by Anna Bailey
* * *
But Hunter doesn’t pick up. Not the first time, or the second. It goes to voice mail every time, and Hunter, sitting alone in his room with a cigarette shaking in his fingers, keeps watching it ring, not daring to answer.
40
THEN
We may be strangers to ourselves, yet God sees us,” Pastor Lewis declares. Gripping his Bible, he is a dark, faceless figure, backlit by the summer light streaming through the window behind him. “The Lord knows each and every one of your hearts. He sees the sin, but He also sees the conscious choice that all of you have made to be here today, in His house, to give worship to His glory, and when the time comes to separate the sheep from the goats, Those who have been righteous in the name of the Lord will be righteous still. God sees us, my brothers, and thus He knows us—but do you know Him?”
Abigail wonders.
The Blakes are always the first to leave church because they sit closest to the door, at the back, and everybody seems to agree that this is where they belong. Even the Blakes themselves have never tried to sit anywhere else. Now, dabbing at her dewy forehead as they file out into the parking lot, Abigail’s mother says, “I’d like to go to the store before we head back.”
Her father shakes his head. “Woman, you were just at the store yesterday. I’m not made of money.”
Abigail shifts her weight from one foot to the other, feeling the heat of the concrete through her thin-soled shoes. “I’ll come with you, Mom.”
“Sam, do you want anything?”
Samuel glances at his wife and daughter, then spits on the ground. “Six-pack of Lone Star.”
Dolly begins shepherding Abigail and Jude across the parking lot, while the other members of the congregation emerge from the church, blinking in the midday light as if they have just awoken from a long sleep.
“Noah, are you coming?” their mother calls over her shoulder.
“I’m going for a drive.”
Abigail watches him slouch off in the other direction, his shoulders held high, hands shoved deep in his pockets. Almost arrogant in his secrecy. He is going to the woods. She knows because she has followed him there before.
* * *
Among the ruins of the old Winslow house, Noah crowds Rat up against the crumbling stonework and kisses him with his teeth against his throat. He fucks him until he stops speaking English, and then they collapse back amid the soft ferns while the mountain breeze blows over them, cooling the sweat on their chests. In this moment they are not just two relative strangers lying in the earth, they are something infinitely softer: ancient love letters, Oscar Wilde’s poetry, lips pressed gently against the back of a hand—they are lovers. Rat’s shoulder feels waxy against Noah’s cheek, and he knows if he were to move his lips just so, he could kiss him there.
Instead he says, “I think I’m doing this wrong.”
“Trust me, church boy, you’re doing it just fine.”
“Don’t call me that. And you know that’s not what I meant.”
Rat props himself up on one elbow, grinning his half-moon grin, the aspen branches above framing his face like some pagan crown.
“Come on, then, Blake, tell me what you mean.”
“I don’t…” Noah chews his lip impatiently, frustrated that the words aren’t coming out like he wants them to. “I’m not like you. I don’t know how to do this. I’m not part of ‘the community’ like you are.”
“Who says I am?” Rat snorts. “Look, Blake, if you’re talking about the gay community or whatever, it’s not some sort of exclusive club you have to join in order to validate the way you feel.” He huffs and tucks his hair behind his ear. “Like, I assume you don’t go to every potluck dinner or middle-school play or moose-petting, apple-bobbing square dance that happens in Whistling Ridge, but you’re still a part of this dumb town, aren’t you? A community is there if you need the support of your own people, but that’s all. It’s not an obligation.”
“I don’t think I have my own people.”
“Sure you do,” he says, running his thumb along the broken line of Noah’s nose. “You’ve got me, haven’t you?”
Noah lets Rat lean down and kiss him. He thinks, We may be strangers to ourselves, and yet God sees us. The afternoon sun bathes Rat in warm green light, and when Noah looks him in the eye, he looks right back.
