Heat and Light (19 page)

“What's the matter, kitten? You barely touched your burger.”

“I don't feel good,” Olivia says.

In the kitchen Shelby is scooping Jell-O into a bowl. “For Olivia,” she says.

“She didn't finish her dinner, she gets dessert?” Rich is interrupted by a terrific thrumming from outside. “What the hell is that?”

He hurries out to the deck. An immense truck, larger than any he's ever seen, is climbing the access road, or trying to. The thing moves at the speed of a cruise ship, enveloped in a cloud of diesel fumes.

“What the hell is that?” his father barks.

“The drill rig,” Rich shouts. “A piece of it, anyway.”

Darren covers his ears. “On a Sunday afternoon?”

In stunned silence they watch the hulking machine inch up the
ridge. That it moves at all is a straight-up miracle. It's as though an aircraft carrier has run aground in Rich's back yard.

“It's so
loud,
” Darren shouts. “Maybe we should go inside.”

“You go ahead,” says Rich. “I'll talk to them.”

He jogs down the stairs and follows the access road up to the ridge, breathing diesel fumes, easily passing the mighty engine. “Hey!” he shouts, waving his arms.

The driver seems not to hear him, which is no wonder. He can't even hear himself.

From the top of the ridge he spots another vehicle parked at the edge of the gravel lot, a white Dodge Ram pickup with a sign—
STREAM SOLUTIONS
—on its driver-side door. A guy wearing ear protectors leans against its hood, watching the slow progress of the rig. Rich recognizes him immediately, the sawed-off muscleman he sees, far too often, at the Commercial. A name,
Herc
, is written in cursive over his heart.

“What the hell is going on?” Rich shouts.

Herc removes his headphones.

Rich repeats, “What the hell is going on?”

“Just what it looks like. We're moving in the rig.”

“On Sunday? I'm having a barbecue with my family.” The engine noise makes Rich's whole body vibrate. They're standing two feet apart, and yet he has to shout to be heard. “You guys were here all day yesterday. You can't give us a break today?”

“That wadn't us. That was the construction crew.” Herc moves to replace his headset. “Don't worry, we'll stay out of your way.”

“You're joking, right?”

Herc shrugs. “Sorry, man. I can't help you.”

“It can't wait until tomorrow?”

“The schedule says we drill you this week. Devlin H1. You're Mr. Devlin?”

Rich nods.

“Mr. Devlin, I'm sorry for the inconvenience. But the show must go on.”

OUTSIDE, A CRACK OF THUNDER.
Rain hits hard and sudden, a sound like gunfire. Periodic gusts rattle the windowpanes. A horizontal rain batters the aluminum door.

The brothers are standing in the garage so that Darren can smoke. Outside, the engine noise continues. Darren is grateful for the noise, which at least fills the conversational void. He's been hoping all day to get Rich alone—why exactly, he can't now remember. To explain himself? To be forgiven or, at least, to acknowledge his unforgivability? To apologize for his entire life?

They have squared off in opposite corners of the garage, crowded with Rich's possessions, some of which Darren can identify: a lawn tractor, a snowblower, and what might possibly be a table saw. Items Rich must consider ordinary, the kinds of things men own.

Darren tries to make conversation. “It's weird to see the farm again. Not what I expected. I thought you'd have cows and stuff.” Wasn't that the whole point, the actual reason Rich had bought him out? Instead his brother lives in a tract house the size of a trailer, and Pap's sixty acres sit unused.

“Soon,” Rich says tersely. “Once the gas money starts coming in.”

“Right.” Darren butts one cigarette and lights another. “Explain it to me again, because I'm missing something. Your kids are going to play next to a gas well. You're fine with this.”

“Do you always smoke this much?”

Outside, a crack of thunder.

