Volt: Stories (3 page)

8

The turkeys were so loud Winslow hadn’t heard the boys enter the barn. He carried a bird under his arm and watched Ham’s son, Jim, lead several boys up a ladder. One by one, they disappeared into the loft.

All morning he’d worked without a break. Pegs all along the back wall were hung with bleeding carcasses. Then Winslow stepped to the block and threw down the bird. He lifted a cleaver, chopped its neck. Its head fell into a bucket and its body flailed, flailed, fluttered to still.

Something wet struck Winslow’s cheek. He heard laughter from above. He looked up, found the boys silhouetted against the hole in the roof. One in a yellow cap waved to Winslow. The boy hawked, spat again. All the boys laughed. Winslow kept his eyes on that yellow cap. He raised the cleaver high. Off came the turkey’s feet.

At lunchtime, Winslow walked out into the corral. The boys were waiting for him. He passed cautiously through the pack. The one in the yellow cap stepped forward. He was lanky but well muscled, acne pocking his cheeks. “Pleased to meet you, new guy,” he said. He gave a snaggled grin, extended his hand.

Winslow moved to shake his hand. The boy lunged to punch Winslow’s gut. Winslow tensed and the fist struck awkward. The boy fell clutching his arm. Winslow knelt over the boy, who wailed, rolling about, the bone of his broken wrist pressing the skin.

Ham raced through the birds and screamed, “What the hell’s going on?”

Jim pointed at the boy on the ground. “Was Harold’s idea,” he told his father. “Harold wanted to see how the new man would holler with his mouth wired shut.”

That night, Winslow followed Ham into Barney’s Tap, a shotgun bar with its doors left open though it was cold. Ham felt bad about what happened with the boys and set up a game of poker as a show of goodwill. A dozen or so people drank in the bar. They all eyed Winslow as he sat across from the lawman, Bently, and Rico, the old man from the jail.

They played with peanuts worth a dime. Winslow motioned for cards, knocked the table to bump, found he didn’t need to talk. He lifted a bottle to his mouth and beer trickled between his teeth. After several bottles, Winslow was drunk in a room full of strangers. He passed a note to Rico, who smiled his denture smile and held the note at arm’s length to read. “Red says he had him a son.”

“A son?” Ham said. “Where’s he gone off to?”

“Don’t be ignorant, Ham.” Bently looked Winslow in the eye, as to say he didn’t need to respond.

Winslow scribbled
WHISKEY
, handed the paper to Ham.

A voice hollered his name. No, not his name. The voice hollered
Red.
Winslow turned to the voice. His eyesight bleared, he could barely make out Ham in the bar’s back door. Winslow stumbled to stand and banged his way through tables to lean on the wall beside Ham.

“Need you to meet some fellas,” Ham slurred, staggering down three steps into a dark grassless lot.

Two young men waited outside. One wore a thin beard and smoked against the stoop rail. The other had an upturned nose, like a snout, and eyes that didn’t blink. Winslow stepped down by Ham. The pig man balled a fist. Winslow instinctively tightened. The punch cracked like a dry branch, and the man ran in circles with his wrist between his thighs, dropped to the dirt like an animal shot.

Ham hugged Winslow’s neck. “Told you my boy’s a rock,” he cackled into the night. “A goddamn human rock.”

The next day, Ham sauntered across the barn, hands stuffed in the pockets of his coveralls. Winslow saw him coming and turned to the wall of pegs, his mind fuzzed from smoke and whiskey, and peered into a turkey’s dull feathers.

“Jesus, Red,” Ham said. “How many times I got to apologize?”

Winslow stepped to the chopping block.

“I got a deal for you,” Ham said. “So just hear me out.”

Winslow gripped the cleaver, gave Ham his eyes.

“You’re about the toughest fella I ever knew. And now”—he jutted a thumb out at the corral—“these kids want to bet a hundred bucks their boy can knock the wind from you with a punch.” Ham rapped his knuckles on the block. “I know this boy. He’s big as a bus, and just as big a pansy,” he said. “What say, Red? Forty for me, sixty for you?”

Winslow’s hands glistened with blood. He disgusted himself. I deserve this much, he thought. He lay down the cleaver, nodded to Ham.

Winslow followed Ham out to the gate where the boys bounded about like puppies. One boy, a head taller than the others and wide as a door, threw off a green and gold letterman’s jacket and flexed a meaty fist. Ham stood Winslow against the fence. The boy hulked before him.

“This is for Harold,” he hissed.

Winslow nodded he was ready.

