American Rust

hand down his pants he thought about that, it was old material but good enough, he finished and fell asleep right after.

Sometime later he was dreaming, there was a car and then he heard voices and he was wondering if he could wedge the door closed when the voices got much louder and he realized he wasn’t dreaming. There were people in the factory with flashlights.

“Someone cracked that door. It wasn’t like that before.”

“Come on, Hicks.”

“You gotta look. You don’t look from over there.”

The next voice was loud: “If there’s any piece- of- shit bums down there you might as well come out now and save us some work.” People were laughing. Someone said: “You’re a goddamn dumb- ass, Hicks.”

Isaac began to disentangle himself from the sleeping bag; the room he was in was small, the office maybe, there was only one way out of it and he was only partially out of the sleeping bag when the door swung open and light swept around the room. He put his hand on his knife but he saw them and they were young people, high schoolers. He let go of the knife.

“Hold up,” he said, but he’d barely gotten off the workbench when one of them walked directly up to him, looked back briefly at his friends as if to make sure they were paying attention, and punched Isaac in the face.

“I went to Buell Memorial,” he said, but the others were on top of him and he was knocked to the ground. He tried to protect his head but something caught him on the jaw anyway and then in the stomach and then his ribs and back and he tried to protect his sides and got kicked in the mouth again. He covered his head and they kept kicking. His wind was knocked out and he couldn’t breathe, he was choking. Then the light was in his face and the kicking abruptly stopped.

“Christ, Hicks. It’s a fucking kid.”

Isaac stayed where he was, covering himself.

“Shut the fuck up,” said Hicks. “All of you.”

One of the others said: “Fuck yourself, Hicks. The car is leaving, you can walk home if you want.”

The person he knew was Hicks squatted down next to him and said: “You’ll be alright, buddy. We got you confused with someone else. You want a beer or anything?”

“Don’t touch me,” said Isaac.

Hicks knelt there a few more seconds, unsure of himself, and then Isaac heard him stand and walk quickly outside. He heard car doors slam and then heard the car pull away. He was afraid to touch himself for what he might find. He stood up and walked outside to the dirt lot. It was empty. It hadn’t taken more than a minute. Most of his face was still numb and he went back inside and repacked his things and finally he stopped heaving. He found a rubber welcome mat and carried it outside to sleep on. The kids had been sixteen, seventeen, maybe younger. Good, he said out loud. Now you know. He walked through the tall brush toward the river until it seemed no one would find him. When he crouched down there was no wind. His heart was still racing and his mouth tasted like blood. You could have stopped that, he thought. If you’d cut even one of them, the rest would have taken off. He decided it was fine. Fool me once. He took out the knife and set it next to his head. It took a long time before his heart slowed down enough for him to fall asleep.

3. Poe

He was in the back of Harris’s truck and they pulled into the police station. It was not the first time he’d been there, it wasn’t even properly the police station, in fact, it was called the Buell Municipal Building on account of there were other offices, the mayor’s and the city council’s. According to the newspaper, the mayor now slept in his office because his wife had kicked him out. It had been a minor scandal, the mayor living out of his office. The municipal building was white cinderblock, three stories with a flat roof, it looked like a big repair shop of some kind, not the headquarters of a town. The inside was painted yellow. It was not old but it looked that way. The original city hall had been condemned years ago and several times Poe had broken in and walked around inside; it was a large red brick building that looked like a castle, iron windows, wood paneling inside and dental molding, it looked like the home of a rich person, a place you could respect yourself. But the city did not have the money to maintain it.

Inside the new building Poe saw the pudgy Chinese officer, he was watching Fox News, it looked like he was having a conversation with the television. Harris took Poe downstairs to the holding cells, Poe had been there before, a long hallway with what looked like big steel firedoors every ten feet or so. The cell had a butcher block for a bed and no mattress. The light fixture outside flickered like it would give him a seizure. There was one window that looked up from the ground toward the parking lot, but the plastic was hazed over.

“I’ll be back for you in a bit,” said Harris. When he wasn’t busting heads he had an open, easygoing face, eyes that forgave you, like he was meant to be something else, maybe a schoolteacher. Which was probably the reason he had to bust so many heads, to make up for the way he looked.

“How long do you think—” Poe said, but Harris closed the door on him.

“Make yourself comfortable,” he heard Harris tell him. He heard other doors slamming after that.

He had no coat and there seemed to be a vent blowing cold air directly onto him, not to mention there was a puddle from the leaking toilet; water covered most of the floor. Here he was, you didn’t think they could do this to you—put you in a locked room—but they could. There was no way around it. It was a tragedy of life. In fact that was how he’d felt the first time they’d locked him up, that there had been no way around it, but in hindsight that hadn’t been true. It wasn’t true now, either. It was his own choices. They never felt like choices while he was making them, but nonetheless they were. It was nice to think it was a vast conspiracy of others but the truth was something different.

The last time he was locked up it was the boy from Donora. Big, though not quite as big as Poe, and aside from the pimples all over his face and neck there had been nothing wrong with him. A B student, people said. But when Poe got through with him it was different. He remembered holding the boy down, they were both bleeding some, girls watching. They were in a dirt parking lot at night and it was very quiet, everyone had stopped talking to watch them, there was no one even cheering them on, just the sound of their heavy breathing and grunting. The boy was pinned and Poe knew he should not let the boy up. Stay down, he whispered, but he knew the boy wouldn’t, he could tell the boy did not want to lose, the boy did not have it in him to lose. It would be the downfall of both of them. Stay down, he said again, quietly into the boy’s ear, but he had to let him up, they couldn’t lie there all night. He should have choked him out, it would have been for the boy’s own good, but others would have gotten involved if he’d done that. It was no win either way, and finally he had to let the boy up, though he knew what would happen. Obviously he did not know exactly what would happen, he only knew the situation would not improve.

The boy went to his car and came back and everyone stepped away. He had a knife, a military bayonet you might buy at a gun show, and the crowd made way for Poe to retreat but Poe had stood his ground, it would have been easy to walk away, the kid was insane at losing the fight, he was not really going to use the bayonet, he was the type who would go off to college, he was embarrassed, was all.

But Poe had stood his ground. Because his fire was going. Because he’d won and now he didn’t want to lose. He had stood there and no one knew what to do, not him, not the boy and then Vincent Lewis had put a bat in Poe’s hand, a child’s bat from Little League it was light and short, a good weapon. It was something out of gladiator times, knife versus club. Neither of them really wanting to do it, it was only because of all the people. The older you got the more serious things became. Your margins for fuckup disappeared. First there was the boy from Donora and now the Swede. It was getting worse. He wondered what would come next. Both times he should have known better but he hadn’t. The next time Christ it would be someone he loved, his mother, or Lee, it would be something unthinkable.

As for the boy from Donora, Poe had asked after him several times but he was not okay. He couldn’t even work a cash register, couldn’t keep the numbers straight on account of Poe hitting him with the bat. He hit him and the boy went down in the dirt and then he didn’t know, he’d hit him once more in the head. Because he was still holding on to that bayonet. And yet that was why the assault charge—the second hit, they were teaching him a lesson. But you didn’t learn it, he thought. You did not learn that lesson.