Shelter

by Jayne Anne Philips

  Alma glanced back and saw Delia step off the bridge. She was completely calm now but nearly stumbled with fatigue, as though the day's work were done. It was hard work, screaming. Alma had never done it, but when she'd caught up to Delia in the woods and held on to her, the screams felt like blasts coming out of her, a ripping apart Delia had to aim toward the outside. Once Audrey had made sounds and not been able to stop, but her sounds were more like howls than screams, and they'd never ended, really. It was like those sounds had just gotten soft and small and seeped inside her. Delia's screams had finished, like a siren. She took deep breaths, like she'd finished an exercise, and the girls had even begun to laugh.

  "Alma," Delia said now, and nodded off to the left of the trail.

  Alma followed her. They climbed steeply sideways awhile, staying over the river, and came to a rocky enclave. The rocks made a kind of leaning outpost on the high bank. If the girls knelt down they could see most of the bridge and scan downriver nearly to the bend. The big boulders curved away from one another like spoons and formed a kind of hard nest.

  "We'll stay here," Delia said. "It's like a fort." Then it seemed to occur to her to be polite, and she added, "You don't mind, do you?"

  "You don't want to keep going? The Seniors are up there. We could find out what's supposed to happen at Turtle Hole."

  Delia shrugged. "Tonight we'll go there and find out." She smiled sleepily, slid down on her haunches, and leaned back on the rocks. "We don't have to walk any further. I'm your excuse. They all know I need my rest."

  Alma sat close beside her. The rocks were mossy near the ground, and cool; Alma felt for pebbles and chips and found a small rock nearly as round as a ball. She balanced the rock on her palm and looked at Delia. "Table tennis?"

  Delia yawned, and followed Alma's gaze. The crowd of Juniors had nearly finished crossing the bridge, and Frank was almost directly below. "I think you could," said Delia.

  Alma stood. "Aim," she said.

  "Fire," finished Delia.

  Alma did. There was an instantaneous lag time, and Frank spun a little to the left, craning his neck to look up. The rock seemed to have grazed his shoulder.

  "Is he annoyed?"

  "Confused," Alma said, "and it must have smarted." She let herself slide down close to Delia.

  "Let's hope so." Delia closed her eyes.

  Safely wedged in the rocks, they waited as the troop of girls passed, climbing the trail a little below them. Soon the trees obscured all the patches of colors, and voices trailed back like echoes. Then the woods were silent. Alma could see the river below, and pipe stacked down along the opposite bank, and the workmen moving about in their khaki clothes.

  "Do you see him?" asked Delia.

  "No, I don't think he's there. Weren't there five of them?" Alma sat without moving, as though witnessing a ceremony, her eyes trained on the repetitive movements of the workmen. They dug with large picks and shovels, throwing the dirt off onto a growing pile of soil. Soon they began to move one of the big pipes into place, girding it with chain and tugging, two men to each end.

  "Now there are only four," Delia said. She must have opened her eyes and looked.

  "I do remember that movie you were talking about," Alma said, "the one we saw in school." She spoke in a near whisper. It seemed to her that Delia was shivering. Their bodies were pressed together by the formation of the rocks.

  "The one in the auditorium," Delia answered.

  A few times a year, the school saw a movie in assembly, the whole student body present in folding chairs arranged in rows. Topics of the films were sometimes inexplicable. A movie about deserts, for instance, or about World War I. Occasionally an old print of Treasure Island, or Tom Sawyer.

  "It was about rain forests, jungle animals." Alma didn't look at Delia but talked softly, wanting to hypnotize her into seeing the exact image Alma couldn't forget. "There was a snake that flew, or glided, from one tree to another. It made its body flat and whipped itself in coils to catch the air. Do you remember? It flew like a dragon—or the native people called them dragons."

  "I don't know." Delia sighed.

  "People made up stories, and they carved pipes and bowls and spoons, all with dragon's heads."

