A Shelter of Others

by Charles Dodd White

  Ray Ray spit again, taking his time. “Like I say. I wouldn’t know the first thing about any of that.”

  “Of course not.”

  Cody stood, looking at the cheap prints and posters tacked to the walls, curling at the edges from where the roof had leaked. The roofs were ever leaking in these places, letting the elements slowly rot them back to their essence. No repair could turn back the basic degradation, the hidden decay.

  “It’s strange though that a married man would give his home of record as this piddly shithole when his wife and Daddy are fixed up in a good family cabin. Don’t you think, just a little bit?”

  “Not all marriages are made equal, I guess.”

  Cody laughed. “No, I guess you’re right there. But still it bothers me. And I can get awfully curious when I’m bothered.” He started for the door. “How about you and me go for a walk in those woods back behind the trailer? I seem to remember there was a rumor of a money garden growing up here just a couple of years ago.”

  Ray Ray tossed his spit bottle in the kitchen trash can and poured himself a mug full of what looked to be cold coffee. Putting fluid the same color into his mouth what he’d just taken out. Recycling through himself this steady ooze.

  “I guess I’m supposed to shit my pants now, is that the idea? How about this? How about I tell you something you’d know already if you used the eyes in your goddamned head instead of sniffing around out here where it’s not safe for you to be on your own?”

  Cody tensed, willing himself into a counterfeit of calm, desiring instead to open this hillbilly’s brains to the clean daylight.

  “Go on and tell me, then. Make us both contented men.”

  Ray Ray told him of living alone in a small hut in the midst of the abandoned timber camp, the mending of a broken life. The staying away from the wife and the deluded father. How the past was a knife, always cutting away at what made a man believe in the goodness inside himself. It was all supposed to be tragic. It sounded too precious to be believed.

  “So if he’s living the Christian life, what is it that keeps him from coming in to speak with the folks down at the courthouse? Man wants to go and repair his reputation and chooses not to honor the law sounds like someone who doesn’t understand his place in free society.”

  “That’s for you to ask him. Now I’m pretty sure we’re done,” Ray Ray said, standing and moving to the front door. He slung out the last scoured grounds of his coffee into the front yard, wincing up at the sun. Cody turned toward his cruiser. He could feel Ray Ray walking behind him, breathing. Too close.

  He spun, locked his hands around Ray Ray’s wrist and torqued sharply inward, swiveling the man’s arm against its natural range of motion, snapping his body like it was a camera shutter being tripped. Immobile and panicked, a trussed animal, eyes wild, mouth gaped. And then a second later a valve of sound, pain made purely sonic. The short downward chop delivered against the braced elbow. The bone giving way like paper. Hollering, howling. Cody leaned down against what he’d shattered. Ray Ray made into nothing.

  “Looks like you’ve had an accident,” Cody hissed.

  “Let me go you sonofabitch. Godawmighty!”

  Cody pushed down until he heard grinding, deepened hurt. “Hush now. I’ve got to tell you something. You listening?”

  By his silence he affirmed that he was.

  “I don’t want to hear about anyone disappearing out from under me. I don’t want to have to believe you’ve called ahead to your coz and given him the heads-up about me looking for him because I intend to let him know I’m displeased, but in my own good time. You understand?”

  Ray Ray nodded shortly, his face frozen with pain. Cody released him, watched him fold. Lying there, he looked like nothing more than refuse. Cody would enjoy coming back up here from time to time. Sorting through him to see what settled. He climbed into his cruiser and drove out.

  Back on the hardtop was another world. Green lawns leaned back from the highway, shaping up toward the foothills, stripes of crosscut grass lapping modular ranch homes. Beveled framing, crisp charcoal shingles. The march of similarity was a breach, a violent magic in the landscape. The conformity was its own kind of courage, one that attested to the surrounding deviance, the limitlessness of what the mountains held. All of the ridges and hollers were cruel and lawless. The wilderness its own kind of pure hell. But what men built up, what money bought, was a square resolution to the overall problem of circles. How could you not admire that kind of audacity?

