Shadow of Ashland (Ashland, 1) (18 page)

I watched Stanley.
 

He watched Teresa and Jack.

I began to feel light-headed. The parlor of the Scott Hotel came into focus as though through a wide-angle lens, curving at the edges.

Is any of this real, I wondered?

Will I ever see my father, my home, my job, Jeanne, or Adam again?

Where am I? What's happening?
 

I didn't know.

Below us, the Ohio River strove upward, trying to join the sky and the rain, squeezing us blindly in between.

FOURTEEN

Sunday, October 14, 1934

"Jack, George, and Jimmy are the first shift," said Stanley.
 

"They should clear the earth right up to beneath the vault. Scrape it clean, so's we can see what we're doin'."

For the first time in front of me, Stanley unfolded onto the coffee table, atop the
Vanity Fair,
a working diagram of the tunnel, the secondary tunnel, the sewer system, all superimposed on a scale drawing of streets and buildings.

"Leo and I'll work the basement, pull the tram out by rope if we can, spread the dirt around best we can."

"Water's pretty high," said George. "Don't know if you'll be able to move the tram that way."

"We'll try it anyway. If we can't, we'll do whatever we have to. Whatever it takes."

In the basement, the water was deeper than we had dreamed. It swirled above the knees, restless, with no place to go.
 

"This'll never work," said George. "Too much water."
 

"Has to work," said Jack. He went first into the tunnel.
 

Jimmy followed right behind him, taking his end of the long rope, letting it uncoil like a water snake behind him as he disappeared.

George looked at us, then focused on Stan. "Too much water," he said again. Then he said what he was thinking: "We should wait a month."

Stanley's eyes did not see him. They seemed to be following the sound of the men wading down the tunnel. "We're right there," he said. "Right under it. It's ours."

George looked at me, then back at Stanley.

"Rain might even help." Stanley Matusik's eyes glazed. "Make it easier to collapse the tunnel afterward. No sign of any kind. Bury it forever."

George heard the same illogic in the voice that I heard and looked to me suddenly for support.

"Maybe George is right," I said.

Stanley did not even look at me. "Too late," he said. "Everything's too late. What's gonna happen is gonna happen."

He stared down the tunnel.

George turned and went after Jack and Jimmy.

We were able to retrieve the tram with its first load of earth. But when we had emptied it, before we could tug the rope on its other end in signal to haul it away, it was clear our system wouldn't work anymore.

The water continued to rise and, empty of weight, the tram car became unstable—not light enough to float, not heavy enough to ride the tracks.

"They try pullin' it back, it'll tip on its side. Fill up with water," said Stanley.

"I think you're right."

"Better tell them." He started to wade toward the tunnel.

"I'll come with you," I said.

"Don't have to. You can wait here."

"I'm coming." I slogged after him into the tunnel.

Sometimes we remember everything with unusual clarity. Other times, it seems blurred, and we wish we were privy to some kind of instant replay, some way of studying an event to see how it happened, what happened, to try to understand it.

I don't know exactly what happened. I try to replay it in my head, but I can't see it clearly. In my mind I feel the water around my legs, feel the mud of the walls with my hand as I walk along, squint into the glare of bulbs.

Then suddenly it is dark. There is the feel of stale air on my face, blown as with a bellows, then I hear the muffled splash far up the tunnel at the same time I feel the walls shudder under my hand. The water stirs with new bubbles. A wave washes up toward my waist as it surges past me, ricocheting its way into the basement where it will crash around crazily without escape.

In the dark I stand there, knowing Stanley is somewhere beside me. Knowing that everything has gone bad.

The flashlight beam snapped on in Stanley's hand, darting crazily about the walls as he ran ahead of me through the water.

I ran after him, tripped, fell, got up, ran again.

The beam of light stopped at the wall of mud in front of us. Jack, George, and Jimmy were in there somewhere—under it or behind it.

I saw Jack's eyes, my mother's eyes, erupt like startling blue flares in my brain, arcing from the past to the present, and back to the past.

Stanley, Emmett, Henry, and I dug for the next fourteen hours straight. We burrowed a narrow path ten feet into the fallen mud without sensing any end to it.

When the water was above our waists, a section of tunnel some dozen feet or so behind us collapsed, leaving only a foot or so of air space above it. We shone our lights back along its top surface. The collapsed portion was only a six-foot span—a segment between supports.

The trapped water around us was rising rapidly.

We turned our efforts on the earth behind us, digging with energy we didn't know we had left, scraping a path along the top of the collapsed mud that would allow us to crawl over it.

With the water at our chests, we heaved ourselves up and inched our way out of our own plight, sliding down into the water and mud on the other side.

In the basement, exhausted, we tried to collect our thoughts.

"Have to go back," said Emmett.

We looked to Stanley. His face showed nothing. "Can't," he said. "Not now. Too much water." A pause. "We need rest, food, too."

"We can't leave them there," I said.

Stanley looked at me.

"What about the other tunnel?" I asked. I looked to Emmett and Henry.

