The Deluge, page 34
Love was a funny thing. You never thought you believed in it or that you’d find it or rather that it would find you. But Raquel treated you like you had some kind of value. When she came back from the clinic and told you she was pregnant, you thought of fleeing. At least it crossed your mind. The problem being there was nowhere to go. Your only people were in Dayton, and mostly they wanted nothing to do with you. You had no money. No way to get any. You’d be living under bridges if you tried to run.
“I’ll get rid of it if you want. I done it before,” Raquel said. You put your eyes in your hands. Of course, you thought of Claire Ann. She’d given up trying to get money out of you. You also knew who Raquel’s other gotten-rid-of-babies probably belonged to. Raquel had been living with an older man since she was a girl. She’d finally run away. “But maybe we should keep it,” she went on. “I mean, maybe this is a chance for us to get clean, get turned around, you know?”
“Turned around to what?” you asked bitterly.
She shrugged one shoulder, a limp, defeated movement. “I dunno. We get off junk. We get a place. Get a name for our baby. Maybe get married someday.”
“Sounds so simple.” You immediately regretted your tone. You could see the choke of tears in her eyes. Why did you have to be like this? Why did everything have to be like this? You took her in your arms but suddenly you were crying too.
You got through rehab somehow. You called your mom for the first time in years and told her what was happening. You told her you were going to be a father this time, and you were going to get clean. She wished you luck but clearly didn’t believe it. Raquel found a place in Zanesville that wasn’t like other rehab centers you’d drifted in and out of. Right in the middle of the city’s busted downtown was this brand-new complex with a garden the size of a farm and a park beside it. There were weird kites tethered to the building and way up in the sky, you could see little propellers whirring, some kind of portable wind turbines you’re told, along with solar panels that look like sunflowers sprouting from the ground. A mural of blue fire as you walked inside and a separate in-take office for the addicts. (It said above the door, bizarrely: WE’RE HERE TO HELP. DON’T WORRY, YOU DON’T HAVE TO BELIEVE IN CLIMATE CHANGE.) They started you and Raquel on a prescription and meetings. Later, they helped her out with job placement. Tougher for you because you’re a felon. It hurt to get sober, but you do it. Or at least you mostly do it. You haven’t touched an opiate for over two years.
Casey appears around the corner of Kroger’s breakfast aisle.
“Thought you was off today,” you tell him. Casey keeps getting fatter while also buying pants even bigger, and he never remembers a belt. He walks toward you hoisting them up every other step.
“I was. Julian called me in. Yo, you hear about Levi’s girl, Missy?” Levi Basset was a guy you two were friendly with. You, Casey, Levi, and Dick Underwood sometimes bowled or got beers when you had a night to spare. Now that you’d had all this time off junk, you were starting to remember what it’s like to have friends.
“Yeah man, she’s in the hospital. Her trailer got tipped last night in the storm.”
“No shit?”
“Broke both legs and her collarbone. Trailer’s totally trashed too, I guess.”
“That sucks a fat one.”
“You guys come through okay?”
“Yeah, didn’t touch us. Course Toby went fucking ballistic. He can’t sleep through that shit, so I can’t sleep through that shit. Saw this lightning come down—holy fuck. Now power’s out, of course.”
“Whole town’s out. They’re saying it’ll be back tonight.” He lifts his Kroger ballcap and scratches what gruel remains of his hair. “We didn’t even get the worst, all the tornadoes missed us. Near two hundred people dead or missing to the south, not to mention Indiana and West Virginia.”
“We still bowling tomorrow?”
“If it’s open.”
“Guys.” Julian appeared in the aisle. You hate this face of his, this exaggerated exasperation. He points to his watch. “My time. Not your time. We’re swamped here.” He says this so a dozen shoppers piling the last of the Lucky Charms into their carts can hear. Trying to embarrass you. To prove he’s the alpha in his stupid fucking grocery kingdom.
