Volt: Stories (4 page)

12

A thumping rattled the trailer door. Ham and Bently stood out in the freezing dark. Bently explained he had to put Winslow in jail, though he’d file no charges and knew those boys were bad news.

“Just so folks think I’m keeping order,” the lawman said. “Don’t have to stay in the cell. I’ll even give you keys. Until the first of the year you just stick around the jail and don’t let folks see you. Then you’ll be free as a bird, with a new year and a clean slate.”

Bently said Ham had something to tell him, too, and Ham stared into the cold trailer. “Goddamn, Red,” he said, rubbing the flab of his neck. “No wild-man shows for a while. Until New Year’s Eve, you got some time off from it.”

Winslow nodded.

“Bently’ll let you out to come to the house for Christmas, too,” Ham said. “You’re family to us, and we want you there.”

Bently set a hand on Winslow’s arm. “We’re worried you’ll get down around the holidays. You feel blue, you’ll tell us, won’t you?”

“I’m fine,” Winslow said.

“We’ll worry anyhow,” the lawman said. “You just take it easy, friend. Get yourself back to center.”

Winslow gave Ham a bottle of Scotch for Christmas. Now it was night, Christmas day come and gone, and Winslow poured a glass to empty the bottle. The family sat piled on the sofa across the room, Jim asleep, his head in his mother’s lap, Sheila slumped against Ham, Ham with his drink balanced on his belly and his feet up on the coffee table.

It was quiet, very late, and Winslow asked, “Ever done something so bad folks won’t forgive you?”

Sheila snuggled Ham’s shoulder. “I got married.”

Ham smirked. “Didn’t use a rubber.”

Wood popped in the chimney stove. Winslow watched the fire behind the grate. “I once met this fella who drove a train,” he said. “A train just don’t stop that fast. It just—” and Winslow gulped his Scotch, swallowed hard. “I mean, you ever stand by someone you can’t forgive? Ain’t no good saying, ‘I forgive you.’ Saying things don’t do nothing. Not really.” He held his glass to his cheek. “Just can’t move away from myself.”

Sheila’s eyes opened, but she didn’t move. Ham glanced down at Jim, ran a hand over the boy’s head. “You oughtn’t drink so much, Red,” he said. “You don’t do well with it.”

Winslow downed his Scotch, scooted to the edge of his chair. “Thanks for Christmas.”

“You going?” Ham asked, sounding surprised.

“Best get back to jail.”

“You ain’t in no shape to travel, Red.”

Winslow stood. “I’ll manage.”

“You ain’t gonna do nothing to yourself?” Ham said.

“Nah.” Winslow leaned clumsily to set the glass on the coffee table. “Got a big show in a few days.”

Winslow curled listless on his cot. All but the hours of Bently’s visits, there he lay. He didn’t exercise, didn’t eat. Bently called in the doctor and Winslow claimed he just had a bug, said he’d be fine if they’d leave him to rest. The doctor gave him a bottle of pills. It was easy to dispose of them, to smash them beneath his heel and brush them away like so much dust. On the eve of New Year’s Eve, his sentence coming to an end, Winslow donned a resolute face.

“Feel better today,” he told Bently. “Doc fixed me up fine.”

But Winslow had endured a disintegration of spirit. He no longer felt all he’d been through was a penance for what he’d done, a punishment to be served. Now this was just his life. He’d die in this skin, feeling this way.

Moonlight seeped through the high bars. Winslow thought of the train man whose path he’d followed months ago. He recalled the moon-white hair, the lips split by a scar. He could see the man racing through the barley, elbows high, growing smaller. Where did this man run to? Did his run ever end?

If you run, you run into nothing, Winslow decided, and he knew if he were to peer out that high cell window there’d be nothing, no road, no woods, just the black matter of space, and perched like a gargoyle atop the moon the train man would gaze down in judgment upon him.

13

The muzzle reeked of dung. “Ain’t about you,” Ham said, pressing the leather straps to Winslow’s face, both men crammed in the tiny bathroom, the clamor from the bar thumping through the walls. “I’m thinking of the show. Any fool knows a wild man don’t talk.”

But Winslow knew it was about him, had always been about him. Ham buckled three straps at the back of Winslow’s skull, and in the cloudy bathroom mirror his mouth cinched into a snarl.

“Goddamn, you look fierce,” Ham said, smiling. “Sure as shit to get the big bucks tonight.”

New Year’s Eve and the bar was packed. Two men held a rope to keep the crowd at bay, and Winslow trailed Ham to the stage. Winslow wore only a strip of rawhide, wrists bound behind his back, stage lights in his eyes. Ham lifted the silver bell, but before he could ring it a commotion broke out, pushing, shoving, two men scuffling. Bently hurried into the throng and wedged himself between the brawlers. Winslow knew this was planned; Ham paid each man twenty dollars to fake a fight, claiming a riled crowd made better bids.

