Volt: Stories (2 page)

4

Winslow kicked through the barley. Hill after hill he hiked, eyes always on the next knob. At the edge of his field, he allowed himself to glance back over his shoulder. He’d trod a path of shadow through the crop. Only the silver dome of his silo was visible above the ridge.

He hopped a ditch and pushed between rows of chest-high corn. Atop a bald knob, Winslow found the brightest light on the horizon, what he thought was from a radio tower, but was actually Venus low in the night, and decided he’d only rest when it burned directly overhead.

He crossed a reeking field of mint, a cow pasture, slogged through a muddy pea field. Hours of steady travel found him passing homes of people he’d never met.

On and on he went until, walking through the ropy branches in a grove of willow trees, speckles of dawn’s half-light warmed his face. Winslow rubbed his thighs, considered turning back. But I’ll snap, he thought. Hurt Sadie again. I’ll just take a day to get my head right. Sadie’ll understand. It’s for her. For us.

Winslow needed wilderness, needed solitude. But wherever he turned there was a dirt road, the whir of a sewage treatment plant, a bait store’s roof winking in the sun. By noon he stood on a bluff above the wide river that marked the state line. He sidetracked an hour before a rusty trestle gave passage to the other side. Winslow peered between rotting ties as he crossed over the churning brown water, clutching girders until safely aground again.

His ankles were swollen, the balls of his feet blistered. He rested beneath the bridge, stuffed grass into his boot heels and tightened his laces. He hobbled along the berm until pawpaw smothered the shore and the hills seemed untouched. Winslow bulled through overgrowth, limbs scraping his cheeks, burrs biting his socks, his neck and forearms barked by brambles.

Deep in the interior, he rested atop a hardwood knob overlooking a thread of brook. Sunlight bucked on the water. Though his body was still, his mind reeled in flashes: a child’s boot upright in a rut; a nurse cutting away Sadie’s bloody hair; a man’s crooked finger in his face.

Dusk descended and the moon crawled into the trees. Winslow crouched in nightshade, his pocketknife drawn. He figured Sadie had called the neighbors looking for him, possibly called the police, and imagined her working needlepoint and listening for footsteps on the porch. He wept and listened to the woods come to life and didn’t sleep.

Dawn bloomed gray green, thunderheads shrouding the hills. It was time to go home, but Winslow’s feet were very sore, the walk back so far.

What’ll I tell Sadie? he wondered. That I didn’t trust you to understand my tears? That I thought you’d see me as weak for the rest of our goddamn lives if I wept just a little? His tiredness was a ballast around his neck, and Winslow tucked his arms into his bibs, eyes closed, and stood that way atop the wooded hill.

Drizzle tapped his eyelids. The rain quickened to a downpour and Winslow scrambled beneath a sandstone ledge. Rain stung sideways, the hill’s grass blown flat. The brook slowly swelled, roiling into whitecaps. Mud crept up the slope. When the sun finally burned through the clouds, Winslow was famished. He searched the woods and found bushes overspread with opal berries. He greedily ate them, couldn’t swallow them fast enough.

Soon his stomach seized. He vomited. Once again, he shivered with fever. His skin steamed. Winslow stripped naked and, holding an exposed tree root, allowed his body to drag in the cold brook. The gap was lost in shadow, and clutching the root, brown water rushing about his chin, he saw a figure atop the hill, the train man backlit by dusk.

The man stood away from the tree, held up a hand, and waved down. Winslow felt as if something giving chase had finally caught him. He shut his eyes and waited for a hand to pull him from the water and drag him back home. Winslow refused to open his eyes. On and on he waited, but the expected pull never came.

Winslow woke covered in mud. It was a new morning, the sun scorching, the brook receding into its banks. Winslow climbed the hill, found no footprints, no evidence at all of the train man’s visit. But the feeling of being pursued remained. He quickly dressed and fled south. At the base of each ridge he thought of Sadie and felt he should backtrack, should begin the long walk home. But then his weary knees lifted, and he stepped up one rock, and then the next.

Deep in the night, after walking all day and on through the evening without a bite to eat, he came upon a yellow tent beside a white truck. Winslow shooed raccoons from a picnic table, devoured stale hot dog buns. Someone moved in the tent, and Winslow stuffed his pockets with pretzel twists, ran clutching a red box of graham crackers.

He raced without direction through the woods, then the trees opened and he crossed a highway, headlights covering him, brake lights flashing, and the land changed again as he dashed headlong into a dark treeless canyon.

