Furnace

‘Dispatcher,’ he would say out loud on the second ring, and then slap his thigh when the familiar voice came on, droning, ‘Josh? Got a pretty high-paying load with your name on it. Call me, would you?’

Or he would mouth, ‘Oh oh, Elizabeth’s brother,’ and then look delighted when the sulky sibling’s voice left its disgruntled message. If he were ever forced to explain the process, and he knew he never would, Sim would have to say that he could see not so much the person, but the essence of the person as the phone rang, and the times he got it wrong he believed were simply the times when he just wasn’t concentrating hard enough.

Of course he never mentioned any of this to Josh or Elizabeth. Sim thought they probably knew he listened to their messages but said nothing. They were so kind. They knew no one ever phoned Sim, and he guessed Elizabeth left the window of the office open purposely so he could hear. Maybe one day he would show her what he could do. He would like that, to see her pretty face light up in delight as he performed the trick for her. Only it wasn’t strictly speaking a trick. It was real. He just knew who was on the line.

Today, however, it was habit rather than design that made him move to the window. Sim wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the message after the fight he’d heard yesterday. He’d heard Elizabeth’s car screech away after Josh had come home, and last night her crying had kept him awake, wondering whether he should go upstairs and comfort her or just leave her alone. He’d opted for the latter, so hysterical and forlorn were her wails. How could anything an old man would say heal that kind of wound? Things must be bad, he thought, for such good people to hurt each other so badly. He waited by the window as the four short phone rings completed and the answering machine clicked in.

‘Josh,’ Sim said to himself, supporting himself against the wall with an outstretched hand.

An eavesdropper couldn’t hear the outgoing message, only wait patiently for the caller to start speaking. Sim waited to hear Josh’s voice, but the caller hung up.

‘Josh,’ he confirmed with himself, nodding as he shuffled back to his herbs.

A cold wind eddied around the edge of the house and stirred the lemon balm. Two more leaves dropped from the stem and Sim cursed in Korean. He bent down again and resumed fussing with the plant.

‘Josh,’ he repeated to the herb. It ignored him, and dropped another leaf.

* * *

By Furnace standards, Alice Nevin’s house was pretty ordinary. By anywhere else’s yardstick, it was an expensive and desirable property. But unlike a Bostonian or Beverly Hills house where the lawn is God, here the front garden was littered with toys. Two plastic pedal cars lay on their sides as if there had been a collision. A ragged fun-fur horse was splayed over the porch steps and an odd assortment of tiny plastic figures were distributed so evenly around the property it was as though they had been placed there to serve some kind of gardening function. Josh stood across the street and stared up at its long white wooden porch and colonial dormer windows, wondering what he was going to do next.

She wasn’t here. Why was he?

A figure came to the downstairs window. A man. He had a crying child in his arms that looked about a year old and small heads moved about at his hips betraying the presence of more children. The man was trying to make the baby look out into the garden, pointing at things and jogging it up and down in his arms in a vain effort to comfort it. It was only a matter of seconds until he saw Josh, and when he did, he stopped moving. He stared at him for a moment, then moved away from the window.

Thinking was getting in the way. So Josh stopped thinking and walked swiftly across the street, picking his way through the toys to mount the steps and ring the doorbell. A distant dog barked, as though shut in a room, accompanied by a variety of screams and shouts that reinforced his belief that he’d seen several children. The door opened wide and aggressively fast. The man, wearing a sweat-stained T-shirt, cheap stone-washed jeans, and holding his tearful burden, stared at Josh. At this close range Josh could see that the man had eyes almost as red and puffy as his baby’s. He had been crying.

‘Need somethin’?’

It was a challenge rather than a question, a voice and demeanour Josh might have expected in a pool hall if he’d knocked a guy’s pile of dimes off the table. It was way out of place in the doorway of an elegant house. Josh felt colour come to his neck and cheeks. This was all wrong, but there was no going back.

‘Mr Nevin?’

The man’s face crinkled from aggression to suspicious aggression. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

A child screamed from the core of the house. Josh looked past the man at the sound, but it screamed on ignored.

‘I just need to know if you’re Mr Nevin.’

‘There ain’t no Mr fuckin’ Nevin. And I asked you a question.’

Josh remembered. Berry Nevin’s girl. That’s what McFarlane had said. That would mean either that Alice Nevin had kept her maiden name in an unlikely modern fashion for this small mountain town, or quite simply that she wasn’t married. The baby in the man’s arms started a high-pitched whine again and was swayed from side to side by the man in an unconscious act of comforting. It was the action of someone used to holding kids.

Josh lowered his voice and spoke quietly, never taking his eyes off those of the man opposite him. He was glad he was burdened with the child. It would be harder for him to hit Josh when he heard what was coming.

