Shelter (1994) (7 page)

Sitting in the cab of one truck after another on that journey to Shelter, Parson had seen the familiar valleys and hovering brackish mountains, the small encroachable skies of southern West Virginia. The land revealed itself like an old dream as a trucker turned on a gospel station; radio chants of songs Parson had led in prison services broke over him like benedictions. Yes, he'd been right to follow Carmody, whose frightened maniacal anger so readily changed to a lax and satiated evil those nights he traded his wife's mailed parcels of clothes and food to the guards for liquor. Then he ranted about girls and women, crouched beside Parson's bunk to rasp in coarse whispers how he'd ripped into this one or that one with a cock like a wood plank till she screamed and begged for more, then he'd whipped her around and shoved it up before she could pull away, ha, they never wanted to do that, up the behind where it was good and tight, Parson knew, sure, reform school boy, foster kid. Women paid attention too when you turned them over and piled in, you had to hold on and shove till your lights came on and then they couldn't get loose to crawl away, eh? right? better do me, this is your chance, till Parson grabbed him to shut him up, to stop his evil mouth, the cell glowing blue with the Devil's light in the blackout of prison black, like being inside a grave, and Parson punched Carmody onto the floor in the corner and held him down, and Carmody felt silken, tasted sweet, as though his body retained some childish perfume despite the loutish, feline sneak in the man. But the flesh of the Devil seduced and fondled was always sweet, not foul with the stench of death like the Devil betrayed and wandering. Carmody groaned and arched himself and laced his fingers into Parson's thick, dark hair, trying to push Parson's wet mouth lower, harder, and Parson heard the Devil's suckling cries, the Devil's whimpering want, and he raised up to he full length upon the Devil's form. He balanced himself there and felt his hands at the throat of the Demon, squeezing the sound and the taste, and Carmody began to buck like a horse. Parson released him then, sat up and hit him once, hard in the face, and left him there, motionless, crawled onto his own bunk, arranging his limbs as one would arrange articles on a shelf. He often felt his body to be an object, something to be moved here and there, and he felt most free when he had seen the Devil in some vulnerable guise and subdued him, beat him back with a power he watched himself employ.

That power was a mystery, sudden, unquestioned, full of wind, like flying. All during the trip to Shelter, Parson had felt some remnant of the power just clinging to the edges of his vision, a fuzz along the plane of the highway, a vibration of color where the landscape
met the sky. He'd got as far as Bellington with various truckers, then walked out Route 19, past the chair factory, and two construction workers in a pickup stopped to give him a ride. They worked at Camp Shelter, they said, out past Gaither, laying pipe, and said they might use him if he wanted to sign on. Slow work, and hot, digging and hauling, but they hoped to make it last all summer and they could pay him under the table, cash, no stubs or checks. Parson agreed. The Lord continued to provide, just as he'd provided Proudytown and the meeting with Preacher, and the long road, even earlier, of foster keepers tainted with evil, some of the evil seductive and sweet. Then prison after Preacher died, prison a concentration of evil and grace, like being sealed in a concrete tomb, a cave or catacomb, Parson an ancient prophet, alone seven years with only the voice of the Lord to believe. Then the Lord had rolled away the rock as surely as for his Holy Son, and Parson had walked to a deliverance meant for him, for Carmody, for this place, the camp in the trees. Riding all night in the trucks of mercy on lit-up roads, he'd almost forgotten the world, but the world came over him like fever that first morning—close faces of the workmen, empty beer bottles on the dash, day heating up and the dense overhanging trees unstirred, how the metal bridge over the river rattled like a fit and they drove a dirt road, bumping along in dew-moistened dust till they passed through the pillars of the camp entrance, the stones themselves overgrown with kudzu and honeysuckle. He'd gone with them right to the work site, a secluded riverbank in the heart of the world, they'd let him have a worn khaki work shirt and trousers, and he'd worked all day for an advance on his week's wages, given him that evening at a roadhouse where they all had hamburgers and beer. He was passing through, Parson told them, but he reckoned he was meant to work with them awhile. He told stories he'd heard other inmates tell, about working construction in Houston by the canal, how the wetbacks would fall asleep at night in the irrigation ditch and drown when the canal was flushed. Then they were straight and dead as logs, Parson said, though he'd never really seen Houston, but he'd thought at night, alone, for years, of how the bodies might look, floating, buoyed by every motion of the water. He saw the narrow water dark and full like ink, like the black dark of the shack he slept in at night, the forest and the camp crouched all around him, breathing. He too could float like death in this darkness, awake and nearly dreaming.

This night he rises in one effortless movement to look out the window of the shack at Turtle Hole; he feels he has moved by merely imagining movement. The water shines, and the black piece of boulder overhanging one side is darker than the air around it. The boy, Frank, sits fishing, suspended in the dark like an ornament. His bare chest looks unnaturally white, and when he throws his line out Parson can feel the hook rip through resisting water. Mornings at seven, the kid blows reveille on a beat-up trumpet at the quad, a grassy oval near three stone hewn buildings that seem too massive to house the activities of children. Even the workmen down by the river could hear the kid's bugle, the sound was so piercing, breaking on the high notes. Moments later would come the girls' voices pledging allegiance, faint and dreamy. Parson has never seen them, saluting in a circular line; the men were already at work by then, or at least gathered by the river to drink coffee. The other four brought tall thermoses but Parson drank from a plastic cup while the foreman laid plans.

