Shelter

by Jayne Anne Philips

  "Don't turn," she says aloud, quietly. "Back up, straight back. Everyone, move back slowly. Buddy has the light. Stay together and move back to the light."

  Lenny hears Delia whispering, making words under her breath, and wonders about the words of the prayer. She can't believe in any prayer made of words: she understands now that she doesn't believe in words at all. None of it translates. Like the taste of the beer her father gave her, sharp and bitter and golden like a potion. And running deep into the field with Alma, urgent and fast, driving her with a long weed they pretend is a coachman's whip, both of them so young the waving grasses rush at their faces. Alma's body flickers through tall stalks and both of them fly, fly away, and their father watches from the yard, not calling them back. And Camp Shelter the first night, throbbing with sound in the dark, the shrills and trells of unknown, miraculous creatines pressed against the canvas of the tent in moonlight; Lenny and Cap sitting on their bunks, looking at each other, listening. Those were prayers, and crying was, and groaning. Standing in Cap's mother's closet, looking together at the clothes she'd left behind: that was praying. Delia was wrong; a prayer didn't have to ask. A prayer could be brave enough not to ask at all. When they were all at Turtle Hole, separate and together among the rocks in the dusk, that was a prayer, and that prayer held them together at the water when he came. It was why no one ran away, even when Lenny told them to. It was why they all hit him after Cap couldn't stop him moving: because it was done, come upon them, and they took it on together, closed themselves in. Whatever happened would happen to all of them. And Buddy, Buddy had been praying all his life. Walking and running and living in his house.

  "Buddy?" Lenny calls out. She twists back again, close now. Buddy's light spills across the rock floor and they've nearly reached him, so much faster than their tortuous movement forward.

  "The light!" Delia gasps, almost to herself.

  Delia doesn't know she prays without talking, Lenny thinks, doesn't understand her father is a prayer that twists, a prayer Delia carries around in her hazel eyes, her curly hair the same brown, like dark honey. A picture slams into Lenny clear as a snapshot: Nickel Campbell with Audrey, Audrey backed against the kitchen sink, holding him, his mouth in her neck. Then the picture moves, they move inside it, forward and backward in their tiny history like film on a reel. Slow it down and look. They were moving, weren't they, like dancing in place, no, more like floating on what eddied and slowed and moved them both, and Lenny thinks about Mud River, Nickel Campbell's car blunt as a metal beetle, spraying water when it hit and disappearing when the river closed over. Audrey backed against the kitchen sink. Lenny hears the roaring, far away from her, like some dim apprehension. There should be water in the cave, more water than the rattle of the stream, there should be water at the bottom of the drop, she'd promised Delia, she'd told Delia there could be water to float the body down and down, safe, where it could never come out, float underground through some watery vein into Mud River, into Turtle Hole. The cave would never let loose, give things up like the river did. How they dragged Delia's father out with steel tools, and pulled the car up, and floated the news through town. Accident or not, they should have let him be. The river took hold and there was no struggling or turning back. Like when Carmody had hold of her, her arms pulled tight and his knee in her back. Everything Carmody was had flashed for an instant in that look on Buddy's face, the look he'd given Lenny when he recognized her in the water, and the dark blur beside him surged toward her. He'd cried out to her in some frequency she can still feel. She imagined Buddy in Carmody's grip, shaken like a rag. Yet it was Buddy who'd suddenly hit him. Buddy's bare feet rushing forward as she lay with her face pressed in the dirt, the dull impact of the stone, and Carmody's loosened grip, like a hesitation in the mechanism of a machine.

  They've reached Buddy.

  "Buddy's here," Alma says. "He's lying on the ground." She picks up the flashlight that lies beside him, shines it over all of them as though to be sure they are all here. Then she runs the bright stripe over Buddy. He seems to be sleeping, curled on his side with his hands tucked in, like a baby.

  Lenny bends over him, cradles his face in her hands. "Buddy. Buddy. Wake up."

  "What's wrong with him?" Cap's hands are on him too.

  "I don't know. Let's get him outside. Alma, you walk in front with the light. I'll carry Buddy and try to keep one hand on your shoulder, and Delia, you come behind me."

  "I'll stay behind Delia," Cap says. In the short cone of light, she lifts Buddy onto Lenny's back, slides him up over Lenny's shoulder. Lenny feels his weight, his head hanging at her breast. She pulls his limp body a little more forward and clutches his wrists with one hand.

  "How do we know which way to go?" Delia asks.

  "We go straight back from the stream," Cap says. "Buddy hadn't moved. The stream"—she reaches out to direct the light in Alma's hand—"is there. Alma, walk that way, we'll follow."