“Yep,” said Casey. “Just had a question for Keep.” Then to you, “I’ll see ya.”
You go back to unloading cereal boxes for $9.74 an hour.
When the rehab folks got Raquel her job at the McDonald’s, you still had only the one connection and asked Casey to set you up at Kroger. He was wary of getting burned after you worked your ass off to get that power plant job only to fuck it up. Raquel got enrolled in Medicaid and food stamps. You couldn’t get either because of your record and had to pretend you didn’t live with your family when the government came around. This also proved a problem in finding work. Your eyes went numb filling out applications, and no one ever called. You just marched to the blood bank twice a week to get your $35. You went back to Tawrny, explaining that you’d gotten clean, but all he said was, “Still can’t have you around product, kid. Glad to hear you’re doing well, though.”
You kept on Casey, and finally it paid off. Kroger fired a whole slew of people because they’d been talking with an organizer from the UFCW. The unions were suddenly flexing everywhere, encouraging wildcat strikes and other disruptions. The bosses were fighting back with companies that rooted around in your social media or whatever. Even talking union could get you blacklisted from every job in town. Good news was, suddenly, Kroger needed a lot of new workers. Casey got you an interview, and Julian barely glanced at the explanation of your incarceration. “I’ll start you part-time, fifteen hours a week, and if you’re on time and a hard worker, I’ll up your hours. Sound fair?”
You couldn’t believe how happy you were about this. You shook Julian’s hand and thanked him profusely. Raquel helped you celebrate that night by baking a lemon meringue pie.
You work from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. The store’s a madhouse. The ongoing argument between Coshocton and the summer storms has given the whole town the feeling of a battered wife. It feels like every last resident is there, elbowing each other for bologna and beans. You have to settle a dispute between two women who think they were first to the last container of hummus. You go home and find Raquel feeding Toby. Thankfully, the power is back. The previous outage lasted two days.
“Landlord called,” she says. “She say we need the rent.”
You think of your car, a junker Prius making a troublesome noise. You’re up to twenty-eight hours a week, just enough so that Julian doesn’t have to make you full-time. You think of how you and Raquel can’t get married because with your shit car, the two of you will have too many assets for the Medicaid. You think of how Medicaid doesn’t cover eyeglasses more than once every three years, so Raquel has to squint when she drives and can never read road signs.
“Can’t make miracles,” you tell her. “Get my check when I get my check.”
* * *
Church the next day. Toby always fusses through it, but Raquel insists. Even when you and her were in the depths of your junkie lives, she always found a day of the week to go. It’s not exactly a Black church, and it’s not exactly a wetback church. There are at least enough white people there that you don’t feel too fish out of water. It’s just you’d rather be doing anything else. She doesn’t ask much of you, though, and this keeps the peace at home. The minister natters on about resilience and forgiveness.
“These storms are not God’s reckoning. Don’t go down that old road. Some folks like to blame every hard rain and earthquake and fire on God, but the Lord isn’t that kind of thinker. These are common tests like everything else. Tests of our humanity and our faith.”
The church has a charity drive going for the families of the people who’d been killed by the summer storms. Raquel slips a five-dollar bill into the greasy collection plate, and you feel that money leave you and your family like the skin you lose after scraping a leg.
On your way out, the minister, a hardy old spic who doesn’t sound like a spic, stops you. “We still got a date, don’t we, Keeper? You let me know.”
“Will do,” you mutter. He wants to save you. You figure he needs your family because now half of every church congregation in the county stays home on Sundays to watch The Pastor yip and cavort around in VR. The rev needs the families who can’t afford sets. Eventually, you’ll let him do it just to shut him up but putting him off is fine too.
On the drive home, you pass a crew sawing a felled tree into more manageable pieces, sawdust misting around an orange-jacketed worker. While you wait to get the SLOW instead of the STOP, your phone vibrates. To your surprise it’s Tawrny. He wants to know if you’ve got a second to talk that afternoon.