Plans were always the same: dig out earth for ten foot of pipe, set the pipe, and spend afternoon cutting brush for the trail road for the truck. They kept the trail close but wound around stands of trees too near the riverbank. Sometimes they dragged pipe with chains as far as thirty, forty feet, in teams, like horses. Sweating, cursing, they paced themselves with their own insolent complaints while the foreman cursed loudest how he'd only taken the job because the mines had laid him off, goddamn mickey mouse operation. Occasionally the little girls hiked the forested hills across the river. They were led by college-girl counselors and their faces appeared and disappeared far off amongst the trees, their white blouses forming a shifting, patchy mosaic. Sprites, the men called them, as though they were forest spirits, and when they were too high up or far away to be seen, their laughter and their urgent, childish speech carried down bright and tiny, perfectly preserved. The older girls, camping higher in the hills, were subjects of speculation and offhand jokes only because the camp directress had asked the men not to set foot across the river without special permission. They were discouraged from walking through the camp except when they were on their way to or from the work site, as though Girl Guides were somehow threatened by the vision of five men in khakis. They'd said as much to Frank, who was sent out hot afternoons with paper cups and a big jug of cold lemonade, and Frank told them he didn't work for Mrs. Thompson-Warner and Hilda Carmody didn't either, or they wouldn't be getting any lemonade. The place was just rented out to Girl Guides these three weeks; unless there was a church camp coming or the Y-Teens, the camp would be vacant most of August. Probably it would shut down. Figure I could hire on with you men? But the foreman had smiled, his lips wet with the cold sweet liquid. Boy can't do a man's job, you a boy, ain't you? I can dig, Frank had said, and I got my own tent I stay in. I don't think so, kid, but you tell that fat woman she makes good lemonade. Sweet as a baby's tits. Those women you take orders from know how much time you spend spying on the girls up at the top of the hill? I don't go up there, the boy had said, they gotta do everything themselves. And the foreman had joked about
everything,
how that old redheaded dame sure seemed worried about those girls, worried about somebody. Nah, she's worried about Communists, Frank had said.

Yes, she was worried. At night in the shack Parson can feel her think in her sleep, creasing her powdered forehead while the Devil passes in and out her open window. Those white frilly curtains she'd hung rippled each time the Devil moved and his legs were the flayed red color of raw meat, and wet like that, and Parson knows the smell in her room is the smell of blood. Blood smelled of meat, warm rotted meat, sticky, like when Preacher had got shot at the card game and the feel of his blood had stayed on Parson's hands. In the shack at night Parson still smells blood, staggering in his dreams under Preacher's weight on the slippery metal stairs of that hotel fire escape. Snow had turned to rain over all the gray parking lot behind the building as Parson dragged them both to Preacher's old pickup, going through the old man's pockets for the keys as he held the falling bulk of his burden up against the cab of the truck. Preacher was still breathing, a sound like rasps of air through ragged holes, and Parson got him into the truck, his own hands and front bloodied, pulling fast out of the lot as the attendant came to the door of the little booth. Parson didn't think of hospitals, he thought only of getting away, going home, Preacher would want to go home. He had driven several streets, roaring down alleys to cut out toward the highway, trying to hold Preacher upright with one arm, when the girl's startled face and form appeared like an apparition beyond the wet glass of the windshield. There was the dull thud of contact overwhelmed by the scream of the brakes and the girl flew up onto the broad hood of the truck, rolling hard, coming for Parson, flying as though impelled into the windshield, hitting lengthwise across it head to foot, assaulting Parson with her wet yellow hair and wide death gaze. She was like a fish with thin human arms outspread, a fish in a flimsy raincoat with a girl's blue face, slapping so hard on the wet glass that Parson screamed into her broken shape, screamed even after she rolled back along the hood and onto the street. In the shack at night he remembered the trundling sound her body had made rolling away, an object out of its element, because she was a fish, that was clear when the police came and he stood looking down at her in the wet street. This man is shot to death, they'd said about Preacher, and grabbed Parson's arms as though he might run, but they had to drag him away. He wanted to look at her, this fish, the ends of her long yellow hair spiky with moisture, her wet coat open, her limbs pulled close as though she were one long shape and might ripple across the puddled surface of the pavement like an eel. But they covered her up and put him in a squad car and he didn't see her again until he got to the penitentiary in Carolina nearly six months later, and she would swim at night, every night, naked, thin and white, through the darkened main corridor of the cell block. The dark there was green and oily, nearly phosphorescent, and she swam face forward, her wet hair flat to her head, legless, armless, her body one undulating streak.

