One of Us (5 page)

five

R
AFE AND I ARRIVE
at Carelli’s Furniture on the outskirts of town, a flat tan warehouse with a glassed-in showroom at the front of the building filled with overstuffed recliners, sectional sofas, dining room sets, and a line of contemporary furnishings where Mrs. Husk probably found her church-window coffee table and marshmallow chair.

I spot Tommy’s truck parked in the handicapped space in front of the doors. He’s in his nineties and uses a cane and could easily get a handicapped license plate, but he refuses. Instead, he’s written a sign he puts on his dashboard that reads: “I’m 96 and if you got the balls to tell me to my face I shouldn’t park here, I’ll move my truck for you. Otherwise, screw off.”

He’s been doing this since he turned ninety, making a new sign every year in order to adjust his age, and as far as I know no one has given him any trouble.

A woman in a pumpkin-colored skirt and jacket and brown sensible shoes greets us at the door. She has clipped streaky blond hair she keeps nervously tucking behind her right ear.

“I’m the new manager,” she greets us.

Rafe shows her his badge. She studies it longer than necessary.

“Where’s your uniform?”

“I’m a detective,” he explains.

“They have detectives here?”

“Just the one, ma’am. Yours truly.”

“What is there to investigate—”

“Excuse me, but where is he?” I interrupt before Rafe has a chance to answer her in a way he probably shouldn’t.

She waves toward a couple dozen couches all crammed together in the center of the room, some facing in, some facing out, some facing each other.

Tommy’s sitting on one with his cane propped nearby, eating from a container of party nuts, watching his wallet-size portable TV, the only advance in technology during the past thirty years that he ever praises, aside from Internet porn, which he’s never seen but thinks is a good idea.

There’s not a single customer in the store.

“What seems to be the problem?” Rafe asks.

“He won’t leave.”

“Has he caused any type of disturbance?”

“No. But he won’t leave. He shouldn’t be here.”

She pushes her hair behind her ear again and blurts out, “Do you know who he is?”

“Maybe.”

“He’s Thomas McNab. He was telling me about his grandfather and the Nellie O’Neills cutting people’s tongues out if they squealed on them. The Nellies were bloodthirsty killers, and he’s related to them.”

Rafe arches his eyebrows.

“Well, he’s not looking particularly bloodthirsty today,” he says.

“You think it’s funny?”

“Ma’am, what exactly is the problem?”

“He can’t be here,” she states flatly.

We go inside and before we can even begin to make our way through the maze of sofas to get to Tommy, he recognizes Rafe.

“Called out the storm troopers on me, did you?” he shouts at the manager, who pretends to busy herself fluffing pillows.

He narrows his eyes suspiciously in our direction, then his face splits into a grin when he recognizes me.

“So you came after all. I told you not to. Are you so famous now you get a police escort?”

I’m flooded with relief. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but he looks exactly the same as he did the last time I saw him and the time before that. I don’t see any obvious signs of a prolonged illness. He has on the same red-and-black-checked Woolrich coat he’s worn for as long as I can remember, and one of his Lost Creek Coal & Oil ball caps covers his unruly head of snow-white hair. The ladies of NONS are always telling him he should take off his hat so they can see his pretty hair. He growls and grimaces over the compliment, but I know he secretly loves it.

I lean down and give him a quick embrace. I don’t expect him to stand up. He spent forty years crouching in a coal mine; the resulting arthritis in his knees makes rising from a sitting position no easy feat for him.

“And Rafferty Malloy. My favorite Malloy. The only Malloy with a good singing voice and an equally good throwing arm.”

Rafe extends his hand for a shake.

“I haven’t used either in a long time. How are you, Tommy?”

“Couldn’t be better.”

“Heard you were pretty sick there for a while.”

“It was nothing. You think pneumonia can kill me? My lungs are Teflon coated.”

“You do look good,” I tell him.

“And you look ridiculous. Don’t tell me you’ve been out running already.”

