Shelter (1994) (2 page)

At night the shack was darker even than the night beyond it, and when he first lay down on his pallet he felt himself cosseted within some creature whose existence he had always suspected. He seemed to be in utter darkness, the dark that is in the inner guts of living things, and he listened for a heartbeat and heard it, a pounding on a wall, a wrenching pump pump pump that was wet and sick, and gradually the close, furry dark took on a bit of the light of the open night, the night in the forest. Out there the sky looked paler than the trees, which were so black they had no depth, and palest of all was the glassy surface of Turtle Hole, which he could see through the two windows of the front wall of the shack. A week ago he'd torn down the tar paper covering the cracked glass: Turtle Hole lay forward and to the right. From deep in the overhanging trees he glimpsed its opaque light. The water was roundly lopsided like a bowl squashed flat, the water was motionless like night ice that still might tremble if some creature swam beneath the perfect surface, the water scared him mightily and so he lay very still, he lay there and the space of the shack enlarged. Floater, underling, he clung to an udder of charcoal dark and saw the steep pitch of the shack roof above him, weathered gray of the boards pale against tar paper. Someone else had stayed here, stuffed paper between the boards, nailed up a few wood scraps in the corner where the slant was worst. Must have been a chicken coop, with a roosting shelf some tramp had long ago made into a bed. Now the partition boards were gone and the shelf built up with straw, straw he smelt chickens in, an old dust of powder and feathers, he'd sooner bed with rats than chickens, he'd killed rats many a time, shot them with a revolver when he was Preacher's boy. But chickens made him scared, the way they bobbed and pecked, jerking here and there on devilish horned feet, blinking their raw, pink eyes that were stupid and soulless as the eyes of fish. The noise they made, the
bwak bwak
cut and cluck, the
ck ck ck
that stammered and froze his blood, how he used to have to chop their heads off at Proudytown, stand there and hold the bloody hatchet while their headless bodies flopped and staggered like runt machines. They were evil, the way they couldn't die, they might have made him evil too, kitchen matron quarreling at him, go on out there and pick up them birds, big boy like you scared of chickens, you gonna eat it you better be ready to kill it, but he didn't eat it, never did, he didn't want that flesh inside him even when his guts rolled with hunger. Oh, it was dark inside him, he knew he was born dark and he liked to be in the daytime, in the dark he had to lie still and watch.

He told himself everything evil was long gone from here. Summers and winters the shack had been empty, falling down for years, who knew how many, maybe as far back as when he was with Preacher, sermonizing, sixteen years old, cowlick and a swarth of beard, dark kid,
guinea kid,
they taunted him at school, in need of a haircut and clothes, in need of a home, Preacher would say from the pulpit. So he became Preacher's foster son, even preached on Fridays, sweating, Bible in his hand, and while he'd shouted in Preacher's Calvary house, snakes had molted here in this abandoned slant of boards. Parson had found skins, some of them so old they fell to dust when he lifted them out of leaves and dirt. Whatever he found that was good he put beneath his pallet: the dry leaves, an empty honeycomb, the clean bones of small animals rotted and returned to powders, and the snakeskins. There were rags of blankets left by vagrants, men who must have slept here in winter when the camp was closed. And since he'd gotten work on the pipe crew, the directress, a fat redheaded woman white as pink-tinged chalk, had sent him twice to the dump with a truckload of junk. Now he had a metal kitchen chair with a ripped plastic seat, and a cot mattress discolored and torn, softer under him than any bed he remembered. He had magazines. He had a dish with a blue flower on it, and a bucket with no handle he filled at Turtle Hole near dusk. Kneeling to fill it, he saw his own face wavering and broken on the cool surface, sometimes he splattered the image with his hand, with his face, biting water that tasted clean and cut like glass, cold and brilliant, and when he came up sputtering he heard the girls singing in their camps, the sounds vague and high, mesmerizing, every night they sang and he could never hear the words, there were different words from different directions and their nonsensical rise and fall seemed to call and answer, calling him, answering, and he knew he'd come to the right place, he'd followed Carmody and come to a place he was meant to find. It almost didn't matter who he followed, any of them, fallen, vicious in their minds, could lead him to grace.

