by Aaron Gwyn
“He’s in the Army?”
“Reserves,” she told him. “Unit got called. Go off playing soldier. Leave me sitting here.”
Martin stood. He thumbed a card from his billfold and asked would she have her son contact him when he got back.
The woman took the card and stared at it. She shrugged.
Martin thanked her. He and Lemming walked over and climbed inside the cruiser. They sat several moments and then Martin backed down the drive. He turned onto the road and headed for town.
“She was something,” said the deputy.
“I’ll say she was.”
“That hair.”
“Yeah.”
“And those teeth.”
Martin nodded.
Lemming looked over at him. “From the crank, right?”
“The crank,” Martin said.
They sat in their recliners, eating supper. Martin had stopped to pick up chicken and he had the TV trays pulled in front of their chairs and the jug of sweet tea on the end table between them. Deborah’s was a rocker-recliner, and she would sit with her legs crossed beneath her, spooning mashed potatoes to her mouth and toggling buttons on the remote.
“What do you do about it now?” she asked.
Martin swallowed and shook his head. “We still don’t know we’re not dealing with a runaway. We can’t do much of anything till his friends get back.”
“He doesn’t sound like a runaway to me.”
“Doesn’t to me either,” Martin said. “Lem said it: ‘If he didn’t take off with his buddies, he didn’t take off.’”
Deborah nodded. She changed the channel. She turned to him and put down the plate.
“You checked the friends, you checked the work. I don’t know what else you can do.”
“Yeah,” said Martin.
“I know you hate waiting.”
“Yeah,” Martin said.
“You said he walks to work?”
“He walks,” said Martin. “He goes and spends the night with his friends, and then walks in in the morning. He only stays home when he’s off. The family doesn’t own a car. They have a relative takes them in and out of town.”
“Where’s he go to school?” asked Deborah.
“He doesn’t,” said Martin. “He quit.”
Deb sat there a moment. Then she leaned forward and rolled out of the recliner. She walked by and kissed the bald spot that had appeared atop Martin’s head, then stepped into the kitchen. Martin turned and watched her go. He looked over at her hobby table on which sat the completed Phantom. She’d applied the dull coat and was just waiting for it to dry. She’d already started her next fighter. An F-15. There was a plastic frame of miniature parts sitting beside her recliner that she’d begun to clip and sand. Martin reached over and took up a small missile, half the length of his index finger. He sat there studying it, thinking about the boy. If the friends came back with a straight story, he’d have to organize the search, release details to the paper. He’d have to drive back out to the house in the woods and talk with the grandmother, tell her they were looking for her grandson’s body. Martin dropped the missile into its box and pinched the space of skin between his eyes. Deborah came back in, sat down, and pulled her hobby tray nearer her chair. She took up what looked to Martin like a section of wing. She folded a swatch of fine-grain sandpaper and began, very carefully, to abrade the nubs of extraneous plastic. Martin sat watching her, the curve of her belly. He thought you could have so much in the world and just like that it could vanish. He didn’t understand that. He thought he never would.
He couldn’t sleep that night. He just kept tossing. Around three in the morning he stepped quietly from bed and pulled the door to behind him, went down the hallway in his socks. He was thinking of the boy and he was thinking of his brother. He’d lain there, turning his pillow to find the cool, and something about it, the two of them had become tangled in his mind. He was concerned about the boy, but he realized he was more concerned than he should have been, and he lay there wondering how concerned he should be. He thought of the grandmother. Then he rose and left the room.
In the den, he sat at his desk, pilfering through the center drawer. He pulled out a money clip made from a 1922 silver dollar, and then he pulled out the belt buckle that it matched. At the back of the drawer he found it, an old envelope gone yellow with age. He opened the flap and sat there, shuffling photos. Black and whites, mostly. From when they had their house on the river. Martin was just seven when they moved and the property hadn’t been occupied in years. This was 1969, outside Cleveland, Oklahoma. That first summer they had scorpions so bad they had to place their bedposts in cans of kerosene so they wouldn’t crawl up them in the night. He could remember getting up to use the bathroom, shaking out and slipping on his sneakers, crossing the room to a sound like fortune cookies crunching underfoot.