He and Rafe exchange looks that say I’m clearly crazy. I’m used to this response here. In their opinion, the only time a man should run is toward a goalpost or away from a skunk.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t at the house to greet you,” he goes on. “I left you some lunch, though.”

“Potato chips and whiskey?”

“I didn’t have any tofu.”

He lets his gaze return to the TV screen in his lap where he’s watching the Home Shopping Network, one of his favorite pastimes. He re
gards it purely as a form of entertainment. To my knowledge, he’s never bought a single item from them.

“Have you ever seen anything so disgustin’? Little doggy booties for sale? Gourmet doggy cookies? These animals live better than I ever did. Look at that. Steps. Little steps to put next to your bed so your old lame dog can get up there with you when he can’t jump anymore.

“Get yourself a man,” he leans forward and shouts at the woman in the advertisement who’s lying in her bed urging a white feather duster of a dog up a set of miniature red-carpeted stairs.

“Well, look at her,” he sneers. “What man would have her?”

“She probably has a man and he probably sleeps with the dog, too,” Rafe tells him. “Ménage à dog.”

Rafe’s comment sends Tommy into a gale of laughter that ends in a coughing fit. He reaches for the empty coffee can he takes with him everywhere and spits out some of the black, tarry phlegm that fills his lungs. That it hasn’t drowned him yet is a miracle. All of the miners he worked with are long dead, many for decades.

I catch a glimpse of the manager watching him with an expression close to horror frozen on her face.

“So what can I do for you boys?”

“We hear you’ve been telling some stories,” Rafe says.

Tommy breaks into another paroxysm of laughter ending in another bout of hacking coughs and spitting.

“Lord, I told her some good ones. I told her after they killed the first foreman they cut out his heart, roasted it over an open fire, and served it up with some soda bread and a nice tart apple butter.”

He breaks off into more laughter.

“And Fiona had a necklace made out of his fingertips—”

“You have to leave, Tommy,” Rafe cuts him off.

“And where should I go? I can’t stay in the house all day. Drives me crazy. I have to go somewhere.”

It’s true. Tommy’s never been one to sit still, especially alone, but he’s outlived all his friends. He’s outlived his entire generation.

“You can’t stay here.”

“Fine,” he says dejectedly.

“Why don’t you go to the Union? Shoot some pool,” Rafe suggests.

“Bunch of kids. Not a man there over eighty.”

He ponders his situation.

“I guess I could go to the Bi-Lo. I need a few groceries. I tried to go last night but Owen was there and I had to leave. I can tell you everything he had in his basket. It’s burned into my brain: a pack of hamburger patties, a bottle of Mountain Dew, two cans of corned beef hash, five boxes of single-serving mac and cheese, and a thirty-six double-roll pack of toilet paper he was lugging around under his arm. A man who lives alone and shits a lot.”

Tommy’s hands begin to tremble with rage.

“I told Arly he was a sonofabitch. I told her. She didn’t have to get married, you know. I would’ve never thrown her out.”

Rafe glances at me, knowing that I’m the reason she did get married whether she felt she had to or not. Having Owen Doyle’s child and not marrying him would have probably been an equally perilous situation. She was doomed the moment the sperm met the egg.

A wave of sadness washes over Tommy and he flops back into the couch, his milky blue eyes becoming clear and then sparkling with tears.

For a moment, he does look old. He’s become alarmingly thin, but he’s not frail. If anything he looks tougher to me than he ever has, as if his body decided to consume any part of him that was soft and weak and leave only bone and gristle.

“I’m sorry, Danny,” he says quietly.

He reaches out his gnarled hand to me covered in the familiar miner’s blue scars like pieces of pencil lead trapped beneath the papery, age-spotted skin.

I take it and help him stand while Rafe puts the lid on his can of nuts and turns off his TV.

“No hard feelings?” the manager asks Tommy with a nervous tic at the corner of her mouth as we pass through the door.

“Of course not, young lady,” he replies, flashing his most charming smile. “You have a lovely day now.

“She’s terrified of me,” he whispers proudly in my ear.

We arrive at his truck, but before he gets in he smiles back and forth between Rafe and me.

