It was a mystery, although it was right there in a glass
case for everybody to see . . . a terrible knowledge . . . .
He could not show the mystery to just anybody; but he
had to show it to somebody. . . . His blood all morning
had been saying the person would come today.
   —Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood

THE DREAM was familiar. July of 1968. He was a young man again, and he was rebuilding a car.

A new eight-track tape played inside the garage: Bob Dylan, Tangled Up in Blue. Insects whirled and buzzed around the dim incandescent lightbulb that hung above the garage. The car was opened up, a patient on a grease-flecked operating table. He was taking apart the valves, removing the encrusted layers of old oil.

The carbon-stained engine of the decrepit indigo-blue 1939 Packard was spread over the floor in pieces, a great heap of metal fishbones. Sometimes Pop helped him, both of them wordlessly moving the pieces of the engine back and forth, trading wrenches and unspoken understandings of the inner mysteries of the Packard.

They got all the way through the valves, the spark plugs, and the carburetor before the summer ended. They had the car running, the sputtering hulk running on three cylinders in an uneven blast of exploding gas and oil. It turned over, and that was more than they’d had at the beginning of the summer.

But somehow they never finished the work. Eventually the car was junked. Yet part of Matt never let go of it. For years Matt had been working on this same engine in his sleep. In his dreams, he was still tangled up in blue.

There was a click in the late morning. Then another, and another. They came so fast it became one high-pitched noise. It woke him. Matt lay there trying to identify the sound. Then he recognized the ratcheting as an adjustable wrench.

A moment later, the screen door banged with a hollow aluminum clatter against the kitchen door, and then Kev banged on the door itself.

Matt staggered to the kitchen. When he opened the door, he held the boy’s fist in his hand, catching it in midswing. For a moment, it was as if the boy held Matt in the doorway by the thrust of his outstretched arm. Then Matt thrust Kev’s arm away.

“Goddamn!” Matt leaned against the doorway. The weariness overwhelmed him again. “What the hell are you pounding on the door for?”

The kid’s face closed to him as he watched, struck as if by a blow. “Need to go to the store,” he muttered. “Thought you’d want to get some parts with me, maybe.”

“Auto parts.” Matt breathed heavily. “You’re pounding to wake the dead.”

The boy looked up at him. “You been sleeping late. Sorry . . . I didn’t—”

“Yeah, you didn’t think at all, did you? Dammit, this is the first regular sleep I’ve gotten in a whole week of working graveyard, and then you come pounding.” He paused for breath. “What did you say? What kind of excuse was that?”

The boy mumbled. “Gotta go to the store. Parts store.” He was no longer looking at Matt. He did not speak again.

Matt breathed heavily. “And now you want to go to the store. You sleep in my garage, use my bathroom, eat my food. And now you break my door down, just so you can open my wallet at the parts store—stealing my money for Doug’s damn car—and you don’t even have the consideration to let me sleep before you do it. Just get the hell off my porch. Go sink the damn car in the lake! So help me God, you won’t have any parts left if you wake me up again.”

Matt slammed the door. The screen bounced hollowly.

The agony was to know how thoroughly awake he was now. He listened to the pulse throb in his head and prepared himself to stare at the ceiling for an hour, toss and turn for another, and finally rise again, his eyes bloodshot and his head pounding with another of the incessant headaches. It was a pure miracle that as his pulse faded, he found himself slipping off onto the other side of sleep, back into the past.

Although Matt could have slept for hours, when he woke, the fatigue was no longer a desperate hunger. It was the first good sleep he’d had in five days. He took a shower. He pulled the sheriff’s truck around in a half circle and stopped in front of the garage.

Then he braked and rolled down his window. The air off the lake carried the acrid smell of denatured alcohol across the yard. In the dim light of the garage interior, he could see the kid dipping the ’Cuda’s disassembled carburetor into a bath of alcohol, scrubbing furiously at it. All across the floor of the garage, on the clean concrete, were laid out individual pieces of the engine, each one scrubbed and clean, just as pristine as any of the parts he’d seen in his dreams.

