Shelter (1994) (17 page)

The silence through which she proceeded was full of scattered birdsong, echoing its hidden search and answer in the trees above and around her. The grass looked lit up, the river fresh, transparent, too clear to be real. Last night the dark water had seemed a solid, disturbed surface roiled from below. Now the river only murmured, a somnolent, rushing murmur that faded and pulsed as she followed the rocky path off through trees to Turtle Hole.

Here in dense shade the ground was spongy with moss, the rocks overgrown with fern and lichen; Lenny no longer heard her own footsteps, only felt the odd slipping of Cap's pink sneakers, too wide and long for Lenny's feet. Only Cap would come to camp with three pairs of shoes, one of them pink—and the laces were round, like cord. Shoes from New York City maybe, or some other city Lenny had never seen, and she had pulled the laces tight to make the shoes stay on, but nothing made them work. They were useless shoes. Cap couldn't wear them at all in the dust and dirt and mud of Highest camp, and Lenny couldn't wear them either. She had to find her own shoes, and she trespassed here while the others were en route to Highest with supplies. No one would miss her in the few minutes it would take to get the shoes; she could circle back up and emerge into camp from her own tent. But she didn't want to be in camp; she wanted to be here, invisible, alone in the woods like a ghost. Girls and women: with all their noise, tramping, cooking, eating, Lenny thought they were mere shadows in the dampish, rough-hewn buildings, in the tents that smelled of dirt. And the men had seemed, from the beginning, shadows—the workmen seldom seen, Frank doing his peripheral chores, Buddy, the little man, the elf, appearing and disappearing. The camp was meant to be empty as the trail was empty now. Empty, and so full of sound and light and dense, liquid shade that Lenny entered it and nearly forgot herself, forgot what she was looking for, wanted to he down and be lost. What had happened last night was nothing to this place: the three of them only sounds, movement in the water, barely discernible in the dark. She held her breath, stepped into the open.

Turtle Hole spread out in front of her, still and deep. Last night the circular water had seemed illumined, lighter than night and clouded with mist. Today the surface was blue, a flat mirror to the open sky. She circled the water, watching it, felt herself track round it like the hand of a clock. The shoes should be just there, somewhere in the rushes where she and Cap had stood to watch Frank on the rock. Lenny moved into tall grass, feeling its moist scent stick to her legs, feeling the delicate slide of Cap's cool hands on her ankles, taking off the shoes. She thought of Buddy's reedy voice, talking his mixed-up song this morning when he'd found them at the stream. Frank, Frank, Frank, rabbits his dad might eat, rabbits for secret pets. Rabbits would always remind Lenny of secrets.

Last winter she'd stayed with Cap nearly every Friday night. Cap's parents were always off somewhere in the big house, the maid working in the kitchen. Left alone like adults, the girls shut the door to Cap's room. They took long baths in her bathroom, coiled together like eels in the wide tub. Then they'd wrap up naked in the old rabbit coats Cap's mother stored in the closet. The skins were torn, the silk linings soiled; Cap would turn the coats inside out and the girls pulled them on like bathrobes. At first the fur was so cool and shivery it made the hairs on Lenny's arms stand up, but it warmed and was so soft she had to rub herself against it. Cap would smoke a cigarette and then they'd tell each other stories, and the stories were supposed to be true. They called their stories the rabbit game, because they had to wear the coats when they talked, and they had to be naked, to make it harder to lie. When it was Lenny's turn, she never lied, but she framed real things with lies so she could tell the truth. She might tell how she'd seen a man biting and kissing her mother, a man who'd come to the house selling dictionaries. In fact the man had been Mr. Campbell, Delia's father, the same one who'd driven off the bridge last spring. He'd brought Delia over to stay the night with Alma. Wes wasn't home and the girls had all been watching TV. Lenny had looked into the kitchen from the sofa and noticed the clock, the second hand moving around, and realized there was no talking. She'd moved into the hallway and seen her mother with Delia's father, pressed against the kitchen counter, their eyes closed, oblivious. Lenny didn't even consider telling her father. It seemed women's business, mundane and mildly horrifying, like menstruation. She thought about telling Alma; unofficially, Alma was in charge of Audrey. But Lenny told Cap instead. In code. He was biting her? Cap had asked. You mean her neck was bleeding? No, he was like, sucking on her neck, like a vampire. The girls had dissolved in laughter. Or Lenny might tell how she'd learned to like beer, how her dad drank at night, outside on the porch, and once she'd sat with him and drank two cans before he'd stopped her, the beer so sharp and cold and bitter, and that night she'd had a dream about a man standing in her room, watching her sleep, then slowly pulling her twisted nightgown down to cover her belly, her thighs. You're lying, Cap had said with authority, you lose! Maybe Cap knew the dream was real, that it was Wes who'd touched Lenny in that gentle, deliberate way, then turned and left the room. But the rabbit game was a way to make things that really happened seem as though they never had, make things that were magical, dangerous, waiting, fade into shadows. Lenny and Cap could hold the shadows, tangle up in shades of lies, Cap grabbing Lenny, lying on her, sucking at her shoulder to make a warm, soft bruise, both of them laughing until it became an experiment just to play with the dreamy, tingly feeling, stay sleepy, silent, a little drunk.