  "I remember the jungle trees, all mossy and grown over with creepers, like they couldn't breathe," Delia said. "Those movies. I only remember that one because it was the day I came back to school."

  Alma rested her arms on her knees and cradled her head, looking down at earth through the tunnel of her own body. Yes, that was the first day after the week of the funeral. Beside Delia at assembly, Alma had kept her eyes on the screen, willed herself into the forms of the animals. The snake was most deathly and most alive, throwing itself into air and cracking like a whip. It was dangerous and free, like Audrey had been that day in the yard. After school, in March. Audrey had stood by the fence down behind the house and looked out at the field. She was weeping, sobbing, not with her head bent, hands covering her eyes, as she wept when she was "in a mood," but out loud, her face a contorted mask. She'd answered the phone and spoken to the secretary of the Women's Club, who'd asked her to bake a pie for the Campbells: Nickel's car had been pulled out of Mud River and the ladies would all be taking meals to the family.

  "Delia," Alma asked softly, "did your mother cry a lot when your dad died?"

  "I was at school when she found out, I don't know. Later she did, or her eyes were just red all the time. Aunt Bird came and picked me up from school and threw all the beer and liquor out of the house. Mom always had some around and Dad let her, but Aunt Bird threw it out. Mom didn't come home for a couple of hours, and Bird didn't tell us anything until she got there."

  Alma listened to Delia's whispery voice. A hint of breeze stirred Camp Shelter and the trees made hush-hush sounds up high in their leafy canopies. The whole story seemed a dream from here, just a dreamy world with rippled images, the way the sky looked upside down through a rain puddle. "The week after the funeral, my mother didn't cry at all," said Delia. "We watched Morning Movie and then Midday Matinee, eating toast on the couch. Sometimes she fell asleep."

  Alma, curved into cool, hard rock, could still hear the sounds Audrey had made, a kind of yelling, Oh, Ohhh, Oh, circular and endless, emptied into the tall grasses that ran all the way to the creek. Blue beads, remembered Alma, she'd been looking for her blue beads in Lenny's tumbled bureau and had gone to find Audrey, demand she make Lenny tell where she'd hid them. But Alma heard the weeping as soon as she stepped onto the concrete porch. She'd closed the door of the house to keep the sound outside, and walked toward the field. She thought at first that some animal was bellowing in the grass, dying maybe, torn up by dogs, and she'd walked out to see. But it was her mother making the sound. Even with Alma standing beside her, she couldn't stop. She'd gasped, Leave me alone, her voice an odd, strangled bark; Alma had gone back to the house and told no one. Lenny hadn't heard anything. A few minutes later she'd given Alma the missing beads, but Alma threw them into a drawer and hadn't worn them in all the months since.

  "Aunt Bird was so funny, " Delia went on in her dreamy voice. "She put the liquor in the trash but she put it in our neighbor's barrels, not ours. On purpose."

  "She thought if your mom really wanted it, she would get it out of your trash. That's what alcoholics do."

  "Aunt Bird is a lunatic." Delia dropped her head onto her chest.

  "Maybe it will rain tonight," Alma said. "It hasn't rained the whole time we've been at camp."

  "Tonight is your supper speech." Delia pulled Alma's arm close around her. "What will you say?" she asked. "I'm glad it's you and not me."

  "I should talk about that movie," Alma whispered. "The dragons and the jungle."

  "No, " murmured Delia, "Communists."

  Alma was silent.

  On the far bank the river workmen pulled and tugged, setting pipe in the leveled ditches they'd dug. Some of them moved in and out of the shallow water near the bank, wear
ing waders like Frank's, and no shirts. They were wiry men with sinewy arms. Alma wondered if men made, ever, the sounds her mother had made. No. The women made the sounds while the snakes flew, and the men held the snakes while eggs appeared in the grass, delicate, glowing with sounds that broke free and caused everything to fly apart. Alma fit her body closer and felt herself flying deeper into cool rock, sleeping beside the sleeping Delia.

