Lost River Read online

  One last day.

  Quiet.

  Peaceful.

  And not a goddamn care in the world.

  DILLON

  Dillon Mackey hits his first home run ever, just as his mama, Kara, drops dead in the bleachers.

  The ball stays aloft in the hot, heavy air . . . spinning, spinning, spinning . . . even as Kara’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, Duane Scheel, falls out right after her.

  Looking on, you might think Duane’s reaching for Kara—a gentle, almost protective gesture—but you’d be wrong. There’s never been anything gentle or protective about Duane Scheel. In and out of Big Sandy RDC since he was sixteen, he once beat a man senseless with a McDermott pool cue.

  Once put a blue steel thirty-eight revolver against a Pakistani’s jaw in a liquor store holdup when he was barely fourteen, and that was ten years ago.

  Now tall, thin, wasted, he doesn’t look his age but a hell of a lot older. Nothing much left of him at all, a hastily scrawled stick figure, all right angles and sharp edges.

  A Punch doll, a bad joke.

  So when he tumbles off the rusty bleachers it’s like someone’s cut all his strings. He goes slack and silly, lifeless and limp, and falls forward with hardly a sound.

  * * *

  —

  Dillon’s rounding first, heading to second, smiling and laughing and raising his arms to the sky and happy for the first time in a long time—least since his real daddy, Ronnie, ran them over to that catfish place in Catlettsburg before he went back up to the corrections for a spell—when Junior Heck’s mama, Tanya, starts hollerin’ loud like a big ole fire truck.

  Dillon passes second, slowing down now and the game long forgotten, as mamas and daddies pull away from the bleachers, a few even runnin’ low and covering their heads ’cause they think it’s a shooting. Eleven-year-old Dillon knows all there is to know about that, what to do if someone angry or strung out or just plum crazy ever bursts into Angel Middle. How you hide when you first hear gunshots. But soon as Tanya Heck started up her hollerin’, Dillon already knew it weren’t caused by no crack of a hunting rifle, no shotgun blast.

  Most of them mamas and daddies have figured that out too, calmly looking for their kids, rounding them up with waving arms.

  But some others are just standing around, wrapped up in cigarette or vape smoke, staring down, embarrassed, at something lying on the ground.

  Dillon takes one last look back over the left-field fence to see if his ball’s still flying high, or maybe rolling instead all the way down to the water’s edge at the Fork, but there’s nothing. That ball, and so many other things the boy can’t put a name to, lost forever in the deepening dusk, where fireflies pop here and there like campfire sparks, like that one time he and his daddy camped down at Yatesville Lake, and what a fire that was. It was summer then too and way too hot, but his daddy helped him build it up bigger anyway, feeding it every piece of hickory or black cherry they could find, sitting as close as they dared, his daddy hanging one arm over his shoulder like they were good buddies. They burned hot dogs pitch-black but ate ’em anyway, then laid side by side beneath the whited-out stars as his daddy told him stories about the mines and even further back than that, when he was only Dillon’s age.

  The boy can’t remember much of those stories now but still remembers his daddy’s hand on his, the warmth of it and the weight of things passed down to him, still gently pressing there.

  Dillon never makes third.

  He slows down and finally stops altogether between the bases, hands still raised like he’s asking a question that’s got no answer.

  Then he starts up again, shuffling past the pitcher’s mound to see for himself what all the damn fuss is about.

  * * *

  —

  He’s always been fine with Duane whuppin’ up on him, but not his mama.

  When it happens, and it happens way too much, he knows just how it feels to get angry or crazy enough to shoot up a school full of little kids who didn’t do nothin’ to no one or burn this whole damn town down.

  His whole world.

