You Only Get Letters from Jail

by Jodi Angel

  “There’s what we have,” she said.

  We both looked down at the collection of things we couldn’t use.

  “And a flashlight,” I said. “And three guns.”

  Shirley turned and sat down on the embankment, drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped them with her arms. “I went to nursing school,” she said.

  I hadn’t given much thought to what Shirley did or had done before. All I knew was that she was home a lot and kept a strict watch for fingerprints on glass, shoe scuffs on coffee tables, dishes in the sink. She had followed me around for days, correcting where I put things, which towels I used. Most days I tried to pick a place and sit still.

  “I dropped out,” she said.

  “Was it the blood?” I asked. “Looking at things cut open?”

  Shirley smoothed her hair back from her headband and looked up at the sky. While we had been standing and sitting and waiting for an idea, the sun had been moving and it was on the west side now, and weaker than before.

  “I never minded the blood, and looking at the insides of people never bothered me. I quit because I didn’t see the point. Why do we go to so much effort to save people from dying? My mother died of cancer when I was seventeen and there wasn’t a team of doctors or nurses that could do a thing for her even though they tried for weeks, pumped her full of drugs so that by the end she kept calling me Julie, and that was her sister’s name. People die. It’s the wrong kind of thinking to believe that we’ve gotta pay somebody to hold a bandage and stop the blood if the bleeding is going to happen anyway.”

  My mother had been dead before the ambulance came and they did not do CPR, or use a stethoscope, or hook up oxygen, or let the sirens loose, or roll back her eyelids and call her by name. She was dead and now Uncle Nick was dead and it was me who had touched both of them.

  Shirley picked up some loose dirt and let it fall through her fingers. “There is no plan for us and no God and no matter what drug they invent there ain’t nobody who is gonna live forever. We’re just these things that work without most of us knowing how and we’re just thin skin and blood and everything has to work at the same time without us thinking about it. It’s amazing that we live at all. So I quit because things happen and I didn’t want to be somebody who tried to make somebody else believe that what I did for them was gonna keep them alive.”

  She had never said that many words to me before.

  The wind came up as the sun began its descent and we ate the sandwiches in silence and took small sips from the canteens. “There are other hunters up here,” she reminded me. “Somebody else is bound to come through.”

  It was too late in the year for mosquitoes or flies, but bugs found Uncle Nick anyway, and there wasn’t much we could do to shake their attention. It got colder but I tried not to notice, and I ignored the fact that October nights could slip to twenty-five degrees up here and Uncle Nick had been the one to tell me that fact as we built the campfire the night before.

  “I think I could make it back to the truck,” I said. There was cold creeping down the back of my neck and I was tired of sitting and waiting and brushing back bugs and biting small corners off my sandwich and hoping for somebody to find us. I had a strong feeling that we were the ones who were going to have to find somebody else, and we weren’t doing that by sitting beside the ditch.

  “You know this is black bear country?” Shirley said. “Mountain lions. Bobcats.”

  “I’ll take a gun,” I said.

  “And you’ll what, leave me alone? Let me sit here in the dark with the smell of blood coming off Nick?”

  I tried to imagine Shirley sitting scared with the rifle raised, trying to sight in a bobcat that just kept circling and circling like a shark in the water.

  “Then maybe you should go,” I said.

  “Right. Be a moving target? Fall off a cliff? Trip and break my ankle and lie someplace else dying so that by the time the forest service comes to rescue us there’s two dead bodies and you?”

  “I just think we’re not doing anything good by not doing anything at all.”

  Shirley picked up her rifle, pulled back the bolt, shot into the air, spit the shell out to the ground, pulled back and did it again and then again. The shots came so fast that I screamed a little and put my hands to my ears.

  “That was something,” she said. She opened the flaps on her vest and dug through her pockets. “Well, now I’m out of shells.”

  The sun had finally crossed over the tops of trees and slid past the edge of the horizon and I knew that there would be seven minutes of light left because it took seven minutes for the sun’s light to reach the earth in the morning and seven minutes before it slipped back at night. I was cold. To the west there were clouds banking together, joining up, and they were dark despite the light.

