All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 86

86

Misty waited for the 42 bus each day after school let out.

And when Patch stepped from it, a little over six feet now, overalls tied off around his waist, white T-shirt hinting at new muscles and his golden hair tied back beneath a dark cap, she ran across Main Street, jumped into his arms, and wrapped her legs tight around his waist. The two alone in their kiss, the other girls looking on.

At sixteen he had left school and took a job at the Bell Lewis Company, riding four buses each morning to the foot of the pits, where he collected his vest and hard hat and worked alongside men twice his age. The first time he traveled down through dolomite rock to the mine face he’d leaned against a pillar and stared up, the room clawed out to the size of a high school gym.

Induction was swift and tough. He shadowed men loading ore onto haul trucks, got too near the crushing house and by the time he made it back to the hoists his ears were ringing. It took a couple of days to get used to the smell, and the damp and the cold. A couple more till he remembered to cross himself in front of the small Saint Barbara plaque before he went down. Patch spent eight hours each day below ground, often in the kind of darkness punctuated only by the shimmer of ore and his memories of Grace.

Drilling, blasting, and hauling. The men groused about steel prices over sandwiches they ate side by side on wooden benches beneath the flicker of orange bulbs.

“You got a girl?” one of the men asked at the end of his first week.

Patch nodded. “Yeah, I’ve got a girl.”

Patch moved through life girded by a girl who was fast becoming the most beautiful young lady. While adolescence printed much of her class

with pimples and awkward angles, Misty rode that breaking wave with impossible grace and purpose.

They spent white winters tramping woodland; on fine spring mornings they braved the cool lake and trod the undercurrent, sometimes lying on their backs and floating. The first time Misty stripped down to her bathing suit Patch had looked away, only to find her eyes rolling on the return of his gaze. Her confidence as a cook grew, if not her skill, and he gamely choked down such wonders as rabbit bourguignon, crab kebabs, and a signature chili so fiery he spent much of that fall sweating.

On television they watched a blizzard send New England into chaos.

Misty pushed her bare feet beneath his leg like she could feel the cold seep through the VIR television. The Meyers regarded their burgeoning romance with something like amusement, certain their daughter would pay down her debt soon enough.

Patch spent Saturday mornings at the gallery, frowning as Sammy openly wept the day Larry Flynt was shot in Georgia. He’s given us so much. So, so much.

In the fall of ’78 Misty got her license, and that winter the two drove across state to the snow globe town of Petra in Marion County. They coasted down white highways till they saw the rise of the Cupler Windmill.

Patch left Misty in the warmth of her Mercedes and met with a lady named Carol Birch whose daughter had disappeared four years back. He’d found her details in the Marion County Herald and letters had been exchanged.

Together they huddled in their winter coats and trudged the iced streets by the Nine Fork Canal. As Carol told Patch about her daughter, they watched a couple of swans grace the frozen water. The girl’s name was Melinda, and there was nothing at all to suggest she was or was not Grace. Carol carried that sense of dread with her, as if for four years she had been watching for the doleful knock on her door. Patch wondered if hope was its own kind of punishment, sometimes worse than certainty, than the long and closed-off road toward healing.

He left with a photograph of Melinda taken before a Mount Vernon sunset. They drove back in near silence, and when he got home Patch

pinned the photograph to the noticeboard in his bedroom while Misty climbed out onto the flat roof. Patch followed and together they held hands and waited for the stars so that he could tell her stories of ancient Greeks and lasting legends.

“What’s it like in the mines?” she said, and wrapped his arm around her.

“It’s fine, Mist.”

“I worry a rock will fall on your head.”

“I wear a hard hat.”

“Did you share my cupcakes with the other boys?”

Patch thought of the cakes rotting down there beneath the breccias and nodded.

“Good. That’s how you make friends, Patch.”

While Misty’s grades soared, he chased leads all over the state. Most came to nothing. Sometimes people didn’t show or answer his calls, and sometimes he felt that pain in his stomach, that he would not find her, and, perhaps, that she was already gone.

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