Volt: Stories (21 page)

The tremor in Winnie’s voice unnerved Helen. Gently, she set her cup on the floor and settled her weight on the balls of her feet.

Winnie slowly stood, the room dark but for a shim of twilight across the ceiling. “Ain’t no law can touch what’s been done here,” she said. “You go on now, Helen. Go on and leave us be.”

Helen’s eye twitched and she tried to still her fear, patted the air with her hands. “Just here to talk, Winnie. That’s all. Can’t we sit back down, work this out.”

Winnie put her face in her hands, heaved deep quaking breaths. “I’m sorry, Helen. I’m just so sorry,” she sobbed. “I’ve buried my firstborn, and now my most precious child is out there like an animal. Just found him ourselves yesterday. Out there running the woods, eating bugs, taking after livestock. I’m afraid he’s broke.” Her body shook as she began to cry. “He come home from that war and it weren’t him no more. Oh,” she moaned, “I miss him. Miss him when he’s right there in the same room. Even when he’s in my arms he ain’t there.” She pounded a fist against her thigh. “My precious baby and now he’s broke. Broke and running wild and my heart’s broke and there ain’t no goddamn law to put that right.”

Helen stepped to Winnie, grabbed her wrists. “I can help.”

Winnie shook her head. “You can’t.”

“I can find him. I know where he’ll be.”

Winnie’s eyes rose up searing. “Then what? Put him away like you done your mama?”

Helen flinched at the words.

“Help how?” Winnie’s eyes bulged in the darkness. “Shoot at him? Lock him up like you done his cousin? His cousin what only come to look after a wounded soul just a little.”

Fury overtook Winnie’s face. She yanked her hands free and slapped Helen stiff across the cheek. Helen stumbled a step backward, touched her stinging jaw. Then she felt a collapsing, a weight in her chest, the gravity of her swollen heart. Her nostrils quivered. Her eyes melted. She couldn’t let them see her cry. Helen pushed past Winnie, tears slicking her cheeks as she dashed down the lightless hall and banged out the screen door.

She leapt off the porch, landing hard and falling, then rising and racing through the beehives and into the dark chute through the woods and down the drive.

At the end of the drive, Helen stepped over the chain, rushed to her car. The windows were shattered, the tires slashed. The dashboard was a mess of wires, the radio gone. Struck sober, weeping, Helen pulled out her cell phone. She stared long at the glowing numbers, but couldn’t figure who to call.

Winnie howled from back in the darkness, yelling Helen’s name. Helen closed the phone, wiped her eyes. Her cheek burned to the touch. Winnie called again, closer now, and Helen briefly read the stars to get her bearings, then broke into the trees.

Helen ran through the woods, glancing back, again and again, into black briar and boles. The stars were blocked by trees and she navigated the hollows by memories made in daylight. She figured if she just kept going she’d find it, and then she did, the swath in the woods cut long ago, a gully cleared for power wires.

The wires bowed silent above her as she followed their path. Soon the wires flanked a field. Helen walked a fallow corrugate at the field’s edge, the wires split off to wooden poles and then to a dark house atop a little rise. Helen kept her distance, crossed a rusted metal plank over the irrigation ditch, stayed with the wires through Gunnar Stovelund’s low field of wheat. Behind Mavis Lott’s place, llamas waggled their ears, their long necks bent as Helen rested against a tarred wooden pole.

Tower to tower she trod, down through flood-ravaged woods, fingers of moonlight fanning through leafless trees, clothes and feed sacks in the jigging branches, a shower curtain swaying like a spirit. Trees uprooted left sodden bunkers, roots thick as thighs corkscrewing out through the darkness. Debris everywhere, an orange traffic barrel, a picnic table overturned, plastic shopping bags rustling in the briar.

Helen waved away mosquitoes, climbed a slope with the urgency of knowing where she was, hooking her elbows around trunks, hauling herself up. Soon she stood on a ridge, out of breath against the leg of a power tower, a single cloud covering the moon, a blush of light from a window of the stone farmhouse on a far hilltop the only light that was not stars.

Helen emerged from the stand of hickory and into the pasture. Cows stood silent as she climbed through them, asleep on their feet as the history in their blood instructed. At the edge of the yard, Helen paused, steadying her heart, quieting her lungs, then scurried past a birdbath and a beneath a crabapple tree to stand against the house.