  It was a cool hour with nowhere he absolutely had to be. So he just toured, driving like it was one vast pleasure open to quieted minds. Being on his own for long stretches was one of his favorite parts of serving as a deputy. He was given to lonesome toil. It had agreed with him so well as a boy and later in the Army. Particularly there. The foreign desert stretching out, sand hissing in the wind like it was an animal walking beside him and beneath him and even in him. An animal with hidden thought and large action, but controlled, tamed by loyalty and history. An absolute slave to man.

  He regretted not seeing combat in Iraq. There had been many patrols, many convoys, but the regular Army grunts were always sent in over the National Guard MPs. Many hours posted up on street corners, M4s at the ready, scanning, waiting, index finger straight and off the trigger.

  He had not seen an actual enemy combatant until he was assigned guard duty at one of the processing centers in Baghdad’s Green Zone. Walked the concrete apron surrounding the twelve foot high cyclone fenced cells. The prisoners trussed and tagged, sitting in the sun and the floodlit nights for a week or two before being transferred to a permanent holding area. The stink of their blood and shit became their lasting signature. The deadening repetitiveness of duty took on a kind of vibrant mystery, a belief. It kept him alert, attentive and damaged.

  What he remembered most was the way the prisoners would lose hope. Not because they were abused or threatened, but because at some point all of them stepped outside of small time. That was a restriction that could not be broken. If it was, their days imploded. Knowing the abstract number of a prison sentence was what gave form to their imprisonment. But take away the figures and dimensions of what contained them and see then what it was to make a human being into a breathing rock.

  The detainees would find broken glass and stab it into their throats, but the cells were swept often and nothing of any size was ever left so the pieces merely lodged beneath the skin and the medics would come and pick out the debris with sterilized scissors, the prisoners screaming from the pain of still finding themselves alive. Cody watched carefully during his shifts so this wouldn’t happen. He didn’t want to have to suffer the plague of sand flies that would be drawn to their blood.

  He drove out toward the old Lincoln township, little more now than a crossroads and a nominally manned post office. The bait and tackle shop where he once bought worms and crickets was closed now, the cartoon of a striking small mouth bass faded to the color of old silver. The Plum was running high. The eroding banks silent.

  Up County Road, past an old Baptist church, white graveyards in the hills. He hadn’t sat in on a country service in ten, maybe twelve years. Still, there was some kind of odd beauty out this way among the pastures and fences, the old religion. He could see why his father had come out this way to hide.

  He pulled up into the horseshoe driveway and sat listening to the police radio for a while. Dispatch and other deputies exchanging ten codes. Seemed as far away as the smooth side of the moon. A slim tether, stretched to almost nothing, a mere idea of the law written in the air. Alone and self-preserving, ready. He climbed out and went up to the front porch.

  “Is that who I think it is?” his father called from the front room. The door was open for the breeze. The screen door shut, latched. He could hear the TV. Sounded like Wheel of Fortune.

  “It is. Why don’t you step on out here in the daylight. It’s mighty fine this time for setting.”

  The old man shu
ffled around, looking for the remote control. Cussed when he couldn’t find it and had to switch off Pat Sajak’s mouth by hand. Cody waited, stepped off to the edge of the porch and walked toward where the big swing hung under an oak limb. He would only talk to him out here. He’d vowed as a child to never enter his father’s house with the woman he’d left his mother for, and in twenty-two years he’d never broken it.

  The sun was just at the treetops, flinging shadows as long as they might ever reach. His father came and sat beside him in the swing, the two of them gently swaying.

  “Where’s Carol?” Cody asked.

  “Out with some friends of hers. Young folks. Some people she works with.”

  “That’s got to get a little lonesome. Seems like she’s always out when I drive up here.”

  “Naw, it’s just Carol. That’s her way.”

  Cody nodded, followed it no further. Must have been hell turning into an old man with a wife prone to wandering. All those sins visiting his head so late in life. Nothing to make of the wrong turns taken, the wrong love trusted.

