by David Rhodes
“I talked him out of that. He’s emotional and there’s nothing the guards here like better than for relatives of prisoners to cry. It makes them feel proud of a job well done.”
“Surely that’s not true.”
“Of course you don’t believe it, Mrs. Helm. No reasonable person should. It’s just one of those little humiliating horrors brought to you by the human garbage pit. Right now—did you know this?—someone is listening to us. Someone is actually being paid to press a tiny wire to their ear and listen to us. It’s insane. Yes, I told my father to stop coming here. Having a son should not include the kind of snickering abuse that runs wild in here. He doesn’t deserve to feel the way he feels when he’s here, and I don’t want him to. If you lived in a garbage dump, would you want your father to visit?”
“My father is deceased, but he wouldn’t have visited me no matter where I lived.”
“Why not?”
“That’s simply the way he was.”
“Frankly, I can’t imagine that. My father is a saint and I sometimes hate him for it.”
“Why?”
“I could never live up to it.”
“Does he expect you to?”
“No, of course not. He’s a saint.”
“Can I ask another question?” asked Winnie.
“Sure.”
“Have you been able to find some small measure of peace here?”
“Not really.”
“I always hoped that prisons were in some way having a positive influence on the people inside them.”
“I’m afraid you couldn’t be more wrong, Mrs. Helm. Does that offend you?”
“No.”
“You have no idea, I’m afraid, what it feels like to try to understand how a single thoughtless action should result in years and years of living in a cage while fools with tiny brains poke you with sharpened sticks.”
“You’re right,” said Winnie. “I have no idea.”
“What can I say? I feel small about the resentment I feel. Some guys who get sent to prison, they know as soon as the door closes behind them that they’ll be treated like lizards. It’s fools like me who imagine that some degree of respect and dignity should still govern the way people relate to each other, even in here. I can’t get over it. Why, for instance, do they search visitors when they don’t even end up in the same building with the person they’re visiting? It’s unnecessary, but they do it anyway. Why do they search our rooms and throw things all over when nothing comes in that has not been inspected? They have rules for everything, but no one can tell you why using the telephone here costs ten times what everyone else pays. Why is that? Go ahead, ask them. They don’t know. There are countless things like that, and it makes me angry. I can’t help it.”
“Anger is never constructive,” said Winnie, “though I often can’t avoid it either.”
“Anger proves I’m still alive,” said Blake.
Winnie looked at the wristwatch strapped loosely around her thin wrist. “I’m afraid my time is almost up. I’ll be back though. I promise to visit you again. You have my word.”
“Look, Mrs. Helm,” he said. “I mean, you did it once and I appreciate it, but you don’t need to come again. It’s against nature. This is a human garbage pit. Don’t come back.”
“I’m coming back,” said Winnie.
“Good,” said Blake.
“Is there anything you would like me to bring next time? I’m sure there are many things, but please limit yourself to things that are inexpensive, not difficult to obtain, and meet the narrow requirements of the prison. Let’s say three things.”
“Three things?”
“Yes, three things.”
“Books, books, and books. I’ll pay you back someday.”
“Do you like to read?”
“You have no idea.”
“Am I allowed to bring books in here?”
“They’ll make it as difficult as they possibly can, believe me. They can’t help themselves, but please, please bring me some books.”
“What kind of books?” she asked.
“Any books are better than none, of course, even books written without much thought—flavorless fantasies relying on clichés and stereotypes. I’ll read those too, but what I really want are thick books with fine print, difficult sentences, long words, and enormous ideas, books written in a feverish hand by writers who hate the world yet can’t keep from loving it, whose feelings so demand to be understood that if they didn’t write them down they would go blind. Bring me books by women who have fallen out of step with society and refuse to march and sing the old songs. Books by men who through terrifying sacrifice overcome all the challenges set before them but one. Find me books by sensualists who drink their cups dry every time and yet never figure out why they’re so thirsty, and books by pious men and women who continue to believe that being good will save them. Bring me books about people in love, people so passionate about each other they will stand against family, community, country, fortune, and fame in order to be together, and books about people who don’t have a chance in hell yet somehow find one. Bring me books about the fear of God and the depths of nature, books about history, philosophy, psychology, science, and motorcycles.”
“I will,” said Winnie. “I promise.”
“And say hello to my father. Tell him that—”
At that instant, from somewhere in the prison, the screen was turned off.
The Wild Boy
Ivan asked and asked, until finally his mother arranged for him to spend a weekend with his friend August. “I’ll drive you over in the morning,” she said.
After hearing this, a tyrannical anticipation governed his actions and thoughts, driving him from one frenzy of expectation to the next. He packed twice before going to bed, slept fitfully, got up at first light, dressed in his lucky green shirt and favorite jeans, and waited silently for his mother to get out of bed.
When they climbed into the Bronco at last, the drive over seemed unbearably long. They had to stop dead and wait at every one of Grange’s six stoplights. Adding embarrassment to frustration, his mother blasted the horn at a driver who pulled out of the hardware store parking lot and cut her off. “Get off the road, idiot!” she yelled.