“Hey, get in the car!” he called. “C’mon, we’re going—get in the car, kid.”

A-1 Auto Parts was filled with winding aisles of parts, each aisle ending in an advertising display—chrome intake valves polished like silver ingots, gleaming halogen headlights, steel wrenches laid out in a swirling wreath of metal spikes.

The kid was talking animatedly about headers and a high-flow exhaust. He had plans to put in scoops on the hood, for induction, and he wanted to add a double-pump carburetor. When he started talking about getting a big-block Hemi engine, Matt just shook his head. “Speed is expensive,” he said. “How fast can you afford to go?”

“Whattaya mean?”

Matt sighed. “How much money do you have?”

The kid looked sideways at him, suspicious. “Um, like eighty dollars.”

“Where’d you get the money from?”

“My stepdad. He sent it to me.”

“He must sure like you a lot—to send you money. Must want you home.”

Kev turned away. “Something like that,” he said.

Matt spent a few minutes pondering a display of suspension springs, wondering if he could justify a thousand dollars to smooth the truck’s ride. Then, as he turned toward Kev, he saw a sign by the register.

“Hey, they’re hiring. Part-time guys.” He pointed at the sign. “You know what you’re doing with cars, and you’ll need more cash if you want to get that ’Cuda going.”

Kev grunted. “Maybe,” he said. “I’ll check it out, ’kay?”

Matt looked up at the ceiling behind the counter. “They have factory hoses in stock! Wouldja look at that?” He turned to the boy. “Have you replaced the hoses yet?”

“No, not yet.”

“Better do that. If you don’t replace the hoses, one of those will blow soon. They’re corroded. I wouldn’t want you to blow a hose when you hit the road. You won’t find good Gates hoses like this everywhere—you should grab some while you can.”

“Nah.” Kev turned away, looking at the electrical aisle with hunger.

“You know what—Pop is coming over later. We could put a few in for you. Whattaya say?” Matt lifted a long rubber snake down from the rafters.

“Look at that.” Matt squeezed the hose, feeling the solid metal spring inside. “A 22597—that’s a good hose. That’ll be just right.”

“Okay—but I’m going out tonight, okay? Hey, what about a new dashboard—”

“Sparkplugs. Stick to the basics. What you need are new sparkplugs.”

Kev pointed to a stack of bright-yellow plugs. Matt picked up a set and read the label. “Accel Racing—plated with chromate and triple-layered for performance. The ultimate racing plugs—best in class.” He sighed. “You don’t need these, you know.”

“But it’s the original muscle car. The Barracuda was built for speed—”

“Just get the damn car running. You can worry about the bells and whistles later.” Matt took a plain brown box off the shelf. “Here—half-price sparkplugs, standard issue. And they’re on me, save your eighty dollars. If you get a job or your stepdad sends you more money, you might even be able to get a Hemi engine one of these days.”

In the twilight, Stan Worthson felt himself to be bereft of his Savior, with out the possibility of redemption. He was finding it harder recently to get to church. Of course, he didn’t miss a day of J. Vernon McGee on the radio, but the preacher didn’t have the same allure as in years past. The words rang hollow now.

In fact, ever since he’d been in the hospital with the cut wrist and what they said now was a minor stroke, he felt as if his engine were missing a beat. It wasn’t a rod through the pan, he could say that much, but somehow he wasn’t running on all cylinders.

The past had crept up on him too, just as it had before during bad seasons of his life, but this time it wouldn’t go away. Everywhere he looked, he saw the boys dead in the mine, he saw old Larry wondering why he was falling backward into the stope. And he couldn’t shake the smoke, it hung on his memory like a shroud now.

He thought he’d decided to tell Matty, when he was in the hospital, but then the moment left him, and now he couldn’t seem to do it, no matter what he tried. He still hadn’t figured out how to tell him.

He stood up and put the casserole from Ruth next door into the microwave and turned the dial with a savage twist. No cooking tonight, no flames. He’d put Matty and the mine out of his mind for an evening. After all, he had something to look forward to.

