Shelter (1994) (14 page)

Now Lenny knew: the sounds were a kind of fighting, a weeping. Last night she herself had cried out and they had all disappeared in the sound. Frank's hands were on her breasts, kneading them like a cat, like he wanted something out of them, and his mouth and his jaw and his teeth were in her neck. Cap and Lenny had played games with their bodies before, but now it was different. The water at night was silky camouflage: Cap had wanted to touch Frank, touch her, move them around like they were blind animals. But she'd got scared. It was scary to watch; maybe she had put her hand on Lenny to keep Frank out. She wanted Frank to show them what people did, and she wanted to keep him out.

"I heard you crying in your sleep. You were dreaming about me then, weren't you?"

"I dreamed about my sister," Lenny said.

"But I'm your sister," Cap said, nudging her. "You're supposed to dream about me, aren't you?"

"You are my sister. You're as bad as Alma."

They had to do the dishes so often that the chore was automatic. They knelt side by side, their knees in the water, one of them scrubbing at the plates with a flat rock, the other dunking them in the bucket to rinse, then back into the stream. They sat like penitents, their shoulders nearly touching.

Cap piled the wet plates bottom up, in little towers that tilted and fell. "If you're asleep and I'm awake, I think of things for you to dream."

"Like what?"

"Things I know, things of mine. Things you could keep for me, so I could forget them. Like when I first moved to Gaither and I just was alone all the time, except for the cats."

She'd lived in Gaither five years. That first summer, Catherine had stayed in Connecticut. Henry and Cap had lived out of suitcases, their clothes laundered but never ironed, the big rooms of the Victorian house emptying off each other like a series of deserted squares. Lenny couldn't believe there was a time when Cap didn't know her: Cap lying on the cool wooden floor of her room after Henry went to the mine office, knowing all she had to do that day was wash the sticky plates from her father's fried eggs. There must have been cicadas starting in the summer trees, lulling Cap back to sleep with their warbled buzzing. Lenny let her wake up when the light had changed, run from room to room, draw the blinds and shut windows to keep the house cool. She ran the narrow back stairs Lenny knew so well, up and down from attic to basement, yelling. At noon she made sandwiches for herself and poured cups of milk for the stray cats that lived in the ruined garden of the house.

"I remember you had cats," Lenny said.

"There were a lot of cats, like eight or nine. The house had been empty for about a year, and all these kittens had grown up wild. I got some of them to let me tie yarn around their necks and I called them by the colors—Red, Blue, Black. They would all hide in the plants when I came out to the garden, but I wouldn't give them any food until they let me touch them. Then my dad found out about them."

"What did he do?"

"He called the dogcatcher and they came with these big nets. But they didn't catch them all. They caught the ones with the collars, the ones I'd tamed. Your parents will always do that to you, won't they."

"Do what?"

"Make you part of some trap they think up."

Lenny laughed. "Remember confirmation class?"

"That was the first day I saw you, at the church. My dad always tried to make me stay at home until he got back from work—we didn't have Juanita then. But one day I left and walked downtown."

Lenny imagined the neighborhood, saw it stretch out as empty as the house; for a block on either side, the expansive Queen Annes with walled yards continued. No cars drove by. No kids—older doctors and dentists, aged professors from the local college, their aged wives who stayed indoors, escaping the heat. The map played out: just before Main Street and a downtown of hardware stores, banks, gas stations, ladies' shops, the three restaurants Cap and her father patronized for supper, was the Baptist church, a red brick edifice whose vast windows were leaded in fantastic shapes. Here Cap first saw Lenny, waiting on the steps of the church while her mother signed her up for girls' confirmation classes. She lay across the steps as though the steps were not hard stone, her pale hair in braids, her face so still Cap thought she was asleep and bent over her, looking. When Lenny opened her eyes and stared, her gaze was empty and calm, like a placid lake. Perhaps she'd seemed the opposite of Catherine Briarley; she'd seemed someone who belonged where she was, like rain on a window.

"You must have walked over a mile," Lenny said. "Didn't we get Cokes at the drugstore? And my mom took you home later. She went on and on at me about your big house."