Martin flipped through the pictures till he came to Pete. On the upper edge of the photograph the drugstore had printed the date: May 17, 1971. Pete would have been about six years old. He’d drowned that next year, August of ’72. In the picture, he and Martin were seated on rocks at the top of the bluff and between them, old Dempsey, their father’s pit bull. They were wearing white T-shirts and tan shorts and one of Pete’s shoelaces had come untied. Martin studied the picture. He couldn’t remember who had taken it, maybe his father, maybe Uncle Jess. Martin was smiling in the photo, but Pete had a scowl on his face. They’d probably been into it. They wrestled all the time. They did everything all the time, everything together. They shared a room and slept in the same bed.
And then the oddest memory. One winter night. They were both asleep and Martin was dreaming of a fountain or falls and he woke up and Pete had peed all over him. He’d done it in his sleep. Martin belted him in the shoulder and his brother awoke crying. The sound rousted their parents out of bed and they ended up getting switched for it, he and Pete both. They didn’t have a washer then; their mother took all the laundry into town. They spent the rest of that night giggling on a pallet. It was funny after the fact.
Sitting there, thinking about it, Martin began to chuckle. He remembered the sound of Pete’s laugh so distinctly. He shook his head, cleared his throat a few times, and it was as if something fell down inside him, and the room went blurry, and he had to put the picture away. He put it back in the envelope, put the envelope in the drawer, stood from the chair, and suddenly he was swiping the wet from his eyes, trying to stifle it down. He didn’t want to wake Deborah, didn’t want her to see this, and he went through the house and outside, crossed the carport in robe and slippers and unlocked the cruiser.
He climbed down inside it, closed the door. He had it, by then, back under control. He sat there, unsure why it got the best of him, feeling frightened and foolish. He shook his head and reached for the door handle, and that was when it really hit him, and it nearly took his breath.
THOMAS SPEAKS
I was older when I heard of Shampe. I was maybe ten. We were at Powwow that summer, at the campground by Maud. It shames me to think it. That I didn’t care about Powwow. That I didn’t care about nothing but half-pipes and skating. Angelica, she took me anyway. She said these were my people and I needed to go. I’d met Charlie by then and I’d heard at the campgrounds there were sidewalks and a concrete parking lot and I knew we could ride our boards. Whenever we skated, we had to go to town. Out here in the country it’s all just gravel, and even where Charlie is, the roads are rough blacktop and there’s too many holes. Too many cracks.
What is the word?
Et cetera.
So me and Aunt Angelica, we picked Charlie up and when we got to the campgrounds, there was plenty of concrete and already people skating. Bobby Thomas was there. His cousin Mike. It was July and hot, but we skated the sun down, and when we went over to the picnic tables, there were Indian tacos and Cokes.
It was like a fair. There were booths and bunks and smaller kids flying kites made of string. They looked li
ke nets. People milled and sat on the grass. They spread blankets. One man backed his pickup to the curb and began to unload these ancient drums. He had his hair grown long and twisted into a braid.
The Elders, they told us, were preparing a dance. Had a huge bonfire—like a brush pile ablaze—and as it got darker the flames rose higher and sparks chased the stars. The old men were gathering. Some beating drums. It was like you’d see in the movies if they made movies like that. The younger men had costumes—boots, and turquoise, and the old men had their headdresses. They went around the fire in a circle: left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot. And all the time the Elders were singing in that lost, lonely way which is how you’d feel before a car crash if you were with your family and knew you would die, but you were still, right then, together and alive. I had to look away. They’d go left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, and one threw back his head and cried at the night. You could feel your heart pulsing in your throat.
