn’t tell him about us,” she said.

“No, but I’m sure he knows now. After tonight.”

She was shaking her head some more. She was not happy about it.

“It’s kind of his own fault.”

She took her hand back.

“I found out from your brother,” he said. “You could have called and told me and it would have been okay. You could have told me yourself but instead I find out from him and I’m guessing you would have split town again without calling me if we hadn’t needed a ride tonight.”

“Because I’m married.”

“Well I’m glad you’re happy.”

“If it makes you feel better there are days when he and I don’t even talk. I can’t even remember the last time we had sex.”

He wondered if she was making that up but he didn’t care. He needed to hear it. Of course it made him feel better, and it seemed to make her feel better also, and after a minute they were holding each other again. He heard her swallow and he could feel her heart going and he thought go on and do it. She let him kiss her. She let herself be pulled into him and he smelled her warm breath and they held their heads together and he took in her smell, some girls smelled like their perfumes or the soaps they used but her it was just her skin. He would know it anywhere. In the mornings when she’d been sleeping all night he would just smell her, smell her chest, smell where the hair began at the top of her neck. They were like that for a long time, breathing in each other’s hair, and then he started rubbing her back and her leg.

“You’re not being fair,” she said.

“I love you,” he told her.

She sighed and burrowed into him.

“You don’t have to say it. I don’t care.”

“I love you, too,” she said.

Soon she was touching the bare skin on his stomach. He put his hand up her skirt and she pushed against it and he undid his pants and slid them down and reached for her. She let him. She rolled on top of him and he pulled her underwear over and got partway inside, it was as quick as that. She raised herself up to get it in smoothly. They were still for a minute. She grabbed his shirt and squeezed it hard and then quickly rolled to one side and took her underwear off.

They started again and after a minute or two there was a look on her face like she was concerned with something and he pulled her mouth to his neck so she wouldn’t make noise. Eventually the tension went out of her and they were going slower.

“Do you want to be on top,” she said.

“I think I’m done.”

“Me too,” she said.

After lying like that for a while they took all their clothes off, just to be touching, and she lay with her back to him, his arms around her. She had a raised mole on her back, on the one shoulderblade, and he leaned and kissed it. He knew the other one wouldn’t, is why. He knew she meant something different to the other one, she did not mean as much to the other one. It didn’t matter. She was not the same for him but that didn’t matter, he was going to write it down, a life lesson. Shut the fuck up, he told himself.

Then he thought she was just doing this as a favor. It was just her doing a favor for you, old times’ sake, next time she will be gone to you. He felt cold. He was considering all the possibilities but then he decided no, it wasn’t from pity, it was from several different things, he was fine with it. But it was time to get going, in an hour he might be nervous or angry, he didn’t want her to see that. He slipped out from behind her and began to look for where his clothes had fallen, then stood up and began dressing.

The coldness woke her and she opened her eyes.

“Where are you going?” she said.

“I dunno,” he said. “I guess home.”

“I’ll drive you.” She stood up, naked. She was so small. “Jesus, I’m shitfaced,” she said. “No wonder I wanted to seduce you.” She smiled at him.

He was slightly hurt by the implication but he smiled anyway and his head began to feel straight again, this was as good as it would get, two old friends, occasional benefits, any more and she’d take him under and then leave him there. He was glad it had happened, a good reminder of how it was supposed to be. It was supposed to mean something, it was more than just body parts. Life was long and he would feel this way again only not with her. He couldn’t figure out why he was feeling so natural about it, he hoped the feeling would last, he knew this was how he should close it. The end of one book of his life. He did not want to think about it.

“I’m glad I got to see you again,” he said. He cleared his throat and made himself lean forward to kiss her forehead. She tried to pull him back to the couch.

“You might as well stay a while longer,” she said. “We might as well do it all night.”

“I should get home.”

“I meant what I said.”

“I know,” he said. “I know you did.”

As he was leaving, he turned to wave and saw something move in Isaac’s window. He kept walking. Soon he was in the dark under the trees.

