Volt: Stories (20 page)

She swung the car around, drove in without slowing, the kids chasing her like dogs. She drew her pistol and strode around the cabin, avoiding the front. Mosquitoes swarmed the back door. Gun poised, she turned the knob, crept inside.

A short dark hall entered onto the main room, lit by a bare-bulbed lamp set on the floor. A young woman lounged on a couch. Dressed in a long black T-shirt, a silver-hoop ring in her nose, she hollered, “Gert!”

The bearded man stepped out from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a little towel. Helen trained the gun on him, screamed for him to get on the ground. The young woman shouted, cursing. The big man didn’t obey. The young woman rose, arms flailing, and again Helen yelled for the man to get on the ground. He stepped hard toward her and she fired.

The man dropped to a knee, gripping his arm. He pulled his hand away and looked at it. No blood. The young woman shrieked and Helen yelled for her to shut up, then shouted at the man to lie on the ground. He did as told, his hands over his head like he’d done this before.

Helen drove a knee between his shoulders and with one hand slapped on a cuff. She holstered her pistol, wrenched his other arm and cuffed it, too. Then Helen jumped off like he was ablaze and redrew her pistol.

With one hand, she helped the man to his feet. His face was scrunched tight, drenched in sweat. The young woman shouted, “I’m calling Daddy Fay. I’m gonna.”

Daddy Fay was Faylon Delmore, Jorgen’s father. Helen knew it was a threat. “You shut your mouth,” Helen told her, and shoved the big man out the back.

“I’ll call him,” the girl cried, as Helen stepped back out into the daylight and mosquitoes. “Don’t you worry, Gert.”

The kids were still around front, jumping up and down, the redheaded teen perched on the cruiser’s hood. To Helen’s surprise, the bearded man hollered, “Get off the lady’s car, Casey.”

The boy hopped off with a gangly dance, flipping the bird with both middle fingers. Helen opened the door to the cruiser, held the man’s head so he wouldn’t bump it on the roof, and ushered him down into the seat.

Helen drove the long way, south of town, to avoid the main drag. The road flanked the Big Squirrel River, its current muddy and frothing, then the new development where all the old houses had been demolished and streets of identical felt-papered frames were erected on the floodplain. Then came the old Victorians, the entire row of houses under repair, their yards planted with fresh sod and saplings.

Soon she turned into the alley behind the brownstone that was the grocery on the bottom floor, the sheriff’s office on the second, her own apartment on top. She stepped out to the scent of grilled meat, and through the side alley saw people gathered in the strip.

Helen escorted Gert, who’d declared nothing beyond his right to say nothing, up into the office. The room was long and spare, the new drywall unpainted, the only two furnishings a desk and two chairs. At the back of the room was a dented metal door, the only thing salvaged from the flood. Gert balked at the jail’s doorway, complained he couldn’t go in when there weren’t no lights. Helen told him to be a big boy and sat him on the cot, the cuffs left on, and closed the door.

Then Helen went down and around into the strip. She stayed tight to the building and slipped into the grocery. Plywood covered the storefront, and she struggled to see, had to hold a soggy magazine to the door to see a grinning hunter on its cover. Down a different aisle, she found scented candles in little glass jars. She sniffed the jars, picked one that smelled like lavender. She found matches behind the cigarette counter, then put the magazine and the candle in a plastic bag, and returned to the jail.

Gert sat where she’d left him. She lit the candle and set it on the floor, tossed the magazine at his feet. “I’ll uncuff you if you behave,” Helen told him. “Move wrong and I’ll Mace you.”

She showed him the spray, and he nodded.

Uncuffed, he stretched his arms and rubbed his wrists.

“Hungry?” Helen asked.

“Fuck yourself,” he said.

She locked him in the cell, then went back down into the road. Much of the town was here, milling and gabbing. At one end of the strip was a horseshoe of grills, with Freely down there cooking burgers and steaks and chicken and fish, long tables in the street covered with buns and chips and sodas. A sign by the grills read LIGHTS-OUT SPECIAL: $
5.

Helen nodded at folks she passed, afraid they’d noticed her swollen lip, worried someone would ask who she had up in the jail. Freely smiled as she approached, hollered at a teen manning a grill to pick the best steak for his sheriff. The old man wobbled over, his arms thrown wide, and though he’d never been much of a drinker Helen could smell the liquor on him.

Freely hugged her. “Sorry about earlier,” he muttered.