A roundhouse like a brick on a chain flung Winslow against the fence and he tripped forward but kept his feet. He exhaled through his teeth. Inhaled with ease. Ham’s voice rang over the lot of cussing boys,
“That’s my wild man. That’s my rock.”

9

Ham announced in Barney’s he’d give the highest bidder a chance to punch Winslow in the stomach, promising to double the money if the person could knock his wild man clean out of wind. Winslow listened from the back door, Bently smoking a pipe out on the stoop.

“You all right with this, Red?” the lawman asked.

Winslow shrugged.

“Ham gets bad ideas breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I’ll make him stop if you like.”

Winslow wrote on his pad:
DON’T CARE.

Just after midnight, Winslow braced himself against the long oak bar, and a red-nosed man in a VFW ball cap flailed at his gut. Winslow didn’t budge, didn’t blink. The small crowd chortled and shrieked and Ham cried in Winslow’s ear,
“Sixty bucks, lickety-split.”

Nightly biddings drew new faces: a foundry worker missing an ear; a bent old woman mumbling her dead husband’s name; a man in a white-collared shirt, his fist wrapped in a gabardine scarf; an elementary school teacher apologizing before she swung, wild-eyed and cursing Winslow after.

The crowds grew, and Ham cornered off a stage with chicken wire mounted with trouble lights. Winslow stood bare-chested in the harsh light. Ham, in an ill-fitting suit, a felt hat adorned with turkey feathers, rang a bell and shouted, “Our world’s turned polite, some might say
dainty.
We all know how things used to be, men uprooting trees with their hands and backs, women fighting off panthers with hairpins and a mother’s scorn. Those days are gone, my friends,” and he paused, eyeing them all. “Yet you still got that rage inside you, don’t you?
Don’t you?
Well, that’s why you’re here. Who’ll start us at a hundred even?”

Winslow watched faces barking bids. The man who won stepped around the chicken wire, wore horn-rimmed glasses, tugged long hair behind his pierced ears. In this young man’s lenses Winslow saw his own reflection: a lockjawed, feral-haired savage. He prepared his body. The punch was thrown. Winslow took a breath. He always took a breath.

10

In Barney’s bathroom, Ham smeared charcoal beneath Winslow’s eyes, told him to growl through his wires, stamp a foot onstage. Winslow followed Ham into the bar, through men in stocking caps, beers in gloved fists, not even the blizzard outside thinning the crowd.

The same storm had earlier in the day bayed over Winslow’s trailer, the sky whirling like a snow globe shaken. He’d sat in the trailer’s window, imagining the shuddering room was a train engine, a crossing and a truck on the tracks ahead. He saw his own face in the truck window, anticipating the crushing of metal and glass and bone.

Winslow carried that same doom as he stepped onto the stage, his mind plagued by questions. Would it matter if it weren’t my fault? Could I let it go if I knew what’s to blame? How do I aim these ugly thoughts to be rid of them?

He stood before the chicken wire, before faces breathing steam in the cold barroom. Ham drew a riding crop from inside his jacket and lashed Winslow across his naked back. Winslow arched his spine, glared hard at Ham as the audience howled.

“Don’t turn them crazy eyes on me,” Ham scolded out the side of his mouth. “Ain’t me what’s going to pay.”

Winslow lay in the examination room. Through grimed windows, he watched the flurried sky, a string of colored lights swinging from the clinic’s eaves. A knock came on the door. Six weeks he’d worn the wires and now they were gone.

Winslow flexed his jaw, formed the words, “Come in.”

Ham entered, hat in hand, and stood beside a little Christmas tree in the corner of the room. “Strange to talk?”

Winslow nodded. “Jaw’s rusty.”

“You feeling strong?”

“I feel all right.”

“Good. I’m glad.” Ham stared into the tree, hung his cap on a branch. “Got the Christmas birds sold,” he said, and stepped to the window. He tapped the sill, smiled down at Winslow. “You look good, Red. Look strong.”

Winslow knew what was on Ham’s mind. “I want a steak,” he said. “Get me a steak. But go ahead and tell folks I’ll be on tonight.”

“All right.” Ham patted Winslow’s leg. “Rico and me,” he said, and stared at the door. “We thought it best you don’t talk during the show. It’s just folks don’t see you as a real man.”

Wind whistled off the eaves. “I won’t say nothing,” Winslow said, the colored lights madly twirling. “Just get me a steak. I’ll eat it with my hands if you want. Eat it right there on stage.”

Her blouse read
Delsea’s Cafe,
and below that
Lilian.
Ham asked Winslow if he was ready. Winslow just stared at the woman, dismayed by the resemblance; the same build as Sadie, face with the same tapered chin, same sad brown eyes, and she wore a silver chain and cross just like Sadie.

