American rust by Philipp Meyer Read Free Book Online Page B

time. They'll find him at the lock, hook him out with a pole. Or he'll slip by them— Old Man River, a long journey drifting. Catfish doing their work. Victim none the wiser. Roof of water, bones beneath. Judgment day he'll rise. No such thing, he thought. And not possible even if there was. Once you lost your water, most of your weight was carbon. Your molecules scattered, were used again, became atoms and particles, quarks and leptons. You borrowed from the planet which borrowed it from the universe. A short- term loan at best. In the eyeblink of a planet you were born, died, and your bones disintegrated.
    They waited until the sun went down before getting up from the rocks. Everywhere there was a bruised purple light. They heard the clicking of bats and looked up and the sky was full of them. They were several weeks early.
    “Global warming,” said Isaac.
    “You know I'm sorry, don't you?” said Poe.
    “Don't worry about it.” He began to walk through the grass and Poe followed reluctantly behind. They crossed from the darkness of the river trees to the clearing along the train tracks and back into the trees again. In the meadow they stayed hidden behind the old boxcars and the long thicket of wild rose; they were well concealed but Isaac felt his legs getting shaky. One in front of the other. Close your mind for a while. He won't smell yet. But don't look at his face. Except you'll have to—won't be able to move him without looking at his face.
    He checked back on Poe, who was grinning nervously, his skin pale and his hair flattened and damp with sweat, his hands shoved in his pockets as if trying to make himself smaller. When they came to the edge of the thicket and stopped to survey the open ground ahead, there was a smell like cat piss in the air. The smell didn't change and Isaac realized it was him. Smell of your own fear. Adrenaline. Hope Poe doesn't notice.
    Around the machine shop everything looked different. The grass was crushed and beaten, the ground rutted with tire tracks. Leading up the hillside was an overgrown fireroad they hadn't noticed the previous day, but had since been churned into mud by heavy traffic. At the top of the hill they saw Harris's black- and- white Ford truck. Harris was inside, watching them.

4. Grace
    T he main road south of Buell angled away from the river to cut through a steep sunless valley, it was a narrow fast road with the trees tight along both sides. She passed vacant hamlets, abandoned service stations, an exhausted coal mine with a vast field of tailings that stretched on forever like sand dunes, gray and dry and not even the weeds would grow on them. Her old Plymouth wallowed and clattered over the potholes, she thought about Bud Harris but she didn't know if calling him would make things better or worse for Billy. She wondered if Billy had killed someone.
    In recent years she'd developed her grandmother's arthritis and nearly any change in the weather hurt her hands; she could only manage five or six hours a day sewing before they fixed themselves shut into claws. Once, a union organizer had come poking around the shop, waiting outside the front door at closing time, he was the one who'd suggested that her condition might have been a repetitive stress injury—not arthritis. That's common, he said. Arthritis at your age isn't. Unfortunately the organizer had given up on their shop, as none of the other women would talk to him—they all knew they'd lose their jobs immediately. And the truth was Steiner wasn't so bad to work for. She knew that with her strange hours she would have been fired from a bigger company, but Steiner, the shop owner, let her do whatever she wanted. Flex-time, he called it. As long as she kept making him money. He paid Brownsville wages but sold his wedding dresses in Philadelphia, got city prices for them, was expanding to New York. Grace's only question was could she afford to keep living that way—everything kept getting more expensive