Saving Allegheny Green by Lori Wilde Page A

limit was twenty-five miles per hour. I slowed. I was in no hurry to see Rockerfeller Hughes or go into his disgusting house but eventually I rolled to a stop outside a clump of about thirty trailers that had seen better days.
    I decided to visit Tim first. Rocky could wait.
    Tim’s trailer was the best in the bunch and that wasn’t saying much, but at least his grass was trimmed and there were no rusting vehicles in the yard. He even had curtains in the window, and his front porch steps looked sturdy and reliable.
    I parked and turned my head to peer directly across the road at Rocky’s house. In contrast to Tim’s double-wide, Rocky owned a tiny repo job teetering precariously on cinder blocks right at the river’s edge.
    His dilapidated truck was parked nose in against the house. The windows were screenless and there was no underpinning around the bottom of the trailer.
    Beer cans and whiskey bottles were stacked like a shrine to alcohol consumption right next to a rusted burn barrel. There was one tree in the whole yard. An old oak with a half-dozen dead branches that needed pruning.
    I’d never been inside Rocky’s trailer, although I had come to pick Sissy up here one night after she called me, crying. She’d been standing by the road when I’d arrived and kept her face turned away from me.
    It wasn’t until we’d gotten home that I’d seen the bruise on her cheek. She’d been smart to hide the marks from me. I would have called the cops on Rocky right then and there and she knew it.
    What was it about my little sister that made her such a loser magnet? Rocky wasn’t the first, well…rocky relationship she’d had.
    She’d always been something of a wild child and from the age of fourteen had engaged in risky sexual behavior. I preached to her about AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases until I was blue in the face. It took me a while to catch on that the more I preached the more promiscuous she became. Finally, I stopped commenting on her sex life. But I never stopped caring.
    “Oh, Sissy,” I whispered. “When will you ever learn?”
    I let the engine idle, pretending I wanted to hear the last of Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven” on the radio, when in reality I wanted to avoid getting out of my car.
    I collected Tim’s file, along with the doctor’s orders and my bag of antibiotics and IV supplies. I made sure I had Betadine and alcohol preps.
    When I could avoid it no longer, I climbed out of my trusty Honda and headed toward Tim’s trailer.
    I knocked at the screen door.
    And waited.
    I knocked again and fidgeted, shifting my weight, tucking my supplies first under one arm, then the other.
    Nothing.
    I checked my watch. A little before noon. He should be awake, even if he was feeling bad.
    Clearing my throat, I knocked again. “Tim,” I called out. “It’s Allegheny Green. Home health sent me out to check that knee and give you some antibiotics.”
    No answer.
    I opened the screen and knocked on the front door. It swung inward at my touch.
    “Tim?” I stepped forward and stuck my head around the door.
    The room was dark, the curtains drawn.
    “Hello?”
    Nothing.
    I took a deep breath. The place smelled funny but I saw no garbage in the trash can. The kitchen was clean, no dirty dishes or food in the sink.
    “Tim?”
    My voice echoed in the empty room.
    With a staggering sense of dread, I moved farther into the house. I set my supplies on the bar and inched down the narrow hallway paneled in dark particle board. The first door on the right was a bathroom. No one in there.
    That left the two bedrooms. With the closed doors.
    “Tim?”
    Suddenly, I found it hard to breathe. My chest tightened. I only knew one thing. I did not want to open that door.
    I rapped on it gently with my knuckles. “Tim, it’s Ally Green.”
    Not a sound. Not a peep. Not a whisper.
    The hair on the back of my neck rose.
    I reached for the knob.
    Forget it. Leave. Go. Tell Joyce he wasn’t