A Shelter of Others

by Charles Dodd White

  That night he set Irving up in one of the finished rooms before walking back to the general store. He promised he would return early the next morning with provisions and what few possessions the squatter had stockpiled in the basement. Once back Mason filled two cardboard boxes with canned goods and a few candy bars, writing IRVING on the sides in black magic marker. It occurred to him that he might have done well to consider his own subsistence, but figured splitting these lifted wares would see them both through until he could afford a proper visit to the grocery store.

  He awoke the next morning to the first smooth grain of dawn. He stood around while the coffee pot gurgled and his sleeping joints loosened, body knots slackened. Time to give himself over to the needs of the day, the demands of labor. Time for the body to relearn the merits of the working repetition he would inflict on it.

  He wanted to push through and finish with the rest of the apartments by sunset. The idea of a deadline gave a pleasing form to the time ahead. Some measurable fit to what he would accomplish given daylight and able hands. The prospect of making the rooms new and habitable calmed him, eased distracted thoughts. There was a fine simplicity in having a thing to do and then doing it, putting to rest the possibility of failure and miscalculation.

  Irving was still asleep when Mason began work, but stirred himself without prompting and helped with whatever he could. This mostly consisted of amiable conversation, something to listen to while Mason striped the walls with new paint, white flecking their forearms and tee shirts. White spending itself in a mist on the taped plastic and unguarded floor.

  Irving eventually and shyly told of how he’d suffered the spinal injury that crippled him. Mason did not pause from his work, knowing it might stop up the natural spring of words. He did not want to interrupt the quietness and care of something so rare. He listened as a lover might, patiently, without cause or need or illusions.

  Irving had been desperate for money. He had been fired from the Wal-Mart stock room for showing up late with a hangover for the third time in a week. Without immediate recourse or any activity to fill up his hours, he had turned to what liquor he still had in the cabinets at home. When a few days later he surfaced from his fruitless duel with self-pity, he staggered down to the employment office to file for unemployment insurance payments. He was denied benefits a couple of weeks later, having already fallen late on the rent. Riding out the next couple of months until the eviction papers could be processed, he did no favors for his situation, drinking on the tab of friends and eating little. When finally he was forced out, he had exhausted what little good will of the community he could call on. Drunk and foolish, he’d devised a solution.

  He waited outside the UPS warehouse at dawn, concealing himself amid a row of elms fronting the property. To prepare for the blow he had emptied a pint of Everclear, but on an empty stomach it had proven to be too much. His reflexes were slowed and he stepped out farther than he had intended, presented his entire body instead of a cocked shoulder toward the oncoming delivery truck. The impact threw him clear, but as soon as he hit the ground he knew the injury was bad. A tingling in his toes and calves quickly seized into an agonizing grip along his thighs, up his twisted spine, and blasting through the top of his skull. The pain was such that he couldn’t make the first sound and for a moment he was afraid the truck’s driver would not know he had struck him and would continue driving forward, rolling the large cleated tires across his chest.

  He had spent two weeks in traction at the local hospital before he remembered a doctor talking to him. Perhaps there had been earlier visits, but if so they were lost to the dream of regularly administered pain medication. The man who did see him was young, young enough that Irving could have been his father. Even so, the doctor wore thick glasses to compensate for unusually bad vision. Irving remembered wondering if this poor condition might have been why the young man pursued medicine as a career.

  There was a problem with nerves, some kind of damage that would need a specialist. But there was the question of insurance coverage, the lack of it. Certain words were repeated: pain management, dosage escalation…a mysterious language largely beyond what he could take in all at once. The more the doctor talked the more certain Irving became that he was about to be turned out with little more than the clothes he had been wearing and a small care package donated by the local domestic violence shelter.

