The Narrows (11 page)

“You got it. Goodnight, Eddie.”

“Goodnight, Ben.”

Eddie slammed the door and padded across the parking lot to his car with his head down. Ben watched him drive away and turn onto Belfast Avenue before he shut the cruiser down and climbed out. Ben could tell it would be a cold winter up here in the mountains. The trees were already whispering about it and the air smelled smoky and cool. He unlocked the station doors and pushed them open on hinges that shrieked like banshees. Green-and-black checkerboard tile floors, oatmeal-colored walls, fizzy sodium fixtures in the ceiling that didn’t always work—he had become so used to this place that it felt like crawling back into the womb each time he walked through the doors.

In the dispatcher’s cubicle, he fed Shirley’s goldfish, Abbott and Costello, muttering to them as he did so. Then he went into what the guys called the “Batter’s Box,” the spacious room segregated into four cubicles where the officers sat when they weren’t out on the road. Ben unbuttoned his shirt and pulled his vest off, his undershirt matted with sweat. He hung the vest on one of the cubicle walls, directly over a stack of Eddie’s
Fangoria
magazines and the very slim case file on the unidentified boy whose nude body had washed up on the shores of Wills Creek early last week. To date, the boy had not been identified or claimed by anyone and, as far as Ben was aware, the pallid, hairless body still sat in a stainless-steel drawer at the county morgue over in Cumberland.

Ben continued down the hall to the kitchen, where he retrieved an apple from the foul-smelling communal refrigerator. There were photographs of some of the officers’ kids stuck to the outside of the fridge with magnets. Taking a knife from his belt, he began cutting the apple into wedges as he headed toward the two-car sally port at the far end of the station. He opened the door to the sally port and felt along the wall for the light switch, while popping one of the apple wedges into his mouth. Dim yellow light poured down from an industrial spotlight in the center of the ceiling housed in a wire casing that reminded Ben of a catcher’s mask. The port was empty—all of the officers took their vehicles home with them—and the room was as cold and as silent as a cave.

That was why he’d put the bat back here.

It was a tiny thing with short brown hair and ears like little radar dishes. It had the fuzzy face of a pig with moist, black eyes. As Ben approached the bell-shaped birdcage that sat on a shelf among paint cans and plastic quarts of motor oil, the creature inside began to twitter and chirp. It hung upside down from the perch, its tiny head bobbing and its piggish little snout sniffing the cool air.

“Hey, bud. You hanging in there?” Two days ago, the thing had gotten trapped in the sally port. He had wanted to let it go but the other guys thought it would be cool to keep the bat as a mascot of sorts, at least for a little while. Mike Keller had gone home and returned with the bell-shaped birdcage. When Chief Harris had simply grunted his indifference, more interested in his upcoming vacation with his wife than any police business, Ben had acquiesced.

So here I am now, three o’clock in the goddamn morning, sticking apple wedges into a birdcage.

He couldn’t help but smile to himself.

“There you go, buddy.” He dropped the final wedge into the cage.

The bat chirped and fluttered its wings.

Both of us trapped here in this town,
he thought, surprised by the depth of his comparison. Suddenly, he wanted to release the bat into the night, but he fought off this urge at the last minute.

“Two peas in a pod,” he told the bat before shutting off the light and going home.

Chapter Three

1

From the sky, the rural western Maryland hamlet of Stillwater might appear to be a ghost town. It sits at the bottom of a river valley, bookended to the east and west by the tree-studded swell of the Allegheny Mountains. The town itself is bisected by Wills Creek, which traverses the concrete slalom of the Narrows before emptying into the Potomac River east of town. The roadways twist and wind and turn to dirt the farther out into the foothills they go. The only testament to the town’s connection with the outside world is the two-lane concrete ribbon that is U.S. Route 40, which clings like bunting to the side of Wills Mountain. This cut of asphalt runs for over two hundred miles across the state, from Garrett County straight out to Elkton, where it continues on into Delaware before it disappears completely like the vaporous contrail of a jetliner.

