The Narrows(26)
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.