Volt: Stories (9 page)

Helen stepped gingerly out on the porch and closed the door behind her. Four men in parkas, the First Baptist deacons, stood at different levels on the steps, colored lights in the spruce reflecting on tracks of ice on the porch. Helen did not have her coat, and hugged herself with one arm and sipped her coffee.

Pastor Hamby’s cheeks were flushed, his thin lips drawn tightly over his teeth. “We were delivering care baskets out in the knobs like we always do,” he said, and looked back at the deacons.

They’d found Joakes’s body, this Helen knew by their faces. She tried to still her own face, her heart, to quiet the guilty part of her that wanted to confess and be forgiven.

Frank Barker, a squat man in glasses, stepped a boot on the porch and leaned over his leg. “The holidays is hard on some,” he said. “It ain’t joy and cranberries for everyone. For some it’s only lonesome pain.”

Spring 2008: Willow limbs hung limply in the brightening morn, the current’s froth filling with light and bending prisms where black branches emerged. All night Helen had listened in darkness to the flood’s drone, and in a waking dream she’d seen the girl’s body float up from the quarry depths, drift and drift in the murky current to be caught in the high branches of one of the town’s ancient oaks, and as the water receded, her neck wedged in a crook, there the girl dangled above Old Saints Road for all to see.

Now Helen sat high in the willow and tore away limbs until she could see out over the water. A single ridge humped out in the east. Her boat was nowhere to be seen. Danny was in a sort of sleep. She’d given him Connie Dempsy’s Christmas sweater, and handcuffed his wrists to a branch overhead so he would not fall. His head hung in the hammock of his arms, the sweater too small and the sleeves far up his wrists.

To the north, sunlight winked off the hull of a bass boat. Helen screamed and screamed, but with the rushing water she knew she would not be heard. She drew her pistol and fired into the gap of sky. She fired twice more before the boat veered their way, then fired again to keep the boat on track.

Once it was close enough, she began to holler. She glanced below at Danny, who picked up his head and stared up at her, the sweater stretched tight across his chest, the silver snowflakes twinkling. He too began to scream, and Helen could see the boat was steered by the long-haired looter from the night before. He cut the motor, the hull piled high with bodies of dogs.

The prow parted the canopy and Helen stared down between her legs, the long-haired man watching her as he passed below. Danny called out to his friend, and the boat bumped against the trunk. The long-haired man held the tree with one hand, and with the other lifted a shotgun to his shoulder and aimed it at Helen.

“No, Ray,” Danny said. “She’s all right.” Danny was staring up at her, and asked, “You all right, ain’t you?”

Helen nodded, held her hands out where he could see them.

“She’s all right, Ray,” Danny said again, and the man in the boat let the gun fall to his side.

Helen uncuffed Danny and they both climbed carefully into the boat, and had to sit on the same tiny bench to avoid the dogs. Dogs filled the hull; a collie atop a German shepherd, and several hunting dogs, blueticks and grays. Stacked in an orderly way, heads at one end, tails the other, stacked like firewood. The boat drifted from beneath the tree, willow branches washing over them and then the sun was warm. Thin clouds feathered out above. Ray stuffed his lip with chaw and stared Helen down. “Found a body,” he said, then turned away and wrapped the cord around the outboard flywheel.

Christmas Eve, 2007: Robert Joakes quietly sobbed, lips smacking as if from thirst, and asked to smoke just one cigarette. Helen considered it a moment, then untied his right arm. She carried the lantern to the cupboard and pushed aside a jar of pickled eggs, and there was the thin wooden box. The smell of tobacco came out strong. She kept the lid open, hoping the smell would overtake the odors of Joakes himself. She even held it beneath Joakes’s nose. He shut his eyes and seemed to take solemn pleasure from the scent. Then he opened his lids and his red eyes drew onto her.

He snatched the lantern like trap jaws sprung, and Helen was struck in the face and fell hard to the floor. The lantern light was gone. Moonlight through the tiny window lit a back wall where skinning tools hung on metal pegs. Freezing pain ripped through Helen’s eye, her skull. Chair legs thumped as Joakes fumbled with his free hand to untie his bindings. Her face swelled quickly; within seconds the eye was closed to sight. Dizzily, Helen took her feet and drew her pistol. She stayed still until she found the pale skin of his bald spot in the moonlight. Helen struck and Joakes shrieked. With all her weight she struck him once more. Joakes’s head bobbed violently, and he made no sound.

