Читать книгу Roadless Homelands - Baroness Melody Von Smith - Страница 3

“Pop is dying.”

Olmstead’s sister breathed these three words through the phone in a regret-filled scratch from rainy Pennsylvania, three thousand miles away.

Olmstead stayed quiet, considered this, listened to the ocean a block outside his door. Eleven years in San Diego had spoiled him. Made him well educated, had him surfing on his lunch breaks. The town he’d grown up in had become a winter wonderland to visit every other Christmas. “Home” had forged itself into a construct propped up by happy letters and punctual holiday cards. Olmstead liked it that way. But some calls must be heeded.

“I’ll be there.”

Three days later, his red-eye flight touched down at the Pittsburgh airport, and he drove a red, rented Cavalier two hours east and north, back to Berk—both the man and the town.

Berk, Pennsylvania, offered two places to work: the cemetery and the dump. Only it wasn’t called the dump anymore, it was the Sanitary Landfill now, and it accepted trash from seven states, with two more scribbling out paperwork even as the town slept.

As Olmstead drove toward Berk the town, he thought of his father, Berkshire Burlington. His father had in fact been named after the settlement by Olmstead’s grandfather. Magnus Burlington had brought his wife and little else from Scotland and its abject poverty here to Pennsylvania, where the streets were paved not with gold, but coal. He’d made a happy life for himself and two boys.

Berk Burlington had raised his three kids in the same house he’d been raised. But coal towns wax and wane—in their opportunities, in their wealth, and in their population. Olmstead was one of three, and only his sister had stayed. Waynewright, Olmstead’s older brother, had strayed the hundred-some miles to Pittsburgh, but Olmstead, now twenty-nine, had left for California the day he’d graduated high school, fleeing both Berks.

Olmstead’s memory had preserved the town in a state of paled but charming splendor. When he’d left, flower baskets lined the sidewalks in the spring, now replaced by autumn pumpkins. He recalled all the shops, the rattling door of Trudy’s Hardware, the earthy scent of fresh cut meat at Dean’s Deli, and especially the rows of candy in glass jars on the far side of McPherson’s drugstore counter. On Saturdays, his father took him there for a malted or a sundae—just him; they’d stop and get candy for his brother and sister before they left. The ice cream, that was a little secret he’d shared with Pop.

Trudy’s lay empty, Dean’s had become an insurance office, and McPherson’s held a for-sale-or-lease sign. Olmstead sighed. But too, he admitted to himself, he felt relieved. Berk wasn’t his home. Not anymore. He turned up the car stereo, drove a little faster.

His parents’ house lay nine miles past Main Street, on sixteen acres of never-farmed land. No warning—from his sister or via posted sign, or even a harbinger trail of fugitive refrigerators—nothing alerted him to the state of the house. Later, on the flight home, it would occur to him to wonder why he hadn’t worried for the house, given the tragic fate of the town. But just then, Olmstead drove along Highway 22, singing out of tune, passing farms on the left and forest on the right.

At mile seven, the forest gave way to a spatter of bright rectangles separated by chain-link fences—the trailer park. Olmstead’s one-time best friend had lived in that trailer park, in space 80. Dillon Mohr. He wondered if Dillon lived in the park now or some place in town, if he had a wife and kids.

The park land butted up against his family’s, marked by a line of evergreens. And there it was. On the other side of the pines, stacked sideways and five tall—refrigerators. A wall of refrigerators lined up against the road, like some post-apocalyptic fort. Mostly white, but dotted with the occasional yellow and sometimes sickly green. The house sat on the top of a hill, and all the way up were neat, segregated stacks of metal. Not just fridges, but all types of appliances. Washers, dryers, stoves, dishwashers, cars!

Olmstead heard a horn and realized he’d taken his foot from the gas and now drifted, gaping at the mountain of metal. He waved an apology and brought the rented Chevy back up to speed.

Soon, he spotted the long driveway leading up to his parents’ place. But he didn’t feel ready to face his family yet. So he drove farther, looking for a different, smaller trail. The one that wrapped around the back of the house and led to the drop-off, by the mine spoils.

