A Shelter of Others

by Charles Dodd White

  “I’m taking you back to the store.” He looked down at Irving’s battered canvas sneakers. They had split along the side, gaping. The soles of his feet must have been flayed. “I’ll see that you’re doctored up.”

  “I can’t go back there. Not ever.”

  His answer was charged with a kind of anguish that cancelled argument.

  “Then I’ll take you somewhere else. Somewhere you can be looked after.”

  Irving’s eyes were cold and distant. Resignedly, he lifted up both of his arms, allowing his weight to be borne. Mason tossed his light body over his shoulder and carried him to the cab of the truck, laying him in like a new wife before closing the door gently behind him. He backed out and turned for the road he’d driven up. He handled the truck cautiously, not wanting to disturb Irving with any quick turns, any needless discord. He twisted the knob on the radio, caught a weak country music signal coming out of Asheville. Johnny Cash singing about how no grave was going to hold him down. Mason wished such boldness could be true.

  THOUGH IT was a good hour before daylight, Lavada was up drinking coffee when she heard the truck rolling down the driveway. She stood watching from the kitchen window, knew no easy tiding had discovered itself at her doorstep.

  “Lavada, it’s me. You up?”

  Mason’s voice, a sharp and turbulent whisper. He tapped the ends of his fingers at the living room window when she gave no answer. She footed softly across the floor, let the latch up and opened the house to him.

  “I know I’m not going to be fond of whatever you’re dragging up.”

  He ducked his head, tugged at the brim of his trucker cap.

  “Listen, I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I need your help.”

  She could see a man was sitting in the truck, as still as if he’d been carved.

  “Sometimes I can’t believe you, Mason. I told you I wanted less trouble around here, not more. And here you come begging for favors. Jesus.”

  He looked off, didn’t contend the rightness of what she had to say. Always knew that was the best way to get to her, to exploit her affinity for his patient silences. It made her mad enough to want to bite.

  “Tell me something, then. I can’t stand here waiting on it all day.”

  “I need to put my friend up here for a day or two. Just enough time until I get something figured out. He can’t go back to the store. He’s worried of who might see him back there.”

  “Why’s he worried about that?”

  He grimaced, shrugged. “Somebody scared him real good. Damn near drove him out of the state. He’s busted up pretty bad. I was hoping you could help sort him out. Make sure he doesn’t get any worse.”

  She allowed him to bring the old man in, settle him in her bedroom. He appeared as weak as a stricken child. As Mason carried him, she was seized by the unreality of the moment, the sheer strangeness of seeing so much of what mattered to her become suddenly realized.

  “I guess I can call in. Stay with him.”

  He thanked her, stood hesitantly at the threshold to her room, perhaps gathering remembrances of what they’d once shared here in this place. Though there was no way to ever be sure what Mason was thinking, planning.

  “He’s probably hungry.”

  “Of course. Don’t worry. I’ve got him.”

  He lingered a moment longer, gazing at her. Seeing in her eyes what they’d done, what they’d tried to repair through the bracing of their bodies.

  “Do you want to look in on your daddy?”

  He swallowed, nodded once. “If you think he’s not awake yet. I don’t want to be a confusion.”

  “It’s fine. Here.”

  She silently turned the knob and pushed in, the light from the kitchen building slim dimensions in the room. Sam lay beneath his creaseless sheets, a clean piece tucked discreetly away. Mason did not venture into the room, content only to look on for a few seconds before he reached up and clicked the door shut.

  “I’m doing my best, Lavada.”

  “I know that.”

  “Do you?”

  She thought about it a while. “I’m choosing to believe so.”

  There was little more he could have said, she thought.

  She watched him drive out without trying to watch, her eyes on the trees, the stones, the plentiful ciphers of meaningless detail, dismembered by her desire to concentrate on the one thing she shouldn’t. Her heart tightened like vine.

