The Evening Hour (6 page)

“Fuck you,” Cole said.

He snapped off the TV and pressed the blinking red light on his answering machine and listened to his grandmother: “Cole, honey, I need to talk to you.” She'd been calling all week. He was tired of being the one she expected to fix everything. Didn't want to hear about how he should go to church with her, didn't want to hear about her prophecies or talk about giving up the land. He erased her voice. Then he stripped down to his underwear and stretched out on the sofa and thumbed through the pill book, a drug dealer's bible, but there wasn't anything that he didn't already know.

He went in his room and took out the safe and counted the money he'd made today, though he knew exactly how much was there. The bills felt soft in his hands, and he brought the green up to his nose, breathing in the inky smell. He had a little over twenty-five grand, more dough than his grandparents had ever had. Aside from what he gave to his grandmother and what went to his granddaddy's doctor bills, Cole rarely spent the money. Charlotte was right to say that he had it. He didn't know what he was saving for, but he liked knowing it was there.

He added today's earnings, pushing aside old-lady jewelry. It always surprised Cole how the residents, and their families, forgot to lock up their valuables. He didn't worry about getting caught. If anyone actually noticed something was missing, which they never did, it would be easy enough to blame it on the Alzheimer's patients, who were always wandering into other residents' rooms and stealing family photos, eyeglasses. Once he'd discovered a half dozen pairs of dentures hidden in a closet.

He leaned over his bed and took out an old Christmas cookie tin. He used to store the money in here, until Reese said, “Are you completely stupid?” and told him to buy a safe. Now Cole was extra careful. He never left his trailer or his truck unlocked. The junkies around here wouldn't stop for anything, even if they had to pull a job way out in the hills. It was also why he didn't sell out of his home.

He pried the lid off and dug out the postcards, worn by years of handling. The first one arrived when Cole was three years old, and after that, they came sporadically—sometimes five in a month, sometimes one a year, but always another one. Las Vegas, Dallas, small towns in Michigan, Ohio. Cities and states he learned about in school, but to him were as far away as the North Pole. As a kid, he had looked at the postcards nearly every night, tracing a pencil over his mother's slanted, loopy scrawl, mimicking the handwriting until it became his own.

The trees in California are a lot bigger than the trees in Dove Creek. They almost touch the clouds. They are big enough to stand inside of. xoxox, Ruby

The messages were all like that, short, simple, random. Never a return address. If his granddaddy had known about them, he would have burned them, the way he did her pictures. But Cole and his grandmother always retrieved the mail. The last postcard came when he was fifteen. There was never another.

Under the postcards were a few photographs. One of Cole with his grandparents on his tenth birthday, the same year his mother had visited. The single picture of her that his grandmother had salvaged from the flames. He set them aside and picked up one of him and Terry Rose. They were at a party, a bonfire. Their arms slung over each other's shoulders. Terry stood a head taller than Cole, his black curly hair cut in a mullet, the back trailing almost to his shoulders. They didn't look like brothers, but when they were thirteen, they opened their skin with Terry's pocketknife and smashed their hands together.

Before Terry, Cole didn't have many friends. The stutter ostracized him as soon as he opened his mouth, and belonging to a crazy snake-handling church didn't win him any friends either. But mostly it was his voice. If he was called on at school, he would mumble inaudibly in order to cover up the stutter, an annoying habit that he never completely kicked. While in his mind he constructed sentences and stories seamlessly, eloquently, whenever he opened his mouth to speak, the words came out mangled. Ugly.

Spit it out, retard.

Over time, as the stuttering faded, his teachers thought he'd outgrown it and his grandfather believed that God had cured him. But Cole credited Terry Rose, who talked so much that his words infiltrated Cole's speech and he began to sound like a boy instead of a stuttering preacher, losing the strange speech patterns that had been derived from the convoluted style of his granddaddy's sermons and verses of the King James.

Cole had met Terry Rose the summer he was thirteen, on a day that Cole had sneaked away to go fishing. He had just cast his line when a voice rang out: “Is there anything to do in this shit-hole?”

