Shelter (1994) (8 page)

Now the night looks blue. There is silence but for a far-off wind just grazing the woods by the river, and the rustling of those leaves is half heard. The moon will lighten the air even more in an hour, two hours, mist will settle above the water, never touching, so that the surface can still be seen and the white smoky vapor might be hung above it from invisible cords. Parson walks to where the girls stood and sees they have left the shoes. He takes them to the shack and feels them all over, looks at them in the glint of the window, then thinks of the flashlight one of the workmen gave him. He takes it from under the corner of his pallet and shines a short, wide beam of light across the shoes. White canvas sneakers with frayed shoestrings. One of them has a cloth decal of Mickey Mouse (Parson remembers the foreman cursing
goddamn mickey mouse operation)
sewn inside. The other has a gummed label on which is written:
LENNY.

The night looked bluer now, bruised with moonlight, and Lenny saw that mist had begun to rise from the river. A cool smoke hovered just on the surface, thick and thin in patches, and Lenny felt as though the ground itself were no more substantial than clouds on the water. Her feet touched the path but she couldn't quite tell where she was walking, she didn't care, it didn't matter. Suddenly they were gone from the river, they were high in the woods, leaving the cover of the trees to climb the steep meadow to the tent. Cap shimmied up the pole to the wood floor and Lenny followed her but they said nothing. Lenny's clothes were damp from the trail but her body still glowed and burned, and when she lay down on her cot the feeling was worse. She could turn just so under the sheet, curl up, press her fists between her legs so hard it hurt, and she must have slept, wondering how to find him, how to be with him again, with both of them, dreaming Cap had done something to her, she couldn't find her way out of Cap's hands. She woke and slept and Alma was waiting for her by the river, Alma was looking for her in the river, and the crows were in the meadow at dawn, screeching their hoarse calls. The crows were screaming too loud and he had found her and put his hands over her ears, he read her face with his mouth, kissing her, talking so urgently, making words on her skin with his tongue, his teeth, but she couldn't hear him, there was no sound, he had no voice. She slept, and Highest camp was in a dream, they all overslept until reveille sounded again and again, fast and shrill and far away.

When reveille began the bodies moaned and turned as mosquitoes caught in giant webs above the screens were turning. Alma and Delia rolled, hit weathered floor, grabbed each other. Guttural sounds, push for the door. Tangled in nightgowns, they fell over each other in the foyer where the cabin's wings separated, bones of an arm. Wrapped in arms, sleep-ridden, they lifted the heavy latch of the barn-board door, scraped their ankles on the concrete steps, and ran grabbing hands, hissing, up the gravel trail to where the woods broke by the quadrangle. Reveille built in the blocked light, piercing, staccato, an automatic gun on gold wind.

"Is he there? Is he there?" Alma heard Delia whisper a cadenced repetition, breathing in time and running.

They threw themselves down. Crept to where the woods ended and lay in creepers. But they could never see him, and the sound washed into them from air. Alma moaned. Where was he? Every morning he stood in a different spot, trying to make it interesting for himself, or because it wasn't serious. Alma dug in, stubbed her dark toes on rocks; her long oval face was intent. She searched with her eyes, considering.

Alma was silent. The game was not a game. Where was Frank, really, where? Alma had to find him; Delia said she loved Frank but Alma wondered. She thought Delia wanted to be Frank, wanted to be a son with all her might, so she could have her father inside her and never look for him. Alma squared her body, felt her pelvis find the bowl of the ground. Beside her Delia rustled in vines. Alma tightened arms around her. She felt Delia's weedy presence; she felt the A-line wasp of Delia curling in the brushy cover. Her own stone thighs pressed dark in the rotating dirt. She thought of words she liked to pronounce, words in Nickel Campbell's books, long words with smudged letters. She heard, close to her ears, the whine of bloodsuckers in the grass.

"Alma Swenson, Delia Campbell," Alma said over and over, to counter the mosquitoes, to drift the whisper of their names across the quad. She pulled the grass and crawled up closer; her cocoa irises fixed on a point and held. She wanted to see Frank, study him; she thought she saw a shadow before it lengthened and became the top of the flagpole, knobbed in gold, the long cord snaking down. The flag began to ripple, the rope cord swaying gently in a breeze only the early morning allowed. Frank had to let go to blow reveille again; he held the bugle with one hand and saluted with the other, racing through the shrill assault three times in rapid succession. He was all alone out there; secretly, Alma knew how he looked, exactly how he stood.

