Volt: Stories (7 page)

His father covered his mouth with his good hand. “Took one hit to switch him off,” he finally said. “Just like I says. But then I was more mad with him dead than when he was alive.”

His father straddled the quilt, struggled lifting Mr. Augusto’s feet with his one hand, and Vernon grabbed the quilt up under the shoulders. They awkwardly dropped the body and the fire was momentarily smothered and the break in the smoke brought a flash of bright light. Then the sun was gone again and the flames grew livid as his father stirred the logs. Vernon sat on a granite bench, covering his nose to the smoke and facing his shadow flickering on the wall.

“Vernon,” his father said, standing at his shoulder. “I want you to take your mama out tonight.” He handed Vernon a folded wad of dollars. “Get her a nice steak. Take her to the picture show.” He sat down beside Vernon, cradling his black-fingered hand tight to his ribs. “When you come back home tonight, Mama’ll go and meet me at the old McAlester Road. From there we’re gone.”

Vernon wondered if the money his father had given him was from Mr. Augusto’s wallet, and allowed himself to peek behind at the fire. His eyes blinked against the heat, the quilt fabric burned away in spots to expose the body. Mr. Augusto’s arm stretched to the edge of one bench, his shirt cuff wriggling with fire yet the hand untouched, the flames reflecting hard off his gold watch. Waves of smoke scorched Vernon’s eyes. He turned back to the wall. His father had slumped forward, as if poised to be sick.

“You’re going to die, ain’t you, Pop?”

His father raised himself straight. “Maybe I am. I don’t know. I just got to get to somewhere I can get my hand worked on and nobody’ll ask questions.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No.”

“I got to.”

His father watched smoke billow black into the sky, then leaned into Vernon. “Listen to me, son,” he said. “I been thinking on what to do with you, and I want you to listen close.” Vernon wiped his stinging eyes, tried to focus on his father’s mouth. “Tomorrow,” his father said, “I want you to pack your belongings into a bag and walk yourself into town to the Baptist church. Go on to Pastor Gould and tell him everything. Tell him how I killed a man. How you had to carry the body. How I made you help burn him up. Tell him you need the Lord. They can’t turn you away; you’re fruit to be picked or go rotten. You go it straight, son, and they’ll give you a life. You’ll be a symbol to them, of how someone can come out of the fire and become righteous. You’ll be a symbol and they’ll take good care of you always ’cause folks need something to believe in. I’ll be a symbol, too.”

Then he was quiet and draped his good arm around Vernon’s shoulders. His head lolled, then Vernon was looking into his father’s gray eyes. “This thing we done, Vernon,” he said. “It’s outside of so much. I’ve worried about all the things that’ll change. But I been thinking about them things what can’t be touched. Ain’t a woman in the world more beautiful than your mother. I was thinking about how much I loved her, and how that ain’t changed, and that got me thinking about my heart and how when it rains your skin and hair gets wet and cold, but your heart don’t know if it’s raining, or hot, or windy. It just keeps on beating.” He lifted his arm back from around Vernon. “That’s how I like to think about it, at least. It ain’t all clear in my mind yet.” He motioned toward the cave entrance. “Go on, now. Take your mother out tonight and try and just forget about me.”

In a gesture they’d often shared when Vernon was a child, his father kissed his cheek. Vernon touched his father’s hair, then rose and did not look back. He was barely conscious of his movement as he wandered up and out from the tunnels.

He mindlessly negotiated the sandstone facade. He walked the woods thinking he should climb back to the cave, that there was more to be said, that he should stay and help his father. But the ground passed quickly beneath him and he did not slow until wire patching his boot soles snagged the grass of the dense sedge prairie.

Vernon turned to face what was behind him. Above the tree line rose the smoking sandstone peak. Black smoke smeared the sky like an oily thumb dragged down pretty paper. In that smoke were brass buttons and blood. Vernon’s eyes burned from smoke. His hands and arms were beaded with soot-black sweat. Smoke clung to his hair, his clothes, his skin. He tasted smoke on his teeth.

Flames flared behind Vernon’s breastbone. He coughed and he spat and wheezed. He became light-headed. He dropped to one knee. Sedge swayed in his eyes and he could no longer see the peak. He saw only smoke-hazed sky. The sky had been sullied for so long Vernon couldn’t recall a day without smoke. He lay on his back in the grass, but could not quell the heat in his chest. Wind-blown smoke swirled in the sky above where he lay, higher, swirling higher, and though he longed to believe his father, to understand him, he knew smoke was not rain and had found its way to his heart.