* * *
In Safeway, Abigail and Jude stand in the fresh produce section in order to catch some of the water from the mister as it sprays the vegetables. It doesn’t do much to cool them down, but it makes Jude laugh and Abigail loves him for that, for laughing. Nobody else at home seems able to.
“You two stop that,” their mother says. “You’re going to ruin your church clothes.”
The store is full of tourists. Abigail can’t see their eyes behind their big sunglasses; as a child she used to wonder if they had eyes at all. She hates them because they will not help her. So many times since the night her father put the hole in the wall, she has longed to run to one of them and say, “Please, please help me, take me away, there is something wicked happening here,” but she never does. They would think she was crazy, and maybe they would be right.
“Abi, sweetie, do you want strawberries?” Her mother holds up a carton and Abigail can see the fruit is already on the turn, too red and soft, like blood and guts.
“No thanks, Mom. They’ll be rotten by the time we get home.”
“They’re not expensive.”
“We won’t be able to eat them. They’ll just go to waste.”
Dolly shrugs and puts the carton in the shopping cart anyway.
“No, Mom, really.”
“You might change your mind later.”
Suddenly Abigail wants to scream, wants to smash her knuckles against the shopping-cart handle until all her fingers are as red and sticky as that fruit. No, she thinks. Mom, I said NO. Why won’t you listen to me? Why does nobody ever listen?
Jude puts his hand on her arm. “Abi, are you okay?”
“I need to go to the restroom.”
As she walks quickly across the store, she can hear Pastor Lewis saying, The Lord knows each and every one of your hearts. He sees the sin. In the cubicle, she pulls out reams and reams of toilet paper and stuffs it up her skirt between her bare thighs until she can no longer feel any space there. He sees the sin. She lets her head fall slack against the cool bathroom tiles, taking deep, shaky breaths of muggy disinfectant air.
No. She said no. When did that word lose its meaning?
NOW
When Noah and Jude get home from the store, their mother has propped herself up against the kitchen counter and is smoking studiously. The house has always reeked of cigarettes, but today is the first time Noah can remember really disliking the smell. Perhaps it reminds him too much of someone else. Perhaps. All he knows is he has to get out of here, so he goes into the backyard to finish sweeping up the leaves he’d left earlier.
He thinks maybe he gets it now—his mom wanting to have something to do with her hands, with any of her limbs, really. Since that meeting in Pastor Lewis’s office, Noah feels like a marionette who, finding himself suddenly cut free from his strings, has just up and walked away. Except now, without Rat, Noah doesn’t know where to put himself. Doesn’t know how to be.
He gets out his phone. A message on the screen tells him he has a missed voice mail, and he is glad he cannot see his own face while he plays it back.
“Hey, Blake, it’s me. Listen, I’m getting out of here. It’ll take me a little while to fix up the RV, but I should be ready to go by six. I wasn’t lying, you know, about the photograph, or anything else. I’ll wait for you. One hour. And if you don’t show… Well, I hope you do, Noah.”
41
Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing.” Pastor Lewis thrusts his Bible into the air. “They are but ravening wolves.”
Dalton Lewis stands shoulder to shoulder with Bryce Long and Cole Weaver, and the other s
traight-up-and-down boys from the basketball team, as he watches his father preaching from his little podium. He can still smell the gasoline, a lingering undercurrent now to the stuffy scent of people after a full day’s work. His mother had had him down on his knees after school, scrubbing at the carpet until his knuckles were raw, and now, he thinks, flexing his red fingers, he’s glad that the gypsy boy left his earring behind. Oh, he’s glad.
“This stranger comes to town with his loud motorcycle and his long hair, and some of us are taken in by his slick talk, his so-called liberal idealism, and some of us offer him hospitality in good faith, inviting him to be a part of our cherished community, and yet behind our backs, he corrupts our children with drugs and homosexual deviancy.”
When Dalton’s father mentions hospitality in good faith, big Jerry Maddox nods vigorously, turning expectantly to those standing around him until they begin nodding too.
