The From-Aways

by CJ Hauser

  Jethro is standing there, heaving, his shoulders moving up and down, in a rage, ready to swing again. And then, in the greatest act of beauty I’ve ever seen from Henry, his body turns on its axis like a discus thrower’s and he hits Jethro back. Like his body has always been made and built to do this.

  After that it is too hard to tell what is happening. Carter tries to find a way between them to stop them and the line is yelling and the black-windowed SUV stares dumbly on. I hear a whoop then, like a boy playing Indian, and Billy has charged into the fray, arms swinging. He charges between Jethro and Henry, who are too busy swinging to notice. I hear Joseph Deep say, “Billy, no!” But it’s too late and there, between the two men, Billy intercepts a swing, and maybe it’s Jethro’s and maybe it’s Henry’s, but Billy is down on the ground.

  There is a shuffling of feet as the men back away from each other, confused by what has happened. Billy is a heap of bird bones in too-big clothes. Henry and Jethro stand with their arms held out, as if by keeping their hands away from their bodies, they will be made blameless for what has happened.

  “BILLY!” Rosie shouts. She runs and falls onto Billy and he’s awake again. One socket is red and his lip is split and his eyes are squinched shut as if Billy knows that to open them will only usher in a whole long experience of pain he’s not ready to greet yet. “Motherfuckinggoddamnsonsofwhores,” he says.

  Rosie wraps her arms around him. She tries to lift him up. Henry reaches down to help because Billy’s just too heavy for her. “Here,” he says, and Rosie says, loud but not a shout, “You leave him alone, Mr. Lynch.” The way she calls him Mr. Lynch . . . it sounds like an invocation of the Father and the Holy Ghost and the Son who is Henry all at once. It stops Henry. He lets go.

  Rosie heaves Billy up herself. Billy says, “All right, I’m all right, okay,” and he leans on her as they shuffle back to the car line.

  Henry wipes his sleeve across his face, and when he drops his arm to his side, there is a long rusty stain streaked across it. He looks at me, holding his arms out a little, like, Yeah, here I am. A jolt of fear spikes in my chest. I am terrified. Terrified for Henry, who is hurt, and in trouble. But also terrified, because how did I not know that Henry could fight like that? That he felt this miserable way about Menamon? What other secret parts of my husband are still waiting, unexploded?

  Quinn looks at me with her teeth bared and says, “Are we remaining fucking impartial now?”

  A joke, I think. Everything will be okay if I can just make a joke. So I say, “Oh, I just thought you were a yellow coward.”

  “Fuck you,” Quinn says, and drags me with her to the car line, going after Rosie. I let her take me, turning away from Henry.

  The SUV windows are dark enough that I can’t see the Dorians except for their silhouettes. There is a sort of dumb show happening inside and I think perhaps Elena is pleading with her husband or yelling at him. She has realized that we are the thing she was so afraid of. Knows she will not be able to keep us out of her house. Not with deer fencing even. We are trickier sorts of animals than that.

  “Leah,” Henry says, calling me back. And when he says my name like that, I love him so much it hurts. At our wedding, at city hall, he said he would love me until I died, and I said I would do the same, and I meant it. I want to be the woman who’s going to make him feel like a man and not a fool. That is what he needs right now and so I think that I will go to him and slip my arms around his stomach like a sailor’s knot and grasp him and cry onto his dress shirt and say I am sorry and I love you and I am so, so sorry, just please take me home right now.

  But then I hear the two blasts. The train whistle.

  “Eleven forty-two,” Rosie says, because that’s a girl who has the train tables ticking away inside her. A girl who wears no watch because she’s never been out of the range of the regular blow of it.

  Not so far in the distance the engine is wheeling through Menamon. I hear the bells clanging at the crossing. I imagine elderly diners at the Stationhouse squinting against the dust kicked up, children covering their ears and looking big-eyed at the bright pieces of silverware hopping across the table, everyone pausing together for a moment as the train, headed south, headed anywhere but here, rattles the building down to its foundation.