A stand of maples marked the far edge of the Burlington property. Half a mile before them, a lengthy tangle of blackberry bushes stretched out from the side of the road, thickening to the shrub-crowded field that had always covered the northeastern side of the property.

Olmstead brought the car to the shoulder, got out and stood peering into the thicket. He fumbled his Oakley sunglasses from the pocket of his suede shirt-jacket, squinting against the deceptively bright sun. The maples stretched stark against a gray backdrop. If he stared hard enough, though, he could make out their buds.

Wind shoved the trees around and cut through his thin suede. Shoulders hunched, he strutted toward the denuded berry bushes—just scruffy, curled sticks now, looking sad and mean as a stray dog. The bushes thinned to a clearing, almost in the center, and beyond that small gap, Olmstead could make out what had once been his trail. He shoved the red-purple arches aside and stepped through them.

Years of neglect had altered a path he once could have traversed on a cloudy midnight. But he made his way. He dodged water-filled ruts now scarring the path, glad he’d worn his chukka boots and not loafers. He and his brother used to ride dirt bikes here in the summer and snowmobiles in winter. Their father had graded it every two weeks, and rode a roller over it every six, to keep it safe for his boys.

Blackberry thorns snatched at his khakis, tore his hands, but Olmstead persevered, his childhood flooding back with each yank of fabric, each scratch dredging up a new memory. What hid back here, he wondered, buried or weathered to nothing? Did the tree house still stand? He and his brother had camped in it for three days during the flood. The safe, the first thing ever illegally dumped on the Burlington property, probably still sat mid-way down the ravine where the mining company’s land started.

Olmstead and Dillon had discovered it, and spent the two weeks of eighth grade spring break beating on it with hammers and a pickax. When it finally gave, they found nothing inside. And they hadn’t expected to, really, had made no schemes for spending the treasures. But once it had been cracked, the best friends no longer enjoyed such joint purpose. By summer, they’d both made other friends, only nodding to each other in the hallways once high school started.

The ravine appeared suddenly. Olmstead saw a gash in the landscape where the shrubs and brambles disappeared, and across the gap, only poverty grass grew. The wind coursed again and brought a foul odor from the gully, a stench reminiscent of a restaurant dumpster. When he reached the edge he discovered its source. The ravine, too, was full of junk, like his parents’ front hill. But the white goods on his parents’ lawn were sorted and salvageable. This was a true trash heap: bald tires, torn clothing, broken lamps, and—Jesus, was that a dead dog?

Olmstead trotted some steps from the edge, an arm over his face so he smelled mostly the suede of his jacket. Satisfied, he supposed. Like the town, the trail betrayed him, charring any idyllic childhood recollections that might have bound him to the place.

As he turned to head back, motion at the far end of the ravine caught his eye. A figure—no, two—emerging from the mine mouth. Two men in boots and jeans and heavy flannels. They both smoked, leaned up against the wood-framed manway. Olmstead recalled stories from his youth of trash heaps catching on fire, and the fires spreading to the mines. The coal seams could light and burn for years. His chest tightened. He should do something! See what these men wanted. They shouldn’t be in the mine; it had been closed for years. There were two of them . . . but this was his father’s land, at least some of it. He stepped back to the edge of the stinking gully.

Biting laughter flapped out of one of the men. And Olmstead fell backward in time, to a Christmas where he’d needed stitches after being stabbed with scissors, to a summer he’d been pushed off the dock in Florida before he knew how to swim, and to when he’d been shoved out of a tree—and broken his ankle—in Spring of his freshman year. Each time he’d heard that same beating laughter; pitiless—but with a lining of scared apology. It was the sound his brother always made just after doing something wrong.

Olmstead retreated. He jogged through the biting brambles, emerged from the overgrown field, bleeding and confused. In a sudden burst of panic, he craved San Diego. He rested his head against the cold metal of the car. What the hell am I doing? And then his sister’s words came back to him: “Pop is dying.”

