Leave the Living Read online

  LEAVE THE LIVING

  Joe Hart

  First Edition

  Leave the Living © 2015 by Joe Hart

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

  www.darkfuse.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  For my father—thanks for always believing in me, Dad. I miss you.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks, as always, goes out to my family, who give me unbelievable support and encouragement. I couldn’t do it without you.

  1

  In the winter, there was always bad news.

  It waited until the cold beset everything, and everyone who experienced loss knew that the warmth of summer was reserved for laughter, carefree words, and warm nights to dream while the darkest months were where sorrow held sway.

  It came in twos. The oldest woman in the family would say something about the other shoe dropping when the first bit slipped in through the phone lines or by the mail slot. Then the second would come, just as she’d said it would, and she would be triumphant amidst the sadness or anger, too mortared in her age to be any more burdened. Sometimes it came in threes the way questions did on forgotten game shows. There would be two notices, and then everyone would hold their breath, waiting, waiting, before the last would arrive. And after that, any more misfortune wouldn’t be counted as a fourth but a new sequence of three.

  When the phone rang that day in early January in the middle of the evening between dinner and bed, Mick knew it was the news that came only once. Nothing worse could follow, for he didn’t believe in successive disaster. Each was unto itself, a universe of anguish held in a microcosm of time. He listened to the voice on the other end of the phone, first his stomach going cold, then his fingers, then numbness beyond the shock that buffeted him. He nodded when the voice asked him a question, and it was over a minute before he realized that the officer on the other end of the line couldn’t hear him bobbing his head.

  He hung up and sat down in the leather recliner that Cambri had given him on a Christmas five years ago, when their marriage had been whole and unaffected by viruses of money and daily worries that slowly stripped their love bare until there was nothing left but the bones of what once was. He sat and looked at his hands for a long time. The calluses were gone, and he wished they were there again. He wished they still looked like his hands had.

  He dialed his ex-wife’s number and listened to the bell in his ear toll, counting the rings. She picked up between the fourth and fifth.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, it’s me.”

  “Hi, can I call you right back? We’re just sitting down to dinner.”

  “My dad died.”

  Stabbing silence cut through the handset, and he ran a splayed hand through his hair, pacing out to the enclosed veranda, its windows framed with scaling frost, the skyline of Chicago a bar graph of lights in every direction.

  “What?” The sound of tears in her voice was too much, and his own welled beneath his eyelids that he clamped down to stop.

  He kept his voice steady in revolt against the burning in his throat. “He had an accident near his house. Apparently he was cutting down a few dead trees, and one fell on him.”

  “Oh God. I’m so sorry, Mick.” Now she was crying, and the sound of her fiancé’s voice asking what was wrong came from the background. She mumbled something that he couldn’t hear and then was back, her voice wet and raw.

  “That’s terrible. Oh, Mick, I’m so sorry.”

  “Thank you.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “They’re not sure yet, but probably sometime yesterday or the day before. You know how far out of town he lives.”

  “Yes.”

  Cambri issued a short sob and breathed out. He imagined he could feel the warmth in his ear. “What do you need?”

  He put a hand against the frozen glass, wanting to say “you,” and melted his palm print through until he couldn’t stand the cold anymore. “I won’t be able to make the wedding this weekend. I know you needed me to help with Aaron, but now I’ll have to go up north.”

  “It’s not a problem at all. I’ll rearrange things with my mom. She’ll be able to sit with him during the ceremony.”

  “You know I’d be there otherwise.”

  “Of course, Mick, I know that.”

  “I just want to make sure Aaron understands.”

  “He will. I’ll explain it to him.”

  The urge to say he was sorry came and fled in the space of a heartbeat. Telling her not to go through with the wedding also arrived in words that lit and died on the back of his tongue like claw-footed birds of prey. He swallowed them down, ill and jagged pills.

  “Just don’t tell him everything. I’ll explain it to him next week when I get back. I don’t want him to be upset all weekend.”

  “Okay. You’re flying out tonight, then?”

  “I should.”

  “Let us know if you need anything.”

  Us, yes, of course. “I will.”

  “I’m so sorry. You know I loved your dad.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’ll call you when I get there.”

  “Okay. Fly safe.”

  He hesitated, her words echoing after him through all the times she’d said them when he’d been about to board a plane. “I will.”

  “Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  He set the phone down and looked at it for a while. Then he stood and made his way to the kitchen and pulled a beer from the fridge, twisting off its cap in one motion before draining half of it. The vast emptiness held at bay rushed in, consuming him in a wash of loss so total it left him breathless. He set the beer on the counter and slid down, his legs unhinging like broken doors beneath him.