Part of the rabbit game was silence, and touching each other was a lie they were allowed to tell inside the game. When Cap was judged to be lying, Lenny often sent her downstairs to steal another bottle of sherry or wine, or more cigarettes; Lenny's customary penalty was to have to lie on her stomach under the heavy, silky fur while Cap took off her own coat and crawled under Lenny's from behind. She started with her fingertips on the soles of Lenny's feet, inching her hands upward. Then she slid her whole body under—her long arms, her boyish broad shoulders, her breasts, face, laughter. It was like she crawled under Lenny's skin, licking, tickling, pinching with her teeth, pushing her fingers into Lenny's mouth to try to make her speak and lose this version of the game. Lenny almost never lost. But late at night, somewhere in their dark sleep, Lenny always lost. She was the one who woke to hear Cap's funny cooing moans, saw her trap her hands between her thighs in a neat pyramid as though she were praying to wake up and couldn't. Her eyes moved rapidly behind their shell-smooth lids. Once, tears coursed down her expressionless face. Watching her, Lenny ached. She tensed until her muscles stung, knowing she could shake Cap, try to rouse her. But Cap never fully woke, only reached blindly for whatever she could touch. She would get too close. She might straddle Lenny's thigh and press against her in a rhythmic, rolling motion. Lenny would pull back and push her away, hoping Cap wouldn't wake up enough to get scared and flail wildly around in the bed. Or she let Cap do it, not helping her, only watching how she tensed and pushed, moving toward one moment again and again until she was in the moment, falling through it. She opened her mouth and panted, delicate short pants. Lenny looked away then, into the meaningless space of the room, and cried, she was so desolate. She cried silently, like Cap, but she was awake and alone.

Finally Cap's mother found an empty sherry bottle and cigarette butts under the bed, and Lenny wasn't allowed to stay overnight anymore. Even after Cap's mother left town and went back to Connecticut, the girls continued to follow her edict. Sometimes in the spring they'd still joked about the game. Cap would say she was hungry, starved, but now she was allergic to rabbits. They'd never played the rabbit game at camp, as though it were all part of the old world of stories and lies. This was the new world. The new world opened, one secret opening against another.

Today when Buddy found them at the stream and talked about secret pets, about rabbit traps and Frank, it was as though he knew about the old game. He was strange, he knew things, he really could move like a rabbit or a raccoon. He was like an imp the grownups ignored. Maybe he'd followed them, seen them with Frank—he might have been out late at night, alone in the dark. Or he might have been in his house nearby with Hilda, the big cook, Hilda cooking all night like she cooked all day, their little house an oven in the warm night, and Buddy dreaming about Turtle Hole, seeing whatever touched the water, knowing everything. The old games were over and Frank was part of the new world, the world that opened. It was like all the sick wanting Lenny had pushed under in herself had burst out of her in the warm dark of Turtle Hole, and it wasn't bad or good or anything she could think about. She wanted it again but she was afraid, afraid without Cap and the water and the dark. And where were the shoes?

