Volt: Stories (5 page)

18

They drove along Elm Avenue. The town emerged from the fog, the diner on one side, the market across the road, their first-floor windows haloed in watery light. An old man in an orange parka, Marshall Traverson, stood beneath the diner’s canopy and opened an umbrella over his wife, Leta. He raised a hand to the truck. Sadie returned Marshall’s wave. Winslow shrank in his seat.

Soon came the Baptist church, nestled between barren fields. They parked at the end of the churchyard. Interior lights stoked color into the chapel’s stained glass. Winslow didn’t move. He watched silhouettes, vague behind the colored windows. Then Sadie opened his door. She offered a hand down and he took it and she helped him out.

Winslow lagged behind, studying cars in the lot, and in his mind he saw their owners inside, praying in the pews. An organ droned. A choir sang. Sadie was waiting up on the stoop and by the door, gripping the handle, eyeing him over her shoulder.

Winslow hesitated at the bottom step. He gazed out over the yard and beyond the field. Bleary through fog and distance stood a leafless line of trees. Choir voices swelled, as did Winslow’s pulse, the woods so near and the voices rising higher, soaring, holding. Then all was quiet.

Winslow bolted into the churchyard. His heels slipped in the snow, each twist a knife to his ribs. Sadie shouted his name, but he didn’t stop. He pushed past the church and into the field, dress shoes sloshing, sinking in the mud, eyes locked on the woods. Again Sadie hollered, shrill, desperate, a mother crying out to a lost child. Winslow stopped. He winced, gasping, his lungs burning.

Trees waved like dreams out in the mist. Sadie stood at the field’s berm, hugging her Bible, watching him as one does a deer, something that may at any moment flee. Then Sadie herself ran with wild flight back through the yard, on around to the chapel doors.

Winslow blew into his fists. He shifted from shoe to shoe in the freezing mud. The chapel’s windows opened. Faces appeared in the gaps. Men poured into the churchyard, and the pastor, a bull-shouldered man in a satin robe, hurried out into the field. He lifted his feet as if wading through a river, stepped close, and pulled Winslow into an embrace.

“Sure nice to see you, Win,” he said. “A miracle. A true miracle.” He rubbed his palms over Winslow’s hands and bowed his head, and Winslow thought they might pray.

“Winslow?”

“Yes?”

“We’ve known each other too long for sidetalking,” he said. “I’m not going to lie to you. It’s not right for a man to run off like you did. Folks around here are awful sore at you.”

Winslow nodded.

“But nobody’s sore about what happened with your boy. Lord knows, it’s not about that. You know it’s not about that, right?”

Winslow’s head felt full of mud. He couldn’t lift his chin.

“Maybe we ought to get some coffee at Freelys?” the pastor said. “Can go tomorrow if you like? Introduce you around again?”

Winslow glanced off toward the snowy yard. A crowd milled in suits and dresses and choir robes. Sadie stood in the field now, mud splashed up her nylons.

The pastor set a hand on Winslow’s collar. “The damned things I’ve seen in my years,” he said, his eyes soft. “God gets around to all of us. Every last one of us. Who the hell knows what to do about it.”

Winslow huffed and tried not to weep.

“Win.” He pressed a palm to Winslow’s cheek. “Even Christ needed time to hisself.”

Winslow turned away from the hand.

“Even Christ needed time. Say it.”

Winslow couldn’t speak.

“Say it, Win.”

“Even Christ—” was all he could get out.

The pastor’s wingtips were up to the laces in mud. “Only fools stand out in a cold field. Fools and hunters.” He grinned, smacked Winslow’s shoulder. “Go on home, Win,” he said, softly.

Winslow nodded.

He trailed Pastor Hamby through the mud. The pastor set his arm around Sadie, ushered her back into the churchyard. He called for everyone to get on inside, hollered that he hadn’t even started preaching. Then Pastor Hamby lifted Sadie’s hand and hooked it gently onto Winslow’s arm. Sadie clutched Winslow’s elbow, so intently, so fiercely, it hurt him though he dare not say.