There was a nature special on television this evening. Alaska, fishing for salmon. The name of the show came up on the screen and Stan sat down heavily on the sofa, but they’d fooled him. First came a commercial.

“I’m Russ White.” The man on the screen turned and pointed directly at the viewer. “And I want to be your new county sheriff.” Then the face smiled. The camera slowly panned away, revealing that the speaker was standing on a grassy hillside near the top of Fourth of July Pass. The voice continued as the camera angle grew ever wider, panning down to show the city of Coeur d’Alene gleaming peacefully beside the lake.

“Isn’t it too long since we’ve had a clean county, a responsible county, a corruption-free county? I believe that together we can build a new spirit in Bitterroot County. I believe that with faith in God, and your votes, we can renew our county.”

As the image of the city faded out, a deep baritone voice emerged: “Russ White, a decorated fifteen-year lieutenant in the Bitterroot County Sheriff’s Department. Russ White, a new voice for a clean county. With God’s help, and with your vote.”

At the end was the name again, Russell White, in big, bold, red-and-blue letters: “For County Sheriff. For Freedom, and Security.”

There had been a momentary lift in Stan’s spirits as the camera panned out, revealing the majesty of the mountains. Russell’s smile gleamed at him from the television screen, and it struck him as youthful and naïve. Stan wondered if other people, watching the advertisement, would feel a twinge of hope, some kind of faith in him.

When he turned his head and looked out the window, Stan could see the road toward town. He thought now that he could start over in any new place, and it would be as unfamiliar as the city by the lake was to him right then. He felt he’d only ever known what fit his ideas of the town. He stood up quickly, leaving the thought behind, pulling his dinner out of the oven.

When the phone rang, the camera was circling the Matanuska range, coming in close over white peaks. On the phone, his son reminded him of his promise to help on the car. He sighed and hung up, but beyond the mountains, Stan could catch a glimpse of a glacier-fed lake, and a stream feeding that lake.

Salmon moved underwater, red, undulating flanks struggling against each other, pushing into the churning current. As the camera rose out of the water, Stan could see fishermen across the riffles of the stream, waiting for the salmon.

On the television, the camera panned away to the surrounding wilderness. A skein of snow blew off the top of one mountain, streaming off the edge of the peak like thick, white smoke. Something in the sharp-edged peaks, the whiteness of the snow calmed him.

He pushed a button on the remote, turning up the volume, but instead of the sound of the fishermen, he heard something else. It came like a wind through his house, the old boards resounding with the buzzy swinging in the air, knocking them both flat, the echo of Larry Clark’s helmet hitting the rocks as he fell sideways down the stope, the wet thud of a shoulder or a leg twisting in his last agony, and the heavy groan he made as he died.

Stan looked out the window. In the Valley, the houses of the small towns were scattered on the pine-covered earth, white blocks against the dark hillsides, each one separated and alone in a tiny circle of dwindling light. Down on the highway, Stan could see a set of approaching headlights. Matt’s truck, a tiny spark coming closer.

Outside with the car, their breaths steamed in the autumn air. The tools gleamed. Pop thumped the curved yellow hood.

“Barracuda. 1968. Slant Six engine. Used to sit beside my garage, right? I think Dougy boy put it there. Who did you say has been working on it?”

“Kevin. Doug’s friend. You met him. He came over to your house, remember?”

“Where’s the kid tonight?”

“I dunno. Said he had to make a phone call.”

Stan pulled the hood up. It took some work, but his arms were still strong.

It was just his heart that didn’t have the power anymore. His son was talking, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t care to listen to this again.

“Pop, look, let me do the heavy lifting here. Your doctor said you aren’t supposed to exert yourself too much. No heavy physical activity, no emotional stress. Said anything can trigger another one of those episodes, and . . .”

