by Alison Stine
Poison ivy and jewelweed.
Lisbeth and I tried it. It was so confusing. The Church forbid everything before marriage, even kissing, and I was stunted by...stunted by—I didn’t know, but I was obviously doing something wrong. I was supposed to feel an explosion of longing. I was supposed to open up and feel warm and emboldened, as bright as a day lily, as free as white trilliums. Wasn’t I supposed to want this? To want it more and more? My mama had moved us to the farm for this, uprooted and permanently scarred our lives to twist in Lobo’s arms, to cry over the dirty dishes for him, and put up with him: his anger, his moods. She wanted him that badly.
And I could barely get through it without squeezing shut my eyes.
“When I get married, I’m going to need to know how to do this,” Lisbeth said. She was very serious. “We need to practice, Wil. I don’t want to be bad on my wedding night. I don’t want to let my husband down.”
I lowered my head. Was I supposed to start? I was looking at the floorboards of her bedroom, the dark spots where water had spilled and been left too long. I was trying not to look at Lisbeth’s knees, the bony domes of them beneath her skirt, and the folds of the fabric, where it twisted—and then her lips were on mine.
This was different. They were soft, she was soft. It felt really, really sweet—that was what I thought. Tender, hesitant. Her hands were nowhere near me, not touching me or trying to, not searching for a way in. That was different, too. I didn’t have anything to bat or twist away from: my wrist pinned to the truck window, my skin burning with a tension men thought was desire but really was me resisting the impulse to run, to fight. With Lisbeth, I just sat there and felt safe. It was just the flutter of kisses, then—
Lisbeth sat back on her heels and opened her eyes. “I didn’t feel anything, did you?”
“No,” I lied.
* * *
At the compound, one of the cars had a pair of underwear speared on the radio antenna, pink and small. On the ground there was a cooler tipped open on its side. A dog licked blood out of the lid.
“Stay safe,” Dance said, then went with the man with the rifle.
The woman and the baby had disappeared inside the shed, and I was supposed to follow her, to walk into who knew what. Jake drank his beer on the porch, watching. Grayson looked at me, then got in the truck and drove it away where they told him to go. I hoped he would be able to grab the knife.
I was left alone in the yard.
For a moment, I thought that this was my chance. The air was still and white—the only sound: two of the dogs, snarling over a bit of food. Jake rocked on a chair against the house, too far to reach me if I bolted.
But how far could I run without a car, without my house and supplies? Where would I go? Where were we, other than West Virginia, in a holler darker than my own?
And I wasn’t alone. I felt it on the back of my neck, as cold as the knife Dance had passed me: men watched me. Jake wasn’t the only one. From the outbuildings, from the burned-out cars, from the woods, I felt eyes. I could not run.
I went to the shed as if it was my choice. Went willingly. Rosemary grew wild against the side of the shed, only half-dead. Herbs could live through a lot. I crouched down and broke off a sprig, still green at the top. I could feel Jake’s presence behind me on the porch. I put the rosemary in my pocket.
The shed might have held wood once, or tools. It had a thin plastic storm door, smeared with grease. I pushed it open without knocking and went in.
A smell. A mattress on the floor. Some laundry, I thought.
There was no heat. Ice crystalized on the window in patterns as pretty as a quilt. The girl with the baby stared at me from the mattress. I was wrong to call her a woman. She was young. Her hair was a lank, yellow smear. Her eyes looked huge and hollow, rimmed by circles of blue pencil.
“You want food?” the girl said blankly.
No hello. No names.
I was hungry—but I didn’t want to take food away from her or the child, an egg-haired toddler on the girl’s lap, her cheeks fat and pink from health or from cold, I couldn’t tell. Her belly protruded from her sweater. Her legs and feet were bare and filthy. She stared at me, silent and sullen as her mother.
They were eating out of a can. The baby reached in her small hand to pull out a fistful of runny, cold beans. She smeared them on her face, a few beans finding her mouth. I had to stop myself from wincing when I saw her hand in the can, inches away from the razor-sharp lid.
“I’m Wil,” I said.
The girl didn’t answer or introduce herself.
I tried a question. “Where are we exactly? What was this place before?”