  Duane’s no good and it’s all just partyin’ and fightin’ now anyway that his real daddy’s gone. This past winter his mama forgot to pay the electric for two whole months, and Dillon had to sleep wrapped up in one of his daddy’s old coats but didn’t mind so much ’cause it still smelled like him, like cigarettes and beer and aftershave, safe and familiar. He found some old oak leaves and chewing-gum foil in one pocket, two white pills he sold to Junior Heck in the other, and hidden in the lining a never-used Bluegrass Blowout ticket that he still holds on to and believes is worth a hundred or maybe even a million dollars. So much money he can’t even guess what it might be, but he’s afraid to scratch it off and see, ’cause if he’s wrong, it’s like he’s done scratched away the last bit of something good in his life.

  So he just carries that stupid worthless ticket around all the time. Holds it tight the same way his daddy held his hand ’round that campfire and the way he tries to hold on to his daddy’s stories and the flickering, fading memories of his face.

  ’Cause as young as he is, he already knows just how easy it is to forget.

  Like when his mama’s hurtin’ and hard on her medicine and she damn near forgets him, even though she tells him all the time he looks just like his daddy, so much so it makes her cry. But his face don’t mean much to her when she’s sick like that, when the hurt is so bad she can’t remember anything else, whispering how she needs that medicine . . . needs it so bad, baby . . . ’cause that pain’s like a toothache and a stomachache and a headache and a whole lotta heartache all at the same time.

  It’s endless.

  She needs it something fierce . . . and that means she sometimes needs a peckerwood like Duane to get it for her. She calls Duane Doctor like it’s a joke and they all have a good laugh at that—good ol’ Doc Duane, who never even finished high school.

  But other times his mama goes alone to see Little Paris.

  Everyone calls him the main man . . . a badass motherfucker . . . and she’s always cryin’ after, ’cause he’s worse than all the others who’ve ever come around. Worse than Duane and even that Jerry Dix, who wasn’t all that bad, all things considered. He used to high-five Dillon and laugh this goofy cartoon hi-yuck and say stuff like Call me Jere, little bear, just like they were friends, best buddies. And sometimes when his mama was all partied out, Jere used to sit on the porch with him and share a Marlboro, watching winter stars through the trees.

  Jere could even name two or three of ’em, which was more than his daddy could do, until his mama told him that Jere got sideways with Little Paris, so Dillon figures he ain’t laughin’ now, not ever again.

  But on the rare day when his mama’s not on her medicine, when she’s clear and her eyes shine bright as those stars, bright as that burning campfire, she can be so sweet and gentle it makes him cry, which ain’t no grown-up thing to do, although Dillon’s watched his mama cry plenty.

  A day just like today, when his mama finally felt good enough to come watch him play for the first time this summer and even put on some of that Avon and brushed her hair and found herself some clean clothes and promised him today was a new day, just another one of a hundred or million promises that’ll never come to anything but somehow still mean everything, a million more lies this boy will always and forever be willing to believe and forgive, ’cause his mama was awake and present and calling him baby and he was gonna get in this one good day with her.

  Until Duane had showed up stinking of beer and smoke and said he’d done got his hands on some of that new Glasser medicine everyone wants, everyone’s been going on about, so why don’t he just come on along for the ride and share a little taste?

  But at least his mama held his hand crossing the gravel lot before the game.

  Held on to him.

/>   With that peckerwood Duane trailing a few steps behind, wobbly and barely there, drifting sideways like his cigarette smoke.

  * * *

  —

  Dillon doesn’t even get to where the dirt infield turns to grass before Tanya, her own thick Avon a fresh mess, runs out onto the field, flabby arms wide—

  “Oh, Dillon, honey, you don’t wanna see this.”

  She goes to wrap him up in those arms even as he pushes past her, but she grabs at him again . . . calling him honey, baby . . . just like his mama does . . . just like his mama . . . and that’s when he knows it’s gonna be bad.

  You don’t wanna see this . . .

  Real bad . . . worse than funny Jere probably takin’ a bullet to the head or his daddy goin’ up to the corrections or Duane whuppin’ up on his mama and leavin’ him with his own bruises.