Like a thief, she slid behind a hedgerow and crouched under the window. Helen peeked over the sill. Candles lit the room. She could see old Moss Strussveld on the sofa, his arm dangled over the armrest, his fingers nearly touching the floor. He still wore his shirt buttoned at his throat, his straw hat tipped over his face. Helen could see his wife there beside him, a stout woman in a dark patterned dress, reading aloud from a book.

Though the window was open Helen could not hear the woman’s voice. For a hushed minute, she watched. Then, with great care, Helen lowered herself to the dirt. Moonlight glazed the house’s stones. Power wires stretched from the roof and out into the night. Helen’s face ached, her sternum throbbed, her eyes straining to stay open as she settled in for the wait.

Helen stirred upon hearing a scuttle in the pasture. She’d sat for a long time. Pain tore through her tender chest as she turned onto a knee to stand. Through the window she saw the room in the house was now dark. She heard the cows lowing, bawling, and Helen stepped out from the hedgerow and crossed the yard to the edge of the hill.

The moon was well past meridian, bright and full, and down there, bathed in its light, ran a shadow, cows scattering, a figure throwing itself onto a cow’s back. The cow cried, bucking. The figure was thrown, then rose again, chasing down another, planting his heels and twisting a calf’s neck until it fell. Helen stood transfixed, cows rearing, grunting, the figure charging into their necks, shoving their heads, mounting one and riding it until it dropped, the man heaving, then staggering as if drunk to clutch the next about the neck, letting it drag him up the hill. Then the man’s grip gave and he flopped to the ground and didn’t rise. The cows lowed, trotting to gather in the darkness near the woods.

Helen looked behind her at the little stone house. The old man stood there in the window. She wasn’t sure he could see her and didn’t wave, merely turned and sidestepped down the hill.

For some time, she watched from just beyond the boy’s reach, his face pressed into the hillside, his head below his boots, his body quaking ragged breaths. Helen said his name, but he didn’t budge. She walked to his side, stood over him, his back slashed with scars, dotted with bruises, a gash along the base of his shaved head.

Helen sat on the ground beside him. The boy moaned, his breathing deep and lurching. She lay a hand between his shoulder blades. His skin burned and Helen let her palm take his heat.

Jorgen Delmore turned to Helen’s touch. He lay his head in her lap, whimpering, his skin seeming to vibrate as she caressed his back, blood crackling through her own throbbing veins, and in a blink she drew up her eyes to see the lights, guttering in the distance far below, the electric lights of town shining in the darkness.

Delmore went without struggle, and together they plodded down the pasture hill. They followed the trail of power wires, skirted an algae-scummed pond, followed a stream that gurgled beneath an old stone bridge that shouldered the road. Once on the road to town, the parched breeze wafting the scent of fertilizer, Delmore asked, “Ain’t you got a car?”

“It’s broke,” Helen said.

The road split fields planted so late with corn the stalks were no higher than a crotch. Seeing over the fields to the houses, lights bright here and there, the world seemed small.

“You missed your trial,” Helen said.

“Oh.”

“The marshal’s to take you in. Be here at sunup.”

The boy nodded. With his head shaved, he looked ancient. He smelled like turned earth. They walked side by side, down the crumbled asphalt and between the sleeping homes. A light was on in Henry Jamison’s front parlor. Helen could see flowers out on the dinner table, a china cabinet against the wall. A light shone behind lace curtains in the Bressons’ kitchen window, a light on in Treet Haskell’s garage. They passed the Baptist church, its roof wrapped in tar paper, scaffolding surrounding the frame of its new steeple. The road sloped and banked, then flattened. The Old Fox Tavern lay dormant, its windows and doors boarded over. A raccoon trotted out of the gravel lot and crossed the road. Then Helen could see the lights from the brownstones.

They walked up the strip, the trash barrels brimming, cans and bottles lining one curb, the barbeques hunkered down at the far end. The diner’s roof sign was burning red. The grocery’s lights were on, too, light pouring onto the walkway through its glass door, slashes showing at the edges of the plywood filling the window. Helen had the keys to the store, asked Jorgen if he wanted anything.

“Could use a beer.”

Helen entered the store and wove back to the beverage cooler. The freezers had switched on, the fans humming behind the glass. She grabbed a six-pack of Bud, saw the ice cream down the way. She looked a moment, took up a box that displayed a rainbow of popsicles. It’d been a while since she’d smoked, but she pocketed a pack of menthols from behind the register, put the rest in a paper sack, then shut off the lights and locked up the store.