Dying. The significance of his trip sank in. It grabbed him by the belly, and he retched by the side of the road. Gagged up soda and airplane pretzels, then dry heaved—once, twice.

When he was through, he started shivering. Pennsylvania’s chill, like his journey’s unpleasant purpose, had caught up with him. For eleven years, San Diego’s ocean cleansed and freed him. In half an hour, the mountains of his home undid all that with their claustrophobic menace. “I’m from Central Pennsylvania,” he used to threaten people. “We eat what we run over.” Now he was from Southern California, and the old joke and its threat were on him.

He yearned for the sea and the sun and the vastness of that Western sky, bad-boy blue and endless against the water. Here a mantel of gray held back the sky and its sun. As Olmstead stared into its blankness, the first few flakes of cold wet snow hit his face. He crept back into the rental, rinsed his mouth with Listerine from his overnight bag, and turned the heat up full blast.

***

Up the hill, Olmstead’s brother’s Ford pickup dominated the driveway. Waynewright had parked backwards so the Jolly Roger on the front license plate grinned out. Last Olmstead knew, Waynewright worked as an insurance adjuster in Pittsburgh during the week and came home to his wife and three kids every Friday night. In Olmstead’s opinion, the truck proved his suspicion that you can lead a hick to the city, but you can’t make him think.

He edged the rental into the space available, rocking from dips in the uneven gravel. How come Pop had never paved the damn driveway? Every year he talked about it. Olmstead had recently offered to pay for it as a Father’s Day present. Somehow it hadn’t come together.

He took a deep breath and entered the house. The side door led to the kitchen and still needed to be kicked open from the bottom.

“Olmstead!” came his sister’s happy bark. And before his boots were even off, two boys in jeans and bright jackets danced around him, circling him. “Uncle Olmstead! Uncle Olmstead’s here!” A dizzying flurry of tow-headed Joey, the smaller boy, and his darker-haired, older brother, Luke.

“Can we stay home from school?”

“Nope.” His sister pressed lunch boxes—pirates and Star Wars—into their hands and kisses their foreheads.

A dual whine echoed.

“I think maybe your Uncle is staying for more than a few hours. He just might be here when you get home.”

Joey’s face lit up. “You are?”

“You will?” Luke, the older boy, looked skeptical.

“Unless they throw me out.”

“Alright!”

Lilly snapped her fingers, pointed at the door. “Don’t miss the bus. I’m not driving you.”

“Maybe Uncle Olmstead can drive us.”

“Go!”

The boys whirlwinded out.

Olmstead gave his sister a hug, pulled her to her tip-toes.

“It’s been way too long,” she sighed. She let him go and looked him over, nodded. “You look good.”

“You, too.”

“I look fat.” She pushed her penny-red elbow-length hair into a thick pony tail, wrapping the gum-band from the bread around it.

“Those uniforms probably make everybody look fat.”

“These are new. You should have seen the old ones. Pleated pants!”

“Shouldn’t you be at work?”

“Nope. They called me off today. Found another body in the fill.”

Olmstead eyes widened. Lilly waved an arm. “What do they expect when they handle New Jersey’s garbage?” She snagged the collar of his shirt-jacket. “Gimme.”

Olmstead relinquished the jacket, wandered around the kitchen and into the living room. “Where is everybody?”

“Wayne took the day off to gallivant with Uncle Devon. The folks are at the doctor.”

“At this hour?”

Lilly turned on the faucet, called over the running water. “You know Mama. Their doc is a nut job anyhow! You can schedule a five thirty a.m. appointment with this guy!”

“Old folks’ doctor.”

“Bingo. Didja eat yet?” Her inquiry carried the unmistakable cadence of the region, with the question sounding after the second-last word: “Didja eat? Yet.” Olmstead knew he’d sound the same, without realizing it, in a matter of days. Hickish. Though, he admitted, from Lilly it sounded endearing.

He stooped to read the titles on a collection of animation DVDs. “Nope. They don’t feed you on red-eye flights.”

“Eggs? Pancakes?”

“What’d the boys have?”

“Some horrible sugary cereal that a better mom wouldn’t feed them.”

