Sorrow Road (39 page)

The mission reminded Carla just a little bit of her quest for a can of Diet Dr Pepper on the snow-laden day she had driven back to Acker's Gap: It sounded silly on the face of it. Nobody else in the world could possibly understand. But
she
understood. She got it. She had to do this. She had to know who he really was. And then she could let it be. She didn't want anything from him—just an explanation.

She would not go to the reception desk this time. She had learned her lesson. She would go to the maintenance building. If Travis—or whoever he was—was not there now, he would be there shortly. All she needed was a few minutes with him. Just long enough to get an answer. She would assure him that she had no intention of ratting him out—she would never do that—but he had helped her, and if he was in some kind of trouble himself and needed help, she could return the favor.

She had a new text. It was from her mother. Carla read it quickly:
Working 2 nite. Houseguest in spare room FYI.
She didn't reply to it. She had more important things on her mind right now.

The door to the building was unlocked. It was a large, square, aluminum structure and its insides had the feel of an airplane hangar: no windows, pristine concrete floor. It was filled with items carefully segregated into specific areas: spare bed frames, extra dressers, and rocking chairs; electrical cables wound tightly on wooden spools; shovels, ladders, buckets, and hoses; a long tool bench with an array of serious-looking tools, from jigsaws to miter boxes; a riding lawn mower and two snowblowers.

Carla did not see him at first. And then she did: He was over by the tool bench, his back to her, working on something. He had not heard the door open because he was making noise himself, pounding nails into the end of a board.

Without even seeing his face, and even though he was dressed in ubiquitous light gray coveralls, she knew it was him.

Before she could speak, he finished with what he was doing, and he turned. He took off his goggles. She would never forget the look on his face—surprise, mingled with a happiness he could not hide, and then the dissolving of that happiness into annoyance.

“Hey,” Carla said.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he said. His voice wasn't nearly as harsh as the words were.

“Needed to talk. You're not Travis Womack.” She did not say it accusingly. She said it with a sort of bemused wonderment. “So who
are
you?”

“You need to get out of here,” he said. “Now.”

“Just tell me who you really are. And why you lied about it. Are you in some kind of trouble? Because if you are, I can help. My mom's the Raythune County prosecutor. We can go talk to her, and if there's a way to get you out of—”

“Listen to me,” he said. He walked several steps toward her. The building, she realized, was not heated. He must be freezing in only the coveralls.

When he got close enough to reach out and take her arm, he did. He did it gently, and then let it go again. “Carla, I really need you to go. I don't want anything to happen to you.”

“Just tell me what's going on and I will,” she said. “I'll turn right around and leave. I know it's none of my business. But the other night—you saved my life, okay? That's what it felt like. I don't mean because of that asshole who wouldn't leave me alone. I mean because of our talk. The things you said—and the things you
didn't
say, too, like: ‘Hey, Carla, grow up.'” She smiled. “And so I want to repay you—if I can, I mean. If there's anything at all I can do.” She took a deep breath. She had been talking very fast, making her case. “So just tell me why you're using somebody else's name. And after that, if you still want me to go away, I will. I promise. And I'll never tell anybody about this.”

There was such compassion in his eyes, and such bottomless sadness. She wished he would touch her again, take her arm.

He had not answered, and so she spoke again. “You're a good man. I know that.”

That seemed to snap him back to the here and now. “Really.” His voice was sarcastic and sharp. “Really—that's what you know. You know that for sure.”

“I do.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, what do you think I'm about to do? This ‘good man' you think you know? Listen, Carla. I stole a guy's name from a headstone I saw in a cemetery. Everything I've done was for this. To be here, right now. I've waited for the perfect moment and it's time. If the storm gets as bad as they say it will, this place'll be cut off for at least a day or two. Nobody going in or out. So this is it.”

“I don't—”

“Now that I've told you, Carla, I can't let you go. I don't want to hurt you—but you have to stay out of the way. I have to do this.”

“Travis.” She had forgotten all about the fact that the name was a fake. She wanted desperately to reach him. “Travis, please, I don't understand.”

“Of
course
you don't understand.” His voice shook a little. “You weren't raised by a monster. A monster who brought strangers home to have sex with you and your sister—while he sat back and counted the money. A monster who locked you in the closet for days—lying in your own pee and shit after you couldn't hold it anymore. And then when he opened that door and he smelled what you'd done, he dragged you out by your hair and he held you down on the floor and he lit a cigarette and put it out on your arm. And then he lit another cigarette and did the same thing. And another and another. And then he switched to the other arm. Now he's here—and he doesn't
remember
it. He has Alzheimer's. So what can I do? He doesn't remember, so it's like it never happened.

“And that, Carla,” he said, bitterness giving way to anguish, “is the worst part of all. He's forgotten all about it. I can't even get in his face and tell him what he is—a
monster
. A fucking
monster
. Janie has been trying that for months now. Trying to get him to say what he did. So that our lives are
real
. So that our suffering
matters
.” He shuddered. “She doesn't know that I work here. She hasn't seen me in years. I keep a lookout for her car, and when I see it, I disappear. Last week, when I spotted her car, I had to pretend to get sick and slip out the back. And a few days before that, I saw a strange car in the lot and I thought it might be hers. It wasn't—it was your mother's.” He shook his head. “The staff tells me what Janie does in there with him, yelling at him, over and over again. It's her way. It's just not my way. And this…” He lifted the board, the one he had just embellished with nails. “I don't want Janie to know about this. I don't want her involved. I'll take the consequences. She's suffered enough.”