  And here, in our own pause, I see that Henry’s jaw is swollen and there is blood on his neck. Actual blood. Because he is real, this Henry. He is here on business. There is a large black car full of clients behind him. He is trying to improve his hometown in the most practical way he knows, and is willing to dismantle his father’s legacy to do it. He is trying to support his wife and establish his landscape-design reputation and he has struck the fisherman’s son by mistake. He knows how to throw a punch, and now he is bleeding, and he needs me, but who is this man? I am frightened by my own ignorance, and cowardice, and I cannot make myself go to him.

  So I do what is easy. What is so very much the wrong thing to do it is almost a joke. I go to Billy. I say, “Come on, we should get you cleaned up.” I smack him on the back in a way I’m sure hurts but spares his pride. This is what I should be doing for Henry. He is my job to take care of. Someone else will deal with this boy and no one else will take care of Henry.

  Everyone is silent, watching Henry in his shame and me in my wrongdoing, and when I can’t stand their anticipation another second, I shout out, “MARKS! Are you going to give us a ride somewhere or what?”

  There is a commotion. At first I think everyone is yelling at me for betraying my husband and I cover my face with my hands. But then Quinn grabs on to my arm and yanks me away and I open my eyes and see that it is the Dorians causing everyone to run and shout.

  They are driving toward the line of cars.

  As we run away from the car line I see what they are trying to do. At the end of the barricade, between Jethro’s truck and a pine tree, there is a gap just wide enough that a car might be able to get through. Indeed, someone might be able to leave through that gap, and cut over to the harbor road, and drive away from all us crazy people.

  While everyone else is yelling and scrambling away from the accelerating SUV, Jethro runs toward it. The Dorians drive their car, faster and faster, and as they try to fit the SUV through the too-small gap there is a screeching, crunching sound. They push the car forward and through, scraping and caving in the cab of Jethro’s truck as they go. And then they pull out on the other side of the line, and we watch them drive away, down the harbor road. Jethro reaches the line too late. He bangs on his ruined truck and yells after them. Yells and bangs. Yells and bangs.

  24

  Quinn

  Everyone in the line received a two-hundred-dollar fine for disrupting the peace. We were just standing around by then, tending to dumb-ass Billy, trying to steer clear of Jethro, mumbling to each other about those fucking people. What kind of fucking people think they can do a thing like that? Then some pissy little state trooper drove up in a Victoria with his siren on. I didn’t get a fine because I was reporting, not protesting, but I wanted a fine so bad I almost begged the guy to give me one. Even fucking Leah got a ticket. Jethro all but dragged the officer over to his truck. The officer took down his report, Jethro screaming his head off and pointing at his busted truck like it was a dead child, the officer nodding and jotting like he couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

  Leah was standing there like she didn’t know whether to run or fall down dead. Rosie elbowed me. I shouted, “Hey, Leah. Come with us.”

  I’M SPLAYED ON Rosie’s bed like one of our gravel angels from months ago and she’s sitting at her desk, looking in a mirror just big enough to shine her face back at her. She’s taking a zillion bobby pins out. Her hands flutter about her head, materializing pins, which, when she drops them on the desk, make a plinking sound so soft I shouldn’t be able to hear it. As more and more pins come out of her hair I start to fear that Rosie might just come apart at the seams like a rag doll. She might crumple over in her chair, a
bunch of calico and stuffing, leaving me all alone in the apartment, swearing she was real just a second ago.

  I may be losing it.

  Leah’s waiting for us in the living room, but I just want to stay here, watching Rosie, for as long as I can.

  “So Billy’s gonna have a shiner, huh?” I say.

  “Yes,” Rosie says. “It’s unfortunate. But maybe it will be good too. Make people see.” What if it had been her, I can’t help but think, who got hit instead? On the way home in the car I kept squeezing her hand until she said, “Everything’s fine, Quinn. Nothing bad happened.” And she was right. But when she got yelled at, and when she ran to Billy, and when the SUV crushed past Jethro’s truck, all those things were carving out a space in my mind, the way a river moves through mud. The space is the story of how something bad could have happened. And when you’re in love, once you believe in the possibility that something bad might have happened, it’s almost just as bad as if it actually did.

