Volt: Stories (19 page)

Dillard touched his own lips. He wiped his eyes on his jacket sleeve. “Pastor?” he said, quiet.

“Yeah?”

“It don’t have a name.”

“A name?”

“The song.”

“Oh.”

“For the bulletin, I mean. How can I put it in the bulletin if it don’t have a name?”

Vernon thought for a moment. “It’s your song, son,” he said. “It’s not for me to name.”

VOLT

The calf’s black tongue hung from its muzzle, its white hide shining in the pale sunrise. Helen Farraley crouched high on the hillside, batted flies from its vacant opal eye. She’d gotten the call deep in the night, the old man’s wife jabbering in ragged English. Something about something in the field. Something about killing. Helen had imagined the worst, was disgusted to find she’d been awakened over a dead calf.

“Some animal get it?” she asked Moss Strussveld. The old farmer wore a straw hat, his collar buttoned at his throat. “Some dogs maybe?”

Moss raised a shaking finger to tap his dentures. “No bite.” His voice was thin and steeped in the motherland. “Animal will bite.”

Helen lay a palm to the calf’s throat, its meat still warm. The old man was right. No marks. “How about disease? Some illness?”

His eyes snapped to her. “My cows are well.”

“Ain’t it possible? The water what it was?”

“My cows are well,” he said, again.

A lone cow lingered, skittishly regarding her, the rest of the herd down below the flood line, where the grassy hillside became mangy ocher dirt. Helen eyed the cow, peered out over the valley. In the far distance, the brownstones of town were scratches in the shadowed land, the sun not yet risen above the hills to wake the lows. Three months since the flood and the world still reeked of silt.

Helen stood, hooked her thumbs on her gun belt. “Listen,” she said. “Got to call the vet. Not the police. Understand?”

The old man wagged his finger. “No vet,” he replied. “Marta say listen, Moss. I hear. Three nights I hear. Some messing been in my cows.”

Helen found herself unable to look at him. She eyed his place on the ridge, his perfect red barn and little stone house. “This ain’t my job,” she said. “I deal in people. People, not animals.”

The old man said nothing more. He clasped his hands behind his back and hobbled uphill toward his tractor. Helen watched him struggle to climb into the seat and thought to offer a hand. But she’d worked the flood, had learned there was a limit to the help some would suffer from others.

The wind buffeted the cruiser and Helen woke with a gasp, as if sleep had dragged her under water. The tension wires thrummed overhead. The wipers rattled against the windshield. She batted her eyes, and came to focus on the quarry pond far below, the dark water riffling. Out the side window, the high grass lashed the feet of the electrical tower, its girders swaying, ever so slightly, against the weltering sky.

Thunder clapped and shook the earth and then the car was engulfed, rain thrashing the windows. By the dashboard clock, she’d slept two hours. Two hours in a blink. Two hours like nothing. Since the flood, Helen was always tired, as if the weeks of fighting water had spent years of energy.

Watching the rain assault the windows, she recalled standing beside Walt Freely in his store, the first of the flood sluicing down Elm Avenue, brown water purling over the tiled floor, over the tops of their shoes, rain pouring then no different from today.

“You fetch the animals,” Freely said, his old eyes somber. “I’ll set to building the ark.”

The storm passed quickly. The high sun pierced the wake of sheer clouds. Helen’s cell phone rang. She checked the number, saw it was Walt Freely, the town’s mayor and her boss. She let it go to voice mail, then, after a minute, listened to his message. Freely sounded perturbed, asking where she was, saying the power had been knocked out in town.

Helen couldn’t see a way around it and drove off the quarry road and down into the flats, the asphalt tricked and buckled, ditch banks crumbled, houses crooked on their foundations with grime-splattered clapboards painted with slogans to warn off looters. The pavement steamed. Branches strewn everywhere. A power pole leaned out over Elm Avenue, held up only by its wires.

Helen turned onto the strip. Folks congregated on the road between the three-story brownstones that housed the diner and grocery, both shops dark, the grocery store’s front window gone, glass glittering on the walkway. Walt Freely, a gaunt old man in a nylon jacket that read
Freely’s
across the breast, stood at her window before she could open the cruiser’s door.

“Where you been?” he snapped.

