The From-Aways (5 page)

No way. I down the rest of my drink.

W
E HEAD OUT
hours later and the night smells like smoke and summer dying. We have whiskey coursing through our arms and arteries, making us strong and stupid. We walk the roads. We hear a humming. Tucked away among trees is the Menamon substation, the energy hub for most of Hancock County. We stare up at the transformers. There are metal towers with cables looping between their posts and coils of metal conducting insane amounts of wattage. The humming is incredible.

From here we can see the construction site Jethro was ranting about. Rosie points a fierce little finger at the foundation of what will certainly be a monstrously big house.

“I hate them,” Rosie says.

“You don’t even know them,” I say.

“No one needs a house like that,” Rosie says. “You should hate them too.”

“Okay,” I say, because with a girl like Rosie it’s impossible to say no. I pick a stone up off the ground. There’s nothing but a foundation to throw at and the site is too far away anyway, but I hurl the stone toward where the house will be. It flies uselessly off into the dark. “One imaginary window, smashed,” I say. “Happy?”

Rosie grins and hands me another stone. I put it in my pocket. “I’ll save it for real windows,” I say. She squeezes my hand, my spine goes electric, and, man, am I in trouble.

“I buried a time capsule down there when I was eight,” Rosie says. “In my backyard. I had every intention of digging it up and then one day there was all this cement.”

“What’s in there?”

She exhales irritably. Like the stuff in there isn’t even the point. “Some photos. A letter I wrote to myself. A tape of me singing my favorite songs. A magic seashell.”

“Magic?”

“Again, eight years old.”

“Magic.” I turn back to the substation.

Rosie wraps her fingers around the chain-link fence that surrounds this electric outpost. “Hmmmm,” she hums, the exact same pitch as the transformer. Maybe Rosie really will become a famous singer someday. Not to be outdone, I hum an octave higher, harmonizing.

“We’re going in,” Rosie says, and starts to climb the fence.

“You’ve got a death wish,” I say. “You’ll be zapped.”

Rosie shakes her head. “It’s never the fence that’s electric,” she says. “It’s everything inside that’ll kill you.” She hops it.

I follow. An obituaries writer, even a retired one of little mettle, has a duty to follow the doomed.

The ground inside rattles with gravel. Rosie lies down and stares up at the steely forest buzzing around her. I lie down too because she’s fucking crazy and I might want to get close to that.

How many watts is a thousand? A million? I spread my arms wide and make a V with my legs. Then I slide them shut. I do it again, and a third time, and I might be cutting up my bare arms and thighs on the gravel but I don’t care.

“Gravel angels,” I tell Rosie.

“You’re wicked crazy,” she says, and begins to flail. “You know that?”

As we flex ourselves open and closed a cloud of dust rises around us. It hangs in the air, tiny particles. We are scuffing ourselves up in this toxic dirt. We are too close together, and as we beat our wings furiously Rosie’s nails scratch my face and my fist wing catches her ribs and we’re drunk and bruised and laughing.

When we’re exhausted and spent we tuck our wings at our sides. There’s only the sound of our alternately rasping breath and the humming. We sit up. The orange light on top of one of the transformers flicks on and light falls around us like a pumpkin, like a halo.

Rosie’s bright hair catches the light and within minutes pale moths have gathered around her head. They parachute their furry bodies in arcs around her, wholly determined torpedoes. Rosie closes her eyes. A few moths settle on her head. I could stare at her like this for a long while yet. In fact, since I got here, all I want to do is stare and stare at this girl’s face, and yes, I really am in trouble now. Bad trouble, I think as I watch this solar system of tiny revolving bodies orbiting Rosie’s head.

5

Leah

T
here are dead bees on the windowsills of the
Menamon Star
office. Their legs stick up in surrender. I have been here five minutes and already I can tell, this is the kind of office where even the vermin have given up.

Charley is in a backroom office. A scrappy redhead raps on her open door to let her know I am here. Charley knows I am here. The redhead walks past me to the copier. On the breeze of her motion I smell last night’s booze. She sits down at a desk that seems more appropriate for an antiques shop than an office.

“You smell like gin,” I tell her.

She looks at me. Her eyes are pinkish around the rims, like a rabbit my class used to have in school. She’s wearing a blue-and-white-striped button-down with the cuffs rolled up and too-big, straight-legged jeans. “What kind?” she says. Her cheekbones are high, a note of distinction in an otherwise ragamuffin exterior.

“Gordon’s, maybe, but I’m only saying that based on looking at you. The smell could be Tanqueray. Could be Beefeater.”

“Who are you?” she says, but then Charley emerges.

Back in her office Charley makes a big show of actually looking through my clippings. I feel nervous, which is laughable, but the real joke is that I want this small-time job as badly as I did my gig at the
Gazette,
and I’m afraid Charley won’t give it to me. She lights a Marlboro, on which she takes long puffs. I can’t believe her slowness. I think of all the competitive editors back in New York who would piss themselves laughing if they could see me right now. But why do we New Yorkers always think we have the best of everything?
Only in New York. Only in New York. Only in New York,
my parents told me. But one day I started wondering, Is that really true? Is all this New York hustle really that important?

