Before Familiar Woods

by Ian Pisarcik

  The trapdoor swung open and snow fell through the fog to the forest floor. Della emerged from the stand and began climbing down the ladder. A moment later, Horace followed after her.

  He was in bad shape. He was alive. But that’s the best thing Ruth could say of him. He stood in front of the hunting stand in the thin shadows of the branches and blinked his eyes like he had been in the dark all his life and was seeing sunlight for the first time. His face was purpled and blistered. The skin above his right eye had been lacerated.

  Ruth felt the weight of the gun against her chest and thought to pull it out. She could shoot him dead and leave him for the animals to pick apart. She stood with her body tense and glanced over at Della, who moved through the snow. She asked herself how Elam had fought against the urge and whether Mathew would have wanted her to pull the trigger.

  Della didn’t say a word. She continued down the hill toward the tracks. Horace remained behind the stand focused on Ruth. He looked at her for a long time, and then he opened his mouth and closed it and opened it again.

  “It wasn’t nothing particular about your boy,” he said. “I thought you’d want to hear that.” He turned to where Della had disappeared and then turned back to Ruth. “I caught him pinching my pain pills.” Horace looked down at the ground for a moment. “I told him I had something stronger. It all started like that. If I hadn’t known this guy Dwyer, it would have never gone so far.”

  Ruth felt her stomach turn to fire. She pictured the man in the lawn chair with the red muttonchops and her hand moved toward her gun.

  “It takes you,” Horace said. “You think there are things you won’t do. But there aren’t.” He wiped something from his mouth and turned from Ruth and began to walk unevenly after Della.

  * * *

  THE FOG BROKE and twisted around their bodies. Ruth remained several feet behind Della and Horace. Horace stumbled every few steps. She could hear his labored breath and his harsh cough. Every now and then he seemed to get stuck in the snow, and then he’d lurch forward like a truck with a busted transmission. She could no longer see Della through the fog, but she knew Della only had to follow the tracks to find her way home.

  Pieces of Horace cut through the fog. An arm. The side of his head. But Ruth was losing sight of him, as though he were a set piece in a dream she was waking up from. She listened to the crunching snow and tried to distinguish Della’s footsteps from Horace’s and both of theirs from hers. She thought again of the gun in her coat pocket, and though she wanted to know everything that had happened to her boy, she wanted Horace dead even more, and so she unzipped her coat.

  When she reached the creek, a sound made her stop. The rhythmic crunching of snow had suddenly doubled. Something was moving toward the creek. Ruth stopped and held her hand on the gun and waited. She strained her eyes but couldn’t see through the fog.

  The footsteps stopped altogether, and for several seconds there was no sound. Only wind slithering around the trees. Then the footsteps started up again—even quicker this time. They were coming toward her. Ruth pulled the gun from her coat and steadied her arms and tried to slow her breathing by counting: one, two, three. She heard a crack and then a thud followed by a footstep and another crack. She kept the gun pointed toward the sounds, her arms shaking.

  The wind whistled. A flock of geese flew somewhere overhead. She narrowed her eyes, but all she saw was white and gray, and so after a moment she took a small step forward and then another and then another.

  She saw the blood first. Just a small amount splattered on the white snow where her boot came down. Then the ungloved hand and the arm and finally the whole body. The side of Horace’s head was caved in and the bone fragments had mixed with the skin and the blood so that there was no order to it anymore.

  Della stood at Horace’s feet, her snow hat uneven and her shoulders moving up and down as she struggled to catch her breath. Ruth didn’t bother trying to hide the gun. She looked again at Horace and thought she might be sick.

  “Were you planning on shooting us both?” Della asked.

  “No.”

  “I wouldn’t blame you.”

  The wind blew, and specks of snow landed on Horace and melted into the crevices of his face. Ruth lowered the gun and then put it in her coat pocket. “There’s a well,” she said. “At the top of the hill on the other side of the creek.”

  Della shook her head.

  “If you leave him here, it’s only a matter of time before some animal drags him onto the trail and not much longer after that before someone finds him.”

  “You don’t need to do this,” Della said.

  “I know it.” Ruth studied Horace and then set herself in motion. She grabbed one of his legs just above his boot. She could feel his waxy skin and the prickly hairs underneath his pant leg. “Come on,” she said. “I won’t do it alone.”

  * * *

  HORACE’S HEAD BROKE through the sheet of ice, and Ruth could hear running water. She struggled to keep her balance. Her right foot punched through, and she felt the cold water instantly. She lifted her foot and put it back on solid ground and pulled.

  The two women ascended the hill. Horace’s arms had rolled back and they extended above his head. He was leaving a small trail of blood behind him.

  “I’ve got to stop a minute,” Della said when they reached flat ground. She dropped Horace’s foot and fell into the snow.

  Ruth set down Horace’s other foot.

  An old stone foundation one room deep stretched in a half square some twenty yards behind them. In the center of the foundation were the remains of a chimney. Two walls of granite built up and topped horizontally by long stones.