Weeks he wandered, awake day and night, eating berries and cress, beetles and worms, an occasional fish, a groundhog caught with his bare hands. Though Winslow’s mind hadn’t reconciled, his body had evolved. At first he’d always been tired, but now he walked vigorously, all day and without pain. His limbs grew sleek, stomach ribbed with granite, beard and hair tangled and sunbleached, skin baked into a russet hide.

The first leaves began to turn and Winslow wondered if maybe his grief would fade with the season. Sunburn no longer affected him, and as the autumn air cooled he did not shiver, and therefore believed he’d tapped some vein man had long since lost beneath quilts and down comforters.

Not a day went by he didn’t consider going home. Some days he’d backtrack a mile, sometimes longer, before a quake of anguish turned him away again.

One tin-skied day, the rain upon hollyhock conjured the scent of Sadie’s perfume. Winslow ran weeping in the direction he believed led home, ran all afternoon and into the night, stopping only when confronted by a wall of peaks. There was no way around; the first time through had taken two full days to scale and descend.

Winslow dropped to his knees. In his periphery he glimpsed a presence, and believed the train man had again found him. But when he turned he saw only a scraggly pine rising from the rock.

Winslow hurled stones at the little tree. Wrung its trunk as if it were a throat. He flailed and throttled the sapling to the ground. Winslow hugged its limbs and tried to weep, but was, at last, dry of tears. Under a pale moon, Winslow knew he no longer belonged to the world of men and would forever roam the woods as a lost son of the civil.

5

Winslow trailed loons to a stumpy lake and sat on a log, watching the shallows and plotting to catch his supper. The setting sun nestled in the treetops. Beyond the loons, packs of pintails and canvasbacks bobbed on red-tinged water.

A flurry of ducks took wing. They flew toward the sun and banked high above. A shotgun fired upshore. A duck dropped from the chevron, tumbling down and down to thud in the cattails at Winslow’s feet. Its head shimmered like green metal, one wing broken beneath its body. He lifted the bird, its neck flopped over his fingers, body still warm, tail feathers damp.

Quickly came a breaking in the reeds and a hound had Winslow’s arm in its teeth. The dog thrashed its head. Winslow dropped the duck, yanked the dog up into a bear hug. The hound snapped at Winslow’s face and Winslow squeezed and the dog yelped.

Orange flashed from the reeds. A hunter swung his rifle, its stock exploding against Winslow’s jaw. Then Winslow was on his back, his vision blurred. He rose to flee. He staggered, his legs failing as cattails rushed at his face.

Winslow woke to sparks in his vision. Searing pain spiked his eyes. He lay in the hull of a metal boat, his hands and feet bound with fishing line, his jaw so swollen he couldn’t lift his head.

Clouds slid passing, the sky graying to night. Soon came cypress branches draped with moss, a dock’s haloed light. The hull scraped the shore. The hunter dragged the boat onto land, each tug a sledge to the spike in Winslow’s skull.

Solitary minutes passed, but the pain in his face kept Winslow from trying to move. Then three men stood over him. One at each elbow, the other at his boots, they lifted him from the boat and carried him to a truck bed stinking of fish.

They drove slowly, but the road was rutted and Winslow moaned against the jostling. They hauled him into a tiny stone building, onto a cot in a cell with metal bars.

They cut his bindings. Winslow didn’t struggle. The men retreated to folding chairs outside the bars. The man in hunter’s orange was rotund and horse-faced, his cheeks ruddy and whiskerless. Beside him, a man sat cross-legged, dark gouges for eyes, dressed head to toe in lawman’s tan. The third, his old flesh the same color as his smoke-stained dentures, said slowly and loudly, “This—is—Barclay—County.”

Winslow tried to speak, to say who he was, but his jaw was destroyed, his words gibberish.

“See them eyes?” the old man said to the others. “That boy’s wild as the wind.”

A gaunt man with pomaded hair carried in a black satchel and stood beside Winslow’s cot. The lawman was there, too. He used his pistol to part the beard on Winslow’s chin. The doctor squinted over Winslow. “It’s busted terrible,” he said to the lawman. “Hand me my bag.”

Winslow searched the man’s eyes for intent.

“Easy now, fella,” the doctor said down to him, like calming a mule. Winslow felt alcohol cool his biceps. A needle jabbed him.