He watched the sky and thought of all the fires the world had ever seen, fires from wars, fires from bombs. So much smoke. Where has it all gone? New smoke curled beneath wisps of old, drifting ever higher, higher. Where does it all go? He inhaled deeply and his insides burned, and Vernon knew all that smoke was now just the air we breathe.

PEACEKEEPER

Spring 2008: There were more direct routes to the Odd Fellows Hall, on a dry knob north of town, but Helen Farraley could not see below the muddy floodwater, couldn’t risk wrecking the boat on a tree or chimney or telephone pole. Who knew what was just below the surface? The streets of town were lined with ancient oaks, the leafy tops of which stuck out from the water like massive shrubs. Helen steered the boat through the channel between them. The others in the boat sat silent as they passed their neighbors’ homes, slate-shingled Victorians under water to the second-floor windows. Helen trolled high above the town’s main street, Old Saints Road, and the treetops dropped away as the land sloped into the valley’s low.

They passed the SuperAmerica gas station, only the hump and peak of the SA on its road sign visible. The others stared into the muck water as if they might see the pumps or store below. Afloat in the current were random lumber, tree branches and strips of siding, a pair of trundling bar stools, a long metal box Helen believed was either a school locker or a feed trough. Then came Freely’s Diner and Freely’s General, three-story brownstones on opposite sides of the road, water up to the white-stone facing, roofs like rectangular docks. They passed within arm’s distance of the electric sign that read FREELY’S, which usually shone bright red, but was now dark and hung just above the waterline. Freda Lawson, who wore a chambray dress over yellow waders and sat beside Helen, ran a finger along the sign’s second E. Helen yanked down the woman’s arm.

“There’s wires,” she snapped. Then she gently held Freda’s elbow, and softened. “Please be careful, hon.”

They passed high above the converted boxcar that was the Old Fox Tavern, and the First Baptist Church, its steeple jutting crooked from the water like the mast of a sunken ship.

“They’ll steal everything we got,” Jake Tiernen said from the bow, his wife beneath his arm. “They’ll take what all they want.”

Freda twisted the hem of her dress around her fist. “I wet myself,” she whispered to Helen, crying.

“Ain’t nobody stealing nothing,” Helen said, and leaned a shoulder into Freda to let her know she’d been heard.

“The hell,” Jake said. “The hell they won’t.”

Christmas Eve, 2007: Light from Freely’s Diner spilled over the snowy walkway and into the cruiser. Helen checked her face in the rearview mirror. Her left eye was badly swollen, and she tried to hide it by tilting her cap over her brow. She considered driving on. But then Freely stood in the diner’s window, the old man thin and hunched and his hands cupped against the glass. Helen climbed out into the cold. She walked around the car and Freely moved to the door and opened it a crack. “I got pecan pie,” the old man said through the crack, then Helen was at the door and he opened it wide.

Helen stepped in and Freely had his arms around her in a hug. Ten years she’d worked in Freely’s General before becoming Krafton’s first and only law officer. It’d been Freely, longtime mayor of Krafton, who decided any real town had a sheriff, and raised funds to buy an old cruiser from the Boonville force, and called a town meeting in the First Baptist Church. It’d been a joke that Helen, a middle-aged grocery store manager, had been nominated and then elected, and when protests arose—
I thought it’d be a goof to vote for her, didn’t think she’d win
—it was Freely who declared civilized democracies stuck by a vote.

The dinner crowd had just left. Ham and potatoes fragranced the air. “I ain’t hungry,” Helen said. “Just saw the lights on.”

“No, no,” the old man said, hustling behind a glass counter. He pulled one of two pies from the dessert case and put the pie in a box. “You coming for Christmas supper? Marilyn said you might.”

Helen studied the front window. Jocey Dempsy’s photo was in all the shopwindows; her middle-school portrait, a ponytail tied with red ribbon, braces, a blemish on her hawk nose. MISSING across the top. REWARD across the bottom. “Don’t know,” Helen said.

The old man was in front of her again. He held the box with the pie inside and wore a fur-lined coat that was much too large for him. “What you done to your eye?”