“Also: since when do you worry about my kids, or anybody's kids? You
are
kids.” Rich jams his hands into his pockets, his balled fists the size of grapefruits. “Jesus Christ, they aren't orchids. When I was a kid—”

“Yeah, I know. You played in the strippins.” It's a word Darren
hasn't thought of in years. In the sixties and seventies, Saxon County was a hotbed of strip mining. Rich Devlin and his friends ran wild in the ruined landscape, riding bikes and motorcycles through gaping man-made canyons, treacherous slopes of loose black dirt. By the time Darren came along, the land had been clumsily backfilled, covered over with grass; but the old strippins was still talked about, tales that took on mythic dimensions. It is the essence of a Bakerton childhood: the foregone conclusion that every worthwhile thing has already happened. The town is all aftermath.

“That place, man. I used to come home black with coal dirt.” Rich runs a hand through his hair, still conspicuously thick and wavy. “Mom wouldn't let me in the house. I had to clean up in the basement,” he adds, as if Darren might have forgotten this detail. As if it hadn't filled his young self with envy: of the four Devlin kids, only Rich had access to the dank basement shower their father used when he came home from the mines.

The hair, honestly, is a little galling. His brother is over forty. Shouldn't he at least have some gray?

“And that's a good thing,” says Darren. “That's a thing that should be replicated.”

“Can't be replicated. There will never be anything like it. That's not the point.”

“Which is.”

“Which is: it didn't kill us. Kids aren't that fragile. What are you going to do, lock them in the house?”

It might or might not have been an oblique dig at Darren's childhood. Which, in point of fact, took place entirely in front of the television.

“Shelby thinks they're made of glass. I refuse to be that kind of parent.”

“Yeah, about that.” Darren drops his butt into an empty Sprite can. “What's the matter with Olivia?”

“Stomach, supposedly. Tomorrow, who knows?” Rich crushes a
beer can and pops open a fresh one. “It's always something. I think she's just imitating her mother, you want to know the truth. My wife is a fucking hypochondriac.”

Wait,
what
? Rich Devlin admitting some sort of vulnerability, some aspect of his life not perfectly under control?

Darren lights another cigarette. His brother's marriage to Shelby has always confounded him. In school she'd been two years behind Darren, quiet, mousy, conspicuously Christian. In a normal-size high school, he'd never have noticed her at all. When his mother told him, a few years later, that Rich was engaged to Shelby Vance, he wondered if she'd made a mistake.

“It's my own goddamn fault for indulging her. Tearing down the farmhouse, for Christ's sake. What a mistake.” A muscle pulses in Rich's jaw. “Pollution gives her migraines. Food additives. Power lines, you name it. She needs her own fucking planet. Mold, can you believe it?”

“Actually, it's a pretty common allergy.”

Rich gives him a warning look.

“So—a brand-new house. No mold. Yeah, I get it.” Darren hesitates. “This is kind of an obvious question, but: she can't live with mold, but she doesn't mind a gas well in her back yard?”

Rich says, “Here we go.”

“All I'm saying is, you don't know what all they're pumping into the ground. I've done research.” Restless in his father's house, Darren had spent Saturday afternoon on a computer at the Bakerton Public Library. “That is some seriously toxic shit.”

“Toxic,” Rich repeats.

The word hangs in the air, rich with subtext:
This from a guy who mainlined toxins. Who spent years injecting himself with heroin, or some random substance sold as heroin on the streets of Baltimore.

Darren drags deeply on his cigarette. “There are like two hundred different chemicals in fracking fluid.”

“Two hundred exactly.”

“Okay, I made up the number. The actual number now escapes me.”

Rich guffaws. “Don't talk to me about chemicals. It's a meaningless term. Everything is made of chemicals. If you eat an apple. If it's on the periodic table, it's a chemical.”

“Oxygen, for example.”

“Oxygen is a chemical.”

Darren marvels at his certainty. It is conversational skill he himself will never master, the tone that invites no argument.

“Look, nothing's perfect. The point is, it's an opportunity. I'm not sitting around waiting for the mines to come back. Unlike some people.”

“Seriously?” says Darren. “That's the dream?”

“They were good jobs,” says Rich.

“Define
good
.”

