Shelter (1994) (26 page)

"Alma." Delia's whisper came from behind, as though to remind Alma that past was past. "Think Frank will remember us?"

"What, that we're the ones who ran away from a snake? No, we look like everyone else. He won't notice us."

Alma watched him on the opposite bank. He was pulling on his waders so he could walk into Mud River and hold the bridge, mostly so the timid girls wouldn't be too scared to cross. The bridge was a concoction of wood boards knotted together with rope and tied to steel cables, two on the bottom to support the bridge and two that ran above as handholds. The counselors had strung rope sides along the cables in a continuous pattern of X's. There was the illusion of safety, but no one really knew if the rope would support the fall of some particularly clumsy Girl Guide. The sets of cables wobbled and swung, not necessarily in tandem.

"Everyone's late because Frank's late," Delia whispered.

"But we were late too, and no one noticed, thanks to him. Right?"

Alma watched Frank wading into the water to hold the bottom cables. Supposedly he kept the bridge from swinging so wildly, his weight a ballast as the girls walked cautiously across.

But the long line of girls jostled and hung back. At least two Junior groups were milling together, trying to cross the bridge and then take separate trails to Highest. Despite the counselors' urgings, the scene was one of lackadaisical confusion. A few girls bawled like cattle, which prompted snickers and jeers from the rest. They were a sort of herd, Alma thought, waiting in single file. They had to walk across five at a time, in carefully spaced intervals.

The line was moving. They began to advance on the woods like a platoon avoiding land mines. Alma and Delia exchanged glances. Acutely embarrassed, Alma began walking, her eyes on the planks beneath her feet. She could feel Delia's footfalls behind her, exactly in step. Midway the river was too deep for Frank to stand; he stood thigh deep on the other side. Alma kept walking until he was directly visible through the rope sides of the bridge; she saw him foreshortened, hanging as though crucified, his form abbreviated by the muddy water. The river was not so slow and somnolent as it seemed: the water eddied around him, lapping at his legs, licking at what disturbed it. Distracted, Alma glanced at his face and found he was looking up at her. His eyes met hers and he winked. Immediately, she looked away. She felt her face burning and hoped Delia wouldn't look at him, knew she wouldn't; Delia hated the river and the bridge and only braved the crossing because she liked hiking. Often the girls were allowed to spread out and meet at a preassigned landmark, and Alma and Delia would find themselves nearly alone in the quiet of the trails. Alma reached the other side and stepped onto land. What had he meant? Winking to flirt was sleazy but she realized, humiliated, that she wasn't even a girl in his eyes. He'd winked as though he were the grownup and she the kid, the stupid kid, the nervous kid afraid of a snake egg. But if he were so grown up, why hadn't he run after Delia, and held on to her and gotten her to stop screaming. McAdams would have. He wasn't a counselor, more like a junior custodian. Maybe he wasn't allowed to talk to the girls; still, no one would have known. He wasn't grown up and he didn't know anything about them, and he didn't care. Suddenly Alma hated him for being so ordinary. She couldn't believe Delia was afraid of a snake egg, or even of snakes. Really, she was afraid of something else getting broken, and Alma was afraid as well.

Alma glanced back and saw Delia step off the bridge. She was completely calm now but nearly stumbled with fatigue, as though the day's work were done. It was hard work, screaming. Alma had never done it, but when she'd caught up to Delia in the woods and held on to her, the screams felt like blasts coming out of her, a ripping apart Delia had to aim toward the outside. Once Audrey had made sounds and not been able to stop, but her sounds were more like howls than screams, and they'd never ended, really. It was like those sounds had just gotten soft and small and seeped inside her. Delia's screams had finished, like a siren. She took deep breaths, like she'd finished an exercise, and the girls had even begun to laugh.

"Alma," Delia said now, and nodded off to the left of the trail.

Alma followed her. They climbed steeply sideways awhile, staying over the river, and came to a rocky enclave. The rocks made a kind of leaning outpost on the high bank. If the girls knelt down they could see most of the bridge and scan downriver nearly to the bend. The big boulders curved away from one another like spoons and formed a kind of hard nest.

"We'll stay here," Delia said. "It's like a fort." Then it seemed to occur to her to be polite, and she added, "You don't mind, do you?"