19

Visitors came throughout the day. Winslow’s cousins stopped by, his banker, his neighbors on both sides. They spoke of horse races and strip mines and coon dogs. Jimmy Lang got a six-point buck. Helen Farelley arrested Harlan Delmore for growing pot in his silo. Little Janice Franklin was pregnant again. Winslow lay on the couch, Sadie running to the kitchen for cookies and coffee. Nobody asked where he’d been, or how he’d gotten hurt, and Winslow guessed they already knew.

It felt like the funeral all over again, people talking cordially and hushed, bringing cakes and casseroles and jars of preserves. The mournful feel conjured in him an old buried memory, of a day Rodney had gone missing.

That evening had fallen dark, his boy lost since lunchtime. On the porch Sadie had held Winslow in her arms, telling him it’d be all right. Then they heard a horse bang its stall in the barn. They found Rodney asleep in a grain trough. In hindsight it was a precious vision, the child curled as if in a womb. But Winslow had yanked him up by his arm, screaming all the dreadful things that happen to a child left on his own. Sadie had taken Winslow’s hand and led him to the house, telling him his mind had made it bigger than it was. She’d let Rodney lag behind.

Winslow remembered that clearly now, remembered it as he never had before, and realized Sadie always knew he, even more than Rodney, needed close watching over, needed her steady comfort and good sense.

The house was lightless in all but the parlor. Sadie served him a bowl of tuna casserole, said she was worn out. “I’m going to take a bath and get to bed,” she told him, her eyes on the foyer staircase. “You take your pill and get the lights off?”

“Of course,” Winslow said, from the couch.

“Watch the TV if you like.” She stepped into the foyer. “Don’t stay up too late.”

“Sadie?”

“Remote’s on the table.” She held the banister, gazed up the dark stairs.

“Sadie?”

She turned just her head. Sadie’s eyes found his, and they saw each other. “I wish I could take my brain and put it inside your head,” Winslow said. “Just for a moment. Then you’d know what all I can’t find how to say.”

Sadie grinned, her eyes weary. “Sleep well, Winslow,” she said. “See you in the morning.”

20

Winslow couldn’t sleep. He gazed at the pictures above the couch, colors bleeding in the dark, though gold doves shone bright in one, a pink bull in another. Winslow strained to the edge of the couch. The floor was cold. He walked into the foyer. Framed needlepoint hung where photos of Rodney once had. Winslow mounted the stairs and ran his fingers over the thread; a silver bear with its paw in a blue bee’s nest, a green girl skipping rope, a red sailboat in a sea of black.

He crossed to his old bedroom. The bed was empty, unrumpled. Sadie was not there. Winslow turned back into the hall. Rodney’s door was opened a crack, a line of light across the floor. He tread softly down, the light passing over his foot, then up his leg. Winslow set his ear to the door. With the tips of his fingers, he eased it open.

The sky outside had lightened, the room washed in a metallic sheen. Football pennants plastered the walls. A child’s desk filled one corner, messy with model cars, a dirty dinner plate, Ball jars furred with dust. In the other corner, beneath the room’s only window, stretched a twin bed. There Sadie slept, the covers drawn to her chin.

Winslow stepped to the window. The sky hung green. Soon it would snow. The hillside of winter wheat lay swaddled in snow, the rails of freight tracks like silver spears over the wet road.

He glanced down at Sadie. Hair fell loose across her mouth. Her eyes were open, staring up at him.

Winslow held his side and lowered himself to the floor. He rested his cheek on the mattress. Her eyes stayed on him. Slowly her hand emerged from the covers. She brushed the hair from her lips. Those same fingers reached across the mattress. Winslow closed his eyes. He nuzzled her hand. She didn’t pull away.

Winslow felt her edge nearer, felt her over him, her hair brushing his ear, his chin. Her breath blew warm on his face, as she whispered, “Your hair has turned so white.”