Yesterday morning McAdams had taken Alma to the infirmary with Delia before anyone was up; the nurse had to clean Delia's swollen lips with hydrogen peroxide and tape gauze on the cut. Nurse said Delia should give her mouth a rest, don't talk too much today, and keep the bandage moist with salve. Just then, reveille had begun, so near everyone was startled, and Alma ran to stand just beside the door. The infirmary was a tool shed attached to the dining hall; Alma could see Frank from behind. His arms looked skinny. He was scruffy, ramrod straight, held taut by the bleating of the bugle; he was at least fifteen. Beyond him, the open quad, the line of the woods, the paths that led to the cabins lost in trees, looked dewy, already warm, as though steam would rise when the sun hit.

Now Alma's eyes watered. Her face was too near the grass.

"I hate camp," Delia whimpered, twisting a knee into Alma's solid flesh. "Hate it, hate it, but I don't ever want to go home."

"Do your lips hurt much?"

"Frank will go home. At the end of camp, everyone will have to go home."

Alma touched the smear of hard scab at the edge of Delia's mouth. "Did they make you call your mom?"

"Yeah, but I just told her I tripped and got a little cut on my mouth."

"You did?" Alma was amazed, not that Delia lied, but that Mina accepted the lie so easily. If Alma had admitted to any accident at camp, her own mother would have gotten into the car and driven the fifteen miles to see the damage for herself. Audrey believed that scars on a girl's face were serious. Delia already had some scars, little ones, from chickenpox. Audrey had remarked on Delia's scars more than once.
Nothing but negligence on Mina's part. You were four when you had chickenpox. I made you wear gloves. At
night I used stringed mittens and knotted them close together. Oh, you hated them, but your complexion is perfect.
Alma knew better than to mention she liked the scars; they were like pretty starbursts at Delia's temple.

"It's all stiff," Delia said, "but at least I won't have to talk to anyone today."

"We don't talk to anyone but each other anyway. Right?"

Delia nodded. "Today is hobby hours. You can make more flower pictures. You can make mine again."

Alma would, though the dust of the dried flowers made her sneeze. At least during hobby hours she could sit at a table like a human being and not be fooling with bows and arrows, or tying knots on a board in the sun. She closed her eyes to hear the bugle's shriek, to concentrate on Frank, see him alone on the dewy quad, but she heard silence, a morning silence dense only with minute sounds.

"Look." Alma nodded into open space, for she saw Frank walking away across the level green, holding the bugle aslant at his hip, the bell of its mouth pressed against him. He walked back toward the dining hall into a glimmer, a trick of the light, and beyond him a pickup truck glided along on the grass, soundless as a boat on a sea.

"It's over," Delia whispered.

The last wind was in the trees. They clambered up, an awkward beetle, running headlong to be back in the cabin before McAdams arrived in B wing with her clipboard.