A long tense silence that seems made up of shorter sub-silences. Darren gropes for a new subject. He wishes he followed a sport.
How about those Pirates/Steelers/whatever the hockey team is called?
To fill the pauses, as men did.

Rain beats at the roof.

“How's work?” Darren asks.

“We're twenty percent over capacity—meth busts, mainly. Dregs of humanity. So I guess you could say business is booming.”

Dregs of humanity.
He'd use the same words, undoubtedly, to describe Darren's clients at Wellways. That Darren had actually
become,
for a time, the dregs of humanity is a fact neither mentions.

“So there's a lot of meth around here?”

“In
Bakerton
? No way, man. These guys are all from Philly or Pittsburgh.”

“They get any kind of treatment in there?”

“There are meetings.”

“No individual counseling? Cognitive/behavioral—”

“There are meetings.”

Another clap of thunder.

“So you've got some vacation,” Rich says. “You can stay and help Dad. I could use a break.”

“Yeah, about that.” Darren gropes for a way to explain it. To anyone else it would be obvious why he shouldn't work in a bar. “I'm an addict, Rich.”

“Again?”

Rich looks genuinely alarmed, and Darren feels for a hideous moment the weight of his brother's concern. A pale shadow, probably, of the worry he's caused over the years, and yet it's enough to paralyze him with guilt.

“Not that,” he says hurriedly. “I'm doing okay with that. It's just—I'll always be an addict, you know? It's a lifelong illness.”

“So I hear. But you were never much of a drinker.”

“That's true.” A fact recently proven: he sat in the Commercial for more than an hour watching Gia Bernardi, and hadn't taken a drink.

“So what's the problem?”

Darren considers. Tending bar, while not ideal, doesn't seem particularly dangerous to his sobriety. Certainly it's safer than two idle months in Baltimore, where the precise high he still craves is a phone call away.

Also: Gia Bernardi.

“Sure,” he says finally. “I could stay for a little while. You know, for Dad.”

Rich smiles so broadly it's a little embarrassing. He claps a heavy hand on Darren's shoulder. “All right, man. That's great.”

A click behind them, the side door opening. Shelby's head appears in the doorway. “Ugh,” she says, waving away the cigarette smoke. “Darren, what am I going to do with you?”

“I am a lost soul.”

“Come have some cake. Regular or decaf?”

“Regular.”

The door clicks shut. Not a word for her husband, Darren notes; not even a smile. Rich stares at the floor.

“Did it just get cold in here?”

Rich shrugs. “She's on your side, buddy. Royally pissed at me about this gas thing. She was all for it—the money, anyway—until she got a look at that drill rig parked at Wally Fetterson's. I guess she thought they were just going to conjure it out of the ground.”

“Too bad they can't,” says Darren.

“Yeah, too bad. But the reality is, it's got to come from somewhere. Fuck it,” Rich says, reaching for Darren's cigarettes.

“Oh ho.”

“Shut up. The point is, what's the alternative? Send more kids to the Gulf, like I got sent? Or we could build more nuclear.” He pronounces it
nucular.
“Though—let me guess—you don't like that either.” He inhales deeply, then coughs. “Jesus Christ, menthols?”

“Nuclear is problematic,” Darren admits, pronouncing it correctly. “But what about renewables? Wind, solar, hydroelectric?”

“How'd I know you were going to say that?” Rich exhales a long stream of smoke. “Yes, fine, renewables. Let's build a few windmills and sit around in the dark.”

Truck noise, traffic, road construction, contamination . . .

HAVE WE HAD ENOUGH YET?

HAVE WE MADE A HUGE MISTAKE?

       
*
  
If you signed a
gas lease
(or if you're thinking about it)

       
*
  
If you're
worried
about your water

       
*
  
If you're
sick and tired
of living in a gas patch

. . . YOU ARE NOT ALONE!

Join your friends and neighbors for an evening of brainstorming and problem solving with special guest, Dr. Lorne Trexler of Keystone Waterways Coalition.

The future of our community is in our hands.