He rolled up his sleeve. His arm looked like uncooked meat riven with fissures and divots. The scars from burns and infections and neglect raged from his wrist to his shoulder.

“My name is Nelson Ferris,” he said, “and I'm going to kill that bastard.”

Three Boys

2014

Alvie had brought the checkerboard again. The stiff cardboard was folded in half, and so after pulling it out of the paper shopping bag he opened it. He set it in the middle of the table. He did this with a bit of a flourish, the unfolding and the placement. Then he reached into the bag again and pulled out the little round pieces, one by one. Each time he thrust his arm down into the bottom of the bag to retrieve a piece, the paper bag rattled.

At each rattle, Harm twitched and blinked. He hated the sound.

Alvie saw that, of course. It made him go slower, making the noise last even longer. Milking it. He liked the power he now had over Harm Strayer. He would reach into the bag, ostensibly to dig around for another round piece, but it was really for his own deep satisfaction: seeing Harm react with that twitch, that blink. Fear and confusion in his cloudy eyes. It was a small, exquisite torture that Alvie could inflict on his old pal. And it left no marks. No one would ever know. It was just Alvie and Harm in here, two old friends.

Harm had gotten all the breaks. Well, no—Vic had gotten lots more breaks than Harm, more breaks than anybody, but Vic was so far out of Alvie's league that Alvie did not think of Vic in relation to his own life. Vic was not a standard against which Alvie could measure himself. The differential was too great.

But Harm—well, Harm, was still on Alvie's level. So he could compare. They were two boys. Two boys from Norbitt, West Virginia. And Harm, everybody liked. Everybody looked up to. Why? For years, Alvie had tormented himself with the question. It was like biting down on a sore tooth, over and over again, just to feel the pain: Why did people like Harm so much? He was a fucking factory worker. Blue collar, all the way. Never did anything else, never dreamed of doing anything else.

Whereas
he
had actually read some books. Studied. Not in a formal way, because the church did not care about any of that when hiring a pastor. They did not ask about degrees—only about whether you were married and had a family. They wanted you stable. But he still read books. Books about motivating yourself to work harder, to size up your enemy and defeat him. How to
succeed
, in other words. How to be a winner.

And then there was Harm Strayer. His old pal Harm. A man who had skated by on his looks and his line of bullshit and on—what else? What else made people gravitate to Harm Strayer in a way they had never gravitated to him? Maybe pity. Harm had buried two wives, and people felt sorry for him. Raising his little girl on his own and all.

Well, Alvie had known sorrow, too, and nobody ever seemed to be extending any kindness
his
way. Nobody ever said, “Sorry your boy's such a good-for-nothing loser, Alvie. Too bad.” Because that was another thing: Harm's girl, Darlene, was smart and focused. She was going places. You could just tell. She worked hard, and she had not taken the kind of shortcuts that Lenny specialized in: stealing things, cheating people when he thought he could get away with it. Losing job after job because he was lazy and stupid. He would get hired, then call in sick for the first week. When he finally showed up again, they'd tell him to leave.
And while you're at it, don't come back. Ever.

It was as if Harm was rubbing his nose in it, in what a bum Lenny was, just by having a daughter like Darlene. Go
ahead,
Harm probably said to himself over the years, secretly snickering.
Go ahead and compare. Put them side by side: Lenny and Darlene. I dare you.

There was no comparison. None at all.

The kids had been friends for a while, in junior high and high school, his Lenny and Harm's girl, Darlene. It was not a boy-girl thing—Alvie always had his suspicions about Darlene, her with that short hair and those dungarees, because every woman he knew cared deeply about her appearance and Darlene did not seem to give a rat's ass about that—but it was a steady, solid friendship. Darlene helped his Lenny. For a time, when they were spending a lot of time together, Lenny's grades ticked up a bit. His attitude improved. He even straightened up when he walked, losing that pathetic,
please don't hit me
hunch of his. But then Darlene went away to college and that was that. Lenny slid back down into his old loser self. It was like she had given him a vision of another way to live, another kind of person to be, and then, just when he was starting to believe it might be possible—she left.

Bitch.

Alvie rattled the bag. He had a few more pieces to go. After he had gotten out the last one, he intended to reach over the table with two hands and crunch the bag in Harm's face, hard and long. Really make that fucker squirm.

Somebody else had come into the lounge.

It was an aide, one of those fat old ladies in their pink smocks and their too-tight white pants and ugly white shoes. Alvie smiled and held up the bag. “Gonna play checkers,” he said. “Harm here loves his checkers.”

The aide had come in to retrieve a cane propped up in a corner of the lounge. One of the residents had left it there. She picked up the cane, and then she looked over at Alvie, and then down at Harm, who sat in the chair with his arms around his shoulders. He was shuddering.

“Doesn't seem to me like he likes it too much,” she said dubiously.

Alvie laughed. “Old Harm here don't know
what
he likes anymore. He'll come around. You watch.” He was silently willing her to leave, but he knew that if he showed that, if he revealed how much he wanted to see the last of her fat ass, she would probably stick around. People were perverse like that. Did what they could to go against you, every damned chance they got.

He looked closer at the woman. She was standing a little cockeyed. She had a problem with one of her hips. Her named tag said MARCY.

She's the one,
Alvie thought.
When the time comes—and it's coming, oh, yes, it's coming—she's the one I'll tell Lenny to pick.