“Before it got cold? It was great,” the girl said. “We had cable. Parties all the time. Lots of bands came through here.” She flipped her hair. Stiff with grime, it barely moved. “Metal mostly. Good bands came to play. We paid them and they could skate, too.” The baby whimpered, and she began to bounce the child on her knee without looking at her. “Now nobody comes here. Well—” she looked up at me “—except for travelers.”
There was something about her glance that scared me, something that seemed not right, beyond the usual hunger and sadness—something beyond what I could attribute to cold and loneliness and exhaustion. There was a leer in her eyes, a flashing darkness. It looked like excitement.
I tried to redirect her. It worked sometimes with Lobo’s customers, to get them focused on something else, something not my waist or small hands.
“This is a skate park?” I said.
“No. Not just a skate park.” She laughed. “You’ve really never heard of us?”
“I don’t skate.”
“You’re missing out, then.” She shifted the baby. “This is a community. We have parties every week. Well, we did before the money ran out. People come to party but they stay.”
“They stay?”
“They used to. I did. As long as you work some, Jake don’t care.” She shrugged, like she was offering me half her bedroom, a trundle bed, a bunk. It was no skin off her back, what she was offering. “You can stay, too, if you want. There’s always work to do.”
“I can see that.”
I thought about Jake asking me if I could dance. I thought of the scar filleting his face, the black doorways where some of his teeth had been.
“You help him out, Jake’ll give you a place to sleep, feed you. Take care of you,” the girl said.
I didn’t like this recruitment, the girl droning on. Had Jake put her up to this? Was this her job, the work she did? She didn’t have much to sell the place with. The shed smelled of sickness. The baby was barefoot. What care was he giving her?
“So this is a commune?” I said.
“I don’t know what that word is.”
She didn’t ask me to explain. She told me her name was Jamey, with a y. She told me she had lived at Skate State, as she called the place, for over a year, though she said it was harder to keep track now, since it was cold all the time. She asked me if I had any good celebrity news.
“Celebrity news?” I repeated.
“I know it’s dumb, but I really like to hear about their lives, you know? They’re so much more exciting than us, and since we got no internet...”
“There’s no internet?”
“It went down.”
“You mean, your network went down?”
“No,” Jamey said. “There’s no internet anywhere. Jake drove into town and tried the free wireless at the Wendy’s. Nobody’s got it. That’s what they said on the radio. It’s gone.”
“The internet can’t be gone. Maybe some lines got icy, that’s all.”
“So you don’t got any news?” Jamey asked. “Where did you come from?”
“Ohio.”
“It’s cold there? Like this?”
“It’s cold everywher
e,” I said.
“No internet.” Jamey shook her head, a little smile on her lips that was grim or amused; it was hard to tell. “We’re on our own, girl. It finally happened.”
If she was talking to herself, or to me, or to the baby, I didn’t know. I heard a cry then, a catlike whimper. I thought it was the baby, but Jamey didn’t look down at her or comfort her, and the child was staring up at me, silent.
The mound of blankets on the floor began to move. A rail-thin arm emerged. A blanket slipped and I saw a head of matted, black hair, a pinched face, and a woman’s eyes: rolling and white. Eyes that were sick. Eyes that were not present, not in this world. I knew eyes like that.
Jamey didn’t seem concerned. “We’re out, Kaylee.”
But the girl on the floor had motivated Jamey. She got off the mattress, balancing the child on her hip—the baby clung to her, submissive as a doll—and set the can of beans to the side. She wiped her free hand on her jeans and shook out some of the blankets, plumped the pillows. It was absurd to see her straightening up the filthy, uninhabitable shed.
The girl on the floor moaned again.
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked, though I knew.
Jamey glared at me. “What do you think? Damn it, Kaylee, I have to wash those sheets in the creek.”
“You don’t have water?”
“I ain’t gonna waste water on her.”
“Who is she?”
“Before everything went to shit,” Jamey said, “she was a stripper. Jake hired her for a party. He let her stay on if she’d dance in exchange for...” Her voice trailed off. She looked down at the girl.
