by Ian Pisarcik
RUTH FENN
Ruth studied the band of scar tissue on her ear and buttoned her coat in the half-light among the particles of dust and then walked down the narrow hallway past the empty guest room where the bed that once held her mother had been made neatly and the floor had been swept clean.
In the kitchen she poured a cup of coffee and went outside onto the front porch, where Elam was already sitting wearing slacks and a white button-down shirt.
“You look like you’re waiting on someone to snap your picture,” Ruth said.
“You think I’d make the catalogs?”
“You haven’t seen the catalogs in a long time. The models are all young and buff now. They’ve got veins crawling up their forearms like hookworms.”
“I don’t find nothing attractive about hookworms.”
“Neither do I. But then we’re old.”
“Are we?”
“Yup.”
“It seemed not long ago we weren’t.”
“Did it?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Elam took a sip of his coffee and rested his boot on the rail. “It don’t ever seem to work out the way you plan it.”
“What’s that?”
“Any of it. All of this. Our lives.”
“My mother used to say it’s a good thing we’re not born long for this world. We might come to expect more. It takes me a while sometimes—to dig up some of the things she used to say to me.”
Elam took another sip of his coffee.
“We been married thirty-six years this summer,” Ruth said. “My mother hadn’t even been alive thirty-six years on the day of our wedding.”
“That puts things in perspective.”
“We didn’t know a thing then, did we?”
“I suppose we didn’t.”
“Do we know much now?”
“A little, maybe. As much as anyone.” Elam adjusted his boot on the rail. “Our boy knew some things.”
Ruth was quiet. Then she said, “How do you figure that happened?”
“How’s that?”
“How do you figure someone as special as him came from people as ordinary as us?”
Elam shook his head. “You ain’t ordinary.”
“I ain’t special either.”
“You are.”
“You trying to sweet-talk me?”
“I couldn’t sweet-talk a bee into a flower shop. I’m just being honest with you.”
“Well, I don’t know.”
The sky was bright, and the long drive had turned a copper color in between shallow pools of water like frameless oval mirrors.
“We don’t want to be late,” Ruth said.
* * *
THE OLD TRUCK rattled and heaved along Main Street. Ruth sat in the passenger seat worried the whole town could hear them every time they left the house. She looked out over the brook where the water was high from the melted snow. The truck slowed as it turned up Wicket Street, and in the distance she saw Leo’s house and then his small figure on the big front porch. He was sitting in a ladderback chair with the newspaper opened across his lap and a pipe hanging from his mouth.
“Heard the new trooper got into it with Elroy Biggins the other day,” Elam said.
“Well, I don’t imagine Elroy Biggins is used to taking direction from a woman.”
“You’re right about that.”
“I suppose he might want to start, though.”
Elam nodded. “It’s been a hell of a first week for her.”
“Has it?”
Elam nodded again. “George told me he had to call her out to the shop on her first night on account of Steve Hayward being laid out across East Hopping Road with vomit running all down his shirt.”
“That’s a long night.”
“Longer than it had to be. George said she got him cleaned up, and then she sat there with him on the curb in front of the shop for damn near two hours.” Elam reached for a cigarette from his shirt pocket but stopped himself. “Said she didn’t arrest him for the needle in his pocket neither. He found out later she gave Steve a choice—jail or treatment. When he chose the latter, she drove him to Bennington, and when she found out the treatment center there was full, she drove him clear over an hour to Granville.”
“How do you figure she’s able to give him a choice like that?”
“Don’t know if she is or isn’t. She seems like the type to have her own mind about things.”
Ruth looked out the window at the marbled mountains. Along the roadside, black-and-yellow-striped butterflies fluttered in place. “Well—that’s different,” she said. “That’s something different.”
* * *
THE BRICK SCHOOLHOUSE looked the same as it had several years ago, though the brick had spalled in places and the swing set that occupied the field behind the school had been replaced with a wooden pirate ship and a metal backstop for the children to play baseball. The brook was still hidden behind a thick wall of willows and dogwoods at the bottom of a steep bank, but Ruth could picture it: the water eddying around the smooth rocks and continuing under the metal bridge and coursing through the center of North Falls.
The parking lot was about half full, and some people—parents and grandparents of children, mostly—were filing into the gymnasium through the red metal doors. Ruth spotted Jett’s purple Volkswagen beetle, and Elam pulled into a spot beside it and turned off the engine. The two got out of the pickup and adjusted their coats and walked side by side across the freshly paved lot under the bright sun.
The gymnasium was lined with long plastic folding tables that held the children’s art projects, paintings mostly, but some sculptures and pencil drawings too. Along the wall underneath the south-facing window was a clothed table covered with doughnuts and cardboard boxes full of coffee. Ruth and Elam stood off to the side where children had piled their coats and backpacks.
“I don’t see ’im yet,” Elam said.
Ruth studied the crowded gymnasium. “There,” she said. “In the back there.”