  She poured herself another cup of coffee and listened to the temporary quiet of the house. Sam would be up soon. What to do with him, how to explain. His medicine had seemed less predictable the last couple of days. There were always bumps, but this seemed different somehow. As if he inhabited a twin of himself in some approximate place, not absent so much as simply attentive elsewhere, obedient to a duality unknown to her. She supposed it frightened her, though that might not have been the right word. Confused, maybe. Made her believe she was the one suffering a damaged perception, twisting the whole of their household inside out. What he would make of a stranger in the house concerned her. The nurses were one thing. They seemed a part of a faceless procession, explainable to him by the pleasing function of their role—to provide care. Like most men, Sam was susceptible to any doting directed his way. But too much difference, too much error in his small world threw everything into dangerous imbalance. That other side of men. Endlessly complicated, especially the ones who considered themselves simplest.

  She went to look in on Irving while she still could. She stood at the shadow-line, listened to him breathe. He had very nearly been asleep when Mason had brought him in. Now it seemed that he had succumbed. When she began to draw back, he spoke.

  “You are all such kind folks.”

  “Rest. You’re safe here. What can I get you?”

  “Water. If you don’t mind.”

  She stepped through the darkened bedroom to the kitchen, ran water in a mug by the side of the faucet. The springs of the bed gave as he lifted himself up to take it. His hand closed over hers as he fumbled and found the ceramic loop. When he drank it sounded like it brought pain.

  “Lord, that’s good. I’ll just set here a while if I can.”

  “Yes, try to sleep.”

  She thought of asking if he’d like her to remove his shoes but decided that could wait until later. She didn’t want to embarrass him, and sheets washed easier than a great many things.

  “What should I call you?”

  “Lavada, my name’s Lavada.”

  “I know that. I was just wondering if you’d had a preference of that or me calling you Mrs. Laws.”

  She waited a moment, trying to tell whether there was some meaning in his question.

  “Either way is fine. And Irving, I need to ask you a favor, at least for a little while, if I can.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “I need you to be quiet until Mr. Laws, my husband’s father, is awake. He doesn’t adjust to surprises too well. You think you can do that?”

  “Oh, yes. I’m a church mouse. I’ll just set in here and you won’t even know it.”

  She closed the door, went back to the front of the cabin. Songbirds were making plain riot of the breaking dawn. They would rouse Sam soon. She turned to the stove and began heating water for oatmeal, sliced ripe peaches to tuck in at the bowl’s edge. The butter left out overnight would pool and give way in the heat. She enjoyed this ceremony. A human way to come toward one another at the beginning of the day. So elemental and ancient and good.

  While the oatmeal cooled she placed a call to Sam’s day nurse to let her know she wouldn’t need to drive down for the day. It was an hour yet before anyone would be in at the assisted health care facility, but she left a message on the voice mail. Now there was only Dennis to deal with.

  HE ORDERED them all out, every paying customer. When they did not heed him and continued to eat their burgers and fries, crunch their pickles, he flipped the old fashioned cash register off the counter, the drawer sli
nging open. Paper bills stuck to the mopped floor. A message lacking nuance. The men collected their hats, the women their purses, eyes sliding profanely at him but no one speaking a word as they left.

  He wiped his hands, left the money strewn like something roadstruck, went straight out to the Dodge and got it running. Sat with his hands on the wheel, wringing it. He rolled the name around on his tongue. Mason. The sonofabitch back. Lavada had tried to talk around it. Calling in to say that she wouldn’t be in for a couple of more days. This after the way she’d acted for the last week. The one moment when he thought they’d turned a corner only to run flat into a stone wall. But when she called this morning he knew that there was more than simple hesitation. When she’d actually said his name it was like being slapped by a board. He let her talk, anger so large and wild that it choked him silent. She had seen him. Seen the bastard. Goddamn all. What was he supposed to say to that?