“Sounds great.”

The house showed its own signs of wear. But they were cheerful: the DVD rack replaced an old magazine stand, a child-sized desk sat where the coat rack had been. In the mudroom, tiny red and yellow boots stood in line with Pop’s black galoshes. Pop was Pap-Pap now. Olmstead knew this intellectually from letters and snapshots. Seeing all the bright children’s things in the drab house brought that fact to the inner circle of emotional truth. He smiled.

“Coffee?” called his sister.

“Please.” He made his way back to the kitchen. “You live here now.”

“Yup.”

“What happened to Dale?”

Lilly set a filled coffee cup next to the giant denim-blue bowl and box of Count Chocula. “Gone.”

“Like, left? You guys split up?”

She became interested in the acreage beyond the window. “We don’t know.”

Olmstead poured milk over his marshmallow cereal. “That’s a little . . . weird.”

Lilly joined him at the table, wrapped both hands around her own oversized blue mug. “Some weird stuff’s been going on lately. They wanna re-open the old Howser mine. The one Pop worked in?”

“Yeah?”

“You remember how crazy things got over at the foundry when we were kids? With the union, and the strike, and people’s cars vandalized and . . . stuff?”

“And their houses caught fire? Yeah, I remember.”

“Some people want this mine. Others don’t. Really don’t.” She frowned at Olmstead, her brown doe eyes questioning: did he honestly remember? “Some of the things people do to try and stop it being opened, you know? Are dangerous.”

Olmstead thought of his brother outside the mine mouth. “Like setting fires,” he said.

Lilly smiled, convinced. Took a breath like she had plenty to say, but then didn’t get to tell him anything more. The door kicked open and there came Uncle Devon, grinning like he’d won money. “Olmy! How’s my youngest nephew?”

Olmstead stood and gave his uncle a handshake to half-hug.

Lilly pointed to the muddied floor. “Boots. Boots!”

“Yeah, yeah.” He hopped back to the enclosed porch, peeled off his crusty steel-toes. “These ladies and their floors.”

Olmstead followed him, looking through the screen door for his brother. “Where’s Wayne?”

“He’s fixing some girl’s fence next door.” Devon jerked a thumb at the trailer park, pushed a length of dull, thin hair from his face. He was lean and dirty, his skin permanently grubby from the mines so that even straight from the shower he appeared suspect.

Olmstead glanced at the big black truck still in the driveway. “Did he walk there?”

“Prob’ly took the dirt bike. Or one of the four-wheelers.”

Lilly’s voice rang from the kitchen: “He oughtta leave that girl alone. He’s married and so is she.”

Devon flashed his lotto grin, displaying his two gold canines. “Wayne’s wife oughtta move down to Pittsburgh, with her husband. Where she belongs.” He tromped back into the kitchen, dug through the cupboard for a mug.

“Why?” asked Lilly. “When her husband’s chasing poontang right here in Berk?”

Devon laughed to himself. “Anyway, word over at Dew Drop says that girl’s old man moved out. He’s living in town somewhere. Somewhere classy, like above a pizza joint or something.”

Lilly’s lips pursed. She shot a sad glance at Olmstead. “That’s a damn shame.”

Olmstead sensed something he wasn’t privy to. Something ominous and ugly beyond his brother’s apparent infidelity. “I understand they want to re-open the mine,” he blurted.

Devon glared at Lilly before answering. “That’s right. Only we don’t want it.”

“Didn’t you work in the mine?” Olmstead asked.

“Right again. So we know how bad it is, me and your Pop. Was us mined it. Along with a thousand other men and a hundred kids. Eighteen inches.” He held his hands apart. “That’s what they mined down to.”

Lilly shook her head. “But this is strip mining, Dev. Nobody has to go inside anything.”

“It’s the same acid rocks poisoning the water. You wanna be the next Johnstown, where the rivers run orange? You want your kids around the blasting?”

