Shelter (1994) (19 page)

Suddenly the door to the kitchen opens. Mam coming for him, she's found him out. Buddy holds his breath and sees, in the crack of space allowed him, Mrs. T.'s shiny black shoes, or the toes of her shoes, pointed toes, and her silk-stockinged feet. Buddy stares. Inches from his nose, the shoes are still; they're like slippers with heels. Mrs. T.'s fleshy hand reaches down to fool with the ankle strap. Then an exasperated sound from above, and the shoes turn round so Buddy sees the heels. The bed gives with a creak as she sits down hard, and the sagging box spring droops just low enough to pin Buddy fast. He nearly cries out, watching her fingers tug at the tiny buckle. He must breathe in with a desperate little wheeze but she grunts as she heaves herself up, doesn't hear; he closes his eyes, sweating. Something elastic snaps far off, is tugged, rolled down. He hears her sit, then her stream of urine clatters into the bowl of the toilet Buddy hasn't seen behind a makeshift curtain. He imagines a long acrid water falling down a hole, falling and falling, but there's no bottom; the clatter keeps rattling down, then levels out in silence as the paper turns on its wooden roller. He makes his mind blank. Then she's up, the snap and pulling, a discreet huff, the toilet flushes. Her shoes cross the floor toward the kitchen in eight hard steps. Slam. The turn of the key in the lock. From outside.

Buddy pulls himself to the edge of his shelter, peeks out. Pulls himself forward on his elbows and looks at the ring where there's enough light to really see. The stone looks clear as rain, but he can't see into it or through it. Cut in minuscule angles but not sharp. He puts his lips there, tasting. Lenny's hand.
Do what a girl does.
But Lenny wouldn't do that. Dad could never make her. Buddy sees her hand, still and open, like a flower. Pale in the air, a ghost of itself. In her fingers, a music he can't hear. He puts the ring in his pocket, thinks again, pulls the pouch of marbles free and loosens the drawstring. Drops the ring in with the other glass.

Now he stands up. At the window, the opaque curtains move. Buddy steps closer. He could climb out the window, but he sees Frank in the back, stringing a length of rope to the side of the building from a utility pole. Clothesline for Mrs. T. Buddy will have to sneak out through the big dining room when she has the lights off. If he gets well into the room before she sees him, she'll think he's snuck into her class again from the kitchen, or from outside. He has the ring. He waits at the exact center of the little space for some time to pass. The fan whirs its quiet noise from the bureau. On the bedside table, the second hand of a wind-up clock moves round. Beside it sits a pitcher of water. Buddy sighs and the brimming water stirs.

It never occurred to her to run, to move, to get away. She stood listening. She wasn't hearing him with her ears; it was like she heard him in her head, his footsteps separate from the forest sounds, and she stood in her own space, understanding it was possible to know what she could not actually sense with her body. As though she'd always heard sounds that lay hidden under other sounds, and never quite known what they were. She had no questions. Now she was conscious of the shack behind her on its rise of ground, broken down, overgrown and hidden, exuding a specific warmth. The hum in the earth moved up through her feet. Beyond the trees Turtle Hole shimmered in the sun, oval as an egg.

She looked at the trees, which were absolutely still, and felt him, closer. He breathed near her. She remembered suddenly: the white bars of her crib, feeling her father come home. Feeling him move through the air along the road to the house, like a spirit. A wailing in her chest, winding out like an unwieldy banner that licks the air, tasting for him. She senses her mother as cloudy, fading off like smoke on a floor. There's just Wes in his undershirt, younger, thinner. Lenny wanted to study the apparition but it vanished, went back inside her, or fled into the trees. No, something else was in the trees. The clearing motionless, densely shaded. Where the trees broke by the path she discerned a particular light, a cast of sun or gold. Lenny kept her gaze trained on the color to be certain it was there, and listened: the interior sound of his footsteps, his breath, the weight of his body. She was conscious of the heat she stood within, the turn of the humid morning as it grew denser. The sun climbed and the day was thick and still. Yet she saw the leaves move, begin to move as though a breeze riffled them. Then she felt air on her face, distinctly cool air that played across her skin. Her forehead tingled with perspiration, with the glaze of her sweat. The air was not breeze or wind; the air seemed to fall across the little clearing in a column, a long shadow, a cold space like a slice. Then he appeared, holding the coiled snake in his arms.

