Lucky Strikes (28 page)

Hiram's ward was at the end of the hallway. There was ten beds in it, but only two was filled, one by a TB patient, who lay with his face to the wall, coughing up what was left of his lungs. Three beds down lay Hiram, in a gown very like mine.

All I saw at first was a gray head and a pair of long, lank, veiny legs. The rest of him was blocked by the woman who set alongside his bed and rested her chin on his arm. Such a
private
pose that I flushed and started back, but Hiram's good eye cut our way, and he raised his head a fraction, and the woman jumped to her feet and swung round.

It was Ida. Her hair wrapped like ermine round her neck, her hand already reaching for Hiram's.

“I should be going,” she said.

She give us each a nod as she passed, then vanished into the hallway without a look back.

Which left the three of us stuck in place, awaiting orders from on high. Then Dudley said, “How 'bout I leave you two be?” and ducked out of the room, and it was just us two.

“Don't know as I ever seen your legs before,” I said, circling round the foot of his bed. “Bare nekkid.”

“Ain't they pretty?” he said.

I angled my face a little to the right of him so I wouldn't have to look at him head-on.

“You sound just like Greta Garbo,” he said.

“Like hell I do.”

“Without the accent.”

“You're a liar,” I said. (Though, for a second, he had me wondering.)

“Everything okay with Ida?” I asked, trying to keep my croak light.

He sheathed his hands cross his forehead. “Ida,” he said, “has got other fish to fry. I believe we've seen the last of her.”

I nodded. Looked down at my hands.

“Listen,” I said. “If the sheriff ever comes and asks you who was—”

“I'm to say it was too dark to see anything.”

“Yeah.”

Lord, it was quiet. Just for company, I found myself staring at the feller three beds down. Who wasn't even bestirring himself now 'cept to cough.

“You'll have to forgive me,” said Hiram.

“What the hell for?”

“I didn't play it smart, Amelia. I saw the fire go up and I went
running
at it. Without a thought. Fish in a barrel.”

I come round the side of his bed, took his dry hand in mine. “Point is we survived.”

“Brenda's Oasis didn't.”

“Aw,” I said. “Who needs that dump anyway? Always more trouble than it was worth.”

“I miss my counter.” He drew in a long breath, like he was sucking on one of his Luckys. “The one thing we always scrimped on was insurance.”

“Premiums was too high.”

“So we always said.”

I set on the edge of his bed. Brought my other hand on top of his. “We had us a good run, Hiram.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Mama would've been proud.”

“I suspect you're right.”

He put his other hand on top of mine, and we set there a good while. At some point, the other feller ceased his coughing, and a silence settled over us like snow. Then, from somewhere far off, come the sound of running feet.

Very particular feet, I knew 'em soon as I heard 'em. Sure enough, when I angled my head to the doorway, there was Earle, bounding into view.

“You gotta come with me!” he cried.

“What for?”

“Just the once, could you shut up and do like you're told?”

 

Chapter

THIRTY-ONE

Well, it didn't take me but ten minutes to collect my bill and be on my way. Doc Brown give me an extra tank of oxygen, and the nurses popped a couple of oranges in my hands and opened the front door for me, and before my eyes had even got used to the sun, Chester Gallagher was pulling up in his Buick sedan.

“Hop in,” he said.

Earle was in the front, Dudley was in the back, and nothing seemed right.

“What the hell's going on?” I said.

Not a word.

“Chester, you're my damn lawyer. You gotta tell me.”

“I'm gonna have to plead the Fifth.”

Nothing to do but drag myself inside and pull the door after. Oh, but I had the sinkingest feeling as we headed north out of town, and when we took a left on Strasburg Pike, my stomach swerved in clear the other direction.

“No,” I said. “I can't.”

But the car bore on.

“I said I
can't
. I can't go back.”

“Shh,” said Dudley, giving my forearm a squeeze.

How strange and terrible the road looked to me now. Like I'd last traveled it a million years ago. I tried to close my eyes, but they was still wide open when we hit that last turn and the sign come soaring out of the noon haze.