  “It’s getting cold,” Shirley said. She blew into her hands and went back to hugging her knees to her chest. “You know, Nick got shot in the head. There’s nothing wrong with his clothes.”

  As the evening had settled in it got easier to look at him and I started measuring up what Shirley had said.

  “This is wilderness survival. You have to do what you got to do,” she said.

  I knew she was right in a way, but I didn’t know just how far she would take it and I prepared myself for what might come—Uncle Nick stripped down to jockey shorts and tied up to a pole and hanging like a spitted pig.

  “I don’t know if I can,” I said.

  “You’d be surprised,” she said.

  I didn’t want to help her but she made me, and while she unbuttoned and unzipped, I rolled him up and to his side as need dictated so Shirley could remove his layers. She set the vest aside and divided up the rest. I got his long-john shirt, his socks, and his jeans. Shirley took his long underwear and his denim work shirt. She wrapped his undershirt around his face and I think it made us both feel a little better.

  “All the clothes are cold,” she said, and I was glad that she stopped there and did not remind me that it wasn’t just the clothes that were cold.

  Darkness brought things to the bushes and we took turns swinging the flashlight at noise. There were a few times when the light reflected back the flat glow of an animal’s eyes, and then we’d yell and shout get out of here and sometimes the eyes would turn and fade back to the bushes, and sometimes they wouldn’t. The one who didn’t hold the flashlight was the one who held a rifle and when it was my turn my nerves hummed like telephone wires. I was afraid I’d shoot Shirley, shoot myself, or, worse yet, shoot Uncle Nick again and have to know that I shot a man who was dead.

  The rain came late but with as little force as spit from the sky, and although we both wanted to slide down to the bottom of the gully and out of the wind, we were afraid that animals would sense our retreat and we wouldn’t be able to see them coming. Shirley took Uncle Nick’s vest and wrapped it around our shoulders, and even though it didn’t cover us well it made me feel warmer.

  “Tell me about your mother,” Shirley said. We had been sitting in quiet, breathing steadily, and I thought she was asleep sitting up because I almost was and when she spoke I jerked the rifle forward and shoved a wad of dirt up the barrel.

  My eyes were heavy and there were no memories stuck in my head, which was wispy as cotton candy, nothing more than spun sugar for thoughts and nothing of substance I could hold on to.

  “Do you miss her?” she asked.

  Sometimes at night my mother would stretch out on the couch in front of the television, and during the times when Tyler had a job and worked nights, she would hold out her arm and tell me to come here and I would stretch out next to her so that she was behind me, holding me on to the couch, keeping me from falling, and we would watch television together and if I was quiet, I would feel us breathe together, both of us keeping the same pace, and I wouldn’t pay attention to the television because I’d be too busy trying to match the rise and fall of her chest.

  “Sometimes,” I said.
/>   “Missing is like a toothache,” she said.

  At some point in the night, maybe after the last of the rain had dried up, or maybe just before when the ground turned damp around us, I let my eyes close all the way and did not try to catch myself when I slid toward sleep. I let myself fall down the chute. I don’t think it was a deep sleep because I thought I could remember surfacing a couple of times, once to realize that I had pulled myself into the fetal position and the dirt was warm underneath me, and once to notice that Shirley had given in too, and she was next to me, asleep, and Uncle Nick’s vest was over the top of us and she was close, both of us facing the same direction, and I knew the cold would force her against me, so she could share more of my heat, hold me to her so that my back was her front. But when I woke up just before sunrise, when there was mist and very little light near the ground, I saw that she had turned away in the night, was far away from me, had taken the vest for herself.

  I was starving. My neck hurt, my sides ached. I couldn’t tell if my clothes were wet or just cold but either way they were no longer holding in warmth. Shirley sat up and started rubbing at her left shoulder, which had been pressed against the ground, and neither of us said anything. Uncle Nick was blue white and his veins looked close to the surface and covered him in thin lines. Birds started checking in with each other and the sun broke through the fog around us.

