Shelter (1994) (33 page)

"Well, what the hell," said Dad's voice. "Beginning to think you wasn't coming out."

"I shined the light all around," Dad's voice said.

"You hadn't heard me yelling, why, you'd been in that cave till you laid down and quit," his voice said.

"Reckon you got me to thank," said Dad's voice. He reached with both long arms and lifted Buddy to his feet. "Get to walkin. We got a job to do."

Buddy felt Dad's hand on his neck, pushing him along the narrow trail behind the diving rock. Buddy knew there was no job. None of it mattered; Dad wouldn't leave. Dad would never leave, and if he did leave, he would always come back. Buddy stumbled. The truth stretched round him vast and circular as a dead world. Dad steered him past the side of the boulder, onto the sandy, pounded ground that circled Turtle Hole. The water spread out still and satiny, flat like a blue egg. Buddy heard sounds, and then he saw the girls. One of them stood still in the water. She turned, and he saw Lenny's face. Startled, backing away. But Dad was in the water too.

The goats have fled into the trees and stand waiting at the border of the woods, their soft muzzles visible through the leaves. They hold still like threatened deer. If Parson tries to approach, their images waver, begin to fade. So he stands quietly. From here the seven markers of stones near the diving rock are directly opposite. Parson sees them across the darkening water and feels he is far away, too far from the stones, and he begins to sweat. Steps barefoot into an edge of water and out again, back upground to a border of neutral space halfway between the water and the woods. To calm himself he thinks about the stones, how they felt in his hands. He looks back into the trees and the goats nod their long heads, peering sideways. He knows the stones were big enough, each a little larger than his hand, heavy and flat-bottomed, balanced. Even from here they look placed, deliberate. A low boundary, an entrance, a remnant of a gate.

He squats, then kneels, breathing. He sees light begin to move, first where the trees begin, then along the shore and among the stones. The light is strong and weak, melding, separating. Tracers of movement. Among the stones. Then he sees the girls' bodies across the expanse of water, moving. The older girls, Lenny and the other one. And two younger ones. Glimmering. A convocation. He hears them laughing, calling one to another, but the words are blurred.

He sees Lenny walk into the water, wade in to her waist.

The others separate, calling to one another. Among the stones.

Lenny is swimming farther out.

Behind them the diving rock turns. Shifts in space. Parson sees it turn like a moving wall, glow in the dusk that is layered, furred with shadow.

He sees the boy walk round from behind the turning rock. And Carmody, close enough to grab him, not needing to, attached to him like a dark hole, shining and empty.

As though she feels someone approach, Lenny hesitates in the water. She turns, executes a smooth circular glide, begins swimming back to shore. Parson hears a gong struck, a hollow, resounding break. And Carmody leaves go the boy, walks through stones, is in the water. He swims like a powerful horse; Parson knows how Carmody swims.

Do it, you fuckin loon. You want to do it.

The water is blue beads, like a long cord Parson swallows. A cord he pulls into himself. He feels every stroke, swimming just beneath the surface as though to break the skin of the water would slow his progress.
Lethal, ain't you, loon. You can pray over me.
And it is like prayer, this clocked glide in heavy space timed to his heart's thud. But he surfaces and sees Carmody reach her, begin to drag her back to shallow water. He erupts in fire like a hunger.

They walk hand in hand where the trail is wide enough. Alma feels Delia's shoulder near her own and they lace fingers or grip each other hard as the path rises and falls, swells and drops, winds around rocks, and the rocks themselves are more than the hard slabs they seem by day, more than a kind of dead furniture thrown up suddenly in the woods. In dusk the lichen dappling their pumiced surfaces light up in scaly lines. The leafy canopies of the trees droop down, as though darkness creeps through them in lengthening shadows. Far off, the campfire flares orange and jagged and Camp Shelter is singing:
Rocka my soul in the bosom of Abraham.
The song spins out in rounds and Alma hears the sound as echoes trapped somehow behind her.

"It doesn't sound like 'rocking my soul,'" Alma says. "It sounds like 'rock of my soul,' like, you know, a soul is a rock inside a bosom."

"A man's bosom." Delia shrugs. "And who's Abraham? If you know, don't tell me."

