Three days passed before the boy recovered his ability to speak clearly enough to be understood. Animal control was dispatched to the trailer immediately but could not have been prepared for the evil greeting them, the starved and outraged beast delirious from its meth binge. Before the officer could wrangle the steel loop around the chimp’s neck, it burst through the front door, hissing and foaming at the mouth. The animal control man dove back into the protection of his truck cab. Since that day, the furry addict had been running the hills, howling for its accustomed fix. Many mistook the sound for Strom’s own wailing, but some knew the boy was still in county lock up and that the cry belonged to a soul even more hopeless than he.
Mason did not betray a smile through the course of Hammond’s cautionary tale. He knew it foolish to discount a man’s wildest fear when the man himself believed in the telling well enough to treat it as wisdom. And despite his incredulity, once Hammond left for the evening, Mason picked up the shotgun and ran a dust rag over its oiled surface before returning the weapon to its customary concealment, comforted by having the piece close at hand. He sat alone in the dark as moonlight slowed across the puncheon floor in those long hours, the fan softly rattling behind him. He was listening for any night cries. Though there were none, he occasionally leaned from his chair and touched the breech of the shotgun, gradually learning its total shape, discovering his affinity for what such a piece of metal might issue.
DENNIS CAST INTO THE WATER, THE dry-drop rig gentling the surface. A pair of big brook trout frisked among carved sunlight. The fishing line bowed as it drew past and tailed out in a long bright score down the middle of the river. When the hooks began to drag, he hauled down sharply on his spare line to break tension, and with one long backcast, laid the flies out in the same upstream braid of current. He waited again. Watched the fish. They did not behave.
He blamed his gear. The rod was too heavy, one of the cheap starter sets that came in a plastic package, difficult to get into without a good blade. He looked upstream toward the big boulders where a couple of tourists in sun hats and neoprene waders had caught and released half a dozen sizable rainbows in the past half hour. He hadn’t put a single fish in his creel.
He reeled his line in and secured the hooks before climbing up the steep bank to his truck. It was getting on late in the afternoon and he knew he’d have to come up with alternate supper plans. Lavada was expecting him within the hour, and supermarket fishing would have to suffice.
He drove down into Canon City to get some filleted catfish and bread crumbs at the Super Wal-Mart. He inspected the greens, picked up some asparagus, but it was limp and thin, so he set it back. On impulse, he got a bouquet of red roses from the florist’s cooler near the checkout. The ugly girl at the register smiled at him while she rang him up.
On the way out of town he saw a vegetable stand still up, though it looked like the man was packing it in for the day. He pulled off slowly, careful not to raise too much dust on what was still laid out. He got out and said hello to the young man folding up a tarp. The man said nothing back at first, looking at him with cheeks hollowed from an intake on the cigarette tight between his lips.
“We’re about closed,” he said finally.
“I was just hoping for greens of some stripe,” Dennis said, coming forward and chancing an easy smile.
The young man bent back to his folding. “Prices are on the boxes,” he said.
Dennis nodded sharply, not accustomed to such stiff treatment. He was surprised at the good quality of what he found. He ransacked his pockets for some folded bills and handed them toward the sullen man. The man looked at them and then back at the counting table.
“Set it over there. I don’t have change,” the man said.
Dennis watched the grocery man for a minute, the cigarette smoke blooming around his head every few seconds. He felt sudden anger part from caution.
“You sell all that much with this kind of attitude?”
The man paused in his work, his head tightly pivoting.
“I don’t see any sign around here saying I’ve got to sell you a goddamn thing .Why don’t you do yourself the biggest favor of your life and run along in that pretty little truck of yours.”
Dennis saw something dangerous boil up in the man, a controlled and precise violence that unnerved him. He sensed more than mere threat in his bearing. He tossed the collard greens on the ground and stormed back to his truck, cranking the engine and ripping gravel from his tires as he swung back on to the hardtop. He watched the market stand grow smaller in his rearview mirror.
In the time it took him to clear town and drive down to the hollow, his blood eased. He despised the thought of backing down. Yet what kind of man threw a punch, actually threw a punch at a stranger? No, it was best that he’d exercised some restraint, some common goddamn decency. He rolled down the drive and parked beside Lavada’s Honda. She was sitting out on the porch in one of her sundresses. She smiled at him, and like that, his mood turned, his day becoming absurdly fine.
“How was the fishing?” she stepped down to embrace him. Her breath warm against his neck.
He handed her the paper wrapped bundles of catfish, along with the flowers.
“That good?”
She kissed him again and went inside.
Sam was before the empty fireplace, rocking and reading from one of his editions of Hawthorne. His bifocals were low on his nose. When he saw Dennis he clapped the book shut and rose toward him.
“Son, what took you so long?”
Dennis had overcome his initial discomfort when Sam had first talked to him this way. It was an oddness that simply insinuated itself into normalcy somehow, this term of affection that was more than that. Something inside of Dennis softened at the thought of belonging to the old man, to claim him as a kind of father. It was sad to think it only a mistake, a carelessness of phrase.