In the predawn hours this Saturday, the streets of Stillwater are empty and dark. Many of the streetlights along Hamilton and Susquehanna are still out due to damage from the recent storm and its subsequent flooding. The stone-fronted shops along Hamilton resemble mausoleums. The bell tower of the Methodist church on Poplar Ridge Road rises before a backdrop of stirring vermilion light that has just barely begun to bleed into the sky. A low susurration whispers through the trees as eddies of autumn wind work their magic along the empty streets.

The old folks rise earliest. These are generations of farmers and blue-collar workers who have eked out an existence for themselves—much as their forefathers had done before them—applying their brawn and discipline toward hard manual labor. Sully Goodwin rises to the horned leaves of the holly bushes scraping against his bedroom window. Since Hugh Crawly split town, Sully has taken over Stillwater’s mail delivery. Without showering, he dresses silently in the dark, his eyes still partially lidded and crusted with sleep, his mouth tasting of the foul cigars and stale beer he had the night before over in Cumberland. His mail truck sits out front of his ranch house—an old Ford station wagon with a detachable orange bubble light that adheres to the roof with magnets. When he’s done with today’s run, he’ll drop the bubble light off at Bobby Furnell’s place, since Bobby uses that same light on the cab of his F-150 when he works construction over in the Gap.

Old Porter Conroy rises early as well, despite having been up late last night dealing with the police and fretting over his livestock. He has a long day ahead of him. The mutilated livestock will need to be incinerated and their remains either buried in the western field or trucked out to the dump. Undoubtedly, he will have to call the Kowalski brothers, those unreliable knucklehead alcoholics, to lend him a hand. Five bucks apiece and he’ll have them doing manual labor all day. He will have to replace the locks on the barn doors, too. For the first time in all his life, he considers getting one of those Yale padlocks Dean Cropsy keeps on his boathouse. Who would have thought it would come to this? He’s got an old remedy for getting rid of the bats as well, but it will take him much of the afternoon to prepare it—a fetid stew that goes on like apple butter but stings the eyes something fierce. Then it’s off to his brother’s place in Charles Town for a few days. He’s decided to lose himself in a sea of slot machines and watered-down cocktails. He knows his problems will still be waiting for him here in Stillwater, but damn if the temporary relief doesn’t do a world of good for his old soul.

Out on Full Hill Road, old Melba Codger sits in her recliner and stares out at a set of blackened windows. In her senility, she believes she can see many shapes capering in the darkness just beyond the glass.

In a two-story A-frame on Susquehanna, seventy-year-old Cordell Jones creeps out of bed, careful not to disturb his wife, and slinks downstairs to the kitchen without turning on a single light. There, he indulges in a sandwich piled high with sliced deli meats and cheeses, mayo and purple spirals of onion. May his acid indigestion and high cholesterol be damned.

Sarah Kamish has not slept well for quite a while now. She leaves her husband in bed—his snoring like the pulverization of granite in a crusher—and wends ghostlike about the rambling old farmhouse. Her son, twenty-two-year-old Michael Kamish, was killed last summer in Iraq…and while she has been haunted by his death every moment since it happened, she has been troubled for the past week by what she assumes to be her own slipping sanity. Late last week, just as she drove back from Cumberland along Route 40 and as the sun set behind the western mountains, she thought she saw Michael standing on the mud-caked embankment of the Narrows. He was still in his military uniform, with a white satchel slung over his right shoulder. As she drove by, his head turned slowly and mechanically and followed her progress along the highway. Sarah slammed on the brakes and got out of the car. She went back around the bend of the highway and crept down the sloping hillside of the embankment that led to the overflowing waters of the Narrows. Of course, it was all just a hallucination; Michael was not there. There in the tall grass, she cried for twenty minutes before returning to her car and driving back into town. Now, Sarah cries silently to herself as she stands in the darkened living room of the old farmhouse—a farmhouse where her parents once lived and where she grew up. It is hers now—hers and her husband’s—and they will be the last of their meager lineage to reside there.