  BUDDY CARMODY: SAY AND SAY

  He crouched near the top of the steep bank. Through patches of leafy branch he saw the stranger turn and walk toward the river. The stranger's brown back and the beige of his pants were visible through the trees in broken pieces. There were sounds in the woods again, quiet sounds Buddy knew and heard now, and birdsong close by, far off. Nothing stopped because a car sat in the woods. If it sat here all fall and winter, the snow would cover it and melt, cover it and melt. The sound of the woods, the wind and sun and snow and dew, took in whatever secret, paid no mind. Buddy heard the stranger walking on layered leaves and needles until his steps across the ground were a faint scuffle that disappeared.

  The pointed rock was gone; Buddy would never find where Dad had flung it. He crouched close to the vertical earth and measured with his eyes the long swooped scrape where the car had slid. He ran his hand along an upended furrow of ground, then inched his body over to sit in the tire-width track Dad had dug up. The earth was soft and black under its cover of weeds and roots; Buddy began to slide, soundless, down the incline to where he could see the silver bumper of the red car. The car was tilted into the pines and sat catty-corner so the bumper looked to be a silly lopsided grin. Like those cars and trucks with faces in the Golden Books Mam used to buy him at the grocery store. She'd get him one every time from the notions rack, since they'd always just cashed their assistance check; Buddy would let her read the books out until finally he wouldn't listen anymore and she found one in the stream, all the pages floating off and the talking cars and trucks erased. Then she taught him checkers and card games till he could shuffle the deck so fast it blurred. He didn't like those snaggle-faced fire trucks and buses with eyes. A car was not supposed to sing and wink; a car should be a machine and fly by on the two-lane, either side of those double lines, sounding a low hum before it even came in sight from around the trees. Bellington was up the road and Gaither was down the road and the cars ran from one to the other, never stopping or turning, and this car could have taken Dad away, got him far off so easy. Buddy could have told Mam how Dad had got drunk and gone off in the car; he could have said how Dad was never coming back and not been lying, and how there wasn't going to be any prison they would have to visit either.

  But maybe Dad had gone off. The red car sat still. The stranger had said how Dad was passed out but it didn't feel like Dad was here: the woods were big, empty and full at once, like they had been before Dad came. Buddy inched closer; he thought he could be a shadow when he moved, nothing could hear him, smell him, feel him circle: in his dreams he could walk the swinging bridge, dance across it, and the bridge never moved or swung, only held still. Like a feather moved above each cross Buddy had carved in the wood. Now he stepped down the spongy, leaf-strewn earth of the steep bank, pretending to fly. There, he was beside the car, and he looked in to see what the stranger had made. It was like a picture: Dad was still and the snake was still and the front of Dad's shirt was dark like he'd sweated through it. The snake was vanished; it was only hung loose around Dad's neck like a piece of round tube, and the dull color of the tube hung down along Dad's leg to his knee. The snake wasn't real anymore; it was just a thing, empty like dead things were empty. If Dad could be empty, like a shell, Buddy thought there would still be a space of air around him, a space where things hummed and tried to get away.

  Quietly, both hands, Buddy pushed down the thin metal handle of the door latch. The latch gave and the car door swung open. Buddy stepped closer, see if Dad was breathing. Dad lay back like a sleeper; he never slept so quiet. Always, passed out or drowsing, on the porch, in the bed, at the kitchen table, he twitched and moved, like he was awake and raging somewhere. Now he just lay still. In his shirt pocket, Buddy saw the round form of the ring. He exhaled a whisper of breath and the breath itself seemed to draw his hand near. He let his hand hover upwards, closer, closer, then down. He fixed his eyes on the little circle beneath the fabric of the shirt and saw the cloth move as his fingers touched inside Dad's pocket. He felt the sharp gold prongs of the setting with his forefinger. There. He let his eyes close, just for an instant. In that moment, he began to step back and away, and he heard Dad's eyes open. A click, like a sound inside a lock.