  That had been nearly a decade ago. The time since had been stripped of direction. The only regulation in his life was the fact of his pain, how to allay it. Years had passed where he hardly noticed the change in the season, living by the unreliable leavings of charity and bitter chance. Derelict cabins and stove-in trailers housed him in foul weathers. Anything found was not wasted. He had learned not to fear despair.

  Mason finished up with the last of the rooms around suppertime and took Irving with him in Hammond’s truck to buy a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken in town. It was a warm afternoon with low thin clouds hunting a way through Buckner’s Gap, drawing up like a bolt of bunched cloth against the face of Callum Mountain. The sound of the river running could be heard just the other side of the road where traffic coughed by.

  “I’d say we did some good work this week,” Mason said, handing over the bucket.

  They sat in the parking lot with the windows rolled down, breeze huffing through, the tickle of pollen in the air. Irving looked down at the chicken, studying each piece before gingerly lifting a drumstick by the tips of his fingers and laying it across a paper napkin spread across his lap.

  “You did the work, but I appreciate you saying so.”

  They ate, saying little more until both had finished and put the leftovers aside. They drank their cokes from long straws. Crushed ice softly rattled in their hands.

  “I’d say there’s a good chance I need you to look after the store nights, if you’re of a mind,” Mason said.

  “What’s that?”

  “In the evenings, once I’m moved in to the new apartments. I’ll need to be over there more to look after things. It would be good of you to move into the back room upstairs in the store and watch the place overnight.”

  “What about old Hammond?”

  “I’m sure he would be happy to let me run it however I want. As long as I vouch for you.”

  Irving was quiet for a long while before he said, “I would sure take it as a kindness from you. I sure would.”

  The next day was a Saturday and they sold vegetables together and boxed the unsold remains up early to see what kind of hand they might turn at fishing. They drove down to Hammond’s farmhouse and brought him and the old dog Quest along, their rods and tackle shivering in the truck bed when they hit a bump in the road. Hammond and Irving took to each other quickly, sharing Old Crow and a cold Pabst tall boy while Mason killed an airplane bottle of Jack Daniels. By the time they arrived at the river, all three had begun to yield to easy laughter and loud voices. The sun was a kind animal on their shoulders.

  Quest wolfed at some ducks. They spooked, flying low and fast, shadows enfolding them in the distance.

  Under a spruce tree Irving and Hammond set down the cooler and their folding chairs. The water was running high but the bottom looked clear, riffles chopping. Mason waded toward the submerged wreckage of a poplar trunk and cast into an eddy, the heavy artificial lure plopping in the smoothed counterwork of current. The water was cool, dam released, and his calves soon numbed. When he walked he felt like he was in the grip of some alien gravity. He plodded along, staring down at the livid refraction of his shins, white as vented steam, the movement of water tugging tight against the skin. A blue heron stilted his way along a granite shelf on the far bank, moving upstream, stealing minnows from the shallows. When Mason came too close, the heron lifted silently and glided upstream and out of sight.

  Mason moved up a few yards and cast to a clear hole where a pair of rainbow trout grazed. A couple of disinterested bumps but no serious follows as he cast and retrieved for a quarter
of an hour. He glanced back to the bank where Irving and Hammond were sitting a few feet apart, watching their plastic corks drift by. They looked like they might be dozing.

  He worked his way over a slick boulder to get at a pool beneath the branches of a tulip tree, casting in low so as to keep the lure out of the leaves and still achieve good distance. The lure slung in close to the loamy bank. A single snagged leaf wheeled down, spinning on the slow surface. He began the retrieval. Almost at once, he felt a strong bump, like a hand jerking the line at the other end for a moment before releasing. He stopped reeling, let the lure sink, then gave play with a short sideways jerk of the rod tip. The fish struck. Mason let line strip as the trout ran down and away from the rocks, heaving for broader water. When the run stalled, he leaned back on his hip, setting the rod high just long enough to get the fish to turn upstream, tiring itself against the beating current. He reeled in hurriedly, getting back as much of the line as he could before the fish turned again, running deep and fast, headed toward the underwater timber. Mason staggered, working back to the bank where Hammond and Irving were watching him. He needed to discourage the fish from taking the line in among the snags. He needed to keep it free and fighting in the open stony bed. He needed to get it to rise.

