Heat and Light (5 page)

They work in the kitchen or laundry, lift weights, watch televi
sion. They go to AA meetings and earn GEDs. Do people on the outside do any more with their freedom? No; they do less. Devlin is thinking of Booby Marstellar and Nick Blick, the great friends of his childhood: one on permanent disability for phantom back pain, the other forty years old and living with his parents, still playing guitar in a band. Devlin's own brother spent years shooting heroin in the slums of Baltimore, the exact number of years unknown by anyone. All three, in Devlin's opinion, would be better off in jail.

Ten years ago he was in a similar situation, an unincarcerated prisoner—driving, at minimum wage, a truck for Miners Medical, delivering oxygen tanks to old geezers slowly suffocating from black lung. The days punctuated by a sound he couldn't forget, the old miners' wheezing and gasping. Like the doomed drip of a leaky faucet, it was a persistent reminder of his own life passing. His youth draining away a drop at a time, a deliberate, inexorable waste.

When the prison opened, half of Bakerton had answered the ad in the paper, five hundred applicants for the sixty full-time slots. A CO made union scale, the best-paying job for miles. Of the sixty men hired, fifty-six were veterans: men already inured to long hours, arbitrary rules and regulations, the palpable, ever-present threat. Not the smartest guys, maybe, but did it matter? Nobody was solving equations at Deer Run.

At 3:55 Schrey comes to relieve him. He is a beefy guy with a shaved head and a reddish goatee that resembles, from a distance, a scabbed-over brush burn, as though he's fallen on his face.

“All quiet, dude?” Schrey's fondness for the word is, like the goatee, a strike against him.

“Yep. Nothing to worry about.” Devlin doesn't mention Hops's sheet trick or Wanda's pills. Why would he?

Don't make me see any (drugging, fistfights, contraband lipstick). Any (dick-sucking, stabbings, cooking of snack foods). Do what you have to do, assholes. Just don't make me see it.

It isn't a forever thing. You have an exit strategy, a plan for the future. This is what you tell yourself.

Devlin's solution didn't fall from the sky, not exactly. It will, very soon, rise up from the ground.

THAT NIGHT, LIKE MOST NIGHTS,
he helps his dad, tending bar at the Commercial Hotel. Friday night, the start of the holiday weekend: every stool taken, men standing three-deep around the bar. Rich keeps his back to the drillers but can't help hearing them, the drawling blowhards shouting over the music. This particular crew, he's seen before—one greasy ponytail, one fat Mexican, a sawed-off muscleman and a pockmarked skinhead, his neck and arms covered with tattoos.

The ponytail is red-faced, half in the bag. “So we're laying there without a stitch on—”

“Do I want to hear this?” the Mexican says.

The ponytail raises a finger, professorial: “—without a stitch on, and she says, ‘You can't stay. I got a dog.'”

“Besides you,” says the muscleman.

“Besides me,” the ponytail says.

A year ago they'd have attracted attention, their accents and soaring bar tabs, their brand-new pickup trucks racing around at all hours, more DUIs than the town cop could process. Recently the state police have stepped in, setting up a sobriety checkpoint on Colonel Drake Highway, a road busy with tank trucks.

The ponytail says, “I got a big dog and he don't like men.”

Rich reaches under the counter and turns up the music, Gregg Allman singing:
Now she's with one of my good-time buddies
.
They're drinkin' in some cross-town bar.

His dad comes out of the stockroom with an unfamiliar bottle. “Pour those guys a couple shots, will you?”

Rich studies the label. “Since when do you stock
cognac
?”

In the kitchen a telephone rings.

“I'll stock antifreeze if someone will drink it.” Dick limps off to the kitchen favoring his left leg, the bum knee a souvenir of his years underground. He's been on his feet since 10:00
A.M.
In the past year the lunch crowd has doubled, engineers and company men with expense accounts.

“A big motherfucker. A Doberman,” the ponytail says.

A screaming wind of guitar, the song building to a climax:
Sometimes I feel like I've been tied to the whipping post.
Teenage Gregg groaning like a fifty-year-old bluesman, drunk and heartsick, beat down by life. A kid himself when he discovered the song, Rich hadn't fully appreciated the vocals. The other Allman, Duane, had been his hero, his and Booby's and Nick's, the three friends holed up with their guitars in the Marstellars' garage. They called their band Sportster, after Duane Allman's motorcycle: three guitars, no bass, no drums. They all wanted to be Duane.