  Dad's hand shot across to grip Buddy's wrist. His long fingers closed like a vise and no one moved, as though the hand grasped and pinched of its own accord. They tottered on a line or an edge, then Dad's voice said, in a questioning rasp, "You. Who you been."

  Out his head, Buddy thought. "The car wrecked," he said.

  Dad pulled himself upright, nearly lifting Buddy off his feet and through the open door of the car. "Get me out," he said, and pitched forward. He fell sideways onto the ground like a sack of stones and the stones smelled sour. Buddy fought to get out from beneath him and thought the stones were full of rot and pulp, breaking inside the bags of Dad's clothes. Dad's shirt was ripe and wet and his pants were stained and the juice would leak out on Buddy and the juice would burn. Buddy kicked to get free and felt himself pummeling air as Dad rolled him over and threw him in the car. The door slammed closed and Buddy was in the driver's seat, his face pressed to the open window. Just level with the blunt rim of the rolled-down window glass, he saw Dad's eyes peer in. Dad's eyes moved side to side in their lit slits and his forehead was smeared with red in the crease between his brows.

  The long form of the snake had fallen away. It must be in the grass at his feet. Dad's hands appeared over the edge of the open window. He was panting, holding on and looking. He disappeared then, and Buddy heard him circling the car on all fours, slapping the metal chassis with his open palms, staying low like something in the car might see him. Buddy felt him jumping onto the rear bumper again and again as the car bounced, and there was a tearing, ripping scrape as the front of the car nosed downward through the woody flesh of the pines. When Dad opened the other door and pitched himself through it, the car finished its three- or four-foot drop back onto four wheels. Dad sat very still, whistling through his teeth. Then he crouched down low, his long legs folded into the floor of the passenger side, and turned himself to kneel across the front seat, his arms bent at the elbows. His eyes darted to one side and the other, and he pulled a rope from under the seat.

  Buddy lunged for the open window on his side, but Dad got him by one shoulder and pulled him nearly flat. The rope whipped around his arm in a flurry and Dad tied the other end to his own wrist. "You gonna drive," Dad said, and pushed him back upright behind the wheel.

  "Ain't no road," Buddy whispered.

  Dad was crouched down below Buddy, half on his haunches, and he moved to turn the key in the ignition. He shifted himself around to face forward, half on the seat, and straddled one leg over to reach the gas with his foot. Buddy felt the car throb, then Dad put it in reverse and they lurched backward, the tires spinning for purchase in the soft earth. "Turn the wheel!" Dad shouted, and Buddy did, and they rammed backward again, and backward and forward till the car had tilted away from the trees and was easing slowly down the grade. "Now steer around them trees," Dad said, and he stayed low, like something in the woods might see him.

  The ground leveled out and the car bumped over soft ground and big roots. The grade of the earth pitched gently downward and Buddy felt Dad lift off the gas so the car idled forward slowly, humming. The trees were white pine whose scraggly lower branches started twenty feet up and flared to feathery plumes. Buddy could see off in every direction through their staggered, singular forms, off to where the trees grew smaller, closer together, and the layered floor of needles stayed brown. Buddy knew
these woods were the oldest; here were the tallest trees, the towering conifers whose piny, top-heavy shade kept the forest floor free of brush. Nothing grew in such dense shade but dappled mushrooms and jewely ferns and the scaly fungus that ran like reptilian stripes on the north sides of the big tree trunks. Light cut through in bright bars from a long way up, and the shady air itself seemed nearly golden. Needles inches deep muffled all sound and the car seemed to ride on pillowy swells. They rose and fell in subtle waves like the ground breathed into them and out, and above them the dense, green-hung branches subtly moved. Dad hunched down lower in the seat. He sighed and the noise was like a whimper.

  "Ain't nobody out here," Buddy said.

  Silence came up around his words.

  "I know what's out here," Dad whispered.

  They were passing through a slant of heightened sunlight and the air seemed moted with dazzled particles. Long brown needles dropped at intervals, twirling down along the top of the car in soft, minute tappings.