Helen squinted up through the window. He’d been this way since the flood. Helen just took it all.

Freely motioned at the little crowd. “These folks pay your salary.” His eyes strayed to the glass on the sidewalk, and for a moment Helen thought he might cry. Then he thumped the cruiser’s roof. “Do your job,” he barked, and stalked off toward his store.

Helen scanned the stolid faces. Ted Yoder and Leonard Bateman. Carol Murphy, who waited tables at the diner. A few guys from the Havesty Construction crew. None smiling, none giving her more than a glance.

Helen stayed in the car, dialed information to put her through to the power company. She worked her way through recorded messages and garbled music, was eventually told by a smoky-voiced woman the problem was a substation, the power out for most of the county. She couldn’t estimate how long it’d take to get it all back up and running, couldn’t say how soon they’d repair the power poles, though they’d surely start in more populated areas.

Helen called Mel Smith, a local handyman, and asked him to come right off to fix the storefront. She phoned the Pendelak twins, who were good ball players and popular in school, told them to come into town with a few classmates, saying the town was torn up again and everybody needed to pitch their part.

Sweat trickled down Helen’s ribs, a line of damp marking the shelf of her stomach. She left the car and crossed the road and the walkway of broken glass to enter the grocery.

The aisle closest to the window was littered with glass and wilted magazines blown from their racks. Passing the aisles, empty of people, sparsely stocked, Helen’s thoughts veered to the senior home where her mother lived, and she imagined her mother, who the day before had looked upon her like a stranger and refused to speak.

Helen found Freely at the butcher counter. The old man peered into the case, at the neat piles of chops and steaks, mounds of sausages, catfish and perch laid on garnished beds of ice.

“It’s to be dark awhile,” Helen told him.

Freely didn’t turn. His head slowly shook, his eyes trained on the meat. “It’ll go bad,” he said. “It’ll all go bad, won’t it?”

Helen held the door for a medic wheeling a woman out to an ambulance parked under the portico. In the senior home’s foyer, Helen passed a moonfaced man with long black braids inspecting an oxygen tank, a dozen or more tanks lined along the front window. In the back of the room, away from the window’s heat, elderly men and women sat waiting in a row of metal chairs, each gripping an orange or red popsicle in an age-spotted hand.

The halls were dark and nearly silent. Where doors were open, sunlight cut into the hall. Helen entered her mother’s room and found her mother sitting in a wheelchair. She was dressed in a pale-blue cardigan, her hands in her lap. Her face turned to Helen, but she said nothing. Helen searched her mother’s eyes, which were unfocused in a way that made Helen wonder if she’d gone blind.

Helen wheeled her mother out. An exit in the back led onto a little patio overlooking a clover meadow. Higher aground, this area had been spared by the flood. Plastic pots marked the patio’s four corners, pansies wet and drooping, mud trails leaking from the bottoms.

Helen held her mother’s hand and more than anything wanted her mother to turn and see her, for them to talk as they once had. It’d been a year since Helen moved her to this home. A year of deterioration, her limbs weakening, her mind slipping. Helen’s heart wrenched, overwhelmed by the guilt in hoping it’d all soon be over.

The door opened and out stepped Sally Winkowski, who ran the home, a woman just a few years older than Helen, her hair dyed the color of beets. In her hands she held a limp box of popsicles.

Sally pulled a popsicle from the box. “They’re gonna melt,” she said, offering it to Helen.

Helen took it, thanked her. “How’s things?”

Sally smiled. “We’re scrambling.”

“Anything I can do?”

Sally patted Helen’s shoulder. “We’re fine.” She pulled another popsicle from the box. “For Mama?”

Helen took it from Sally. She tore the paper. The popsicle was bright red and she worked her mother’s fingers to hold the stick. Her mother’s eyes drew onto her fist. Helen considered what it would mean to forget a life, the slate cleaned of all notions of good and bad. To be innocent again. Her mother’s arm lifted and Helen watched her lick the popsicle, her eyes widening like a child’s, her tongue lapping the sugar put onto her lips.

Sunlight bled through Helen’s eyelids. She’d parked in the electrical tower’s latticed shade, but now the sun had shifted. Helen lolled her head against the cruiser’s bright window, her eyes opened to power lines bowing tower to tower then vanishing over the rim of the hill only to reappear, far below, to span the quarry pond. Sunlight dully flashed on the pond’s storm-stirred water. Trucks parked down there, kids come to swim.