They were singing from church still, all night they'd kept on. Buddy wanted to watch Frank blow reveille, hear Frank from inside the camp kitchen with Mam. But he slept so hard he couldn't move and there were words in his mind: Mam had sayings she'd taught him to think if his prayers were said and he still couldn't sleep. Sing-songs, she called them, and he liked the one about the woods that had trees, and a lot of soft dark with nothing but wind, because he thought the words at night when he was safe, or he was safe when Mam told him the words:
Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen.
Rushy glen was like the name of a town or a road, a fork of some road that twisted back through the county, and Arey's Feed Store was the big wooden store near the train tracks in Gaither, but no train stopped there anymore. Mam and Buddy had to take the bus through Gaither and Bellington clear to Winfield to get on the train, and the train was like sleeping too, how it rattled and swayed him in the dark and Mam told him sayings then, the same words that always got him sleeping,
glen, glen, we dare not go a-hunting, for fear of little men.
A dare was a tease kids said to get you into trouble, but little men didn't make trouble, Mam said they were very little, like elves. Elves were afraid of people and people were afraid of them, they stayed away from each other, that sounded good, and his favorite part was
wee folk, good folk, trooping all together, green jacket, red cap, white owl's feather.
The owls in the trees sat hooting in the dark but sunlight was in Buddy's eyes; hunters went out at night with lights that bright and the animals couldn't run, a rabbit could freeze in a car's headlights, miners wore headlights, lights on their hard hats. But down in the tunnels of the deep mines there were no animals, just rock and coal and water rattling, Dad said. Dad had worked in the mines. A long time ago when he worked, Mam said he had a job and made good money and plumbed the house—that meant pipes to carry water. In the trains there were little sinks and metal toilets, how could trains have pipes for water, a saying was words you called to mind and never forgot, you could always find them. He wanted to be like the little men, walk in a line all the same. Hidden away.
Down along the rocky shore, some make their home,
a shore was like a riverbank and Buddy could live by the river. He could have a tent like Frank's and use all the big pipes that sat along the riverbank, make a fort of branches leaned against them. Mam said the pipes would get buried later when they brought in a bulldozer to cover up the trenches, that would happen when camp closed, a trench was a long ditch, no light in a trench, the pipes would roll in and lie still. Buddy wanted to move but the words came in their singsong to say he was still asleep, he was hungry and sleeping and he should already be awake.
They live on crispy pancakes, of yellow tide foam,
that sounded so good, like sweet cracker, Mam, wouldn't it be? Where was she? In his sleep, he listened for sounds, the rattle of the kettle, her footsteps on a floor. Yellow foam was bubbles and floating, like how the stream got scummy. Runoff from the mines was dirty, but food the little men ate would be clean, full of air like the cotton candy Mam bought him when the carnival set up in Gaither every spring. Dad had been gone when the carnival came in trucks with the metal rides folded up, but Dad was here now. Buddy called him Dad.
Some swim the reeds, of the black mountain lakes
and Dad made the house full of that same deep water. Buddy dreamed the house swam off in strange angles now, stretching so he couldn't see into all the rooms. Things hid
with frogs for their watchdogs, all night awake.
Buddy heard the radio coming from the porch, but Mam never played the radio, they left so early for camp. Something was wrong. He opened his eyes and lay still.

There was the chair and the footstool Mam propped her feet on at night. Down the room a way he couldn't see into the bigger bed. The dark green blanket Mam had hung for a divider was still; no one moved behind it. The woolly cloth was nailed right onto the ceiling but had pulled free in one corner and drooped. The same sunlight that fell almost direct into Buddy's eyes played in panels across it. Mam had left him, gone to cook and left him here asleep. She'd left him sleep because he hadn't waked up in time, and now he'd have to get away without Dad seeing him.

She didn't know about Dad. She didn't know.

He found his clothes at the foot of the bed where Mam always put them, and he got out of his pajamas noiselessly. His bed was a metal cot just like the girls slept in at Camp Shelter; it squeaked something awful every time he moved. Mam had brought it home just before camp started. Borrowed it, she said. Before that, in the first week Dad was back, Buddy had slept on an air mattress on the floor, softer and better; it was like since the bed came, Dad could hear Buddy's every turn or twitch all night, and started to notice him in the days.

Naked, he crouched on the floor beside his cot, got into his pants and shirt. The radio was playing so clear, no static. No other sound, like there were tiny girls singing out there about a boyfriend.
Hey la, hey la, wait and see!
Boom boom! Drums in the plastic box of the transistor. Dad might be in the back and Buddy should go out the front. Or he might be on the porch, just waiting, and Buddy should go out the kitchen door and around by the woods.

He was halfway across the kitchen linoleum. The red and white diamonds were flecked with yellow and Buddy had a charm about keeping his feet exactly within their dimensions and making it out the door.

"Hey there, boy," said a voice. "What about breakfast?"

Dad stood behind the porch screen door, a shape, tensed on the balls of his feet. He was fast, a fast runner, long and skinny. Buddy was nearly as fast. But he didn't want to run into the woods, lead Dad into the trees. He stood still, feeling the cool of the floor move up through his feet, into him.