Shelter (1994) (20 page)

Alma wanted company, wanted Delia to join her in the camp of the alarmed, but Delia declined. "You don't listen," Alma hissed at her now, "because I do listen."

"You're dumb to listen," Delia said. "She makes it all up."

"She can't have made up the film strips."

"Someone made them up for her."

"What about James Worth? Did she make him up?"

Delia shrugged. James Worth was a man who said he'd been a prisoner in a Russian slave-labor camp, and he'd written a book with a man in chains on the cover. Somehow Mrs. Thompson-Warner had gotten him to come all the way from Pennsylvania to talk to the girls in heritage class. "Maybe she didn't make him up," Delia admitted, "but she must have made up his hairstyle. He was wearing at least a bottle and a half of Vitalis. His hair looked wet. And he was sweaty. He looked like he'd just been swimming."

"That doesn't mean he was never in Russia." Alma frowned, remembering his squinty eyes. She supposed he squinted because his cell had been dark, and the snow in Siberia was endless and white. He'd worn a suit and tie in the heat of Camp Shelter, and kept his fingers laced together in front of him while he talked, as though he still wore handcuffs. Or maybe they just used rope in Siberia. Alma was certain he was genuine; there was a terrible heaviness about him, in the hunch of his shoulders, in the way he turned his head to look to the side, so slowly. She remembered a line from her speech:
If people aren't free, they can't think.
James Worth was like someone who'd been asleep a long time. He spoke normally, but with such deliberation and weight, as though he'd once forgotten how to talk. Mrs. T. said he'd done a great deal for his country. What did she mean?
We know what President Kennedy told us the day he became the leader of the Free World.
Alma had written that in her speech, but when she thought the words now, she only saw James Worth, how careful he was, like someone who'd had to learn again to move, to smile.

"Something happened to him—we don't know what." Delia sighed. "Look, I'll see you later. I'm not going to sit up here." She walked to the back as Mrs. T. turned on the record player.

Alma took her seat, rustling the thin sheets of her notes. A reedy soprano voice floated through the hall as girls sat down on the benches.
Show me the prison, show me the jail
... It was the voice of an angel, resigned to sorrow. The lights went out and grainy black-and-white picture stills filled the screen: a woman with a guitar on an outdoor stage in front of a crowd, her long, wan, romantic face and straight dark hair. Immediately, Alma wanted to be one of that crowd.
Unfortunately,
read the words across the bottom of the screen,
many of our most popular youth entertainers are Communist-inspired. Many of them have publicly attended Communist meetings.
It was a kind of war, Alma thought, the cold war Mrs. T. talked about, all done with spies. Alma closed her eyes for a moment and saw her mother's mouth, closer than a kiss, saying silently
secret, secret,
and
spy.
But she had never said
spy;
it was a word Alma thought, remembering the big doors of Souders Department Store in Winfield, and watching Nickel Campbell step out of her mother's car after one of their Saturday meetings. Alma saw them pull up in the car again and again, like pictures on a reel. "You shouldn't be in the car together," she'd told Audrey, "lots of women from Gaither shop at Souders. I see them all the time." It wasn't true, but after that Audrey always drove up at exactly twelve noon, alone. Alma would watch for the car, numb like a spy must be numb, seeing familiar things look strange.

Now she sneaked a look at Mrs. Thompson-Warner, who stood watching the film from her usual position beside the record player. Mrs. T. wore old-ladies' jersey dresses, slick to the touch, patterned in small prints, buttoned down the front with a fabric belt around the waist. Mrs. T. was big and the flowered dresses were vast, like fields. Her voice was large too, deep and shrill at once, and her shoes had ankle straps. Even in the heat she wore silk stockings, and her seams were always straight. The whispered swish of her heavy thighs touching as she walked was a sound not unlike the repetitive soughing of wind in some hidden leafy place. Mrs. T. really was like a forest, with her faint patchouli smell and her clothes that were printed with the images of tiny leaves and curlicued creepers. Her skin was so pale she looked chartreuse and her long red hair escaped strand by strand from the tight French twist that bound it. Her hairpins, Alma knew, were sterling silver; she used exactly six, and all had been wedding gifts.