Helen staggered into the yard, clutching her gun, and broke an icicle off the pump’s handle. She lay back in the snow, dim stars turning in fractured tracks, the frozen ground beneath her seeming to turn, and though she meant to hold the ice to her eye, she brought up the pistol and it was cold and soothed her just the same.

December 20, 2007: Parked on the quarry’s service road, the cruiser growing cold with the motor off, Helen sipped peppermint schnapps and considered the world made of her design. My religion is keeping peace, she thought. It hadn’t begun that way, was nothing she’d planned, but now she saw that’s how it was. I just ran a grocery, she thought. I don’t want this. I ain’t the one to make the world right. She swallowed more schnapps, then capped the bottle and put it away in the glove box.

Helen stepped out onto the road and popped the trunk. The air had warmed, the boreal wind stilled. Like ashes from a furnace, thick and gentle snow began to fall. She’d taken the clothes from Joakes’s root cellar, washed them in the river, dressed the girl. She’d wrapped the girl in a green canvas tarp. Helen struggled lifting the body from the trunk. But she tugged and heaved the torso out over the fender and the rest followed. Helen had needed a sled, and without knowing its use Freely sold her one at half price, and now she turned the green canvas parcel onto the sled, a sheet of red plastic tethered with rope.

She hauled Jocelyn Dempsy on the sled, the girl’s weight breaking the undercrust of old snow, dredging new snow in wet mounds about her head and shoulders. Helen pressed onward, eyes closed to the cold, legs plodding into drifts.

At the quarry’s rim she paused to unfasten the tarp. She did not look at the girl. She moved behind the sled and shoved it all over. From her knees she watched the sled and tarp flutter, and the body turn and break through the film of ice with barely a sound.

Flakes fused to flakes and piled on her thighs and gloves. The quarry would soon be thick with ice, and what was below would be held for a time. In spring the body would ascend through the gray slush and be found. The town told stories of children who’d fallen to their deaths in this quarry. Teenagers were drawn to its danger. They would all believe Jocey had just drowned, and it would be over. Helen gazed down into the quarry. This is how I’ll be, she thought. I’ll be this icy hole, this season, this falling snow. I’ll just freeze myself over.

Spring 2008: In the flume between hillocks the floodwaters converged, dammed by logs and mud, a kitchen chair, a section of roof, a child’s plastic slide, refuse thick and high and brown water sluicing through random gaps. A frenzy of gulls hovered, filling the sky, the refuse wall alive with white birds. Ray ran the boat onto the grassy hillside. He hopped out and stomped the anchor into the soft earth. Helen climbed cautiously over the mound of dogs, a glove to her nose, Danny close behind. Scum water churned at the dam’s base. The torrent on the other side, the swollen Big Squirrel River, charged madly east. Helen feverishly scanned the refuse. The tan face of a mare, what looked like a carousel pony, stuck out from beneath what might be a green canvas tarp. Helen’s hands trembled; she’d lost control of her hands. She stuffed them in her pockets, and clenched them into fists thinking of Jocey’s school portrait on the evening news, remembering Freely, only weeks ago, taking down the same picture from his diner window.

They climbed the hill where rail tracks split the ridge, and stood on the wooden ties. Down by the river lay swine, a black-faced sheep, more dogs. Helen thought of Haley Winters’s cattle. Where’d all those cattle gone?

Ray pointed at an outcropping of rock. A body lay on a slab of limestone, fully clothed, feet spread apart. A gull roosted on the body’s shoulder, and Helen could not see the face. “I seen that boy some in the Old Fox,” Ray said. “Don’t know his name. Never said so much as hey to me.”

Helen rushed down the hillside, her momentum carrying her in a reckless sort of run. Wind blew the long grass flat. She followed the grass down with her eyes and tripped and slid hard on her side. The gull on the body raised its wings, flapped twice, and glided downshore. It wasn’t Jocey. It was Keller Lankford, a hay and bean farmer who lived south of town, nearly three miles from the river. His face was the blue of his overalls, his blackened fingers clawed into a fence slat clutched to his chest.

Helen was relieved, horrified. Her body shook, then Danny was over her pleading,
Don’t do that, oh come on now,
and pulled her into his arms. Helen shoved him away. She tried taking her feet, only to crumble. Her ankle was badly hurt. She wiped sweat from her eyes and face, noticed small cuts had brought blood to her palms. “Take off that sweater!” Helen screamed at Danny, blood streaked across her cheeks. “Throw it in the river. It ain’t yours to be wearing.”