BRENDA
'
S OASIS.

“See?” cried Earle. “It never come down, Melia. Barely even got smudged.”

He was right. The desert and the water and the camels, they was near as fresh as the night they went up. And that was the cruelest blow of all somehow. To have that sign looking down on all the waste and wreckage. Like a queen gazing on a dead kingdom.

“Stop,” I whispered. “Please stop.”

And when that failed, I shouted, best I could.

“Will you stop the goddamn car!”

That's when Hiram's porte cochere swum into view.

I rolled down the window and leaned my head out, stared until I couldn't stare no more. 'Cause, of course, I'd seen that porte cochere swallowed by fire. Seen it crumble and fall. The only way it could be standing now was if I was dreaming it.

But there was the four columns, braced and firm and true. Just like I remembered. The only thing that didn't fit was the man who lay sprawled atop the roof, raising a John Henry hammer to the clouds.

Warner. Warner the trucker.

“How you?” he growled down.

“Uh. Okay.” I stared at him some more. “How you?”

“Tolerable.”

“What you
doing
there, Warner?”

“What the hell's it look like? Laying down shingles. Hey, watch your head there.”

I spun round, and there was Joe Bob, carrying a length of ceiling vault. And there was Dutch, bending a gutter, and just beyond him was Elmer, and, to the left of Elmer, Merle.

“How'd you fellers even…”

“Word travels fast in the hills,” said Warner.

Then I heard someone calling my name. It was Frances Bean, in rolled-up sleeves. Her hands was stained with paint.

“Hot enough for you?” she was saying.

Directly behind her was a wall. A free-standing, load-bearing wall. Exactly where the front wall of the store used to be.

And not far off, two
other
walls. Waiting to make corners with the wall that was standing. And, a few yards past,
another
wall, ready to make a fourth.

And alongside each of these walls, a human being. Hard at work.

It was like some veil was being peeled away, piece by piece, from my eyes. Suddenly I could see dozens and dozens of people—people I knew by sight—swarming across what was left of Brenda's Oasis. Pouring concrete. Sanding floorboards. Carving molding. Laying down nests of wire.

Basil Buckner was taking an adze to a ceiling beam. Farmer Stokes was pouring fresh gravel out of the back of his truck. Frances Bean's husband was cutting sections of drywall. Maggie McGuilkin was screwing a knob onto a door, and Mrs. Hicks and Mrs. Buckner was carting away barrows of sawdust and wood chips.

Ladders was rising to the sky, and hammers was ringing and saws grunting. Body after body was bent in the heat, bearing down and dragging up, and in that fog of sweat and toil, under the ministrations of a thousand hands, Brenda's Oasis was rising from its ashes.

Over there, by the garage, lay the remains of our old icebox, waiting to be hauled to the junkyard. But
here
, just a few feet from where I was standing, a carpenter was fashioning a new one, the
same
one, right down to the mirrored doors. On the far side of the road lay our old pickle barrel, a blackened stump of its former self. Here on this side, a cooper had made one even bigger than the last, and a blacksmith was girding it round with iron hoops.

Lewis Quint, the glazier, was fitting a new plate-glass window, and a crew led by Mr. Hicks was buffing down a slab of wood that, less my eyes deceived me, was going to be Hiram's new counter.

Why, you might've thought the whole population of Walnut Ridge had turned out for this very occasion. There was Minnie-Cora Harper and her newest beau. There was Lizabeth Shafer and Gwendolyn Davenport. There was Mrs. Goolsby, carrying a pitcher of sweet tea from worker to worker.
Pastor
Goolsby, using a hammer claw to pull nails out of charred wood.

And there, on her hands and knees, was Mina Gallagher, scrubbing the last bits of soot from the store's stone foundation.

I was gazing out on truckers whose names I hadn't even got down yet. On townsfolk I hadn't seen since they got their palms read by Madame Ouspenskaya. On children who'd never done nothing more than climb into our tire swings. Here they all was, with their wrenches and pliers and planes and screwdrivers. I believe it was the closest thing I'd seen—will ever see—to a miracle. And so frail did it seem to me in that moment, I almost didn't want to breathe on it.