  “You need a ride up to the store or something? I’ve got the time.”

  “No, I can get along fine, thank you,” he answered crisply, formally. “She’ll be back soon enough. I can always call her on the telephone if it’s an emergency.”

  They sat a while longer and then Cody made his excuse to leave. He could never stay with the old man for very long. Easier to hate a man who would hate back. Instead, his father had become a relic, a lost statuary to all those years of resentment without purchase. Seeing what a mild thing he’d become was just about enough to break Cody in two.

  “There’s no need to rush. Why don’t you come in there and watch a little TV. I’ve gotten pretty partial to Dancing with the Stars.”

  Cody stood, dusted off his lap. “No, I need to see to a few more things before the evening is up. Bye, Daddy.”

  “Goodbye. Take care of yourself, Son.”

  Once he was back on County Road early evening had begun to darken. His headlights made poor sense of the gloom, the fog rolling off the river. The sight of it chilled, slowed down the proper lapsing of time. So much of this place seemed to advance out of a different sense of the past, a lesser sense of the future. He gradually angled his foot against the accelerator. The road sang.

  THE HOUSE WAS EMPTY, untroubled by signs of life. Cody preferred sleek abandonment, the precise nothing of a vacuum seal. He shucked his corfram shoes at the front door and placed them on a black wooden rack. The carpet was soft and deep against his socked feet as he crossed to the kitchen, reached into the refrigerator for a protein shake. As soon as he drank it in four great gulps, he stripped out of his uniform and went back to the bedroom and stood naked on the digital scale, waiting for the red numbers to dial themselves in. 185. He needed to cut another seven pounds in the next two weeks, eight to be safe. Some time in the sauna, some roadwork in sweats and he would be ready for the tournament. Nothing but dairy and meat, and his body would reduce itself just as it always had, find its equilibrium, its purity.

  He dressed in blue drawstring pants and a white tee shirt. The blue jacket and purple belt he carried over his arm and settled in the car seat beside him before he cranked the engine and backed out of the swept concrete drive, headed out of the cove. All the houses along the road had been trucked in and planted like weird gardens of vinyl and glass. Clayton Homes, bought on the big lot off the state highway. Each of the models was named, though the naming seemed to imply a kind of deeper anonymity. He had toured the Regency and the Washington Deluxe before deciding on the Neoclassic. The only variation he could discern was in the number of bedroom windows. As he drove past he could see that most of the houses were seated against perfectly formed concrete foundations, planed smooth. The neighborhood was soft and geometric, like sculpted rubber. He could see a few forms within, moving under the overhead track lighting, settling down to microwaved suppers and the plasma screen news. It was like watching something happen in the future.

  By the time he drove into town the streets were largely deserted. He pulled into the parking lot of the martial arts studio and sat in the cruiser for a while. He was a few minutes early and his teacher hadn’t yet arrived to unlock the steel door. He closed his eyes and tried to meditate, but the white center of concentration evaded him. He slowed his breathing, tried to hear the tide of his blood, but it slipped and ran.

  He waited until several cars had arrived and the other club members had begun to enter the cinderblock building. Many of them wore the same blue uniforms, though others wore black and white with blue or white belts cinched around their waists. The instructor wore a black belt with three red stripes at one end. Once all the others were inside, he stepped out to join them.

  Inside, everyone was going through warm-ups, stretching or performing light calisthenics. A few struck the soft molded mannequin torsos arrayed along the far wall. Cody nodded to the sensei before he sat on the edge of the mat and began his own physical routine, slapping the padded surface hard as he rolled to his back. The first shock of sound and stinging awareness sharpened the realness of the moment. He gave his mind to the overall energy of the dojo, tried to escape the uneasy contrivance of himself.

  Once the group was ready, the higher ranks paired off with the beginners so that they might move profitably through the lesson of the day. He found himself with a young woman wearing a blue belt. She was short but strongly built across the hips. He had practiced with her before, but could not remember her name. It didn’t matter. There was little that would have benefitted either of them. They listened as the instructor explained the grappling technique then demonstrated it against a brown belt with grey hair. Everyone began.

