End of the Season
I was lucky. Della heard me when I said I was down and out, and when I hinted that it would be easier that way since I lived here and yon and had no permanent address, hired me under the table. Customers knew me by name in a week. Waydean Long, they’d say as I served their pie and ice cream, settle yourself down here a minute and tell us what it’s like burning up the highway for a livin’. Seems I had a certain reputation, without even trying much. Gossip traveled, and the diner was a hub of it.
The Black Cat was a diner with a fix-it garage in back. Della was out there by six a.m., already telling the boys she’d hired to do this, do that, get her done. I’d slip an apron off a wall and see Ona waking herself up over the coffee pot, her red hair still shower-damp. We’d set to, making lunch salads.
We had our regulars, Smyte lawyers and card players from the local Kiwanis Club who owned a coffee cup to hang on the rack behind the cash register. We all eyed the chain-brand drive-through coffee shop that had gone up near the shopping center they called the small. Della scurried from garage to pumps to fill up tanks and make a pass at cleaning car windows and, afternoons, she sat going over the books and adding and subtracting figures, her eyes a deep, sad blue.
Some days Della’s eyes were cool and gray. No color, really. They were goldish when the sun was looking at her a certain way and she thought no one was noticing. With autumn not far off and cool coming in early, her eyes turned a washed-out blue. A cold winter lay ahead, no winter at all compared to the ones I’d sampled up north, but they said diner traffic would dwindle.
Nights, I didn’t go anywhere. I sat outside the diner as cars trailed music and beer bottles shattered along the asphalt. Semis loaded with everything from chickens to lumber hauled through in those hours, taking a short-cut around the bypass. I counted trucks and coal rigs with their windows rolled down and voices hollering out at no one in particular. The Black Cat sign stayed on all night, its half-burned-out neon a light I grew to trust. Across the road, the sky was nigh about hidden by the smokestacks of the factory. The Wallen Industries sign over there became my reference point for why I was in Smyte.
I saw plenty of men at the Black Cat who could have been my father in some other life. A mill worker with his big hands wrapped around a coffee cup on his late-night break. A salesman with a briefcase in conversation with Della by the cash register, early of a morning. But I didn’t ask Ona Short or Lacy May or anyone else about Russell Wallen just yet. Cody had said finding my father would shake me up more than I could imagine. He’s here already, girl, Ruby said to me, late at night as I lay watching streetlight shine into my room at Lacy May’s. And here, and here, and here, Ruby said. And that was true enough. As I walked to work near sunrise and stopped to buy a pack of cigarettes, I seemed to see him in the muggy late summer air of Smyte. It could have been his hand pulling a blind down on a window as I passed some house. The folded-up love note I found on a sidewalk—I told you I’d meet you, and where were you, mister—that could have been what my mother wrote to him in another time and place. That woman at her mailbox on Smith Street with the shadowy skin beneath her eyes and how she said, “Morning, this morning. Fine morning, this morning,” could have known him better than I ever would. That couple quarreling on their front porch? There was something of my father in that, too. There was something of my father every night as I sat outside in the parking lot at the Black Cat, looking at the dark windows of the shut-down factory buildings called Wallen Industries. I’d so far held my cards close to my chest in asking about my father of anyone here, but sleuthing had to start somewhere.
On my day off, I visited the Smyte Public Library, a one-story brick building behind an out-of-business women’s clothing store. I made myself at home in the library’s underworld—the basement microfiche and film room. I found out all I could about Wallen Industries. Old microfiche issues of the local paper described hard work in a paper mill. Twelve-hour days, heat, asbestos burns in lungs. And all alongside the mill, the river:
One summer—in a drought year—the water level of the river dropped and the concentration of sulphur solvents became sufficiently intense that it began to blacken and then peel the paint off houses. It has been rumored that the river actually caught on fire, although this has not been documented.
I found stories about the founding of the mill, the first warehouse built along the river road, the first paper machine that made its way to Smyte from up north. One machine became two, became three. Wood stock came from western Kentucky. From the east. From up north and as far south as Mississippi. I read about papermaking until I could about taste it. Slurry. Nip. Slice. Then the articles gave way to ones about Wallen Industries, and three machines became four, five, a dozen.
In the midst of all those articles I scrolled through, there were pictures of my father. Russell in a white T-shirt, a cigarette pack stuck inside a rolled-up sleeve, him looking down into a big chest full of wet white pulp like it was gold in the making. Him in a three-piece suit, black, with a skinny striped tie. My heart nearly quit as I looked at his photo and the column that went with it.
Now that Wallen Industries is falling on hard times, it seems fitting to turn our attention to history. The paper mill is the history of Smyte, in some ways, so they say. It is certainly the history of one man in our town, Russell Wallen, co-owner with Della Wallen of an eatery that is nearly a town legend.
It was her. Della from the Black Cat. My mouth went dry. Della was his wife? Only this Della was a whole other woman. I traced my finger along an outline of a white dress, along the arm she had draped around Russell’s waist. Della Wallen was my stepmother, or some other name akin to that. Wife, lover, another woman from a life Ruby never knew about, or had. I held my hand against the glass of the microfiche screen, blanking out the both of them, my father and this Della from another time. My forefinger traced the shape of my father’s face, the spread of his fingers on Della’s shoulder, his half-smile. Russell Wallen. I said his name again and again, good as a nighttime prayer, but what they said about hard times? When I looked at his face, I felt nothing at all.
The days grew shorter, cool air from the river drifted over the streets, and the library microfiche room became my second rented room, that and the library break room. When I’d had enough microfiche for one night, I’d make my way to the break room, where three vending machines and four long metal tables about filled the place. An old woman with rolled down stockings and a bad perm was eating cheese crackers. There was hardly a chair but the one back in the corner near the Coke machine.