8. Lee

She was lying on the couch, looking around at the home she’d grown up in but had put from her mind five years now, water- stained ceilings, patches of wallpaper curled from dry plaster, Isaac’s books flung everywhere. Since she’d left, the books had filled the house. Old science textbooks he’d picked up at thrift stores, copies of National Geographic, Nature, Popular Science, piles of them on every shelf, on her mother’s upright piano, the stacks of books and magazines spread across the living room in unruly masses. It was a large room but still there seemed barely enough space for her father’s wheelchair to pass. Obviously, Henry had decided to tolerate it. But maybe he no longer cared. A person looking in the window would have thought the house belonged to some crazy old lady and about twenty cats.

On one hand she loved her brother for it, his curiosity, he was always teaching himself things, but she was beginning to worry about him. He was getting more isolated and eccentric. Right, she thought. You’re the one who stuck him here. It didn’t seem like she’d had a choice about it. She’d always thought she had escaped just in time, outrun the sense she’d had her entire childhood that with the exception of her even-stranger younger brother, she was fundamentally alone. It was not a good way to think. It had changed completely when she got to Yale, not right away, but quickly enough, her sense of aloneness, of what she would now describe as an existential isolation, had disappeared. Her entire childhood in the Valley now seemed like a past so distant it might have been another person’s life. She’d found a place she belonged. It seemed impossible she’d have to give that up and come back here.

There was a creaking from upstairs—her brother was still awake. She felt guilty. I’m working on it, she told herself. Simon’s family had agreed to pay for a nurse, she’d made some phone calls, tomorrow she would start the interviews. It could not have gone any faster. Same as what they taught you as a lifeguard—you have to save yourself before you can save anyone else. That’s what she was doing. She had gotten herself to solid ground and now she was coming back for her family. You sure took your time about it, she thought, but that probably wasn’t true, she was just being hard on herself. She hadn’t been a particularly good lifeguard, either—her body wasn’t big or buoyant enough and technique only went so far. A heavy enough person would drag her under every time.

She got up and walked around the stairs, through the small dining room, and into the kitchen. Off the kitchen, in the den which had been converted to a bedroom, she heard her father snoring, the long pauses when his breathing seemed to stop. It is him, she thought. He is the problem. Her ears and neck got very hot and she had to wash her face in the sink, it was the old feeling that there were terrible things in motion and she would only understand when it was too late, it was the feeling she associated with this house, with the entire town. She felt it every time she came home. Soon they would all be gone from it. It was a conversation she’d been planning for years, telling her father it was time for both of his kids to leave. That he could stay in the house with a nurse or move to a home, but that the time for Isaac to stay had passed.

She had always been the favorite. Their father treated Isaac like a foster child, because he, Henry English, was a big man from a line of big men, because Isaac had a curious mind and Henry English did not, and while those same faults, smallness and fine- mindedness, were acceptable in his wife and daughter, when they appeared in his son it was as if everything he had to offer, everything he had valued in himself, it had all been submerged under the character of his wife. Including her Mexican coloring, which both children had inherited. Their skin wasn’t that dark, really, they just looked slightly tan, Isaac could have passed for someone from the hills. Not so much her, though. A little more foreign. Dark eyebrows, she thought. Meanwhile Henry English was pale and red- haired. Or had been, anyway.

Their mother had come to the U.S. to study at Carnegie Mellon, and as far as Lee knew, she had never gone back. By the time her kids were born she had no trace of an accent and neither Lee nor Isaac had ever heard her speak Spanish. Right, she thought. As if Henry would have allowed that anyway. He wouldn’t have been happy either if he knew you checked the box, called yourself Latina, on your college and law school applications. She’d thought it over many times, but when the time came she hadn’t hesitated to do it. It was true and not true. She could look the part if she wanted, but she didn’t know the language, not even a nursery rhyme—she was the daughter of a steelworker, it was a union family. At Yale she’d learned French. As far as college and graduate school went, she probably would have gotten in anyway, she had perfect SATs and nearly perfect LSATs but there were times she wished she could know for sure. Obviously it was a luxury to even wonder about it.

