About the Book: “Just outside of smog-covered Pittsburgh, the gritty town of Avon is home to blue-collar families just trying to scrape by. One of those, the Sampsons, have seen more than their fair share of tragedy.
Ed Sampson worked in the mill and fathered three sons over a 20-year period. But after oldest son Nate died in Vietnam, things unraveled at home, and Ed took off.
Middle son Nevin, a photographer, headed to Southeast Asia to trace Nate’s footsteps and learn what he could about his older brother’s fate. And now, in 1978, he’s missing and presumed dead.
After all the heartache and loss, the boys’ mother, Ellen, self-medicates and has mentally checked out.
That leaves the youngest Sampson boy, Nick, basically on his own.
Nick barely avoided the military draft and, when he’s not drinking, works at the local bottling plant.
He’s 25, rudderless and adrift, with only his childhood friend Gina to rely on.
Gina has issues of her own, including a medical problem that she won’t talk about.
But a shocking discovery has Avon abuzz and brings Nick under scrutiny. It also pulls Nick and Gina closer together as he battles his demons and searches for answers…”
More Info About the Author: Ken McCarthy is a financial journalist working from home in western Pennsylvania. He and his wife, Chris, have four children. This is his first novel. He has been sober since 2007.
More from this author…
The Nest
Chapter 1
The lunch whistle blew, and Nick Sampson headed for the exit.
The first five hours of the workday passed with their typical, agonizing slowness. Nick could see one of the clocks from his station, and at times it seemed to stop moving. At other moments he could have sworn it was going backward. But the final three hours of the 7:00-3:30 shift would move along a little quicker.
At least for Nick.
He had been working on the production line at Kingston Bottling off and on for seven years. At 25, he had never worked anywhere else. All in all he hated it, but it was close to home and it paid pretty well.
It was a job.
Nick shouldered the push bar on the heavy steel door and walked out into a glorious spring day. He had heard somewhere that only rainy Seattle saw fewer sunny days in an average year than Pittsburgh. He didn’t doubt it. And because such days were few and far between, they had to be fully enjoyed.
And I’m about to do just that, he thought.
Technically, the bottling plant wasn’t in Pittsburgh proper but sat just outside its borders in the hardscrabble town of Avon. There were probably doctors and lawyers among Avon’s 15,000 residents, but the vast majority of the adults (the men, anyway) either worked in the steel mills across the Monongahela River or in a business that supported those steel-making monoliths.
Nick heard that Hollywood had arrived recently in nearby Mingo Junction, Ohio to film scenes for a Vietnam War-themed movie to be called “The Deer Hunter” that would hit the big screens early the following year. From what he understood, Mingo was chosen because it was the archetype of an American mill town in 1978. He had never been to Mingo so he couldn’t say if it was a good choice or not, but he thought Avon could certainly hold its own in that regard.
Dust from the mills coated everything that sat still in Avon, and the air almost always had a gritty quality to it. You cleared snow off your windshield in the winter and gray grime from it the rest of the year. It was not uncommon for an Avon resident to emerge from home in the early morning to find the message “clean me” scrawled on one of the windows of the family sedan. When he was younger, Nick himself had been guilty of that sort of finger painting on more than one occasion, and his dad, Ed, would have been surprised to know that his own Cutlass had been so decorated at his son’s hands once or twice.
Well, at least when Ed Sampson was still living in Avon, that was.
And if Hollywood needed more visuals for its steel town backdrop there were always the smokestacks in the distance. Avon was built on slightly more than 1.5 square miles of land that became hillier the further east you went from the river. But regardless of your vantage point in town, you could almost always see at least the tops of the stacks perpetually billowing their gray smoke into an often-gray sky.
Nick let the door slam behind him but heard it immediately creak open again. Most of the bottling plant crew took their lunch in a little meeting room that had been hastily built into the rafters 20 feet above the work floor. With only 30 minutes for lunch, it was either bring your own food or make a mad dash to a restaurant across town. There was nothing but industrial operations in the seedy part of Avon where Kingston Bottling sat.