Weaving in and around were four or five others that belonged on a night with Cody and me in Knoxville. One of them, a skinny girl, had strange large eyes and shiny gold threads in her hip-length hair. With her was a fat boy covered with tattoos and baggy pants hanging low from his hips. I scanned the room and just like that, there was Russell Wallen, the very man all the news clippings had shown.
I want to say the world stopped right then and there. That a spotlight came down out of nowhere or that it was all like a scene in an old movie with a backdrop of mountains and snow, heartfelt music. It is true that a kind of music came from him, a low-down blues from the very pores of his skin. Beneath a slouchy felt hat, he had gray and black hair and a full mouth. I picked up the trail of his music and followed it over to him where, under the dim lights of the break room, his eyes looked me up and down so my cheeks felt hot.
Spread out on the table in front of him were documents. Letters with handwriting so old the ink was brown. Maps. Some signed forms that looked like deeds. Property, I read. In the ownership of. I couldn’t read a name.
“You’re Waydean Long, I hear.”
I stood, looking at my hands.
“You that new girl over to the diner?”
“Word gets around fast, it seems.” I kept standing.
“I hear you read a card or two.” He laid his hand down in front of me, palm up, waited to see what I would say. “What’s the story on this palm, now?” He stretched his fingers and waited for me to take a look.
I hesitated, then reached across and traced my finger along his lifeline. The line was clean and neat, one part steady until it broke, disappeared into the wide cuff of his sleeve.
When I got back to the boardinghouse it was late, and I sat a spell on the porch swing. Across from me was some other porch, and its light was on too, and three houses down, an upstairs window was lit behind a shade. Russell Wallen. I want to tell you I stopped breathing, knowing I’d seen him, that a hand gathered around my heart and massaged away at some ache I’d always had, and that the world picked me up and shook me and said, You, Miracelle Loving. That should have been true and it was not.
I had been carrying Ruby’s fancy tarot cards with me the last couple of days, and I took them out of my shoulder bag. I held the box against my chest like I was expecting it to breathe, then took out a card, studying the picture in the low light. A woman, caught in a tangle of dreams and swords. Another card. A woman with long black hair, a rose in her hand. “Ruby Loving,” I said aloud. “Are you there?”
The front door creaked open. “Somebody out here?” It was Lacy May in her housecoat and slippers. “Waydean?”
“That’s me,” I said, and scooted over to make room for her.
We kicked the swing forward and back and she picked up one of the tarot cards from my lap.
“What’s this here?” She held the long-haired woman’s card underneath her eyeglasses.
“Just a little reality check for tonight,” I said.
She picked up a second card, the tangled dreams one.
“I always see you and them cards out here and you waiting like they have something to tell you.”
“I keep waiting for the right card to fall, I reckon.”
“That room I rented you, now.” Lacy stood and looked down at the spread I’d laid. “I will say that room has seen some folks over time.”
“Enough pictures up there to prove that.”
“I won’t say it’s haunted.” she said. “But maybe Tince’s still up there somehow. Maybe healing’s up there, too, if you believe it’s so.”
Up in my room I paced, knowing I needed no cards nor the lines on my own palm to tell the kind of man Russell Wallen was. I’d already memorized details of him. A deep scar began at his wrist, wound its way across his knuckles. He wore his hat tilted just enough to make it hard to read his face, but in that face I already saw myself. When I smiled, my mouth also held teeth crooked as a dog’s hind leg. His eyes were red-rimmed, tired as I myself could be with nights awake or nights needing some back road to drive with a bottle of whiskey and radio songs. His hands knew as much hard work as I’d known, and I imagined that when he stood, we’d match one another for lean and tall. If Russell Wallen had been a word, I’d have rinsed him through my teeth and spat him out, neat.
I stood in front of the frame that held Tince May’s photo. So she’d been a faith healer. As far as I was concerned, faith was maybe a tiny shake in your bones that came and left right quick. I wanted to believe, but what I’d always trusted most was the road out, the next town ahead, with strangers making a lot more sense than kin. Still, it was worth a try. I closed my eyes and laid my hands against the glass over Tince’s photograph and waited.
I could hear the least thing. A dog howled at something and the something yipped back. Down in the street, people walked by and I could hear them talking. “Just go on then,” the man said. “I will,” the woman said, her voice high-pitched and sad. “And just see how much you like it.” After that, not a sound from anything, and I waited, my hands against the cool picture-frame glass that shook a little as a train whistled and the cars hustled by on the far-off tracks.
I guess wishing hard enough means I had to see a few things, and I did. I saw my car, headed west, cigarettes scattering sparks along a highway. I saw Cody’s face when I told him not to love me. I saw the color of Della Wallen’s eyes, a cool blue as she carried trays of burgers in from the kitchen and smiled at me like she’d known me all her life. I saw my mother, her scared face as I ran through a trailer door and found her lying in her own blood. Here I was standing in a rented room with my hands against a picture frame, waiting on the voice of God. What had Lacy said? Healing’s up there, if you believe it’s so. Belief had always been a day late and a dollar short in my life, and now here I was waiting on the ghost of a fat lady to tell me some answers, and I wasn’t even sure what my questions were in the first place.
I stretched my hands against Tince’s framed picture, dug my fingers next to the glass like it was skin. What had I expected I’d see when I saw my father’s face for the first time? Kindness, maybe? Had I expected he’d stand beside me and whisper in my ear like he was some preacher man ready to bless me from here on out, forever and ever, amen? What I wanted and what I got were two different worlds. I had wanted to know my father, and now here he was. Hurt. Maybe that’s what I wanted most of all.