If she didn't find them she'd have to call her mother, and Audrey would drive out with new shoes and lecture her, and want to see the tent, and eat in the dining hall. Lenny thought of home with a kind of panic. Nothing from home belonged here, home would take it all away. She thought of her father at the dinner table, his mouth, his teeth on his food, his hard, sinewy arms, the way he would sit outside after supper, spring, summer, fall, Gaither darkening around him, lightning bugs lighting the field he watched, while Alma and Audrey banded together in the house and Lenny was forced to choose. She remembered the other life and she felt soppy and indistinct, warm, banked, saved up. She heard herself moan with frustration and she peered into the depths of the rushes, sweeping them aside with extended arms. She began to walk systematically back and forth across a small area. It was from here she'd first seen Frank on the rock, she was sure of it. She stopped and turned.

Then, somehow, a break in the forest cover caught her eye. It was a sort of path, or a place where the green of the cover was mashed into what might be a path, as though dogs had run there, or kids, breaking things down a little. Just up a rise, nearly hidden in leaves, something shone, caught the sun. The light cut and turned like a tiny knife. Lenny felt herself startle, as though someone saw her, watched her. She walked toward the light, seeing it turn and glint, and when she got to the cover of the woods she bent and saw the shack itself, the glass of its broken windows shining in jagged shapes. Tar paper hung from the sills in strips. The little building was a lopsided rectangle. One end of it seemed to have sunk into the earth, and the other had buckled up and tilted, as if the shack itself had seized up, or tried to stretch itself around a curve like a house in an animated cartoon. Buddy could live here; it was just the place for a woods elf. Lenny had heard he lived in a shack with his mother, but this one was much too small for Hilda. Poised in its twisted shape, it seemed a house for rabbits or mice, a child or a lost wraith. Lenny never considered going inside but she wanted to see, to look without touching, as though to touch would taint her, bewitch her, cast a spell she'd feel for years. She walked soundlessly closer. There might be animals inside. From here she could see the ground was dug out a bit along the front side of the shack; there was a long, narrow hole under the floor. Like a crawl space, and Lenny could see bits of dirty burlap merged with earth as the space descended into dark. She could barely see inside the shack—there was a melamine plate on the floor, and beside it an old bucket. Cicadas were trilling in the trees. Maybe they had sounded all along, but now Lenny heard their noisy, urgent rattles rise to a crescendo.

She looked back at Turtle Hole and saw a man walking around the water, round and round it—one of the workmen, she supposed. He was wearing khaki pants and no shirt. Lenny thought he couldn't see her but she crouched, watching. She saw that he held something dark in his clasped arms and strode purposefully along, not looking at it, like an Indian chief walking a private ceremony. He came abreast of the path to the shack and suddenly flung his arms out; the dark thing he'd held against himself snapped out, rope-like, toward the water. Then he let it hang in one hand and turned toward the woods, his arms outstretched. Lenny saw that he held a snake. He walked toward her, into the cover of the trees. She lost sight of him but felt him moving toward her, along the path.

McAdams marched them to hobby hours at Great Hall. She even called out double time as the line of girls broke from the trees into the quad. Double time meant they raised their knees high and more or less danced across the open green, heads bobbing. Double time was a gait unlike any other, unlike running, certainly. Alma watched from the rear as her compatriots hit the clearing and swung into rapid action. The line of girls resembled a giant centipede in electroshock, but no one giggled anymore. Delia didn't and Alma definitely didn't. Double time was a grim odyssey, almost as grim as required swim in Mud River. Staying in step while galloping in a controlled jerk and bounce required concentration. There was no room for laughter, as double time engendered its own weird momentum. By the time they reached the overhanging porch of Great Hall, Alma felt jangled and listened for a ringing in her ears. She'd assumed everyone marched, since McAdams was so fond of it, but Lenny had set her straight.

Alma usually tried to talk to Lenny after breakfast, before the Seniors picked up supplies and hiked back up to Highest. The older girls had to carry jugs of Kool-Aid, boxes of hot dogs, bags of potatoes, graham crackers, water bottles.

"Do you have to march all the way up, toting that stuff?" Alma had asked, trying to make her tone disinterested.

Lenny laughed. "They march you because you're too old to hold hands, like the Primaries. It's just to keep you in line and rush you along."

Cap gave Alma a look and a sigh. "Crowd control," she said, "purely for Junior crowds."