Devon stared out at the acres of stacked trash just like Lilly had. The man’s crooked smile revealed little. Olmstead suspected his uncle looked back on those dark days much the way Olmstead recalled grad school. Long nights, impossible tests, teaching classes full of freshmen who didn’t care and whose parents threatened him regularly, topped off with the intermittent sleep-deprivation-induced hallucination. But in retrospect those years were fun, challenging. Olmstead missed them.

What did Devon see? Old miners shared the reticence of World War II vets. But sometimes they told stories. Cave-ins, explosions. Glory days.

“Town needs some real jobs,” Devon said.

Lilly sighed, sympathetic. “I think we need any jobs we can get. Even mining jobs.”

“What you kids don’t seem to recall is that Berk was a boomtown. When you were little, this place was growing faster than grass in a rainy summer. They even talked about building a college here! And the mine was already closed then. So why we need it open now?”

Lilly asked the obvious question. “If it was such a boomtown, why’d Pop start collectin’ them fridges?”

“Pop’s always had those fridges.” Olmstead gazed at them, there in the yard. “I mean . . . maybe not so many.”

“Not always. Your always maybe,” said Lilly, “but not mine or Wayne’s.”

Uncle Devon swooped a hand, finger aimed, across the vast expanse of dead cars and white goods. “Each one a’ them fridges represents fifty bucks.”

“And the washers?” Lilly demanded. “And the cars?”

A memory surfaced—Olmstead snapped his fingers. “Pop started taking stuff from people right after the foundry closed. So they wouldn’t have to pay the county to come and get it.”

“But he charged ‘em!” Devon exulted. “Charged ‘em, yes, but less than the county did, and people’s more likely to give their money to a regular working man tryin’ to make a living than to the state.” His hooded gaze found Olmstead. “That’s how your college got paid, boy.”

“That and a number of academic scholarships.”

Devon flashed his oblique smile. “You always were an ungrateful sum’bitch.”

Olmstead now gestured out the window. “Who’s gonna clean up all that crap? That’s a veritable Superfund site out there! Pop is dying; guess who’s going to foot the bill?”

Berkshire Burlington clattered through the kitchen door. “Who said Pop’s dying?” He winked at Olmstead. “Come give your old man a hug, you ungrateful sum’bitch!”

Olmstead threw his arms around his father. He sank his teeth into the flesh inside his cheek to keep from crying, dug his nails deep into his palm to keep from squeezing his Pop the way he wanted, like when he was six. And mostly, he kept his eyes closed.

Berkshire Burlington, always such a broad-shouldered barrel of a man, felt now like a broom in Olmstead’s arms. His eyes, molasses black, still sparkled with mischief, but now they did so from the depths of bruisey caverns. When he let go of his son, he leaned back on his cane.

Olmstead coughed away his grief. He couldn’t think of anything to say, had forgotten all his obligatory questions about how the surgery went and did the chemo start yet. He panicked that he might throw up again—or worse, start crying—but then he heard the grumble of one of the four-wheelers start up. Not wanting to invoke his uncle’s wrath again, he asked instead about the other absent family member. “Where’s Mom?”

“Your mother? She’s down at the women’s club. Thursdays, that’s what she does.”

Olmstead frowned at his sister. “I thought you said—”

“After Dad goes to the doctor, he drops Mom off at the club.”

Berk glanced at his daughter, then back at Olmstead. “That’s right. Drop her off on the way home.”

He clattered his way to the kitchen table with his cane and his boots. Same boots as Devon’s, Olmstead noticed, but without the steel toes. Berk left a trail of mud, but Lilly didn’t bark about it, just wiped it up after him before helping him get the clunky shoes off.

Devon filled a mug halfway with Ensure, then topped it off with coffee. Setting it in the table he asked, “You want some apricots, Berk?”

“Yeah, but I wanna walk around.” He smiled at Olmstead, who could only stare into the gray-brown mixture in Berk’s mug: his father had always taken his coffee black.

“New way of living, son,” Berk grunted, pulling himself to his feet. “It’s weird for all of us, not just you.” He waved at the table. “Why don’t you sit down. You’re making me nervous.”