She took a handful of vitamins for all the wine she’d had, drank a glass of water, and went back to the living room. She couldn’t get over the house—it was bigger and grander than some of the houses of her professors. Built for some businessman in 1901, the date in stone over the front door. A little ostentatious, but that was the style then. Her father loved the house more than he would ever admit. They had bought it in 1980, when things were beginning to slow, when people in the Valley were much less sure about buying big houses. Later, it had been the reason he had to take the job in Indiana, after the mill downtown had closed, living in a shack while he sent back money. In hindsight it seemed stupid. But of course that was the American Dream. You weren’t supposed to get laid off if you were good at your job.

She wasn’t ready to go upstairs and face her brother and decided she would sleep on the couch. Cheating had always seemed a male thing to do. She wondered why she’d slept with Poe. Maybe because she owed him, she’d made him some silent promise, the sort of promise you made with your body and she had broken it. Not so much by getting married as by not telling him. Or maybe she wanted this marriage to be over sooner rather than later, and was trying to speed up the process. No, that was not what she wanted but still, married at twenty- three, it was a little ridiculous. She had done it to show Simon she forgave him, it seemed as good a reason as any. Still there were days when he wouldn’t get out of bed, barely acknowledged her existence. He was going through a hard time but maybe he had always been like that. He was going through a hard time but he’d grown up on an estate in Darien, Connecticut. He was a little bit spoiled.

Also, she still loved Poe, in a hopeless sort of way, in a way she would never love anyone else because she knew it could never go anywhere— Poe was a boy from the Valley, Poe loved the Valley, Poe had not read a book since graduating from high school.

She didn’t feel sorry yet but that was probably still the endorphins. Or maybe not—Simon he’d cheated how many times, three girls she knew about and then how many others she didn’t? She wondered if the statute of limitations had expired on those things. She wondered what she would do about Simon. He was already getting testy, she’d only been away two days but he wasn’t doing well on his own, he’d gone to stay with his parents in Darien. From Darien it was only an hour train ride into New York, he had maybe fifty friends in the city but he didn’t feel like leaving the house. It was depression but it was also a habit. It was his habit of acting helpless. To say he was a little spoiled—it was a gross understatement. If his supply of money were to somehow run out… he wouldn’t make it. Maybe half of her Yale friends would make it. Most of them worked very hard, but none had any idea what it was to want something they wouldn’t get. A specific lover, maybe. You’re being defensive, she thought. This is better than you ever thought it could be. You are happier than anyone you know.

She still had principles—there was no longer any real reason to go to law school but she was still going. Simon was trying to talk her out of it, he wanted to do some extended traveling—there was a family house in Provence that was barely used. Only it was too cliché, blue- collar girl marries into rich family, benefits accrue. When she thought about that it made her sick. She would not take their money. Except they’re happy to have you, you’ll be the most well- adjusted person in their family—a scary thought. Obviously they had more money than she could reasonably expect to make in her entire life, even if she got a job at a Big Firm, which she would not do, she’d end up doing something for humanity, work for the Department of Justice or something, civil rights law. That is what everyone tells herself, she thought: I’m going to Harvard Law so I can be a public defender. Was it Harvard? She had gotten into Stanford and Columbia as well, all she had to do was pick. Actually she knew. Harvard, obviously. She couldn’t help smiling. Christ you’re a snobby bitch. That was alright. As long as you don’t let anyone know. You just tell them you’re going to school in Boston, and then if they ask further… but under no circumstances offer the information otherwise. It just sounded too snotty—Harvard. It was the same as Yale but worse. What about your brother, she thought. What is your brother going to do?

She wondered if she and Poe had been loud, she wondered if Isaac was a virgin and he’d heard her having sex with Poe. It would be horrible. She was not sure how much she knew him anymore. Part of her worried he was headed for serious trouble. She couldn’t sleep. She opened her eyes and sat up.

She made a mental inventory of all that was wrong with the house— roof, paint and plaster on the inside, the trim around the windows was rotted, the bricks needed repointing—those were just the things her father had told her. It was a gorgeous house but it would likely cost more to fix those things than they’d get out of selling the place as is.