As Bently dragged the men through the rabble, Winslow saw him; a man with moon-white hair. Faces jostled, shouted. The lights were blinding. Hands bound, Winslow couldn’t shield his eyes, couldn’t find that face again. Ham rang the bell and hollered,
“The world has turned polite, some might say dainty—”

Winslow peered frantically about for the train man. Fists flailed money, men shrieking bids. Ham helped a lanky man around the chicken wire. The man raised his fists like a fighter before the bell. The crowd wildly cheered. Winslow saw Ham ask him if he was ready, but could only hear the crowd.

Then he was there again, just beyond the fence, his scarred lips grinning. The train man’s eyes burned into Winslow. He felt the guilt, the grief, all over again. The crowd shifted, like wind through barley, and the train man was gone.

Winslow lowered his eyes. He nodded to Ham, but left his abdomen limp.

The punch detonated deep inside Winslow. Without hands to break the fall, his face thudded against the floor. It was as if the world was suddenly without air, as if he were trying to scream but had no voice. Then the first bit of breath erupted into Winslow and he gasped beneath his muzzle.

Bottle shards rained over him. Men tore down the chicken wire. Bently scrambled over Winslow, waving his pistol above his head. Pain burned through Winslow’s side. He huffed through flared nostrils and, as if to stir himself from a nightmare, mumbled without ceasing, what once they removed the muzzle became a glut of painfully uttered words:
“Sadie. Call my Sadie—”

14

Winslow woke to a figure in a sun-bright window, another moving toward him. This was a hospital. Pain throttled his side, bandages binding his ribs. One figure was a nurse, who made him swallow a pill with a glass of water. The other dragged a chair beside his bed. This was a law officer. He was muscular and had a child’s face and wasn’t Bently.

“You know why you’re here?” the officer asked.

“My side hurts.”

“Three broken ribs,” he said. “Could’ve been worse.”

Winslow blinked. “You close the drapes?”

“They say you asked to be hit?”

“Please.”

“Say you got paid to be hit?”

Winslow raised a hand to shield his eyes.

“It was a show? That right?”

“The drapes. Please.”

The nurse stepped to the window and closed the drapes. Winslow turned his cheek into his pillow. “A train hit me.”

“What?” The officer leaned forward.

“A freight train.”

The officer’s hands were frail. He turned a wedding band on his thin finger. “Don’t you want whoever did this to you to face due justice?”

Winslow shut his eyes. “
I
did this.”

15

The nurse told Winslow he had a visitor. Winslow expected Bently or Ham. In walked Sadie. He studied her face, her silver cross, hair dyed the color of wheat, waiting for her eyes to prove she was real. She crossed the room and piled clothes on the chair by the window; his favorite green flannel shirt, jeans, his old brogans.

Then she turned and asked the nurse to see the doctor. He saw her eyes. It was really her. Winslow couldn’t breathe. His body shook and electric pain tore through his ribs. He quietly moaned as Sadie, without a word, followed the nurse from the room.

Sadie remained in the hall while the nurse helped Winslow button his shirt, buckle his belt, tug on his boots. The nurse helped him into a wheelchair and pushed him out. Then Sadie took the nurse’s place.

They rolled down a long tiled hall, Sadie silent behind him, and out into the parking lot. A gray sky hung low, the day unseasonably warm. Their truck sat in the far corner, out near the highway. In the field across the road, patches of soil showed through the snow. Beyond the field were hills dense with trees. The urge lingered to run into those woods, to hide away from the world.

Then they were at the truck. Sadie opened the door and Winslow climbed gingerly into the seat. He gazed out the windshield at the wintry hills. Sadie hardly glanced at Winslow. She covered him with a quilt as one might prepare a delicate piece of furniture for a long haul.

The truck descended a ramp to the interstate. They got up to speed and merged behind a semi. The wheels droned and the cab shook and Winslow tried to hold it down, but the pain and silence were too much. Tears ran hot down his face.

“Tell me if you need to stop,” was all Sadie said.

They were the first words she’d spoken to him. Winslow swallowed to steady his voice. “How long a drive we got?”

“Five hours.”

So long he’d walked, so much wandering, and now mere hours by truck. The land outside was open plains, the hills still in sight but fading, and though there was no quelling the pain in his side, Winslow leaned against the window and the glass cooled his face.

Rain ran down the windshield and the wipers thrummed. Winslow pretended to sleep, watched Sadie through his lashes. Her face was shadowed, but even through the darkness he believed he saw something altered in her face.

