Here is a preview from Complicated Shadows, the second Henry Malone novel by James D.F. Hannah.
Chapter 1
Billy helped get me the job, a fact I wasn’t ready to forgive him for.
See, after things had settled following everything with the National Brotherhood, what with this band of white supremacists falling apart, some folks getting arrested, other folks getting killed, and the Feds bulldozing the compound into a blank space in the middle of nowhere, I found myself with too much time on my hands.
Beforehand, I’d have been okay with it, since I had a disability retirement from the state police thanks to the shotgun blast that had left me with a gimpy knee. The thing was, I’d rediscovered the joy of getting off of my ass and doing things again, even if some of those things had almost gotten me killed. Still, the whole clusterfuck had opened up a desire to be a productive member of society again. I gave it a little while to see if any of it passed, like a cold or a case of the shits. When it didn’t, I decided I’d better find a job.
Billy Malone—who’s had the misfortune of being my father for 42 years—had retired from the coal mines years ago, but he still knew people, and among those people was a guy who needed someone to work security at a strip mine. It might have sounded fun, but it shouldn’t have, because it wasn’t.
The job put me at the front gate of Witcher Shoals Mine #4, where my main priority was to make sure the gate rose and dropped when folks swiped their electronic pass across the scanner, and to shoo away protesters if they violated the hundred-yard limit. There’d been folks with their panties in a bunch over strip mining operations, based on the idea they didn’t think blowing up the tops of mountains and turning it into flat land was a good thing.
I should have an opinion on the whole thing; I had watched my coffee cup dance across the tabletop following some earth-shattering kabooms—explosions that sheared more rock from a mountaintop in the search for coal. Sometimes an explosion let loose a chunk of mountain that took out a house or some cars. No one had been hurt yet, but you had to wonder how long luck like that could last.
I can’t say I was a big fan of the landscape left behind. All of this work knocked the mountains into barren nubs, shorn of century-old growth, empty for years until reclamation work came around and rolled out grass deer ate within weeks, and planted trees that would take decades to grow.
Losing the mountains also gave way to views of the horizon none of us knew what to do with. We’d grown up with mountains surrounding us, enclosing and encasing us, keeping us safe from the outside world and the 21st century. Before you knew it, we’d have a clear view of Ohio, and no one wanted that shit.
But I wasn’t smart enough to figure out a better option, either. The world wanted coal—if less of it than in years prior—and the universe had seen fit to shove it into seams not easily reached through conventional means. Plus, Parker County needed the jobs; nobody else was asking us to dance, and you couldn’t expect anyone to keep their family fed wearing a blue vest and stocking shelves.
Long story short, I suppose, was I had a job. It was early May, but the weather was already hot as the crotch of flannel boxers at the equator, and the little box they put me in didn’t have air conditioning. I did have a fan which pushed warm, thick air around, and the ultimate effect was like getting smacked in the face with a wet towel.
The company gave me a pale blue polo shirt with a badge stitched on where a pocket should have been, a nightstick, and a can of pepper spray. I spent the days sitting in the little box, waving through miners who drove in and out for their shifts, and reading. Woody, my AA sponsor, had given me a copy of The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler. I’d heard of the movie, had never seen it, and didn’t realize there was a book. Woody said I should read up on the basics and aim to become a shamus. I’d laughed, then went home and Googled what “shamus” meant.
The sun was up, and the early morning rays beat down on us like we owed them money. Mist hung from what remained of the mountaintops, clinging to the trees like cobwebs. You learned to dread humidity like that. It was a sign that the day would get oppressive. I hoped the air conditioner in my shit-hole trailer kept working.
The plan was to go home and try to sleep, most likely with Izzy next to me. Izzy was the Shetland pony-sized bullmastiff who kept reign over my house. I’d had her since coming back to Parker County, when Woody told me I needed something to care about besides myself. She kept me decent company if you counted snoring as company.