Because that was what was going to happen. Isaac was not going to stay here any longer, and she was not coming back, and Henry would have to accept that. He was willing to sacrifice Isaac, but she was not. Except you did, she thought. You let this go on way too long.

She wondered what they’d get for the house. In Boston or Greenwich it would sell for two million, but in the southern Mon Valley it might go for forty thousand. The neighbor’s house had been empty twelve years, even the For Sale sign had faded and rotted away. The state had built a brand- new highway running north to Pittsburgh but there were never any cars on it, it was hard to imagine that in any other place, an enormous highway that no one used, the central artery, empty. Driving around New York or Philadelphia, the entire I-95 corridor, you wouldn’t believe a place like this existed, and only a few hours away.

To help her get to sleep she decided to read in front of a fire. She opened the flue and piled some logs on the grate and put newspaper under them and lit the paper but after the paper burned out the logs were just smoldering, no real heat or flame. The smell of smoke filled the house and she opened the windows so the smoke detectors wouldn’t go off. She was an idiot, really, how she’d managed to grow up in a town like this and still be such a girl. She did not know how to start a fire, shoot a gun, anything like that, she’d never had any interest though she’d grown up in Pennsyltucky for Christ’s sake, it was embarrassing. Maybe before she left she would ask her father to do that, teach her how to shoot one of his handguns, tin cans in the backyard or something. That was something he’d be happy to do.

Looking through the books she’d brought, she picked up Ulysses, but couldn’t figure out where she’d stopped. She wondered if it was really such a great book if you could never remember what you’d just read. She liked Bloom but Stephen Dedalus bored the crap out of her. And Molly, she’d skipped ahead to read that part. Racy for then, pages and pages of masturbating. At least she would not have to do that tonight. That was a relief. It had gotten to be a chore, really. Here she was, a young hot piece of ass and no one to give her what for, only her own hand to depend on. She shouldn’t be so hard on Simon, really. It was only because she worried about him. He had hurt that girl, it had not even been his car, it was John Bolton’s car, it was John Bolton that should have been driving. John Bolton had been nearly sober but he liked to encourage Simon, the bad part of Simon. John Bolton was one friend she wished Simon didn’t have. Actually, there were several others. Anyway there was the black ice on the road. That was what the investigators had determined. There was no point in even thinking about it. She had forgiven him. You did not forgive people and then change your mind later. Simon hadn’t forgiven himself and that seemed like enough punishment. She wanted them to have a normal life again, it didn’t have to be crazy googly eyes or anything, just back to the way it was. Except there was Poe who is so warm you want to wrap yourself around him, you see him and you cannot stop touching him. You would not be happy with Poe, she reminded herself. Poe who gets in bar fights. Poe will never leave the Valley no matter how all the blood rushes down there and everything so sensitive and wanting pressure even thinking about it now she closed her legs together very hard Poe Poe Poe she squeezed her legs harder she thought about his flat stomach and the muscles on his chest she listened her father was still asleep she slipped her hand under her skirt, no she thought, there’s no need for that. She took her hand back.

She picked up Ulysses. Hands are for turning pages, she decided. Leopold Bloom was having lunch. She wanted to fall asleep. She wondered if she had any Henry James. Except right there on the side table was her old copy of Being and Nothingness. Sartre—that was an equally good choice, good as Ambien. What should she pick? It was a very tough decision her life was full of them. She decided to stick with Joyce, she would get as far as she could. After a few more pages she was dozing happily.

9. Isaac

There was a noise and he woke up; he hoped it was morning but there was just the blue black of night, bright stars. The TV is on, he thought, but it was not the TV It was from the porch. Poe and Lee talking. You know why. After a time he heard Poe say he loved her and she repeated it back to him and then it got quiet, he could feel the skin on his neck tingle like he was drunk. It’s all of them, he thought. Lying right to your face.

They were on the porch, where his father had hung his workclothes so as not to get the dust in the house. He remembered grabbing his father’s legs but his father, wearing dirty long johns, pushing him away until he dressed. Is that a real memory, he wondered. Or just something you think might have happened.

He listened a while longer, heard his sister suddenly whimper. All of them, their human condition. Even your own mother waded out to sink. Pocketful of rocks. Final eyeblink, saw her whole life in it. Wonder did it make her feel good or bad.