  Lenny balances carefully, her feet slightly splayed to support Buddy. She doesn't want to lean on Alma, throw her off. She gets in position behind her sister and waits to feel Delia's hand. When it finds her, tentative, reaching up, Lenny says, "Hold me at my waist, the belt loops. Easier for you." She grasps Delia's hand for a moment, guiding it, then touches Alma in a signal to move forward.

  If she could only close her eyes, Lenny thinks, carry Buddy and just walk. But she can't help peering into the black, a dark deep as oil, pierced by the beam of the light. The black takes on its own shimmer, like an absence of colors that sucks and turns. Fear licks up in her, a tongue at her wrist, in her chest: without Buddy to lead them, they'll never get out. Stay here, tracing paths back and forth to the stream until the batteries give out and the light disappears. Lenny tries to see; her own thoughts seem to roil and turn like black scarves in the black around her, floating and vanishing like the white fish that moved across her hand. There, the stranger, the workman who was some magician, some angel, walks through trees into air itself, rising, rising away from them, contracting in mist over the water, pulling in to curl like a fetus and float, mindless, away from them. Behind them, the monster she felt on top of her at Turtle Hole peers after them in the dark, tasting their departure and waiting, hungry, so hungry and empty, a monster still wet from Carmody's body, wet the way newborn babies are wet, slathered with fluid and suddenly alone, the monster that threw Carmody away and passed into the summer dusk, seeking a darkness like this. Or she was wrong: the body she'd thought was empty had pulled Buddy after it, wouldn't let him go after all. She stumbles, pitching forward.

  Alma stops in front of her. "Lenny?"

  "Yes, keep going."

  On her back, Buddy doesn't move or twitch; his head bobs against her with the motion of her walking. But she feels his warmth, his borne-down weight. He's only sleeping, she thinks, so he won't remember this part. Tears well in her eyes and she gazes rapidly to the left and right, never turning her head, amazed to see a glowing crosshatch of markings arc above them. The marks seem to float, they aren't stationary, then they disappear. She looks again, tries hard to focus, takes a deep breath. They've done a terrible thing. The line floats into her head like a story about someone else. She knows what it means but she can't feel it. She knows something terrible happened, came to get them. She feels it in front of her, breathing on her. Like the air of another world, this world, the world that shifts and moves beneath what she knew. What had they seen, each of them, what did they know? A world inside them all, dark and velvet and ripped. Suddenly come upon and taken in. Like he took them in and showed them: what was in him roared like a cyclone, a hurricane; it was the sound that ate Carmody and turned him loose and Buddy had turned it all: Buddy with the rock in his hand, no plan, no thought, what he knew broken through in him at the only possible moment. Strangely, he'd saved them, and they had saved him, made sure Carmody never got up, never, to come and get him, find them, find Buddy. They did something terrible. And when he'd fallen and lay there, still, w
ith his feet turned in and his long arms loose, the roaring dropped him like he'd dropped Buddy. What it raged inside was only a thing, a possession. Where had it gone? Lenny imagines a black wind tearing through the night sky over Turtle Hole, ripping at trees and bridges, ripping along the two-lane to Gaither, imagines Audrey alone in the house, opening the door. And the roaring is Lenny's own voice, poured through like a message, a long, rattling, unmistakable sound, perfectly rendered.

  "Lenny," comes Cap's voice from behind, "I can carry him for a while, let me—"

  But Lenny finds herself on her knees, her face hot, and it's hard to breathe, somehow she's tripped over nothing, and the beam of the flashlight tours wildly around to find her. "Alma! Don't turn around, don't move!" She hears her own ragged sob behind the words, and Alma's panicked denial, "I'm not! I'm moving the light, only the light!" and Cap, reaching forward over Delia, "I'll carry him now," and in all the sounds it takes a moment to feel Buddy's hands clutching at her neck, her throat, then he moves his head, burrows in like an interrupted sleeper, and Lenny holds still just to feel it, relief breaking over her.

  "Shhh," Alma's saying, "wait. Be quiet a minute."

  And they all hold still.

  "I hear something," comes Alma's whisper.

  And there is a sound, far off, like applause.

  "Rain," Delia breathes.

  "We're close," Lenny says, and she pulls Buddy higher onto her shoulders, shifting him with both hands, gets her legs solidly beneath her and stands. They move forward again; Lenny can feel Alma veering off a little to the right but the sound leads them, closer, and they smell it, warm and wet, and they're almost at the slanted entrance before they see it.