Lenny stood motionless. He was a shape in the trees, wearing the same type of khaki pants her father had worn as a laborer years ago. Soft with washings, faun-colored. She felt a tug of memory, an image that pulled at her consciousness like a fish on a line. But it was gone, eclipsed in the face that loomed into her vision, very close: his dark, curly hair, a swarth of close beard, and the sculpted look of his mouth, perfect and red. He was grown, a man, but younger than her father, darker. She wasn't afraid. Instinctively, she reached up to touch him, to see if he was real; the whiskers on his face were long enough to feel soft, not bristly like her father's weekend beards. If he was real, this near her, then everything was real: the colors and the coolness in the air, the way he had come close to her without seeming to move.

"Why is the air cold?" Lenny said. She felt she was speaking into a tunnel. Her voice sounded far away and thin. She wondered if she'd thought the words, not really said them.

He shook his head impatiently, as though considering the air were a waste of time. His eyes were dark and full. He lifted his chin to indicate what he held in his arms. Lenny glanced down but the snake was gone and she saw dark vines in his arms, vines looped one over another, with dark reddish leaves the color of wine, and closed among them were long blossoms with curved petals, still and opalescent, nearly black.

Lenny touched the flowers and they stirred, cool beneath her hand, rolling and smooth. The flowers seemed to flatten, move and coalesce in a darkly patterned blur. Lenny saw the trick, the spell he cast: how the vine became the snake and the snake became the vine, shining, moving over him. His crossed arms were sinewy and firm, sun-dark, close to her, and she felt the cool glide of the snake just at the level of her chest. Again, a picture of Wes, or a sense of him, flashed into her. Throwing her toys over the top bar of the crib into his arms, soft toys, fuzzy bears, a white lamb that wore a hat. Lying flat on the mattress. The blur of the white bars, the toys raining down on top of her and the mattress bouncing. Then the pictures blurred like film run too fast, and Lenny stepped back. Immediately, the man with the snake stepped closer, one step, no more, a mirror image of her own movement. He filled her vision and she focused on his mouth, his parted lips, the line and shape of his upper lip like a tipped bow, the roseate color deep, lines in his flesh deep, the flesh thick, cushiony. He seemed about to speak but he only breathed, his mouth pursed, open. She saw his teeth, the pink tip of his tongue. All around, the light seemed by turns shaded and bright, as though clouds blew quickly across the sun. Or a light was lifting and settling in her head; she heard a window shade in her room at home, pulled fast by the wind, blown forward, pulled fast, and the other curtains were drawn. It was all confused; her father was there. She saw herself in a crib, falling asleep. After something. Sleeping with his finger in her mouth, the smallest finger of his right hand. The pulsing of her tongue against him, sucking. She pushed out hard with both arms, pushed away, heard the sharp exhalation of her own breath. Again, the man with the snake moved with her, leaning far back with the force she'd exerted, then moving back toward her. Two of them, moving. She understood he was not going to hurt her, that he was, in fact, waiting for her, waiting for her to see. He only stood near, not touching her. She put her hands on his chest and felt the thud of his heart, a pounding inside him that seemed to ripple through her and into the ground. She was certain she saw a glow move across the planes and curves of his shoulders, his throat, up into his face. She couldn't look into his eyes; she saw his wide brow, his dark, tousled hair. The glow seemed to move outward and emanate, a violet blue, completely transparent, like a rainbow, or the light that shows motes of dust moving in bright air. She could see a whiter glow around her own hands, her forearms against him, like a buzz over her skin, an after-image.