Daniel stood near a folding table underneath the basketball hoop talking with a group of children—a few girls and some boys. All seeming to be friendly with one another.
“Who’s that he’s with?”
“I don’t know,” Ruth said. “Why would I know that?”
Elam scratched at the stubble underneath his chin. “I just thought you might.”
Ruth looked around the gymnasium and found Milk standing in the opposite corner wearing a AAA Northern New England cap pulled down tight. Jett stood beside him smiling with a water bottle pulled close to her chest. Some of the other people Ruth recognized. Children of parents she knew or had known—now with children of their own. But most of the people were unfamiliar to her.
Ruth and Elam remained against the wall near the entrance and listened to Principal Hayworth tap a microphone at the front of the room. The parents and grandparents and some of the children turned to face the principal.
“We’re going to start,” the principal said. “We’re going to start in a minute here and announce the prizes. But I wanted first to thank all of the children for all of the work they put into this show.”
Some of the adults clapped, and the principal nodded and clasped his hands behind his back. “Everything you see here was the work of these students—even the doughnuts. Though it was my idea to bring the coffee.”
Some of the people in the gymnasium laughed, and the principal smiled and unclasped his hands and put them in his pockets. “It’s important,” he said, “to recognize how talented all of these students are here. All of you have been walking around and looking at the various projects, and I have been, too. They’re all good. The committee and I had a heck of a time picking only three. We wanted to pick more. We wanted to pick them all.”
The principal looked around the room. A bead of sweat ran down his temple, though it was not warm in the gymnasium. “As a reminder before we announce the winners—the winning projects will be displayed at the
library for the entire spring, and the students will be photographed for the North Falls Citizen.”
The parents clapped, and the students looked at each other like they could picture themselves in the paper and the fame and fortune it would bring them. Daniel remained with the group of children, all of them laughing and gesturing at one another.
* * *
RUTH AND ELAM left the schoolhouse before most of the crowd. They stayed long enough to see Daniel win the first-place ribbon and to see him smile and look at the floor the way Ruth had grown accustomed to seeing him look when he did something that impressed her and she told him about it. The clouds had moved over the sun and thinned the light. The wind stirred the leaves of the maples that surrounded the small school.
“It’s a nice day,” Elam said.
“First one in a long time.”
“I don’t know—we’ve had some nice ones already for it only being May.”
“You say that every year.”
“And every year it’s true. They say the earth is warming.”
“Let ’em come to Vermont and say it.”
Elam laughed. He patted his pocket that held his cigarettes but hesitated and dropped his hand.
“I got this feeling,” Ruth said. “It’s been going on a couple days now.”
“You’re coming down with something maybe.”
“No. Not like that. A feeling like we might build something. A new shed, maybe.”
“A shed?”
“Something bigger than the one we have now.”
“You’re thinking about taking on more students?”
“I’d like to. There’s no reason I couldn’t.”
They reached the truck. Ruth stood there with her hand on the handle and looked back at the school and the rough hills behind it, and she listened appreciatively to the sound of small voices behind the schoolhouse walls.
“We can go back if you want—congratulate him on his ribbon.”
“No,” Ruth said. “Let him be.”
“You want to go home then?”
“Yes. Let’s go home. Let’s go home and sit outside a while.”
* * *
THE ROAD UNFURLED in front of them. The tall trees cast shadows across the road and across the hood of the truck. The radio was off. “I don’t know as I can see it exactly,” Ruth said.
“What’s that?”
“The rest of our lives.”
“I don’t know that you’re supposed to. They got names for people who say they can.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
The clouds drifted west, and Ruth felt the sunlight on her face. She closed her eyes and pictured the town from above like a worn quilt of summer green and pale winter straw. The snow visible only in the deepest parts of the woods. The muddy roads and the winding brook where the surface ice had begun to break and push through even the narrowest sections. From above, the town looked both ancient and new. The stiffness of winter slowly giving way to something softer.
The truck groaned as it moved up the rutted road and then up the gravel drive to the small clapboard home. Elam turned off the engine, and Ruth remained in the truck, looking at the house. She heard Elam unbuckle his seat belt and open the door, but he didn’t get out of the truck.
“What are you looking at?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Ruth said.
She felt Elam’s eyes on her and she heard the door close, and then she heard his body shift over the vinyl bench seat to face her.
“There are things I’d like to do,” she said. “Things I’d like for us to do. That’s part of the feeling I was trying to describe back at the school.”
“Have you got something specific in mind?”
Ruth turned to Elam. The light had fallen below the leaves of the birches that lined the drive, and the copper sunlight and white bark and black fissures combined to give the appearance that she was looking at an old photograph. She studied Elam, wanting to tell him that what she meant was she wasn’t finished. That she felt like she had started a conversation a long time ago and had stopped it for some reason she could no longer remember. She wanted to tell him how important it seemed to continue. How it might be the most important thing.