He stared up at the cracked ceiling. A moth flitted about a light shielded in wire. Soon the light blurred, the moth became lambent confetti, and his heavy lids closed.

6

Daylight shone through a barred window high up the wall. Winslow batted his eyes, tried to focus himself. Tiny wires secured shut his mouth. He gingerly ran his fingers over the wires, over his teeth. He knew it was over. He wondered what would happen to him now.

The doctor entered the cell. In his shirt pocket was a prescription pad. Winslow lifted his hand, pointed at the pad, wiggled his hand denoting his desire to write. The doctor glanced to the door, where the lawman stood. The lawman tapped a thumb against his teeth. He nodded to the doctor. Winslow took the pad and pen from the doctor.

He wrote:
I MEAN NO HARM

The truth would send him home. He couldn’t go home. So Winslow wrote that his name was Red, that he’d been a rancher before some big company bought his cattle and cut him loose. At some point he’d decided to hike the woods.
BEEN LOST A LONG TIME.
As the doctor read aloud, Winslow had the sensation Sadie stood just beyond the cell bars, hearing all these lies. He couldn’t fight it off and began to cry.

The lawman patted Winslow’s boot. “Any family we can call?”

Winslow pressed the pen point to his lips. He thought long on how to respond. Finally, he scrawled:
ALL DEAD

He heard only murmurs of their discussion out in the hall. Then the lawman, whose name was Bently, came in and motioned at the hunter trailing him, explained that since Ham had busted Winslow’s jaw he’d volunteered to take him in. Winslow could stay in a trailer at Ham’s farm. If he felt up to it, he could work the turkeys, make a few bucks.

“Just until you get back on your feet,” Bently said. “But you’re a free man. Can leave now if you’d like.”

Winslow stared out the cell window. The sky was a dark, wet snow dripping down the glass. He knew it’d be tough in the woods with his jaw broke. Ham, eyes full of regret, smiled at him.

Winslow scratched the pad as if etching the word in stone:
WORK.

7

They drove crumbling roads up into the hills. Winslow wore a new jacket, overalls, socks, and boots, a sack filled with canned soup in his lap, all bought by Ham, an advance from his first paycheck.

“Turkey’s the future,” Ham said, having talked without pause the entire way from town. “Folks want
healthy.
They want turkey. Nutritious as an apple. More versatile than chicken. It’s the future, buddy, and that ain’t just talk. Got fifty ways to put turkey in the place of beef and pork—” and he began going one by one down the list.

Soon they turned onto a dirt lane between leafless stands of ash and bounced into a clearing that was the farm. A corral of turkeys sprang to life, black feathers shifting, the birds shrieking. Beyond the corral sagged a weathered barn. They drove behind it and parked beside a silver trailer wedged between spruce trees, the trailer vertically dented from the trees, which bowed over the fuselage like weary giants.

“Keep her here to block the wind,” Ham said, like an apology. “Don’t look like much, but she’ll keep the cold off you.”

The warmth of blankets made Winslow uneasy. Back in the woods, he’d constantly been gripped by figuring how to keep a fire, how to fend off mosquitoes, how to find water and know it was clean. Now Winslow’s mind teemed with thoughts of home.

This time of year, Ced Raney always had an Oktoberfest party in his barn, and Winslow worried how people spoke of him in his absence. He thought of Jon Debuque, a bachelor who’d had eyes for Sadie ever since high school, and imagined Sadie crying in her rocker and Jon stroking her hair, telling her he’d make everything all right.

Winslow threw off the covers and rushed out of the trailer. Icy wind braised his skin. The frozen dirt burned his toes. Winslow stepped to the spruce. He held a branch and crawled beneath the limbs. Lying on his back, trembling on the bed of needles, Winslow peered up into the tree’s cold wavering guts.

At daybreak, truck lights bobbled into the clearing. Winslow was relieved the night was done. He hustled into the trailer and dressed, and met Ham as he climbed from his truck, as did a boy, a teenaged version of Ham, and an ample woman in a denim jumper. Ham introduced them as Jim and Sheila, his son and his wife. Winslow shook Sheila’s hand, and Jim stared dumbly at Winslow’s wired jaw.

Winslow followed Ham into the corral. Turkeys woke gobbling as Ham kicked them out of the way. They entered the old barn. A large section of roof was missing. Through the gap the snow came gently down. Ham turned his face to the sky, tried to catch snowflakes on his tongue. Then he smacked his lips, looked over at Winslow.

“Red?” he said. “How you feel about killing?”