"You don't want to keep going? The Seniors are up there. We could find out what's supposed to happen at Turtle Hole."

Delia shrugged. "Tonight we'll go there and find out." She smiled sleepily, slid down on her haunches, and leaned back on the rocks. "We don't have to walk any further. I'm your excuse. They all know I need my rest."

Alma sat close beside her. The rocks were mossy near the ground, and cool; Alma felt for pebbles and chips and found a small rock nearly as round as a ball. She balanced the rock on her palm and looked at Delia. "Table tennis?"

Delia yawned, and followed Alma's gaze. The crowd of Juniors had nearly finished crossing the bridge, and Frank was almost directly below. "I think you could," said Delia.

Alma stood. "Aim," she said.

"Fire," finished Delia.

Alma did. There was an instantaneous lag time, and Frank spun a little to the left, craning his neck to look up. The rock seemed to have grazed his shoulder.

"Is he annoyed?"

"Confused," Alma said, "and it must have smarted." She let herself slide down close to Delia.

"Let's hope so." Delia closed her eyes.

Safely wedged in the rocks, they waited as the troop of girls passed, climbing the trail a little below them. Soon the trees obscured all the patches of colors, and voices trailed back like echoes. Then the woods were silent. Alma could see the river below, and pipe stacked down along the opposite bank, and the workmen moving about in their khaki clothes.

"Do you see him?" asked Delia.

"No, I don't think he's there. Weren't there five of them?" Alma sat without moving, as though witnessing a ceremony, her eyes trained on the repetitive movements of the workmen. They dug with large picks and shovels, throwing the dirt off onto a growing pile of soil. Soon they began to move one of the big pipes into place, girding it with chain and tugging, two men to each end.

"Now there are only four," Delia said. She must have opened her eyes and looked.

"I do remember that movie you were talking about," Alma said, "the one we saw in school." She spoke in a near whisper. It seemed to her that Delia was shivering. Their bodies were pressed together by the formation of the rocks.

"The one in the auditorium," Delia answered.

A few times a year, the school saw a movie in assembly, the whole student body present in folding chairs arranged in rows. Topics of the films were sometimes inexplicable. A movie about deserts, for instance, or about World War I. Occasionally an old print of
Treasure Island,
or
Tom Sawyer.

"It was about rain forests, jungle animals." Alma didn't look at Delia but talked softly, wanting to hypnotize her into seeing the exact image Alma couldn't forget. "There was a snake that flew, or glided, from one tree to another. It made its body flat and whipped itself in coils to catch the air. Do you remember? It flew like a dragon—or the native people called them dragons."

"I don't know." Delia sighed.

"People made up stories, and they carved pipes and bowls and spoons, all with dragon's heads."

"I remember the jungle trees, all mossy and grown over with creepers, like they couldn't breathe," Delia said. "Those movies. I only remember that one because it was the day I came back to school."

Alma rested her arms on her knees and cradled her head, looking down at earth through the tunnel of her own body. Yes, that was the first day after the week of the funeral. Beside Delia at assembly, Alma had kept her eyes on the screen, willed herself into the forms of the animals. The snake was most deathly and most alive, throwing itself into air and cracking like a whip. It was dangerous and free, like Audrey had been that day in the yard. After school, in March. Audrey had stood by the fence down behind the house and looked out at the field. She was weeping, sobbing, not with her head bent, hands covering her eyes, as she wept when she was "in a mood," but out loud, her face a contorted mask. She'd answered the phone and spoken to the secretary of the Women's Club, who'd asked her to bake a pie for the Campbells: Nickel's car had been pulled out of Mud River and the ladies would all be taking meals to the family.

"Delia," Alma asked softly, "did your mother cry a lot when your dad died?"

"I was at school when she found out, I don't know. Later she did, or her eyes were just red all the time. Aunt Bird came and picked me up from school and threw all the beer and liquor out of the house. Mom always had some around and Dad let her, but Aunt Bird threw it out. Mom didn't come home for a couple of hours, and Bird didn't tell us anything until she got there."

Alma listened to Delia's whispery voice. A hint of breeze stirred Camp Shelter and the trees made hush-hush sounds up high in their leafy canopies. The whole story seemed a dream from here, just a dreamy world with rippled images, the way the sky looked upside down through a rain puddle. "The week after the funeral, my mother didn't cry at all," said Delia. "We watched
Morning Movie
and then
Midday Matinee,
eating toast on the couch. Sometimes she fell asleep."

