One of Us Page 5

  “What happened?”

  “It looks like he died of natural causes, but we won’t know for sure until we get the coroner’s report.”

  “I don’t understand. Where? How?”

  “We found him at the gallows.”

  Her eyes brimming with tears grow comically large.

  “The gallows?” she repeats in a fearful whisper.

  “That’s what I’d like to talk to you about if you feel up to answering a few questions.”

  She gestures inside the house at an enormous green living room with cathedral ceilings, gold carpeting, and a huge coffee table inlaid with green and yellow pieces of the kind of rippled plastic seen in cheap church window reproductions.

  Rafe follows her and takes a seat on the edge of a green-and-gold-striped couch and I’m immediately reminded of a farm machinery salesman waiting for an airport shuttle in the lobby of a Midwest Comfort Inn. Bethany Husk practically disappears inside a barrel-shaped suede chair that looks like a big moldy marshmallow.

  I decide to remain outside and stretch. Cavernous, color-coordinated houses make me nervous; along with traditional claustrophobia, I also suffer from a reverse type where I feel trapped by too much useless space.

  The view from here would be beautiful on a sparkling October afternoon when the trees are a splash of enameled colors, but in January it’s a vista of depressing shadows. Bundles of sooty bedsheet clouds sit heavily on the tops of the distant hills. Down in the valley through a black screen of bare tree branches is the gray stream from which the town took its name, meandering sluggishly among patches of snow like a vein on the underside of a wrist.

  I can almost make out the town from here. There was a time when Lost Creek Coal & Oil owned every part of it: the rows of houses, the brass and marble bank where footsteps echoed like gunshots, the square, squat brown brick post office, the all-important company store, the jail, and eventually a school with a cafeteria that would also serve as a gymnasium and a place for town meetings and the laying out of bodies after a mine disaster. The only things Walker Dawes didn’t own were the Red Rabbit and the two churches. For some reason he decided to let someone else profit from a miner’s need to drink and his wife and mother’s need to pray.

  After the Nellies were executed, the gallows were never used again, but Walker made sure they weren’t torn down. He claimed he left them up as a reminder of what happened to men who broke the law, but the miners knew the real message behind them was that he was the law.

  Unlike his father, Walker Dawes II, or Deuce as he was better known, was a superstitious man. He never liked the fact that the gallows had remained standing, but even after his father passed away and the land was his, he was too frightened to destroy them. He wanted to sell the place but no one wanted to buy it until Warren Husk, a prosperous farmer with a morbid streak, showed up. Warren knew how badly Deuce wanted to get rid of the jail and the gallows, and he used it as leverage to put together a deal where he was able to buy up hundreds of acres of the surrounding land as well at a bargain price.

  I never answered Billy Smalls, but to my knowledge no one’s ever been seriously hurt there, aside from the men who were put to death, which is nothing short of amazing considering the amount of kids who have climbed up the gibbet over the years in response to dares or as part of macabre midnight games.

  As children we were surrounded by irresistible life-threatening hazards: water-filled quarries, railroad tracks, abandoned mine shafts, mountainous bony piles that were the site of legendary dirt bike accidents, but none were as appealing as the gallows. We were too young to have a sense of mortality. We couldn’t comprehend the horror of facing our own deaths or watching a friend jerk like a hooked fish from the end of a hangman’s rope, but we were already well acquainted with the concepts of cruelty, treachery, and the dark art of survival. Whether pretending to be a miner or one of Walker Dawes’ hired thugs, we understood what happened to the Nellies and we loved and feared their story the same way we did the one that belonged to our fathers.

  “Simon’s greed was greater than his fear,” Rafe announces as he joins me again, stuffing a brownie into his mouth.

  He hands me one. I shake my head. He eats that one, too.

  “Everyone knows he was obsessed with the gallows. He’s been afraid of them ever since he was a little kid and thought he saw the ghost of Prosperity McNab.”