SMOKE

A voice called his name. Vernon woke to the haze of dawn, and a figure slouched in through the open window beside his bed. Vernon was hungover. His eyes pulsed and he rubbed them to clear his vision. The figure raised erect, balanced itself with one hand on the sill. Beyond, the pastel sky blazed.

“Vernon,” the voice said again.

“Pop?”

“Couldn’t make it alone, son.”

Vernon sat up and dropped his legs off the bed.

“Wear them old boots,” his father said. “Them new ones ain’t broke in yet.”

His father wore a filthy undershirt, his hand swaddled in a blood-stained rag. A cut sliced the meat of his shoulder, the skin jaggedly sewn with green thread. With his good hand he pulled a comb from his back pocket and dragged perfect lines through his oiled hair. Then he returned the comb to his pocket and rested his head against the window frame.

“Don’t wake your mama,” he whispered, and took Vernon’s hand. “Wear them old boots, son. It’s a ways we got to go.”

Vernon stepped in bare feet out the front door. The humid air poured over him. He stuck his feet in his old boots and walked off the porch and on around the side of the house where his father sat on a soda crate beneath his bedroom window. His father’s eyes were closed. In his right hand he clutched a gunnysack.

“Pop?”

His father’s eyes opened but he did not stir. “I’m sorry, Vernon,” he said. “A son shouldn’t have to see his father this way.”

“I don’t feel good, neither.”

“That don’t say much for the both of us,” he said. “Now help me up and keep quiet.”

At fifteen, Vernon was already taller and broader than his father.
He reached around his father’s waist, as if hugging a tree, and lifted. “No, no,” his father groaned, and slumped to one side, and Vernon knew he’d tugged the stitches on his shoulder. His father held his injured hand in the air. He slowly braced a knee beneath himself and stood without assistance. Vernon tried to take the gunny, but his father yanked it away. Then, with an overtired sigh, his father offered Vernon the gunnysack.

It was heavier than Vernon expected. Inside was a thick coil of rope and a tire iron, and he could not figure what they’d be used for. Then his father was pushing through the sweetbriar and entering the shade of the woods.

“Where we going?” Vernon asked.

His father didn’t answer, but descended a gentle slope, bracing himself against saplings to slow his momentum. Vernon caught up quickly and found he had to pause between steps to stay beside his father. Halfway down, his father leaned against the mossy trunk of an oak tree. He shivered, his elbows clamped to his ribs. Then he pushed off the tree and straightened himself.

“I’ve been up all night and I want to tell you some things,” he said. “But not here. Let’s get there first. I ain’t very strong and we just need to get there.” He reached back his good hand and Vernon took it. “Your mama sewed me up. She won’t never see me the same. Once things change they don’t never turn back.”

His father’s voice scared Vernon and he held his father’s hand and helped him down the hill.

“Wouldn’t you be better in your bed?” Vernon asked.

“They’d find me in my bed.”

Vernon wondered who
they
were, wondered where his father was leading him. It was rare for them to hike off into the east. There used to be a couple of families in these woods, but their wells ran dry and they had to move closer to town. Vernon pretended they were going to check the coon traps. Maybe Pop couldn’t reset them traps with his hand busted up, he told himself, though he knew it was a lie.

Vernon followed his father through swales of prickly weeds and honey locust. His skull felt as if filled with thistle; the Nordgren brothers had stolen three fifths of whiskey from the Old Fox, and Vernon finished an entire one himself during last night’s double feature at the picture show. The sun burst full over the hilltops and Vernon wanted to keep walking to get to where they were going, but then he had to piss and asked his father if they could stop. His father said nothing, but eased himself down on a stump. Vernon unhooked his overalls and peed over the wilted bells of cardinal flowers. When he turned around his father had fallen backward, his legs drooped over the stump. Vernon ran and propped him up. His father’s skin was the pale gray of something extinguished.

“Are you my daddy?” his father said up to Vernon.

“You all right, Pop?”

A queer smile brightened his father’s face. “You remember when I came home from the war?”

They’d had a party and a cake with lemon icing. “Yes, sir.”

