She had always been afraid of thunderstorms and remembered now the terrifying tornado drills at school when she was a little girl. Clutching books tightly against their heads in darkened hallways. Whispered voices slithering along the concrete walls. The preparation created a sense of the real event in her imagination; while she crouched alongside the other children and waited she could almost hear the rush of the cyclone. The fear was so real that even the reality of the storm itself could never overpower her vivid concept. She was forever lost in her dreams of what might occur, believing in their fatefulness like some believed in prayers or music or art.
She stood and washed her face in the sink, studied her blurred reflection in the mirror. This was the image of her. She opened her eyes wide, smoothed back the wings of her loose hair. She supposed this was what the rest of the world thought of her, this faintly pretty, tired woman, a sadness touching her that made her seem older than she was, or even would soon be. How utterly disappointing.
With the lights out she went to her bed and lay on her side, facing away from the sashed window. Irving had made the bed but she could still smell where he had lain that morning, an odor of coffee, copper and damp earth. It was comforting somehow to have the impression of this man so close to her, connecting her to Mason, if only by something as tenuous as scent. She closed her eyes and felt her sleepiness begin to divide herself from concrete realities. Though still short of dreaming, something obscure and tidal came alive in her, lifted body free from itself. Her mind became a clear stream, the essence rather than the form of what it was when fully awake. At times this sensation could distress her, but the aftereffects of drinking had calmed any defensive impulse. She allowed the inner division and welcomed confusion, having no other choice. She was resignedly chained.
What manner of horror could she have known when the screams woke her? Only falling within falling. Space in cascade. She ran, ran up through the running. Her legs were water. Her eyes were engines. She stumbled. Her arms spidered the walls as she reeled away, tried to escape from what she saw.
Sam straddled the man Irving, drove a paring knife in and out of his neck like stitch work. Blood jerked up then slapped the floor. Only this quiet struggle, no voices permitted. As silent as the space between milliseconds. Lavada staggered toward them, reached a trembling hand. Sam’s eyes snapped to her. His face was as fixed as night. She knew no history there. No idea of what pain passed between those who loved.
She felt the house swallowing her, breaking down the foundation of her bones. Her legs gave way as she felt herself bend beneath ceaseless weight.
Part III
THE FIRST of the rain fell from the sun. Dennis was pleased by the strangeness, the accidental alignment that created the illusion, until he blinked his sore eyes once and remembered where he was and why he had come. He sheltered his face from the direct light and checked the sky. The clouds were high and scudding but dark. Strong waters would soon come. More than he would be able to simply wipe away.
He sat up and dusted himself off, tried to rid himself of the grogginess from the afternoon nap. He kicked the Tecate box. There were a couple of cans still in the bottom. He decided to leave them as gifts for the general good and walked back to his truck to get clear of the storm.
He sat listening to the radio while the rain came down. He was unsure what he was doing up here, what he thought he would be able to chase. The affair with Lavada had always seemed unreal if he was honest with himself. She was a married woman, after all. As much as he wanted to play the part of one deceived, there was the unavoidable fact that any time with her was stolen. There would always be a particular kind of price to pay for such a theft. He belonged to her, whether she wanted him or not, and now he had no choice but to go and be her fool.
He put the truck in gear and rolled up the off-road, tires whirling before they caught stone fragments embedded in the packed sand. He turned for Lavada’s place, drove down to force a closure to what they’d begun together. His chest tightened. She would not be happy, but that didn’t seem to matter. All necessary things had to travel through times when the outcome was undecided. Dennis had spent much of his life guarding a tendency toward impulsiveness. He was so successful at this that others often mistook him as being plodding and overly cautious. But this was far from the truth. Every moment of the day vibrated with the allure of some errant whim, whether it was kissing a stranger on the street or putting his fist through a storefront glass. He remained perpetually tempted, and this ever present combat between indulgence and self-control became a kind of dissatisfaction that disguised itself as calm. Lavada had offered a release from that, but the more he had allowed himself to believe in the consolation of her, the more he had begun to substitute her for the surrendered element of self-possession. With her loss, he would have no idea what pieces remained in place to provide the required order and tension.
He parked beside Lavada’s Honda and stood in the yard waiting for her to come out. She had always met him in the front whenever he drove up to see her. It was hard to admit that he appreciated something that was not so different from any common juvenile wish. Maybe there was nothing wrong with that. When men decided they were old and irrelevant, the truth was that the symptoms of age were never far behind.
“Lavada?”
He wiped mud from the heels of his boots on the top step and knocked on the front door. The rain came harder, popped against the roof. He knuckled the door again, felt it give way and creak open. He called her name again, hesitantly. The air inside the cabin was close and thick, best not breathed in too deeply. No shadow of movement inside. Nothing in him desired to trespass that gulf. But desiring had little to do with what ultimately decided one’s deciding.
He entered, stood looking at the dim cast of the surroundings. All the lights were off, and though it was still afternoon, the storm had deadened the sky so that as he turned toward the open doorway he’d just crossed he felt isolated and battened from any semblance of the familiar. The sky beyond was a wall, distant and unscalable.