"I couldn't believe how you were just lying across the steps, like some bewitched Sleeping Beauty—"

"My mother had dragged me to the church and I wouldn't go inside, and it was hot and the stone was cool, and I knew she'd be pissed off when she came out and saw me lying there." Lenny was laughing, and shaking the wet metal cups against rocks in the water. The cups jingled. "But I heard this voice in my face, 'Wake up,' and there you were, like you appeared out of nowhere. You made out to my mother that you'd come to sign up to be a Baptist."

"I did become a Baptist. I guess I'm still a Baptist. I mean, I was never unconfirmed."

They'd sat together in the sanctuary for weeks while the minister lectured them about joining God's flock. A stained-glass
Jesus and the Children
towered over them. Light poured through Jesus' robe, scarlet against the blue sky of that other world. They practiced sitting very still in the pew, pretending to be incarnations of the girl in the massive image, the child whose hand rested on a lamb, whose expectant gaze was the essence of glass.

"Lenny, what happened to the scour pad?"

"I don't know. It disappeared yesterday."

"Lenny, you lose everything. I don't know if I'm going to lend you any shoes."

"Rocks scour the plates just fine. And I'm going to find my own shoes. Who wants to wear pink sneakers, and they won't fit anyway."

"Juanita packed them. She likes pink. My mother has a deal with Juanita to make sure I get all the stuff she sends me from Connecticut."

Lenny sat back on her heels. "Didn't your mother finally move down to Gaither after she found out your dad let you join the church? We wore those white gowns that were barely sewn up the sides. And we gave each other lilies. Remember?" Her eyes widened and she fixed Cap with a look that was nearly startled, like she'd forgotten the flowers and their milky smell.

Together, they'd been confirmed. Henry, amused, had watched from the congregation. Their baptism took place the next morning, privately, in the strange cement pool behind the altar. The pool was a rectangle perhaps five feet deep, hidden behind a heavy velvet curtain. The girls wore white cotton gowns and were barefoot; the pool was filled with water made aquamarine by chlorine drops. Potted lilies lined the border of the cement. The snowy, waxen flowers seemed drowsy. Lenny felt herself submerged in the minister's black-robed arms, her hair swirling in an underwater cloud. She was the only one who'd believed she would float in the act of coming to God, her arms straight in her belled sleeves. When the minister let go and raised his hands to say the words, Lenny opened her eyes, gazing upward as though the roof had lifted from the building. Sinking, she exhaled a Milky Way of tiny bubbles and found Cap within that liquid crescent—she never remembered seeing anyone jump in. She opened her mouth to laugh—suddenly it was all so funny—but the water was big and filled her up when she tried to talk. They grabbed the folds of each other's gowns and struggled to the surface. There they stood gasping, doubly confirmed: it was the first time they'd tried to save anything but themselves.

Waxy rhododendron leaves were cold against his face and neck, they smelled of carrots, cold and sweet, and he pressed them to his mouth, peering through green cover to watch the girls at the stream. The others were sounds receding down the mountain, the soft pounding of their footsteps repeated and repeated. But somehow Lenny and Cap were here, kneeling, their hands in water, jangling and clanking a dank, pretty music. Banging stones, Buddy thought, and he wanted to do it too, then he saw the pile of tin plates and spoons and metal cups they were rinsing in the stream. They were talking and saying words but he didn't hear any words, only the trill and inflection of the words and the laughter, the pour and splash of water, and he could hear their bodies, he thought he could, the way they crouched and knelt and moved on their haunches, their wrinkled blouses white in the clearing by the water. They held out their long creamy arms to each other, handing off piles of plates and stacks of the collapsible metal cups that came in Girl Guide mess kits.

Buddy had a cup like that at home, one he'd found last fall at Highest when the tents were rolled up and stored under a tarp. Then the weathered platforms on stilts sat empty like big scattered pieces of a finished game. Buddy had leapt from one to another, hollering like he was after the Russians because these were army tents, and he pretended he was painted in wobbly, muddy colors like the army used when they wanted to hide in the woods. The Russians in his game had faces like Dad's and like prison men, pinched-up faces and wild, tangled hands, and they wore blue prison uniforms like Dad used to wear. Buddy could see them wherever they were, but they couldn't see him, he was invisible, spotted brown and green like the army guys in comic books.