  Shirley stood up, stretched, handed me a granola bar. “We made it,” she said.

  In the early light of a new day I felt like I could find the truck. I looked out toward the stand of trees that we had come through and tried to see past them to the broken grass I had trampled trying to move quietly in one direction. And then it came to me that we had been thinking too small, trying to hit a small target with a rock—get back to the truck—when actually we could hike toward the roads. There were highways that cut through the mountains and forest service roads were bound to come out somewhere. If we came down from where we were, we might be able to hear big rigs on the steep grades and we could walk toward the sound.

  “We could find a road,” I said. I was excited suddenly. “If we went down and that way”—I pointed to my left—“I think we could get back to a highway.” I was chewing my granola bar fast, as if there was another one after this, and I had to remind myself that there wasn’t.

  Shirley looked off toward the direction I had pointed. She raised her hand and shielded her eyes as if she was cutting out the glare, but the sun was still weak and there wasn’t much light bouncing back.

  “I think you should go,” she said.

  I hadn’t really thought of just myself going. I had thought of the plan as we and I had pictured both of us walking, both of us sharing the relief of finding a road.

  “What about you?” I wadded the empty granola bar wrapper into a ball and set it on the ground, then thought better of it and put it in the pocket of my jeans. Even though I had Uncle Nick’s pair over the top of mine there was plenty of gap at the waistband to get at my own.

  “I’d like to stay with Nick.”

  The trees were full of birds now and I could see a squirrel jumping branch to branch on a short pine. I gave Shirley all the extra clothes, and when I handed her the jeans she reached into the back pocket and took out Uncle Nick’s wallet and opened it. She handed me the money that was inside, forty-two dollars, and apologized that there wasn’t more. Nick didn’t like to carry too much cash, she said.

  She gave me the knife but kept the guns and when I was ready she gave me a stiff hug and it was hard to feel her under all her clothes. “Don’t send help, Robbie,” she said.

  I stepped back from her. “What are you talking about?”

  “You heard what I said last night and I meant it. I know my cancer is back but I didn’t have the heart to tell Nick and I like it up here. Nick’s here. I don’t want to go back and spend six months with people forcing me to live.”

  “That’s just crazy talk,” I said. “You’re dehydrated and your blood sugar is probably low. You need to sit here and drink some water and eat your granola bar and wait for help to come.”

  “Okay, Robbie,” she said. “You’re probably right.”

  When I left the gully and passed back through the trees, she was sitting on the embankment and adjusting her headband. She looked small. Uncle Nick was no longer a person, more like an unearthed rock that was rising out of the ground. It hadn’t rained hard and the grass had not bent with the weight of the water. It didn’t take me long to find the trampled weeds of my trail. I imagined what it would be like to come out on the highway, jump down out of the woods and walk the gravel shoulder with my thumb out. Maybe a trucker would pick me up, and he would ask me where to and I would tell him Los Angeles and he would say he wasn’t going that far, but he could drop me at the next city where the interstate connected. And maybe he would be playing old country music like my mom used to listen to—Conway Twitty or Dolly Parton—and he’d have a thermos of coffee and offer me a cup from the lid. I knew that sound had a strange way of traveling in the forest, and the shot could’ve come from anywhere—there were 413 other hunters taking down deer this week. There was the pop and the hush, but I did not flinch like I had before.

  GAME-BRED

  If I concentrated really hard, clamped my mind down and squeezed it tight as a fist, I could remember what it was like to be nine years old and getting my leg torn to shit by a rock-headed pit bull named Geraldine. She was a thick brown dog who liked the taste of kid skin and her owner was a fat old lady who thought maple-walnut ice milk on a cone was a treat I loved. Everything about her house was hell, and for seven months I was sent there on Tuesdays when my mom worked late. I went through a lot of socks in that time, and I learned to take it, learned to let my leg go limp so Geraldine could square her shoulders and shake it like a rag, because if I ran, she was like a fire that would gain strength from the air. With Geraldine I learned the true meaning of stop, drop, and roll, and so now I tried to remember that feeling of being bitten—the smell of sweat and fear and maple-walnut spit and knowing that I wouldn’t run—because I owed Richie Dobkins a hell of a lot of money and if I couldn’t come up with the cash by kickoff tomorrow, Richie was going to do a whole lot more than just chew up the skin on my legs and send me home with a wad of shredded socks in my pocket.

