Shelter

by Jayne Anne Philips

  Then he was standing by the truck, though he didn't remember getting out. The directress, close to him, smelled of vanilla, like a cake—some perfume she wore—and she was white as cake and soft and round. No mate for the Demon, no match. But she was empty and evil; she scared Parson because the evil would work through her to get to someone else, many others maybe. She herself would be no prize for the Devil, no barrier to his greed, but the Demon was near her like a shadow, never left her. She knew about evil, she was afraid, he could smell her fear. Frank was there, piling up junk, but she gestured to Parson and began to speak the Devil's names, pointing to the cover of a magazine, top one in a ruffled stack tied with twine.

  "There is Lucifer in the flesh, there is Beelzebub, there is the Devil himself," she was saying.

  Parson looked at her straight on, amazed, realizing she was somehow kin to the big, lonely women in Preacher's congregations, women who had fanned themselves with folded paper while Parson spoke of evil and retribution. But this one was wealthy, she held herself drawn up and tense, she wanted to be clean.

  She pointed to the magazine and the image of a short, fat, bald man whose hairless face seemed swollen, whose tiny, bright eyes were squeezed small like a pig's. "The Democrats are fools to think of a treaty with Khrushchev," she went on. Parson loaded junk, boxes of empty metal cans, broken lengths of wood, spotted linoleum flooring ripped up in irregular pieces. Leaning, bending near her, he smelled again her sugary smell, like a bake shop, yes, a smell suddenly so specific that he felt dizzy, remembering the sweet shop in Greensboro, in the hotel where Preacher had played cards that day. They'd gone to a revival down in Carolina and Preacher had got wind of a high-stakes game. The hotel in town so fancy, and the sweet shop all pink and white like this woman. "People have to be educated to recognize evil," said her voice close his back, a fat, soft, woman's voice. The hoarse whisper of the Demon echoed her every word, hissed in Parson's head. "Better load that refrigerator now," it said, "or you won't have room." Straining to lift the empty, doorless cabinet, Parson shut out the sound of her and recited a litany of his own, a litany so fast he never had to speak, just move his lips, sounds meant to shut out the sugar and the sweets and the images of that night in Greensboro when Preacher had got shot.

  Parson remembered pieces. The sweet shop where they stand before walking upstairs to the room. The long glass cases holding trays of pastry swans in lines, cookies in the shape of four-leaf clovers, sprinkled with sugar bits. The sugar green as bottle glass, glinting in minute squares. Saint Pat's Day, a day for pagans, but snowing this late in March, a freak storm that will turn to rain. Warm hotel, and the heady sugar smell. Swans made of sweet crust filled with yellow cream, their long necks dipped in chocolate. Parson is nineteen and he has never seen ... a sugar swan. Kneels. Eye-level flotilla of confections on paper lace. So perfect, made for no reason or use. What sort of children hold these sweets in their palms, even eat them as though they are bread or meat? Children far from the smell of the wind in Calvary, the riverblown smell of wet growth, algae, the greeny water where frogs breed after the thaw, frog eggs a fresh rot smell not so different from the sour yogurt smell of women, the real smell wet inside their fake perfumes. Preacher urges Parson away, up long stairs of dark oiled wood, dark walls ascending upwards into darkness. Then the upstairs bedroom where the men gamble, smoke in the air, blinds drawn, shirt flung over the lamp so the light is dim. Fire lit in the grate, room too warm. Lines of talk. Should have seen him, Preacher laughing, big grown kid wants a sugar swan, and how one of the men sends down for a tray of the pastries but Parson won't eat one, only holds it in his hand, looking, and later during the fight the whole tray is thrown into the fire, bitter smell of the burnt sugar pungent as the smell of burning hair. Fire crackles, explodes, or the explosion is in the room, the table goes over, cards in the air a slow arc that rains on Parson's face. Then another crack, loud, like lightning, and the other men are gone, out the window to the metal fire-escape stairs, nearly falling in a jumble, their arms and legs jerking like sticks as they descend against the snow. Smell of human guts like the smell in the den of a beast, and the smell fills the room, smoky, darkening all but the comets that flash as Parson rolls Preacher onto his back like a feed sack in a black suit. Preacher's front slick, smeared, splashing red on the floor, on the window, on the snow that covers the fire escape, and out there in the air, the day is blinding white, whiter and whiter.