  “Rosie,” I say, “if someone ever punched you in the face, I would kill them.”

  She laughs a tinkly little laugh that means she’s not taking me seriously. She obviously wishes she could take it back as soon as it’s out because she claps her hand over her mouth. After a moment she lets her hand drop. She shuts her eyes. “How?”

  “What?” I say.

  “How would you kill them?”

  Rosie’s got most of us fooled into thinking she’s America’s sweetheart, but this is a girl with a morbid streak a mile wide. And maybe she’s not the one doing the fooling. If I, if everyone, looked closer, maybe we’d understand that Rosie, abandoned by her parents, working regular double shifts, living in a shitty hometown she won’t be able to afford much longer, might not be all sunshine and light after all. But no one wants to look close.

  I say, “Oh, you know, I would kill him with a sword, I guess.”

  Rosie laughs a dark lady’s laugh. She tackles me on the bed.

  “How very chivalrous,” she says. “Now come on, we have a guest.”

  25

  Leah

  Quinn is intent on her guitar. She sounds good. She is not good at the news, but this is something she knows about. Rosie hands out cups of whiskey and sits on the couch, leaning forward onto her knees. Her arms are plump like a child’s and her stomach has a soft curve to it.

  Rosie sings along with Quinn’s playing: “What bird is at the window? A sparrow or a lark? Not an owl for sure, no. It’s hours past the dark.”

  “You don’t have any harmonies in you, Leah Lynch?” Quinn says. She slugs some whiskey. “Tell me a song, Leah, and I’ll play it for you.”

  I look at Rosie and she nods at me. I am trying to come up with a song but all I can think of is what tonight would have been like if I’d just stayed in the car with the Dorians. I think about how Quinn came raging from the sidelines when Rosie was in trouble and wonder why I didn’t have that much loving snarl in me. I failed to rush to Henry. Didn’t want to know that ugly, difficult part of him I’d never seen before. I don’t know what I can do to fix myself so that when I go back and tell Henry I won’t ever hurt him like that again, it will be the truth.

  “Leah?” Rosie says. “Can’t you think of a song?”

  “Play anything,” I say. “I’ll sing. Just play and I’ll make it up as I go along.”

  LATER, I AM full of whiskey and my voice is hoarse from singing, loudly and badly. Quinn sets up the couch for me to sleep on. I wash my face and take my jeans and bra off and get under the blanket. Quinn pops out of the bathroom. She has toothpaste on her red T-shirt.

  “You need anything?” she says.

  “No,” I say. But there is something. I’m not sure whether I really want to hear it, but I have to. I say, “Quinn, what was it Rosie and Henry said to each other? That got everyone so mad, just before you came running out of the woods?”

  “Nothing,” Quinn says, rubbing her eyes, deflecting. “People were just all riled up.”

  I am good and drunk and I don’t like being protected from information. I have had quite enough of this from Henry already. I stand up on the couch. I am wobbly on the cushions and the frame groans beneath me. I say, “Don’t you dare lie to me, Quinn Winters!”

  “For Christ sake, get down, Leah,” Quinn says. I sit down and fold all my limbs up appropriately. Quinn leans back against the stove and crosses her arms. “She said his mother would be ashamed if she could see what he was doing.”

  “And what was it he said back?”

  Quinn sighs. “He said trash like her wouldn’t know the first thing about his mother.”

  There is too much, too awful, to know about a person.

  “Rosie might have been right, you know,” I say. “About June. Henry’s mother.”

  “Yeah,” Quinn says. “But you just don’t say a thing like that to a person.” She springs up off the stove and palms my head. “Good night, Leah.”

  After she closes the door I pull up the covers and try to sleep but my brain is going around and around. I think about the deer fencing that has already begun circling the Dorians’ estate. I think that my own yard will be next. And then the house. And around the bed, and around my body and my heart until everything is deer-fenced and I will be safe and unable to move at all.