  Like a toothache and a stomachache and a headache and a whole lotta heartache all at the same time.

  It’s gonna hurt worse than all those things for a long, long time.

  That’s when Dillon Mackey starts running again.

  Cryin’ all the world for his mama.

  TREY

  1

  Kara Grace comes back to life.

  Trey used to think that was a miracle but he’s not so damn sure anymore.

  Dobie holds her head off the grass, hands tangled in her flaxen hair, tossing the spent Narcan aside. She needed only two hits and some oxygen to bring her back from the dead and no chest compressions at all.

  Not too bad, all things considered.

  Kara blinks, spits, then nearly throws up. She sucks in air slow like she’s sipping out of a straw and starts breathing again with a bang and rattle, a cold truck engine turning over.

  Her eyes are blown wide, but it’s hard to know what they’re seeing, and they shine with bright, fresh tears.

  Alive.

  Dobie says quietly to no one in particular—

  “She’s going to be all right. All right.”

  Trey’s not so damn sure about that, either.

  2

  There are no miracles for Duane Scheel.

  He stays dead right where he fell beneath the bleachers as Little League kids and parents gawk at him. Plenty have seen a dead body before, so it’s no big deal, not really. Even straight-up funny to some, because Scheel pissed all over himself. They smell it and make little effort to pretend they don’t.

  A few snap pictures or run a minute of video. Trey worries how he’ll look on Instagram or Facebook or Snapchat or whatever—professional, serious? Adult. He should have gotten his hair cut a month ago but wonders if he’ll even be in focus at all.

  Just another shadow lurking in the back, looking at the ground.

  All anyone cares about is the body anyway.

  The dead are always the real stars of the show.

  * * *

  —

  Dead Duane’s no loss for Angel, Kentucky.

  Trey didn’t know Scheel enough to say hi but knew all about him: a miserable piece of shit running around with the Glassers and only worth crossing the street to avoid. He was bad news, contagious like someone sick, like all the Glassers and their kin. But Trey does know Kara Grace a little. They both went to Lawrence County High, although she’s several years older. He’s seen her driving around town with her son—Dale? Dalton?—who’s now wrapped up tight in the arms of Tanya Heck, fighting to hold him back while Dobie works on his mom. Kara must have had him when she was, what, fifteen, sixteen? Trey can only guess at the boy’s age, but he’s already taller than her, even if he weighs only a few pounds more.

  Kara is frail, made of paper. The boy is all dirty arms and legs and angry intensity, refusing to let her out of his sight.

  He breathes right along with her, breathing for her, willing her to stand up and be okay.

  Trey could go over and put a hand on his shoulder, lie to him that it’s going to be all right, just fine, the way Dobie did, the way Dobie always does. But Trey thinks it’s better to just tell it straight, how it’s not fine and not likely to ever get any better and how the kid’s probably staring at the rest of his life laid out there on the grass; how he’s always going to carry his mother’s burdens.

  She’ll forever be a heavy weight on his chest, on his heart.

  Some fucking miracle that is.

  But Dobie’s already snapping to get Trey’s attention, telling him to wait with Kara so he can take another look at Duane.

  Dobie slides over, politely asking the crowd to move back and give him some room, but the circle’s drifting away anyway. Phones flick off one after another, show’s all over. Angel PD will roll up soon and no one wants to answer questions about what’s happened here or what they saw. No one wants their name in a report and no one ever knows anything anyway and no one cares.

  They all just want to get on home.

  Dobie gently rolls Duane over and checks the dead man’s pulse a second, even a third, time. Duane must have taken a bigger hit than Kara, maybe twice as much, although he also barely weighs more than she does. Both look like hell froze over . . . and neither are going to show up well on YouTube or the local news.

  Like Kara’s, Duane’s eyes are open, too.

  Dead but still fucking staring.

  What are you seeing now?