He stepped round the end of the sofa and saw the old man stretched on the floor, a puddle of blood beneath him. His first though was that it was Sam, but he saw the man’s hair was long and unkempt, his clothes cheap and unwashed. Only then did the flood of adrenaline announce itself in his system, and he became shaky and flushed. He ran to the kitchen sink, ready to throw up but nothing came. He opened the faucet, splashed the cool water on his face and neck. Felt every bit the dead man himself.
An abrupt horror in his thoughts. What if there were other victims? If the death of a stranger could do this to him, then what could be made of a dead lover? He braced his hands to the edge of the counter, held himself on his feet before a quick push away to look for anyone else, making the reckless choice of movement. His hurried steps were their own form of humbling, their own self-elected punishment. To go on and fill his eyes with whatever might break him completely. He would later suppose this is what many men might call courage. To him, though, it felt frantic and slight.
The rooms were empty. Lavada and Sam were gone. His lungs became constricted and he rushed back out into the rain, sucking air and water inside him until he calmed. Got back in the truck and tried to call 911 on his cell, but he was unable to raise dependable reception and the call would not dial. He cranked the engine and turned around, driving fast, too fast, while he watched the seesawing bars on his call screen. He was a mile down the road before he was able to get through and he stopped suddenly as he waited to be connected. The operator was a patient voice meant to steady him but hearing another person speak only quickened his nerves. His words came out in a rush. He spoke of blood and an old man and his wife missing. When he realized the mistake he’d made in calling Lavada his wife he did not bother to correct the operator. He built her into his memory as his wife. Yes, she had always been his. And he would fully claim her.
He told the voice that he’d seen no other tire tracks in or out of the hollow. Sh
e had to be on foot. Her and whoever had killed the old man. And he was going after her now. No, not waiting. The police would see his truck and then follow if they could. He could go back, cut for sign like he was hunting game, then mark the way he tracked. He was going to her, making a mend to the sundering. A peace to this errant wildness.
SAM CARRIED his broken hand like a gift. The pain wavered, bent meaning at the edges of his mind, but was no more than register, sentience. A body’s simple consciousness conveyed an alertness and strength that stepped beyond the brain lifting it to motion. This power pushed him deeper into the forest, past the restrictive boundaries marked with orange surveyor’s tape. He was set free by the pain, made whole by its steady ache. He became the fundaments of ligament and tissue. He survived and went on.
He held few memories, had no need of them. The rain was his compass. He read the directions of his travel in both the distant and near report of its fall.
He strove through the low tangles of briar and scrub. His feet broke through the snagging vine, tripped but regained balance. His eyes were poor in the darkness. He shrugged his way forward, crashed against low limbs.
The trail appeared abruptly, hard and clear, maintained. The evidence of human hands at work. His body became suddenly more immediate. The injury radiated. With an awareness of pain came memory, a dream. The blow the hand had delivered. The repeated blows to a strange man and then another, no stranger but his own kin, his daughter. Striking her across the face and shoulders until the bones in him gave. Snapped like a child’s fingers. Grief set itself in his blood and he wept without shame. He wept like a father.
How long he remained exposed there he couldn’t be certain. The chill of the rain may have been what returned him from the brink, or perhaps it was something less definable. He stood, his age making itself known in the fatigue and soreness, a sensation that seemed like a kind of half remembered sadness. The thunder growled. The sound cleared his head from the brief diversion of self-pity and he made for better cover, left the trail and crossed a swollen creek. The water surged past his ankles, pried at loosened stones. Without the storm it would have been nothing more than an insignificantly dry bed. Once across he looked back at what he had transited. He could make no sense of streams and trails, rises and hollows. In the moment, all of the landscape was an amazement to be escaped.
He came to bluffs and huddled in the small shelter they provided, drew his old knees to his chest with his head nestled in a furry crook of moss. He did not seek sleep as much as fall to it.
Morning came softly, a subtle graduation of light. The storm clouds were low, the rain light but regular. The weight of standing water bent the boughs of leafy trees. He sat still, rising like any cautious beast, scanning the ridge with his eyes only, his head fixed. The forest was always living, and what it might give or steal was always final and without regret. Even the soil itself was a thought, a reasoning. The small awakenings of its intelligence were to be respected, perhaps even embraced. He joined the woods, made the complicated mesh of himself to its hidden receptivity.
He gathered himself against the chill and stepped out from his shelter, moved down the long valley, tunneled the passage of sleek conifers. His tracks filled as soon as he laid them, gurgled with mud before the entire outline was lost in the combing rain. Without realizing it, he made steady progress toward the Plum River, drawn to the sound of its flood.
Here, another trail, a low and narrow opening through rhododendron, just high enough to allow him to stand. He turned to follow it, watching the swift downstream gallop past. He had walked the banks of this river for most of his life, but now it was as strange as the surface of another planet. The normally smooth plaiting of current was ruffled white and electric. The water exploded through the bends, a scream through the stone. Great violence had been done. Stricken hemlocks were wrenched and stranded just beyond the waterline where they’d been cast up by the high mark, their massive trunks like the wrecked columns of a doric civilization. He was fascinated by the utter catastrophe the river had enacted. This water that had been a peaceable neighbor his whole life was in terrifying revolt. He walked on, captivated by its unfamiliarity, its uncommon threat. As he went on the valley narrowed, the stone banks becoming increasingly high and narrow. The rapids were swallowed by massive cracked boulders. On top of one he saw something extraordinary.