  Even through the thudding downpour, the color of the dark is a pale charcoal in its rock frame, and the color floats; Lenny has to focus to see its exact dimensions, the line of rock around it. She realizes their light was nearly useless; they would never have seen the opening against the dark, never found it after dusk without the sound of the rain to lead them. The others are yelling, screaming with pleasure, and Cap is pushing Alma up, through the shelf of space to the outside. Then they are lifting Buddy away, pushing him through to Alma, and Lenny finds she can stand upright, touch the rock face, reach through to feel the rain pounding into her hands. But they push Delia through next before Cap nudges Lenny, helps her up the incline, and when she slides into the world she is instantly drenched, and she opens her mouth to drink, reaching at the same moment back inside for Cap's hands, Cap's arms, and they are rolling over in the loud rain, crouching around Buddy, squinting in the force of the downpour, and they bend over him, water running off their arms, and he opens his eyes and looks, in the refuge of their faces, their shoulders, their breathless shouts.

  ALMA: ARM OF LOVE

  They all listen. And then Alma can feel it, smell it, move toward it without the light, the very air pulls her as though the rain could breathe them in, and when she reaches the opening she has to feel for the shape, reach up to grasp the rock before she sees it, and the rain pours off her hands, splattering. It's as though they all fall out at once, up into the world, washed in the downpour, and their noise wakes Buddy up, their noise and the drenching rain, and the girls actually join hands around him, whooping and revolving until Lenny pulls him upright and begins to move down the path around the rock, back toward Turtle Hole. They are sliding and falling, not talking, Alma has hold of Delia and the broad wall of the diving rock beside them streams with rain. Water gullies and flows down the path, fills Alma's shoes; she sees the prints of Lenny's bare feet fill like puddles and disintegrate as they all flash past. Turtle Hole is dappled, pounded with rain, brimming like a bowl, but Lenny leads them away, back up into the woods along a trail that is only mashed weeds through overhung trees, and the trailers and vines drag on Alma's arms like wet hair. The night is truly dark but awash in shadows even through the rain; there's no moonlight, no lightning, no thunder, only the sky split open, falling down driven and polished. Alma watches the slippery ground; they're nearly on the shack before she raises her eyes. A torn screen door hangs off one hinge, slanted like the walls. Alma steps up, inside, onto a board floor that gives under her weight.

  They move, all of them, carefully, and for a moment they simply stand together, motionless, listening. Rain pours through the pitched roof here and there, drums on the board floor, spreads in a wet oval on the mattress tick, one like theirs, Alma thinks, but older, ripped into the cotton batting, shoved onto a kind of shelf a little off the floor. Someone has arranged things in front of it, like a display, just so. Alma moves to flash on the light, go closer, but Lenny touches her shoulder.

  "Stay here," Lenny says. "All of us, stay here."

  "Don't we have to go back?" Delia asks. Her hair has sprung into wet, shoulder-length curls; she bunches them in one hand and squeezes water onto the floor.

  "They would all have sat by the fire until the rain began to really pour," Cap says. "Then they'd run everywhere, scatter under the porches."

  "Sitting around in the cabins," Lenny agrees, "with the troops all mixed up. I don't know if they'll even miss us. If they do, we'll say we got caught in the storm and waited under trees, in the woods."

  "We did wait in the woods," Alma says. "We were under the trees."

  "In a shack," Buddy says in a small voice.

  "He stayed here," Lenny says. "These are his things."

  "In here," Buddy says, "and no one knew about him."

  "What things?" Delia says. "Look at them. Shine the light."

  "Wait." Lenny takes the flashlight from Alma and turns it on. She shines the beam along the walls, along the line of the tilted floor. It all looks empty in the dim light, swept with a broom maybe, but there is no broom, and the inside has a hay smell, like clean dust, even in the rain. In the splintering pour of the storm there is such a silence, like a church or a cell, a cloister, empty, and rain courses down the broken glass of the block-paned windows. Some of the jagged glass juts up like tongues, other panes are shattered intact, jeweled in their frames in webbed configurations. A metal kitchen chair with the vinyl seat laid open stands near the door. There's a bucket with no handle, and a bowl. The beam of light comes round to the pallet, the long shelf filled with the mattress, and Lenny walks closer, Alma so near their arms touch in the small space.

  Objects. Trash, Alma thinks at first, or not trash: things from the woods. Each is placed deliberately, as though the interlude of space around each one is perfect and the spaces are not to be touched. Lenny shines the light and they bend close to look. There's a piece of honeycomb, long abandoned, its miniature grid intact. There are leaves, one brown-laced leaf placed atop another, stacked neatly like irregular, desiccated papers. Bones. Vertebrae like knuckles, and a jawbone studded with little teeth. A snakeskin, placed lengthwise, under the rest. And the metal blade of a broken pocket knife. Beside it, a piece of cardboard folded round like a sheath.

  "That's his knife," Buddy says. "I seen him use it."

  No one answers him, but Lenny lowers the light.