Henry shook his head. "Runs off the sewer," he said. "Sewer's full. Everything's flooded. You'd need diving equipment. Even then, full of water like this, whole goddamn thing could come down on you in an eye blink." He looked down the tunnel in front of us. "This one, too."

"What do we do, then?" I asked. I heard my voice rise a notch.

No one answered.

The water, thick with its mud and power, flowed relentlessly out of the darkness around us.

By Sunday night, the water filled the basement completely.

FIFTEEN

Monday, October 15, 1934

The water crept up over the curbs onto sidewalks. By dawn, the town was beginning sandbagging operations.

The bank did not open for general business that day. But it did open special at 10:00 a.m. for the armored car that pulled up in front of it.

I watched from the veranda as the rain poured down steadily and the gray figures moved from bank to truck and back again, gathering the money, escorting it to the train and out of Ashland before it, too, sank beneath the water.

It rained all day. The streets disappeared.

That evening, I stood knee-deep in water on Winchester Avenue, hands in my pockets, the rain running off my chin, down my neck, into my eyes, feeling where the pavement had buckled slightly beneath my feet, facing the Second National Bank.
 

Jack, I thought.
 

Jack.

And then it was over.
 

Everything changed.

SIXTEEN

They remain shadows... shadows whose few remaining words and acts I have invented. Perhaps I only wanted their forgiveness for having forgotten them.

"I remember their deaths, but not their lives. Yet they're inside me, flowing unknown in my blood and moving unrecognized in my skull.

—Margaret Laurence

The Diviners

1

The air changed.

The water was gone. The rain had stopped.

The wind blew warm and sultry.

I looked about me, at the present, at the hot August night of 1984.

I was back.

The lightning flashed in sheets in the sky, and I stood, as I had that night, outside the First National Bank and Trust building, looking into the smiling face and warmth that was Jack Radey.

"It's hot here," I heard him say. "But I like it. I like the possibilities." He stared at me, silhouetted in the radiance from a streetlight, a young man, confronted with his future. "A man can make something of himself down here. Anything can happen." He moved closer so that I could see the glow of hope on his face. "Do you know where Ashland is? Do you know where I could go from here?"

I didn't know what the answer was. I didn't know anything.

"God ..." He ran his hand through black curly hair. "Anywhere," he said. There was a flicker of lightning, like a strobe. "Anywhere." Then he turned and stared at the mountains, at the east. "It's like the jumping off point to anywhere." He paused. "I'm on the edge of the Virginias, the Carolinas. I could go right through to Richmond or Norfolk, or up to Washington, Baltimore, Atlantic City. It's all ahead of me." He turned to face me again. "You tell Margaret I'm fine."

I nodded slightly, feeling his presence everywhere.
 

"Tell her everything's fine. Tell her I miss her." He offered his hand. I took it. His eyes sparkled.
 

"Tell Father I'm fine, too."
 

I nodded again. "I will."

He smiled openly, warmly. "Nice meeting you, Leo."
 

I smiled in return. "Margaret wants you to stay in touch."
 

"I will," he said.
 

And then he was gone.

It happened like that.

The moment of purity and insight and belief and hope and regret and possibility folded up and vanished into the stillness.

I looked down at the cracks in the sidewalk, the shallow depression at my feet.

I went back to room 8 at the Scott Hotel. For most of the night I sat in the blue upholstered easy chair, staring out the window into the darkness, seeing nothing, seeing everything.

I think I fell asleep. I’m not sure.

      
I’m not sure of much anymore.
 

      
In the night, as before, perhaps as always, what seemed to be dreams may have been real, what seemed real may have been a dream.
 

      
In the morning I went to the basement of the Scott Hotel and stood on a cement floor. Where the drain pit had been was a proper metal grill fixed in the floor. Everything was dry, reasonably modem.

I stared at poured concrete walls. The entrance to the tunnel was gone.

"Who are you?"

I turned to see Stanley Matusik, balding and timeworn, standing at the foot of the stairs behind me.

"I'm just who I said I was."

"I know you. From somewhere."

I nodded. "Maybe you do."

He looked at me. The eyes searched. "You know, don't you."

"I think so."

"How?"

"I just know."

He knew it was true. "Been over fifty years." Then he asked. "What do you know?"

"I know it didn't work. I know they're in there. Jack, Jimmy, George." I glanced at the wall where the tunnel had been.

"Yes and no," he said.

My senses sharpened. Maybe I didn't know.

"You know about the rain. About the flood." Statements, not questions.

"Yes."

"Whole goddamn thing came down. Water turned everything to mud, everywhere. Filled both tunnels solid, like they was never there. When it stopped, when it finally receded, when everything dried up, you couldn't even tell there'd been anything but solid ground there ever." He walked over to the concrete wall, stared at the opening in his mind. "We dug the whole thing out again. Me, Henry, Emmett, and some others. Took us eight weeks to do it properly. By then, rumors was goin' 'round. Folks in town seemed to know what had happened. Jimmy and George's families must've talked. We asked 'em not to." He shrugged. "What can you do? Don't really blame 'em."