Shadow of Ashland (Ashland, 1) (15 page)

They were silent.

"C'mon. What are they?"

Nobody answered.

"Pretty quiet bunch. You know what they are. Same's I do." He placed his hands on his hips. "Leo's either in or he's out." He looked at me. "Aren't you, Leo? If you're out, could be dangerous to us all."

I scanned their faces. They looked scared. And because they were scared, they might be dangerous. But that was not a real factor in my decision. Their fear was a deeply rooted human fear, different from the fear of someone caught in an act of wrongdoing. I felt that what they feared was not me.

"I'd like to be in. I can help."

Again, nobody spoke. I glanced at Jack. There was the faint trace of smile left on his face.

Stanley paused. Then he said: "Believin' a man is a tricky business. Man says one thing, does another. Happens all the time. 'Specially when he's scared."

I looked at Jack, Stanley, Jimmy. "I'm not scared."

"Maybe you should be," George said. His fingers gripped his shovel tightly.

"Maybe." I had no idea what I was doing here, how I had even gotten here.

I looked again at Jack, felt his excitement, felt more alive that I had in years. Below the ground in Ashland, I had discovered six men digging for a future, with hope and craziness and desperation.

And I was in awe of them all.

"I'll vouch for him."

They all turned to stare at Jack.

"He's just a guy. He knows my sister, back home."

The others listened to him.

"He's okay," he said. And then the smile came back in full bloom. "I can just tell. Somehow."

"He could be a cop, a Fed, Pinkerton," George said.

Jack smiled. "Nah," he said. Then even he looked a bit perplexed. "Any guy who could find me way he did, with nothin' but scraps of letters to recall and old photographs way back in his head, it's kinda like he's meant to be here, with us."

Stanley looked at Jack. "Hope you're right," he said at last.

Jack nodded. "I am," he said.

"You know what's goin' on?" Stanley asked.

I nodded.

They said nothing, waiting for me to tell them. Emmett reached for a water bottle, took a long swig from it, then passed it to Henry.

"Jobs dried up and blew away," I said.

They listened.

"Two million men roaming the country looking for jobs, handouts. Maybe three million. Maybe more."

Henry passed the water bottle to George.

"More'n twenty million unemployed."

Jimmy nodded.

"And out there, right in the middle of it all, sits that big bank, fat with money."

They stared at me.

"And here you are, fellows who know a thing or two about diggin' tunnels, about goin' into the earth for what's there."

The bottle passed to Jack. He had it to his lips when I said, "I know about Toledo."

He stopped, lowered the bottle.

The men in the dank underworld studied him. Jack looked both bewildered and sheepish.

I shrugged. "We all learn. It's okay."

Jack didn't look at me.

"Who's right, who's wrong ... What to do ... Sometimes it isn't so clear ..." I thought of my own life, of things that I didn't want to discuss, decisions I had made, things that embarrassed me when I remembered them.

Jack looked up, his face puzzled.

I stared hard at Stanley Matusik. "Who'll be hurt? Anybody in town? Neighbors?"

"No," he said. "We ain't gonna drill safety deposit boxes. Nothin' personal like that. Just cash. All insured. Nobody'll be hurt."

I nodded. It was madness. All of it. The idea. The tunnel. The Scott Hotel. My presence here.

All of it.

"I'm in," I said.

Stanley smiled.

Jack looked at me in wonder.

George was sitting on an overturned orange crate in the middle of the mud. "I once walked twenty-five miles looking for a job. Made it all the way to Portsmouth. Stopped at every store, every house, knocked and asked. Mostly, nobody'd talk to me." He shook his head. "Had to hitch home. Lost twelve pounds. Gettin' too old."

"Back in thirty-two," said Henry, "I was with a crowd of folks in Charleston. Men and women. We raided a grocery store near City Hall. We was all arrested. Twenty-six of us."

"My little boy died," said Emmett. "Scarlet fever." His lips moved, but nothing else came out. He fell silent.

"Somethin's wrong," said George, frowning. "Something's bad wrong."
 

"Money'll come in Friday, the twelfth. Bank'll be full all weekend. Leaves on the Monday. It's the same every month. We seen it, like clockwork," Stanley said.
 

"I'm not following."

"Comes in by train," he explained patiently, "from Huntington, Charleston, Bluefield, Roanoke. Stays the weekend. Goes on down to Lexington, Louisville. Ends up in Cincinnati, in a big goddamn bank. Bigger'n this one." "How much?"

Stanley shrugged. "Depends. We got folks tell us some months it gets as high as four hundred thousand. Others, bad months, two-fifty, maybe three."
 

"Whose money is it?"
 

Jack smiled. He looked at Stanley.
 

"Barbara's," Stanley said.

I know my lips parted because I found myself closing them quickly.

"Barbara Hutton. Woolworth heiress."
 

I pictured Jeanne, then Teresa, behind the counter.
 

"Poor little rich girl," he said.

"She's got more stores than you or I got hairs on our head," said Stanley. "There's a Woolworth's in every town in America. Some got two, three of 'em. Ashland's got five."

"More'n a thousand throughout the country." Jimmy wiped his hand across his brow as he spoke, streaking the dirt. "Even up there in Canada, I hear," he said, looking at me closely.

I remembered the one at Yonge and Eglinton. I remembered the one at Queen and Yonge. Carlton and Yonge. The Danforth.

"Newspapers say she inherited forty-five million dollars," George said.

"I heard sixty-five million," said Emmett.