Ray was down breaking twigs and tossing them into the current, water climbing the legs of his waders. “Get rid of them dogs!” she shrieked at Ray. “Nobody wants to see them dogs. Just let ’em be gone. You hear what I say?” Ray snapped a twig and brought it to his mouth. He waved up with his middle finger. Danny ran past Ray, thigh deep into the raging flood, and he tore the red sweater off over his head, balled it up, and hurled it into a rush of gulls.

Christmas morning, 2007: Helen wore a rain poncho over her coat, wore yellow rubber gloves. She held the lantern to Robert Joakes’s swollen face. Faint plumes of breath trickled from his lips. With a wooden spoon she pried open his mouth, then pushed the spoon and his head tipped backward. She considered, as she had many times before, asking him
why.
But what could he possibly say? What insight could possibly be gleaned? Instead, she inserted the barrel of a shotgun into his mouth. He made noises, not words, gagging on the metal. She set the lantern on the stove, raised her poncho’s hood, turned away her face, and squeezed her gloved thumb over the trigger.

The explosion in the small room rattled the cupboards. A ringing pulsed in Helen’s ears. Joakes had toppled in his chair and lay in the dark of the floor. She worked fast, looking only when she had to, untying his legs and thighs, his hands and chest, blood pooling blackly over the uneven planks. She worried momentarily as to which hand was his shooting hand, then chose his right, and worked his thumb onto the trigger.

She piled the bindings into a garbage bag, along with the blood-splattered poncho and rubber gloves. She left the lantern burning on the table, hurried outside, careful with her footprints, stepping sideways into drifts so the snow would collapse, then on the exposed rocks behind his house, up the hill, breaking the ice and splashing through a tiny brook, then down the bluff to the frozen stream, where she paused atop a granite boulder.

The moon was in its descent, the stars fading. She’d wait for dawn, for pale light to arise and cover her. She thought of Freely’s grandchildren tearing pretty paper from gifts, singing “Away in a Manger” in church. She thought of families gathered around tables thick with holly. In her mind, she tasted honey-glazed ham, scalloped potatoes, macaroons.

But she could not wait for dawn. Her feet were wet, the night bitterly cold. She clutched her collar and limped along the stony banks, and stepping up to enter the prairie she slipped and fell onto the garbage bag of rags and slid until she was out on the frozen stream. The ice popped, but held. Thistles of pain stabbed her toes. She lay on the brittle black ice and could hear water flowing beneath her.

Spring 2008: The men had come down the hill from the shelter and now gathered around the boat. They were solemn, unshaven, shirts rumpled, the pits of Pastor Hamby’s white shirt stained with sweat. The farmer’s body lay in the hull where once had been dogs, Helen’s jacket shrouding his face. The sun was high, the air damp. A new wall of thunderheads and the fur of rain bulged forth in the west.

“You’ll tell the others?” Helen said.

Pastor Hamby nodded. “What can we do for
you
?”

“I need rest,” Helen said, wilting, and almost began to cry from tiredness. “Let me rest awhile.”

Suddenly came the wind, full and strong, and Helen’s coat blew off Keller Lankford and tumbled onto the hillside, exposing his blue bloated face. Helen lunged after her coat. Her ankle gave and she caught herself as she fell. A deacon, Jerry Timlinson, clambered into the boat and covered the dead man’s face with his own jacket, then squinted up at the approach of weather.

Spatterings of rain fell sideways in wind and sunshine. Pastor Hamby and Frank Barker lifted Helen, each with a hand beneath her thigh and another at her back. Slate clouds rowed forward over the sun, its light dappling the hill and then the sunshower was a storm.

The men entered the lightless hall, shirts transparent with rain, Helen riding their arms. “Put me down,” she said, clutching their shirtsleeves. Pale faces emerged from the darkness, Walt Freely and Marilyn, Connie and David Dempsy, the little girl held to his shoulder, everyone she knew, grimly nodding, touching her pant legs, stroking her wrists, some speaking her name with quiet reverence. “Let me down,” she repeated, but they did not, and Helen began to cry. Rain drummed the masonry. Light from the storm laid a greenish glow in the hall. She could not stop herself from crying. They huddled around Helen, silent in the gloam, then the pastor raised his pulpit voice and called for them all to just clear out and leave her be.