Now Lenny and Cap looked dappled too, spotted by shade and sun. They really were part of some army, Buddy thought, gold pins on their shirts and braided pockets, but they looked rumpled and their hair was messed. They couldn't win. No matter how old they were, they were only two girls, tall grownup girls, and the Russians would grab them and beat them and put them in prison, and Buddy would make a rescue, yelling special words and fighting with a stick. Russians would get Lenny first because she was the tallest girl in camp, and she would fall asleep in prison from being scared, like Buddy fell asleep sometimes if a bad thing happened. Buddy would make a litter out of sapling sticks and rope with blankets on top, just like he'd seen Mam do once for a big old hound dog lame in two legs. But the dog had been a bundled heap on the litter, crouched low while they pulled him along, and Lenny would stretch out long and thin, sleeping. The dog had stayed on their porch a week before he healed enough to run off, but Buddy would take Lenny to the cave near Turtle Hole and she would never run off: Buddy would tell her how Russians lived in the woods. Russians would look for her but never find her: only Buddy knew about the cave, how it opened like a yawn as tall as him behind bushes and brushy cover, just under the back ledge of the diving rock at Turtle Hole. Lenny could sleep on the mossy rock floor, inside where Buddy was afraid to go, and Buddy would bring food to her; Lenny could wash her metal plates in this same shallow stream as it rattled through the back of the cave in the dark. Lenny would make the same sounds she made now, scouring the plates with stones. Her long pale hair hung loose and dragged in the stream when she bent over. Buddy crept closer and thought her hair would cling to his hands like corn silk damp from the husk.

"Why did you have to lose the scour pad, Lenny? It's stupid to wash them with rocks."

"It's stupid to wash them at all in cold water with hand soap. If we can't get soap in the stream, how do they expect us to rinse dishes?"

Now Buddy picked up pebbles to skitter along the water, to hit the plates they'd stacked, and the pebbles made sounds like rain blown suddenly off leaves. Lenny looked up; he'd known she would, but Cap kept on talking.

"If you'd gotten all the food off your share last night, we wouldn't have to do them over again..."

And while she talked Buddy came into the clearing in a- skitter, like a deer. Lenny was barefoot like him, her toenails painted with flaking pieces of red, and Buddy crouched across from her with the narrow stream between them and held his head just so, like her, moved his hands, his foot, and when she shook her hair out, he shook his too. She laughed and he made a somersault, rubbed his eyes like his hands were paws, peeked about like an animal waking up.

"Buddy, you found us," Lenny said. "You're always finding us, aren't you. Such a wise guy."

Cap was talking. "This kid is everywhere. Don't you ever stay home, kid? What's he doing now?"

"Well, he was me but now he's a raccoon."

"Great. If he's going to bug us, give him some dishes to wash."

Cap tossed him a few plates that Buddy held up with his wrists to catch the light and show how coons liked shiny things. Then he licked them and sniffed them and trundled round them in a lumpy crawl and banged them together while the girls laughed. When they laughed like that, he was too big to be a raccoon anymore and he had to stand up and jump and do his best handstand, the one where he kept his legs straight until he flipped backwards and landed on his feet. He bunched down in himself, sat on his haunches and twitched his face, scratched his head with his back foot like a rabbit. Finally they clapped for him.

"Shake the water off those dishes, would you?" Lenny threw some of the plates to Buddy.

The metal clanked when the plates banged and he asked Lenny were they going to breakfast, why weren't they going, why not? "I got me some rolls in my pocket," he said, and pulled them free. He didn't want the rolls or even like rolls so much, mostly he liked to hold them in his hands when they were first warm from the pans. But now the bread was squeezed small, and Cap rolled her eyes at him so he threw the rolls high in the air and let them fall for birds. He grabbed the metal plates on his side of the stream, the clean ones that still smelled of the water, and jumped, jumped, jumped their wetness onto his skin, happy to hear Lenny talk, happy the way her voice was low and deep, happy Cap liked her too, made her talk and answer, and the two of them were like two birds flying, gliding up and down and crowing warnings.