  He drove up to the Valero gas station and got a twelve pack of Tecate from the cooler in the rear, paying with cash. The girl behind the counter asked if he wanted to buy a lottery ticket, and for some reason he couldn’t explain, he bought ten dollars’ worth and folded them into his shirt pocket. The action was automatic, as if he was watching something transpire outside of his control. When he got to the truck he tossed the tickets out the window and popped the first can before he cleared the parking lot and turned up the highway toward the North Carolina state line. It was nearly suppertime, but he hadn’t eaten all day.

  By the time Dennis reached Sanction County his stomach sloshed with the beer and his head felt like pressboard. He had gulped three cans in under twenty minutes. He felt like an idiot. Was this what a woman could make of him with a simple telephone call? Release this side of him that behaved like he was a sleepwalker let loose in the daylight. But part of him wanted to give himself over to vanity and savagery. To confront what was unreconciled. Drinking could make that happen.

  He pulled off at a bridge and drove down a rutted trail nearly smothered by clover. He parked and hugged the box of Tecates under his arm, went down to the sun cooked bank of the river. He sat in one of the long shadows of the bridge’s stanchions and opened another beer. It ran quickly into him. He closed his eyes and listened to the water twining in its sophisticated currents, tried to mentally separate one distinct influence of water from another, but it was impossible. There was no way to tell where one character of the river ended and another began. How lonesome that made him.

  He grew tired, abject. The sun found him once more as it shifted gradually toward the open horizon. The slow warmth was a kind of gospel he was living in. He let himself be read by the falling light, opened. Pleasure was in being muted, undiscovered by consequence. Care was what caused pain. He wanted to be blessed with an animal brain. Oh, to be silent for a moment in the gaze of the blank sky.

  The mind is a forest too. Its trails and brakes are patterns for no easy reckoning. The inevitable circularities can make strange faces familiar. As it has today. Lavada has shown me this man, this disguise. He calls himself friend, but I see in him something dangerous. An undisclosed threat that only another old man can recognize. He brings violence, sleep.

  How did he arrive? She told me my son brought him here, but I know that can’t be true. Mason has been gone so long. Any counterfeit of him who has passed has done so like a wraith, moving thinly through the walls, pressing himself through the narrowest chinks.

  This man with the face like an idol, the hair like scorched and grimy grass, he is carrying something into this house that must be met. He is burdened with a charge that holds no pity for the outcome of his cause. Like a long rope, I must pay out my patience, let him settle, let Lavada sequester herself in his false gratitude, so that when he is unguarded I can strike and make proper defense before the hour is too late.

  But there is time to let things settle, hope for some other means of safety. These quiet little wars are fought more than one might believe. The gambits of love and loyalty sacrificed all too often to be thought special. I must hazard my due.

  If only I could be sure that this man is what I think he is. To discover the sure and certain mark of identity would put away all hesitation. It would throw down the force of chance that lives over us like impending storm. But then there would be no risk in the movement, no blood in the muscle. Like dead men, we would content ourselves with the solace of dirt, the solace that is only other dead matter. Let them think me dead, lacking consequence. In this single moment, I will be stronger than God.

  SHE DID not trust the look in Sam’s eyes. There was depth, but a depth without kindness or recognition, as if he was preparing for some action but refused to disclose it. She checked his medicine boxes, the bright plastic cubes etched for each day of the week. Everything was in order. Not one pill had been passed over. His blood should have been as calm as a lake, but something was moving inside him. He was slowly boiling.

  When she had introduced Irving to him, she had seen the change come across his face. He refused to take his hand, stared through him like he was better off pinned to the wall than walking free among equals. It embarrassed her. Was this some small prejudice against Indians rising up from the cover of dementia, something that had always been part of Sam’s beliefs, or was it merely a more general dislike for the unfamiliar. Either way, it made her feel apologetic, though she was unsure exactly how she might beg forgiveness without betraying Sam. Now the house was a stage with a small audience. When any of them moved from one place to another, the others watched, listened, as if expecting uncommon calamity at the slightest misstep.