  “Seriously?”

  “He saw a ghost outside his bedroom window and the next morning someone had written ‘Fi’ in blood on the bathroom mirror.”

  “In blood?” I repeat.

  “Well, not exactly blood. It turned out to be his mom’s lipstick.”

  “Prosperity’s ghost was running around with a lipstick?”

  He nods and grins with a mouthful of chocolate-coated teeth.

  “It was obviously some stunt someone played on him, but Simon never stopped believing. He’s always been too superstitious to get rid of the gallows. He thought if he tore them down the Nellies would come back and kill him. But apparently Walker Dawes offered him a sum of money he couldn’t pass up.”

  He finishes his brownies and brushes the crumbs from his hands.

  “It’s been big news around here. There are some people who think the same way Simon did. They believe if the gallows fall, the Nellies will rise.”

  He makes the same googly eyes he made at Troy and Billy earlier.

  “That’s ludicrous.”

  “His wife said he’s been going to the gallows a lot lately. That’s the part that doesn’t make sense.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he was scared of them.”

  “Maybe he finally wanted to confront his fears at the source before the gallows were no longer his,” I offer.

  “And one of the times he’s over there, he drops dead. You have a problem with that?”

  “None at all,” I reply.

  “Me neither. But just to be safe you think I should question Prosperity? You think he’s gone back to his grave? Or he could be sitting over at the Union Hall with a beer and no one would even notice him. Just one more living corpse with a Miller Lite and a bad cough.”

  “Well, I’m glad everything makes sense and I’m glad you were able to escape. I was starting to get worried. The widow seemed awfully fond of you.”

  He doesn’t respond. I know from experience he won’t talk about his Lothario past, although I do remember him telling me once that he was amazed he got through high school without getting a girl pregnant. He was drafted right after graduation, then within six months of returning from Vietnam, and spending all of them drunk, stoned, and brawling, he did exactly that.

  On the night he was packing his Firebird getting ready to skip town, his future first father-in-law, Trooper Stan Zilner, stopped by his trailer, sat him down in the kitchen, laid his service revolver on the table between them, and explained to Rafe that he knew a few extreme guys like him, guys who’d been in Nam, guys who teetered on the edge of good and evil. A push in one direction and they’d end up toppling into the dark abyss of criminality, a push in the other direction and they’d find themselves on the solid ground of law enforcement. Stan gave him the choice of becoming a cop, marrying his daughter, and raising his grandchild, or being pulled over by a state trooper who would discover a large amount of illegal narcotics in his possession and might possibly have to shoot him if he resisted arrest.

  Rafe chose the first option. Ironically, out of the three elements comprising the scenario, the one he had the most misgivings about—being a police officer—turned out to be the only one he was good at.

  He gets a call. He walks away from me to take it then returns frowning.

  “I found Tommy for you,” he says.

  “Is he okay?”

  “Oh, yeah, he’s fine. But the manager at Carelli’s Furniture isn’t doing so good.
She wants him out of there.”

  “Why is he in a furniture store?”

  “You’d be amazed where he pops up. Let’s go get him.”

  He bends down, scoops up a handful of snow, and swallows it: a country boy’s method of cleansing his palate. He takes another piece of candy out of his pocket.

  “Why don’t you get a patch?” I wonder.

  “That would be cheating.”

  “There are no rules for breaking an addiction.”

  He makes a slow turn, taking a final inventory, noticing things I’m sure I don’t, reminding me of an old hunting dog grown white around the muzzle. I wouldn’t be surprised if he raised his nose to sniff the air. Instead he bares his teeth and tells me, “There are rules for everything, Danno.”

  five

  RAFE AND I ARRIVE at Carelli’s Furniture on the outskirts of town, a flat tan warehouse with a glassed-in showroom at the front of the building filled with overstuffed recliners, sectional sofas, dining room sets, and a line of contemporary furnishings where Mrs. Husk probably found her church-window coffee table and marshmallow chair.