One-handed, you text him back and ask him about what.
Might have an opportunity for you, he writes.
You can’t tell Raquel that you’re going to see Tawrny because there’s only one kind of work the man has, so you make up an excuse about Casey potentially having a line on a handyman gig.
“You didn’t say nothing about that,” says Raquel, but not with suspicion. Hope.
“Didn’t want to make a deal of it, ’less it turned into something. Shouldn’t take long. I’ll be back by dinner.”
* * *
On the way out to Cassingham Hollow, you pass the house with vinyl siding the sunny color of Raquel’s lemon meringue, only to see that the roof collapsed in the storm. Now the family has all its belongings on the lawn. They squat in their possessions like exhausted hobos, confused. Like they can’t find a missing couch.
Pulling up to Tawrny’s Queen Anne, you expect to find him on the porch smoking, but instead, he opens the screen door and gestures you inside. He’s never let you through the door before. He’s grown his goatee into a full white beard, which makes him look like Truck Stop Santa. He shakes your hand.
“How you hanging in, Keeper?”
“Good, T. Good as can be expected.”
He leads you to an old oak table in the kitchen.
“You getting through these storms all right?” His voice is still gruff, flinty.
“We been lucky. We don’t got any trees too near the house, but I’m sure as hell losing sleep over ’em.”
“Yeah, we had a tree come down.” He motions with his cigarette hand, sort of waving the yellowed digits to the back of the house. “Just sorta glanced off the roof, but goddamn if it didn’t sound like the whole fucking thing was caving in. Bets ain’t doing too well, so she about lost her mind. Made me make up a bed for her in the basement.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“You know what this reminds me of? I’m watching this old show about the blitzkrieg in World War Two when Hitler was trying to bomb Britain into submission. And they got some of the survivors talking on it. What it was like to worry every night about a bomb coming down on your house. The way they talked reminded me of these storms.”
“Huh.” You nod. You don’t want to look too impatient for him to get to the point.
“Maybe that sounds like an exaggeration but this last one killed damn near three hundred people when you count all the tornadoes and flooding and wind.” He takes from his jeans an old pocket watch, the glass murky, the hands still, and begins twisting the top to set it. “So the grapevine comes down saying you got clean.”
You nod again. “Over two years now,” you exaggerate. Without mentioning that this clean still lets you get down on a Budweiser or the occasional can of hairspray.
“Hell, boy, that’s impressive. Seen many a man that looked tougher’n you fail abjectly at such a project.”
“I swear, I’m good, T. I’ll carry product. I’ll sell. It might be tough for me to straw buy ’cause of my record, but whatever you need.”
Tawrny twists and twists the crown of the pocket watch. He relaxes back into his chair to the tortured squeaking of the wood.
“Not that kind of job. One-off gig.”
Disappointed, you try to keep your eagerness, your sobriety, on display.
“You used to work at Tuscarawas power plant, correct?”
“That’s right.”
He sucks on his teeth. He releases the crown, and the watch ticks satisfactorily.
“I got a guy—he’s willing to pay a nice chunk of change for some information regarding the security concerns there. Told him I could get him that information.”
You’re confused. “Okay…”
“You understand the conversation we’re having, Keeper.” His eyebrows arch. “This don’t go beyond us. This is the kinda thing you keep under your hat.”
“Course. What do you need?”
“Say you wanted to break into that facility. How would you go about that? From what I understand there’s a fence surrounding the property. And then a thumbprint scanner to the front door.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“You don’t have access anymore, do you?”
“Nah, they woulda dumped me from the system first thing.”
“And there’s only that one way to get to the plant?”
“Well, sure, to get inside the building, but to get in the perimeter, inside the fence, there’s actually an access road that comes in from the back. I s’pose if you wanted to just sneak onto the property, all that’s on that gate is a dinky padlock with a punch code.”