T
he visitors' line is shortest on Mondays. Like every Monday, Rena dresses carefully: no jewelry, no hair clips, a cotton jog bra (underwires trip the metal detector) beneath her scrubs. Instead of a purse she carries a Ziploc bag with cash for the vending machine, coins and singles only, to buy Calvin potato chips and Snickers bars, the junky snacks she rationed when he was a child. Now, because there's nothing else she can give him, she treats him to this terrible food.

Calvin needs a haircut. Unshaven, he looks tired and dissipated. His chin bristles with a two-day beard.

The visit passes slowly. They all do. Rena asks what he is reading. They discuss the upcoming presidential election, and watch the TV bolted to the ceiling—tuned, always, to a court show, in which an irascible lady judge scolds plaintiffs from the bench.

The people are REAL! The cases are REAL! The rulings are FINAL!

Who chooses the program? The guards, probably. If Rena were in prison, it's the last thing she'd want to watch.

“I have my meeting tomorrow night,” she tells Calvin. “About the gas drilling. I'm a little nervous.” She'd been hesitant to call Professor Trexler, worried he wouldn't remember meeting her at Ronny's store. (He did.) Nervous that nobody would come to the meeting, or that everyone would, a roomful of strangers who knew too much about her, the defining reality of small-town life.

I've never done anything like this,
she told him, as though it weren't obvious.

Don't worry. I have.

They spoke by phone nearly every day, Professor Trexler talking her through each step of the process: reserving the room, printing the posters, alerting the local newspaper.
It's a lot of work,
Rena marveled to Ronny Zimmerman. Having failed for years to engage her in his various causes—the antiwar protests, the hemp rallies—he seemed stunned by her sudden conversion. Still he took full credit for it, as though he'd baptized her himself.

Mack was, if anything, even more astonished.
You want to do
what
?
Night after night she'd listened, more or less patiently, when Rena came home from the hospital ranting like a lunatic. Steph Mulraney's sudden, violent illness; her eventual miscarriage. The bewilderment of her doctors; their frantic attempts—ultimately fruitless—to determine exactly what she'd been exposed to. Rena herself had spent hours on the phone with slippery PR flacks: at Stream Solutions, the drilling company; then at Dark Elephant, which owned it; then at Darco, which owned
it.
Eventually she'd reached an assistant to the scientific director at Bentonics Chemical, the manufacturer of Flow-Z.

Who told her, essentially, to go to hell.

Rena explains this to Calvin at some length, grateful to have something to talk about. She can tell by his face that he couldn't care less. “Wish me luck,” she finishes, lamely.

“Good luck,” he says, staring at the TV screen. “How's Mack?”

“Don't start.”

Minutes tick away. The plaintiff is suing his estranged wife for four hundred dollars, the price of a tattoo she charged to his credit card. The visits pass slowly because Calvin refuses to discuss anything that matters. Still, Rena tries.

“Have you thought about November?” He'll need a job, a place to live. Staying at the farm is no longer an option, after last time:
twelve hundred dollars missing from the safe; the unexplained disappearance of one of Mack's guns.

He tips his head forward and looks up at her with fierce eyebrows. He's done this all his life, since earliest childhood. Mack and Rena have a name for it:
Calvin's stinkeye.

“November,” he repeats.

He'd been a late talker. His first-grade teacher noticed that he rarely spoke in complete sentences.
I can,
he told Rena.
I just don't want to.
The stinkeye spoke for him. There was never any doubt when he was displeased.

“I think he'll be reelected,” says Calvin.

“That's not what I mean.”

“He'll need to make some cabinet appointments.”

“I'm talking about your future,” Rena says.

There is a knock at the door, the guard returned to fetch her son. Shamefully, she is relieved.

Calvin gets to his feet. “Attorney general would be my first choice, but I doubt they'll ask me. I'd settle for secretary of state.”

Rena says, “See you next week.”

“HE ASKED ABOUT YOU.
He always does.”

Mack and Rena are lying in bed: Rena knitting, Mack half watching a fishing show on the Field and Stream channel.

Mack does not respond. She is drifting in and out of sleep. It annoys her to do two things at once.