Stan lifted himself on his arms and pushed a flashlight into the engine well. Inside, he could see that the vines and overgrown grass had been stripped away. Even the carbon stains and grease slicks had been scrubbed off. The engine gleamed with work. That strange kid who reminded him of his grandson had put some hours into it, it seemed.

Again, the sounds of Larry’s death seemed to echo in his mind. “Poor damn guy, what did he do to deserve that?”

“What was that?” said Matt. “What did you say?”

“Nothing,” said Stan. “I didn’t say nothing.” But he couldn’t get Larry out of his head. Poor damn guy went in a mineshaft and pulled sand out of a slushed-in stope, just as he was told. And look how he got paid for it, he got buried in that same stope.

“Okay,” said his son. “So anyway . . .”

His son was talking. He’d missed half of it already. “When I saw they had the factory hoses in stock, I just had to grab a set.” Matt held out a set of rubber pipes.

“Not the flexall things, are these?” said Stan. “Those never work very well.”

“Nope. Like I said, I got the factory-made. With the springs inside. You see?”

“Okay,” said Stan. “Let’s drain the thing.” Without another word, he lowered himself to the ground and slid underneath, his flashlight held ahead of him. With a grunt, he loosened the plug. It spurted for a moment and then began to drain like a plugged-up toilet. The other end was still capped. Fifty-seven years old, and his son still couldn’t do anything right.

“Take the radiator cap off, wouldja?” yelled Stan. Moments later, the water gushed out, a steady stream.

Stan had to help with the hoses too. The old rubber was crusty, glued to the radiator by age and decay.

“So, remember I said I had some questions about the Sunshine?” said his son.

Stan grunted and forced a screwdriver into the gap, pushing the hoses apart.

“They gave me a missing persons case recently. You know all the old-timers. A lot of the young guys too, because you helped lead the union for so long. So if I tell you a name, think you can remember him? I’m looking for a tramp miner named Curtis Siwood.”

“Maybe.” Stan worked the screwdriver back and forth, breaking the bastard loose. Curtis’s face filled the engine well in front of him. As he pulled at the hose across the manifold, he could see the distended eyes, the slightly bulbous nose, the rocky jaw, the receding chin under the sullen mouth. He reached out and made the mouth open, he made Curtis talk to him, tell him why he came back after all those years. The face was alive before him. Then the hose slipped off the water neck and it seemed to fall apart in his hand. Gray dust rose up in a gritty cloud.

Matt spoke again. “Do you think Curtis was a miner you knew? He was probably considerably younger than you, because he worked as a tramp miner just a decade ago. He got to know Karl Avery, back when Karl could work. You got any idea who this guy is?”

Stan yanked the corroded hose out from under the hood, a black thing shedding its skin like a snake in his hand. “He’s dead.”

“What do you mean?” His son’s eyes widened, as if the boy had never seen the like.

“Larry Clark is dead. That’s all. He’s just dead.” Stan spit on his finger, rubbing the inside of the new hose with saliva, lubricating it to fit. “You clean the water neck already?”

“Yeah, I cleaned it,” said Matt. “But why are you talking about this guy Larry Clark?”

“Checked the thermostat too?”

“Yeah, I got that too. It’ll open up at one eighty. But I asked about Curtis Siwood.”

“Isn’t Larry who you asked about?”

“No, Siwood is who I’m looking for.”

Stan stared at him. “Well,” he said finally. “You find out about Larry, you’ll know about Curtis. Larry died in the Sunshine.”

“But Larry is a missing person, still after all these years. How do you know he’s dead? He’s not on the list. I mean, there were hundreds of men coming out of the Sunshine that day—dead and alive. How do you know that for sure?”

Stan squeezed the metal spring apart. He held his breath and pushed the hose onto the radiator neck. Afterward, he could feel it in his lungs, he gasped as he spoke. “I know. Larry Clark stayed in the mine. I know.”

“But you didn’t get out. You stayed in the Sunshine after.”

Stan turned away from the car, looking for a hose. “You got the antifreeze handy?”

“Sure,” said his son. “I got it mixed already. Half an’ half. I put a little extra antifreeze. North Idaho is getting colder.”