  I spot Tommy’s truck parked in the handicapped space in front of the doors. He’s in his nineties and uses a cane and could easily get a handicapped license plate, but he refuses. Instead, he’s written a sign he puts on his dashboard that reads: “I’m 96 and if you got the balls to tell me to my face I shouldn’t park here, I’ll move my truck for you. Otherwise, screw off.”

  He’s been doing this since he turned ninety, making a new sign every year in order to adjust his age, and as far as I know no one has given him any trouble.

  A woman in a pumpkin-colored skirt and jacket and brown sensible shoes greets us at the door. She has clipped streaky blond hair she keeps nervously tucking behind her right ear.

  “I’m the new manager,” she greets us.

  Rafe shows her his badge. She studies it longer than necessary.

  “Where’s your uniform?”

  “I’m a detective,” he explains.

  “They have detectives here?”

  “Just the one, ma’am. Yours truly.”

  “What is there to investigate—”

  “Excuse me, but where is he?” I interrupt before Rafe has a chance to answer her in a way he probably shouldn’t.

  She waves toward a couple dozen couches all crammed together in the center of the room, some facing in, some facing out, some facing each other.

  Tommy’s sitting on one with his cane propped nearby, eating from a container of party nuts, watching his wallet-size portable TV, the only advance in technology during the past thirty years that he ever praises, aside from Internet porn, which he’s never seen but thinks is a good idea.

  There’s not a single customer in the store.

  “What seems to be the problem?” Rafe asks.

  “He won’t leave.”

  “Has he caused any type of disturbance?”

  “No. But he won’t leave. He shouldn’t be here.”

  She pushes her hair behind her ear again and blurts out, “Do you know who he is?”

  “Maybe.”

  “He’s Thomas McNab. He was telling me about his grandfather and the Nellie O’Neills cutting people’s tongues out if they squealed on them. The Nellies were bloodthirsty killers, and he’s related to them.”

  Rafe arches his eyebrows.

  “Well, he’s not looking particularly bloodthirsty today,” he says.

  “You think it’s funny?”

  “Ma’am, what exactly is the problem?”

  “He can’t be here,” she states flatly.

  We go inside and before we can even begin to make our way through the maze of sofas to get to Tommy, he recognizes Rafe.

  “Called out the storm troopers on me, did you?” he shouts at the manager, who pretends to busy herself fluffing pillows.

  He narrows his eyes suspiciously in our direction, then his face splits into a grin when he recognizes me.

  “So you came after all. I told you not to. Are you so famous now you get a police escort?”

  I’m flooded with relief. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but he looks exactly the same as he did the last time I saw him and the time before that. I don’t see any obvious signs of a prolonged illness. He has on the same red-and-black-checked Woolrich coat he’s worn for as long as I can remember, and one of his Lost Creek Coal & Oil ball caps covers his unruly head of snow-white hair. The ladies of NONS are always telling him he should take off his hat so they can see his pretty hair. He growls and grimaces over the compliment, but I know he secretly loves it.

  I lean down and give him a quick embrace. I don’t expect him to stand up. He spent forty years crouching in a coal mine; the resulting arthritis in his knees makes rising from a sitting position no easy feat for him.

  “And Rafferty Malloy. My favorite Malloy. The only Malloy with a good singing voice and an equally good throwing arm.”

  Rafe extends his hand for a shake.

  “I haven’t used either in a long time. How are you, Tommy?”

  “Couldn’t be better.”

  “Heard you were pretty sick there for a while.”

  “It was nothing. You think pneumonia can kill me? My lungs are Teflon coated.”

  “You do look good,” I tell him.

  “And you look ridiculous. Don’t tell me you’ve been out running already.”

  He and Rafe exchange looks that say I’m clearly crazy. I’m used to this response here. In their opinion, the only time a man should run is toward a goalpost or away from a skunk.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t at the house to greet you,” he goes on. “I left you some lunch, though.”