“Remember the first thing you said to me?”

“No, sir.”

“You was so small, just a tiny child, and you stood like a soldier in the doorway and looked up and asked, ‘Are you my daddy?’”

His father’s eyes were far off, were black dots beneath papery lids. “I met you at the bus,” Vernon said, like breaking bad news. “Weren’t but a year ago. I was tall as you. You said, ‘You’re a mirror to me,’ and you had me try on your coat and it fit me just right.”

His father gazed up at him, and his eyes seemed to suddenly take focus. “That’s right,” he said. “That was
me
who said that. That was me and my pop.”

His good hand gripped Vernon’s arm, and he took his feet and stumbled over the stump and found his stride. Vernon followed behind his shoulder. If his father wobbled even slightly, Vernon grabbed his belt and pulled him straight.

After they had walked several miles, the low hills rose into steep striated limestone and the ground became slanting flats of rock. His father stepped off to where in past years flowed a trickle of waterfall, but was now a dry basin stained a powdery white. Vernon followed his father across the basin, on around an outcropping guarding a dry streambed. In the rock’s shade something large was wrapped in his parents’ bedspread, a blue and red bearpaw quilt. For a moment Vernon thought his father had shot a deer out of season. Then he noticed an uncovered shoe; a patent leather oxford, its wax lace untied. His father knelt and waved away flies with his good hand, then gently set his hand atop the quilt.

“I killed this man,” he said. “I wish I hadn’t, but I did.”

Vernon struggled to know what to say. He stared at the shoe and kept expecting it to twitch. He became mindful that he’d been made part of a big secret, an ugly secret.

“Who is he?”

“Don’t really know,” his father said. “Name’s Nory Augusto. Learned that from his wallet.”

“What you kill him for?”

His father pulled the quilt to cover the shoe. “We best get him hid,” he said. “Took all night to drag him this far. Couldn’t get him over the rocks myself. He ain’t that big a man. You ought to be able to heft him all right.”

Vernon gazed nervously about at the sunlight. Through all his adventures of hunting arrowheads in these woods he’d never crossed paths with another human. Still he glanced above at the shadow-strewn crest of the rock, then at the slashes of tree trunks down in the hollow and into the canopy where the sun flashed off leaves as it might off a lawman’s spectacles or the buckle of a holster.

Vernon quickly grabbed two fistfuls of quilt. He set his legs and hoisted the body across his neck and shoulders, as if he were carrying a calf. The quilt smelled of his mother’s detergent. Then a second odor seeped out, something like urine and musk cologne. Vernon gagged but kept hold. He steadied himself, then followed his father around a flat rock.

As Vernon stepped up large slabs, his father pressed a firm hand on the body to keep him from tumbling backward. At the bluff’s ridge, Vernon was exhausted and his head throbbed and he could feel the man’s hip bones on his neck. He leaned into the shade of a cliff and vomited. Whiskey and chocolate silk pie came up, and the smell of it made him retch again. Bile stung sour on his gums. He wished he had water to rinse his mouth. His father did not say a word, but wiped his eyes with a handkerchief and turned away.

Vernon had never seen his father cry. This overwhelmed him and he began to cry, too, and his father continued to cry and Vernon found that weeping made his head feel better. They did not look at each other or speak as they trod the jagged downslope weeping.

They pushed through a prairie of broom sedge. This was farther than Vernon had ever been to the east. The white sun was unbearable and he wished he’d worn a hat. He marched like a mule, one foot in front of the other, slow and steady. They hiked half an hour through the high stiff grass, pausing several times for Vernon to rest, before they again entered the shade of the woods, and ten minutes more before they came upon a rock jutting from the earth like a giant blunted tooth. Vernon followed his father’s eyes up the sandstone slope to a ledge fifty feet up. His father reached into the gunnysack and removed the rope and shook it loose from its coil.

“Put a log beneath Mr. Augusto,” his father said. “Tie this rope up around his knees and chest.”

“What we gonna do?”

“Climb.”