  All of the sudden Della began to scream. She sat there in the snow with her fists clenched in front of her and stared at nothing and screamed. A guttural scream that seemed to shake as it left her mouth.

  Then she stopped.

  The two sat quiet for some time, and then Della stood and Ruth followed. They grabbed Horace’s legs and begin pulling him through the deep snow. Ruth kept her eyes on the ground, and when she spotted the stone well, the lip of which was flush with the snow, she turned her body sideways and picked up her pace.

  They didn’t give much thought to how they would do it. Neither said a word to the other. They didn’t count to three and they didn’t position themselves differently. They just pulled and tugged and pushed and when Horace was gone, fallen and disappeared to somewhere they couldn’t see, they collapsed in the snow like two old stones toppled from a boundary wall that had been standing since before they were ever born.

  All at once Della began to talk. She talked about Horace and the time she first met him when she was just ten years old at the ballpark where he was waiting in line to buy a hot dog with a quarter that his mother had given him, and how years later he wanted to name their son William after Ted Williams, and how he had started buying pain pills from some guy after hurting his back logging, and how she had threatened to leave him the first time she found him shooting heroin in the school bus and he hit her hard enough to leave a five-inch bruise the color of dishwater over her right kidney.

  She told Ruth that William worshiped his father and that she had come to feel like a roommate in her own home. She told Ruth that she had always been jealous of her and Elam and what they appeared to have. At first it was easy to let people treat her like a victim after the boys were found, because it made her feel like she was finally part of her own family—like she was connected to her husband and son in some way that she hadn’t been before. She told Ruth that she felt awful about it later and had wanted to speak out and had driven to Ruth’s a couple of times but lost confidence and turned around before she got to the drive.

  Ruth let Della talk and again took to noticing things in the woods. Fire-cracked rocks. Cairns placed between trees with no discernible pattern. A single withered apple tree in a copse of oaks. She thought that after fifty-two years there might be something she could say to
Della or to herself. That she might be able to draw on something to help her see the events of the last couple of days more clearly. But she couldn’t see the form the events took—everything was dull at the edges. Everything without shape.

  MILK RAYMOND

  Milk dreamt he was lost in the mountains and valleys along the Zagros range. He had been lost for several days but saw no sheep and no goats. There were farms scattered within the valleys, but the farms were abandoned. The winter had come and the nylon uppers of his boots were tipped with ice.

  He followed a path down a steep mountainside and reached a square mud hut. He peered inside the hut and found it empty save for several pomegranate rinds laid over a sheet. He looked out over the snow-covered field. In the middle of the field he saw an old man sitting with his back toward Milk, facing the mountains. Milk drew his rifle and started toward him. The wind blew and carried with it the faint scent of dried clover.

  The man didn’t turn when Milk reached him. He held a shotgun between his legs with the barrel pressed against the underside of his chin. The man began to speak quietly, but Milk couldn’t understand the words. He heard something off in the distance and turned. A small boy stood at the edge of the tree line, his face blurred. Again Milk smelled dried clover. The boy stood still, watching Milk, and then he turned and ran into the woods.

  * * *

  THE DUPLEX WAS cold when Milk woke. He gathered his clothes from the pile next to the pullout couch and dressed. He walked over to the heater and held his hands over the plastic casing. No heat came out. He went to the thermostat and cranked it to the right, but there was no sound and no heat.

  He pulled back the curtains and saw his truck buried in snow. A bluebird clung to an empty suet cage that hung from a tree in the yard. He watched it for a moment and then walked down the carpeted hall to his boy’s room and opened the door. The bed was empty. He checked the bathroom and the kitchen, but no one was there. He paused in the middle of the hall, and then he went quickly to the front door and put on his boots and coat.

  He hurried around the side of the house to the storm doors, wondering if his boy might have gone into the basement at night and been trapped when the snow piled up. He fell to his knees and dug out the doors and pulled them open. The basement was dark. He started down the wooden stairs and pulled the string and looked around at the bright-blue floor and the plastic chairs and the workbench. His boy wasn’t there.

  He came up from the basement and jogged down the drive. He stood at the end of it and looked down the road in both directions, but there was nothing. He turned back to the house. The weather stick extended from the siding, and above it he saw that one of the blinds over Daniel’s bedroom window had been flipped horizontal. His eye started to throb.

  The snow was still coming down. He watched it collect on the drive on top of the already fallen snow and knew that any tire marks would have quickly disappeared. Same for tiny footprints.

  RUTH FENN

  The two women reached the truck out of breath. Ruth pulled the keys from her pocket. Her fingers were numb. She opened the door and collapsed onto the bench seat like someone who had been shot in the stomach. Her face burned. She looked in the rearview mirror and saw that her skin had gone white save for her ear, which was a deep purple. She started the engine and turned up the heat and backed the truck away from the red-flocked hobblebush.

  The fog had dissipated some, but the snow covered the roads and continued to fall. Her wipers thumped against the windshield. The cold air pushed through the vents.