“In the Bible, when Matthew talks about a wolf in sheep’s clothing, he’s talking about exactly this kind of smooth operator, but you will know, my brothers, exactly when you are being led astray, because these people are not faithful to the teachings of Jesus Christ. No, it should be clear to us all that no good Christian man would seduce a member of this very congregation to commit the sin of sodomy. No good Christian man would try to intoxicate minors with illegal addictive substances. And no good Christian man would attempt to burn down a place of godly worship!”
There are several gasps from the pews, the crowd fidgeting now as if they are a nest of ants that Dalton’s father has ripped apart, exposing them to the daylight.
“But I,” Pastor Lewis shakes his head, hand over his heart, affecting a look of such deep sorrow that Dalton almost believes it, too, “I have to take some responsibility here, as we all do. Only when we are truly following the word of God, when we are living and breathing and preaching God’s message at every turn—only then can we truly spot a wolf when he sits in our company. And, oh, my brothers, my sisters, what a wolf we have allowed!”
Here, Dalton’s father reaches into his pocket and produces the gypsy boy’s earring, holding it aloft so that the fang glints wickedly in the yellow light.
“These days they call us intolerant when we try to defend our rights as moral citizens of the world and, most importantly, as Christians. Well, I say we have been about as tolerant as we can be, don’t you think? In the Book of Exodus, it clearly states if there is harm, then you shall pay, life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot—burn for burn, my brothers, burn for burn!”
And it is this chant that the congregation carries with them as they pour out of the church, pile into their cars and pickups, and travel in convoy up the mountain toward the trailer park. Dalton goes with the other boys from the basketball team to buy garden torches from the Home section of Safeway. He hollers about justice and morality at the self-checkout, and then a couple of the guys from the deli counter tag along with them when they leave. Dalton imagines, just for a moment, that this is what his father must feel like when he stands up in front of the congregation, and Dalton likes it. Raising their young voices, like a pack of wild dogs, they wave their makeshift firebrands in the face of the oncoming night.
* * *
Dolly shivers and shrinks down into her coat. The electric sign for the clinic is on—fritzing a bit, but still joining the chorus of hums that make up urban America at night—and yet there is nobody inside. She scolds herself for not having come earlier, when Melissa would surely still have been on shift. Melissa would have known what to do about those diary pages; she would have been able to help. But now the whole of Seventeenth Street is strangely empty. The wet ground is awash with reflected neon light, and there is the distant, familiar sound of O’Shannon’s Best of Irish Fiddle CD from the next block over, but there are no people. Even for a Monday night, Dolly feels there is something not quite right about that.
She jumps when she hears footsteps in the alleyway across the street. But they are too fast and light to be a man’s, and when little Chrissy Dukes emerges onto the sidewalk, Dolly sighs, relieved. She raises a hand to wave, but Chrissy hurries to the door of the Aurora diner, panting as though she ran all the way here, and after a brief battle with her keys, she ends up hammering the flat of her hand against the glass.
“Dad! Hey, Dad!” She steps back, calling up to the second-floor window. “Dad, you’ve got to come quick. It’s Beau, he’s taken the truck!”
But there are no lights on and nobody answers.
Dolly waves again. “Hello? Is everything all right?”
“Oh, Mrs. Blake!” Chrissy clutches a hand to her chest. “You scared the crap out of me.”
The girl is too short, her chest sticks out too much, and her hair is too straight for her to be Abigail, but Dolly surprises herself by saying gently, “What’s the matter, sweetie?”
“It’s my brother, he went to that stupid sermon. God, Mrs. Blake, I swear they’ve all gone off to lynch that poor guy.”
“Which guy?”
“You know, that guy! The one they’re all saying…” She looks down at Dolly’s shoes for a moment, and when she looks up again, her cheeks seem very pink. “He used to come in sometimes. I just know Noah really liked him, is all.”
“Hold on, the gypsy boy?”