A long dining table was set aright on the brow of an island of mid-river stone. Also, a pair of ladderbacked chairs and a large white box on its side with something on its bottom edge flapping noisily in the current. After staring for a while he determined the box to be a battered refrigerator. Remarkably, the dining set was relatively unharmed, having found an improbably safe navigation through the flood. He wondered at the senselessness of this scene. How was he supposed to reconcile this cruelty? He was not so far gone as to fail to understand he was slipping away, parting from the way others held onto life. But this was a concrete thing before him, a coordination of event and timing that stepped outside of what any person could ever expect to comprehend, and he was supposed to somehow treat it sanely. It angered him. It angered him that chairs could toss and then right themselves once the raging waters began to subside, as if some hand had seen them properly installed. Yet there was no hand in anything. If the floodwaters proved anything, it was in the plain caprice of destructive forces. He closed his eyes, shutting the sight out of his mind, so that when he opened them the erratic vision was gone. He turned away, clutched a small poplar trunk and hauled himself uphill, fled the clamor.
As the morning wore on it appeared the storm had begun to lift but the reprieve was temporary. By noon the sky was black as contagion, and the rain was swift and driving. Lighting split trees and left long strokes of scorch. Sam was forced once more to find shelter, searching the woods for any protection. He thrashed wildly, compelled by raw terror. Sawvine lashed his skin, brought welts and slim tracks of rising blood that were washed clean by the rain. Wind rattled through the quaking forest.
His foot missed purchase and a high splintering of wood registered in his ears as the certitude of ground abruptly dissolved. He felt himself batted by the hard walls of the hole as he fell many feet, but when he landed softly was surprised that pain hadn’t come quick and severe. For the moment he was simply glad to be shed of the rain. Had he had match or kindling there would have been ample room to counterfeit the comforts of hearth, but he was unfurnished with any such provisions. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness and he probed his fingers into the strangely padded surface beneath him, he saw the improbable luck of it. He felt eagerly for the edges, found them, grasped the telltale corners and corded loops. An old mattress. He bounced gently on its springs, heard it creak. He patted around for other domestic articles but found none. Along the near wall of the shaft he found a sturdy plank nailed into a scaling tree root as big around as a man’s arm. He stood carefully and reached further up, waved his hand before him like a signalman, found another just a few feet up. He stood on his tiptoes. Another. He smiled, baring his teeth, at the darkness.
He lay back down careful to stay dry beneath a jutting stone ledge. Its savage shape was crisp against the dim light above. Had he fallen on the wrong side there was little doubt in his mind that he would have nothing more to contemplate now than permanent oblivion. He folded his hurt hand to his chest and gazed up at the hidden promontory. He wondered what history this place held. Perhaps it was the last hideout of some convict trying to suffer his days until he judged it time to move on to some similar redoubt. Or maybe it was the setting for the assignations of illicit lovers, finding their way together amid the unimpeachable embrace of the wilderness. He preferred to think it love rather than crime. As he slept he dreamt of warm bodies with limbs like heated wax that boiled into the pores of his skin but brought no pain.
He tossed somewhat when the rain diminished but his tiredness was so complete that he did not fully wake until he heard another sound that seemed to bounce off the sky
itself, ricocheting down into the ventricles of his comfortable hole. He sat up and listened as it drew closer.
Dogs, a small pack of them, baying. Soon there were men shouting as well, hieing the animals on. Sam, though he was safely concealed where he was, pressed himself into the deepest shadow of the open shaft. Daylight was now bright and definite, the storm clouds leached away. He could hear the bloody hydraulics of his pulse beating in his throat.
He was unsure why he wanted to remain hidden. He knew he should seek out the aid of these men to get attention for his wound, but some vague worry had set its teeth into his chest. He was afraid of what these searchers might make of him, though he didn’t know why. Something terrible he had done, perhaps. An act that must have been subsumed by the woods. Had it not only recently been within grasp, this memory? He shook his head, rid himself of the cumbersome weight of not knowing the source of his fear, caught his breath as he watched the portal overhead.
The dogs came like children, frenzied, directionless. They pawed at the leaves and bracken, flung themselves at the trail, snouted the ground and then broke for the higher ridges, howling as they chased their longing for more scent. A few minutes later he heard the approaching footsteps of at least a pair of men. He could hear their voices but their words were indistinct, swallowed by the sky. They stood very near the rim of the hole, but it seemed they were unaware of it. Perhaps the natural sculpting of the land contrived to hide it from them as well as it had from him.
Their voices crowded overhead, betrayed no concern. He strained to recognize the pitch and tone of either but could make no claims to identity. They gradually moved along, their conversation flagging. Sam waited a few minutes in silence before he stepped from his shaded concealment and began to climb his way to the surface.
A Shelter of Others Page 12
