American rust (14 page)

“Whatever.”

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

“I couldn't see their faces.”

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

“Am I gonna be booked now?”

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

“Fine,” said Poe. “I'll be there.”

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

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

“You gonna run if I let you go?”

“I ain't goin anywhere.”

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

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

Billy Poe nodded.

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

5. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

    — — —

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  — — —

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

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

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

“Let me get my coat,” she told him.

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

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

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

“Poe?”

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

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

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

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

He looked at her suspiciously, then nodded.

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

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

“What did he hear?”

“Everything.”

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

“Are you there,” Poe was saying.

“Sorry.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It wasn't me.”

“Where's my brother,” she said.

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

“He's involved, though.”

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

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