In prison he'd watched Carmody carefully. Carmody, long and lank, his faded, wheat-colored hair and squinty eyes, his face that was not young with its callow, unfinished look, showing always an edge of the rabbity anger that caused him to hang back, scheming while his cohorts strutted and preened. Carmody moved, not seeming to move, planned while he appeared to sleep: Parson dreamed Carmody was water, an elongated sheen not unlike Turtle Hole in color and brilliance, an oval water that moved along the edges of things like a shade or a ghost, a water that moved up walls, through bars, edged past the warrens of cells along the main corridor of the prison, water that glistened, featureless and flat, probing, searching to take on any shape, any color, anything to get out. For some of them, prison was no worse than what they'd lived through. But prison broke Carmody up, he was wild to finish his time, afraid of the wardens, afraid of the other men. He even seemed afraid of his wife and kid, or afraid to see them, the wife a big woman gone to fat and the kid a pale towhead, quick and thin, darting beside her like a shadow tethered to a string. Before their rare visits Carmody was jumpy. He said his old lady was a nut for God, she and Parson would get on, but Parson wasn't much for women, was he, and Carmody laughed. Parson could smell the fear on him, a bitter vegetable smell like rotted seeds and pulp. For a while they'd shared a cell in D block: Carmody flowed from one side to the other, pacing in the dark, ranting about the block bosses and their gofers until he knelt in the corner and beat at the wall with his fist, a rhythmic pounding punctuated by frantic whispers, I gotta be a good boy, good boy, gotta be a good boy,
kill
them,
fuck
them, until Parson dragged him by the back of his shirt to the bunks and prayed over him. Oh Christ, Carmody would mutter, struggle like a cat in a sack, shut up you crazy loon, they all know you're crazy, why the hell do you think they leave you alone? But the praying always worked and Parson was strong enough to hold Carmody still, hold him in the healing grip of the Heavenly Father and press hard against the evil, press hard and shake the Devil loose.

Now Parson could hear the Devil walk near the shack at night, stalking spirits in the vaporous air. The devil made a scrunching sound in the grasses and leaves and loose dirt, a sound like a creature with tiny feet, and there was the airy, slick whish of the Devil's probing tongue, tasting and wanting, just on the other side of the thin board wall. The mist of Turtle Hole was like wet smoke in the hours before dawn. In those hours Parson had to stay awake to pray, his was a consecrated soul, no matter that the Devil slithered and wandered, sniffing at the corners of the boards, picking away with his bony, glowing fingers at the rotting wood.
Poor devil,
the country people would say of a man in the grip of poverty, disease, dissolution. And that face of the Devil pulled and sucked at Parson, weeping. Wasn't the Devil a fallen child, too hungry to eat, starving, ravenous, alone so long he didn't remember who'd first cast him out, a boy child, abandoned,
lost?
Parson had to pray the old prayers, ones he'd learned when Preacher had first called him Parson Boy and made him kneel to speak. Those prayers were words and more than words, flailing chants that set the air to humming, made it thick, kept the Devil pressed back beyond the boundaries of the Kingdom, back where the Devil moaned and cried, outcast, betrayed, while Preacher rattled on like a man wielding chains and whips. Back then, Parson lay in his bed in the wooden house by the river in Calvary, not thirty miles from Proudytown and the Industrial School for Boys where he'd spent the last six years. He lay in bed in his closet room behind the small kitchen and listened to Preacher pray alone in the parlor furnished with folding chairs, chairs filled three meetings a week with Christ's pilgrims. Phrases cut and slashed across Parson's vision like colors and worked their way into his sleep.
Hear ye, Jerusalem! Cast out your sinners and entreat your guests, slick with the liquid gold of the Devil's songs
... Parson mouthed the cadences of the lines and forgot what his name had been before, at the orphanage in Huntington, the city and the dingy park, at the foster homes where he'd always just arrived or was preparing to leave until the last, the one where he'd set the house on fire to get away and old Mr. Harkness had died, stone drunk on the broken bathroom floor, where he'd staggered from Parson's bed. Harkness was one of the Devil's weaker servants, but foster homes for older kids were hard to come by in the coal towns, and the social workers sometimes placed boys with a widower on a farm. The caseworker called Harkness, rheumy-eyed and sober,
the picture of sincerity;
Parson had been there four months, along with another boy of seven or eight who never talked, just ate his rice and beans and grits and boiled chicken at Harkness's scarred table without looking up. There was the familiar mud of the country winter and the hogs and the six goats to milk, and that was all right, the goats were warm and quick. Their strange vertical pupils scared the little kid, who tailed along after Parson regardless, eager to be outside because Harkness was in the kitchen, drinking. After dark he took his Wild Turkey out of the tin cup that hung by the door on a hook. Even then he didn't hit them; he staggered, cooking suppers, and reeled around in the downstairs rooms after they'd gone to bed. Later he came up, crying softly or whimpering, and lay down fully clothed on their beds. The little boy slept under his bed but Parson lay wrapped in his blankets, motionless under Harkness's tentative, cautious touch until the old man fell asleep or stumbled away, afraid. Now in the shack at night Parson watched the shapely dark congeal into faces, all their powerful faces, his succession of keepers and parents. Harkness wasn't the worst of them but he was helpless, sober all morning at his half-time job as a postal worker, offering his apologetic grin, seeing their clothes were clean and making a show of buying new schoolbooks instead of used ones. The night of the fire was cold and Harkness's cold face felt dead to the touch, used and stretched like putty. His mouth and the smell of the whiskey were on Parson's ears and neck. Harkness begged to get into the blankets and did, then walked to the bathroom, fell down. Parson got up and went downstairs. There were still hot coals in the fireplace and he pulled the iron grate across the bricks to the rug, and the rug caught and began to blaze. It was warm quickly and there was a lot of light, and Parson went back up and pulled the kid from under the bed and they went out the bathroom window, walking over Harkness, and as they slid down the roof they could feel it was already hot and smoke came off the shingles. The kid said they'd better get the goats out, since the barn was attached to the house. They did and the goats went off, their hooves crackling over dry leaves in the dark.