Helen nodded, glancing up at the second-floor window, at the salt-white flood line near the roof. She asked the teen for a burger, too, and filled the plates with chips and potato salad and grabbed two sodas, the load precarious as she walked up the road.

Back in the office, she set her plate at her desk, then knocked on the jail and hollered she had food and that he should move to the back unless he wanted to get Maced. She opened the door. Gert stood at the back wall, barely visible in the candle’s light. She set the burger and chips and soda on the floor, asked if he was okay. He said nothing, so again she locked the door.

Helen ate at her desk, chewing steak in the watery light from the windows overlooking the road. She knew there’d be a trial and she thought about the report she’d have to write. She’d fired her gun. It’d been an impulse, and it worried her now, not because it’d be deemed unjustified, but because she was uncertain she’d meant to miss.

Then she wasn’t hungry and sat listening to the people down in the strip, Harriet Meyers singing church songs like love songs. Helen crossed to the window and gazed over the scene. Teens lounged in truck beds. Kids ran with sparklers. Men threw horseshoes in the empty lot where the SuperAmerica once stood. Others talked in the road, and though Helen had once been one of them, she was no longer sure what they said to each other, these people who saw each other day after day, week after week, until they died.

Her cell phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number, thought about letting it go to voice mail, but answered at the last moment.

“Helen?” a woman’s voice asked.

“This is.”

“Winnie Delmore.”

Jorgen’s mother had been a Henderson before she married Delmore, and long ago she and Helen had been in the same class at school. “Been a while, Winnie.”

“Well,” she said, “seems we got a little mess here, Helen. Think we ought to get together and chat?”

“I’d surely like that, Winnie.”

Helen followed Winnie’s directions out into the knobs, down a snaking dirt road, and over hills bunched with sumac and sassafras. Then the road was blocked by a chain drawn taut between two trees. Helen shut down the car. For a long minute, she held her pistol in her lap. I’m just here to chat with an old friend, she thought. She set the gun inside the glove box. But then she felt all the more afraid, and retrieved the gun and snapped it back into her holster.

Helen stepped over the chain and onto a sloping dirt path. Dusky light feebly lit the canopy. The path soon opened onto a grouping of low tattered buildings. Boxes that were beehives filled the yard. A long porch fronted the house, and a portly young man in dead-leaf camos called through a window for his mother.

Helen waited in the yard, eyeing a group of men off in a corrugated shack who stared down into an aluminum crate Helen guessed was an old freezer. Then Winnie Delmore was there, drying her hands on an apron and stepping off the porch.

Helen shook Winnie’s rough hand and they smiled at one another. There’d been a time they’d run in the same circles, swimming at the quarry, hunting mushrooms, drinking gin and Fanta in the Indian caves. Winnie’s face had gone fuller through the cheeks, but her blue eyes, her snaggled smile, were just as Helen remembered.

“How long’s it been?” Winnie asked.

“Too long,” Helen said, and meant it.

Helen followed Winnie into the porch’s shade and through a screen door. The house smelled of kerosene. The electricity was off here, too, and they passed down a long dark hall into a parlor with windows facing west. The sunset leached amber light over everything. Helen sat in an armchair facing Winnie and two young women, one being the girl in black from Jorgen’s cabin. Two others sat back in the shadows, ancient creatures slumped on a love seat, an afghan smoothed across their laps.

Winnie asked about friends she hadn’t seen in a while, smiling, talking about the old days, how things seemed simpler back then. “That’s getting old for you, though, ain’t it?” she said. “Always thinking things were simpler.”

She asked about Helen’s mother.

“Got her over in that Quail Ridge senior home.”

“You put your mama there?”

Helen peeked at the women on the love seat, skeletal and unmoving, one woman’s blond wig crooked on her ashen skull. “Mama don’t know where she’s at. Doesn’t even know me on sight.” Helen forced a grin. “Part of life, I suppose.”

The boy from the porch carried in a silver tray with china cups and a teapot. He set the tray on a delicate little table by Winnie’s chair. Winnie patted his arm. “Tell Daddy Fay he ain’t needed here,” she quietly told him. “He can get to his own business now.”

The boy left and Winnie served the tea. Helen took her cup and saucer as Winnie poured for the others. The room was decorated in pale-blue carpet and flowered wallpaper, a menagerie of taxidermied beasts, a bobcat, a beaver, a turkey with its breast puffed out. Then the women all stared at her, and Helen wasn’t sure if they meant for her to talk.