“Aren’t you going to ask me about Simon Husk?” he says suddenly.

“How the hell do you know about that already?” Rafe asks.

“Nora was on the scene right away and she called me. You know how the NONS love me.”

“She called you here?”

“She called Birdie and Birdie called Betty and Betty and I had run into each other earlier at the Kwik Shop and I told her I was headed out here. Told her I need a new couch. Aren’t you going to ask me if I think the Nellies murdered him for selling the gallows back to Dawes?” he says ominously.

He has the vaguest touch of a brogue and speaks with the cadence of an Irishman, but this lilting quality to his speech doesn’t come from Ireland. It comes from growing up in a closed-off American community of Irish immigrants.

Tommy’s never set foot in Ireland, although he’s always talked about going, and I’ve offered more than once to take him. I can’t imagine anyone more Irish than him, but I know if he ever finally made it over there he’d be an obvious American.

It’s the same problem his ancestors faced when they first came here. They weren’t Irish anymore, but they weren’t American yet. They were neither, and they were both. They were Irishmen living inside an American skin; they were Americans living inside an Irish head.

They were forced to carve out a new identity and a new culture for themselves here in the hills of Pennsylvania. Ireland had no place for them. America didn’t want them. The mines became their country and the Nellies became their justice system.

“There was no murder,” Rafe assures him. “And the Nellies had nothing to do with it.”

“Right, right,” Tommy says with a wink. “Move along, folks. There’s nothing to see here.”

I tell Rafe I’ll take a rain check on the beer. We say our good-byes and I get into the truck with Tommy.

I know it’s useless for me to ask him to let me drive, so I sit back and
brace myself in the passenger side of his truck as he careens down the middle of steep, twisting roads, not seeming to care at all if another vehicle whips toward us from the opposite direction.

Most people become cautious as they grow older, but age has made Tommy even more reckless. Instead of viewing the remainder of his life as something he should protect and savor, he sees it as something left over that he needs to gulp down before someone else gets their hands on it.

“Do you mind if we go to the Bi-Lo? I don’t have anything to make for dinner tonight.”

“It’s Bi-Lo, Tommy. Not
the
Bi-Lo. It’s a grocery store, not a casino.”

He beams happily at my correction, something I’ve always loved about him. He was the only person who ever made me feel like my thirst for knowledge was a good thing and that speaking up when a mistake was made was a positive response, not an act of arrogance.

Nothing excites Tommy more than learning something new, which is one of the reasons I can’t understand why he’s lived all these years in a town full of people who seem like they don’t even want to know the little they can’t avoid knowing. He loves books. He’s the most voracious reader I’ve ever known, a trait he credits to Fiona, who was a self-taught reader and always made sure he was surrounded by the written word.

She raised Tommy. His own mother died in childbirth and his father, Jack, died ten years later in a roof fall in one of Walker Dawes’ mines. This string of McNab men who grew up without fathers would end when Tommy had a daughter, my mother, Arlene. She gave birth to me, a son, but my father is a Doyle, not a McNab, something Tommy has forgiven but will never let me forget.

“Why didn’t you tell me the gallows are coming down?”

“Must’ve slipped my mind.”

“I don’t believe that for one minute.”

“Why should I care?” he asks. “They should’ve been torn down over a hundred years ago. They should’ve never been put up in the first place.”

“But . . . ?”

“They’re a reminder,” he concedes.

I can’t begin to understand what those morbid pieces of wood truly mean to Tommy. Even though I had an ancestor die there, they’ve never had much of an emotional impact on me. I was just one more kid who got a cheap horror-movie thrill from them, but for Tommy, they weren’t the stuff of an overactive imagination or the symbol of some distant historical event. Fiona used to take him there every Sunday afternoon. She held his hand exactly the same way she had held the hand of Jack, and they would stand in silence as if before a church altar while he’d be forced to envision what had happened there to a man who had been taken from him and had left a hole in his life. I never would have known Prosperity McNab, but he would’ve been Tommy’s grandfather.