by Alison Stine
Something detached from a log, becoming not a part of the woods, but a hand, raised up as though I had called his name.
A man lay in the leaves, a hatchet beside him. His right foot was turned to the side, and he held it with his other hand. He looked familiar, in the way all men did: bland features, broken capillaries on his cheeks from the cold or bad shaving. Long dark hair stuck to the side of his face.
I approached him slowly. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“I guess not. I guess I twisted my foot.”
“What are you doing here?” I didn’t look at his foot. I looked at the hatchet beside him. I looked out of the corners of my eyes and couldn’t see a truck, a friend of his. But where there was one man, there were certainly others. I saw notch marks in the log felled beside the man. The marks looked fresh, like the nibbling of a small beast. “A white birch?” I couldn’t help myself. “That burns way too fast. That’s a bad tree to use for firewood. If that’s what you were doing.”
He just looked at me, then tried and failed to stand. “Can you help me? Drop me off in town? I think my foot’s broken or something.”
What was the trick, what was the scam? But nothing in the woods seemed out of place. No branches were broken off along the path. I saw no cigarette butts in the snow, heard no rustling. There was no one else around. Cold whistled in the trees like a drunk.
It was just me out here, me and this man. I heard Lobo’s voice in my head, telling me not to be stupid, not to be a girl about this. Not to trust anyone.
“Lean on me,” I said.
We hobbled together to the truck. I helped him into the front seat and started the engine. I listened to it turn over, thought about what to say that wouldn’t give up too much. “My mama always wants me to carry a first-aid kit with me when I’m chopping wood, but I always forget,” I said.
“Me, too. Obviously.”
I looked over at him. “What’s your name?”
“Grayson. You’re Wil. Short for Wylodine, I remember.”
“You remember?” I studied him as he leaned back in the passenger seat, teeth gritted with pain as I began to drive. The truck bounced over the rutted path. “Did we go to school together?”
“I’m a year younger.”
“But you know me.”
“The name,” he said.
“Right. The name.”
“And...” I could tell he was debating whether or not to say it. “Your family.”
“Of course. My family.”
But some families grew or cooked worse: poppies, meth. Some traded in pills. Some drove back and forth to Chillicothe with balloons of heroin, bottles of painkillers. A lot of families got caught. Some were in jail, or died, or were killed. Lobo and Mama at least had been careful.
I looked at the man from the woods again. His back rested against the window, though rested was the wrong word. He sat rigid—and not just from pain. He was poised to jump if I did something (what?), ready to flinch, roll, or run. I wouldn’t have been surprised if his hand was on the door handle.
He would be disappointed to find out I had locked it.
My eyes flicked back to the road. I kept my voice cool. “Did you want to buy something? Is that why you were in my woods?”
“Buy something?”
“Weed?”
“No! I don’t do that.” He paused. “Do you?”
I could feel him looking at me, gray and intense.
“You must not remember me well,” I said.
* * *
The parking lot at the clinic was full. I dropped Grayson off at the emergency entrance and parked down by the river. When I returned to the clinic, I found Grayson slumped in the very last chair. I crouched down beside him.
He seemed surprised to see me. “You don’t have to stay.”
“Do you have folks coming?”
He made some kind of sound.
“I’ll stay. Nobody’s waiting at home for me, either.”
The waiting room overflowed. People sat in wheelchairs. A baby cried. Maybe more than one baby. There were several people with ice packs or bandages, several more coughing, but most just looked pale and miserable, red eyes and thin shoulders.
“People don’t want to go home,” a nurse said, pausing beside us, ice pack in her hand. “They don’t have heat there.” She bent the ice pack, releasing the chemicals with a crack, and handed it to Grayson. I thought of graduation: Lisbeth’s mama and her hand warmers. It seemed like years ago.
Someone moaned in a corner by the gift shop, and the nurse headed off to see to them.
“You want to tell me what you were doing in my woods?” I asked Grayson.
“I didn’t know it was your woods.”
“I didn’t see a car. How did you get all the way out there?”
Grayson folded the ice pack over his foot. He had taken his boot off, and in the harsh, yellow light of the clinic waiting room he looked younger. The beard scruff on his face could have been new. No lines spread around his eyes. “I got a ride from some guys at the restaurant. I ran out of firewood and wanted to go somewhere nobody would notice if I took a little. The guys dropped me off and I hiked into the woods. I thought, if somebody lived in those woods, they wouldn’t mind.”
“Stores sell firewood, you know.”
“They used to.” Grayson adjusted his ice pack. “When was the last time you were at Walmart?”
“My idea of hell,” I said.
“Well, the space heaters are gone now. They sold out weeks ago. Back-ordered, I guess. There’s a run on sleeping bags, blankets. Grow lights.”
“Grow lights?”
“Things are getting bad,” Grayson said. “You might not know because you’re out there on your farm.”
It was true. I could go for a week without going into town, maybe longer. I could make the groceries stretch. It was a thirty-minute drive into town in good weather, and I had made the trip less and less since I had been by myself. I wasn’t sure what stopped me. Snow or ice. Worrying about the roads. I waited until too late to set out. The sun sank earlier and earlier in the afternoons, and I didn’t want to be driving much after dusk, coming back alone to a house both empty and dark.