Alma had last week fetched a lantern to the room of Mrs. Thompson-Warner; to Alma it was unthinkable that Mrs. T. actually slept at the camp, but she did, in a small room behind the kitchen of the dining hall. There, according to the counselors, she was accorded the special privileges of coffee, hot rolls, and jam before breakfast ("served on a tray, don't you know"), and an electric fan. The room had a door that led into the kitchen, and another that led into the dining hall; maybe it had been a cook's bedroom. The one window had no screen, but it had sheer curtains Mrs. T. had brought with her. She'd also brought her own mirror, a large round one in a gilt frame. She'd stood before it, pinning her hair, when Alma was admitted with the lantern. One of the pins dropped and Alma picked it up, observing at close range Mrs. T.'s silk-sheathed toes. Thanking Alma, Mrs. T. confided that she couldn't manage without her pins, made for her by a Bond Street silversmith and given her by her husband's family at the time of her marriage. She spoke of her marriage as an inalienable, long-past ceremonial event, like a coronation. She seemed to pretend her husband had gone down at sea or perished in a courageous struggle. Now Mrs. T. lifted the needle of the old record player and began the song again.
Show me the hobo who sleeps out in the rain
...Mrs. T. stood contemplating the film, pleased and stern, a tense smile playing about her lips. Watching her, Alma thought people could be convinced of anything as long as they didn't know the truth, or didn't remember it. She wondered if Mrs. T. remembered the truth about things that had happened to her, if she had secrets she'd made herself forget. Nickel Campbell was gone and no one but Alma and her mother knew the secret about him. Audrey would stay at home now, wouldn't she, and not leave like she'd said she might; Wes would stay, though he might leave for a week, two weeks, as always, and not say where he went. Ten years would pass. Lenny would grow up and go away. Alma, in her turn, would go away. She tried to imagine being grown up: all she knew would be layered over, made less sharp, made softer, older, buried. She gripped the bench and held on.

The singer's voice ebbed and flowed, punctuated only by a muffled banging of pots and pans in the kitchen. Mrs. Carmody would be cleaning up breakfast or starting lunch; the swinging doors to her domain trembled as usual. On the far side of the same wall was the door to Mrs. T.'s room. Alma gazed absently beyond the screen and saw Mrs. T.'s door open slightly; she thought she glimpsed Buddy's round, pixie face before it disappeared, but she wasn't sure. She was nearly asleep and might have dreamed him; she was never sure what Buddy was, the way he hung on the edges of things, skinny and wispy, there and not there. The clear tremolo of the song continued to float behind the grainy, subtitled stills.
There but for fortune.
What was fortune? Sleeping, Alma looked for Mrs. T. but couldn't find her. Even in dreams, she couldn't think of Mrs. T. as a being involved in real life, walking along streets—not like she imagined, in stark detail as her eyelids fluttered, the sounds from her parents' bedroom, or her father's rough touch as he shoved Audrey away from the refrigerator when she planted herself between him and his beer. He would tell them to call an AA meeting, Audrey and Alma, two girls, teetotalers. At this time of morning, Audrey would be hanging out the wash in the yard, in the corner where the clothesline was strung. Alma heard the hymn-like, sorrowful song and behind it sheets were flapping, snapping, filling with air and billowing. Alma dreamed there was wind at home when there was not even air to breathe in Camp Shelter. Audrey was half hidden as the sheets twisted, dropped, flew again, her naked arms upraised, her hands urgently working. Alma heard the wind as though surrounded, like her mother. She saw Audrey's hands pinning the double-hemmed sheets with wooden pins as the flapping cloth tugged hard and tried to sail away, waft like flags over the green of the spring earth. The ground was spongy with water and the dream smelled of water, and when the lights went on Alma was shocked to recognize the electric smell of the projector. The fan had failed again, the projector was in pre-burn, the bulb had gone out.

"We seem to have technical difficulties," Mrs. T. was announcing at the front of the room. She fanned the projector with her wide, pale hands before she remembered to turn off the switch. The hum of the machine died away.

"Is it going to catch fire?" Alma heard herself ask the question in a faraway, disinterested voice.

"No, of course not." Mrs. T. looked at them brightly and clapped her hands together once. "Now then, girls, what do we mean when we say 'Communist-inspired'? We mean that certain entertainers, though they may not be members of the Communist Party, have attended Communist meetings or publicly expressed support for Communist points of view."