Devon yapped something about a cigarette and Lilly echoed his sentiments, but regarding laundry. Suddenly Olmstead was alone with his father.

Berk paced the kitchen, clunk, shuffle, shuffle, taking a dried apricot from the counter on each pass. “Been easier to eat this way since the surgery,” he explained. “You send a lot of emails to your mom, kid. Of course I read ‘em. But why don’t you tell me about California?”

So Olmstead did. He talked about his job and his friends and how much he loved living by the ocean. The University of California at San Diego had provided him a master’s degree in computer programming, and the company that hired him straight out of college let him work hours that didn’t interfere too much with his surfing.

“We wanted to come for your graduation,” his father told him. “But Lilly was having problems, you know, she had a lump taken out of her breast.”

Olmstead’s mouth fell open and his brow knitted. “Why didn’t anybody tell me!”

“She wouldn’t let us.” Berk leaned in conspiratorially. “She’s glad you got out. Lilly wants out herself, but her husband wouldn’t leave. And now she’s stuck with me.”

His father told him other things, details that don’t make it through the filter of three thousand miles: Lilly’s older boy was dyslexic but great at math. Olmstead’s mother, who had previously refused to take so much as vitamin C, was now on a blood thinner and blood pressure medication. Devon’s root canal had gone awry, and so half his face tingled all the time.

His father finished the apricots. “Seems like I’m the healthy one, don’t it?” The man’s laughter filled any uncomfortable gaps conversation may have left. Olmstead laughed, too. It felt good. Freeing.

Suddenly Lilly was putting rolls and lunch meat—olive loaf, Lebanon bologna, and chipped-chopped ham—on the table, while Devon bitched that there wasn’t any beer. Noon already? It seemed to Olmstead that he and his father had just gotten started.

His father eased into the neighboring chair. “We’ll talk more later, don’t worry.”

Devon rinsed Berk’s mug out, put ice in it, and was filling it with tap water when a car pulled up outside, catching his attention. “Uhp. Better set another place, Lilly.” He grinned over his shoulder at Berk. “Must be noon at the O.K. Corral.”

He stood in the foyer with his hand on the doorknob, but waited until the visitor knocked.

“Well look what the cat drug in! How are ya, Officer Mohr?”

“Hiya, Mr. Burlington. I’m sorry to bother yuns at lunchtime—”

“Don’t be stupid, boy, you know you’re welcome any time.” Devon led the uniformed man through the foyer and to the table. “Besides, who makes better coffee than Lilly, huh?”

Olmstead just stared. Dillon Mohr stood—lanky and blonde and pumpkin-headed—like a snapshot from Olmstead’s memory. Except for the uniform, which he wore well and with straight-shouldered pride, Dillon could have been visiting from his mom’s trailer with a pack of bubble gum and a pocketful of frogs.

He pulled his curvy-brimmed hat off, nodded to Lilly, and shook Berk’s hand, all the while apologetically explaining his presence in the same mile-a-minute chatter he’d displayed as a child. “You probably know this already, but it was one of your neighbors that called, so the department figured they better send somebody around to tell you: there’s a fire down in the old Howser mine. Looks like it was set right on your property. So of course we need to know if you’ve seen any . . . ” He stopped and stared right back at Olmstead. “Holy shit!”

And, just like when they were kids, Lilly shooed them to the back porch, where they sat on the broad wooden steps eating chipped-chopped ham sandwiches and apples. But instead of finishing off the meal with an Astro Pop, Lilly made them coffees with honey and whipped cream. And though this reminded Olmstead of past arguments whether peanut butter was better with bananas or fluffer-nutter, the two men now spoke carefully, trying to catch up.

“I got married the summer we graduated,” Dillon reminded Olmstead. “You don’t remember?”

“I wasn’t invited.”

“I guess you were already in California. ‘Course I guess I didn’t know that when we were making out the invites . . . ” He shrugged. “I dunno why the hell you didn’t get an invitation.”

“I think we weren’t talking.”

“Aw. Aw, yeah, huh? What happened?”

“We opened an empty safe.”