I think I also didn’t go because I didn’t want people feeling sorry for me. It was a small town. And small towns talk. Some people knew my family had left. The men at the feed store were already throwing in bags of fertilizer for free, offering to carry stuff out to my car, help me load. They weren’t hitting on me. Men who had known me longer than a heartbeat, or who were familiar with Lobo’s temper, had stopped trying stuff with me a long time ago. It was pity I saw in their eyes now.
In the waiting room, I looked around at the wheelchairs, the old women in shawls. A child couldn’t stop trembling. Being isolated on the farm, I had cut myself off from a lot. My puffy coveralls felt almost too hot in the waiting room. I wore comfortable boots that fit. I was warm and fed. Fine.
Grayson was talking on and on. “Canned goods are going. Nonperishables. Propane.”
I pulled out my phone, but didn’t dial the number. Lobo’s number. My mama didn’t have her own phone. Too expensive, he said. If I called, he would answer. He would want to know why I was calling, what had I done wrong. I shoved the phone back in my pocket. “After you’re done here?” I said to Grayson. “We’re going to Walmart.”
* * *
Seeing a doctor took all morning. When she finally came into the room where we had been placed—a storage closet, based on the mops and brooms and rolls of brown paper towels crowded in around us—her eyes looked scared. I sat on an upside-down bucket because there was only one chair and I let Grayson have it.
The doctor didn’t ask our names. She didn’t introduce herself. She didn’t even ask how it happened. She had a large brace ready in her hands. She unwrapped it and strapped
it around Grayson’s foot.
“This is a walking cast,” she explained, tightening the straps. “You’ll need it.”
Grayson looked at me, then back at the doctor. “What does that mean?”
“That means, in an ideal world, you’d rest for a few weeks. You’d stay off your foot as much as possible. You wouldn’t walk. I’d give you crutches. You’d give your bone time to heal. But we don’t live in an ideal world,” she said. “I don’t want you to be left behind.”
“Left behind?” he echoed.
And that was it. She was leaving. She had spent five minutes with us, barely. The clinic had not even taken X-rays, not that I thought Grayson could have afforded them. I had been parking when he had filled out his paperwork, but from the sick gray tone his skin was taking on, the way he had kept asking me, Is it broken? Do you think it’s broken?—like I knew—paying for this visit was going to be a problem.
The doctor moved to the door, then thought of something. She pressed her lips together. She had short, dark hair, tight as if she had curled it, the blood-shadow of lipstick that had faded away. I could tell she didn’t have time to tell us whatever it was she was going to say. “Stop by the pharmacy on your way out.”
“Why?” I asked. “Does he have a prescription?”
“No. It’s going to hurt. But we’re all out of prescription pain meds.”
“Out? How can you be out?”
“Oh, we were out days ago. Everyone refilled everything they had or could get their hands on. We’re waiting on a shipment, but I don’t have high hopes. There are shortages everywhere.”
“Why should we go to the pharmacy, then?”
The doctor looked at us blankly. As if we should know this already. “Vitamins,” she said. “Over the counter pain meds. But especially vitamins. Get as many as you can carry.” She opened the broom closet door.
“Wait,” Grayson said. “Do we stop by the front desk or—”
The doctor was already in the hall. Now that the door was open, we could hear crying. An adult this time. “Don’t worry about it.”
“But I don’t have insurance.”
“Why bother?”
And she was gone.
What had happened in the slow, predictable days I had spent on the farm, rotating and watering the plants, chopping firewood? How much had gone wrong? How fast?
We pushed through the swinging double doors, Grayson walking with a hitch as he dragged his bad leg. His foot looked heavy in its new brace, like he was towing a log, and his breath sounded jagged. He was trying to get used to the pain. The waiting room had gotten more crowded since we had been in the storage closet, and out the windows, the parking lot looked strange. Too white. It had snowed again.
At the clinic pharmacy, a line of people waited in the prescription drop-off area. But I headed straight for the shelves. I swept bottle after bottle of vitamins into my arms, then I started filling Grayson’s arms.
“Hey, those are prenatal vitamins, for pregnant people,” he said.
“So?” I thought for a moment, then put the prenatal vitamins, and gummy vitamins for kids, back. I added boxes of cough syrup, bottles of iodine, rolls of tacky bandages, and painkillers.
“I don’t have enough money for all this,” Grayson whispered.
“I do.”
It was a short line to pay; most people were still at the drop-off desk, clamoring for refills, for something for their pain. The cashier had a look I was starting to think was the look, her lids popping open, her pupils the tiniest dark dots. The whites of her eyes looked as shocked as snow. She filled several paper bags with our purchases and shoved them across the counter to us. A man started to bang his cane against the counter to get her attention.
Grayson and I reached the lobby. The nurse who had given him the ice pack stood on a chair and was shouting, “Please remain patient. You will be seen in the order you arrived.”