The voice belonged to a boy who was smoking a cigarette. He wore a baseball hat that said “Indy 500,” and told Cole that he used to live in Indianapolis. “You like cars?” he asked, his voice flat, nasally.

Cole shrugged.

“My dad was a race car driver,” Terry said. “He got killed in an accident.” Now he and his mother were living with his aunt in Rockcamp.

Terry told Cole that he had a brother in Texas and a sister in Florida, and as he talked about the places he'd been to, many of which were the same places that the postcards had come from, Cole felt a warmth blossoming inside him, a combination of wonder and familiarity, as if this boy was the missing link to his mother. Terry bragged that he knew how to take apart a carburetor and put it back together. He said he was going to be a race car driver like his dad. He claimed that he'd already had several girlfriends. Cole had no reason to disbelieve anything the curly-haired boy told him. He had never met a city-dweller before: he wondered if they all talked this much. When Cole went back the next day, Terry wasn't there, and Cole felt disappointed, wondering if he had been real or if he was one of the restless spirits that his grandmother said walked the mountains. But a couple of days later, he was back. Terry never seemed to notice Cole's stutter, and eventually Cole also learned to ignore it, so much that it began to disappear.

Once he'd overheard his granddaddy complain that Cole had been a pretty good boy until Terry Rose came along. But Cole had never felt like a good boy. When he closed his eyes, he saw Charlotte dancing with the man at the Eagle. He saw Terry Rose, his toothy grin. He wished they would both disappear. He felt drunk and mixed up and far from God.

When he woke up, his head was pounding. He showered, ate several aspirin, and poured black coffee into a thermos. He was heading out the door when the phone rang.

“What are you doing?”

“I'm on my way to work.”

“Well, I thought you would already know by now.”

“What?”

“I got a call a few days ago.” His grandmother's voice sounded thin and tight. “There's a space for your granddad.”

Cole's skull felt like it was going to explode. “No, I didn't know.”

“I thought they would have told you.”

“It's a mess down there. Nobody knows what's going on.” He tried to think of which space was open, then remembered Otis Smith, his grown children standing over his cold body. “You sure you want to do this?”

She took a breath. “I don't see what else we can do. The other night, he grabbed the fire poker, scared me to death. Larry and Rebecca have been coming over here almost every day, it's too much.”

“I've been busy,” Cole said defensively. “Working all the time.”

“Oh, honey. Listen, over there he'll get the care he needs.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself. “I'll visit him every day. It'll be nice.”

Cole looked out the window at the thick fog lifting across the back field. “You want me to take him in?”

“He's sleeping now. We'll bring him in later.” Before she hung up, she added, “The only reason I feel okay about this is 'cause you'll be there.”

As usual they were short-staffed. Cole, with his head still screaming, spent the first hour changing diapers and sheets. The old miner John Hill, suffocating with black lung, couldn't get out of bed, and Cole maneuvered around him, carefully turning him as he rolled on the new sheet. As soon as Cole finished, John let loose, peeing all over the sheet he'd just put down. “Fucking hell,” Cole said.

He stepped outside for a smoke, joining Ellen. “It's going to be weird,” he admitted. “Working in the same place where my granddad will be.”

“Don't you pretty much just take care of him anyway?”

“I guess so,” he said, feeling a sharp pang of guilt.

Ellen patted his arm, said everything would be okay. He liked Ellen. He could talk to her about nursing school, and she did not seem surprised that a guy like him would consider it. He used to entertain the thought of asking her out, but she was engaged. To a cop, of all people. He looked at her hand on his arm and Charlotte flashed in his head. Why hadn't he done anything, instead of just standing there, watching her put her arms around someone else?

Cole walked by the room that his grandfather would be moving into, still pulsing with the most recent death. Stripped bed, bare walls. He tried to imagine his grandfather among these people, Larry Potts twiddling his thumbs and Hazel Lewis trying to take off her shirt. The truth was, he'd probably fit right in.

