Allegheny Front by Matthew Neill Null

Author:Matthew Neill Null
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781941411261
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Published: 2016-02-24T05:00:00+00:00

They begin sharing meals each night, but Shelly keeps on stealing. She and her father stay on for a week, then two. At first they share token supplies with the researchers—a sliced loaf of store-bread, peanut butter—till they run out of food. No one mentions it. Stranger things disappear: a battered water bottle, a bottle opener, a new jug of bleach for sterilizing materials. Nothing expensive: fly rods, the Bushnell rangefinder, and laptops stay put. It feels more like a game than a violation. A magpie of a girl. It doesn’t matter. In a week, Kathryn will make the thirty-mile trip to Elkins for supplies.

At this point, her research demands no more than two or three hours a day, so she spends time with Shelly—maybe she’s stealing out of boredom. Kathryn takes her swimming in the afternoons, something they both love. The others stay behind to play cutthroat euchre.

Kathryn lends her a towel, and they walk to the flat rock by a ruined trestle. The Shavers Fork of the Cheat is a shallow river, and even out in the channel, the water comes only to Kathryn’s breastbone. They bring biodegradable soap. They step over a pile of broken crawdads where coons made a meal. The sun is glorious. Mica glitters in the rock.

Kathryn feels hesitation—taking off her clothes with someone else’s child—but in a moment, they’re naked. She can’t imagine doing this in any other context. Shelly’s body is just becoming girlish, winnowing itself out of a child’s frame, but naked, she still has a child’s lack of self-consciousness. She doesn’t know to be ashamed. At seven? Kathryn worries for that, wondering if it has to do with how Shelly was raised. For her part, Shelly gazes full on at Kathryn, a grown woman, unabashed. Esteeming her, the loose breasts, the trim nest of hair. Kathryn doesn’t mind, children are curious, but when they’re in the water, she takes care not to touch the girl, not to graze a swimming leg. The rock is pleasant and hot. She loves being naked in the sun. If Gary would leave. Maybe he’ll volunteer for Elkins. She tries not to think of sex. She hopes Michael doesn’t ask about her father.

They ease in over rounded, mossy stones and find the water pleasantly cool, a touch under sixty. Shadows dart to the edge of the pool. Kathryn soaps herself, then hands it over. She wonders if Shelly would have washed otherwise. If Nedermeyer would have cared.

Shelly puts her hand to the current and carves out a white plume of water.

Kathryn closes her eyes for a moment—just a moment—and sinks under. Back at camp, surely, over cards, Nedermeyer is telling them about her father. It can’t be helped. It nettles just the same. Hell, Nedermeyer is probably related to someone at Green Valley Mine—probably related to her. No more than ten thousand people in Tuscarora County. When Kathryn was an undergraduate, her father died in the mines. Everyone knows how the miners were trapped behind

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