"I don't remember," Alma says. "One of the Bible fathers, I don't know. But I know we don't have a flashlight."

"So what? We won't be out all night. Anyway, I could walk this trail blindfolded. Couldn't you?" Delia lets go of Alma and moves ahead, singing under her breath, "
Oh, rock of my soul.
"

There was that old story about the Pied Piper, Alma thinks, where all the children in the town disappear into a rock by the sea. All except the lame boy. His soul is too pure, or not pure enough, and he can't keep up. Can't be taken in, like treasure, which was always hidden in rocks. Like the treasure in one of Nickel Campbell's books,
Arabian Nights,
buried in a cave inside a rock, and the rock had a door. Then there was the rock Jesus lay within until the third day, and the door of the rock was rolled away. And Lenny had made a game once where the girls collected a treasure of rocks and sank them in the stream, far down in the field behind the house. The rocks fell through beige water, slowly and deeply, and mud furled up like smoke around them when they hit bottom. But Nickel Campbell had floated, floated away, out of his car into river water, and Alma imagines her mother's soul, stuck like a shard of rock in the center of his chest. Wet that day, in the muddy river, buried now. Audrey's soul really would be hard and dense, buried or hidden like a nugget or a seed, like a jewel with her voice held tight inside. Or the voice had found a way into Alma's head, with all its words intact.
I don't know why I was brave enough to be so foolish, phoning him at work that first time. Maybe I was just desperate, not willing to go along nursing some little hope. I told him it was Audrey Swenson, please not to say anything, that I knew he went to Winfield to do banking for Consol every Saturday, I wanted to meet him there, this week, at noon at the bus station, I wanted to talk to him, more than anything in the world, please if he would just not ask questions and agree
... What question would he have asked? Sometimes, driving to Winfield, Audrey and Alma had played Twenty Questions; Alma paid close attention to every clue, and she was better than her distracted mother at guessing answers. Animal, vegetable, mineral. Bigger than a bread box.

"I bet we're going skinny-dipping," Delia says. She turns to face Alma, a band of sunburn across her nose and cheeks. She blinks and her eyelids look pale. "Cap will have cigarettes, of course," she says. "Alma, do you ever smoke with them?"

"I don't like smoking," Alma says. "I cough. And it smells awful."

"It doesn't. And Cap wears that French perfume. If you stand near her you can smell it, and it mixes up with any other smell. She told me she wears it for camouflage."

They've come to the clearing, where they leave the swinging bridge and the river behind, and move off into the woods toward Turtle Hole, but Alma bends down to tie her shoe and Delia stops on the path beside her.

Alma frowns. "When did Cap tell you that?"

"One day after breakfast," Delia says, nonchalant. "We were talking. What's her perfume called? She wouldn't tell me, like it's a secret."

"I know."

"Well?" Delia asks.

"Let's play Twenty Questions," Alma says.

"No, it's boring."

"Twenty questions about Cap. The name of Cap's perfume." She peers up at Delia, then reaches out to pull down Delia's socks. "Your socks fell down."

Delia crouches to pull them up, moves to shove Alma off balance. "So tell me your speech. Let's hear it."

"What, now?"

"You wrote it, didn't you? You know it by heart, I know you do. You were only going to read it off paper to keep from looking at them all." Delia's eyes widen and she leans forward, cocks her head sideways and fits her face to Alma's. The scab at the side of her mouth is a hard little shape. This close, her lashes brush Alma's eyelids.

"I don't have to give it now, not ever, and I'm glad." Alma closes her eyes. She does know all the lines of her speech, but their sequence seems to have jarred loose; the order is gone.
President Kennedy said not to ask what our country can do for us.
The phrase floats clear in Alma's head, detached from any other, and she smells Delia's skin, Delia's hair. She thinks how like themselves they both still seem, and how different they've become in this place. They smell different now, more like earth, less like their mothers' houses.

"You think she'll forget about it?" Delia laughs, moves away. "Mrs. T.? Not likely."

"She might," Alma says. "The schedule would get messed up if everyone from tonight had to talk tomorrow night—"

Delia makes an impatient noise in her throat, grabs Alma's hand. "But tell it to me. Tell me now, the lines you remember. About the secret furnace in the basement of the Russian embassy. How hot it burns. You were going to say that, weren't you? It's Mrs. T.'s favorite story."

