Shelter (1994) (9 page)

"Come on out here," Dad said. "Come see what I got parked down here in front of the house." He held the door open.

Buddy moved through it, past him. He went to the far side of the porch, by the railing, and looked down at the car. It was a red car with a dented fender. All the windows were rolled down.

"I got you something too," Dad said.

He held out a blue leather bag in one hand, a pull-string bag open at the mouth. Buddy leaned to look inside and saw marbles, cat's-eyes and a big shooter. He reached out but Dad pulled the bag away, then jumped back on his toes and made as if to throw it. Buddy was supposed to catch, and the leather pouch landed in his cupped hands.

"You know how to shoot? I can teach you. After breakfast." He eased himself into his chair, watching Buddy. "I figured you two were at church last night," he said.

Buddy nodded.

"While you were gone I took me a little walk out to the road. Got a ride into town. Damn if I didn't meet up with a nice little lady, wants me to take care of her car for a while." He tilted back in the chair and propped his feet across the railing. Buddy couldn't get through to the steps unless he ducked under, and if Dad wasn't drunk, his arm could shoot out and grab whatever moved, quick as the flicked tongue of a lizard.

"I don't mind doing a favor," he said now, and cocked an eyebrow at Buddy. "You mind?"

"What's that?"

"You mind doing a favor?"

Buddy shook his head.

"Then put that bag of marbles in your pocket. Go in there and get the tomato juice out of the refrigerator, and my pint of vodka. I'll eat light."

Buddy went back inside. He could get out the back door now, but Dad would only catch up later. He opened the squat icebox and stood staring. For a crazy instant he thought of getting inside, fitting right between the nearly empty metal racks. "Well?" he heard from the porch. "And bring some ice." The tray was so cold it stuck to Buddy's fingers. He had the six-pack of V-8 in one hand and the pint bottle of vodka under his arm and the cold ice tray burning into his fingers; the screen banged as he went out. He wished he had a gun. Beyond the porch there were butterflies, six or seven bright yellow ones, dropping and starting like some little whirlwind had them in a swirl. But the morning was still and hot.

Dad had his shirt off already and he took the ice tray and whammed it against the porch rail near his chair. Splinters of ice flew everywhere and a couple of big chunks skidded along the board floor. "She goes off to cook for a hundred girls and leaves us here to shift for ourselves. You believe 'at?" He smiled up at Buddy, waiting. Then he said softly, "You forgot the glasses, Miss."

But he had them sitting on the floor, under his chair, two plastic tumblers. Buddy leaned over and picked them up.

"Now you got the glasses," Dad said. He put ice into both of them and poured Buddy some juice and himself a pale red mixture. "I been waiting for you to wake up," he told Buddy. "My god, all that religion must have tired you out. Couldn't skittle out the door with her this morning." He drank down the glass and poured another. There were flecks of moisture on his lips. "Bud-eee, Bud-eee," he said, mimicking Mam, saying the name in the drawn-out way she pronounced it when she called Buddy in from the road or the woods. He shook the ice in his glass and the liquid moved, and he drank it then, fast, his Adam's apple moving in his throat. "Chugalug," he said, watching Buddy.

Buddy picked up his own cup and began to drink. He had to just keep drinking the cold, thick juice. He had to drink without stopping.

Dad was drinking too, another glass, then he put in more ice and poured the rest of the pint in, only faintly pink, and he drank it, blinking, and his eyes got wet. He pointed at Buddy. "I'm going to be taking a ride, now I got me a car. Just need me a stake." He laughed. "Maybe I'll take you with me. That would get her goat, wouldn't it."

Buddy stepped back, drinking.

Dad leaned forward, like a bird arching its long neck. "You don't want to come, though, do you. Nah." He took a deep breath, then, in one long motion, heaved the empty bottle into the air, out from the porch. It tumbled end over end, twinkling a little, and fell soundlessly into the brush down the bank, on the other side of the road.

Buddy could hear himself breathing. In. Out.

"You and your Mam," Dad said. "You a couple of girls, ain't you."

Buddy knew not to answer yet. Not to move.

"Well, ain't you? Couple of girls? Or not. Yes or no?"

Buddy nodded. He held out his glass.

Dad put an ice cube in it. "Two girls," he said. "Then do what a girl does."

Buddy put the ice cube in his mouth and held it.

Dad took hold of Buddy's wrist and turned away in his chair, so Buddy stood just behind him. Maybe he would leave the radio on this time. But he turned it off. He breathed a few times, jerked his head hard like he was shaking water off, settled in, opened his fly. "All right then," he said.