The key to not blowing your life apart is not asking too many questions. But once I started, I couldn’t stop—and then there was Henry. Standing there in the bar near my office downtown, the one I went to on bad days, not the celebrating pub two blocks the other way where I might see people from work. I was staring at the back of Henry’s neck and waiting to order something truly potent to make the day slip away. His neck was so deeply tanned I knew he worked outside. He smelled of pine and soap, and when he turned he caught me behind him, leaning in too close.
What, do I smell or something?
he said. We sat in a vinyl booth.

Hours later, I said I hoped I wasn’t keeping him from anything. He probably had somewhere else to be, I said. Everyone in New York has somewhere else to be. Henry said,
Where would I be going?
He rolled his shoulders to crack his neck and relaxed into the booth. He had tussled sandy hair, and a knobbled nose, and even though he was so young, he had white crow’s-feet by his eyes from being sunburned while squinting. I could see that boring tattoo on his arm, and when he smiled he had a snaggletooth. He had
stillness,
Henry. He wasn’t rushing away anywhere.

I sit with Charley now, and I see this too is a family trait. They can sit quietly, these Lynches, for what seems like an eternity.

Charley stubs out her cigarette in a coffee mug. “You’re hired,” she says. “Report to the redheaded felon out front.”

I’m so relieved I almost laugh. It may be small, but I don’t even care, I’m just so happy to be back on the beat.

6

Quinn

I
crane my head out our front window and catch the blue smell of wild grapes getting fat on the vines that choke the trees to death. The fall makes me so goddamn melancholy. Today is my birthday. My ex-girlfriend Sam called at midnight. She was out at some bar,
drunk but thinking of you!
I listened to her message three times.

I go downstairs and sit on the steps of the Stationhouse. Today I’m on assignment with Leah Lynch, my new partner. What a person could have done wrong in this life to wind up both related to and working for Charley Lynch I can’t imagine. I thought I was hallucinating when this tall woman with a broomlike black ponytail walked into the
Star
office and sniffed the booze on me. Damn was she tall. Olivey-skinned with a wide, thin, serious mouth and eyes that showed exactly how disappointing she found the office. I listened in while Charley hired this sister-in-law, smoke drifting from her office, and I thought, Could you be the Woodward to my Bernstein? Are you the one I’ve been waiting for?

I operate best in units of two. Once, it was Sam and me. When Marta got sick, it became Marta and me. Imagine our family portrait: a confused and suspicious balding woman in a blue gown stares ahead as her snarling redheaded daughter crouches nearby, a protective animal. That was us. And then Marta died, leaving me alone in the frame. That wench. We were two parts of the same whole, and when she was gone I felt a lightness, a heavy weight unlashed from me. It should have been relief, not having to take care of her anymore, but instead I felt like I was floating, barely there at all.

Get me straight: I don’t
need
anyone, but old habits die hard. Sometimes, when I feel too nothingy for my own good, I want to pull someone, anyone, into that empty space next to me in the family portrait. Otherwise, I’m just an old snapshot of some random girl.

Rosie is taking someone’s breakfast order on the porch when she spots me sitting on the steps. Beyond the parking lot the train tracks are a rusty orange. The last of the summer weeds are busy pushing up through the gravel between the slats. How they keep from being blown to pieces when the engine goes through is a deeply fucking mysterious matter.

Rosie finishes taking the order and sits on the step above mine. She’s wearing a tight white T-shirt and faded jeans. Her pouch of waitressly things is tied around her waist and makes her look marsupial. She flips through her order tickets and rips one off for me. In the section where it says
Table #
she’s scribbled
Happy Birthday!
In the order section she’s written,
This ticket entitles you to one highly mediocre birthday breakfast at the Menamon Stationhouse
.

“Thanks,” I say.

By the time Leah gets here, I’m eating a plateful of huevos rancheros with blue birthday candles in them. Leah’s ride is what my mom called a woody. It’s the sort of car poor-ass surfers are always driving on cable television. Leah opens the door and scopes out the parking lot like she’s trying to decide whether this is the sort of planet she wants to land on. She squints into the morning sun and jangles her car keys as she approaches.

“Nice ride,” I say. “Want some eggs?” I offer a sloppy forkful of candle wax and red beans.

“I’ll pass,” she says, and squats on her heels so that we can talk. “It’s your birthday?” I shrug and extend the red beans to her again. She waves her hand to dismiss them. “Well, happy birthday.”

Over her jeans, Leah is wearing a cream-colored sweater that definitely can’t go in the washing machine. More than that, I swear her black hair is in a French fucking twist. Marta used to keep her hair that way. She was one of those women who went apeshit for Audrey Hepburn, a lameness of spirit only acceptable in someone as strong as my mother.

Leah eyes my Top-Siders and green hoodie that lets her know I used to play a mean field hockey midfield. On the back it says
WINTERS
19. I can tell she’s questioning her sweater. She says, “I’m not quite sure how this works. I presume you know the ropes?”

“Slipknot, double cross, and superhold noose,” I say. “I know them all.”

Leah considers. “What percentage of the
Star
’s content would you say you write?”

“Sixty,” I say. “I’m a goddamn machine.”

“Sixty percent!” Leah stands up fast. She presses her fingers to her temples. Her hands are enormous. They fan out at the ends of her thin arms. “That’s obscene. Why don’t we divide up the work? You take this story. I’ll find another one.” This makes perfect sense, but what the fuck? We’ve barely met and already she’s decided she’d rather go solo?