At last, Winnie said, “Jorgen’s a good boy.”

Helen nodded. “Always liked him.”

“But let me just say a few things. Things you may not understand,” Winnie said. “ ’Cause our Jorgen’s the best of all of us, my opinion. I know a mother shouldn’t have favorites that way, but he’s always been special.” She sipped her tea, glanced off at the parlor’s doorway. “Some different than them others. That’s Jeremiah out on the porch. He’s tame enough, but don’t have much a mind. Different from my oldest. You knew Harlan?”

Helen nodded. Harlan was a known felon, served twice in the state prison for battery and drugs.

“Harlan was hell to raise.” Winnie chewed her lip. “Past few days I been thinking about a coon dog Harlan once kept,” she said. “Skittish blue, would tuck its tail whenever Harlan come around it. Well, Harlan didn’t care for it so skittish, so he beat that dog. To toughen it up, you know. Lots of folks do dogs that way, I suppose. But them beatings just made it cower all the more, which made Harlan all the madder. The more he beat it, the more it shook. Till he took a wrench and broke its skull. Was but fifteen then, still a boy.” Winnie set aside her teacup. “Never been more ashamed of one of my children, the way he done that dog.”

She touched her own cheek, her eyes turned into the window’s light. “You think some are just bad or evil or whatnot, but somewhere along the way they was someone’s baby, suckling the teat like anybody. Then something puts a volt in ’em and they ain’t the same no more. You might think a man like Harlan don’t care much what his mama thinks. But I shunned him and he couldn’t never shake it.” Winnie’s eyes dropped and she crossed her legs, seemed to fold in on herself. Then she looked up, rolled back her shoulders. “You got children?” she asked Helen.

“Never got around to it.”

Winnie nodded. “Didn’t imagine so,” she said. “You was never one took to affection, as I recall.”

Helen eyed her, knowing she’d meant malice.

Winnie glanced at the young woman beside her. “Sheila,” she said, and nodded at a big girl with green-streaked hair that spilled down her shoulders. “Sheila was Harlan’s wife. Is his widow now. Widow come three days.”

Helen watched the girl’s blank expression, trying to understand what she was being told.

“Was Jorgen what killed her husband,” Winnie said, her jaw set firm. “What killed his own brother.” She motioned to the girl Helen saw at the cabin. “Beside Sheila sits Luanne. She’s Jorgen’s girl. Was meant to be married the fourteenth of October. Ain’t that so?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the girl squeaked.

“Never much cared for autumn weddings myself,” Winnie said, sadly, staring hard at Helen. “You see them there beside each other? With what’s between them, sitting there like sisters?”

Helen clutched her saucer and cup, watched them intently.

“This is Delmores,” Winnie said. “We ain’t the savages some say we is. Sometime things go crooked, but good or bad we get it straight. Nothing to concern the law, what with so much else to bother with.”

The light outside was fading. Helen could no longer see Winnie’s eyes. “You say Harlan’s dead?”

Winnie’s head cocked to one side. “Why you’re here, ain’t it?”

“No, it ain’t.”

Winnie inhaled deeply, uncrossed her legs.

“Jorgen missed a court date. Up in the city. Drug charge.”

“Well,” Winnie sighed,
“damn.”
Her head swung to the side, her gaze settling over the younger girls. “We talk to them boys about not getting junked over. Fay’s hard on that, says he catches them boys junked he’ll put ’em under hisself. Harlan was weak on that, running days so junked you could smell it on him. Had to wash him three four times ’fore the smell come off him to be buried.” She raised a long finger. “But not Jorgen. Drugs? No, that ain’t right.” She eyed Jorgen’s girl. “You know about this?”

She fingered her nose ring, shrugged. “Weren’t his.”

“Harlan’s?” Winnie asked.

The girl sniffled, said nothing.

Winnie clasped her hands together, her head bowed like she might pray. “Jorgen had this dog, you see. White pup no bigger than a squirrel. Carried that dog like it was made of eggs. Didn’t want it wandering the woods or getting into nothing, so he kept it tied to the porch, right close to the house. Then Harlan come driving in here all junked over. Damn near hit the porch. Come on up to the house like weren’t nothing happened. Asked if I’d make him fried chicken.” Winnie shook a finger, then her hand became a fist. “
Fried chicken.
Thought of killing him myself. Ain’t ashamed to say it, that dog beneath that truck, just as broken as a thing could be.”