“Going home for lunch, Nick?”
He turned and saw that Freddy Baxter, the plant manager, had followed him out of the employee entrance. Freddy normally ate with his workers even though most of them couldn’t stand him. He wasn’t a bad guy but didn’t handle stress well. In some work environments that might not have been a problem, but Kingston’s equipment dated to the second World War and hardly ever operated the way it was supposed to, so he was always under pressure.
“Don’t I always?”
Nick lived almost exactly one mile from the plant, so theoretically he could jog home, devour a sandwich and return before the back-to-work whistle sounded. And, occasionally, he did just that.
But more often than not — and especially just lately — Nick instead headed to the nest.
He was almost positive that none of his co-workers knew about his little midday diversions. Access to the nest was on the opposite side of the Kingston building from its main entrance and — at least when he first started going there — Nick always circled the building once or twice to make sure no one was watching. More recently, though, he would just quickly glance around before making a beeline to his little hidey-hole.
But was it possible Freddy had seen a change in his afternoon demeanor or performance lately and was wondering where exactly Nick was spending his break time? Or had he somehow spotted Nick coming from or going to the nest and walked over for a closer inspection? But even if he did, what would he find?
He didn’t think Freddy or anyone else had a clue, but discretion was the better part of valor.
“I know I would if I were you,” Freddy said. “Anything to get out of here for a few minutes.”
None of the other Kingston workers lived far from the plant, but no one else lived close enough to walk.
Freddy pulled a crumpled pack of Camels out of his breast pocket and quickly fired one up. He took an extremely long pull and let out a huge cloud of blue smoke.
“Well, have a nice lunch, Nick. Tell your mom I said hi. See ya in 30,” he said, then took a quick look at his wristwatch. “Make that 29.”
Nick had no intention of going home and wasn’t about to change his plans then, regardless of Freddy’s possible suspicions. The thing was…once he got the idea of visiting the nest in his head it was almost impossible to alter course.
The bottling plant took up most of a block and was pressed up against the railroad tracks that bisected the borough. The tracks were an immutable fact of life for everyone who lived in Avon. But, unlike in other towns, there was no good or bad side of the tracks. All of Avon’s residents were in the same financial boat. And that boat was listing.
Waverly Street (in reality not much more than an access alley) sat between the plant and the tracks and also led directly to Nick’s mom’s house. The street was in constant need of repair and was especially potholed in the area around the bottling plant where tractor-trailers assaulted the blacktop on a regular schedule, day and night, seven days a week. Pittsburghers seemingly could not get enough of the locally made, sugary beverages that Kingston pumped out.
On the far side of Waverly from the plant, a bent and twisted guard rail kept cars and pedestrians from slipping over the steep, weed-choked embankment that led first to a thin, polluted stream and ultimately to the railroad tracks themselves.
A mile further up Waverly near the Sampson’s home, a path had been cut through the weeds and sumac trees over time by Nick and his older brothers and countless others who used the spot to cross to the other side of town. Growing up, Nick’s parents had told him to stay off of the tracks more times than he could count. He never had a close encounter with a train himself, but there were legends galore about Avon boys who had barely escaped death after a brush with a speeding train.
Nick supposed one or two of those tales might even be true.
He headed toward home at a jog until he rounded the first bend in the road. At that point he knew without looking back that he was out of sight of the plant’s employee entrance. He suspected Freddy had snubbed out his butt and headed back inside for his daily bologna sandwich and apple (occasionally a slice of pie for dessert), but he couldn’t take chances. He moved a step back toward the plant and slid behind a telephone pole. Nick then slowly moved his head to the right until he could see the building.
All clear.
Crossing Waverly, Nick worked his way over the guard rail, down the embankment, over the stream and up onto the tracks. Every time he stood between those huge wooden ties — even as an adult — he could hear his mom’s voice warning him of the imminent danger.