  As if the thought had summoned it, the brown trout ripped the surface. It allowed only the briefest glimpse, but must have been close to twenty-five inches, golden and powerful. Mason allowed it another short run before pulling up high on the rod, first to the left, then quickly back to the right to confuse the fight. The arced line cut a steep angle to the water, drawing steadily closer. He raked the net from where he’d tied it on to his belt loop and leaned out. The fish’s belly flashed whitely, and then it broke back once more, making strong for a stone ledge. He must wait. He must wait.

  “You need some help?” Hammond called from the bank, clearly tickled.

  “Just toying with him,” Mason answered, tried to laugh, but his heart clenched when the trout cut downstream once more, stripping line until the reel just cried. He waded after it, stumbling once and slipping on a mole of wetted rock. He plunged in chest deep, the cold water jolting him back to his feet immediately. He envied cold-bloodedness.

  The fish was running too hard, going in among some swift water. There was too much line out, close to a hundred yards. Too much out there he couldn’t see.

  And then the line went slack. Gone.

  When he climbed up onto the bank Irving handed him one of the iced beers. They sat and drank, wordless, watching the metallic surface of the river wind by. Hammond flipped his line out, the hook baited with three kernels of corn. The old man looked after it like it might have been a humble prayer. Mason felt like he might throw up.

  “I don’t even want to believe that happened,” Irving said, a kind of hard pain deep in his throat.

  “Well, it did,” Mason said, turning up the beer. “It happened right out there. Right in front of my own eyes.”

  “It was a hell of a fight though. That was some angling or I’ve never seen it.”

  “You want to give it a try?”

  “Me? I’ve got me a cork out there already.”

  “You won’t catch nothing but pan fish with a rig like that. You got to get out there. You might be busted up in flesh and bone, but I believe you got enough in you to wade out.”

  Irving rose, shuffled forward.

  “The hell you say. But we’ll see, won’t we?”

  Mason helped him down to the edge, mud blooming in the shallows around their ankles. He could feel fear in Irving, a sense conveyed through touch alone, but unmistakable, living. His hands on the old man were urgent and quiet songs. When they entered deeper water Irving calmed, the river meeting around them, enclosing them in a single shared space. The current had its own fluent voice. They moved toward it together like men sentenced.

  Irving cast across and began a clean retrieval, listening to Mason, giving play when told, waiting. Then casting again, learning to read the surface, learning how water shaped according to the principles of force and form. The inferring of the hidden world below the water line, the mystic antagonisms. Patience instilled itself, creating its own capacity.

  Time and more time.

  The strike. Down and away, drawing off with smart resistance. Mason could see the realization of it explode in his friend’s eyes. He spoke little, letting the fight develop outside of him, knowing it was Irving’s alone now. The water snapped as the trout freed for a moment. Mason watched, waiting, the net unslung, imagining the movement of the line.

  “Bring it to the current,” he said, the words easy and cool. Words of readiness.

  He moved toward the fish, reaching to draw it in.

  Part II

  CODY GIBB had no use for such trash. Never had. Not since his daddy had run off with the likes of such holler leavings, trailer shit. Left him alone to take care of his mama. What was left of her after all the medicine the doctors had put her on, trying to solve the riddle of her palsies, her moods. Stumbling and staggering when she’d taken too much or too little and called 911 for the tenth time in two weeks, telling of men inside the walls scratching out their threats in some morse code only she could understand. Pulling out old family photos and coloring them with acrylics, spreading loud color across their dead faces. Seven years old and left to look after a full grown woman that never was more than a child herself. All because the old man wanted to wet his dick with some Barnhart tramp, a girl not much older than a daughter would have been, had God been cruel enough to allow such a child entry into this so-called family.