Helen turned toward the door. “Slipped on some ice.”

“Clumsy girl,” and he took her arm. “Walk me home?”

They left out onto the walkway. Freely’s hand shook and he struggled to put the key in the lock. His house was down the road and up a small hill. Warm light shone from the windows, colored lights twined around two large spruce by the porch steps. “Looky there,” he said, pointing across the road. Over the dark field colored sparks burst, rained, faded in the night sky. They sounded far away, maybe miles, the pop of fireworks like a puff of breath in Helen’s ear.

December 19, 2007: The cruiser’s headlights caught the shadows of footprints across the road’s new snow, and Helen pulled to the shoulder. The gravel sky looked heavy, the woods flanking Pentland Road lost in a fog of flurries. The footprints disappeared through a gap in the brambles. The girl, Jocey Dempsy, hadn’t come home from school, had been gone over a day. Nobody in town had seen or heard from her. Her folks said she often took walks in these woods. Helen retrieved the holster and pistol from the seat beside her. She turned the cruiser’s spotlight on the tree line, but could not see through the falling snow. She shut off the engine. The motor ticked in the dark quiet, wet snow piling upon the windshield.

Christmas Eve, 2007: Helen glimpsed her reflection in the door’s glass, her battered eye bulged like a stone had risen on her face. Snow curled up the porch steps and over her boots. The door opened. There stood Connie Dempsy wearing a red sweater with snowflakes embroidered in silver thread. She did not say hello, but stepped aside for Helen to pass.

The front hall smelled like popcorn, like cinnamon. A little girl in pajamas, a smiling bear on her belly, hid behind Connie’s leg. She was Jocey’s baby sister and looked like her. Warm light fell into the hall from the kitchen, and then David was in the light, wiping his hands on an apron. Helen didn’t know where to stand. There was no doormat and she did not want to track snow into their house.

“Merry Christmas,” she said.

Connie lifted the girl into her arms, would not look at Helen.

“Would you like something to eat?” David asked, still down the hall in the kitchen doorway.

A puddle had formed on the tiles beneath her boots. “I don’t have any news,” Helen said. They said nothing. Helen held out the pie box, and another package wrapped in green paper with a white ribbon. “Here’s one of Freely’s pies. And I got something for the girl. It ain’t much of anything, but it’s something.”

They went into the family room, an upright piano in the corner, the tree beside it, tiny colored lights flashing. Helen had removed her boots and was afraid her feet stank; she’d worn the same wool socks five straight days. But all she smelled was popcorn and cinnamon. The family sat on a sofa, the girl in the middle. Helen faced them in a high-back wooden chair, her gun belt awkward against the ar did not tear the paper like most kids. She picked at the tape, her mother helping, and carmrest.

The little girlefully unfolded the wrapping to reveal a box. Inside was a tiny pink shirt. Across the front were a golden star and the words JUNIOR DEPUTY, KRAFTON POLICE. Connie and David glanced at each other. Light glinted off the silver thread in Connie’s sweater. The apron hung down between David’s legs. The little girl wrinkled her nose and stared at Helen’s face, and Helen was sure she’d ask about her swollen eye.

Helen crossed one socked foot over the other. She looked at Connie. “It ain’t much,” she said. “I didn’t know what to give a child.”

December 19, 2007: Helen crossed Pentland Road and pushed through brambles and into the woods. Her flashlight created a tunnel of light, inside of which were the arms of catbrier and low-slung limbs and the occasional shallows of footprints. She pulled her stocking cap to her brow. She felt the immense silence. Helen trudged on, and deeper in, where gray dusk lit the bench above her, she saw tracks of black soil where the snow had been disturbed. Helen climbed, her feet slipping as she scaled the slope, and stopped up on the ridge to examine a scuttle of boot prints.

Slivers of pink broached the flurries in the western sky. She paused, breathing heavily, and stared down over the valley. A black stream cut the mottled white, powdered trees hunched on their hummocks. In one distant corner of the prairie the last of daylight glinted off a tin roof.

Some gentle movement in her periphery made her notice the near trees. Far below, a large white oak still held its autumn leaves, its branches gently waving. Through a gap in its canopy she glimpsed a flash of pale skin. Her breath drew away, and then she was shuffling down the bench and she slipped and fell hard on her back, sliding in the new snow to the base of the slope.