Now Parson wakens in the shack and sees Frank fishing Turtle Hole, the long bamboo pole barely visible over the glassy surface of the water. He imagines the girl who is a fish, circling deep within that wet bowl, down where the line and hook will never touch. The boy seems to hang suspended against an outcropping of dark rock, pulling his line out again and again only to throw it across to the same spot, raking the surface in slow swaths. He seems to break the water gingerly, stirring it in identical sweeps as though it were volatile. But the water sleeps. Parson sees the two girls long before Frank knows they are there, he sees them walking across the river trail from the woods, moving carefully and quickly, nearly in tandem. They are not ghosts. One is in white but for her dark pants. The other is more than human. Nude, whiter still, she follows the first as though to restate each gesture and step with longer, thinner limbs, a bound shimmer of pale hair moving behind her. They have no faces, only forms, and the paler, more fluid one swims the air, only seeming to walk. Parson goes to the door of the shack and beyond it, moving soundlessly closer, crouching along the barely discernible trail to the water. He creeps through reeds and lies hidden, watching: no, this girl is different, but she is the same, as though she's a sister to the one in the street, the one who swims still in some dark space, searching for him. And might never find him again, never, until he is a shade himself. Already he sees and hears as a shade, hearing no voices now but feeling himself inside the mind of the girl who might be a fish; he finds himself surrounded by her magnified, sonorous pulse, by a great ruffling of air. She might be capable of flight, there is such wind in her, and electric blue flares that shoot up like fires, and in the dark of her something cracks, loud as the crack of a gun, keeps cracking apart. Parson shakes himself to be outside her again, watching, and in a moment he sees them, the two girls, on their knees at the edge of Turtle Hole. Frank has not seen them, he must be nearly sleeping, staring at the unbroken surface of the water.

See how the water holds still, as though enclosed in glass, sheer as first ice. But the night air is warm, just cooling, and as Parson creeps closer, so close he can see her face, the other girl stands, silent, waiting for Frank to look at her. When he does, she kneels back into the reeds, and the taller one appears, nearly opalescent above the dark grasses. She has a face like stone, stone shaped by hand: the brow, the wide-set eyes, the straight nose and parted lips. In jail in Greensboro, waiting to come to trial, Parson had seen from the high window two stone women tower above the courthouse steps across the street. At night, the street deserted, the building lit so their shadows fell across the broad steps, Parson imagined the end of the world, no people at all but just these buildings, sidewalks, long empty streets, and the statues fallen over. Now he imagines this girl as one of them, the whole white length of her lying not in the depths of Turtle Hole but in the stream, which was shallow and looked so clear, her face washed by water until the regular features and cast of eye are obscured. Until she is smooth as scooped stone, long and tapered in her body, a rock fish, a fish with breasts. Her breasts are like white apples, full and compact, young, not the large breasts men slept in, but breasts men mouthed and tasted, nearly tore with their teeth. The nipples are faint bruises at the centers. Parson sees Frank, unmoving on the rock like a light-blinded animal, so startled at the sudden appearance of her body that he has not really seen her face. He looks, keeps looking, and as he does, she lifts each foot gently, never altering her gaze, so the other girl can remove her shoes. Then she walks into the water as though drawn to its center, as though she would walk until she disappeared, and the boy stands and jumps in.
I threw it in the water,
Parson had told the men in Carolina. They were men in suits but there were no windows in the little room, they took off their jackets and rolled up their sleeves. There was the one who gave Parson cigarettes and called him son, and the one who shoved him from wall to wall while fluorescent tubes buzzed overhead. Parson remembered the heat and how the men had paced like winded dogs, big dogs who could only sweat from their tongues.
Who shot him? Who were the others? Did you shoot him? Where's the gun the gun the gun
... but Parson wouldn't answer, wouldn't say. They had come straight for him in the fluid, moving room just as the boy swam for this girl now; Parson dug his fingers into the dirt and watched her lift herself, hold to Frank's shoulders as though she might drink the whole deep bowl of Turtle Hole, drown as Parson had drowned in the cage room that smelled of those men. The girl was a fish, he'd told them, lost from Christ as they were lost, as Preacher was lost, gambling on evil, and the room had circled as the whole sheen of Turtle Hole now begins to circle, stirred to move by their bodies and the silence they make until the other girl wades in, her clothes wet and darkened, her darker hair a black cap. She is the dark one who puts her mouth on them, touches them, she and Frank hold the naked girl between them and the girl cries out. The sound she keeps making freezes Parson's blood, he has to lie down in the reeds and hold himself tight, clutch his ears, but she goes on and he begins to try to crawl away, move backwards like an animal in a narrow space. This is how that other one would have sounded had she opened her mouth and let a sound roll from her long white throat. In all the years he has seen her, navigating dark air like a sea, she has not made this sound from death. The sound goes on, eating its own fear, released and saved, and when it stops Parson cannot remember where he is, all of space seems so empty. But it is night here and the girls move in the water, emerge pouring water from their bodies, the naked one shining, stumbling, and they run then, gain the path and are gone. Parson watches Frank, who calls once to them and follows, just to the edge of the water, then crawls out and lies down, seems to rouse himself, walks back through the woods to where Parson knows he has a tent in the clearing.