  "You winded? You want a cold drink?" The directress's powdered face was not even so white, and now she put her face close to Parson, and he could hear the Devil laugh.

  "I don't want any drink." Parson stepped away and saw the Devil leering from behind her, a thin wraith of a devil in a shadow cloak wide as this woman. Then the Devil shrank to a gray wrinkle at her side and faded off completely. "Don't want any drink," he said again. He knew his voice sounded strange.

  "Well, that's all there is," she said, and lit a cigarette. Two rings flashed on the hand that held the gold lighter. "I do appreciate your assistance, once again."

  He nodded, wanted to leave, but the little flame in the cigarette glowed up as she inhaled. The tiny fire held him.

  "You live near here?" Her words came out in a slender fume of smoke.

  She could make trouble for him, send him away. "I stay with my brother in a house down the road."

  "You mean Hilda's family, Hilda Carmody, the cook? They're the only house back in there now, I believe."

  Parson nodded, for Carmody was surely his brother; Parson was near him, always, breathing his look and his smell, watching Carmody's big wife arrive every morning at Camp Shelter with the blond kid in tow. He'd seen her pull the boy across the quad like a weightless paper toy on a string. Waiting to go to Carmody, waiting for the moment and the time, Parson could almost see into Carmody's wooden house, into the dirt flat of the backyard, or would the yard be grassy and overgrown, sloping off to the narrow stream that fed the river and rattled through the woods? "I'll be going, got to get the truck back," he told the directress now.

  Suddenly she straightened, looked him in the eye, and held out her hand. "I'm Virginia Thompson-Warner, regional secretary of the Daughters of the American Revolution. I certainly have a lot of respect for your sister-in-law, she accomplishes a great deal almost single-handedly." The directress touched him then, grasped his hand, and her hand in his was flat and thick and cool as the raw white breast of a fish.

  Parson pulled away, startled. To her right, the sheer curtains of her small room behind the dining hall fluttered just a little in the open window. The long rear of the building was beside them and the sudden whap whap of the kitchen screen door sounded, kept sounding.

  "Oh, do stop that," said the directress sharply. "Must you kick at the door?"

  It was Carmody's kid, peering out at them through the screen.

  The directress sighed. "No need to introduce you. You know each other."

  "Surely," Parson said. He reminded himself to smile slightly, like a man on a TV show.

  The boy continued to regard them as the door swung open and shut, a summertime, scruffier version of the child Parson had last seen close up at the prison. He held a little pouch aslant in one hand and marbles began to drop out, rolling backwards across the kitchen floor behind him. The kid made no move to pick them up. A light came off him, a glow to say he was marked. He began kicking the screen door again. Whap. Whap.

  "Well then," said the directress, "I won't take his silence personally."

  "No, ma'am." Parson turned and he was in the truck and the truck was moving, rolling slowly over the grass toward the road, but the look of the boy's face was in his head. The boy knew him, would know him, and the boy knew Carmody, knew who Carmody was. His round wan face was browned with sun and his hair was even lighter, his eyes lighter, set off in his pinched face. There was a pale corona around him, like an echo of the dark gold that fell across the woods just after dusk. The illumined green of the trees turned dark. The wood
s were unlit, cast in a warm, still pall. Like a curtain dropping, twilight enveloped the forest in a chorus of insect sound. Parson knew the boy sat then in Carmody's wooden house, listening, dreading night, when his big mother stood as the only bulwark in a long, dark passage. In the shack at night, Parson listened too. The dark wasn't safe, and the dark would leak into day. Whap. The time was coming, approaching, and he was tired, he wasn't strong yet, he needed to sleep. He would unload at the dump and return the truck and say he needed to sleep, he had to lie down now.