Stan breathed heavily. The work had taken something out of him. “Sure it is,” he said. “Look, you know when you brought the poster around—I guess I should have told you then about what Curtis did, about what I know . . .” Stan paused, his throat catching. He glanced away at the darkened house. The only light was the false blue glow of Sall’s late-night television. His breath burned in his throat, the truth still stuck in his mouth.

“Tell me, Pop. Tell me what you know.”

“That guy you’re looking for . . . Curtis worked with me for a while. Back a few years ago, he was tied into the Bunker Hill. He was one of old Mr. Herrick’s guys working all over the Silver Valley, finding out stuff about the union, doing petty sabotage.”

“I’d heard a rumor Old Man Herrick had guys inside the union, reporting to him.”

Stan nodded, the shame creeping over him again, a vast malaise. “I was—I knew that guy you’re looking for. I know what he did. I wrote it down. I saw him . . . do things. Cheat guys of their ore loads, mess up the Sunshine books, derail union meetings if things weren’t going the right way for Herrick’s own Bunker Hill. Whatever it took to win.”

“You wrote it down?”

“Uh-huh.” Stan nodded and turned, his eyes wet with sudden effort. Some how, he still couldn’t simply tell Matty that he’d stood back and watched a man die. Matt interrupted. “But Pop—how could you know and write it down, and not take action to . . .”

Stan shrugged and looked down at the car. “You already changed the oil. Put a fresh battery in here and all that stuff?”

Matt nodded. “Kevin did that. It’s ready. But the fuel pump doesn’t show anything. There’s no gasoline in the carb.”

Stan nodded and reached under the hood. He lifted off the air cleaner. Then he opened the butterfly valve in the carburetor. “You got the gas?” he said.

His son passed him a dropperful of gasoline, which he squirted into each side of the carburetor. After he put the air cleaner back, and the wing nut, he stepped back.

“Okay, let ’er roll.” The key turned. The engine gave a throaty cough: gug, gug, gug. Then it caught, and Stan thought he was home free. Then it died again. He stepped forward again. “Nothing in the fuel filter.”

Again he primed it. His son seemed to want to ask more questions, so Stan talked as he put the air cleaner back. “Four-barrel carburetor,” he said. “Factory Holley carb.”

Stan stepped to the car and turned the key himself. Gug, gug, gug. A cough, a roar. “It’s a rough idle,” he shouted over the harsh growl.

“Well, don’t rev the damn thing,” said his son. “Let it build up some oil pressure.”

“I know that,” muttered Stan. “I’m not some stupid kid.”

A welter of blue-black smoke came out of the rear. Stan turned the key off. “Is it running too rich? Burning oil?” he said. “Maybe we should check for a vacuum leak?”

His son sighed. “You know something else, Pop, don’t you? Just spit it out, okay?”

Stan opened his mouth, but he couldn’t seem to speak. Damn his own soul to hell, he couldn’t even find redemption right there, at the foot of the cross. Slowly, he closed his mouth again. Then he spoke haltingly, looking at the steam that rose off the cold engine.

As the words came out, he felt something in his chest give way, something from the past slip away out of him. “I remember, back in ’72, there were some papers . . . they were supposed to be from the Bunker Hill mine, Herrick’s other mine. They got taken into the Sunshine, to be archived under sand in an old mined-out stope . . . that had some consequences. Like I said, you find Larry . . . you find . . . You look into that . . . might do some good.”

Stan paused, the breath laboring out of him, the words as if made of sand, he could hardly force them out of his mouth. They were heavy as sin.

The world slid out from underneath him, just like it had before. Distantly, he felt as if a doctor was declaring sentence on him. He could almost hear him saying “stroke, stroke, stroke,” as if it were one of his son’s rowing competitions. The Barracuda was far beyond his reach, his son was miles away, the sounds from his mouth were incomprehensible. With an effort, he thought he could make out words. “Pop! Pop—my God, are you all right?”