"I don't have to, Delia. It doesn't matter anymore."

"It does matter. Tell me!"

Alma sighs, and she hears how still the woods are. She will have to say something, tell Delia. "All right, listen," she says, and she leans close to Delia, whispering each word distinctly. "Blue on blue. Heartache on heartache." She wonders if Delia will hit her, slap her.

But Delia moves closer as well, and whispers, "I'm ... Mr. Blue. When you say. You're sorry."

Alma smiles into her flecked eyes. "Blue on blue. Now that we are through."

"She wore blue," Delia says softly, "velvet, and in my heart I—"

Beside them the river moves like twisting fluid dropped into a trench. There's a sound close to the bank, jump of a frog or a fish, a sluice of escape and a plop.

"Look," Delia says.

And the fish jumps again, flashing like a comma, falling back in muscular surrender.

A soul could be like that too, Alma thinks, that silver color, or a kind of smoke. The way lines from songs curled and drifted, peculiar, real and airborne, if you took them away from the music people moved to, the music that begged and pushed. Words could push too. But Audrey's words only waited in Alma's head. It was Alma who seemed to push them, remember them, try to hold them up. She wanted to move them. A soul could fly: hadn't Wes let his go, drifted upwards and blown about like hair? Her mother's voice stated facts to make a gravity he escaped.
I never knew your dad drank until after I married him. The man is a secret still, but he's an alcoholic as surely as Mina Campbell is. That family has been through hell, I know all about it from hearing Nickel talk and hearing women gab. Years ago now. Your friend Delia was only three or four. Mina's still OK but they all walk on eggs.

Last Easter, Mina had said how Good Friday was the holiest day for Christians, and the Resurrection the most joyous event; Christmas was pagan really, the trees and the lights. Alma had stayed overnight at Delia's that weekend, and they'd skipped church Easter Sunday but dressed in good clothes and gone to the cemetery with flowers. They'd have a picnic and an egg hunt instead, Mina said, just the five of them, and the gossips in church could talk about someone else today. Nickel Campbell had died a few weeks before, and Mina drove Bird's station wagon up the winding cemetery road, steering with one gloved hand and smoking a cigarette. Alma and Delia were sitting in the back with John-John between them, and Alma could see the shape of Mina's face reflected in the rear-view mirror. The short black veil of her pillbox hat moved with her breath when she exhaled little puffs of smoke and her dark pink lips showed when she talked. Bird said to put out that cigarette, Mina would smudge her gloves or catch herself on fire, one or the other. Bird was like Audrey that way, Alma thought, always telling people what was going to happen, or comparing one story to another.
You've not been through what Delia's seen. Even so young, kids remember I never let your dad drink at home. He'd just go out and drink and be gone; he wouldn't ever say what happened. I think it's because he didn't remember. It's all secrets from him as well. And I never knew why he went off. It never seemed to have anything to do with me. If he's not drinking now, fine. He's gone so much I wouldn't know. It's all him, his whole life is him. I'm just a bystander.

Delia and Mina and John-John are never gone. They don't even have a car anymore; they drive Bird's car.

"Hey," Delia says. She leans toward Alma, into Alma's face. "Let's go. You're taking so long, we'll miss them."

"I wonder how John-John is," Alma says. "Don't you always think about him at night? Where does he think we are, I wonder."

Delia stands and turns, leaving the path to move off through the trees. "He thinks we're at camp. Anyway, that's what they told him."

"He's too little to remember, or know what camp means." Alma has to move faster, skipping to keep up.

"Bird will explain it to him," Delia says, and laughs, because they both know Bird isn't capable of explaining anything. Bird mixes everything up and changes it around.

Delia moves on through the trees and Alma lets herself fall just behind; she can see Delia's white blouse through leaves. Delia is singing again, and they've left the drifty sound of the campfire singing behind; there's only Delia's sometimes lines and phrases, floating back disconnected.
Oh, rocka my soul,
she sings, and
white silver bells, upon a windy hill ... that will happen only ... when the faeries sing,
all camp songs she says she hates and can't stop thinking.