  ALMA: PLASTIC ROSES

  McAdams and Pearlie, the A-wing counselor, slept in a small space just off the foyer of the cabin. Their door was never left open but Alma had seen inside their room yesterday. McAdams had discovered Delia outside at dawn; Delia had knocked down some torn window screens propped on the cabin porch and made a clatter when she fell down the steps. Alma heard the noise in her own uneasy sleep, sat straight up in her cot, realized she'd let Delia go. She'd stayed in her own bed and forgotten her migration in the dark to Delia's cot; now the cot was empty. Alma was on the cabin's broad front porch then, and crows were squalling, far away, somewhere up the mountain. The screen door slammed; McAdams and Alma ran down the cabin steps together. There were only three broad ones made of brick, and Delia had not really awakened until McAdams and Alma knelt over her. She lay on her side, her T-shirt pulled up above her hips, eyes closed, blood all over her face. McAdams and Alma picked her up between them. Even then, she didn't open her eyes; she wouldn't look at who or what was carrying her. When she did look, she was propped up with pillows on McAdams's bed. Alma was crying a kind of long, high noise, but no one paid any attention. McAdams peered at Delia, curious, taking her time, before Pearlie rushed in with a wet cloth. McAdams wiped away the blood. Alma heard her say Delia didn't need stitches on her mouth, it was mostly a nosebleed. By then Alma was standing by the door, but Pearlie shut it, then McAdams opened it and let Alma in. McAdams pulled on clothes while Alma kept the wet cloths in place until the nosebleed stopped, so they could go to the infirmary.

  Later, Delia was allowed to rest during flag raising and breakfast. Alma was sent back to the cabin with her. Delia really had fallen asleep on her cot—as though sleepwalking weren't sleep and she was making up for lost time. Alone, Alma went into the counselors' room, which was strictly forbidden. She sat eating doughnuts on McAdams's bed, memorizing what she wasn't supposed to see. There was barely room for two cots and a table with a lamp. McAdams and Pearlie kept their clothes piled on a built-in shelf, their notebooks and manuals and clipboards on the dirty sill of the one window. They wore khaki shorts and white blouses, white socks and tennis shoes, and green lanyards around their necks with big silver whistles, in case someone got lost in the woods. They seemed to have lived in the cabin always. Alma couldn't imagine them in any other circumstance, though in fact they'd been in camp only a week longer than their charges, for training session. Alma had watched them suspiciously the first night during introductions. She had wanted camp to be like the army, like her father's photo album of the war in Korea, and Pearlie was a pink blonde with frosted, tousled hair. Alma knew: Pearlie had sat still, wearing a shower cap perforated with dozens of pinholes, while minute strands of her hair were doused in a pungent blue lotion. The lotion stank, and anyone who touched it had to wear gloves.

  Delia's Aunt Bird was a beauty operator. Since Nickel Campbell had died in March, Alma had spent hours in Bird's shop with Delia; it was easier than being at home after school with her mother. All that spring, Audrey spent the days in bed, or working in her garden, or driving in the car; she was gone. Mina Campbell was gone too, in the afternoons, taking courses at the college; it fell to Delia and Alma to take care of John-John while Bird worked beside them over this or that customer. There were two other beauticians, young girls just graduated from the Academy in Bellington, but Bird ran the show and the talk. Everyone was safe in this commotion. Gossip and the whir of space heaters blinked on and off under the white noise of the big hair dryers, which were like spaceship versions of barber's chairs. Women sat motionless, reading Photoplay or Reader's Digest, while the bulbous metallic globes of the dryers were lowered into place over their heads. Delia would abandon John-John to sweep up the feathery hair that littered the linoleum floor, working the big push broom in dreamy, circular motions. Alma was left to entertain Johnny, who was almost two and sat playing with curlers. Bird had bins of the fluorescent corkscrew shapes, all sized by color; John-John liked to mix them up and throw them but Alma was trying to interest him in the fact that the colors had names. She lined up the red, the blue, the purple, whispered words in his ear as women talked over their heads about dentists, doctors, recipes, and slipcovers. John-John's ear, fleshy and pink, delicately whorled as a shell, became a receptacle for secrets; John thought colors were secrets. He had a certain way of glancing up at Alma through his lashes as he surreptitiously nudged a curler into the red pile. She wanted to say to him, very quietly, in the same secretive tone, your dad and my mom, but she didn't let herself. Somehow, deep inside, he might understand. It had to be enough to pretend he was her brother, her baby; somehow, in some way, wasn't he hers?