Her cell phone rang. She checked to see it wasn’t Freely, then answered it.

“Sheriff?” It was a man’s voice, soft, hoarse.

“Yes.”

“Gil Henderson.”

Helen straightened herself. Gil Henderson was a marshal from the county seat, an old brand type who didn’t call for leisure. “How’s things, Gil?”

“Busy, sister.”

“That’s a song I know.”

“Well,” he said, “afraid I’m going to have to add to it. Got to come down there. Thought I’d phone ahead.”

“Appreciate it, Gil.”

“It’s a courtesy.”

“Appreciate it,” she said again.

“You know a Jorgen Delmore?”

Helen winced at the name. Her mother had taught the boy in 4-H, schooled him in taxidermy. He’d mounted a pheasant for her once, won a ribbon at the fair. Last she knew he’d enlisted in the army and was off in Iraq. “Yes, sir.”

The marshal explained Delmore had been arrested in the city on felony possession, got out on bail. Said he’d missed his court date and now there was a warrant for his arrest. “Got to hunt him out,” he said. “How’s this look from your end?”

Helen’s jaw tightened. She hadn’t heard Jorgen was home, hadn’t heard any of this. “Those Delmores,” she said, considering how much to tell. “Well, they just ain’t right.”

The marshal grunted. “How well you know the boy?”

“His family’s rough, but he ain’t bad.”

“Hell, he ain’t.”

“Well—”

“Got to bring him in.”

Helen’s cheeks flushed. “Yes, sir.”

“You help us out?”

“Help?”

“Go talk with him,” he said. “Smooth the road for us.”

Helen tapped a knuckle against the steering wheel. “All right.”

“It’s a tight leash, Helen.”

“That right?”

“Be there tomorrow, a.m.”

“That soon?”

She heard a clicking on the line. “You help us or not, sister?”

Helen shut her eyes. “Sure, Gil,” she said, rubbing her brow. “I’ll do what I can.”

The cabins were circled like battlements against the overgrown woods. Kids played in the middle, stomping puddles, kicking about a green plastic bottle. Some barely out of diapers, boys and girls alike shirtless and filthy. They watched Helen as she trolled the circle, searching out the address Henderson gave her. A redheaded boy, twice as tall as the rest and nothing but legs, spat on the cruiser’s hood.

Helen found cabin 17. The yard was a mess, a tricycle with no front wheel, a sandbox steeped in weeds and brown water. Garbage bags covered the windows. The kids followed the car. She opened the door and told them to go home, but they didn’t.

She walked a path of flat stones around to the door. She was just here to talk, tried to put on a smile, look at ease. She heard movement inside, a woman shouting.

As Helen stepped onto the stoop, a door banged at the back of the house. She heard quarreling, voices. Instinct told her to move, and she hurried around to find a bald man in jeans and no shirt, his muscled back riddled with cuts, trying to run while another man tugged his arm to keep him in the house. But the bald man tore free and dashed into the woods, the other giving chase and calling, “Jorgen, goddammit.”

Helen shouted after Jorgen, too, then a shadow cast itself over her, and she spun to face a large bearded man in a red shirt. His fist struck the base of her throat. She crumpled as if her legs had lost their bones, her face hitting the ground.

Sparks hissed across Helen’s vision, blood in her mouth. She tried to take her feet, couldn’t catch her breath. Gasping, she bear-crawled toward the cruiser. The muddy feet of children blocked her way. She reached to push them aside, then, groaning, her lungs bucking, pulled herself up the cruiser. She opened the door, fell into the driver’s seat.

Helen shut the door. Kids pressed their faces to her window, laughing. She started the motor and switched on the siren. Breathing came strained as she slipped the car into gear, rolling slowly away so as not to crush the children.

Helen gathered herself in a turnout a quarter mile down the road. Her lip was bloodied, a front tooth loose. When she inhaled, her breastbone burned. Everything that was Helen that was not her body told her to drive away, to just tell Gil Henderson she’d tried but couldn’t find the boy. But her muscle and blood wanted to clutch something and not let go.