Vernon found a log as thick as his leg and turned the quilt and body belly-up over it. He secured the ropes. His father tied the rope around his waist, with plenty of slack left atop the body. Vernon cinched the loose end of the rope around his own waist.

“Take it slow,” his father said, and gave Vernon the tire iron in the gunnysack. “If you can get up there carrying that gunny, then I surely can with my hand busted.”

“What’s up there?”

His father peered up at the ledge. “A cave. I been in it before. It’s a good cave. Nobody much knows of it.”

The rock was steep, but pocked with footholds. Vernon moved slowly, trying not to crumble the soft rock, glancing down between his legs to gauge his father’s progress.

They found their way high up the rock face. At the precipice, Vernon threw over the gunny and scurried onto the ledge and pulled the rope tight. His lungs heaved. Sweat stung scrapes where his chin had rubbed the rock. His father came slowly behind, his face and chest yellow with sandstone chalk, and moaned as he crawled onto the ledge. They lay side by side on the hot rock. The summit loomed high above the ledge, baking in the full sunlight.

“I killed Mr. Augusto with that tire iron,” his father said.

Vernon lay on his back, breathing hard, and watched his father’s swaddled hand tremble atop the rope around his waist. His father rose. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s pull him up.”

At the edge of the cliff, Vernon took up the slack of rope. He was afraid to look down into the woods for fear he’d see someone and someone would see him. He flexed his grip and leaned backward, taking tiny steps. The body’s heft took anchor, then Vernon dug in his heels and each step was a harried thrust. His father did what he could, pulling with his good hand, and they continued backward until they’d run out of cliff and were against the rock wall. Then, fist over fist, Vernon advanced to the edge and muscled the body up a few more feet. In this fashion the body in the quilt was soon on the ledge.

His father told him to untie Mr. Augusto and so he did. Vernon and his father remained belted with the rope, and as Vernon knelt over the body the rope tugged him toward where his father had disappeared into a gap in the rock face.

Vernon quickly followed. The rope stayed taut between them and Vernon stepped into the gap. The air turned cool and damp. Sunlight fell through a fissure high overhead and striped the sloping white-rock tunnel. Vernon shuffled down and watched darkness rise like water up his father’s back and then he was gone.

The light dwindled for Vernon. He felt along the wall with his fingertips. In his other fist the tire iron in the gunnysack swung freely. He clanked the sack against a wall and rock crumbled away. He struck the tunnel again, this time with purpose, and sizable chunks dropped onto his boots. Vernon stepped down through the darkness, wondering if it was easy to kill a man with a tire iron.

Bright light bloomed as the tunnel abruptly turned, and Vernon crawled through a narrow chute to enter a stalactite cavern. The center of the cathedral roof had eroded into a natural and perfect oval. Blazing sun poured through the oval. The walls and floor shone like polished pearl. His father sat on a slab of gray stone, one of three slabs among all that wet glowing calcite. The rope lay on the ground at his father’s feet, and Vernon untied his end and let it drop.

“What is this place?”

“The Indians used it, I think,” his father said. “Someone put these benches in here.”

Vernon sat on a slab and hugged himself. The sweat from the climb had soaked his clothes and now gave him a chill.

“I want you to know me as I am, Vernon,” his father said. “I don’t want you to see me as good no more. A man what kills someone ain’t no good.” His father leaned against the damp wall and studied the sky. “You remember that long road we took to get to the Miller rigs? That long dirt road that went on forever?”

“Yes, sir,” Vernon said, and he remembered driving an hour on a thin dirt road. He remembered nothing but oil pumps and flat fields and a horizon that didn’t buckle.

“Another truck come along that road yesterday. Seven years I ain’t never seen a soul on that road, and here comes some shiny truck like it ain’t never been dirty. And you know how steep them ditches are. Well, me and Mr. Augusto come nose to nose with our trucks. Don’t know who built that road. Don’t know what kind of a man makes a road ain’t wide enough for two trucks to pass. Surely weren’t Christian, whoever he was.”