He needed something to rinse his throat. Keep this up, he thought. Keep this up and it’s back to the river in no time. He got up and stood near the open window in the cold breeze his head was swimming, he had a feeling his room was enormous, looking around in the dark it seemed the walls stretched on forever like a fever dream, he remembered his mother holding iced towels to his neck. Taught fourth and fifth grade because she couldn’t handle the older ones. Old man tells everyone she was pushed. Coverup, he says, uninvestigated murder. Can’t go to heaven if you kill yourself.

Even her—she lived only for herself. Got tired and checked out. Easy to be generous when it doesn’t matter but when the hard decisions come you see what they all choose. It doesn’t matter doing right when it’s easy. Her, Poe, Lee, the old man. As if they’re the only ones alive on earth. Meanwhile you’re always expecting different. It is your own fault expecting things.

You are the one who let her go—watched her walking down the driveway, last you saw of her. Maybe the last anyone saw of her. Maybe she saw someone along the way. Wish she did and wish she didn’t. That was the happiest you’d seen her in a while. Went up to your room and then saw her walking. Seemed out of place but didn’t know what. A nice day, she was going for a walk. Back to your reading. Time magazine. I was reading Time magazine when my mother died. If I had chased her down, he thought. Why would you have—there was no reason. Nice day for a walk. What no one knows about you. I didn’t know, he thought. Alright alright alright. Put it out of your mind.

He stood in the dark listening. The voices started again, giggling, then the porch door opened and closed. He watched them walk out into the driveway holding hands, kissing their good- byes. Maybe you only care because they’re happy, he thought. But he didn’t think that was true. Poe was walking alone across the dark lawn, down the hill toward the road, Isaac watched him and the strange way he had of bouncing on his toes. Poe turned again and waved to Lee. That’s all, you’re being petty. Angry because they are happy. Then he thought no, it has nothing to do with that. It’s because of what they have inside. But somehow you’ve turned out worst of all of them.

He reached for the light but it was too late, there was a loose fluttery feeling in his chest, his heart was beating faster than it ever had and his legs went loose and he sat down. There was a warm feeling like he was pissing himself. Faulty wiring. He took deep breaths but it was beating too fast, fluttering too fast to pump blood. Like the kid who died at soccer. Didn’t confess. Please God, he thought. He sat against the wall and he couldn’t get enough air and he was distantly aware of being cold again and wet everywhere. He tried to call out for his sister but he couldn’t and then the feeling began to pass. He felt embarrassed.

You need to get out of here, he felt more than thought. On shaky legs he got himself up and turned on the light, examined himself, his thin naked body, there was almost no substance to it. He was still shaking and wanted to sit back down but he made himself stand until his legs felt strong again. He was clammy with sweat but that was all. Get up and get moving. Get. Out. Of here. He wiped himself off with a shirt and grimaced. Look at you—when it comes down to it you think Lord God come and save me. Confession get my pardons. Christ, he thought. He felt embarrassed though of course there was no one to be embarrassed in front of. Go on and pay a visit to St. James. Dear old Father Anthony, moral guide and choirboy fondler. Ten Hail Marys and a blowjob. Jerry what’s- his- name, the kid from Lee’s year, had a breakdown. Meanwhile half the town still goes—easier to believe that young Jerry was a liar. Diddle our sons but you can’t shake our faith.

He knew it wasn’t true about his sister. She was not a bad person. Their mother dying, it had driven Lee away, she’d gone off to college right after. He didn’t think she’d chosen another life, not exactly, but a different path had been offered and eventually she’d decided to take it. How can you blame her? You made one visit to New Haven and knew it was right for her. Probably right for you, too, but too late for that. No, he thought, that’s just your pride.

Most of what he needed was in the backpack he’d left by the machine shop. That was the first order of business. It was a crime scene but so what. He couldn’t believe they’d been so stupid today, just walked through the field. It would have been easy to stake the place out and make sure no one was watching. Lessons of hindsight. You are not playing by the same rules as last week, even. No more stupid mistakes. He found a spare set of thermals and began dressing, his heavy cargo pants, a heavy flannel shirt, wool sweater. Get your fishing knife, you might need it.