Mabel Johnson was sitting in a rocker with a ball of blood-red yarn on her lap, looking dressed for church: blue belted dress, strand of plastic pearls, stockings the color of sand. She barely hit five foot, but wasn't frail; she looked like she could walk for miles. Mabel was ninety-five years old and had the memory of an elephant. She was the only black resident in the home, and a few of the patients refused to room with her.

He handed her a can of apple juice with a bendable straw poked through the top, and set down a bowl of tapioca pudding.

“You got anything else?”

“Just for you.” He dropped several chalky peppermints into her wrinkled hand. She popped one in her mouth and for a second it sat, a bright pink medallion on her fleshy tongue, then her lips smacked and it was gone. “Mmm,” she said. “I like those candies.” One time Mabel had walked in on Cole as he was searching her dresser, the closest he'd ever come to getting busted. He pretended that he'd lost something, a ring, he muttered, and she narrowed her eyes:
I never knew you to wear no ring.
After that he had avoided her, until one day she put her hands on his:
I don't hold grudges
. To this day he wasn't sure what she knew.

He asked what she was knitting.

“A scarf.”

“Who for?”

“One of the grandchildrens, I 'spect.” She motioned for him to lean forward and her icy fingers grazed his neck. “Or maybe I'll give it to you. I can see this color kindly favors you.”

Cole said he'd be proud to wear such a scarf. Mabel's children had fled the coalfields long ago and rarely visited, but she didn't complain: “I reckon they're busy.” Now she looked at him, and her eyes were dark and velvety and filled with stories. The old people clung to the past. They could go on and on; usually he liked hearing them talk, but today he was preoccupied.

“You know they whipped my brother, Cole.”

She told him this story nearly every time she saw him.

“In nineteen hundred and eighteen, before we got the union,” she started, and she told how her brother had wandered over to the white section of the coal camp, and they accused him of watching their women. “They said the next one who came over to their side would be hung—” She held onto the arm of the chair like she was afraid of falling off. “I'll never forget those men's faces. They all dead now, but I can still trace their kin. I look at everyone here and know exactly who they come from, what kind of people they are.”

“I know it,” he said.

“But you come from good stock.”

“Crazy stock.”

“Your granddad is a good man.”

Although Mabel, a Baptist, told Cole that she did not like that Pentecostal gibber-jabber, she respected his grandfather and believed he was a man of God. She'd told Cole stories that he'd never heard before. How his granddaddy delivered sweets to the poor on Christmas. How one time the town pharmacist put up a sign that said Whites Only, and his grandfather had escorted Mabel in and told the man that he would burn in hell if he didn't take down that sign. He took it down.

“Well, I'm glad you like him, because you're going to be seeing an awful lot of him.”

She titled her head. “Explain yourself.”

“He's moving in.”

She showed no expression, and he wondered if she'd heard him. Then she looked down at the yarn in her hands. “Sometimes I see things,” she said mysteriously.

He waited, but she said nothing else. Quietly, he eased out of the room.

As he headed down the hallway, Ellen stopped him. “Cole, he's here.”

“Where?”

“At the door. Won't come in.”

Cole jogged down the hall and nearly ran over Delphia Slone—hunchbacked and gray like some kind of creature from the dinosaur days, struggling to push her walker. “Watch where you're going,” she yelled.

“Sorry.”

At the front doors, his grandmother, Rebecca, and Uncle Larry were trying to coax his grandfather inside. Linda was waiting with a wheelchair, saying, “Come on Mr. Freeman,” using her baby-talk voice, but Cole caught the undertone of impatience.

“I'll take care of it,” he told her, and she looked relieved.

His grandfather stood stiff and hunched in the doorway, refusing to take another step. Cole's grandmother said, “Maybe he'll listen to you.”

“To me?”

“Try,” she insisted.

Aunt Rebecca had tears in her eyes, and Uncle Larry, in his Heritage security guard uniform, looked annoyed. “You take one arm and I'll take the other,” he told Cole. “We'll carry him in.”