Momentary echoes broke through: the clatter of the gurney wheels on the concrete, the smooth slap of the automatic doors opening and shutting. As if he were being swallowed by a mine elevator, sinking deeper and deeper into the ground.

Stan gulped hungrily at the cold air, but he couldn’t breathe it, he couldn’t inhale. Something had died inside him, a pump broken in his chest. The mask over his face hissed like a gaslight.

The breath caught in his throat, and he tried to sit up against his restraints, coughing, hacking. Someone spoke.

“Get him immobilized and—”

Stan felt like that poor man must have felt as he fell into that endless hole in the mine stope. A sudden pressure, a pain that wouldn’t stop.

Stan could hear Larry falling again, the sound of his helmet an alarming dissonance. In his head was the image he’d seen on the television, a reddened salmon lurching out of the water beside the trawling boat, struggling to breathe in the sudden air.

“Intubate him.” Stan opened his eyes to see who spoke, but there was only a white uniform before he was cleaved apart by pain. The darkness blew him out, a flame in the wind.

NOVEMBER 1988

THE CORNER of the weatherworn barn was stacked high with old containers and broken furniture. The girl wormed her way between a splitting cardboard box and a wicker chair. She pulled her blanket and the doll’s pillows behind her. Then she pushed a piece of insulation into the gap she’d made. No one could see her now.

The water stains and streaks of oil on the floor of the barn were covered with a layer of dust from the field. Carefully, the girl spread her blanket, making an untidy nest on top of the dust. She arranged the bear and the dinosaur. When she curled up with them, she could feel the hollow place under her chin where her doll would have been.

Karyn, the doll, had blond hair like hers, but the doll’s hair never got messy, and it didn’t blow around. It was always combed and parted neatly, tied back in two braids on either side of her head. Usually the doll wore a red dress with white trim. Underneath, she wore white panties, just like the girl. The girl curled against the pillow, remembering.

That morning, she’d spoken to her mother for the first time in two weeks. “Where did he go?” she’d said. “What did Karyn do wrong for him to keep her?”

The egg sitting unbroken in her mother’s hand had rolled out and cracked across the floor. Then her mother came across the room and took the girl into her arms in a suffocating hug.

“Oh baby, oh baby.” Her mother rocked back and forth. “Honey, you’re finally talking, and you’re right here. You’re right here with me. No one took Karyn away. Everything’s going to be okay. Karyn’s right here with me.” When she let go, the girl looked up to see the tears freely streaming down her mother’s face. Her mother held on to her and tilted her head up to look into her eyes. “Honey, you’re going to be okay, and one day soon, we’ll be . . . we’ll be together with him.”

“My dolly,” the girl said. “Is Karyn still with my daddy?”

The girl squeezed her hands up against her eyes again, and thought of her missing doll. Like a voice from inside, a whisper, it had come to her that her doll was in the car.

She remembered being in the car with somebody’s daddy that night. She’d known where she was, even though her eyes were still closed. The smell of the sweet smoke—a different thing from the smoke itself—filled the inside of the car. When she finally was brave enough to open her eyes again, she thought her own daddy might be driving. But he wasn’t there anymore.

Instead, there was the other man. She remembered him only dimly. Tousled gray hair and a smoking stick in his mouth. The one who had taken her in the bus station. He gave her a quick, nervous look. She could tell he wondered if she knew who he was, if she knew his secret.

She wanted to smile at him. But they were alone, and until she saw her mommy, she would not feel like smiling. He would come back someday to get her. That’s what he said. So she could smile at him later. She remembered now. She’d left her doll behind, stuffed between the two front seats, so that she could wait to see where he went afterward, to help him come back to her.

The girl opened her eyes. The old scents were all around her. In that corner of the old barn, the aroma was strongest: grass rotting on the mower, motor oil, a vial of incense from a church service, a broken bottle of almond cologne, and nearly buried in the mess of boxes, a forgotten package of his old pipe tobacco. She closed her eyes and inhaled. In the darkness, she could smell her father.