Buddy took the big ice cube from his mouth, his jaws aching. He held it in his free hand and moved it over Dad's head, in his hair, around and around, then down onto Dad's neck. Dad began to breathe like he did, his feet down off the rail, his legs spread out in front of him. He would have hold of himself by now but Buddy kept watch on the solid bank of trees across the road, their foliage level with the porch. Their leaves moved; Buddy strained to hear them, heard them, made the sound big in his ears. A saying in the air, a singsong that stayed awake. He could see the air whisper through the leaves, track its movement, like some form made of air was in the trees, and he kept his eyes on the shape that rippled there. He moved the ice along Dad's white, freckled shoulders but he didn't look at them anymore; he had to move the ice down Dad's chest, onto Dad's flat brown nipples, into the hollow between, exactly right, to get it over with. He had to do just this, the same each time, exactly the same. Buddy could hear Dad slapping, straining, but Dad couldn't make Buddy look; he couldn't see Buddy's eyes. Even someone walking right below couldn't see up on the porch, and there was no one to hear. The trees rustled, their layered foliage ruffling out toward Buddy, then moving backward, pulled in as though what was far behind the trees beckoned, nodding. Buddy had to lean over Dad's shoulder to reach down his belly with the ice, and Dad began to whimper. He tensed until his whole body seemed to vibrate and his grip on Buddy's wrist squeezed like a vise. When he started to talk it was almost over. "Don't do that to me," he would say, the words all run together and his voice high-pitched, shrunken. "Don't do that to me don't do that to me." But he wasn't talking to Buddy. Buddy was supposed to move the ice, not stop. And there was a pent-up squealing, and Dad was finished, and Dad was crying. He let go of Buddy then and Buddy could run, he was supposed to, if he was still there Dad would yell at him, "What are you looking at? You get away from me you leave me alone!"

The first time, Buddy had watched, he had looked, but now he never looked. He ran down the porch steps, across the road and down the bank into the trees. He ran yelling, pouring it all out of himself into the wide woods. Today he threw down the stub of ice and jammed his wet hand in his pocket. The leather bag of marbles clanked into his palm as he ran toward the camp to Mam.

One long, thin swath of cloud drifted above the river's surface as though a ghostly swimmer had metamorphosed and arisen; beyond it the bleat of the kid's bugle erupted its piercing assault three times and stopped, leaving a quiet so dense Parson heard the minute creaks of the swinging bridge above them, a hundred yards to their right. The murmurings of the men over their coffee seemed not language but river sounds, and this space by the low-lying water seemed a forgotten shelf, a location in which they were placed and held. The men referred to themselves as
the dirt platoon,
as though they were soldier remnants of some small castoff army delegated to dig and haul; it was
Private, hump it, for Chrissakes!
or
Sarge, gimme a smoke!
By noon their faces and bodies were powdered and smeared with dirt but in the mornings they looked nearly pale, cursing and grunting, passing Parson a steaming plastic cup. The coffee at his lips was hot and bitter and he thought about the name,
Lenny,
until it was merely a sound, a feeling, a twinge in his guts. He watched the river cloud begin to break up, drift, pieces of white amoebic mist eaten by the air or the warble of the water, and he wondered if any of the others had seen it. The foreman was laughing, nodding at him, going on about how Parson's
assistance was requested
by the front office, that fucking dame and her junk,
dump run,
they'd have to offload this pipe and let him take the truck for an hour. It was a joke and they always made Parson go, since he seldom talked and seemed to do what he was told, and that dame drove everyone up the wall. They made like they were going to start in digging but Parson knew they'd sit on their flats smoking cigarettes, and he took the keys and the others finally rose to begin unloading, two men to a pipe length. To Parson it seemed the others had been here forever, marking time; if they were an army, they fought only the heat of the long days and the weight of the pipe, and there was no commander but the endless whisper of the river. It was the river that spoke and talked, not this crow-voiced foreman who gestured at him now, telling him to
git on,
do his good deed and get the truck back.

Grasshoppers flew up around him, dozens of them, disturbed as he drove along the brush track they'd cut in from the dirt road; he could hear the whir of their wings and one of them lit for a moment on his bare arm, its mandibles frothed with a minuscule globular blob of spit. He jerked his arm away, swerving the truck onto the harder surface of the dirt road, and the insect dropped, smearing his flesh with a brown juice. They were a plague: locusts, gypsy moths, hoppers, any of the creatures that consumed insatiably and moved in droves. He began to sweat, feeling the omen implicit in the stain on his skin, and he considered taking the truck, getting as far as he could before ditching it, but he felt the Devil's pull, a kind of magnetic tension, almost a vibration, strung tight in the air. Parson had to stay here, this country, this ground, waiting for Carmody, waiting to see how the Devil moved or talked, in who, in what. He pulled through the camp entrance and wound around over the grass to the back of the big dining hall. Lines of girls fanned off the front porch and the smell of bacon hung in the air, a smell so tantalizing in the building heat that Parson felt himself salivate like a dog. But the directress approached before the truck even fully stopped, raised her bangled arms, and the sudden violent urge to eat, to fill himself with smoked meat as though meat were the salty taste of all the girls he must never touch, dropped completely from him.

