Shelter (1994) (25 page)

None of the other workmen knew about the shack. The boy wouldn't tell anyone about Carmody, about anything Carmody did. The girls wouldn't want to explain to anyone about the snake, and Frank had laughed it off. Carmody would come to and blunder toward Parson in his own time, in his red panic and his rage. Parson would go to the shack but he knew Lenny wouldn't be there. She got farther and farther away from him. She moved higher and higher.

She lay across his big chest, holding on to the narrow straps of his white undershirt; his eyes were closed and she disappeared because he couldn't see her. His body moved them to and fro like a boat and their laughter seemed far away, secret and careful, sounds through a gauzy wall. She kept her eyes closed, and behind her lids his white undershirt came loose and rippled in space, all alone like a shaken flag. The shirt grew smaller and disappeared in a black pool as she rolled to one side and the other of his long form, and the room cracked open. He was gone and she saw herself lying still, a white shape on the black ground; she saw the whole of the forest as a massive shadow darkly green around her, and the oval of Turtle Hole was the black pool she knew could tilt and move through trees. She knows someone else was here with her, someone who seemed a dream but was not; now he is lost to her as well and moves away from her, leaving her. She remembers his broad, naked back, the moist feel of his skin, his arms full of vines. Nothing to hold but his shoulders, his hands; he walks away and she hears his footsteps as though she were in his head. But the pictures he seems to have left in her are older and rush through her, darting and flashing: the two windows of her parents' bedroom, rectangles blocking the sun, and light falling in long bars from under the blinds. Her father and mother asleep on either side of her. Light plays across the foot of the bed; sparkles swim in the lit air as though swirled by a wind no one can feel. But when Wes ran under the clothesline he was the wind and she held on in the glaring sun, legs clasped tight around his neck, holding her arms high to touch the dangling sleeves of shirts and blouses. They ran into the field and there was no fence yet and the house looked bald and small with no bushes around it, Audrey laughing, calling them back, and Lenny tries to open her eyes.
Open, shut them, open, shut them. Give a little clap!
Her mother played that game, covering her face with her hands. Sleeves of the shirts hung upside down and Audrey let Lenny hold the pins she kept in a special apron, a heavy apron with big pockets that sagged, and the pins with hinges could snap your fingers.
Open, shut them, once again. Put them in your lap.
In the big bed she keeps her eyes closed but afterward she can reach the string on the window blind by its little ring and pull it all the way down. The blind reaches to the floor and Lenny sits hidden between the blind and the wall, a narrow white space like the inside of an envelope. Cross-legged on the floor of the room, her chin level with the windowsill, she can see her mother far down in the yard, near the field. Audrey hangs clothes on the line, appearing and disappearing between the shapes. Lenny hears the shower go on in the bathroom and she calls to her mother in a voice that doesn't talk, but her mother never hears. Far away, Audrey pins up the damp, heavy sheets, white sheets that are vast and square. The sheets are white and the bed is white and the walls and the ceiling are white. Rumpled pillows along the tall headboard. Lenny's knees drawn up as the bed darkens, enfolding and layered. Low sound, a growl or murmur that stays near her face yet moves, rolling, against the side of her hip, the one part of her broad enough. Muffled and careful. Then a white cloud of canopy over the bed: Cap's room in Gaither. Lenny awake, and Cap's white chiffon curtains tied back with ribbons. Sounds Cap made in her sleep. Lenny hears Cap's little moans and feels a thrill of fear. Don't look. Go to the window, safe in the white envelope. The sound like a song until it's over and stops and leaves an emptiness. Like when her mother danced with her and the music on the hi-fi ended. Phonograph needle knocking against silence and Audrey whirling around in her full skirt, swinging Lenny faster. Dizzy, the sideways ceiling, white and high. She wakes up at night and hears the raccoons shriek near the field, near the garbage cans Wes has chained together to keep them from being toppled. She sees him bending over in sunlight, pulling chain through the handles of the metal lids; she can't see his face, only the khaki side of his leg, his long clothed thigh. His big hands with their squared, clean nails, moving her up beside him in the white bed. Milky Way bars from the freezer. The frothy chocolate in her mouth got warm and she heard the shower go on and she stood by the window and her mind was white.
Open. Shut them.
How her mother stood against the sky, straddled tall as a bridge between the flapping clothes when Lenny helped with laundry and looked up, peering through her fingers.
Right up to your chin.
His one hand holding her, a warm tight seat, and the white cotton of his shirt on her face. She moves, gliding on the hide of a long animal, and someone still kneels with his face on her belly, helps her stand amongst black flowers.

