Ashes

Andy and I burned fallen branches in the woods to watch the firelight move on the leaves and bark. There were railroad ties out there, brown pieces of iron, and soil blackened with coal. It rained a lot. I tried to have the best thoughts.

“How do you think we ended up here,” I asked him, “when there’s so many other places?”

Andy stirred the coals, the rain making a familiar sound on the turning leaves.

“Worse places to be,” Andy said.

The smell of the fire was strong because the wood was wet, some of it waterlogged and beginning to rot.

We were behind an old coal tipple that had trees growing through the gaps in the ties. Beyond that were stone foundations surrounded by marshes of septic overflow.

I was convinced I could get myself to be something like beautiful. I could leave and go someplace where there would be soft light and pretty daughters. Where bike trails didn’t lead through your neighbor’s septic overflow.

But for now I hated clean people, whoever they were.

I liked to build fires in the rain. Andy was creative with insults and moved deliberately. Bad things happened around him without a change in atmosphere. He had once bent a cafeteria spoon back and forth until the friction heated the metal and the spoon broke from its handle. He pressed the hot end of the handle to my neck like a branding iron.

“I didn’t know,” he said.

“How could you not?”

“I just thought I’d see.”

After the fire burned to coals, we kicked the embers into the moss and pissed on what still glowed. We walked back toward Andy’s house, over the shit creek, past the abandoned brick theater. We had that feeling 14-year-olds have, knowing that we were on the edge of figuring something out. Andy lived in a house with holes in doors and stains in the carpet, with a father who talked to him like I would talk to him.

I had a stepfather, Russell, a logger who hauled home old trucks and parked them in the yard. He piled empty barrels and car seats behind the garage and built a makeshift stable, where he kept a steer. At the supper table, dirty and shirtless, he talked about conspiracies and the biblical apocalypse. “Big brother’s watching,” he’d say. His face shone; his teeth were worn to nubs from chewing tobacco.

You weren’t allowed to argue. He’d hand out punishments like having to bake him a pie—either that, or he’d threaten to beat you within an inch of your life. “I’ll be out of jail before you get out of the hospital,” he’d say, “and then we can do it again.”

My mother sat in her apron with her hair still up from work. She said his name slowly while he glared at her. She’d been a redhead in high school, lived on a corner property near the football field. In her yearbook pictures, she looked like she had a comfort then that she couldn’t afford now. She was a woman who fired a coal furnace in her nightgown before she dressed and worked testing children’s iron levels and writing government checks for cheese. She read the Old Testament in the mornings, called my worries vanity.

Andy and I walked up the sparse end of Main Street to his shingle-sided house with moss on the roof and appliances on the front porch. In the cellar, two cigarettes we’d dipped in cough medicine were drying under a lamp on his wooden workbench. The first hit made your arms feel long and your gums tingle.

“I’m working on a tattoo gun,” Andy said, picking something off the workbench and handing it to me. He had taken the top off an electric razor and was trying to solder a needle to the part that vibrated.

“All you really need,” I said, “is some wet cigarette ashes and a sewing needle.”

Andy poured some water in a bowl for me to put ash...