He knew the lunch (half) hour was quickly slipping away, so he hustled back in the direction of the building. Just as he pulled even with the third of the five truck bays on that side of the plant, the nest came into view. It was really only visible from that exact spot, and even if you were looking for it (and why would you?) it was hard to see.
The nest, so dubbed by Nick’s friend Gina, was in reality just a small clearing amid the shrubs and weeds. It was barely large enough for two grown adults to sit comfortably. Luckily for Nick, sharing the space had never been an issue. As he hustled toward it, he realized that Gina had only been in the nest the time she had jokingly named it, and no one else had ever visited.
“I love what you’ve done with the place, Nick,” Gina had said on that day, which must have been about a year ago. He had cautiously told her about it a week before that, and she had been bugging him to see it since. Nick wasn’t worried about Gina telling anyone about the spot or using it herself. He just didn’t want her to think any less of him. “You got yourself a nice little nest here.”
The name had stuck, and the nest became the basis for a constant stream of ribbing that involved Gina asking Nick for updates on his latest decorating efforts in his little hideaway.
Nick had just stepped off the tracks and started toward the stream and the nest tucked above it when he sensed movement to his right. At first, he thought Freddy had cagily waited for him to return and was about to ask Nick exactly what he was doing. But Nick quickly realized the figure was not wearing a beer-belly hugging dress shirt and tie but instead an olive-green, military-issue dress coat that once belonged to a U.S. Marine. It was torn in several places and, like its owner, was badly in need of a good washing.
Brownie.
There was no man or woman more universally recognized across Avon than Brownie, a former Marine (so the story went) who had returned from World War II to find that his wife had decided that remaining celibate while her husband was fighting in France was simply too much to ask. In fact, (so the story went) poor Brownie had actually walked in on the missus and her new beau while they were in the act. But instead of taking revenge, Brownie turned heel and headed straight to the nearest liquor store, where he had been a regular ever since.
Much like the tales of boys who barely missed getting splattered by passing trains, Nick had always assumed there was little truth to the story. The only parts that were beyond debate were that: A. Brownie always wore that Marine uniform, and B. Brownie was always drunk.
With his 30-minute lunch ticking away, Nick didn’t have time to wait for Brownie to stagger off, but he didn’t want the old man to see him enter the nest either. Action was needed. He reached into the front pocket of his jeans, pulled out a crumpled dollar bill and approached the old vet.
“Here ya go, Brownie. Go treat yourself. Heck, maybe it’s your birthday.”
Brownie could have been no taller than 5’6” standing straight up, but he was in a perpetual stoop and often seemed to be examining his battered boots even while he walked, so he appeared even shorter. He also had long, matted hair that hung in his face. Between the unclean locks and a wildly, overgrown beard, little skin above the neck was visible. But as he took the dollar from Nick’s hand, Brownie turned his dirty face up, and Nick was taken aback by the two blazing blue eyes staring at him from deep in their sunken sockets. In them, Nick saw not madness but profound sadness. It occurred to him that he had probably never been that close to the old man.
“They wouldn’t even tell me which way to go,” Brownie whispered. Or at least that was how Nick interpreted the man’s mumbled response. With that, Brownie brushed past Nick and continued down the tracks toward the heart of town, where he could find a bar on every corner that would exchange Nick’s dollar for a couple of tall glasses of Schmidt’s Beer.
As he watched Brownie stumble off (thinking how easy it would be for the veteran to fall, knock himself out on one of the steel rails and get run over by the next train), it occurred to Nick how many homeless vagrants there seemed to be around town lately. It was the kind of thing that was easy to miss as you went about your daily life. Those hopeless, helpless nobodies seemed to fade into — and become part of — the urban scenery, and they were only noticeable if they were in your way. Still, it seemed to Nick that their numbers had been on the rise around Avon.
The clock in Nick’s head told him that he’d already lost about nine minutes of his lunch, and more time was slipping away. He shot one final look to make sure Brownie was moving on and then crossed the stream.
He climbed up into the nest.
This excerpt is published here courtesy of the author and should not be reproduced without permission.
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