  Alma knew she didn't have Delia in the same way anymore. It had been all right until Nickel Campbell died; Delia had never seemed to notice anything, know anything. But now she seemed eminently puzzled, suspicious, distracted. Alma wondered if everyone knew everything, now that Nickel Campbell was dead, but no. Audrey had said it was still their secret, hers and Alma's, and she had taken Alma with her at first, on her drives to Winfield and Bellington, back around on the country roads that smelled of hay and soil, as though spring were bursting out of the wet, punished ground. Finally she seemed to realize that Alma was on the point of not getting into the car with her, and she began to stay home and garden. She plowed up the whole lower yard and planted; it was as though she still had Nickel Campbell, his absence, out there in the ground, and she kept it close beside her.

  Everyone had someone or something. Lenny had Cap, and Cap had Lenny. Wes had his own plans; he was selling accounts for Henry Briarley now, marketing coal, and he traveled nearly all the time, appearing at home on weekends. Mina Campbell had her course books and practiced dictation with earphones on. Aunt Bird had Mina; she called Mina "my baby sister," but it was hard to believe they were sisters. Bird was skinny and stooped, middle-aged, in her round tortoise-shell glasses and blond Jacqueline bouffant—she had named the hairstyle after Jackie Kennedy, and she had a dark rinse called Bouvier to urge on brunettes who were going gray. Mina's hair was perfectly dark, almost black, and her dark eyes were beautiful. But Delia and John-John had Nickel's eyes, exactly, hazel eyes shot with gold lights. And the lights in Bird's shop seemed golden, warm and goldly pink, no matter the weather or time of day.

  Bird called the place Birdy's, even though Bird was her married name. She was widowed or divorced, no one seemed to care which, in another town long ago, and had followed Mina and Nickel to Gaither. She was always remarking, in the girls' hearing, how Mina and the kids ought to sell that little house that leaked and move in here with her—why, she positively rattled around in this big place by herself, with only the bottom floor given over to the shop. And it was a big house, a cupolaed Victorian just across from the post office, built long before the post office, before Main Street extended so far south to the unused railroad tracks. Maybe it wasn't so quiet on the edge of downtown, Bird would say, and no professors for neighbors, but a business had to be centrally located. And besides, how was Mina going to finish her secretarial courses and work, with John-John only two years old? Bird could put a playpen right here in the shop, or give some girl from the country board and room to take care of him. Maybe not forever, Bird would say mysteriously, Mina being a young, healthy woman—here she would glance at Delia, and Delia would glare at her—but there were times family had to pull together until conditions improved. All the women would nod sagely, and coal trucks rattled by on Main Stree
t, shaking the big front window. After all they've been through, Bird would say. If Delia was out of the room, changing Johnny upstairs, she'd go on to say it wasn't as if anyone else was going to help, Nickel's own family not even showing up for the funeral, as though what he'd done was Mina's fault! Here Alma's heart began to pound and her face grew hot. Audrey had told a different story. They came to this godforsaken town because Mina made such a scandal up north with the drinking, and Nickel with no one to help, since his family had disowned him for marrying her in the first place—but she was pregnant and he did the honorable thing. Honor! He didn't learn honor in those fancy schools, or from his skinflint father. Most men would have kicked her into the gutter, but Nickel married her and then spent every penny he had on fancy hospitals, as though anything but abstinence cures an alcoholic. Lord, Bird would say, who'd have thought I raised her all those years after our parents died, for her to go and have children who are orphans themselves. She'd nod meaningfully at Alma, whom she thought far more mature than Delia, so quiet and sensible. Respect for the dead, she'd address Alma in a low tone, as though everyone in the shop weren't listening. I don't speak badly of Nickel, she'd say, but he was always, well, inward. My pretty little Mina tried to bring him out of himself, make a life for him. And Bird would shake her head, hearing Delia walk in the room above them.

  Alma knew her mother would never set foot in Bird's shop. She said Bird's was a continuous hen party, for hens with below-average IQs. But when Alma heard Delia through the floor, it was as though Audrey were the one walking overhead, looking down on all these women, her voice floating into Alma's thoughts. Bird is a meddlesome gossip with a past of her own. Nickel was exhausted with Mina's sickness, thinking he could never leave her or she'd drink herself to death, and he was trapped in that job with Henry Briarley, a last favor from Nickel's high-and-mighty father. Some favor! Nickel doing the bidding of a rich man not fit to shine his shoes.