Joe Flip, better known to the patrons of Crossroads as “Flip the Drip,” finds himself jarred awake from a dream that has left him in quite an impressive state of arousal. The details of the dream are lost the moment he opens his eyes, but he knows it had something to do with Wendy Crawly, the attractive, middle-aged waitress who works down at the Belly Barn. Even if she is quite a few years his junior, she continues to be awfully flirty with him whenever he stops into the Barn for lunch. She has a nice smile and nicer tits and—not for the first time—old Flip the Drip wonders if she’s just been
aching
for it ever since her husband split town with a younger broad. Recalling the way Wendy Crawly’s breasts fill out her waitress uniform, Flip the Drip fumbles his meaty cock from the fly of his boxer shorts and proceeds to masturbate with the discipline of millworker.

On the outskirts of town, where Wills Creek empties into the steady, black drink that is the Potomac, a woman named Hazel McIntosh is already making coffee in her kitchen. It is still dark outside and she can see nothing beyond the blackened panel of glass above the kitchen sink as she rinses her coffeepot, save for the twinkling of moonlit diamonds glittering along the surface of the river. The flooding had been bad and the river had rushed up to greet the old house where she lives alone with her seven calico cats, and it swept her lawn furniture away. Nights earlier, she had been staring out this very window when she saw a section of the Highland Street Bridge go cruising by. One of its stanchions poked up out of the water like the smokestack of a ship. She guessed that it had been washed straight out into the Chesapeake…or, for that matter, the Atlantic Ocean. Stranger things have happened in her lifetime.

Small towns are secrets kept by the elderly. The old keep watch, and while they don’t quite realize it—not on any conscious level, that is—there is a certain primal part of their makeup, perhaps ingrained in their earthly DNA, that keeps them up and alert and continually rising early to beat the sun at its own game. And it would be a lie to say that, on occasion, one or more of these individuals doesn’t feel a tingling sense of stewardship during these dark, predawn moments—a sense that they have been selected to keep watch over a town that, for years now, has been slowly dying beneath their feet.

The people of the Narrows keep watch.

2

Brandy Crawly awoke early, just as she did every Saturday, and winced at the slivers of sunlight that speared through the blinds. She remained in bed for several more minutes, watching motes of dust swim in the shafts of light, and considering the possibilities for the day ahead. The daylight hours were hers, to do with as she pleased after her chores around the house were done. Later that evening, she was babysitting Tabby Olson for some extra spending money. The Harvest Dance was only a week away—Jim Talbot had asked her to go with him—and there was an off-the-shoulder black dress at Macy’s over in Garrett that she wanted to buy. The babysitting money should put her in the black.

When she heard her mother’s bedroom door open and the old shower pipes clank and shudder in the bathroom, Brandy climbed out of bed. She combed her hair in the bevel glass then pulled it back into a ponytail. Then she bladed her body, sucked in her belly, and flattened her nightshirt against her chest to examine her profile. Her breasts were too small, her hair too frizzy, her nose just a vague, upturned nub between eyes that, in just the past year or so, had grown too widely spaced apart. She thought her legs looked funny, too. They were too wide in the upper thighs and too narrow at the calf. She lifted one foot and flexed the calf muscle, pointing her toes down like a ballerina. Had she continued with the track team through last year, her legs might have had a more even, tapered look.

Girls on the track team don’t get asked to the Harvest Dance by boys like Jim Talbot,
she thought.
And boys don’t like girls who run faster than they do.

She pulled on a pair of lacrosse shorts and glanced one last time with some dismay at her reflection in the bevel glass. Then she went downstairs to prepare breakfast.

She heard the screen door banging against the frame from the hallway. Entering the kitchen, she froze. The porch door stood wide open while the screen beyond banged and clattered in the breeze. Matted wet leaves lay in clumps on the tile and there was grit and debris like sprinkles of pepper on the kitchen counter.

Her initial conclusion was that someone had broken into the house at night while the three of them slept, and a cold dread overtook her. Suddenly, the rattling water pipes upstairs sounded as insubstantial as noise coming through a television set. Brandy went to the door and examined the lock and, to her immediate relief, she found that the lock had not been busted. This had not been done by any intruder. This had been the work of her stupid, careless brother.