Then he was standing by the truck, though he didn't remember getting out. The directress, close to him, smelled of vanilla, like a cake—some perfume she wore—and she was white as cake and soft and round. No mate for the Demon, no match. But she was empty and evil; she scared Parson because the evil would work through her to get to someone else, many others maybe. She herself would be no prize for the Devil, no barrier to his greed, but the Demon was near her like a shadow, never left her. She knew about evil, she was afraid, he could smell her fear. Frank was there, piling up junk, but she gestured to Parson and began to speak the Devil's names, pointing to the cover of a magazine, top one in a ruffled stack tied with twine.

"There is
Lucifer
in the flesh, there is
Beelzebub,
there is the
Devil
himself," she was saying.

Parson looked at her straight on, amazed, realizing she was somehow kin to the big, lonely women in Preacher's congregations, women who had fanned themselves with folded paper while Parson spoke of evil and retribution. But this one was wealthy, she held herself drawn up and tense, she wanted to be clean.

She pointed to the magazine and the image of a short, fat, bald man whose hairless face seemed swollen, whose tiny, bright eyes were squeezed small like a pig's. "The Democrats are fools to think of a treaty with Khrushchev," she went on. Parson loaded junk, boxes of empty metal cans, broken lengths of wood, spotted linoleum flooring ripped up in irregular pieces. Leaning, bending near her, he smelled again her sugary smell, like a bake shop, yes, a smell suddenly so specific that he felt dizzy, remembering the sweet shop in Greensboro, in the hotel where Preacher had played cards that day. They'd gone to a revival down in Carolina and Preacher had got wind of a high-stakes game. The hotel in town so fancy, and the sweet shop all pink and white like this woman. "
People have to be educated to recognize evil,
" said her voice close his back, a fat, soft, woman's voice. The hoarse whisper of the Demon echoed her every word, hissed in Parson's head. "
Better load that refrigerator now,
" it said, "
or you won't have room.
" Straining to lift the empty, doorless cabinet, Parson shut out the sound of her and recited a litany of his own, a litany so fast he never had to speak, just move his lips, sounds meant to shut out the sugar and the sweets and the images of that night in Greensboro when Preacher had got shot.

Parson remembered pieces. The sweet shop where they stand before walking upstairs to the room. The long glass cases holding trays of pastry swans in lines, cookies in the shape of four-leaf clovers, sprinkled with sugar bits. The sugar green as bottle glass, glinting in minute squares. Saint Pat's Day, a day for pagans, but snowing this late in March, a freak storm that will turn to rain. Warm hotel, and the heady sugar smell. Swans made of sweet crust filled with yellow cream, their long necks dipped in chocolate. Parson is nineteen and he has never seen ... a sugar swan. Kneels. Eye-level flotilla of confections on paper lace. So perfect, made for no reason or use. What sort of children hold these sweets in their palms, even eat them as though they are bread or meat? Children far from the smell of the wind in Calvary, the riverblown smell of wet growth, algae, the greeny water where frogs breed after the thaw, frog eggs a fresh rot smell not so different from the sour yogurt smell of women, the real smell wet inside their fake perfumes. Preacher urges Parson away, up long stairs of dark oiled wood, dark walls ascending upwards into darkness. Then the upstairs bedroom where the men gamble, smoke in the air, blinds drawn, shirt flung over the lamp so the light is dim. Fire lit in the grate, room too warm. Lines of talk.
Should have seen him,
Preacher laughing,
big grown kid wants a sugar swan,
and how one of the men sends down for a tray of the pastries but Parson won't eat one, only holds it in his hand, looking, and later during the fight the whole tray is thrown into the fire, bitter smell of the burnt sugar pungent as the smell of burning hair. Fire crackles, explodes, or the explosion is in the room, the table goes over, cards in the air a slow arc that rains on Parson's face. Then another crack, loud, like lightning, and the other men are gone, out the window to the metal fire-escape stairs, nearly falling in a jumble, their arms and legs jerking like sticks as they descend against the snow. Smell of human guts like the smell in the den of a beast, and the smell fills the room, smoky, darkening all but the comets that flash as Parson rolls Preacher onto his back like a feed sack in a black suit. Preacher's front slick, smeared, splashing red on the floor, on the window, on the snow that covers the fire escape, and out there in the air, the day is blinding white, whiter and whiter.