You have no idea why anyone would want to break into the Tuscarawas power plant, but you’re unbothered by the mystery.
“And what’s that code?”
You cross your arms. “C’mon, man, I ain’t just giving away all this. You told me you had a job for me. I got a kid now, brother. Tell me what you’re paying.”
“Think they’ve made any security upgrades since your termination?”
You fart with your lips and repeat what you’ve heard Casey say. “Ohio Valley Power ain’t sinking a dime more into that place. As soon as the fucking Democrats get their way, that place is getting shut down.”
Tawrny nods. He looks pleased. He has an ageless quality, a survivor’s ferocity. Whatever he needed this information for, it’s no oddball favor.
“Tell you what. You give me that code and you give me the time when that fence ain’t being watched, I’ll give you half of what this guy’s paying me.”
“How much is that?”
He hesitates. “Two grand.”
Your head buzzes from the number and the notions of what you could do with that money: a couple months of rent, baby food, clothes, eyeglasses, repairs to the house, to the car, a new microwave. The possibilities bloom and recede, bloom and recede.
“Tawrny, man, if you’re paying two grand, I’ll get the shift changes, I’ll draw you a map, I’ll get the code—whatever you need.”
Tawrny nods. “Got yourself a deal then, Keeper. Just a little information and that money’ll be as good as in your pocket.”
* * *
You take the next two days to make sure you get everything right. You tell Raquel that Casey hooked you up with the gig. Just some basic masonry work for a couple of rich farmers, you lie. You park out on Route 273 and hoof it down the access road past the tailing pond of the Tuscarawas plant. Squatting in the dark underbrush, you snack on Fritos. The smokestacks glitter in the night. Twin stars blinking from the top of each stack, that orange rocket-fuel color of the lights washing over the water. The shift changes over exactly as you remember. One group of hard-hatted workers slinks in, and soon after, another slinks out. Then quiet. You sidle up to the fence and see a camera perched over the road, and it’s more than you could’ve hoped for: nothing’s changed. Because the camera’s angle is fixed, you approach it from the left, climb a bit of fence, and drape an opaque plastic bag over the lens. No one would think twice about the wind landing it there. You try the lock, and it’s still the same code: 1-9-8-5, the year of the plant’s commission.
You hand over all the information to Tawrny, and as promised he puts a stack of bills in front of you.
“Don’t go telling your woman where it came from.”
“Course. I may be an ex-addict, but I ain’t retarded.”
You already have your plan: Pay this month’s rent and the next. Give Raquel $400 for baby supplies and whatever else she wants. Put $200 in the bank. Save $100 for miscellaneous spending. Blow $100 on a night out with Casey, Levi, and Dick Underwood.
“What’s this business?” A waif of an old woman appears in Tawrny’s kitchen. She is frail, emaciated, and a crumpled nightgown hangs from her skeletal frame. Tawrny moves quickly.
“Betsy, goddamnit. Back to bed.” She looks confused. Strands of white hair float away from a scalp the color of a burlap sack, and she has patches of dry skin all over her face and neck, little white lesions that look like scales. She doesn’t want to be led away, but Tawrny turns her around and moves her quickly back down the hall. The sight of her has made you ill, and when you leave, you wish greatly that you had never seen her.
* * *
You tell Raquel the extra work paid off, but you only pay one month’s rent and give her $300. A week later, you and the guys get your Saturday at the bowling alley. They got a deal on Jell-O shots—$1 each—and Levi insists you all put down three before you start bowling. From there it’s pitcher after pitcher. You bowl like shit, partly because you haven’t played in five months, mostly because you’re getting drunk really fast.
“Keeper, you roll like Obama,” Dick Underwood says. He’s in third place, then Casey, then you. Levi’s like a pro. Bowls three or four times a week by himself. Casey’s about at your level but he can hold his liquor better. You buy two rounds of tequila shots to even the field but somehow Levi bowls a 280.