  I take out my notebook and I write down everything I saw or heard, remembered or pieced together today. I write clearly, not in shorthand. I leave the notebook on the floor for Quinn to find, because at least I know I took down enough material for a good article in those pages.

  The light under Quinn and Rosie’s door goes out and it is quiet. I get dressed.

  I trip down Quinn’s stairs and then I am walking away from the Stationhouse, away from the tracks. I walk past the cemetery, which is not quite as spooky at night as you might think. A million peeping insects and frogs are all talking at once. And then there is that chortle and wail. That stupid loon call you cannot escape around here. I hear first the four-note chortle, like an insane nervous laugh, and then the long blow of birdsadness that follows. That’s the sound that gets me. Like someone calling hello in the night. Hello. Hello. Hello. Like mourning so terrible it sounds maudlin.

  I give a chortle. I let out a wail. I honk again and again until I am short on breath. Leah Loon.

  26

  Quinn

  In the morning Leah’s gone and she’s forgotten her notebook. She’s got problems, I know that, but I’m annoyed she couldn’t wait a damn minute so we could go to work together. I’d wanted to ask about her and Henry. I’d have done it politely: Hey, how did it all go down the tubes and could you please provide me with a list of warning signs? I grab Leah’s notebook and go.

  At the Star, Charley is all kinds of worked up. I can tell because she’s chain-smoking in the main office, which she knows I hate.

  “It smells like a fucking Winston-Salem in here, Charley, what’s going on?”

  “Nice of you to show up, Winters. It’s almost ten and we have shit to do today.” It’s going to be a bad day; you can tell with a boss like Charley. One thing out of her mouth in the morning and that’s all the weather report you need.

  “Leah’s not here?” I say.

  “No, she’s not, and when I called my brother he informed me she was staying the night at your place.” Charley looks at her cigarette to see how much is left. It disappoints her. “We’ve got to get this story in, now.”

  “She was gone when I woke up,” I say. Where could she have gone if not back to Henry’s? “Charley, are we really going to run this? I don’t think you’re going to like this story very much.”

  “I know the gist already. I went to the bar last night,” Charley says. “But give me your notes.”

  I think about it, then I hand over Leah’s notebook. Charley sits down on my desk, her ass in a pile of papers. Her hair is all bed-rumpled and it looks good on her. Good old rumpled Charley, sexy as a fishwife.

  Charley smashes her cigarette out in a SLOOP RACE 1999
! mug. Then she rubs her hands all over her face. “These are good, Winters. They’re good notes.”

  “Thanks,” I say. I consider taking the credit. “But they’re Leah’s. I sort of froze up out there.” I can’t take credit for Leah’s work when she’s not even here to elbow me for it. Leah! Gone where?

  “They’re good, they’re good,” Charley repeats. “I was afraid they’d be good.”

  “What do you want me to do with them, Charley?” I say, hoping she gets what I’m saying—that I’m offering her an out. Would Woodward ever do this? Offer to suppress information to protect a party? No, I don’t think he would. But I’m the reason we’re in position to cover this story in the first place, and Henry is Charley’s brother, and this can’t be easy.

  She shakes her head. “No, write it up, Winters. Take your good notes and write up the story.” She’s shaking the notebook in her hand like a developing photo. She looks for another cigarette, spots her pack across the room, and slumps.

  And I love Charley for this. Unwavering, is fucking Charley. “If we run this,” I say, “they’re gonna show up to your brother’s house with pitchforks and torches.”

  Charley doesn’t say anything. Just keeps shaking Leah’s notes. “They’re good notes,” she says again. “Did Hank really say that? Henry? Did he really say what she says he did?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “He did.”

  She puts her finger on a spot in the journal. “I assume your story will elide the part where Leah tried to join the line?”

  “That is correct,” I say.

  WE’RE ALL SITTING around at Carter’s house, on the lawn. The men are in wooden Adirondacks and a few busted armchairs hauled from under the deck. I sit cross-legged on the ground. Carter does the same, across the circle. Spring is toying with us. It’s almost sixty-five degrees.