  Trey kneels next to Kara to steady her, grabbing her hand in his own, an intimate gesture with a girl he barely knows.

  He runs his other hand along her bare arms, tracing the tracks beneath his gloved fingers, all the tiny lesions and the tender, delicate bruises. Those pinprick holes that run along her wasted veins and the hollow places where the flesh has fallen through, that she tried so hard to hide today with makeup, a dusty foundation even thicker than Tanya Heck’s Walgreens warpaint.

  The last few years of Kara Grace’s life written all over her skin.

  Trey scans the ground for a needle, but Kara’s suddenly awake now, alert and squeezing his hand, even though there’s no strength behind it. Like holding hands with a fucking ghost.

  She asks if Duane’s okay. If she’s dead already—

  Am I finally in Heaven?

  And with her son looking on and staring hard at them both, Trey can’t do anything but lie, and tells her it’s going to be all right.

  You’re fine, Kara, just fine.

  Not Heaven, he says, but you’re still alive, right here in Angel. And I guess that’ll have to do.

  And although she didn’t even bother to ask, he also tells her that her boy’s right here waiting for her.

  3

  Duck Andrews, the Angel PD uniform who shows up, parks his quiet cruiser behind the van.

  Zero hurry, not even bothering with lights and sirens.

  Everyone calls him “Duck” because of his weird, left-leaning waddle, and although Trey’s dad worked with him for a time, Trey doesn’t know the man’s real name, either.

  “Duck” was about the nicest thing his dad ever called him.

  Now he walks over with a spit cup in hand—looks like he had DQ for dinner—and stands over Trey and Dobie, watching intently but not offering any help.

  He blinks at Trey once, sizing him up, then ignores him.

  “What we got, Dob?”

  Dobie gets off his knees, rubbing his gloved hands on his pants. The purple nitrile dusts him with powder like Kara’s makeup.

  “One cold, the other lukewarm.” That’s nothing like the way Dobie normally talks, but he’s playing tough for Duck, and Trey wonders why he even bothers. Duck is never going to think he’s tough, is never going to think anything nice about him at all. “I gave her the usual. She’ll be okay in a bit.”

  The usual is four milligrams of Narcan per hit, enough to bring an OD back from the edge, but not so much that it kicks their high completely out from under them. Dobie’
s taught him that if you pull them back too hard, too fast, they wake up pissed and already in withdrawal, eager to fight.

  Dobie turns to Trey, permanent charcoal circles under pale blue eyes. He’s tired, always tired. Unmarried, no kids, Dobie stays up alone late watching shitty satellite TV or reading weird books, history no one cares about anymore. Dobie believes in aliens and ghosts and Bigfoot and admitted to Trey he’s had serious trouble sleeping ever since he was twelve, when hooded men burst into his family’s trailer in Fallsburg. The whole thing made the papers across three states then, big news before Trey was even born, and it’s still possible to find those black-and-white photos of a young Dobie, the only survivor, sitting in the back of an Angel PD cruiser, his scared face caught in a sudden flash.

  Dobie asks Trey, “What did you say her name was?”

  “Kara. Kara Grace.”

  Tanya Heck, hearing the name, calls over—

  “Kara was married to that Ronnie Mackey. You know Ronnie, Delia’s boy from down the way? He’s up at Big Sandy RDC for a spell again. This here is his boy, Dillon.”

  She pushes Dillon Mackey forward like she’s presenting him for some grand award, and Duck considers the boy before looking past him, out past the bridge, past the gathering night.

  Park lights are coming up now, bats circling. It’s humid, still pushing eighty, and damp circles are already widening under Duck’s armpits. The uncertain sky is low and close, holding its breath, threatening rain, and maybe Duck is searching somewhere out there for distant lightning.

  Or maybe, like Trey, he’s just wishing he was anywhere but here.

  Duck watches as the knots of other parents and kids make their way to their trucks, heading home. He doesn’t even bother trying to call them back over.