There was storytelling. A man named Enoch came and they got a chair for him and a microphone, and a PA was set somewhere in the dark. Mr. Enoch. He didn’t look like the other Indians. He didn’t sound like them either. His voice had that whispered hush of fire. You didn’t want it to stop. He told about Creation. Coyote. Stories on Elk and Bear. He talked it seemed like hours, and someone finally asked for one last story, and he asked what did we want to hear. People mumbled different things and looked at each other. A woman in front of me looked at her lap. A man rose up and said something in Creek. He and Enoch spoke back and forth. Like talk in a prayer. He’d just sat down and a man across from him was standing when a shout came from the darkness, and everyone got completely still.
I turned to ask Charlie what was said.
“Shampe!” called the voice, and folk began to mutter and twitch.
Enoch just sat there. He looked, of a sudden, very old. The lines in his face were like lines cut in wood. His hair was long and silver. It was gathered in a ponytail at the back of his skull. No one said anything. You could hear logs crackling in the fire.
I thought maybe he wouldn’t tell it. I thought there’d be something else. A breeze blew streams of cinders.
Then Enoch began talking.
He talked for a very long time.
He was a creature, Enoch told us. Oldest. The deepest dweller. We were all, at one time, of his breed. All of us. The Indian Peoples. Darkness. No memories. We were forgetters, he told us. But we came topside and began to gather. We made homes and huts and traveled. Shampe, though, he kept himself below. Took no bride. Took offspring to him one by one. All his life, said Enoch, was the bottom of things. He made the soil his home.
Enoch looked at his hands. He closed his eyes. He said one last thing I can remember and I can remember it word for word.
“Elders,” said Enoch, “would speak of him when I was a boy. Now I am an Elder and no one speaks but me. It is said of Shampe he is a vanisher. It is said of Shampe he makes his way beneath. At all times a miner, he comes topside in greatest night or need. He slips through weeds and windows, carries off the wayward child.”
Then he looked up.
“He is not a story,” he warned. “He is not a tale to amuse. Shampe is our commitment. We have obligation, each and every one.”
That was all. There was no clapping. The moon in the sky was bright and round. People sat for a while. Enoch rose from the chair and walked away.
I stood and started to follow. I didn’t know where he was going. I didn’t know what to say.
He walked to one of the picnic tables where there were several Indian boys waiting. One handed him a Styrofoam cup and he drank from it. Then he seemed to sense me and turned to look. His eyes were gray and fierce. His mouth a crease.
I stood there, wordless. This man who, not even knowing, had told a story like the story of my birth. I felt myself tugged to him. Drawn like a string tied to me, pulling.
He stared at me a moment.
Then he turned his back.
Charlie fell asleep on the drive home. I was in the backseat beside him, looking out at the night. I thought about Enoch and what he’d told us.
And right then I knew several things at once.
I think the main thing I knew was that my father was gone. He wasn’t underground or tunneling. He wasn’t coming back. My thinking before this had been wrong thinking.
So I stopped it.
Let it go.
But now a different thought started. It’s like when you get rid of something. There’s always something takes its place.
Usually it’s a bad something.
And what it was this time was that I quit believing in my father. I quit believing he was under things. Quit looking. I started believing in Shampe instead. I don’t know how to explain it. Things got swapped. And while before I was trying to get to my father and find him, now I was running from Shampe, who’d be coming to get me.
And I think this was when I realized.
I didn’t have much time.
OCTOBER 2006
Hickson turns off the television and sits. He glances at the clock in the wooden frame just right of the bookshelf and its various knickknacks. His collection of knives. His grandfather used to collect them and many of the ones on this shelf are from him. Hickson likes how they look. In their cases. Some on little swatches of velvet he purchased mail-order from a store in Tennessee. Hickson stands and walks to the bookcase. Karen used to have his medals out when he first came home, but eventually he made her put them away. She used to have knickknacks of her own. Frogs. Ceramic and stuffed and some of them carved from pieces of soapstone or glass. She took all of them when she left. Hickson picks up one of the knives—German-made Hen and Rooster with a bone handle—and pries it open. He can see a shard of himself reflected in it. Self-portrait in the blade. He polishes the steel against his shirt, closes the knife, and positions it back in its case. He walks over and stands at the sliding glass door.