“The fish wouldn’t cooperate. Stingy about giving themselves up for supper, I guess.”
Sam smiled and squeezed his shoulder. “Come on, come sit down while Lavada gets things ready. The fire is warm.”
They sat before the dead grate, watching the smoothly swept brick and nothing more. Sam’s eyes were afflicted with some kind of pleasant abstraction.
“I’ve seen the robins coming finally,” the old man said after a while. “It’s late for them. The cold weather, I suppose. The future, you know, is always predicted by the way the birds behave. You remember when I taught that to you as a boy, don’t you?”
Dennis glanced at Lavada, but she did not look up. He could not tell if she fully registered what was becoming of Sam. To him, the old man’s decline was increasingly apparent. But what good was there in pointing that out now?
“Yes, of course,” he answered, almost embarrassedly. “What have you been doing with yourself, Sam? Giving that fiddle hell still?”
The old man’s face wrinkled into a guarded smile. “I’ve scratched a lick or two, to keep in practice, you understand?” He was having fun with him, teasing before he made the inevitable retrieval. Despite what things his mind had surrendered to dementia, Sam remained a repository of tunes, mountain and flatland alike, though Dennis preferred above all his Irish drinking songs. Sam opened the fiddle case and struck up one of his favorites, “Whiskey in the Jar.”
When Sam played, the rest of the world fell by the way, his eyes shut tightly against the light. Dennis admired this passion in him. There was a quaking in the old man when he laid the bow against the fiddle, some bright force on the verge of ripping through him. That was a kind of joy Dennis had never known. His own life had been quiet, subdued. He was a foundation stone for others, a place to build up against. He did not desire the heartache of living too stringently. There was a kind of art, he knew, in living his life in support of those he cared for. He was content to let it remain so, regardless of what people might think or say.
While Sam continued to play, Dennis crossed the room and set the table for them,
watching Lavada work in the kitchen. A corkscrew of loose hair clung damply at the nape of her neck. A signature of her private self. He thought the moment unbearably lovely. She turned and caught him staring. If he was to be given to any kind of recklessness at all, then he was glad it sprang from her.
Once he’d helped her put the plates down, they sat and ate, listening to Sam’s recollections of songs he had learned since he taught himself fiddling thirty years before, his mouth a continual vehicle of sound above the steaming food. His voice never wavered in uncertainty, his mind grasping hold to the specifics of his memories like anchor flukes.
After they were full, all three took the evening air on the front porch. Sam rocked and played mournful music while Dennis and Lavada walked among the trees, looking at the stars in the splash of overhead night, moving with arms joined, just beyond where the old man might overhear their lowered talking.
“I know it’s not long now,” she said.
“Not long?”
“Not long before he’s too much for me to handle.”
He squeezed her hand. “You’ve done a lot for him.”
She shrugged, pressing her back against the rough skin of an oak and facing him. “I’m not sure how much that’s worth in the end. Or if he’ll remember it at all. He talks about you a lot when you’re not here, you know. His idea of you, anyhow”
“He thinks I’m Mason.”
She did not look at him, though she nodded her head. “You’re something else to him, I think. A wish. Something he wants to believe in. It matters to him a great deal that we’re together.”
“I hope he’s not the only one.”
She kissed him, and they moved back toward the house, the best qualities of night surrounding them. He tried to tell himself that he did not mind her silence.
MASON FLUNG THE TARP IN ON top of the last of the boxed produce, cursed the bastard for dumping perfectly good collards on the ground, sat in the cab of the old man’s truck. He counted out what he’d earned in a day of watching the stand, deducting his wages from the take home envelope before he cranked the engine and drove to the BP station to buy a six-pack of Bud and a bag of ice for the cooler. He drank from some of Hammond’s Old Crow while the beer iced, decided to get just one cold one from The Slab Tavern down near the county line before heading back to the general store for the night.
The parking lot was full, a Thursday evening. He could hear Blake Shelton on the jukebox, bragging about what a good country boy he was. Inside, under a poster of a high skirted woman spread across a Mustang, he found an empty seat and ordered a pitcher.
“Can’t sell a pitcher to one customer. It’s the law,” the curly headed waitress said. She popped gum when she talked. Her red tongue moved inside her red mouth.
“My buddy’s in the john.”
“He is, is he?”
“Got the bladder the size of an English pea.”
She didn’t smile but still went behind the bar and pulled the tap. When she came back she set two pilsner glasses besides a full plastic pitcher. He watched her behind as she walked away. That just made him feel worse. He began to drink, and in a little while that did too.
He had not had a woman since the last night before he’d been arrested for the charge that would send him up to the pen. A teenage girl named Kayla, one of his best customer’s daughters. He’d driven up to the Plum River turnaround and sat smoking and waiting for old Tom Parrish to come down for the order of Oxycotin he’d called in earlier that afternoon. It was a quiet and warm night, stars unwinding above the low river. He was undisturbed that Parrish had not come at the appointed time. He enjoyed the calm of the evening, a momentary retreat from the drawing on of the mask of personality. When the girl had shown up in her father’s stead, it was on foot and with sweat on her like she was something new. Urgent, untidy, a shadow to what may have been her better portion.