The oak towered above her. She shone her light up into it, over the girl’s exposed ribs, her dangling arms, and between her buds of breasts curved a rivulet of dried blood, dripped from where the rope had torn the skin of her neck. Helen turned on her side and retched. Vomit steamed in the dirt. She took clean snow into her mouth and caught her breath. She stood and unsnapped the latch over her pistol, and approached the darkness beneath the boughs.

The girl’s toes dangled inches from the ground. She wore only shoes. Clunky black shoes with square heels. Her naked skin glowed white against the dusk. Her mouth hung open and what little light came through the saffron boughs gleamed in her braces. Helen took off her own coat. She tried throwing the jacket up over the girl’s shoulders, but it slid off and fell in a lump on the ground.

It was the girl. Jocelyn Dempsy, whom everyone called Jocey. She raced motorbikes on a dirt track by the old mill, played JV basketball as an eighth grader. She loved Moon Pies. Loved cherry cola. She’d come to the grocery and buy them, and Helen would watch her eat alone by the road and return the bottle for a nickel before riding off.

Brisk wind whistled through the limbs. Helen stumbled to sit against the trunk of the oak, her legs stretched out before her, pistol drawn in her lap. Dusk had settled. The prairie was tinted blue, shocks of blue sedge stiffly swaying.

Spring 2008: All day Helen had searched the flooded area, delivered the stranded to higher ground. Now she was alone. The current took the boat and she shone the spotlight across the black water and onto the large house, the flood up to its second-floor sills. She hooked the dock rope around a window box and the prow knocked against the siding. She pressed her forehead to the window’s cool glass. The room’s red fabric wallpaper had silver stripes that flashed in the spotlight. A twin bed lay diagonally in the middle of the room. A cardboard box made a crater in the mattress, a new-looking ball glove atop the box. Alone on a wall above a dresser hung a poster of three busty women in yellow swimsuits, each suit with two letters that when pressed tightly together spelled YAMAHA.

Helen forced open the window. Careful not to sway the boat, she held her holster and stepped down into the room. It was the first time in hours she’d been out of the boat, and her legs shook. The carpet glistened in the spotlight, a dark line three feet up the wall marking the flood’s highest point.

The room had not been disturbed, was kept like a museum; Helen had been in the room that winter, putting on a play of sorts, searching the girl’s drawers and beneath her bed and taking notes on what she passed off as evidence—report cards, a menu from the Tahiti Connection restaurant in Turberville, a ticket stub from a motocross event in Bowling Green—she knew would lead nowhere. She wrote it all up in a report for the staties.

The bedroom door was locked from the inside. Helen opened the lock and door, wiped the knob clean, then walked down the hall. Water splashed with each step. The walls were tiled with Dempsy family photos: Jocey, very young, sporting a boy’s shag haircut and straddling a small motorbike; the family in matching cream sweaters with David on a hay bale, the baby on his lap, Jocey and Connie each behind one of his shoulders; Jocey’s school portrait, a ponytail tied with red ribbon, braces, a blemish on her nose.

At the back of the house, Helen entered the master bedroom. A canopy bed with mahogany posts filled most of the room. Helen gazed out the bedside window at the flooded world, the dark roofs of houses spread like barges on a big river. Everything smelled of soil and fish. So much water, so much washed over, but perhaps when they started anew everything could be better, everything forgiven. Perhaps God would allow the girl to be dredged up by the flood and found, her parents granted their closure, yet the unrighteous cause of her death kept a gracious unknown.

Helen walked to a bureau and searched the drawers, one filled with scarves and nylons, the next with panties neatly folded and separated by color. She moved to the closet and shone her light over the clothes; pants at one end, then blouses, then dresses. Sweaters were on a shelf above the hanging clothes. She pulled the red sweater from the middle of a stack, unfolded it to be sure it was the right one. The silver thread of the embroidered snowflakes twinkled in Helen’s spotlight. She held the sweater to her face; it smelled faintly of Connie’s perfume. It was an impulse, and Helen could not explain why she needed it other than to say it was something clean and lovely in a world of mud. She hugged the sweater to her throat and lay down on the bed, the mattress soft and pulling her in, her boot heels flat and heavy on the waterlogged carpet.