I looked at Jack. "She won't miss it," he said. "Nobody's hurt." Then he added, meeting my eyes: "Ain't like Toledo."

"Is this it?" I asked. "How many are in on this?"

"There are others," said Stanley. "They give us information, tools, lumber." He was silent for a moment. "You don't need to know, Leo."

I looked into the tunnel. It went in sixty, eighty, a hundred feet. I couldn't tell. "How close are you?"

"We'll be there by the fourteenth," said Stanley. He stepped in front of me. "We could use another strong back, just to be sure."

"This is crazy," I said. "You'll never do it. It's too much digging. Too far."

"My daddy was part of a crew cut a tunnel ten miles long one way, then twenty-three miles t'other," said Stanley. "Had to get 'round a ridge. He traveled 'bout five miles a day on his knees."

I studied the firm set of their faces again.

Crazy, I thought, completely exhilarated.

Then my head was dizzy with other faces: my mother, my father, my grandfather, Nanny, Jack Radey, my brothers and sisters. Jeanne and Adam.

Aidan.

TEN

Wednesday, October 10, 1934

The next morning, Stanley, Jack and I sipped coffee on the veranda of the Scott Hotel. It was only eight o'clock, but the sun was already warming.

"You know much about Barbara?" Stanley asked.

"Some. Not much," I said.

"She got the inheritance last November. 'Bout a year ago."

"You read about her comin'-out party?" asked Jack.

"Don't remember," I said.

"When she was eighteen." He thought for a moment. "Would be nineteen thirty. Was in all the papers and magazines."

I shrugged, smiled.

"Was at the Ritz-Carlton in New York. A thousand guests. Maurice Chevalier, Rudy Vallee, three other orchestras."

"For her, there weren't no Prohibition or Depression," said Stanley. "Was thousands of bottles of champagne, the papers said."

I began to realize the degree of people's obsession with her as I listened.

"Had flowers and trees flown in special from both coasts."

"Eucalyptus trees, from California," said Jack.

I had read once how farmers there during the Depression planted mile-long windbreaks of eucalyptus to keep the plowed topsoil from blowing away.

"One night only," said Stanley, emphasizing the point with his index finger. "Party for a little girl. Cost fifty thousand dollars."

"Two hundred fifty million dollars in sales in nineteen thirty-two for the company," Jack said. "She got married last year. Wore jewelry worth one million dollars. They say her lace lingerie for her weddin' night was made by a dozen nuns. Cost twenty thousand dollars."

"Speedboats, Argentinean polo ponies, the White Russian choir, European honeymoon," added Stanley. He paused. "All we wanted was union wages."

"Nobody'll be hurt," said Jack, his blue eyes sparkling, a missionary zeal spreading across his face. And he smiled that smile. "Drop in the bucket," he said.

"Only problem we might run into is rain," said Stanley.

I looked at him, listened.

"Rain and tunnels, they don't mix. Get a lot of it, could weaken the ground. Too much of it, could flood." He sipped his coffee, thought for a minute. "Been lots of flooding in this town. People in Ashland still talk about the big one of nineteen thirteen." He nodded toward the north. "River rose up. Happened in eighteen eighty-four, too, they say. Whole town went underwater two or three feet."

We all looked into the east, looked at the sky.

Later that evening, I dug with them, in the mud beneath the streets of Ashland. The shovel in my hands was real, but the sensation of being beneath the earth, buried treasure and Rosetta Stone lying in wait somewhere ahead of us, was not.

"My little girl, Jenny, she got typhoid last year," said Henry. "All her hair fell out. She's just turned eight years old this summer. Went through the school year bald-headed." He wheezed a load of dirt to one side. "Couldn't afford no wig for her. Leastways, no wig worth wearin'. Place in Louisville wanted fifty dollars for one made of human hair—blond, like her own." He paused, straightened, thinking. "Can't remember the last time I had fifty dollars all at one time." He placed his hand on the small of his back, working the muscles there with his fingers. He continued to think. "Don't think I ever had fifty dollars all at one time."

I straightened beside him.

"She got used to it," he said. "We all did."

There in the tunnel, the sound of men working about me, another filament of memory dangled down from my childhood. There had been a sidewalk construction pit a block or so from where I grew up—a hole at the southwest corner of Duplex and Eglinton. I was eight... perhaps ten years old ... I watched them work, saw how the tunnel some twenty or thirty feet down went out under the street.

I have no idea what it was all for.

I went back after dinner, in the early evening, when everyone had gone home. Red flare lanterns had been placed around its perimeter, and it had been covered over with long construction planks. I played about it for quite a while, peering down between the planks, trying to see the mysteries below. At some point I realized that there was a ladder below the planks, and assuring myself that no one was about, I pulled one of the boards aside, boldly lifted one of the red lanterns, and descended into the pit.

To this day, I have no idea what made me do such a rash thing.

Alone, I explored far out under Eglinton Avenue. No one knew I was there. Had there been an accident or cave-in, it would have been days perhaps before anyone discovered me.

It seems like madness to me now.

I played down there for about an hour. When I got home, my mother was frantic—a combination of maternal anger and fear.

Where were you? I was asked.

Playing, I answered.

Where?

Around the block on Duplex Avenue, I answered.

I was not allowed to cross the street.

No, you weren't... I've been around the block twice looking for you! Where were you? Where did you get all the mud on your shoes?

I couldn't answer.

I never told.

I knew, even then, that what I had done was foolish. I knew I would be in trouble. And I had not the guile to construct a more intricate story.