“Now, normally that'd be a good sign.” The ponytail shouts over the music. “It means she's conversant with male behavior.”

“It means she'll pick up big piles of shit,” the muscleman says.

Three Duanes: that's what they should have called themselves. They practiced for a year or two, though only Nick had shown actual talent. For all the good it had done him, or ever would.

Sometimes I feel like I've been tied to the whipping post.

Rich pulls an Iron City and sends it down the bar to his neighbor Peachy Rouse—hunched and bleary, spitting tobacco into a styrofoam coffee cup. “Hey, Peach. How you been?”

“Not so hot, Richard. We had some excitement out to my place.” Peachy spits again, a quiet, practiced hocking. “Some kid broke into the barn and stole my fertilizer. Some goddamn drug addict.”

“Jesus,” Rich says.

“I don't care about the anhydrous. That costs me a buck a gallon. But now I got a busted valve and a couple sliced hoses. I have to replace the whole goddamn tank.”

Rich nods silently—glad, for a moment, that his grandfather
isn't here to witness such a thing, Pap who lived on his farm for fifty years without a lock on the front door. “Did they get the guy?”

“Not this time.” Peachy lowers his voice. “There was another one back in April. Tapped my wagon tank. I don't advertise it, because it was my own goddamn fault. I never should've left it out overnight.”

Dick returns from the kitchen with a tray of Buffalo wings. “That was Shelby on the phone. I said you'd call her back.”

“Jesus, now what?” Rich had left his cell phone in the truck, hoping for a few hours' peace. “I told her not to call here.”

“Why don't you shove off early? Gia's around here somewhere. She can help me close.”

Gia is always around somewhere, a world-class waitress when she remembers to show up for work. Like other local girls popular with the drill crews, she seems to live her whole life in or near a bar.

“It's her night off,” says Rich.

“She won't mind.” Dick makes a quick pass down the bar, collecting the fives and singles and stuffing them into Rich's shirt pocket. “You earned it, buddy. Now get out of here before I change my mind.”

Rich grabs his keys and slips out the back door. All along Baker Street, every parking space is taken, pickup trucks with out-of-state plates and the occasional bumper sticker:
DON'T MESS WITH TEXAS. DERRICKHANDS KNOW HOW TO TREAT A HOLE.
A half dozen have crowded into the small lot behind the Commercial, despite the sign Rich hung there:
EMPLOYEE PARKING ONLY.
(
What employees?
Dick protested.
Half the time it's just my car out there. Richard, don't be a prick.
)

Rich heads for his truck, parked at the far end of the lot. Directly opposite, ten feet away, sits a red Mazda—locked in a stare-down, grille-to-grille, with Rich's truck. Even with its windows closed, he can hear its radio blasting hip-hop. The tattooed skinhead sprawls behind the wheel, leaning back against the headrest—eyes closed, sleeping off his drink.

Rich gets into his truck and flicks on the lights. A second later,
a head pops up from beneath the Mazda's dashboard. Gia Bernardi squints into the headlights, her hair in disarray, her blouse undone.

Rich squeals out of the parking lot into the street.

He takes the long way home, avoiding the drunks on Drake Highway. The extra driving doesn't bother him—it's a relief, actually, after sixteen hours on his feet. Forty-two, he thinks. This is what forty-two feels like. If he's this beat at forty-two, how must his father feel? Dick at the stage in life where, if he were a car, you'd junk him before the transmission went.

In five minutes the lights of the town are no longer visible. Rich drives and thinks of Gia Bernardi, servicing strange men in the parking lot of the Commercial. His dad's favorite waitress, beloved like a daughter. If Dick ever found out, it would break his heart.

Forty-two feels like the midpoint of something. His dad will be seventy-six next month. Duane Allman was dead at twenty-four, his Sportster creamed by a flatbed truck.