He took her from behind, her hands and forearms braced against the trunk of a hemlock, bare toes pinching at the mulch. She gasped and begged him to come. Once he did, she reached back and drew her shorts up to her waist before leaning forward against the old tree, catching his hand between the bark and the jumping pulse of her belly. He didn’t let his better flesh stay trapped long.
He went down and washed his face in the river before driving home, leaving the girl at the end of the long dirt drive of Parrish’s riddled trailer before moving on. Easing the long back roads. Listening and seeing everything like it had been scratched and later smoothed over clean. The tree frogs in chorus. The moon pausing in a thin signature of empurpled cloud. The sea smell of strange unseen blooms. He could have dreamed it all that way if the world hadn’t.
When he pulled into the hollow the cabin’s lights were out, Lavada and the old man having gone to bed. Whether they heard him come in didn’t matter. Their senses might record his physical shape and presence, but what he left behind in their minds would evaporate quickly. He knew he had already begun to change in their eyes, to flicker away. This last night meant pressing up close against the pieces of a life that was no longer his, but he was prepared for that far better than they. He was ready for the break between what was given and stolen, met and taken.
He stripped but did not shower. When Lavada turned to him in bed he could feel her tense, smelling the stranger on his body. She called him a goddamn sonofabitch before she kissed him on the throat and worked her hand around his slack cock but got nothing in return. She began to cry then and did not shrug away when he put his arms around her. When he fell asleep he had dreamed of diving through oceans and never finding bottom.
The pitcher of beer went down too fast and when he stood to pay his tab his knees were loose in their joints. He braced up against a cedar column at the end of the bar while he peered down into his slim wallet. Someone may have laughed. He thought of knocking them on their ass, but he was too tired to venture so much.
It was dark out and he leaned against the side of the truck a long time before he could match the key to the door lock. He settled himself with one quick pull from the Old Crow before he cranked the engine. The curves were quick as bullets, and before long he’d sweat the best part of his beer and nerve out, hands aching from where they gripped the steering wheel. He was afraid to drive too slow, knew the cops would have him. He pulled over and sat with his head out the passenger’s window until he vomitted a long clear trail that cleaned his thinking. He put the shift back into drive and horsed the engine further down the road, cutting over the centerline before jerking back. Nobody was around to notice.
Memory crawled up through him. Without knowing he intended it, he found himself slowing at the head of the familiar hollow, headlights doused. There was room enough in a big oak grove to drive down and sit, to listen to the night and what was spread out in the evening country. He could not make out the distant cabin despite the unleafed hardwoods. Had he been sober, nothing could have brought him here. Pride and daylight were brothers, but nighttime hurt was surely different.
He closed the truck door and walked down the gulch, staying clear of the gravel drive. The ground was stony above the creek bed. He knew it all. Remembered something like a boyhood here. Evidence that time did not obey the laws we prescribe it.
He stepped among the windfelled branches, voices ahead drifting in the twilight like summer smoke. He watched from the cover of tall trees, arrested by the sound of her speaking and the broken music of his father behind her softly scratching his fiddle. This was their world without him, an empire of quiet. No power of his will could ever change that.
He saw the man with her, but could not hear him if he spoke. This brother of the night walking along the trails of everything remembered but no longer known. Mason could not hate him. He could only look on, hidden, recused from caring for something so clearly lost.
He left without once being seen and drove the empty roads to the general store where the dog stood to meet him, ears erect. He got out and fed it, talking sweet nonsense and scratch
ing its dusty coat until dirty clouds rose before letting it inside with him where they curled together like corn sheaves on the bed in the back room. Mason drank his cooler of iced beer while he listened to the timbers of the store settling. The dog closed its brown eyes and slept with its long snout against his chest, snoring and yelping while it dreamed.
Deep night sounds woke him. He lay still, listening to what sounded like the living groans of the building itself. The dog did not wake, but that meant nothing. What wildness the animal had in the past was worn smooth by years on the chain and plastic bowls of easy water. It would have been better to strangle it. Little more now than fleas and appetite.
He shrugged free of the mattress and crossed to the counter where the shotgun was cased. He checked the shells before shutting the breech.
Taking the stairs to the basement, he heard the scrape and shuffle again. The sound set off a tremble and scratch on the bottom of his brain. He brought the shotgun up as he moved across the cool floor, his heart convulsed. Light cut the spaces between the boards at the end of the room, faint yellow. An occasional contagion of shadow wheeled across, a theater played out on a hidden stage. He placed his free hand to the horizontal boarding, seeking some latch or door but the way was sealed.
Outside the wind blew and trees scratched busy shadows by the moon. He walked through this, moving around the side of the building and along the natural decline of the yard. Vines clung to the store’s cinder block foundation, clothing it. A broader growth of weeds and snarled bushes surrounded the way in. He cautiously picked through, discovering a path, a wicket. He had to bend deeply to go on but when he did he found the right-of-way eased. The dirt was firmly packed and rutted. He followed it all the way to a painted door.
A Shelter of Others Page 4