Then, after a couple of miles on the highway, they heard a sound like a helicopter. Dart pulled over, got out, walked around the Bronco, and found a flat tire.
They were in the middle of nowhere—weeds and sky everywhere, no cars, no buildings, no signs, no nothing—and Ivan’s sense of urgency bloomed into horror over the likelihood that his time with August had been jinxed.
“No worry, this is a piece of cake,” said his mother, yanking the jack out of the back. “Come on, Ivan, give me a hand here.”
They got the old wheel off, but when the wrench slipped, his mother cut her hand. She wrapped a rag around it to stop the bleeding. After the spare was on it looked about half as big as the other tires. His mother said it would be fine. All spares were like that, she said.
Just as they finished, an Amish buggy came around the corner. The two horses pulling it were big and brown, with black manes and tails, and breathing hard. The buggy and its wheels were also black. Inside were maybe eight faces, old and young, a nest of humans. They all waved. Ivan started to wave back, then checked the movement in reference to his mother’s expression. “Hill people,” she said, and spit into the weeds.
They got back into the Bronco and continued up the steep winding road, to the top of the ridge. Ivan looked down into the valleys extending to the right and the left. Then they had to stop at the four-way intersection that August called Creepy Corners. Someone had put a white cross about as tall as Ivan in the ditch nearby, along with some plastic flowers. After several years, black mold had grown over the flowers and covered most of the cross.
They turned right and headed down, curving first one way and then the next, heading toward the road to August’s house. If they didn’t turn on his road and kept going str
aight they would end up in the town of Words, which was so darn small there were no stores other than the Words Repair Shop, where August’s father fixed things.
“We can take the flat tire over to August’s dad,” Ivan told his mother.
“I’ll take it somewhere later,” she said. “I’m sure he’s busy today.”
That was probably true, but Ivan knew the real reason his mother didn’t want to take the tire in. She never wanted anyone to know when something went wrong. “Never complain and don’t bother people with your troubles,” she always said.
August told Ivan his father had so much work to do at the shop that some nights he never came home. Sometimes August’s mom would get up in the middle of the night and drive into Words and yell at his dad. Whatever you’re doing can wait, she said. She said she’d rather be a wrinkled old maid in a tin hut on a cold mountaintop than have a husband who didn’t come home. And at that point his father always came home—because, August said, his mother was hard to refuse when she got worked up. Most people called her Pastor Winifred, some called her Preacher or Reverend, and some called her Winnie. But Ivan’s mother said he was only to call her Mrs. Helm.
August also said his father had to work so hard on account of the government in Washington, DC, moving so many of the good jobs over to foreign countries. And to make matters worse the government started gambling with all the money inside the banks. They kept gambling until just a few gamblers won everything, took their loot, and moved to an expensive island resort. And that’s why the economy went bad, such that no one around here could afford to buy new things. Everyone had to take their old things to August’s father for repair.
The Words Repair Shop had a pop machine next to a hunchback lathe, where curls of shiny metal piled up on the oily concrete. There was also an old woman who sold kitchen crafts in an adjacent room. But that was it. The rest of the town was nothing but houses, garages, sheds, and the church where August’s mom preached. There was nowhere to buy food in Words, and you could walk all the way around it in less time than it took August to get through one of his shorter explanations of why things were the way they were. In fact, he and August had walked around it many times while waiting for August’s father to stop working.
Sometimes Ivan had to remind himself that August came from such a tiny place. He had no idea what went on in important places like Grange, where there were a lot of stores and cars and lights and noise, and several thousand people living close together. Ivan never made fun of him, though. It wasn’t August’s fault that he was born in deep ferny woods in the middle of the Ocooch hills. Besides, he had Ivan to ask about the rest of the world, and they shared everything.
Dart turned down the dead-end road leading to August’s driveway, and Ivan checked again to make sure he still had his suitcase with his stuff. It was actually an old blue plastic typewriter case, which his mother called a suitcase. The typewriter had been taken away, but it still smelled like ink inside. It made a fine place for clothes, though, with a little compartment for special things and a hard plastic handle for carrying.
Ivan liked going to August’s. He lived in a log house with big rooms. There was always something to do, even though August’s mom wouldn’t let him watch most television shows or play video games. They burned wood for heat and his dad had a homemade wind generator for electricity. On days when the blades didn’t turn, the lights sometimes went off. Coyotes screamed at night, owls hooted, and you never knew what to expect.
He and August knew everything for miles around. They found animal trails snaking along the rims of valleys, and holes as big as barrels in trees. They made bridges over the creek so they could cross without getting wet, they found places where they could swing over on a rope and places where they could jump all the way across. In the middle of a ravine they built a fort with long spiky poles, windows, and a roof. They knew where rattlesnakes lived by the hundreds in Sun Rock Cliff, and the Secret Night Gate, where the militia went into the Heartland Reserve to do its martial arts training and plan to overthrow the government. There was almost nothing they didn’t know about in the area.
Still, whenever Ivan stayed away from home for very long he wondered about his mother—what she did when he wasn’t there. He knew she had lived in Red Plain after she moved out of her mother’s house in Luster and before she moved to Grange, and he wondered if she went back. He didn’t know what she did when she lived in Red Plain, and he’d never been there himself. But somehow the name of the town seemed dangerous, filled with blood.