‘My name is Josh Spiller.’ He paused, and when he spoke again Josh’s shame was apparent in his voice. At least to him. ‘Are you Amy’s father?’

Some things happened to his face. Strange things, as if a dial had been implanted that could be turned to a variety of different emotions, and someone was spinning it. His eyes were a mixed carousel of grief, confusion, anger, and most perplexingly, fear.

‘Yeah.’

There was no rise in the intonation of the word that would have made it a question. Inexplicably, Josh wanted to touch the man, wanted to reach out his hand and hold his arm, to tell him it was okay and he understood. Instead he savaged him with his words.

‘I was driving the truck.’

The eyes that had registered that abnormal mix of emotions now became cold, opaque and unreadable.

‘What you want?’

Josh looked at the baby and then back up at that hard face.

‘To say sorry.’

The man took a step back into his house, shaking his head like Josh had drawn a gun.

‘You git off. You fuckin’ git off now. Right now.’

Josh lowered his eyes and stood still almost as though he were going to pray. In truth he was wondering feverishly why he was here. What lunacy was gripping him, making him behave so irrationally?

He could hear the man panting as he turned and made to leave. A babble burst from the figure in the doorway and Josh turned back towards him.

‘It was her fault for fuck’s sakes. The kid was seven days old. You hear that? Seven fuckin’ days old. I says to her to watch it, I says to her, but shit, she never listen to nothin’, that dumb bitch. Never listen. And it ain’t goin’ to be okay. I knows it ain’t.’

He started to cry. A horrible sound, all high and whining like his child.

‘She was so beautiful, my little darlin’. I sees her bein’ born. I ain’t done that with the other six. But I sees Amy come right here into the world and I tells her that everythin’s goin’ to be okay. But it ain’t. I couldn’t do what I had to do. Couldn’t do it. Maybe I’m not man enough, maybe I’m too much of a man. I just couldn’t. She was so little, know how I mean? I don’t know what she was thinkin’. She knows it ain’t goin’ to be safe. I don’t know nothin’ no more.’

He let his whining develop naturally into full-scale weeping, while Josh watched, horrified and baffled. The man was senseless, and the babbling insanity of his outburst was far more terrifying than the violent retribution that Josh had anticipated, and perhaps secretly desired. Still facing him, Josh breathed that he was sorry again, although this time it was more an expression of sympathy with the man’s hysterical condition than remorse for his actions. He backed off down the steps and walked crab-like over the lawn. The sideways walk became a canter, and as he turned his head away from the crying, ranting man at the door Josh broke into a loping run.

He kept running until he was three blocks away, where he stopped, bent over and put his hands on his thighs to regain his breath. The purpose of the visit had been unclear to Josh, an order that was impossible to disobey from some despotic part of his subconscious. But if its secret agenda was to free his head from the maze of craziness, then it had failed spectacularly.

What had he learned? Nothing. At least nothing except a heap more stuff that didn’t make sense. The baby was from a big family. The parents weren’t married. They looked poor and undereducated but they lived in a house a surgeon or a lawyer might be proud of. And the father. The father didn’t blame Josh the way any redneck mountain-bred man would, regardless of circumstance. He blamed the mother of his children.

Josh was sweating from his ludicrous, panicking run and he wiped his face with the sleeve of his jacket. Reality. Familiarity. Normality. There was only one place where those precious things resided. He had to get back to Jezebel.

9

She’d taken the call calmly, although there was a suppressed fury in her voice that seldom surfaced, a fury the man on the other end of the line recognized and silently prayed would be contained. But there was no time for displays of personal anger. There was work to be done.

A 10A scalpel blade had always been her favourite. Straight edge and not too short. She turned it over in her hand for a moment, feeling its weight, the coolness of the handle, and then positioned it delicately between thumb and forefinger ready to cut. As the blade pierced the skin, the subtle drag on the metal parting those tiny cells told her how sharp this instrument was. She sighed.

The waste. The infernal waste. The potency was not inexhaustible, and to remove a part now for such an unnecessary task was shambolic in the extreme. She used her left hand to steady the rest of the tiny corpse as she made the second incision. Too much. The blade had gone too far. She put the scalpel down carefully and picked up the engraved copper rule. It confirmed her mistake. The second incision was a fraction over seven inches. No matter. The two short cuts that would complete the skinny rectangle would redress the inaccuracy.

Seven inches by seven sixteenths exactly. It would dry smaller, but it had to be cut precisely. She picked up the scalpel and held it alongside the rule, running the blade down the straight edge, and with a steady hand made the final two cuts. This was where the 10A held its own.

A curved blade was useless at prising the skin from the flesh, but with the accuracy of such a straight point she could easily slice away the precious shell from its red fruit without tearing.