He was telling her something without speaking. She suddenly heard him, in the interior way she'd heard him walking toward her, in the way she must have heard other things, a long time ago. Ways she'd forgotten. She leaned subtly closer and found herself seeing into his eyes. Instantly, the sounds and images came clear; a deluge of rain, and glass between them, like a long, curved window. She seemed to look down at him through glass, a glass box, or he was in a box, enclosed. The air felt fluid, as though the water from her dream this morning were all around her, the water of the stream she'd lain within, floating. But he was real; she felt him moving onto his knees and looked down at the top of his head, at his upturned face. He had knelt in front of her and her hands were on his shoulders. The vine was around his neck, the dark vine that was alive, and the dark flowers were turning and moving. They were slender, closed blossoms, turning up their barely open lips, glistening. He extended his arms and Lenny saw how the flowers were the dappled black of the snake's hide, the darkest gleaming, shining, moving over him; she felt the snake on her own wrist, how it moved, a heavy shiver, undulating and smooth. The weight of it moved along her arm to her throat; she felt the flick of its tongue, the small, blunt probe of its head. It moved along her skin, across the cleft of her collarbone, long and blind and silken. She could smell burnt sugar, the buttery, darkened sweet of the burnt sugar cakes Audrey would make Wes on his birthday when the girls were little. Caramel icing she stirred with a spatula in a tin saucepan. He drank that dark, bitter beer with the sweet black cake; she saw her mother's lips on the mouth of the bottle. A burnished liquid fell through space. She felt the white heat of someone's touch, a fingertip tracing each of her ribs; she saw the room, her parents' bedroom with the high windows along two walls and the lilac branches waving outside. She couldn't see who else was in the picture. A white form lay its head on her chest, and the light cracked open and shut; everything grew bright, and the long flowers in the flat leaves of the moving vine were white. He was giving them to her, lifting them with his arms, and she knelt down in the bright white that was left, in what was there when the colors had bled away, before the picture went blank.

Heritage class and the supper speeches were the only difference between Girl Guides camp and other camps. Heritage class was in the morning after hobby hours, while the grass was still drying and the heat hadn't grown too intense to forbid indoor gatherings. Supper speeches were meant to reflect what the girls had learned in heritage class, but to Alma the class was like storytelling, and the stories were meant to be scary. She sat in the dining hall now, trying to finish her supper speech on the blue onionskin stationery her mother had given her for camp.
I'm the first B-wing girl from our cabin to make a supper speech about freedom. I think freedom is like a long road or a trail that winds to where we can't see, but living in America means we go there together.
That was true, but a heritage wasn't just about freedom. Mrs. Thompson-Warner said it was their Christian duty to be informed citizens because Communists were godless.
Each county of our state has sent at least one girl to Camp Shelter. We come from cities and towns and farms, and we pledge allegiance to Girl Guides, our state, and our nation.
Alma read her own lines and wondered if the Russians believed in magic, then; anyone who hadn't heard of God seemed to believe in magic, in spirits of the forest or the air. She wrote:
The forest is all around us and we're like a country inside it.
The woods were full of sounds and silence, but her speech had to be about protecting Democracy. Mrs. Thompson-Warner told them numerous stories and facts about Communism; Alma jotted down details that seemed related. Russia was a very large country partly because it had taken over smaller countries and made them fly the Russian flag. People were arrested just for criticizing the government and taken off to prison. Everyone knew these things, but not everyone knew the Communists were trying to take over America.

Heritage class was held in the dining hall. Each morning, the Juniors bumped their shins moving twelve white benches away from the tables and arranging them in even rows at the side of the big room, just in front of Mrs. T.'s lectern. She had a record player and a projector set up there on a rickety table, and a screen on a stand that pulled up from its metal tube.

"Alma." Delia was nudging her in a confusion of milling girls. "Put your speech down and help me move the bench."

Struggling, trying to match her steps to Delia's at the other end of their long burden, Alma heard a rasping sound as Mrs. T. struggled to raise the portable screen taller than her own height. Today she had a broomstick with a hook in the end that she used to push the screen as high as it would go. Now the pictures would look bigger.

"Wonderful," Delia said, "another film strip. Where did she get the broomstick? It's perfect for her."

"Will you sit with me?" Alma set her end of the bench down in line with the others and waited to be refused.

"In the first row? No way." Delia always sat in the back and tried to read comic books after the lights went out. She'd brought
Millie the Model, Richie Rich,
and her
Classics Illustrated
version of
Lorna Doone;
she read in the light from the kitchen, the comics concealed in her materials folder. She even had tracing paper strategically placed over the pictures of Lorna she wanted to copy. Alma sat up front and was buffeted, swayed, enveloped by the words of Mrs. Thompson-Warner, who spoke after showing a film strip or presenting a program.