"What's a Communist point of view?" someone asked.

Mrs. T. nodded, pleased. "A Communist point of view is the opinion of a person who believes Communism to be the best form of government, and who wishes to see all governments become Communist. Or a Communist point of view may be held by an uninformed person who has been duped by a Communist individual into believing that that individual is different from Communists in China or Russia."

Alma shifted on her seat. Far back along the shadowed rear wall, she thought she saw the doorknob to Mrs. T.'s room turning first one way, then the other, as though someone were trying to get out. Unaccountably, her heart leapt. The door quivered and was pushed ajar just slightly. One bright eye appeared in the opening, so near the floor that Alma thought the creature about to crawl forth would be an animal, scuttling on all fours. The eye was like a little jewel, a subtle glitter, and Buddy's small face emerged behind it. He held so still that no one saw him at first. Alma held still as well, looking past Mrs. T. as Buddy edged into the dining hall thirty feet behind her and silently closed the door. Glancing at no one, he began to move rapidly along the floor in a cat-like crouch, huddling near the wall, his body parallel with the dark baseboards. He wagged his fuzzy, yellow, close-cropped head in time to his own quick movements and was utterly silent. A few girls had seen him and began to titter.

"Certainly," Mrs. T. said, "it
is
laughable. It's ridiculous. And ridiculous that some Americans find it fashionable to admire Fidel Castro, who promised to liberate the people of Cuba and instead enslaved them, just a few miles from our own national borders!" She paused for emphasis and regarded her audience as they responded in a chorus of ragged giggles. She lowered her voice and said flatly, "I assure you, it's no joke."

Helpless, the girls laughed. Alma lowered her head and bit her lip, trying to stop. It came to her that Buddy was both an animal and an enchanted creature, nearly always alone, appearing and disappearing around the camp like a small ghost the wind blew through and lifted up at will. She wished she were like Buddy, so strange no one could own her, and she laughed harder, her eyes tearing, her stomach sore.

Mrs. Thompson-Warner looked over her shoulder to her left and caught sight of Buddy as he reached the corner and began moving straight along the wall to the double doors of the dining hall. She crossed the floor in several heavy strides and hauled him up by his arm. "Little
boy,
" she said, "do not
ever
interrupt my class again. Go into the kitchen and stay with your mother and
obey
her from this moment onward!"

Buddy seemed to dangle in her grasp, still in motion, straining for the doors with his eyes. He kept his fists clinched and then tilted his head to look at Mrs. T. He gazed at her for some seconds, staring, his mouth pressed into a tight smile. The girls quieted and Mrs. Thompson-Warner released him. He seemed to hop in place, then he skittered across the floor and was hidden by one of the swinging doors to the kitchen, which moved ever so slightly in response to his entrance. Alma looked after him longingly. She thought she could still smell his dusty, woodsy smell. He didn't care about the Russians, even if he was a sort of spy, always trailing someone, looking around with his whole peculiar, watchful face—not just his eyes but his raised brows too, and his little pursed mouth, and his short-cropped hair that stood on end.

Mrs. T. folded her arms and looked at the girls. "As I was saying, Cuba is no joke. You may remember just last fall, when Castro and the Russians were ready to attack us with missiles launched from Cuban bases." She paused as the children grew more silent. "How many of you had air-raid drills at school, in case the Russians attacked?"

Alma glanced back at Delia and raised her hand. The sixth grade had been herded into the girls' bathroom and told to crouch along the cement-block walls with their arms over their heads. Delia wouldn't raise her hand, but Alma heard her call out in a loud voice, "We had drills, and at recess the boys pretended to be Russians and knocked the girls over."

"The boys are Americans and they had better
be
Americans, even in games, because I assure you, the Russians are not pretending." Mrs. T. held one finger up and jabbed at the air to emphasize each word. "Certain Americans have
vanished without a trace!
"

Alma's face burned. She remembered how Nickel Campbell had looked in his casket at the funeral home when her mother had sent her in to pay respects and sign the book "Mrs. Swenson and Alma." They'd gone early in the morning one day before school, when none of the family were there, and Audrey had stayed in the car and cried and said she couldn't look at him and Alma would have to sign.