Sadie had never been able to lie to Winslow, her feelings always true in her eyes. From their first date in high school he’d teased she was incapable of keeping anything from him, and understood his ability to read her as a function of their love. Now he read nothing, and the place behind his sternum, what Winslow considered his heart, felt hollow with the possibility her face had nothing left for him.

He lolled his head and trained his eyes on the road. Brake lights flashed, a semi kicking mist. The wipers cleared the glass, but he could not see far enough beyond the road to know where they were.

They crossed the wide river, overflowing its banks, oil-black current churning through the boles of trees. The tires sang over the bridge. On the other side, Winslow read a billboard for the Chestertown Inn, where they’d stayed for their tenth anniversary. He remembered a featherbed and a room of sunshine and Sadie’s sweet breath on his cheek.

“Got the hay harvested,” Sadie said, the first either had spoken in hours. “Fred Halliday helped. Store paid pretty well.” Set back from the road was a favorite restaurant of theirs, the Angus, a mammoth black steer on its roof. “Bought that old calico from William Bennet. The one Betty’d ride sometimes. It was a wild hair, but she’s a good old horse.”

Winslow wanted more words. Any words. Even the casual felt comforting. “How are William and Betty?”

“Alive,” she said, and stiffened.

Old Saints Highway, Traverson Lane, Birch Road, Hickory, Mayapple: roads driven to school, to dates, roads mapped in memory. They’d taken the long way, avoiding the drive through town, and now cruised a straightaway, snow overfilling the ditches, then Sadie pumped the brakes and they crossed the freight tracks and there sat his home, high on the knob and blending with a gray-brown sky.

Snow covered everything, covered the tracks and hillside, drifts scaling the barn walls. A pack of whitetail does, undaunted by the truck turning into the drive, huddled in the near field, nibbling the wheat beneath the snow. If I’d been here during deer season, Winslow thought, them does wouldn’t be out there. Now he’d have to ward them off, day after day, or they’d devour the crop. The truck slowed and then stopped by the house, the engine shut down and ticking.

“Need help inside?” Sadie asked, without looking at him. “Or you think you can make it alone?”

16

Her hair smelled as it’d always smelled, as she helped him down into the rocker. Then she was gone upstairs. The front parlor felt new, its wood paneling painted a pale yellow, and on the wall above the couch hung needlepoint, four rows of five pictures, each in simple white frames, threads brilliant in shades of reds and blues and oranges.

Sadie returned with his pajamas, sheets, a quilt, and a pillow. She made his bed on the couch. Then she crossed to the rocker and knelt before Winslow, helped him off with his boots. He wanted to kiss her hair, to pull her close. She helped him to the couch, handed him his pajamas, and left the room.

Winslow struggled changing alone, left his buttons undone, and climbed beneath the covers. He lay in lamplight, listening to a vacuum upstairs. The smell of pot roast filled the house. Then the vacuum stopped and Sadie came downstairs. He heard the oven door open, heard water from the faucet, plates clinking.

She brought in a plate and set it on the coffee table, handed him a glass of water, made him sit up and take his medicine. She told him to eat if he could. She said she’d see him in the morning. Then she was gone again, her footsteps ascending the stairs. Winslow stared at the plate until his eyes watered. With excruciating effort, he reached behind him and switched off the lamp.

17

Winslow lay awake, dwelling on all the people he’d soon face. The tragedy of a small town was that bygones never wholly dissipated; Winslow still held a grudge against William Gentry, who’d bullied him in grammar school, and could never see pure Annie Phillips, a registered nurse and mother of three, who as a girl skinny-dipped with the high school ball team. Winslow would prefer to get it over with, to stand in the Old Fox Tavern and let the entire town, one by one, slug him in his busted ribs.

But the grace of Krafton came with the seasons, sowing, reaping, breeding an understanding that last year has no bearing on this one; this crop might be better, or worse, and regardless there’ll be another and then another. In this there was only the future and diligent work, and not emotion but movement, just as the rain falling or crops sprouting was not emotion.

Winslow decided he’d engage the forthcoming days in the movement of work, and tried to remember how his days had begun at this time last year. He imagined the farm taken to ruin, chickens unfed in their coop, cows bloated, the silo a high mash of seed gone to rot. He was tempted to dress and inspect the outbuildings. But his body wouldn’t allow it.

Winslow managed to stand and carry a blanket to the rocker by the windows. The sky was clouded, the land black. He could see little beyond the yard, and told himself, as he had over years of taking crops to store, to allow last year’s seed, which grew imperceptibly, day after day, and then was a stalk gone beneath the harvester reels, to vanish from his waking life, to be no more than a ghost in his dreams.