  He turned up Narrow Spokes Road and slowed the cruiser to keep the gravel nicks and dings to a minimum. He would have to hose the vehicle down as soon as he got back to Canon City to be rid of the dust, but he didn’t want to risk anything permanent that might get the Sheriff’s attention. He’d already been cautioned once for blowing out the transmission on the last Crown Vic they’d assigned him. A broken down excuse for a law enforcement ride. But with the budget tight, every slim expense was under scrutiny. Nothing like the Army. There he could push any machine under his hand to its limits, test its ferocity, prove its superiority. It sometimes amazed him to think he’d been back from the war for nearly three years.

  He pulled off behind an olive green Bronco. He knew the truck, the Browning decal affixed to the back window. Ray Ray King was no stranger to the Sanction County Sheriff’s Office. Drunk and disorderly down at the county line Slab Tavern more than half a dozen times over the years. A driving check point that had relieved him of his license for six months. Cody had been the arresting officer that night. Still remembered watching Ray Ray literally piss his pants while he was filling out the paperwork that would secure the poor fool in the county detention overnight. Ray Ray was exactly what the rest of the world thought scratched its sorry life out of these hollers, and Cody despised him and all his kin for it.

  He rapped on the trailer door with the butt end of his Maglite. He liked to have it out when he came in on somebody. With pepper spray or the ASP baton there was paper to be filled out. But a flash light didn’t require a thing. No bureaucracy. And it could lay open a man’s skull like it was plaster.

  He could hear the steps of someone on the other side of the door, the simple weight of a man enough to make the whole trailer shudder. How people let themselves live like this.

  “Deputy,” Ray Ray said, opening the door halfway. He wore boxer shorts and a skivvy shirt loose at the neck, probably three days past laundering. Proper attire for midweek and midmorning among this kind, Cody supposed.

  “Mr. King,” he answered, stepping forward, putting himself across the threshold without any insincere formalities. “I believe I need to sit down and talk with you a minute, if you don’t mind.”

  Ray Ray moved back instinctively, retreating within his own home. Cody liked the feeling it gave him. He wasn’t an overly large man, but there had always been something in his bearing that conveyed irritabi
lity, menace. It was as much a tool in his job as the Beretta at his hip. He’d managed to professionalize his anger, his resentments. It was the result of controlled force, the kind of dark weather in a man that worked best when it remained steady.

  They sat in the kitchen, looking across a green Formica table at one another. Ray Ray unscrewed the cap on an old Dr. Pepper bottle and let a brown viscous bead of spit trickle down the plastic neck in with the rest. Cody had never been subject to any stimulant. Even coffee made him feel like he was walking barefoot across an electrified rug. Chemical dependency of any kind was a vulnerability, a concession to madness.

  “You look like you’re missing something,” Cody said.

  “Boy, I bet you’re about to tell me what it is too, ain’t you?”

  “There’s no reason to talk uncivil, Mr. King. You ought to know that. I’m only observing, that’s all.”

  Ray Ray watched him. “Why don’t you just go ahead and enlighten me.”

  Cody smiled, a crease that was more scar than expression.

  “I’m talking about your cousin, Mason Laws. He’s up and disappeared on us.”

  Ray Ray seemed confused but put at ease. “I don’t think I quite understand what you’re saying, deputy. I’ve not seen Buddy since he got back from the pen. Oh maybe five, six months ago.”

  Cody waited, seeing if Ray Ray showed some tell, surrendered the fact that he might be lying. But there was nothing. Strange. Passing strange.

  “Well that’s the problem. See, Mason put down this address as his home of record when he was coming back from prison. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem, but he’s on probation, supposed to check in with us down at the courthouse from time to time. And the thing is, he hasn’t seen fit to grace us with his presence. That has the sheriff a little bit concerned, as you might imagine.”