I worked the job with another guard, and his job was to periodically patrol the grounds on a four-wheeler. Mitchell was an older guy, built like the Southern sheriff from every movie made in the 1970s, all chest and torso and attitude, with gray-white hair growing out in tufts aimed in every direction. He had more gut than shirt, and the bottom of the shirt was always coming out from the waist of his polyester slacks, and he forever had his hand down the front of his pants, tucking the shirt back in. At least, that’s all I thought he was doing. He had his hand down there often enough, he could be checking for lumps. He was in the midst of doing just that when he walked up to the box as our shifts were about to end.
Mitchell finished ball-checking like he was Michael Jordan and whipped his cell phone from his back pocket.
“You see those naked pictures of the chick from that movie?” he said. He smiled and licked his lips, and I felt a bubble of bile reach up through my throat.
“You’re gonna have to narrow it down,” I said. “I’m trying to think of actresses who haven’t had photos of everything they’ve got show up.”
He danced his thumb across the screen. “This young one, she’s gotta be about my daughter’s age. Real hot piece of ass.”
The bile threatened to charge further, and I worked to keep it at bay. “Mitchell, that statement’s fucked up for so many reasons, I’d have to diagram the ways it’s wrong,” I said. “Thanks for the generous offer, but no, I don’t want to see them.”
He furrowed his eyebrows together. They were hairy little fuckers, and knitted together they made him look like a missing evolutionary step.
“You a fag or something?” he said.
“No, I’m not, and it’d be none of your goddamn business if I was, anyway,” I said. “But I don’t get off on pictures of a naked chick when I’m not the one she’s taking a picture for. I would prefer to see a real woman who wants me to see her naked.”
Mitchell laughed. “Goddamn, you are a fag. She’s some Hollywood slut, that’s all. They put their shit up there on the screen all the time.”
Coming up from the distance, I saw my shift replacement walking toward the guard station. I checked my watch. Three minutes ‘til seven.
Goddamn close enough for me.
I said, “I’m out of here. But I hope you enjoy staring at daughter-aged starlet ass.”
I got out of the box and said “hey” to my replacement. He was a young guy named Plants, and our only interaction was uttering that “hey” to one another every morning when he took over the next shift. He nodded in my direction, and we moved on through our lives. It was a beneficial arrangement that worked for us.
I headed to the main office to clock out and glanced back. Mitchell leaned through the box window, showing Plants his phone, and laughing.
Chapter 2
It was Tuesday, which was my de facto Friday. Even though my job involved doing equal amounts of jack and shit, I needed the next two days off. I didn’t feel the greatest, and if I didn’t know better, I’d have thought I was coming down with something, but this was one of those rare moments where I knew better.
Part of the problem was I was still married, at least in the legal sense. Maggie had left Morgantown and taken a job with a newspaper in Philadelphia. It was getting harder to not sign the divorce papers. We hadn’t seen one another in more than a year, when I’d gone up to Morgantown one weekend, and she’d made it clear she wasn’t interested in trying. We still talked, sometimes not even about divorce, but if you had to narrow down most of our conversations, that would have been the most frequent topic.
I’d made a go at dating. Her name was Doria, and things didn’t work out well after white supremacists kidnapped her and got she shot in the leg and decided I wasn’t worth the effort. I couldn’t say I blamed her, but in my defense, I wasn’t the one who had shot her, and her getting shot had probably saved her life. There’s just no talking to some people, I suppose.
I sat in my car, tapping my fingers across the steering wheel. It was five after seven.
I could hear Woody’s voice in the back of my head, telling me I should go to a meeting. I’m not sure why I’d want to listen to him, though; he’d been the one who shot. I could have argued he was part of the problem.
There was the eight o’clock meeting at St. Anthony’s. Why not? I thought. I could always use the coffee.
Folks hung outside the church entrance, smoking and bullshitting, both vital to AA meetings. I pulled my car between faded yellow lines as my cell phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number and let it go to voicemail. Odds were it was a bill collector, and I didn’t feel like lying to anyone that early in the day.