Outside, it is fully dark. The yard in shadow. Hickson can see, beyond the fence, light from Parks’s windows. His back door. Sometimes he keeps them on till morning. These are better nights for Hickson. He sleeps easier these nights.
He stands a couple more minutes and then slides the door on its groove and steps onto his deck. He reaches inside and flips on the porch light. He can see the hole without it and he flips it back off. He walks back inside and into the kitchen and unplugs his Coleman flashlight from the wall socket and then walks through the house and onto the porch and goes down the steps. The narrow beam of light bounces in front of him. He slows and shines it on the hole. He searches the lawn around it and then he comes onto his knees and aims the flashlight down its throat.
It is cool outside. The grass wet against his jeans. Hickson stares. With the flashlight, he can see twenty feet. Maybe thirty. Beyond that the light disperses. There’s just the black. He shifts the beam and examines the walls of the shaft. Perfectly smooth. He lies on his stomach and leans over the hole. There’s something down there. He can feel a breath on his face. The air warmer. He stands and walks a few feet and closes his eyes and tries to check. The temperature on his face. He looks to the houses on either side of him. Then he lies back down beside the hole and turns on the flashlight and peers in. The air is warmer down there, he’s sure. It feels warm against his forehead and cheeks. It’s because the earth is warmer, he thinks. It’s warmer than the surface. He wonders is this true. How he knows it. Before going overseas, his Ranger unit was shipped to a base in Minnesota, and there was a man in cadre who showed them how to make shelters in the snow. Using snow. They were leaving in two weeks for desert, and they were in Minnesota making snow shelters. It strikes him he didn’t wonder at the time.
Hickson turns off the flashlight and labors onto his feet. He stands there. He won’t be able to do anything until morning, but somehow he can’t leave. He thinks maybe he should block the hole. Make a barricade. If someone were to come over his fence and fall inside it. Vandal
s. He’s had them before. They might fall inside and then there would be crews of people in his backyard and cranes and media. Hickson tugs at his beard.
He considers the mower, but it’s nearly eleven, and he doesn’t want to start it. He ends up using rakes. Rakes and shovels and a wheelbarrow and a couple of garbage cans. When he’s done, what he’s created is a mess, but he thinks it adequate. He pulls at the neck of his T-shirt, and then goes back up the steps. He goes inside the house and locks the door and pulls shut the blinds. He turns off the lights in the living room and then he turns off the lights in the kitchen and then he goes down the hallway and brushes his teeth. He walks back to the bedroom and pulls off his jeans and his shirt. He sits, for several minutes, on the side of the bed. He reaches over, turns off the lamp, lies back on the mattress. Crickets from the bushes just outside the window. Crickets and frogs. He listens for about five minutes. Then he leans up and turns on the lamp and crawls out of bed. He goes back down the hallway and through the living room and over to the door. He pulls back the blinds and stares at his yard. Beyond the fence, Parks’s house sits in shadow. Hickson stands there. On the wall beside him are framed pictures of kinfolk and friends. His grandfather aboard a carrier in the South Pacific. His uncle seated in a chopper, 1967, maybe, ’69. Another which is black and white of Hickson’s father propped shirtless against a bamboo fence, wearing tiger-striped fatigues and sunglasses, holding an M16 slightly slanted and propped against his thigh—two days before he was killed in the raid on Khe Than. Hickson looks back through the glass.
He stands, staring.
He stands there for a very long time.
Midnight now, and Hickson dreams of tunnels. He has come to a place within a place, crossbeams and kerosene lanterns; sandstone; structures of clay. In a widened hallway, corridors branch all directions. Rough-hewn, cracked, a colony here, refuse from topside—road signs and rusted scraps of tin. From down the passage, murmurs, the chink of iron. Hickson’s shadow gathers behind him, the floor against his feet like powder or cloth. He rounds a corner and the gleam along the walls begins to brighten. His dream alters and he awakens to birds.