“It’s cold out here,” Sam says, “let’s go to the Mill.”
Sitting up, she cocks her head at him.
“Unless you don’t want to,” he amends.
“No,” she says and it takes him a few seconds to understand she means the opposite. “Have to go back sometime.”
The padlock’s on the ground, rusting. Here too, there is evidence of passage, the patch of damp ground in front of the door churned up.
“Winos,” she says. “Oh well, I suppose it’s better than them freezing to death.”
Inside the Mill is the familiar sink of cold, and the stench of things gone sour. Sam flicks the switch and the floods come on, shedding a sad light on the cavernous vault of the room. The hoop draws its gallows loop upon the ragged brick wall.
Deanie wrinkles her nose at the smell of the place. Raw human waste, somewhere around.
He grasps her by the elbows as she steps in front of him and holds her back. “Let me go first. There’s any bums camping out here, I don’t want them scaring the piss out of you.”
While he goes to look into the watchman’s cubby, she scuffs her feet on the floor.
“Shoulda brought a ball,” she says.
“Your old one’s still here if nobody took it.”
But she goes back to her loose stone by the door and he hears the suck of the lid coming off the tin candle box.
Their flop’s been used for sure. There is a strew of garbage—a broken beer bottle, empty canned heat tins, butts. There’s a dirty blanket crumpled on the mattress. The heater’s still there—probably kept whoever’s camped here from pneumonia, if not death. The ball is gone.
Sam backs out as Deanie catches up with him. “Ball’s gone. Nobody in there but somebody’s definitely been around. Probably out boozing now.”
They look at each other, reading the same thought in each other’s faces. It’s not their place anymore, just a hole in the wall that some bum is flopping in. If either of them had any urge for nostalgic lovemaking, it’s dead now.
Sam takes her hand. “Come on, I want to look around.”
Lighting candle stubs from the button box, they wander the empty spaces again, the rooms where something went on, some process, now obsolete and forgotten, that once consumed the hours and days and years of the workers and rendered up something of value to someone. Perhaps because they walk in the wavering, liquid candlelight, it’s creepier than Sam remembers, with small sounds at the edge of hearing, as if ghosts are stirring. Rats, no doubt, vermin, pigeons living their verminous lives, and the structure itself that even in its long death continues to breathe like the brain-dead. The smell of the burning candles makes a peculiar, churchy incense that he thinks he will never forget for the rest of his life.
Toe to heel, they pace the length of the old power train and again Sam is entranced with the massive dinosaur bones of the ancient machine. From underneath, the draft from the Millrace carries more than chill; there is a chortle of running water under the thinning ice, and with it a sharp, metallic odor, as if the water were rusty.
At the foot of the tower, they find several steps collapsed with rot less than halfway to the first landing. It occurs to Sam the chance to view the town from the vantage of the tower may have passed irrevocably. All at once, he wants to restore the Mill and for a moment the fantasies flower gorgeously in his head.
Back in the main hall they pinch out their candle-flames. By the floodlights the naked hoop looks so melancholy, he feels an idiot again for trying to make something here for her. The more he stares at it, the stupider it seems. Against the brick wall, it looks like something in a prison yard. When he looks back for her, she’s gone.
He spins all around, panic turning the air to broken glass in his lungs. Then the ropes whisper and she giggles from above him. He spots her halfway up to the beams.
“Oh shit,” he sighs.
She skinnies up the rope with a monkey agility that makes him tired. On the beam she toes along it a ways, sinks to her haunches and takes a baggie from her sleeve. She waggles it at him. “Come on up and have a toke, you tight-assed goon.”
Sam closes his eyes for a long moment. The rustlings overhead inform him she is spreading a paper, spilling the shit onto it, rolling it up.
“Where’d you get that shit?” he asks.
From that tin box, maybe, or some other hole in the wall. She doesn’t answer, not that it matters.
“I don’t like this,” he calls up to her. “It’s a step backward. It isn’t going to change anything, Deanie.”
“Right. Not a frigging thing. So haul ass up here, ‘god, and let’s see if this shit still has some life to it.”
She’s gonna kill him, he glooms. If he goes up there, he’s a dead man. He finds the end of the line and tugs at it. It’s hung here another winter. Christ knows how much more rotten it may be. Probably got just enough climb in it for a bald witch to scoot up it and now it’s ready to snap at the next two hundred forty pounds of mouthbreather. He squints up at her; she sucks on the doob and jumps her eyebrows in a Groucho moue at him. The smoke drifts down to him and prickles the inside of his nose. He wraps the line around his throat, cocks his head to one side, bugs his eyes and lets his tongue hang out and she laughs as if he had her in a deadlock and was tickling her.
Unwinding it, he thrusts himself up onto it, feels it take his weight, and proceeds,