  "Dad had hold of me," Buddy says, "and he come and got Dad off me, but Dad run the car over the bank. And he cut a snake with that knife—trying to scare Dad, I reckon." His voice rises at the end of each phrase, as though he's reciting a series of questions. "Mam and me," he says softly, "we was waiting for Dad to leave his own self. He kept saying he was going to leave, but then he said he was going to take me, not tell her. Make me go with him."

  None of them moves. Outside, rain seems to wash the world away. A piece of Turtle Hole is visible through the broken windows. The sky is light gray and mist drifts through it like smoke behind the rain.

  "He was wanting me to take all the stuff from that old lady's room. I had got me one ring—I got it for a reason, but Dad took it and kept it. I took it off his finger in the cave. I took it when you was all gone from me, looking for the edge." Buddy reaches into his pocket and shows them the ring, flat on his palm.

&
nbsp; "You keep it tonight and you put it back tomorrow," Lenny tells him. "At breakfast you put it back, before she misses it. She won't be looking for it tonight, with all the confusion and the storm."

  Buddy puts the ring back in his pocket, speaking slowly, as though to himself. "I'll tell Mam he's gone, he's left. She knows he was aiming to leave, and she won't be looking for him to come back."

  Lenny swings the beam of light off the floor, up to the rafters in a bell that expands and fades, a circular tour, back to the pallet. They see the knife, small as a nail file, and farther on, just at the head of the bed, a pair of white shoes. Canvas sneakers.

  Alma walks over and picks up the shoes. She walks back, three steps, holding them in her arms. She turns them one way and another in the yellow wash of the flashlight, as though to be sure. They sit on her flat palms like objects on a tray. The frayed strings hang down. Inside one, the fabric decal of Mickey Mouse, worn nearly smooth.

  The rain still pours, a pounding, murmurous constant. They all sit down, knees almost touching, and Lenny sets the flashlight on its end in the center of the circle. The light shines up, a low lamp. She takes her shoes from Alma, and puts them on.

  EARLY NOVEMBER, 1963

  BUDDY CARMODY: HIS KINGDOM

  He climbs to the top of the rock nearly every day; even if he can't see the whole camp, he knows he stands over it, and he spreads his arms out and stands straight up and turns himself, slow, like he holds all below him in a bubble or a globe. School days, they get home before five and while Mam makes supper she lets him stay out; he has him a secondhand bike she got from someone at the church and he rides it down the road and straight through a stand of level pine till he can see the swinging bridge. Then he runs; he knows the light is going and it's not much longer she'll let him out like this near dusk, the wind blown around wild, a sudden rush in the trees while leaves fly up, like the wind blows him into the needle of the bridge and rocks him in its swing. He loves how the bridge looks to be a different color now because the sun has got a darker shade, like a fireball in a brown box, glowing through to turn the brown box red and tinge Mud River. The river is louder, faster, floated with leaves that rush away, like it knows the ice will crawl across it, choke it off narrow and more narrow till the water only runs hidden and slow, a deep channel no one sees. Buddy sees the little crosses he carved once on the bridge, a code at his feet as he runs across the moving planks; the crosses look like chicken scratches or a one-legged track that disappears, and he likes the unmarked part of the bridge, the part he'll never have to write on. He runs faster then and takes the flat part of the trail by the river at top speed. These shoes aren't like the leather ones Mam used to get him, or the boots she'll make him wear later in the cold; he can rim now fast as the painter cats never seen around here anymore, faster than anyone at school, even the oldest boys. The long dirt track on the riverbank where the crew lay pipe is covered over now. Men brought in a bulldozer on a flatbed truck, edged it down a ramp and roared it through the woods from the road; how the big machine crashed through brush and throbbed, the August heat rising up from its yellow sides in lines. And the hills of dirt the workmen had dug up and piled like a ridge along the ditch began to disappear. The lengths of pipe were deep and still and linked and the dirt began to cover them, little trees and green bushes pulled in and crushed, the limbs cracking and the dozer jerking back and forth, roaring. There's still a long mound where the trenches once lay open; Buddy has run up and down it, stomping and tramping, talking to the hard dumb pipe that is buried. He's said all his words and he doesn't have to look as he pours himself through the woods toward Turtle Hole, round the big trees, onto the dirt track edging the water. If he looks the water will stop him, make him stand and try to see across, make him look at the rocks still scattered round like thick flat plates in a certain spot, the only place he can't go to or look at, the only one not part of his kingdom. And when he runs past, faster, cutting through, sometimes he can feel the angel pass by in the opposite direction, not the way he really looked behind Dad or in the water, but the way he was, faceless, like a wind, bigger than his body, trailing pieces of himself like a fog. Then the diving rock comes up beside like the flank of a wall or a tower and Buddy rims round to where the cave was, hidden now, Buddy thinks, hidden a while, anyway.