Her fist popped weakly off Winslow. Those in the bar laughed and hooted. Lilian looked at her fist. Slowly her body shook, as she started to sob.

Even her tears fell like Sadie’s.

“I’ll get your money back,” Winslow blurted. “Buy yourself something nice. Some jewelry or a sweater or something. Something nice. Something—” He pulled her to him, her cheek pressed tightly to his pounding heart.

Lilian shrieked. She struggled to get loose and Winslow held her tighter. A wicked smack stung Winslow across his bare shoulders. Ham yanked Lilian free, waving the riding crop at Winslow as a tamer might ward off a lion.

11

Winslow paced the dark trailer. He realized, with the reclamation of his voice, he could simply phone Sadie. But it was very late. He had no phone. I’ll go to town in the morning, he told himself. Can hear Sadie’s voice this very day. I can tell her where I’m at, that I don’t know how I got here. It wouldn’t be a complete lie. He could tell her he wanted to come home. Could say he was lost without her. He’d say as many true things as he could before she hung up.

“Something nice,” he said, aloud. “Something
nice,
” searching for perfect kindness in his tone.

Then Winslow remembered Lilian’s revolted expression and knew his voice couldn’t mute his appearance. I’ll get a haircut. A shave. I’ll become myself again.

But then old fears took hold. Sadie won’t want to hear from me. She’s glad I’m gone. She’s glad I ain’t around to remind her of her dead boy. Winslow dropped to the floor. He grunted out sit-ups, counting aloud to dissuade thought, shouting numbers in the cold, dank trailer.

Bitter wind whipped Winslow’s hair in his eyes. He cowered behind the red-striped pole in the building’s alcove. Then the old barber was there, waving Winslow aside to unlock the door. Winslow trailed the man into the dark shop.

“Ain’t got a dime to spare to you,” the barber said to him.

“I got money.”

The old man nodded, suspicious. Then he threw the lights and put on his white smock. He walked behind a chair and brushed the seat with a whisk. Winslow sat down. The barber secured the cape and stood before Winslow, his eyes wide like a man figuring how to clear a prairie.

“What’ll it be?”

Winslow stared at a Christmas wreath hung in the front window. “Used to be a farmer,” he said. “Was a deacon at my church.”

“All right then,” the barber said. “Deacon it is.”

The barber clipped the beard at Winslow’s throat. Outside, the sun glared off the snowy road. Three boys passed, each holding a cigarette to his lips. One boy, heavily jowled for his age, glanced in the window. Winslow heard the lather dispenser, felt the cream hot down his neck. The boys stood in the window, smoking, watching.

“Ain’t there school around here?” Winslow asked.

The barber turned, straight razor poised. “Not all’s meant for learning,” he said, and leaned over Winslow, squinting as the blade shaved the cream. Winslow felt the air chill his skin, felt the boys’ eyes on his bare throat.

Bing Crosby singing “Silver Bells” played on the radio in Delsea’s Café. Winslow watched Lilian refill a man’s cup at the end of the counter. She’d refilled his own cup three times, had looked him square in the face, but with his haircut and shave she’d not recognized him. Winslow held a five-dollar bill, stared long at its edges, then raised it high. Lilian walked down, coffeepot in hand. Winslow handed her the money.

“Change this for quarters?” he asked.

“Want any bills back?”

He shook his head. “Got a call to make. Need the coins.”

Lilian made change at the register, then Winslow pushed out the café door, the quarters jingling in his pocket. He passed an alley, where the boys from the barbershop huddled smoking. He crossed the street. The boys followed him across the road, then through the supermarket parking lot, on to a pay phone just outside the doors.

Winslow lifted the receiver. He dropped in quarters, trying to ignore the boys behind him. But he couldn’t think with them standing there, couldn’t remember his old phone number. Someone tapped his shoulder. Winslow slammed down the receiver, spun to face them.

A grin flashed on the boy’s round face. “Ten bucks says I can hurt you with a punch.”

“This ain’t the time, son.”

The boy tugged his glove tight to his fist.

Winslow eyed him. As he turned back to the phone, the boy slugged Winslow’s kidney. A fuse was lit in him. He whirled and punched the boy stiff in the mouth.

The boy dropped to the walkway. Blood coated his teeth. The market door swung open and a bent old woman stood there gawking at the boy, at Winslow standing over him. Winslow sprinted away, his arms pumping, quarters tumbling from his pocket down onto the icy asphalt.