At last she allowed herself a smile. It was perfect. It would need washing and drying of course, but she had already prepared the solution. In only a few hours it would be completely ready.

The thud of a ball hitting the back yard wall near her window made her look up and stay still like a thing hunted. She waited on her side of the closed Venetian blinds, senses keen and on standby for action. The children’s voices were full of laughter and sunshine.

‘Oh my God. The window. You nearly hit the window.’

‘Get the ball, you jerk.’

‘Get it yourself.’

She waited. They were laughing, those young high-pitched yelps, growing faint as they receded to some distant part of the yard where their game was in progress, and mentally she ticked off the faces she knew matched the voices, counting how many there were, listening for the tiny dangers of playful curiosity or insubordination.

Then, certain it was safe, she put down her tools and lifted the strip of skin to the light. The light shone through its pinkness and she smoothed it between her fingers, assessing how much time it would take to dry. They didn’t have long. Maybe these few hours were not enough.

She took a deep breath at that alarming thought, then walked to the high table and began the ritual. She pulled the skin over the stone, pinning it at either end with the copper pins, and lit the candles. It was a time to concentrate, not to concern herself about the tasks of others, and so she closed her eyes and pressed a thumb to her forehead.

As she practised the words inside her head before they were spoken and could never be corrected or retracted, a fly circled the room clumsily and came to rest on its target.

Once there, with the only person in the room who would shoo it away deep in meditation, it crawled freely over the remains of a terry towelling babysuit stiffened with blood, and made ready to feast on the shining new rectangular strip of exposed flesh.

It took only five minutes to walk back to the truck, during which time he worked hard to get that sad mixed-up man’s face out of his mind.

She was still there, parked at a tortuous angle outside the store and his heart leapt at the thought of the simple pleasure of climbing into his own private space, the place that smelled of him, that housed the detritus of his driving life, and starting her up. But as he came closer, Josh remembered the consistency of what had been under those wheels, and his pace slowed to a crawl. Would they have cleaned it up? Would anyone have been under there since they slid beneath the trailer and scooped out what was left of Amy Nevin? The saliva dried in his mouth. He approached the trailer from the back and walked slowly along its flank towards the cab.

There was nothing to see. The wheels were just wheels.

A darker patch of asphalt under the whole cab was the only sinister suggestion that maybe someone had taken a hose to it, and it made him look towards the store. There were people in the window of Campbell’s Food Mart peering out at him.

He could see their heads and shoulders turned towards him, watching silently over a display of cans and giant bags of nachos as if waiting for something to happen, and for a moment he thought of going in, asking them what they saw. But the face of Amy Nevin’s father came back. That twisted, weeping, mad face. He wanted no more of this. Either everyone here was blind and insane or he was, and right now he didn’t care to work out which.

Driving would help him think. It always did. With eyes boring into him, he unlocked the cab, climbed in and sat down heavily in his seat, which bounced in happy response. There was a brief moment of paralysis as Josh started the engine and waited for it to warm up. He listened to the familiar throaty throbbing, feeling it vibrate up his spine, and for a fraction of a second he thought he might never drive again. There had been plenty of fur and feathers beneath those wheels, but never soft white skin and tiny bones. He’d never even clipped anyone, despite cretins stepping out of car doors into his path and kids playing chicken on city streets. He stared at the gas pedal as though it had grown teeth, then took a breath, dug deep into what was left of his tattered resolve, and won.

Josh Spiller wanted out of Furnace.

The street was not sufficiently wide to turn in, so Josh drove ahead looking for a side street that would take him back the way he’d come. The opportunity came at the end of the block where a sign told him that the interstate was seventeen miles away down the route to his right. It was a different route from the one he’d come in by, and longer, but it was heading south so he would make up the mileage when he rejoined the interstate. And from here it looked like a better road.

There was little pleasure in driving, but as he increased his speed past the last of those heavenly suburban houses, and a small sign said Leaving Furnace, the vice around his heart loosened a notch.

The road was heading back down the mountains again, but this time it did so in a more generous and less winding fashion. Lacy budding forest still formed an impenetrable cloak on either side, but only a few miles out of the town normal Appalachian life started to appear. Here and there the odd tatty cabin poked a roof or porch from the trees, and an unpleasant-looking general store even boasted a roadside location with the comforting sight of abandoned rusty cars growing from the sumachs in the rough field behind.

Josh was numb now. He was back on automatic and he drove without thinking, letting the moving landscape roll in front of him. Five miles on and a huge clearing to his left revealed a long low restaurant called Mister Jim’s. It looked modern and clean, but more importantly the parking lot was big enough to take Jezebel. Josh started to brake and pull in.

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