American Rust

“Billy, I goddamn caught you going back to the crime scene.” Again he resisted mentioning the jacket he’d found. “I got your footprints everywhere. Size fourteen Adidas—know how many people wear those?” He looked under the desk at Poe’s feet. “Most likely blue in color, right?”

Poe shrugged.

“If you’re lucky this is going to put you in jail until you’re fifty. If you catch a bad break it’ll send you to the injection booth.”

“Whatever.”

“Billy you and I know that the truth, the one that matters, is that this man was killed by his own choices in life. That for all practical purposes, you had such a small part of it as to mean nothing. But you need to help me now.”

“I couldn’t see their faces.”

Harris shook his head. He motioned Poe to stand up.

“Am I gonna be booked now?”

“For your mother’s sake I’m letting you go home tonight to get yourself in order. Tomorrow I’m going to come by your house and pick you up before the staties do. Make sure those shoes don’t exist anymore, and if you still got the box, or any kind of receipts, burn them, too. And don’t get any ideas in you. They’ll send you up for sure if you run.”

“Fine,” said Poe. “I’ll be there.”

“This witness,” said Harris. “Claims he saw the whole thing. Tell me about him.”

“I need to go home,” said Poe. “Give me a day to think about it.”

“You gonna run if I let you go?”

“I ain’t goin anywhere.”

What does it matter, he thought. Then he thought: don’t be stupid about this. But they had nothing to hold Billy Poe on anyway. Or at least nothing the DA knew about.

“I’m guessing you got a day, maybe two, before they put a warrant out for you, so I’m gonna come by your mother’s house tomorrow morning. Make sure you’re there.”

Billy Poe nodded.

Well, thought Harris, as he walked Billy Poe to the station’s front door. You might have just made your life a lot more interesting.

5. Lee

Isaac had been gone almost two days and she’d been calling Poe’s cellphone ever since but all she got was a message saying the number was out of service. He’d been late again paying his bill. The sorts of things Poe did—not paying his bills on time, driving an old car that was always breaking down—she’d always found them rebellious and somehow admirable but now they seemed immature and frustrating. She needed to find her brother. What kind of person doesn’t pay their phone bill? Then she thought: a person who can’t afford to. She was angry at him anyway. She was angry at herself. She put her head down on the table and counted slowly to ten. Then she got up to find her father: he had an appointment at the hospital in Charleroi and they needed to get moving.

From Buell they headed north along the river and her father, piloting the Ford Tempo he’d outfitted with hand controls, drove too fast for the narrow road. But soon enough she was distracted by the beauty of the Valley: the opposite riverbank rising steeply from the water, thick with trees and vines and sheer outcroppings of red- brown rock, the untamed greenness cascading over everything, tree limbs stretching for light over the water, a small white rowboat tied in their shadows.

Farther along she couldn’t help noticing the old coal chute stretching the length of the hillside, passing high over the road on its steel supports, the sky visible through its rusted floor; the iron suspension bridge crossing the river. It was sealed at both ends, its entire structure similarly penetrated and pocked by rust. Then it seemed there was a rash of abandoned structures, an enormous steel- sided factory painted powder blue, its smokestacks stained with the ubiquitous red- brown streaks, its gate chained shut for how many years, it had never been open in her lifetime. In the end it was rust. That was what defined this place. A brilliant observation. She was probably about the ten millionth person to think it.

As for her father Henry in the seat next to her, he was more content than she ever remembered, he was happy she’d gotten married, it soothed him, it made her less like her mother, who had not married until she was over thirty, who had been engaged to another man before she met Henry. Henry would never get along with Simon, she knew that. It was not possible for him to even comprehend someone like Simon. They had never met, she had always made up excuses, they had gotten married on the spur of the moment at a city office. She wondered if Simon understood why. Certainly he hadn’t complained about it. And yet Henry, knowing they were excuses, knowing the reason she must have had for making them, he had gone along, saying only: I suppose I’ll meet him someday. He had always held her in a certain awe, same as he had held her mother. It was a feeling he’d always needed to balance with a disdain for Isaac. There was only so much a man like Henry could give up.

The money Isaac had stolen had not been mentioned in several days and regarding Isaac’s second disappearance, all her father would say about it was he’ll be back soon enough. Somehow this made her certain that Isaac was not coming back, now or ever.

* * *

Outside the Charleroi hospital she waited in the sun, high up on the hill, looking out over the town, the immense cemetery across the river that occupied the entire hillside, stretching on as far as she could see. The cemetery seemed bigger than the town. She felt a surge of guilt.

But Isaac had stayed here of his own volition. That was the only explanation she could think of—he’d visited her in New Haven once, it seemed to have gone well, he’d even gotten a sort of patron there, her ex- boyfriend Todd Hughes, who had offered to help Isaac with his application and asked after him a half dozen times afterward. But Isaac had never taken her up on her offers of further visits, and finally she had stopped offering. Maybe it had put a certain pressure on him, visiting like that. She had not visited a single college, not trusting her own judgment at the time, which she guessed was provincial. And it was, she thought now. It really was better to not visit, to go by reputation. At seventeen, you’d pick a school based on the nice architecture, or that a professor had smiled at you, or that your best friend was going there—you made choices based on feelings, which were bound, especially at that age, to be arbitrary and ill- informed and rooted mostly in insecurity.

Still, she couldn’t make sense of Isaac’s choice to remain in Buell. He didn’t respect their father; his disdain for Henry precisely mirrored Henry’s disdain for him. But there seemed to be some contract between them that she did not understand, one Isaac seemed unwilling to break. Henry, though weakening, could shop for himself, drive the car with the hand controls, cook, clean, and bathe himself. Of course it was not safe for him to live alone—if there had been a fire or something. But the Mon Valley had an aging population and finding an inexpensive caregiver would have been easy—it seemed to her that if Isaac had gotten into a good college, Henry, out of pride, would have been forced to let him go. But Isaac had not done that. Maybe he had wanted to be released, instead of having to bully his way out. Or he had wanted to leave with Henry’s respect, and thought that looking after him all these years would earn him that. Not knowing that it would more likely have the opposite effect—that it would be difficult for a man, especially a man like Henry English, to respect anyone who amplified his feeling of helplessness. And eventually Isaac had figured this out, had been so desperate that he’d stolen the money from Henry, therainy-dayfund, Henry called it, the cash he kept hidden away to soothe his worry that his bank might fail, or that the country itself might fail. And now…

She sat down on the curb and smoothed her skirt and looked out over the Valley again: though she was sitting in an asphalt parking lot, around her the trees were all popping with spring and it was a pleasant view. In fact there were very few places in the Valley that did not offer a pleasant view; this had always been true, even when the mills ran. The terrain was interesting and it was very green, everywhere it was just little houses terraced up and down the hillsides, the mills and factories in the few flat areas along the river, like the pictures of medieval towns from school-books—this is where the people lived, and this is where they worked. Entire lives visible in the landscape.