  Cody placed the blue belt on her back and worked from inside her guard, he over her but trapped between her legs. Slowly, checking the order of her movements, she pushed his right hand up to his chest as she swung her left leg to his shoulder. Her other leg snaked up to the other side of his neck so that it trapped his left arm in a locked position. With gentleness, she crossed the one leg over the other and began to constrict his neck until he could hear his pulse rise in his ears. He tapped her with his free hand to submit and they returned to the starting position to repeat the strangulation at greater speed. Once she felt she understood the complete movement, they switched roles.

  On his back, he drew her firmly between his legs, brought her toward him by grasping the lapels of her jacket. Beneath she wore a black tee shirt. He could see the hollow between her breasts as she leaned forward, the flesh over her bones. He worked her hand down to his chest and swiveled his hips quickly up so that he made the correct fit against her neck. As he squeezed he did not bring her head against him, watching instead the strain in her eyes. He reluctantly stopped when she submitted.

  After the class was dismissed for the evening, Cody loitered until the blue belt had showered and changed into street clothes in the women’s locker room and crossed the parking lot to her car. A few other students remained talking, but he had gone on to the cruiser and pulled a half block down the road while he waited for her to pass him on her way home.

  He followed at a small distance, drawing up within a few car lengths. The glare of streetlights glided across the windshield like eyes. He went up through a row of modest bungalows built on a rising street. Hydrangeas and flowering laurel bushes made a prettiness of the place, though they become unreal beneath the occasional sodium lights. When her brake lights burned, he swept the cruiser immediately to the side of the road and waited for her to park. Once she was inside behind her locked door, Cody got out and wrote down her license plate. For a long while he stood in the driveway looking up at her second story apartment. He would pass through those walls if he could. Lose himself against its structure like a spring wind.

  The next morning he was early to work. He had slept little but wasn’t tired. He went out to the armory and collected his live rounds for his sidearm and as he loaded his pist
ol magazine he stood looking out the long window that showed the small town square. He imagined that he could hear the indolent laughter of the stone fountain. The gentle give of the water reminded him of skin. It was all was a map of something at the edge of his mind.

  After calling himself out of the station over the radio, he drove through the McDonald’s for orange juice and biscuits. He sat in the side lot eating while he waited for his computer inquiry to come back on the blue belt’s license plate. He’d been thinking about her since he’d left her alone in the darkened apartment. He had enjoyed the strength of her over him, the way she had resisted his technique. He wondered what it might be like to hold her like that without the constraint of public space. Would she whisper secrets to him too fine to taste in the common air?

  The records came back clean. Her name, Allison, disappointed him. He would have liked to invent another but there were times when being bound up by the unbidden revealed some larger meaning. He liked to believe so, anyhow. He drove up to her house and cruised slowly past, saw no one home. He fired the engine and screeched back out to the highway, looked for traffic to pull, looked for an easy answer written in the road.

  It had been a long time since he’d had a woman. There had always been the basic inconvenience at heart he could never overcome. The forced attentiveness and predictable patterns of upset. He had written to a distant cousin of his while overseas. She’d sent him pictures of her at a swimming pool with her dark hair up, wearing an orange bikini that did no favors for her pale complexion. He had stared many hours at the picture, noting every imperfection, every slight bruise and shabbiness. But he knew her to be prettier than the photograph, and he had seized to the idea of her in the long forfeited time he was away, especially in the lonely evenings in the K-Span barracks. At night he would close his eyes and imagine her big body beneath him, shuddering from his impact.

  Like most, Cody wondered if he was normal, but knew in the end that he was not. There was a crucial difference in the way he was put together. He knew others didn’t find pleasure in the same way he did. This awareness is what had drawn him to his martial arts training. He wanted a physical piece to fit in with his idea of desire, and the deliberate force of jiu-jitsu had leant that. On the mat he felt that he faced death, the real nasty trivia of death, and surely embracing that told you something about your mettle. The question was whether there was any lasting value in such knowledge.