From the crowd, there was a murmur, getting louder. People had spilled into the lobby and through the emergency room doors. People sat on gurneys and newspaper bins. Someone was bleeding, a bright red trail that streaked across the floor. I began to hear distinct voices, popping up above the crowd like Lisbeth’s treble when she led the choir. Not going to stand for this... How much more...
We went to Walmart.
3
We had to park clear at the end of the lot, by the Chinese restaurant, which was closed. A hand-lettered sign in the window read No Heat. We walked quickly. The pavement was frosted over, the reflections of streetlights buzzing in the icy puddles on the ground. Strangers joined us, their shoulders down, a tautness to their jaws like an arrow’s string. It made me think of Lobo, Lobo mad. I heard a thudding, which I realized was Grayson’s leg in the cast, striking the pavement.
“I should have dropped you off at the door,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
He would never be able to wear coveralls with that thing. How would he stay warm?
“I have to get used to it. That’s what the doctor said.”
There was no greeter at the entrance to the store. I grabbed one of the last remaining carts, whipping it past a woman who cursed at me. I muttered an apology.
“It’s only going to get worse,” Grayson said.
Inside, our boots squealed on the floor, crossed with slushy tracks. We were only a few steps into the store when I realized I could see my breath.
“They turned the heat off?” I said.
“Probably never turned it on. Big place like this, it must cost a fortune to heat. No wonder the schools closed.”
People and carts clogged the aisles. It was more crowded than even the first of the month, when support checks came in, and everyone who could afford to shopped with their tiny bit of money from the state. Mama had taught me not to go to stores then.
Everyone looked gray as overwashed clothes, exhausted and faded, their eyes turning up at the shelves as if they held the answers. This was another reason I didn’t like to come to town. There was too much suffering.
There had been suffering here forever, even before the cold came. Long ago, we had been forgotten in the holler, forgotten and left to make it on our own with no jobs, no hope of jobs. Now, cold wrung the worst from us. People snapped at each other, impatient, panicking over milk. All the women looked like my mama: grease-colored hair, faded pretty faces. The bright displays of the store, which had always looked garish, now seemed obscene.
“I don’t know what to get,” I said.
Grayson took over. “You’re pretty set for vitamins now. You probably need warmth and nonperishable food.” But in housewares, the shelves had been swept clean of blankets, sheets, even fluffy towels. In the crafts aisle, Grayson shoved bolts of fabric—fleece and hunter’s plaid and thick gray wool—into the cart. “You can make blankets if you have to,” he said. “You don’t even have to sew.”
“Good thing, because I don’t.”
The camping section had been stripped. Hand warmers, lanterns, and portable stoves had disappeared, along with all the heaters, as Grayson had predicted. He put several plastic gas cans into the cart. In the grocery section, I saw a man pulling canned food out of a stranger’s cart. He kept taking them until he was caught by the second man’s screaming wife or girlfriend. We steered out of that aisle.
The shouting intensified. We curved the cart around a smashed jar of cherries, bright and pink on the floor. It was hard not to feel dizzy, not to think of bad things. Grayson edged between strangers, adding energy bars, jars of peanut butter, tins of meat and fish, powdered milk, and packages of hard candy into my cart, swiftly and confidently reaching his hand between strangers’ hands, taking what he thought I’d need.
“You sure you have enough money for all this?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Cash isn’t a problem.”
Mama and Lobo had l
eft a lot of it buried in the yard.
“You listening to the president’s speech tomorrow?” the cashier asked us, scanning our items. We had waited half an hour in line to reach her. “It’s something bad, I bet. Chemical weapons or terrorists. You know what I think?”
“What?” Grayson said.
The cashier leaned forward, her name badge clanging against the stand with the card reader. Her name was April. “I think you should all get the hell outta town.” She started scanning again, the beeps from the register punching under her words. “I tell you what, I ain’t sticking around to give my notice. Not worth it. I’m leaving tomorrow. Mama and me. We’re going to Florida.”
I tried not to feel anything at the word Mama. My own was fine, she was fine. She had gotten out. It was normal for the two of us to go awhile without talking. We hadn’t been close like that for a long time.
“Florida’s packed,” Grayson said. “Besides, even Florida gets snow sometimes.”
“That church left. They just picked up and left, you know? All of them, cleared out in the night.”
“It wasn’t in the night.”
“Maybe those wackos were onto something.”
“Thanks,” I said. I grabbed the receipt, as if we were ever coming back.
* * *
Grayson told me he lived in the rolling ridges on the other side of the county. I knew the place. We had lived there ourselves for a few years right before and after my daddy left. The houses were brown and forgettable. A lot of duplexes. Ours had smelled of mildew. On some nights, when the wind blew a certain way, it seemed like the house had a sharpness, a bitterness I could breathe.
Maybe it was my parents’ fights. Even after my daddy had gone, anger had a way of hanging around: sulking past the corners, down the drab carpeted hall. Disappointment lingered in the doorways, like smoke or a ghost.
“Do you like living here?” I asked Grayson. I didn’t tell him about my old house. I hoped we didn’t pass it. I didn’t want to see it again.
“It’s okay. My allergies are bad around here. The Church was trying to help with that.”