“Hello?” says Rena. “Anybody in there?”

Mack takes her hand under the covers. “Yep, I'm right here. How's he doing?” she asks dutifully, as she does every Monday. To her relief, Rena has stopped asking her to tag along. Mack's interactions with Calvin go badly. The problem, according to Rena, is Mack's stubbornness.

“He's about the same. I tried to get him to talk about November, but no luck. He needs to make a plan.”

He can't come here. You know that.
Mack doesn't need to say it. They've been through it all before. If Calvin were an addict she might have some sympathy. But he is just a businessman.

Mack's stubbornness isn't the problem. The problem is that Calvin takes after his father. Mack believes in breeding the way she believes in weather, in Rena's goodness. She believes in these things because she sees them every day. A good milker will give birth to good milkers. A bull that's ornery or skittish will pass those traits along.

Freddy Weems was an ornery bull.

Freddy Weems was a piece of shit.

Mack doesn't have moods, interior weather that shifts suddenly, dramatically, for invisible reasons. If she's sad or mad or frustrated, it's in response to external conditions: a sick animal, a leaking roof, a glitch in the milking line. Otherwise she is always the same.

External conditions, such as threats, intimidation, obscene phone calls. Such as late-night visits with no warning, Mack and Rena startled awake by an angry drunk pounding at the door.

Such as withholding child support.

Shooting into their pasture.

Pounding at their door shouting filth no child should hear.

Such as following Rena home from work.

Setting the toolshed on fire.

The suspicious death of Mack's dog.

For several years—for all of Calvin's childhood—Mack kept a .44 pistol in the bedside table, unless Freddy was in jail. Rena, who hated guns, understood that this was necessary. Men like Freddy Weems were what guns were for.

State prison in Ohio and West Virginia—for killing a woman while driving drunk, for stealing a motorcycle, for armed robbery.

Mack kept a pistol in the bedside table, until Freddy was killed by a cop in Morgantown.

Calvin was fourteen then, old enough to be told how his father
had died. How exactly they phrased it, Mack can't recall. What she remembers is the boy's reaction. He turned to Rena and glowered, looking up through his eyebrows: Calvin's stinkeye.
I guess you're happy now.

If anyone else spoke to Rena this way, Mack would clean his clock.

At seventeen Calvin committed his first felony. That summer Mack discovered, in a far corner of her back forty, three dozen healthy marijuana plants hidden behind a copse of trees. Three or four felonies ago.

She can't clean his clock because he is Rena's son.

We could've gone to prison,
she told Rena.
We could've lost the farm.

But we didn't,
Rena said.

She has never apologized for Calvin, who'd produced and distributed drugs at Friend-Lea Acres, land farmed by Mackeys for six generations.

His first felony. At least, the first one they knew about.

Marijuana growing on Pop's farm, a thought that fills Mack with shame.

FOR THE FIRST TIME
in whothefuckknows how long, Darren has a key to the house.

His dad gave it to him with little ceremony, as though it were simply a question of his own convenience:
I can't be here all the time to let you in.
Sparing them both—Darren saw this, and was grateful—the agony of a conversation they should have had years ago but whose relevance died with his mother. A conversation whose time was past.

What Dick didn't say (though Darren heard it anyway):
You belong here. I trust you. You are still my son.

Now he sleeps in his childhood bed, smokes cigarettes on the back porch, showers in the familiar bathroom—avocado-colored
porcelain, unchanged since 1972. The house is in every way the same, and yet, without his mother, feels foreign and cold. Darren blames, in part, the absence of food smells. The kitchen goes completely unused. Dick eats meals at the Commercial, buys his morning coffee at Sheetz. In the freezer he stores batteries, fishing lures, ice packs for his knee. It's not so different from the way Darren lives in Baltimore, his trash full of take-out containers and Starbucks cups. In this way only, he is exactly like his dad.