She blinked at the shuttering light and let the words take shape in her mind.
MATHEW FENN
He had come to the cave every week since the first time he was picked up at the motel. A middle-aged man who called himself Maidenhair and only liked to sit in the front seat of his car that smelled like chlorine bleach and watch through the rearview mirror while Mathew sat in the back seat and ate sage honey from a jar with a spoon.
Mathew never took anyone to the cave with him. It was the one thing he kept for himself.
The tall woodland ferns still covered the tract of land. The mushrooms still crowded the shaded spots under the pine trees. The rocks and dirt still blocked the entrance. The only difference from the time his mother showed him the cave three years before was that the rain had cleared enough sediment to expose a second entrance. An entrance just wide enough to allow a ninety-eight-pound boy to push himself through feetfirst.
The first few times he entered the cave, he worried the rocks would collapse and block the entrance. But after a while the idea excited him. He imagined living inside the cave. Eating bugs and drinking rainwater and drawing with charcoal on the walls for people to find thousands of years later.
He never walked to the end of the cave. Just like his mother. He never even made it past the first room. He only liked to sit in the dark and imagine that he lived in the cave or that he had been born there. That he had descended from a long line of hardened, prehistoric creatures born among the pockets of limestone and the hanging stalactites.
The sun shone white through the open canopy despite a steady rain that glittered the leaves. He shielded his eyes. He wore stained carpenter shorts and a shirt with the dark clouds of the Carina Nebula printed on the front and back. When he pushed through the opening, he scratched his hip on the bedrock and wondered whether he was getting bigger but recalled how his mother had only recently remarked on how thin he had become.
Inside the cave the light disappeared. He removed his backpack and set it on the floor and then removed a small flashlight from his pocket.
He had been taught to inject the heroin from behind so there were no marks on his arms or legs. He removed the spoon and the needleless syringe from his backpack. He dissolved the solution using a blue plastic lighter and a small amount of water and filled the syringe. He leaned against the side of the cave and pulled down his shorts. He took a deep breath and pushed the plunger inside himself and injected the solution.
A feeling of warmth and safety and then disconnection. A feeling as though part of him had spread across the woods and mountains while a separate part of him remained inside the cave.
He almost always laid still afterward so that his mind would separate more quickly from his body, but today he felt like moving. He adjusted his shorts and picked up the flashlight and started unevenly down the narrow passageway. The rocks around him groaned. A wet wind swirled, and he saw its shape before it settled. He whispered the sounds of the wind and the rocks until his mouth went dry and he could taste salt.
The rain beat down on the ceiling of the cave. He entered the second room and faltered momentarily. The loose rock flooring had turned to sand, and there were puddles of water in the deepest parts and more water dripped from the flowstones so that he had the feeling of being in the bowels of an old boat. He pushed through a narrow crevice and emerged inside a large chamber decorated with stalagmites and stalactites. At the end of the chamber was a dark tunnel, and somewhere inside the tunnel was a tiny light.
Mathew stopped. His breath rolled out in front of him. He turned off the flashlight. The light in the tunnel moved back and forth like a lantern hung from a wire handle. He watched as it grew larger, and as his eyes adjusted he saw that a body held the light, and then he recognized
the body as his own.
He understood that he was losing himself. He had started using to dull a pain that seemed impossible to escape. He believed he could outsmart the drug. That he could use its power to change how he perceived pain, so that time might pass more easily until he and William could leave North Falls together. But he understood now that he had not outsmarted anything. The drug was stronger than him and stronger even than the pain he felt. And now he was caught up in it, like leaping from a burning building to avoid the flames.
The light continued to grow, and Mathew saw his face within the throw of light. He could no longer feel the part of him that remained inside the cave, and he began to wonder which of the two bodies belonged to him and even if there might be a third body somewhere outside the cave that was also his. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on himself, and though he could not feel his legs or arms, he could feel his fingers gripping the dimpled flashlight, and he tried to move them, and when they came free of the flashlight he heard the sound it made as it struck the floor.
He opened his eyes. He could see his face more clearly. His eyes pleading and his mouth relaxing and his lips beginning to part. He turned and ran. His body remained numb, and so it seemed like he might be flying or that he might have turned to water and was rushing forward, a great wave lapping the sides of the cave. And like a charcoal drawing, he thought he might be leaving his mark along the walls—washing them smooth. He imagined someone entering the cave in the future and running his hand over the rocks and knowing somehow that Mathew had passed through this place and smoothed what was once rough and jagged. And though he had come to feel that so much had been taken from him, this felt like a gift.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Ian Pisarcik was born and raised in rural New England. He currently lives in Washington State with his wife and Labrador retriever. He spends the majority of his time in a dimly lit room making up stories about ornery men and heartbroken women and not-quite-empty woods. His stories and poems have appeared in the Roanoke Review, Lullwater Review, Maine Review, and the Flyway Journal of Writing and Environment. Before Familiar Woods is his first novel.