Delmore sat on the curb, a little tabby cat nuzzling his fingers. She handed him a beer and he thanked her. They crossed to the side alley and took the stairs up into the sheriff’s office, the door thrown wide, the lights left on. The jail door lay on the floor, broken off its hinges. Light from the cell softened the shadows of the main room. The place smelled like lavender.

Helen pulled her desk chair around to the window, pulled another chair for Delmore, and they sat looking out at the diner’s red sign tinting the rooftop across the road. Helen got herself a popsicle, gave one to Delmore. It’d melted and refrozen and it took a while to pick the paper clean. She lit a cigarette and took a long draw, then licked the popsicle, and that seemed about perfect.

Delmore bit his popsicle, too, and in the room’s light she could see just how filthy he was, smeared in muck, grass stains on his forearms, cuts across his sunburned forehead. Helen licked her popsicle again, was suddenly exhausted. She sobbed once, then felt as if she were shriveling, like a stabbed tire leaking air. She tried to breathe, gritted her teeth to stifle it all. Delmore stared out the window. Helen drew long on the cigarette, breathed, drew again, then snuffed the cigarette on her boot heel.

She slowly released the smoke, said, “Sorry.”

He bit his blue popsicle, said nothing.

Helen wiped her eyes on her shoulder, watched Delmore suck on a chunk of ice. “You remember my mama?” she asked him.

He turned his eyes to her.

“She ain’t well. Not at all.”

“I liked her.”

“I ain’t well, neither,” Helen said. “Maybe none of us are.”

He nodded.

She looked out at the night, studied their reflections in the window’s glass, two figures lost in the stars, the moon not the moon but a white globe of light hung above their heads. Jorgen held the beer in one hand, the popsicle in the other. He drank from the beer, rested the can on his knee.

“Back in the army,” he said, “had this sergeant who was kind of a squeaky type. Had these little round glasses. Always trying to get me to read this or that. Nice fella. Everybody liked him, I guess. One day we had some shit go down. A sniper. Lost three of our own, just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Then we was all just sitting around, getting drunk. Sarge comes up in the bunch of us, says there’s two worlds. One world was like it was back home, where folks ate cheeseburgers and kids had sleepovers and ball games and people went to work and got angry over stupid shit that didn’t matter. Like their TV ain’t no good, or they ain’t got the right sneakers. Some shit like that.” He held his popsicle stick to his lips. “But then there’s another world, where folks ain’t got a goddamn thing, and these motherfuckers’ll try any damn thing to blow your ass to dust. Sarge says it was up to us to keep them worlds apart, and if we thought shit that happened over there wouldn’t make it back to some little girl’s sleepover then we had our heads full-way up our asses.”

Jorgen bit the popsicle stick, then eyed the tooth marks in the wood. His face sagged. “Supposed to rally us, I guess.” He shook his head, stared at the top of his beer. “But then I had to go back out that next day and the next and all I come to think on was how I ain’t never had no sleepovers or ball games or none of that shit, and didn’t none of it make a damn lick of sense.”

Popsicle juice dripped down Helen’s hand. She licked the heel of her palm, tossed the popsicle in the wastebasket. Then she rose and stepped to the window. She leaned her shoulder against the glass, glanced back at Delmore. His head hung low, his lips blue from the ice. He was just a boy, should be swimming in the quarry, smooching girls out in the Indian caves.

“My mama showed you how to mount a bird proper. That’s something you had.”

He rubbed his cheek. “Forgot about that.”

“I still have that pheasant somewhere.”

“Was a long time ago.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

Delmore chewed the popsicle stick, rested his chin on his hand.

“Mama used to work three jobs,” Helen said, maybe not even talking to Delmore. “Gave more time to others than her own. Raised myself mostly. When she was home, she’d be feeding the animals or baking something, hoeing the sweet corn. I thought she was crazy.” Helen looked at her hands, callused and bruised. “Back when I was just a teen and full of piss I was mad at her about something or another. I remember her darning a pair of stockings and I says to her, ‘Why don’t you ever take a goddamn break? Enjoy life for a while?’ Her eyes were sleepy and she barely looked at me, says, ‘Can’t go around with holes in your stockings.’ So I says to her, ‘What the hell’s it matter? Keep your shoes on won’t nobody know there’s a hole in your stocking.’” Helen grunted a sad laugh. “She had this look you didn’t want to get and I got it then, and she says, ‘That the kind of woman you gonna be, Helen-Marie? The kind what walks around knowing they’s holes in her stocking?’”