The boys watched the fire from the edge of the woods. They weren't even cold, the old place made such flames, and later at the police station there was a Christmas tree on the desk. Parson told them he made the fire but no one believed him, and the kid said nothing. Parson said other things, how the Devil had licked his ears and breathed on him with his sick breath and begged to get warm. Then he was sent to Proudytown and the psychologist found out he couldn't read. He learned, decoding old texts no longer used by the county schools, a few words to a page with pictures of the blond children and the spotted dog. Run, Spot, run! Betty throws the ball! Beyond the brick facade of the school the winter sky was low slung and yellow. Scrub pine edged the hills, gnarled and overgrown, crushed by the weight of the cold, the damp that smelled of decaying straw. Parson read Bible stories from a children's book and went to the prayer meetings run by Preacher Summers, the volunteer revivalist from Calvary. Everyone called him Preacher. In chapel he turned the lights up bright, then snapped them off and prayed in the sudden dark; once in a downpour he opened the windows wide.
Hear the cleansing thunder of the Lord! Among you are souls bound for God, chosen to recognize His enemies and cast them out—the wind may tear the clothes from your backs, the multitude may call you infidel, but the Lord's child never stumbles.

Here at the camp Parson wore khakis like the others, work clothes given the pipe crew by the foreman. He was in disguise, just like in prison. In the shack at night Parson saw the dead, the legion of the vapor world, and the shades of the living who were marked for death. Carmody floated near the ceiling, leered his snide joke of a grin, or lounged along the low board wall in prison blues.
Where you from? You from up in my country? What you in for?
He'd laugh, and his laughter was too long and too slow.
Not saying, or don't know, maybe. They say you ought to be locked up with the loons.
Carmody's mocking words were drawn out like the sounds on Preacher's old Victrola. Preacher used to lay his finger on a record to slow the sound of the hymn, distort it to a garbled rumble:
The Devil speaks in many guises, but this is the sound of his dark, sick soul. Never pity those who are sick with evil.
The darkness in the shack swelled a little around Preacher's words, rippled, shivered like the skin of a horse. Carmody rippled too. Along the angled rafters Harkness floated in his ill-kempt blue uniform, whimpered like a dog half froze, kicked with his feet as though he were trying to swim. But the river was a ways through the trees and Turtle Hole was too perfect to admit such desolation. Harkness began a low buzzing like a fly trapped in a screen, and Parson slept.