Number Twelve Road is high and winding, unlit, the rusted tipple looming in the distance like a dinosaur's skeleton, all that remains of the old Baker Twelve. Beyond it lies a valley of dense forest still known as Swedetown, though the mining camp is long gone and no Swede has lived there in a hundred years. The valley belongs, now, to the Prines and Thibodeaux, clans connected by marriage but eternally feuding, each sequestered in its own ramshackle compound of junk cars and sagging sheds and stationary trailer homes, the whole mess wrapped in razor wire and guarded by rottweilers, as though anybody is fighting to get in. The families are known in town, easily recognized: the long Thibodeaux face replicated through the generations with uncanny accuracy; the pale and white-blond Prines. For a few years, in elementary school, Rich knew kids from both tribes, a marauding band of cousins who roamed whooping and barefoot through the forest until they grew into their parents, impulsive, semiliterate, precociously sexual, and heavily armed.

He takes the curves quickly. In his peripheral vision, a burst of light: the Prines or Thibodeaux are setting off fireworks. The forest is loud with canine excitement.

Another burst of light.

Finally the road curves eastward, through cleared farmland. He's maybe fifty yards past Peachy Rouse's when he sees a county sheriff's car parked at the side of the road, a uniformed deputy at the wheel. In the passenger seat is Chief Carnicella, the town cop, miles outside his jurisdiction. Remembering the stolen fertilizer, Rich gives him a wave.

He pulls into his driveway, gravel crunching, bouncing over potholes he's been meaning to fill. A light is on in the kitchen. Inside he finds Shelby at the kitchen table, staring at her laptop. She wears ancient gray sweatpants and an old flannel shirt.

“Olivia was sick after supper,” she tells him. “She threw up twice. I'm so tired I don't know what to do.”

He leans in for a kiss and gets her forehead. “Again?”

“She has a nervous stomach.”

“What does she have to be nervous about?” He opens the fridge, locates and unwraps a leftover chicken leg.

“Let me get you a plate.”

“Nah, that's okay.” He eats standing over the sink.

“The bank called. I took a message. It's here somewhere.” Shelby riffles through the clutter on the table—junk mail, clipped coupons—and hands him a yellow Post-it note.

Rich takes it without looking and tucks it into his pocket.

“You're exhausted,” says Shelby. “You can't keep doing this.”

“Dad needs the help.” His father is healthy, mainly, though he spends more and more time running to doctors—the knee, a lingering cold, recurring appointments for what his doctor calls
blood work
(what exactly they're hoping to find in Dick's blood, Rich isn't sure). The Commercial is too much for a man his age, and yet he'll never let go of it. Dick Devlin is that rare thing in Bakerton, a success
story: a respected businessman, president of the Borough Council. His old union buddies scrape by on Black Lung and hold court in the Legion, drinking to kill the day.

“He needs to hire someone,” says Shelby.

“He shouldn't have to. It's a family business. Darren could do it.”

This is not a new conversation. Unlike his sisters, who disappeared long ago into marriages and children, Rich's kid brother—eternally single, earning chicken feed as a drug counselor in Baltimore—has nothing better to do. He'd make more money and live cheaper and better, helping Dick run the bar. It's the least he can do, in Rich's view, Darren who caused their parents more grief than the other three kids combined.

“He'd never move back here,” says Shelby.

“Why the hell not?”

“No bones in the disposal, sweetie. Remember last time.”

He throws the drumstick in the trash.

“You're home early,” says Shelby. “That's good, anyway.”

He takes the last beer from the fridge. “Yeah, well. Gia's helping Dad close. Supposedly. It's her night off.” Just saying her name has an immediate effect on him. He can nearly feel the weight of her head in his lap, though he's never, in actual fact, experienced such a thing, a warm mouth in a parked car. Shelby isn't adventurous that way, or any other way he can think of.

“So why is she hanging around there?” Shelby turns her attention back to the screen. “She told me she quit drinking.”

“I didn't actually see her drinking. None of my business what she puts in her mouth.”

Shelby looks puzzled.

“She was talking to those drillers. Just, you know, being social.”

His wife frowns, as though it's an alien concept. As though they hadn't—before they were married, a lifetime ago—closed a few bars together: Rich and Shelby, Gia and whatever dirtbag she happened to be dating at the time. Back when Shelby and Gia were too
young to order their own drinks, Rich—fresh out of the navy, newly divorced—had paid for them both, liking how it looked. They had seemed, at first, like two versions of the same thing, one brunette, the other blond. At a certain point he had to choose between them. Shelby had seemed the safer choice, a quiet, pretty girl who could be trusted.