She opens her eyes and the colors are washed out, fading in slowly: she sees the shack on the rise behind her, and the path through the trees to Turtle Hole. Above her the sky is an amazing blue. She stands up inside it, puts her hands over her ears to stop the sound she hears, the sound that fades: a white cloth twisting in black space is sucked inward, swallowed and gone.

Lenny begins to walk toward camp. She sees her feet negotiate brushy ground and rocks; she takes the fastest route, through thick trees, up over the ridge that will bring her out at the periphery of the quad, lowest point of the path to Highest. She moves quickly, grasping and climbing, her arms around her face when she moves under the drooping limbs of long-needled pines. She doesn't look at the pictures in her head. If she looks, the images will disappear again. She lets them shuffle, like cards, waiting for the one at the bottom of the pile. She looks for Alma and can't find her. Alma was always there, but Alma's gone.

The house empty. No one home. Or someone on a white bed, in the bright, white, middle of the day. Home sick from school, reading picture books, tick-tack-toe on a board with a magic lift-the-flap. No, that was later, not alone, Audrey in the kitchen making soup, smell of tomatoes simmering. Alma in her own room when they both had chickenpox, and Lenny gets her parents' bed because her fever is higher: the big bed feels cooler and she pleads to sleep there. Alma, playing paper dolls, not sleeping at all, yelling for Kool-Aid, how things seal off for a while behind the pair of them, the two girls. They smell warmly of illness, the oil of the bumpy rash that splatters them back and front, between their fingers and legs, inside their ears and mouths.
You're covered, covered,
Audrey marvels, but in the last days of the quarantine they build tunnels in the sheets with pillows, hide under the skirt of the bed in dust and forgotten shoes, listen to her calling, calling them. Dolls and plastic horses, appaloosas, palominos, Percherons, Alma sets them up on towers of books behind the couch.
You girls get this cleaned up,
Audrey says,
don't ignore me just because you've survived.
Summers they don't clean up anything, ever, they're in the field being horses they call Fury and Patches, horses that walk on their hind legs like men and drum their forefeet in the hairy milkweed. Alma throws her shirt down in the weeds but Lenny stays covered in the approaching dusk: Wes is outside while their mother washes the supper dishes. Lenny stands deep in the overgrown field; she sees him through hollow stalks, brush or feed corn in tall rows, sitting at the picnic table and smoking, watching them.
Run!
she tells Alma, run
away,
and she drives Alma farther into the field, not letting her stop till they've run clear to the creek, and the lightning bugs flash on and off like constellations.

Later, he was never at home till nearly dark. Audrey will slap them but he never touches them; supposedly he's afraid of his temper,
all up to me,
she complains,
like everything,
and he no longer works with his hands, he's a salesman and their mother irons his shirts, spraying the wrinkles with water from a squeeze bottle. In a dream Lenny has, he holds out his hands for inspection, to show he hasn't taken anything; the hands show open palms against a white field that gets so bright the hands are blotted out.

He doesn't wear khakis anymore, he doesn't drive a truck or work a night shift, he doesn't come home any longer in the middle of the day.

Lenny keeps walking, stops and bends down to tie the lace of her shoe. Cap's sneakers are too big and she pulls the laces tighter, she hasn't found her shoes, she will have to wear these, get used to them. It doesn't matter. She wants to see Alma, talk to her about any stupid thing. Stand beside her and look down along the straight part in her brown hair, her high brow with its cat scratch of a frown.
My beauty and my beast,
Audrey would joke, her joke being that Alma was the beauty, curled up with her books and her serious glower, always seeming to watch her feet when she walked, and Lenny the beast in her long body and mane of hair. After all, pretty is as pretty does.
What did I ever do to you? Why don't you talk to me?
The phrases are Audrey's, plaintive and insistent, as though she's repeated them for years. Lenny feels herself respond with an old silence, but she hears, in the trapped quiet, another answer which seems to have been there all along:
You can't hear me. You could never hear me.
Startled, she looks around her at sumac and rhododendron, the waxy green leaves that flop and arc. With almost no awareness of effort, she has gained the steepest part of the trail to Highest. Below her the greenish river meanders. It will be dusk soon. How bright the water looks here at night, shimmering and black, and the shadows seem broad and safe. But at home the dark in her room is a mash of shapes, fuzzy and diffuse. Cars turn the curve on the road that runs beside the house and cast their headlights across her wall, shadow play, pale yellow like a searchlight, falling across the empty wall and disappearing, disappearing. Don't look, go to the window instead. She wants to talk to Alma about anything, even Delia, or Delia's baby brother or Delia's crazy aunt in the beauty parlor. Or funerals, but only when Delia's not around, and their mother can't hear. Alma still has to think about all of it, like she borrows it from Delia, like it was
her
father who drove off the bridge. Lenny stands still on the trail and closes her eyes, sees Wes drive across bridges, silver structures with crisscrossed steel beams like Mud River Bridge but bigger, higher, wider, and he drives so smooth and fast, the familiar Chevrolet doesn't even touch pavement. Her point of view shifts and turns magically, gliding closer: she sees Wes talking, his lips moving, and she wants to make out what he's saying so intently, all alone in the car.

