Volt: Stories (22 page)
Delmore took the stick from his mouth, swigged his beer. He rubbed a hand over his sweating scalp, then stood and crossed to the window. He set his forearm against the glass, leaned his head against his arm. The night was waning, his eyes drawn to a welt of pastel light on the eastern hills.
“You got a shower I could use?” he asked quietly. “Clean myself up some ’fore that fella gets here?
Helen considered the boy in his stance, and the storm clouds in the near distance, their undersides lit pink. “All right then.”
Helen kept the lights off in her apartment, ashamed of its unfinished walls, the milk crates holding her things, the mattress on the plywood floor. Delmore needed a shirt, so she gave him the baggy gray T-shirt she slept in. She gave him a pair of tube socks fresh from the pack. Gave him a towel and washcloth, a bar of soap, told him he could use the razor by the tub.
The bathroom window looked out over the fire escape, the grassy lot below strewn with lumber and broken bricks and colorful swatches of refuse she couldn’t discern. Helen drew down the shade, used a wrench to turn on the water since the new fixture hadn’t been installed.
Then she turned to him, the light dingy but his eyes a striking blue. “Let me know if you need anything.”
Delmore stilled his eyes, nodded.
Then Helen went out and lay on her little mattress. Wrapped in a yellow bedsheet, she gazed out the window, listening to the water from the shower. Morning had risen dark, the sky a sheet of tufted iron. Light throbbed in the folds of clouds.
The shower ran for ten minutes, fifteen. The dust of the world rose and the rain was a smell before the first drop splattered against the window. The rain fell steady and the sounds from outside and the shower fell into a cadence. Then there was only water.
Three months back, the flood nearly covered this building, this room soaked brown and buckled. Helen imagined the water rising again, slowly filling the grocery, and then the office one floor down, the jail cot floating until waterlogged, then sinking, the water seeping between floors, through drywall and insulation, through plywood and nails.
Twenty minutes passed, the shower still going. Helen pictured the boy bounding through the high wet grass toward the woods, her nightshirt soaked, his scars washed clean. But she couldn’t make herself get up to check the bathroom.
I just need a little rest, she told herself. Just a few minutes to gather myself. Then she imagined God in Heaven just as weary, slouched on his golden throne and deciding to try a smaller flood or two just to see if we’d save ourselves and spare him the effort.
Helen was by no means devout, but she knew the Bible, knew the story of God drowning the wicked world. As a breeze misted in through the window, she hugged herself in her thin sheet and pondered what she’ll do if this rain keeps on and the people cry their end, the sun choked, the power towers submerged, and God’s thunderous voice pierces the gray dome, charging a volt into that sacred truth behind her eyes. Will she think herself crazy? Cower and weep? Or will she rise from her damp mattress, hold stiff her trembling chin, and be the one?
The author would like to thank the following people for their assistance and support in making this book possible: Mary O’Connell, Wendell Mayo, Richard Messer, James Park Sloan, Eugene Wildman, Robert Olmstead, Mitch Wieland, Elise Blackwell, Alvin Greenberg, Janet Holmes, Bob Kustra, Anthony Doerr, Luis Alberto Urrea, Michael Collier, Benjamin Percy, Joy Williams, Michael Cluff, Tom Weekes, Danny Cerullo, Nick Steiner, Brandon Grew, Ryan Mann, Christina Thompson, David Lynn, Ted Genoways, Michael Ray, Otto Penzler, Scott Turow, and Nat Sobel. Thanks to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Writers’ Conference, The Cabin, and the Idaho Commission on the Arts. Special thanks to Steve Woodward, Fiona McCrae, the Graywolf staff, and his agent, Sarah Burnes.
Alan Heathcock
’s work has appeared in
Zoetrope: All-Story
, the
Virginia Quarterly Review,
the
Kenyon Review,
and
Best American Mystery Stories,
among other places. He is the winner of a National Magazine Award in fiction. A native of Chicago, he teaches fiction writing at Boise State University.
Book design by Rachel Holscher.
Composition by BookMobile Design and Publishing Services,
Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press
on acid-free recycled paper.