  Della didn’t speak. Ruth thought she had worn herself out and probably regretted some of the things she had already said. But Ruth had questions. She wanted to know how it was possible that Della didn’t know what was going on. But she also wanted to know about the last time Della had seen Mathew. She wanted to know if he had said anything and how he looked. She wanted to see him one more time, but she wasn’t sure what good it would do, and she was afraid of the answers she might get, so she sat there with the silence as heavy as chunkwood.

  She followed the road north past steep banks crowded with hemlocks and fields covered with snow, where shorthorn cattle walked slowly along the barbed-wire fences. She turned east and headed in that direction for some time, past houses with their curtains pulled closed and then long stretches of woods broken only by the occasional gravel drive that led to homes settled so deep in the woods that no one could see them.

  She continued past an empty field and then a small farmhouse. Lights winked through a stand of oak trees. Ruth slowed the vehicle. She thought at first the lights were from a dump plow. A reinforcement from Bennington. A ten-wheel plow with massive tire chains and wings that tore pavement. But the lights were flashing blue and red.

  Della leaned forward. “We need to turn around.”

  Ruth slowed the car around the bend.

  “Turn around,” Della said.

  The police cruiser sat in the middle of the road with no one behind the wheel. There were no other vehicles. None pulled over to the side of the road and none in the ditches. There was only a ruined deer fence and partially filled tracks cutting into a snowbank. Ruth pulled behind the cruiser and put the truck in park and opened the door and stepped out onto the road.

  “Ruth,” Della said.

  Ruth saw him then. His upturned boot and then his entire leg and then his body and the faint tracks in the snow beside his head.

  He was breathing when she reached him. But his breath was labored and his eyes were closed and it looked to her like maybe Leo Strobridge was dead and it was only the wind passing through his mouth causing the sound she mistook for his breath.

  Ruth crouched there in the snow beside him. He wore a wool shirt with royal-blue epaulets on the shoulders and a matching tie. The tops of two blue pens were visible in his coat pocket below his badge. His rimless glasses covered with snow still clung crookedly to his small nose, and his mouth was as straight as a piece of paper on a desk. That was one thing that always bothered Ruth. The way his mouth never seemed to turn one way or the other. It was as though it was detached from the rest of him, something he put on in front of the mirror every morning just like his belt and holster.

  Leo’s hat had fallen from his head and lay upright in the road. His right hand rested by his hip and his left hand laid palm-up next to his ear, as though he were telling someone to stop. She saw that he still had his gun on him—that whatever had happened, he hadn’t pulled it from his holster. She looked around the woods and then back to the police cruiser and the flashing lights and then to her own truck, where Della sat watching from the passenger seat. She turned back to Leo and thought she saw his upper lip twitch.

  She studied him for a moment, and then she stood and went to the cruiser and peered inside the window. She hesitated and grabbed the handle. The door opened. She sat down in the leather seat. There was a large black screen and a keyboard in front of the dash. She struck the keyboard, but the screen didn’t change.

  Between the seats was a shotgun rack with a single upright Remington, and behind the rack was a metal cage covered with Plexiglas. The radio chattered but she couldn’t make out the words. She looked out the windshield at Leo lying in the snow with flurries gathering on his uniform and thought of Mathew in the tent naked and bruised and of Horace and the snow melting in the sunken parts of his face. She thought again of Mathew sitting at the table with the window open and the wind pushing the curtains inward. She tried to read his face, but it wouldn’t take shape, and she felt a sinking in her stomach thinking that she might not have even looked at him—that she might have simply glanced at the block of clay and the index cards on the table and headed upstairs to her bath. She wondered what words she could have spoken to him then and what effect those words might have had.

  The police radio chattered again. The wind bore down on the cruiser. Ruth studied the radio and reached for it. With her numb fingers she thumbed it to life and called for help.

  MILK RAY
MOND

  Milk had never believed that his boy looked like him. When Daniel was five years old—the night before Milk left for basic—Milk was drinking beers and playing cards in his apartment with Jessica and a man he worked with at the Jiffy Lube. The man had brought his wife, who Milk had never met and who worked selling makeup from home. Daniel was in bed, but he woke at some point during the game and made his way to the dining room where everyone was sitting. His brown hair was disheveled and he wore a white T-shirt that hung loose from his chest. The woman stood when she saw him. “My god,” she said. “He looks just like you.” She had had a couple of beers by then, and she made a big deal of it. Walking over to Daniel and touching his face and looking back at Milk. She wasn’t the first person to say it. People he didn’t know came up to him all the time. Customers that saw Daniel when Jessica brought him into the Jiffy Lube. Old women behind them in the checkout line at the grocery store. But Milk didn’t see it.

  The wipers pushed snow from the windshield. Milk resisted the urge to press down on the gas, knowing it wouldn’t take much to lose control. The thumping of the wipers kept him calm. Kept him thinking of his boy.

  Jessica had probably been right when she told Milk he’d hardly known Daniel before he left for the war. He had gone through the motions of dressing and feeding his boy and putting him to bed. He loved Daniel and would have done anything for him. But he didn’t know him. And he wondered now how Jessica had gotten Daniel to go with her. He wondered if she had called him outside and grabbed him and forced him into her car or if she had simply asked.