  Images cascaded through his mind. Snippets of memories, happy until that moment, soured now into a wretched doppelganger of what once was. They would never be the same, he realized then. The words and lessons taught wouldn’t ever have the same meaning as they did an hour ago.

  Mick pulled his face from where it had fallen into his hand, wiped away the moisture of tears, and shook his head. His father was gone, and he was alone.

  2

  O’Hare to Humphrey was a blur. The crowds were sparse after the holiday rush. Bedraggled travelers surrounded him, dead-eyed and weary, trying to get home, or at least to somewhere they could rest. He blended in easily with them.

  He fell asleep the moment the plane left the ground, its anti-gravitational force pulling away the thoughts that plagued him like hornets from the disturbed nest of his mind. He dreamed of his father walking toward him across a great plain of snow. There was nothing but the white cut of it against more accumulation that fell in twirling curtains around them. As his father neared, he saw that his feet were bare and that they didn’t touch the new powder beneath them.

  He was shaken awake by a stewardess ten years his senior, looking as disheveled as some of the passengers he’d seen boarding the red-eye flight, as tired as he looked, he supposed.

  “Sir, w
e’re deboarding,” she said, rousting him on the shoulder with only fingertips. He wiped his mouth, which wasn’t wet but too dry, and blinked, taking in the vacant interior of the 737.

  “Thank you,” he said, clearing sleep from his voice.

  He gathered his carryon and shuffled through the terminal to an all-night restaurant named Café Slim’s. His connection flight to Warren didn’t leave for over an hour, so he ordered a club sandwich that he didn’t touch and three rum and Cokes that he finished every drop of. The time passed too slowly, and his mind wandered, beginning to plan for what the week would bring: the arrangements, the paperwork, the relatives. Thankfully, there were few of the latter to call. His father had one brother that lived in the town he was flying to, no doubt already alerted by the authorities, and an aunt that had been out of touch with reality since the late nineties. His mother had beaten his father to heaven by thirty-three years.

  His age, to the day.

  He sighed and sucked the last dregs of rum from the bottom of his glass, the ice disintegrated remains of the cubes they were. Remains. That’s the word the officer had used on the phone. He would need to stop by the county coroner’s office and identify his father’s remains. Why? Why would he need to identify him? But he didn’t want to answer that particular question. Not now, not with this much booze flowing through his system. The answer would be too painful, too acute.

  When the small, twin-engine passenger plane took off, it was into a twelve-below night, gradually gaining light on its eastern edge. The flight would only last an hour. He had almost rented a vehicle in Minneapolis and driven the damn three hours to his hometown instead of paying over two hundred dollars to fly a hundred miles. But the thought of being alone on the barren road flanked by unending forests encrusted with a Minnesota winter was too much. But really, it was the time that urged him into spending the extra money. The time spent staring at a two-lane road leading into the night. Time left for his mind to work. The time scared him.

  The caffeine in the Coke offset the alcohol, and he couldn’t sleep. So he watched out the window, ignoring the two attempts his seatmate made at starting a conversation.

  The land below gathered the graying light of the sunrise and washed it across the snow-covered trees, speckling the ground whenever the clouds would disperse long enough for him to get a glimpse. There was an open space of a snow-covered lake and a winding serpent of blacktop so far below it looked like a child’s squiggle of pencil lead against an untouched page. The rest of the day faded into an ashen morning from his youth: cold, crisp air so sharp it would stab your lungs if you inhaled too fast; the melting snow inside the cuffs of your jacket after a snowball fight; the rush of wind as you sledded down a path packed by the man that towed you up the hill over and over, his big boots crunching the ice. Snap, snap, snap.

  Mick woke, shaken that he hadn’t known he was sleeping, as the plane dropped the last few feet and touched the runway, the tires beneath him screaming their protest. The wind howled against the plane’s aluminum hide, clawing for a way to get into the cabin.

  Warren airport was two strips of tarmac laid side-by-side and intersected with two other smaller runways, forming a giant hashtag in a clearing set just far enough from the waste water treatment plant so the passengers wouldn’t see the massive block building that filtered the town’s refuse but close enough to notice its stench whenever boarding or disembarking from the aircrafts.

  Mick caught the sharp tang of sewer, there and gone, as he climbed out of the plane and funneled along with the other dozen passengers into the high-ceilinged terminal. How long since he’d been here? A year? Two? His father had flown down for Aaron’s seventh birthday last fall. Before that, he couldn’t remember when he’d been up to see him.

  “These your bags, sir?”

  Mick came out of his trance, his fingers numb from holding the straps of his carryon. The customer service agent pointed at the black suitcase waiting on the stainless-steel baggage claim. “Yes, thanks. Sorry. Do you know when the car rental kiosk opens? I see there’s no one there now.”

  The young man in the blue polo smiled. “Sure do. I’m the agent over there too.”