Dillon nodded once. “That’s right.” He gazed toward the maples, where they’d worked over that dumped safe for ten days. “Nothing inside,” he said, pensive. A lull. Then: “Your sister’s being promoted to shift supervisor. Did she tell you?”

“Yeah, I heard. Something about landfill mining?”

“It’s new. They rework ‘em and and get the good stuff out, then I guess they can use the leftover space. Doubles the life of the fill, apparently. They put her in charge of all that.”

“Did she go back to school?” Just how much did Olmstead not know?

“Naw, I guess there’s some training program or certification? Something.” Dillon fished a circular container from his back pocket, pulled a small white pouch from it. “It’s great ‘cause it will double the crew, too, at least on first shift.” He tucked the pouch between his cheek and gum, dropping his voice. “Maybe she can even get your scruffy old uncle a job. He’s more of a problem since he quit drinking than he was when we were kids!”

Olmstead recalled his uncle’s angry quest for beer at lunch. “You sure he quit?”

“Yeah, this week. I can tell from his temper. He’s way less ornery when he falls off the wagon. Probably ‘cause when he’s sober he only hangs with Snail an’ nem. Remember Snail?”

“Moose’s cousin?”

“Yup.”

Olmstead put up a hand. “Say no more. Surprised they haven’t all shot each other.”

Dillon laughed in agreement. “So, how long you back for?”

Olmstead shrugged. “As long as it takes.”

“You in charge of your pop’s estate?”

“Cleaning all this up, you mean?”

Dillon squinted, puzzled, then guffawed. “Cleaning it up?”

Olmstead nodded, gazing out at the mountains of metal. “That’s my reaction, too.”

“No, you don’t get it. Your Uncle an’ nem bought a shredder, and hitched up with, I dunno, some company that’s separating the stuff. The government paid for the shredder, I guess so’s they’d agree to recycle the mercury? But that”—he waved a finger at the yard of junk—“that’s worth, I don’t even know. More than I’ll make in my lifetime, anyway.”

Olmsted started to laugh but stopped himself. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah! I can’t believe they didn’t tell you.”

Olmstead considered his uncle. “I can.” The thought irritated him, so he changed the subject. “You still living in the park?”

Dillon sort of scoffed. “Nope. My wife is, though, and my two little girls.”

“She got the property, huh?”

“I gave it to her.” Dillon shrugged. “I don’t hate her or nothing. We actually have a lot of fun together still. Ballgames an’ nat? We’re friends.”

Dillon was ingenuous enough for this to be a truth. “So where are you living?” Olmstead asked.

“Just moved into town. Above a pizza shop.”

Olmstead looked away. He sat next to his once-best friend thinking about how he was going to kick the shit out of his brother when he saw him, and then a stray thought spilled clear from his head out of his mouth: “Did my Pop set that fire?”

Dillon smiled but his brow creased. “Are you for real asking me this?”

Olmstead shook his head, fearing he’d just ratted out his old man.

Dillon laughed, punching Olmstead in the arm. “The whole town knows your father set them fires. Hell, three counties over they knew, before the fires even started!” He shrugged. “What are we going to do, prosecute a dying man? He won’t live through the trial. Why wreck his last days?” He shrugged again. “Not to be mean. Sorry.”

Olmstead waved the comment away.

Silence settled between them, but this time warm and comfortable, like a fire on a chilly summer night. Olmstead closed his eyes and recalled days of tadpoles and skinned knees, nights of fireflies and s’mores. He couldn’t help but smile.

Berk was now a landfill; Berkshire’s house, a dump. But years ago, when Olmstead had been raised in it, the town had been a good place to be raised. And the man had been a good father. Still was.

“Maybe it doesn’t doom us to love where we’ve come from.” This too spilled out of Olmstead’s head, and he said it to himself. But of course Dillon was there with him, to hear it.

His childhood friend shielded his eyes with a hand, looked to the trailer park where his kids were growing up that very moment. “Man, I sure hope not!”

Olmstead sat back, sipped Lilly’s sweet coffee. Glad he’d heeded the call.