  Richie’s Uncle Dave had a house up in Northern California, somewhere near the town of Trinidad, on the isosceles side of the great white breeding ground triangle, and the last guy who’d owed Richie a hell of a lot of money got taken for a boat ride and dropped in the water, about a mile from shore, in nothing but his clothes and a life jacket. That thought kept me awake at night—being dropped in the ocean with a life jacket on, so my head was high enough out of the water to see the first dorsal fin coming—or not see it, which would be about ten times worse, to just be waiting and waiting and not know what was underneath me, bobbing around, stone-cold alive and waiting for the shark to hit like a freight train. I was a weak swimmer who was six months from graduating with a 1430 on the SATs. I had fifteen hours until kickoff and my mom was in Reno. I took her Plymouth Suburban and her Wusthof, parked down the block from the Tri-County cash machine, and waited.

  I had practiced in my bedroom. I needed a good voice and a quick arm with the knife, so I stirred together equal parts Johnny Cash and Norman Bates and turned “Give me your money” into Folsom Prison Blues behind a shower curtain. I didn’t want to hurt anybody, but there was a fine line between threat and circumstances, and put under pressure, even a lump of coal can turn to diamond, hard and clear. I just needed one good minute at somebody’s back and come tomorrow I could tell Richie that I wasn’t gonna fuckin’ fish or cut bait.

  I was thinking about that, fishing and the Discovery Channel and what it looks like when one of those big-ass sharks comes out of the water and takes forty pounds of chum off the end of a stick some idiot is holding out over the side of the boat, and I almost missed her, the girl at the cash machine with
her purse under her arm and her card in her hand. She was a tall girl, and from where I sat I could see that she was alone—even the passenger seat of her car looked empty—and the street was quiet and soft with fog. I cracked the window and took a deep breath and it felt cold and good in my lungs and I was snapped clean and awake. The storefronts were dark and the sidewalk was lit with the staggered row of street lamps that were having a hard time muscling their light through the thick air. The sound of cars was distorted—they could’ve been streets away or miles away, I couldn’t tell. I wiped my hands across my jeans and pushed at the Wusthof and thought about taking this first pitch—letting this one go and waiting for the next—but this was a sucker pitch, a lob, a girl all alone, and this might be my only chance to swing for the fences.

  I eased the door open and slid off the bench seat, dragging the knife with me. The girl didn’t turn around. I hugged the car until I hit the sidewalk, and then I stood in a shadow and caught my breath. I was sucking air like I’d just run from my house and it was hard to get my lungs full again. My heart was tapping out a code and I had to lock my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering. It had been easier in my bedroom in front of the mirror. I knew that this was how it would feel when I hit the water up north—shaky, cold, and in over my head. I got myself walking and I stayed quiet and didn’t stop.

  She was looking at the receipt in her hand, and she had her finger on the button by the screen and then I was behind her and I cleared my throat so I could touch bass, and she turned on me before I could get the words out. I had the knife handle white-knuckled and locked in my right hand and I wouldn’t be able to drop it and run even if I wanted to. The blade was solid against my thigh and I got to “Give me . . .” before she shifted her weight forward and said my name.

  “Nolan?”

  I turned the blade on its edge and if I’d pushed it a little harder I could’ve made it bite through my jeans. There was no more air in my lungs—what little I’d managed to hold since standing in the shadow had evaporated like the fog under the streetlights. I tried to finish my sentence but all that came out was a long squeak, like a balloon at the end of a neck-pinched release.