Chrissy bites her lip and nods. “I’m so worried about Beau—you know, my brother? Those boys he hangs out with can be so mean, and he gets swept up in stuff so easily. I don’t want him to do something he’ll regret.”
A nice girl, Dolly thinks, to worry about her brother like that. “You listen to me, sweetie, we’ll go to the station together and tell the sheriff.”
“Oh no, we can’t! There were cops at the service, Mrs. Blake—I saw them. They’re just going to let it happen, I know it.”
Dolly watches the cloud of steam growing from each of Chrissy’s nervous little breaths, and she tries to think, but the only thing she can seem to summon to mind is the gypsy boy’s face. She remembers him standing there in the police station with the curler in his hair, the way he’d just gazed at Noah.
It’s only now neither of them is talking that she realizes she can no longer hear the music from O’Shannon’s. The two women lean into the night, and Dolly isn’t sure what she’s listening for, but she is almost certain she can hear the distant sound of many engines headed toward the mountain road.
42
THEN
You don’t go into the woods to find yourself,” Samuel tells his daughter, when she is thirteen. “You go to lose yourself, and you must, or the forest will know you don’t belong, and it’ll carry you off in its jaws.”
They are hiking along the memory of an old trail, now cluttered with the gray bodies of fallen trees. Somewhere up ahead, Samuel can hear a waterfall, but sound carries differently in the forest and it’s difficult to judge the distance yet. He explains this to Abigail, and she nods, her patient face shining with sweat.
“You ever get lost out here, you find the river,” he says. “Big Thompson flows east and goes through town, so you can find your way by that.”
“I’m not going to get lost, though, am I? I have you.” She elbows him lightly, and he elbows her back.
“Well, sure, baby girl, I won’t let anything happen to you if I can help it. But that’s the thing about the wild—you can’t always help it.”
They come upon the remains of an old fence, green with moss and half sunk into the earth. Climbing over, Abigail catches her foot on a piece of barbed wire and it tears across the back of her ankle.
“All right, all right.” Samuel sits her down among the springy pine needles and takes off his vest, bunching it up against the wound to staunch the blood. “Here, hold this tight. Hey, Abi, listen to me, listen, you got to do as I say.”
He can see his daughter blinking hard, staring at the fabric around her ankle as patches of deep red begin to soak through.
“What do I always tell your brother—what
do you get if you cry?”
“A busted lip.”
“That’s right. Now hold on tight, press real hard, and it’ll stop, okay?”
He puts a hand on the top of her head and her hair is soft and warm. For a moment he is back in the jungle, his hand buried deep in Alex Major’s hair to keep him still as he twitches on the sun-baked ground, bleeding out no matter how hard Samuel presses on the hole in his gut.
“Tell my mom I couldn’t help it,” Alex had said. He was like Samuel, only eighteen. “Dying in a place like this.”
Samuel watches his daughter now, barely flinching as she presses on the wound, setting her jaw like she knows she has a job to do and she’ll get on with it without complaint. “Attagirl,” he says. Whenever he can teach her something, it gives the rest some meaning.
With his bloody vest tied tight around Abigail’s ankle, they press on to the waterfall. He can tell that it’s midday because their shadows have been sawn off, so they lie out on the boulders beside the river, eat the energy bars that Dolly packed for them, and listen to the water.
“I always like that sound the best,” Abigail tells him. “Helps me tune everything else out.”
“I know what you mean, baby girl.” The sun beats down on the rocks under his hands, and he tries not to picture young Alex Major.
He would have been fifty-eight this summer, if he’d lived. The same as Samuel. That was no way to die, Samuel thinks, but sometimes he gets to wondering if this is any way to live. His joints ache and click all the time, these days; sometimes he thrills at the sound of a gunshot, at others the slightest noise makes him want to rip off his ears. And when he closes his eyes, even now, sitting out in Colorado on a sunny day, the jungle shadows are always there, the body of poor Hoa who ran from him always with him, as if someone had soldered her shape onto the back of his eyelids.