But then—one by one—the workers stopped what they was doing, set down whatever tool they had in their hands, wiped their brows, and looked at me.

Someone—I think it was Chester—set down an old milk crate, then helped me stand on it. I must've spent a good minute or two just clearing my throat till I remembered that was how my voice sounded now.

“Hey, y'all.…”

Next second, I heard someone yell, “Speak up!”

“She can't!” shouted someone else.

“Listen now,” I said. “My voice ain't much—I mean, it never—I never was much of a public speaker.…”

“Neither was Moses!” called Pastor Goolsby.

There was some laughter at that.

“What I mean,” I said, “is there
ain't
no words. Not really. For what y'all have done. I mean, I can't believe you'd—I never thought you…”

I never thought you give a rat's ass about us.

And still they stood watching. Quiet as Quakers. Waiting for something I couldn't dredge up. I think I might be standing on that crate this very minute if Warner hadn't bellowed down.

“Quit your yapping, girl, and get to work!”

And so I did.

I confess, being just out of hospital, there weren't too much I could do. Anything too strenuous, my windpipe'd squeeze down on me, and I'd have to go trotting over to Chester's car for a whiff of oxygen.

So I kept it small. Cleaning brushes. Carrying paint buckets. Pouring water and sweeping up mess and sending up pulley buckets of nails and screws. Sometimes, I'd just set and watch. Astonished that all this was going on round me without no plan nor blueprint, no supervisor nor foreman. Bubbling up like a spring.

Oh, I knew a brand-new gas station didn't come for free. Someone'd have to pay for all this hardware and lumber and labor. But as the afternoon wore down and the air got prickly with the thought of rain, it begun to come home to me that there would be neither bill nor reckoning. The citizens of Walnut Ridge had done the one thing I never would've expected in a million Sundays. They had gathered round their Gas Station Pagans and raised them up.

Round about four thirty, a car come rolling in. A car that, from a distance, looked very like Harley Blevins's butternut Chevy Eagle. In fact, it was. It shuddered to a stop three yards shy of me, set there for a spell in the heat. Then, inch by squeaking inch, the driver's window rolled down, and a man leaned toward me. A man I never seen before, with a scrub of mustache and a trail of scab and scar winding down his forearm.

“Afternoon,” he drawled.

“Hey, sorry, mister. We don't have no gas today, but if you—”

“I'm Tom Goggins. I suspicion my name is known to you.”

We was quiet a spell.

“It is,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “that's a grief to me.” His hands clenched the steering wheel, then unclenched. “Miss Melia, I would like you to know I didn't have nothing to do with this last business.”

“I know that, Mr. Goggins.”

He nodded. Breathed in and breathed out. “I've also been asked to hand something over to you.”

He reached toward the passenger seat and brought up a brown kraft envelope. Next thing I knew, it was resting in my hands.

“You may want to check,” he said, “just to be on the safe side.”

Sure enough, every last mug shot of Hiram Watts was there. In a neat stack, fastened with a paper clip.

“They're yours,” I heard Tom Goggins say. “Courtesy of Mrs. Blevins. To do with as you will.”

I started to speak, but something stuck in my throat. So I took a breather and tried again.

“You be sure to thank Mrs. Blevins for me, will you?”

“I will.”

“Tell her to stop by anytime she likes.”

“She said the same 'bout you. She happened to notice you enjoyed her lemonade.”

“That I did,” I said.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a Zippo lighter. Set it in my palm and closed my fingers round it. “I reckon there needs to be another fire,” he said.

“You may be right.”

“I won't never call us even.”

“We're even.”

I give him half of a wave, he give me the other half. The car pulled away, slow as a milk wagon.

In the end, the only hard part was finding someplace I wouldn't be seen. I had to cross the road and then head east for a spell. I set the envelope on the gravel, and then I lit each corner. The day was humid, but the envelope caught straight off. In less than minute, it was a pile of ash. I give a kick, and the ash scattered in soggy clumps.