He bent the sheath loop backwards so it would sit inside his waistband and still clip to his belt. He looked at himself in the mirror, a knife in his belt, and felt ridiculous. Go down and talk to your sister. No, it’s too late for that. It was stupid but there seemed to be no way around it. You’re going to die alone, he thought. This isn’t kid’s stuff anymore.

You didn’t have to leave this way. Only now you do. Took the car the other day up to Charleroi and then you were on 70 West and you kept going, just to see what it felt like, nearly ran out of gas and got home after dark, he was waiting for you. Sitting on the porch, just waiting for you in the dark. Meanwhile you are twenty years old.

I had an appointment with Terry Hart that I missed.

Why didn’t you ask him to pick you up?

You know I don’t like to do that.

Alright, you told him. I’m sorry.

It’s my car, he told you. Don’t borrow it again unless you tell me where you’re going and when you’ll be back.

Knew he was pushing you—the car was your only freedom. But that is his way. Could have lent you the money to buy a car but didn’t. When you got that job in the Carnegie Library—two hours each way on the bus—he got sick all of a sudden. Four visits to the doctor in a week. Wanted you home but wouldn’t say it. That was his way of telling you. And you gave in. Some part of you was happy to give in. The same part of you that has kept you here waiting two years now.

The air in his room suddenly felt thin and he had an urge to get outside as quickly as possible but he took a final look around and made himself think. There was the ceramic bank his mother had given him, he hadn’t wanted to break it before, it was in the shape of a schoolhouse and it had been full for years but now he cracked it on the edge of the dresser, took the dollars and the quarters, counted it, thirty- two fifty, left the rest of the change on the bed. Rifling his desk for anything else he needed to bring, Social Security card, anything, but he’d packed so carefully the last time that there was nothing. Everything—the money, his journals, everything else—was in his surplus Alice pack sitting under that pile of scrap metal in the field. Unless someone found it. Unlikely, he decided. They had no reason to search the field, everything they needed was in that building. He glanced briefly at the picture of his mother over his desk but it didn’t inspire any sort of feeling. It is because of her checking out that you lost Lee and now you’ve lost Poe as well. Or maybe that happened a long time ago. Either way it’s better that you know it.

He got his spare schoolbag and put a blanket and extra socks in it just in case. In case nothing. You need to get the other pack. After a final inventory he went softly down the stairs, found his sister asleep on the couch, her foot tucked in a hole in the torn plaid cover. He watched her as he laced up his boots. Cheats on her husband, falls fast asleep. Miraculous conscience. Deleted at birth. These are just things you are saying to yourself, he thought.

She opened her eyes, groggy, not sure who was there. He walked past her toward the door.

“Isaac?” she said. “Where are you going?”

“Nowhere.”

“Wait a second, then.”

“I heard you and Poe.”

She looked confused and then she was more awake, she looked again at his backpack, his coat and hat and hiking boots. She untangled herself and stood up quickly. “Hold on,” she said. “It isn’t how it sounded. It isn’t anything. It’s an old thing but now it’s over.”

“You told him you loved him, Lee.”

“Isaac.”

“I believe you. I know that somehow in your mind, both of those things can be true.”

“Just hear me out.”

She took another step toward him and bumped a pile of ancient books, which fell heavily to the floor, startling her. For a second he seemed to see her clearly, her hair disheveled, hollows under her eyes, the grand old living room now filled with junk, so different from the way their mother had kept things. The house literally falling apart around her. She didn’t know how to handle any of it. The only thing she knew how to do was leave.

“Soon we’ll both be out of here,” she said. “We’re really close.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore.”

She looked confused and then the old man began calling out from his bedroom. Isaac ignored it.

“Should we check on him?”

“He does that in his sleep every night.”

She nodded. Because nothing is required of her, he thought. Then he was angry again.

“I swear this is all about to get fixed.”

“You were a day too late,” he told her. Before he could hear her reply he was out the front door, making his way toward the road in the dark.