  “Potato chips and whiskey?”

  “I didn’t have any tofu.”

  He lets his gaze return to the TV screen in his lap where he’s watching the Home Shopping Network, one of his favorite pastimes. He regards it purely as a form of entertainment. To my knowledge, he’s never bought a single item from them.

  “Have you ever seen anything so disgustin’? Little doggy booties for sale? Gourmet doggy cookies? These animals live better than I ever did. Look at that. Steps. Little steps to put next to your bed so your old lame dog can get up there with you when he can’t jump anymore.

  “Get yourself a man,” he leans forward and shouts at the woman in the advertisement who’s lying in her bed urging a white feather duster of a dog up a set of miniature red-carpeted stairs.

  “Well, look at her,” he sneers. “What man would have her?”

  “She probably has a man and he probably sleeps with the dog, too,” Rafe tells him. “Ménage à dog.”

  Rafe’s comment sends Tommy into a gale of laughter that ends in a coughing fit. He reaches for the empty coffee can he takes with him everywhere and spits out some of the black, tarry phlegm that fills his lungs. That it hasn’t drowned him yet is a miracle. All of the miners he worked with are long dead, many for decades.

  I catch a glimpse of the manager watching him with an expression close to horror frozen on her face.

  “So what can I do for you boys?”

  “We hear you’ve been telling some stories,” Rafe says.

  Tommy breaks into another paroxysm of laughter ending in another bout of hacking coughs and spitting.

  “Lord, I told her some good ones. I told her after they killed the first foreman they cut out his heart, roasted it over an open fire, and served it up with some soda bread and a nice tart apple butter.”

  He breaks off into more laughter.

  “And Fiona had a necklace made out of his fingertips—”

  “You have to leave, Tommy,” Rafe cuts him off.

  “And where should I go? I can’t stay in the house all day. Drives me crazy. I have to go somewhere.”

  It’
s true. Tommy’s never been one to sit still, especially alone, but he’s outlived all his friends. He’s outlived his entire generation.

  “You can’t stay here.”

  “Fine,” he says dejectedly.

  “Why don’t you go to the Union? Shoot some pool,” Rafe suggests.

  “Bunch of kids. Not a man there over eighty.”

  He ponders his situation.

  “I guess I could go to the Bi-Lo. I need a few groceries. I tried to go last night but Owen was there and I had to leave. I can tell you everything he had in his basket. It’s burned into my brain: a pack of hamburger patties, a bottle of Mountain Dew, two cans of corned beef hash, five boxes of single-serving mac and cheese, and a thirty-six double-roll pack of toilet paper he was lugging around under his arm. A man who lives alone and shits a lot.”

  Tommy’s hands begin to tremble with rage.

  “I told Arly he was a sonofabitch. I told her. She didn’t have to get married, you know. I would’ve never thrown her out.”

  Rafe glances at me, knowing that I’m the reason she did get married whether she felt she had to or not. Having Owen Doyle’s child and not marrying him would have probably been an equally perilous situation. She was doomed the moment the sperm met the egg.

  A wave of sadness washes over Tommy and he flops back into the couch, his milky blue eyes becoming clear and then sparkling with tears.

  For a moment, he does look old. He’s become alarmingly thin, but he’s not frail. If anything he looks tougher to me than he ever has, as if his body decided to consume any part of him that was soft and weak and leave only bone and gristle.

  “I’m sorry, Danny,” he says quietly.

  He reaches out his gnarled hand to me covered in the familiar miner’s blue scars like pieces of pencil lead trapped beneath the papery, age-spotted skin.

  I take it and help him stand while Rafe puts the lid on his can of nuts and turns off his TV.

  “No hard feelings?” the manager asks Tommy with a nervous tic at the corner of her mouth as we pass through the door.

  “Of course not, young lady,” he replies, flashing his most charming smile. “You have a lovely day now.