  Mick followed him to the desk where he filled out the necessary forms, opting for the SUV instead of the more economical midsize car.

  “Smart, I’d say.”

  “What’s that?” Mick asked, holding his hand out for the keys.

  “Going with the four-wheel drive. They say we’re supposed to get more snow through tonight, a continuous storm.”

  “Yeah, better safe than sorry.”

  “You from around here?”

  “Not anymore,” Mick said, taking the keys from the man’s hand.

  The cold air bit harder than it had through the flimsy gateway on the tarmac, and he shivered as he jogged across the drifted parking lot to the Chevy Tahoe encased beneath six inches of snow. After cleaning the vehicle off, his hands buzzing with cold, he headed onto the access road that ran parallel to the long, blowing field of runway.

  The town of Warren boasted a population of five thousand according to the green sign outside the city limits. He doubted it was more than three now since the paper mill had closed its doors last spring. The mill was the main employment for the area, carrying the people who didn’t rely on tourists during the summer months. But it was gone now, shuttered and locked, its massive space quiet and still. His father had relayed the news over the phone to him with sadness in his voice. Several of his close friends were moving away, searching beyond Warren’s borders for employment that the little town could no longer provide.

  Mick reached out and switched on the radio. A song filtered in through the Bose surround sound, and he couldn’t help but shake his head. The radio was tuned to the only major station in the area, and it was playing a song that the disc jockeys had pumped continuously his senior year in high school. Nothing changed here. He let the familiar waves of memory wash over him and fill him with a melancholy that was separate from the sharp edges of grief. His youth was gone, faded like the workers at the mill.

  He flipped the radio off and continued the drive in silence with nothing but the buffeting wind and the crackle of snow beneath his tires for company.

  3

  Warren appeared through the blowing snow, signified by a single stoplight. The road he was on became the town’s main street, which intersected with Highway 2 running east and west a mile farther on amidst the heart of Warren. But for the most part, the small burg was a straggled and ill-planned mess of cobbled shops and buildings that lined the road he was on. Outlying the stores were neighborhoods, the poor on the left, the less poor on the right. Mick watched the stoplight. It didn’t blink in a metronomic signal like he’d almost expected it to but changed systematically, allowing the cross traffic of a single truck to turn left and head past him out of town. He waited, watching the road, snow swirling in delicate eddies as if he were not on blacktop but at the bottom of some frigid river.

  A single honk sounded from behind, and he glanced in the rearview seeing nothing but the intimidating grin of an eighteen-wheeler’s grille. The light was green, and he pulled forward, leaving the big truck in a flurry of snow.

  Warren swept by him on either side, and he noted several more CLOSED signs on business doors than there had been the last time he visited. The town was dying, gasping its last breaths. And somewhere in the back of his mind, he vowed never to return here once everything was in order and his father was buried.

  The sheriff’s office was a squat building made of weather-stained brownstone attached to city hall on the corner of the only major intersection in the town. It sat beside its larger counterpart like an ugly afterthought. A single cruiser idled beside the curb, a haze of exhaust blooming in the freezing air.

  Mick hurried to the duel swinging doors through the weather, instantly chilled. He cursed himself for not bringing his heaviest coat and flexed his fingers within his pockets to keep them limber.

&n
bsp; The reception area of the building was as hospitable as its outer shell. Faded beige carpet and matching walls led up to a chipped Formica counter with Plexiglas set above it, a hole cut in its middle that framed a young deputy’s face. He was clean-shaven with weary eyes that spoke of the end of a shift not far off.

  “Help you?”

  “Yeah. My name is Mickey Bannon. My father is—was David Bannon. He died yesterday in an accident.”

  “Oh, gotcha. Why don’t you have a seat. I’ll send out the sheriff.”

  Mick nodded and turned to sit in one of the threadbare seats near the doors. But before he could, an entrance to the right of the counter clacked open, and a man wearing standard browns of the department stepped into the reception area. He was short and squat, but his posture suggested his body was powerful rather than flabby. He moved with assurance across the distance between them, his mouth framed by a dark mustache pulled downward in a frown.

  “Mickey, I’m Sheriff Reed. We spoke on the phone last night. Very sorry for your loss, son. I knew your father fairly well. He was a good man,” Reed said, extending a hand for Mick to grasp.

  They shook, and Mick tried to smile. “Thank you.”

  “You got here sooner than I’d thought. Must’ve flown out right away.”

  “I did. I didn’t want to wait any longer than need be.”

  “I hear you. Sad business and nasty weather.” The sheriff contemplated him with deep-set eyes, not blinking, just staring.

  “So what do I need to do?” Mick finally asked, feeling himself squirm internally under the other man’s piercing gaze.

  “Well, I apologize, but you’ll have to identify the body.”