Woody saw me as I walked toward the entrance. He was one of those lean, lanky guys who’d looked 50 since he was 20, but hadn’t aged since. He kept his black hair pulled back in a ponytail, and he dressed in black T-shirts and blue jeans, and he looked like he should have been on the poster for the movie Tombstone. He’d been my sponsor since I’d moved home. I didn’t know much about him, such as why he kept canister grenades in his truck box. Maybe I didn’t need to know anything. Maybe I only needed someone to help keep me sober and alive, and his past didn’t matter. That he was a general-issue badass and sniper-grade shot didn’t hurt, though, and those seemed as good of reasons as any to keep him around.
He handed me a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. I shook seven minutes of my life free, lit it, and took in a lung-deep drag of carcinogens.
“You just off work?” Woody said.
I nodded. “The uniform was a tip off, wasn’t it?”
“Thought maybe you just wore it on account it gave you a sense of power of authority.”
“Men tremble at the sight of me, and women crumble to my feet. Truth told, I didn’t feel like going home and staring at the TV or the dog.”
“The dog might miss you.”
“The dog is the one creature on this planet who I guarantee misses me.”
“Yet here you are, amid the bungled and the botched.”
“Like you always tell me: a dollar here buys you all the coffee and human misery a man could ever want.”
“Where else you gonna get that value for your money?” He took a last pull of his cigarette and crushed it underneath the scuffed toe of his Doc Martens. “Come on and let’s listen to everyone bitch.”
Morning meetings run on the small side, because people have jobs and lives, and they don’t want to be up that early if they don’t need to be. This meeting had a dozen or so in it, and they were long-timers. You got a lot of shift workers in morning meetings, and I recognized a guy from the mines across the table from me. We gathered in one of the Sunday school rooms. I poured myself a cup of coffee, dumped sugar and powdered creamer in there, and hoped for the best.
We went around the room, one by one, talking about what we had going on in our lives and what we were doing to not be drinking. When it got to me, I said, “Hi, my name’s Henry, and I’m an alcoholic. Today, I’m happy to not be drinking, because it doesn’t get me anywhere. It’s not solving my problems. It’s not fixing anything with me that’s broken. I miss it, and I hate people who can do it without their lives turning into disasters, but I can’t, so I’m content to be here, to be sober, and taking it a day at a time.” I let it move on to the person next to me.
After the meeting, once we all got started smoking again, and Woody said, “Talk to Maggie?”
“No.”
“How long you plan on dodging the inevitable?”.
“I figure I might have another 30, 35 years ahead of me. I think I can pull off at least another 10 before she gets too upset.”
Woody inhaled off of his cigarette. He held it between his forefinger and thumb as he drew the smoke in and let it out.
“You are a fucking asshole,” he said.
“Seems to be the consensus.”
Woody finished his cigarette. “I’m headed over to the Riverside to get breakfast. Want to join?”
I shook my head. “I’ve got to let Izzy out. I’d wager she’s bouncing around the inside of the house with her legs crossed, and she’s got bladder enough, if she lets loose, it’ll flood the place.”
“Call me later, then. Come by and we’ll shoot things.”
Woody had built his own range behind his house, and put in regular efforts to make me a better shot. Things were improving, but there’d be seismic shifts and political revolutions happening quicker than me hitting a bull’s-eye anytime soon.
Back in my car, I checked my phone. Whoever had called before the meeting had left a message.
“Henry, it’s Pete Calhoun. I’m in Parker County for a few days and wanted to see if you wanted to grab a bite to eat, have a beer. I’m staying at the Days Inn near the One Stop. Gimme a call. It’s been a month of Tuesday since I seen ya, since…well, since what shit happened. I’ll even buy the first round. Later, tater.”
There’s nothing like a voice from the past to make life drop on you like test results from the doctor.
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