Alma, curved into cool, hard rock, could still hear the sounds Audrey had made, a kind of yelling,
Oh, Ohhh, Oh,
circular and endless, emptied into the tall grasses that ran all the way to the creek. Blue beads, remembered Alma, she'd been looking for her blue beads in Lenny's tumbled bureau and had gone to find Audrey, demand she make Lenny tell where she'd hid them. But Alma heard the weeping as soon as she stepped onto the concrete porch. She'd closed the door of the house to keep the sound outside, and walked toward the field. She thought at first that some animal was bellowing in the grass, dying maybe, torn up by dogs, and she'd walked out to see. But it was her mother making the sound. Even with Alma standing beside her, she couldn't stop. She'd gasped,
Leave me alone,
her voice an odd, strangled bark; Alma had gone back to the house and told no one. Lenny hadn't heard anything. A few minutes later she'd given Alma the missing beads, but Alma threw them into a drawer and hadn't worn them in all the months since.

"Aunt Bird was so funny, " Delia went on in her dreamy voice. "She put the liquor in the trash but she put it in our neighbor's barrels, not ours. On purpose."

"She thought if your mom really wanted it, she would get it out of your trash. That's what alcoholics do."

"Aunt Bird is a lunatic." Delia dropped her head onto her chest.

"Maybe it will rain tonight," Alma said. "It hasn't rained the whole time we've been at camp."

"Tonight is your supper speech." Delia pulled Alma's arm close around her. "What will you say?" she asked. "I'm glad it's you and not me."

"I should talk about that movie," Alma whispered. "The dragons and the jungle."

"No, " murmured Delia, "Communists."

Alma was silent.

On the far bank the river workmen pulled and tugged, setting pipe in the leveled ditches they'd dug. Some of them moved in and out of the shallow water near the bank, wearing waders like Frank's, and no shirts. They were wiry men with sinewy arms. Alma wondered if men made, ever, the sounds her mother had made. No. The women made the sounds while the snakes flew, and the men held the snakes while eggs appeared in the grass, delicate, glowing with sounds that broke free and caused everything to fly apart. Alma fit her body closer and felt herself flying deeper into cool rock, sleeping beside the sleeping Delia.

He crouched near the top of the steep bank. Through patches of leafy branch he saw the stranger turn and walk toward the river. The stranger's brown back and the beige of his pants were visible through the trees in broken pieces. There were sounds in the woods again, quiet sounds Buddy knew and heard now, and birdsong close by, far off. Nothing stopped because a car sat in the woods. If it sat here all fall and winter, the snow would cover it and melt, cover it and melt. The sound of the woods, the wind and sun and snow and dew, took in whatever secret, paid no mind. Buddy heard the stranger walking on layered leaves and needles until his steps across the ground were a faint scuffle that disappeared.

The pointed rock was gone; Buddy would never find where Dad had flung it. He crouched close to the vertical earth and measured with his eyes the long swooped scrape where the car had slid. He ran his hand along an upended furrow of ground, then inched his body over to sit in the tire-width track Dad had dug up. The earth was soft and black under its cover of weeds and roots; Buddy began to slide, soundless, down the incline to where he could see the silver bumper of the red car. The car was tilted into the pines and sat catty-corner so the bumper looked to be a silly lopsided grin. Like those cars and trucks with faces in the Golden Books Mam used to buy him at the grocery store. She'd get him one every time from the notions rack, since they'd always just cashed their assistance check; Buddy would let her read the books out until finally he wouldn't listen anymore and she found one in the stream, all the pages floating off and the talking cars and trucks erased. Then she taught him checkers and card games till he could shuffle the deck so fast it blurred. He didn't like those snaggle-faced fire trucks and buses with eyes. A car was not supposed to sing and wink; a car should be a machine and fly by on the two-lane, either side of those double lines, sounding a low hum before it even came in sight from around the trees. Bellington was up the road and Gaither was down the road and the cars ran from one to the other, never stopping or turning, and this car could have taken Dad away, got him far off so easy. Buddy could have told Mam how Dad had got drunk and gone off in the car; he could have said how Dad was never coming back and not been lying, and how there wasn't going to be any prison they would have to visit either.