When she hears real voices, a confused talking and laughing far below her, she holds to a branch and leans over the ravine to look. The Juniors are crossing Mud River on the swinging bridge. Frank stands in water hip deep, holding the bridge steady as the girls step onto it. Lenny sees the top of his head, and a view of the bridge halfway across. She looks for Alma and Delia, but the girls are anonymous in their similar uniforms.

The girls all wear green but men doing construction wear khaki, men on crews. The man she saw at the shack must be one of the workmen, but his clothes were a disguise. The way her father was in disguise in his dark slacks and open-necked shirts, his sportcoats he wore to Henry Briarley's office and other offices, driving in his car, working away from home.

She sits down. Everything is solid. The picture in her mind is just the shape of that window in her parents' room; the image comes clear. She sees her mother again so many years ago, down by the clothesline, calls out for her, keeps calling through the glass. And when Audrey finally turns, Lenny sees her form in the loose dress, how she leans back to balance her bulk and carries the empty clothes basket to the side, her round and swollen front so big there is no room.

The swinging bridge was old. There were a few blond boards where men had repaired winter damage; Alma tried to imagine Mud River in winter storms. The wind blew at night and snow thrummed against the walls at home, drifted on sudden wind. When snow fell from the eaves it landed with the
thunk
of some long body falling and lying still. That cold seemed to have happened in another world: the river was low and lazy now, like something in a bowl, colored the beige of coffee with milk. By day it looked to be the temperature of old bath water, mute, barely moving, but it was full of snakes and turtles and gluey mud. How could there be rapids in the spring, ice melting and the banks ripped by a rage of water so high it tore the bridge? All that and no one here to see it—the camp empty, the cabins shut tight like closets and the tent sites just rows of wood platforms layered with leaves, snow, rain. They'd all been somewhere else then. Frank was from Bellington, a town whose Main Street was only slightly longer than Gaither's. The private college there was Methodist, not Presbyterian, and the football team played in the Triple-A division, and the high school was new. The county was bigger and had money, her dad said, if anyone in this state did. Wes had grown up in Bellington; there were two or three big coal companies, and a couple of factories. But Shelter County was mostly mountains and forest preserve. Wes said all the state cared about were those trees, like people were only camping out and didn't need jobs anyway. When Audrey complained about Henry Briarley, Wes retorted that Gaither would shut down if it weren't for Consol Coal, and Bellington did seem richer and busier: cars always bumper-to-bumper down Main Street on Saturdays, and a Strawberry Festival in the summer, when bands came from all over the state to march in the parade. There were three drive-in restaurants on the two-lane route that led into town. Frank was old enough to have a learner's permit; Alma supposed he went on dates, school dances with the Bellington kids, but her mind's eye faltered at imagining his hands on someone, ceiling decorations above his head in dim light while music played on an intercom. He must have taken driver ed. last year, all boys did. Probably he'd lounged in the dark watching movies of wrecks while Alma sat beside Delia in Gaither, twenty miles away. Math class, texts with printed sums, notebooks, homework pages with ragged edges torn free of the binder. The clock ticked as they recited answers, one by one, and everything had been different then—Nickel Campbell worked for Henry Briarley and went to Winfield on business every Saturday, and Alma and Delia went to Girl Guides after school at the Baptist church on Wednesdays. They'd taken home pamphlets from Camp Shelter and their fathers had written out deposit checks.