  Irving sensed it as well. He took the cup of coffee she’d served both of them and went back to her room, closed the door behind him. She would have chided Sam if she thought the words would have taken hold, but he had turned to the newspaper, poring over stories and facts that would be lost to him within only a few minutes. She flipped on the television for noise, but couldn’t separate herself from the underlying unease.

  “Sam, let’s run some errands. Get dressed please.”

  He continued through the paper, absently wetting his thumb as he turned each new page.

  “Sam!”

  He glanced up, pointedly annoyed. “I heard you. I’m no child, Daughter.”

  She was surprised by the harshness of his answer, said nothing more. Reluctantly, he followed her outside.

  The drive into town did not invite a word of conversation. A static silence, freighted. When they parked and stepped into the small downtown, they walked the broad sidewalks, the sun verging on the thin banks of darkening stratus. The air only faintly moved. Sweat coated them, made poor shape of their pressed clothes. All around people seemed to labor under the heat. The entire town staggered—stricken, inflicted.

  She went into a small diner at the bottom of some stairs below street level. The descent alone cooled her, the dampness on the back of her neck going suddenly cold as they entered the air conditioning. They sat at a table near the back, though the place was empty at the mid-afternoon hour, and stared at plastic menus. Sam asked for coffee. Lavada ordered a beer still in the bottle. It was chill enough to smudge the glass.

  “Isn’t this better?” she said.

  If he sensed her desire to draw him into easy communication, he did nothing to aid her, waiting for his coffee without discussion.

  “Is it good?” she asked once he’d had a chance to sample his coffee. He nodded vaguely, made some mutter of affirmation but remained as distant as before.

  She tipped back her beer and drank with an unfamiliar thirst. She hated to admit how much she needed this. The flood of relaxation that moved over her even in these few ounces of drink. It was not only the change in Sam that had her concerned. It was her behavior as well. In her own way she was being just as out of joint and confusing. She should have stayed away from Mason. She had been able to seal him away, deal with what they had become, but letting him come back to her, or her to him, broke through many deliberate obs
tacles, levees raised to protect her, and perhaps him too. She sent the waitress away for a second beer, drinking it while she let her mind drift gently free. Maybe she was only being paranoid, after all. Maybe there was nothing in Sam other than the eroding ground of his dementia and she had grafted some greater purpose to it, made a simple mood into something ridiculously exaggerated. She pinched the bridge of her nose, tried to push down the encroaching headache. So many pressures working their way through her, finding their way to any slim flaw.

  She paid for their drinks and when she stood was surprised by the sudden lurch of the ground beneath her feet. She quickly grabbed out for Sam’s sleeve. He bore her, grasped her clammy hand. This was not her. This was not her at all.

  The walk back to the car seemed endless. The storm clouds were stacked like muscle. Thunder muttered. But no breeze. Only heat and the suffering earth beneath it.

  Her head pounded as she sat in the Honda and tried to fight the key into the ignition. She rolled down her window and told Sam to do the same but she needed motion, something to clean this thickness from her head. The key somehow found the slide and she put the engine to work and headed home, drove slowly and precisely. The wind did nothing.

  When they got back to the cabin Irving was sitting in the living room in front of the television. He stood to turn it off but she waved him away, said it would be fine to make himself as much at home as he liked. Sam went straight to his room and closed the door. A shriveling in her stomach put off any further politeness. She excused herself to her bedroom and before she had time to cross the room she had begun to lose the beer. The rest found the toilet. She patted the hem of her dress along her slavered chin and leaned against the wall, listening to the swift heartbeat in her temple. She remained that way for a long time, unable to tell the difference between the upset sounds her body was making from the gathering weather outside. Eventually, though, she could not ignore the deep reverberations in the structural timbers of the cabin when the thunder boomed. She turned toward the small window above the shower and saw the fierce down stroke of summer rain. The glass pane was in violent motion.