His dad moves around the house like a shadow, a precursor to the ghost he will, in a few years, become. Dick's younger self—gruff and irascible, barking orders—seems to have disappeared entirely, leaving in its place this limping old man, frightened of the future. To Darren he is barely recognizable, the son having missed some vital transition, the tempering years in between. That he likes the ghost better seems somehow shameful—as though he'd wished this fate on his father, the creeping frailness, the years ticking away.

The sad truth is that he loves his father mainly in Dick's absence. Their interactions are polite, a little uncomfortable. Only later, alone in the house, is Darren overcome by emotion, the artifacts of Dick's old age—the reading glasses left on the kitchen counter, the plastic denture case on the bathroom sink—filling him with a terrible tenderness.

Surprisingly, it's the Commercial that feels like home to him. For years, in Group, he's listened to alcoholics pine for their favorite taverns. More than one has dissolved in tears. Now, at last, he understands it. At a bar addiction is normalized, made to seem a regular part of living: the warm light and familiar faces, friendship or the illusion of it. Addicts are lonely creatures. His own addiction had been a furtive thing, deeply solitary—swooning behind closed doors, secret shame, private bliss. The isolation amplified his illness. Copping heroin on the streets of Baltimore, he was regularly
scared shitless; but later, in the luxurious solitude of a heroin dream, he could imagine himself a kind of desperado, a romantic outlaw. There was no one to contradict this version of events. High, Darren was whoever he wanted to be.

The illusions without which addiction would be impossible. The stories we tell ourselves.

Night after night, he and Gia close the bar together. He enjoys the sameness of these nights, the pleasant regularity of the petty chores, Gia racing circles around him emptying the ice traps, returning mugs and glasses to their shelves, swabbing counters and floors.

Jesus, what's the rush?
he'll sometimes tease her.
Everybody's gone.
I'm
not going to tip you.

I want to get the hell out of here,
she'll say, giving him a shove.
Anyways, what do you care? Less work for you.

Anyways.
Everyone in Bakerton says it, but to Darren the word is pure Gia. He will feel, for a moment, filled up with her.

Serving drinks at the Commercial, he is conscious of enabling. When business is slow he watches the customers—men mostly, some raucously convivial, others staring dumbly at the TV screen. Undoubtedly some are addicts. And yet—compared with shooting heroin—drinking seems increasingly benign to him. He knows on some level that this is distorted thinking, his inner addict talking. That he's been in Bakerton far too long.

Each morning, after Dick has left for the Commercial, Darren hikes across town to the Bakerton Public Library and plugs in his laptop. At home, in Baltimore, it is never unplugged. Nor does it ever sit in his lap. It rests,
en permanence,
on a flimsy IKEA desk, the Berg or Borg or some such, its portability wasted. He has never joined the coffee-drinking masses at his neighborhood Starbucks, who assemble daily in order to ignore each other completely—humans of every age and description deafened by headphones, staring dumbly at their glowing screens. Each morning Darren studies
them as he waits in line for his double espresso. Then he orders his coffee, sweetens generously, and leaves.

The truth is that he doesn't like to move his laptop. In his barren apartment it hums continuously. Evenings, weekends, he spends most hours in front of it. Ambidextrous, he mouses with his left hand and eats dinner with his right.

At his father's house, this isn't possible. There is no wireless signal, no wireless anything. Darren was unprepared for how profoundly this would affect him. With no access to the Internet he feels invisible, intangible, as though he has ceased to exist.

That morning, as usual, the library is empty. Like most buildings in town, it used to be something else. A restaurant, in this case: Keener's Diner, a teenage hangout where his mother had once worked as a waitress. Putting herself through college, young Sally Becker had one day served lunch to a sailor named Dick Devlin, home on break or vacation or whatever the navy calls it when they let you leave.

Darren remembers the story with a pang. His mother was prone to reminiscing in a way Dick isn't. If not for Sally, he'd know nothing at all about his parents.

He boots up his laptop and waits, studying the announcements on the bulletin board, which change with surprising frequency. Used snowblowers for sale, used building materials, used truck parts. All of Bakerton, it seems, is selling itself off for scrap.