“What are you doing this weekend?” Ivan asked as they neared the end of the dead-end road, where August’s driveway went off into the trees.
“I’ve got errands to run and some cleaning jobs.”
“Is anyone coming over?”
“Not that I know of. Ivan, are you worried about something?”
“No. I just wondered what you would be doing.”
“Same thing I always do,” she said. “Work.”
As they turned off the road, his mother put the Bronco into four-wheel drive, and they bumped over the narrow dirt lane through the trees. August’s pet bat heard them coming, flew around in front of the windshield, and sped off into the woods. About a year ago August had found Milton lying on the floor of his bedroom. He brought him back to life with drops of warm milk with insects mixed in it. During the winter Milton was gone for a while—back to the cave beneath Sun Rock Cliff, where August thought bats hibernated. But in the spring Milton came back and stayed with August most of the time, except when August was in school.
“Just look at that,” his mother said, scowling. “A bat in the middle of the day. Horrid, filthy things.”
Ivan didn’t reply. Adults and flying mammals never got along, and talking about them usually just made for trouble. Even August’s mom sometimes had a problem with him, and she had feelings for animals and bugs that were unnatural in a grown-up.
August said Milton was a long-eared bat. They were pretty rare, with ears that were larger than those of an average bat. August thought he looked quite distinguished, which was sort of true.
As they came closer to the house, Ivan noticed that his mother’s face got a pinched look from all the old engines and four-wheelers and snowmobiles and everything else August’s dad had stacked around and was going to fix up someday.
“A nice home like this, with two incomes. It’s a crime, Ivan. When we have a place of our own it’s going be different. It’s going to be nice.”
Ivan guessed that August’s mom felt the same way. Women were especially alert to things looking good. Mrs. Helm’s response to the situation was to make her own little place away from the house. It had thousands of flowers and bushes, a fountain with running water, fancy fish, and colored rocks, and it was almost done. All that was left was for August’s great-uncle Russell, whom people called “Rusty,” to build some chairs and benches.
Mrs. Helm said she needed a park for her peace of mind, which is something August said adults didn’t have a lot of, at least not around here. August said his mom thought a peaceful place was needed because something very bad was beginning to happen to the whole world. Ivan kept trying to get August to tell him what this was, but he hadn’t figured it out yet. He just knew it was real bad.
When Ivan and his mother walked up and knocked on the front door, no one answered. They climbed between several four-wheelers and ride-on lawnmowers without wheels, but they still couldn’t see anyone back there. There were trees everywhere.
“Hey, August!” Ivan called, but his mother said not to shout, because only people with no class talked without keeping their voices down.
From about a hundred yards away August’s mom yelled back, telling them to come on ahead. For some reason Ivan’s mother didn’t find anything wrong with August’s mother shouting, and they hurried through the backyard and down the path leading through Shrubbery Jungle. Then they walked through the tunneling vines of flat-headed red and orange flowers to where Mrs.
Helm had set some small sandwiches and lemonade on a wooden table. A tiny smile crept over his mother’s face. She clearly agreed with August’s mom that eating triangular cucumber-and-lettuce sandwiches with napkins next to a fountain was a very good thing to do. But it was also true that she liked her a lot more than she liked most people. When they got up close she even allowed Mrs. Helm to hug her, though she didn’t hug her back.
There weren’t any chairs to sit on, so the two women carried their lunch over to the colored rocks beside the fountain. After August’s mom said a few words of prayer, they each picked up a sandwich and nibbled on it, wiping their mouths with red napkins after every bite. Ivan said he wasn’t hungry and just watched. His mother rarely talked to anyone. She said most talking went nowhere fast. But now the two women chattered away like a couple of finches, pecking at their brown-bread sandwiches and sipping from plastic cups, perched on rocks with their knees together. Several times Ivan’s mother laughed, then quickly covered her mouth with a napkin, prompting Mrs. Helm to smile and say, “Oh, Danielle, you’re such a treasure.”
His mother even told Mrs. Helm that she was thinking about applying for a live-in job with the owners of the construction company.
“Oh, I hope you do,” said Mrs. Helm. “I’ve met them and they’re nice.”
“I don’t see how they could be,” said his mother. “They’re rich.”
At that point Mrs. Helm looked at Ivan and said that August was somewhere down by the creek. Ivan left his suitcase on the table and walked into the woods. It was cooler there. Before long Milton found him and flew around his head several times while he crawled through a hole in the fence. Ivan followed him across the Long Stretch, where it was hot without the shelter of the trees. Pretty soon they were back into the cooler woods again.
August was a short distance down the creek, sitting with his back against a tree and staring into the water. Ivan could tell—even from that far away—that August was trapped in one of his moods again. He was odd that way. Ivan knew him so well that he could almost see his thoughts. Sometimes August worried about his great uncle and aunt because they were so old, other times he thought something would happen to his father when he worked without safety equipment, and then often he just worried about why people were always thinking up ways to hurt each other. There was almost nothing he couldn’t worry about.