Half of my life was spent ignoring high people. I had seen people on Molly. They acted happy, unconcerned, sometimes wild. It was scary, watching them be happy, because I knew little else mattered to them in those moments: even a child, even me. Even their own child. People on opioids, maybe like Kaylee, didn’t hurt you, they didn’t want to. They just fell asleep. Sometimes forever.
“You can’t take care of her?” I asked. “Help her?”
Jamey shook out a sheet so hard it snapped. “We don’t have internet. We don’t have heat. We definitely don’t have oxy. Or methadone. Not anymore. Nobody does.”
“You have to get out of this place.”
Jamey was staring at me, numb as the baby. “Jake ain’t never gonna let you leave.”
* * *
Jamey took the sheets to the river, and handed me the baby to watch. I think she thought I wouldn’t run away with her baby in my arms: another mouth to feed, another person to take care of, one who wasn’t even mine.
The child went willingly with me—too tired, too cold, or too used to it to complain. For a few minutes, I thought about running, anyway, taking her with us to California and away from this, whatever this was, with the skating and the guns and the men who burned cars.
I wondered what that would be like. Where would we find milk for her, if all the stores had closed? Did she still drink milk? What would my mama say, when we caught up with her? I had a sudden memory of Lisbeth, when we were little, kissing all her dolls.
I had to get out of the shed. Even the cold was better than this stinking shack, stifling and freezing at the same time. I wrapped the baby’s legs in an adult-size fleece I found on the floor, which looked mostly clean. Outside, the air, even tinged with gas and the smoke from the barrel fires, felt better in my lungs.
I sat on a log in the woods a little distance from the creek and rocked the silent child. It was strange how quiet and compliant she was, unnatural. She took to me instantly. I wondered what her name was. Through the trees, I could hear water running over rocks. Otherwise, the woods were silent. I listened to the soft smacking sounds the baby made with her mouth. She started to play with a thread on my gloves, picking at it until it ran. She made a red zigzag, like a heartbeat.
Something was off in the woods. Other than the river and the child, I heard nothing. No birds. No scuffling of squirrels or chipmunks. Had the men scared them all away, or shot them? We had packed deer meat, frozen hard and wrapped in white paper, from the hunters who had traded game for weed. But we might run out of that eventually. If we did, I was going to have us hunt squirrels: clean, easy meat, though not a lot of it on each animal. But what if there were no squirrels? There had been no frogs singing at night, no turtles sunning themselves on rocks in the river.
Who knew where the frogs were. The days blurred together—they were barely days. The bare trees, the early sunsets... Jamey was right; it was difficult to keep track of time.
I felt the weight of the baby on my lap, and missed Lisbeth more than ever. We used to pretend, when we were very young, what our lives would be like. It was not a game I was good at. For Lisbeth, it was all husbands and children and singing. For me, it was...maybe go to the community college the next town over? They had a clinical herbalism program. I thought I might like to do something with plants that could save lives, that could heal, not just make someone feel good or get relief for a little while. Maybe I’d own my own farm, somewhere far away.
But now we were away—across the state line at least—and what good had it done me?
The child whimpered, and I hugged her a little tighter. I wondered if she was cold, though the shed wouldn’t be much warmer. Where was Jamey?
I heard a twig break, the crunch of leaves that had frosted stiff. I stood with the little girl in my arms, preparing to give her back to her mama. But the figure that emerged from the trees wasn’t Jamey. It was Grayson.
“Where have you been?” I said.
“Why do you have a baby?” he asked.
I hitched the girl higher on my hip. “Her teen mom is at the creek, doing laundry.”
“Well, that’s depressing.”
“What’s going on? What do they have you doing?”
“Cleaning the kitchen.” His face looked flushed. “This place is a giant frat house. I have the privilege of making them dinner tonight.”
“Well, you said you could cook.”
“I was trying to barter for your life.”
The baby made a sound, and Grayson leaned over to brush a tendril of hair out of her mouth. The gesture was so kind it derailed me for a moment. “How did you get away from them?” I asked.
“Went for firewood. The cookstove is almost out.”
“You have to make dinner on a cookstove?”
Sometimes, when the power went out because of a storm, we would do that on the farm, simmer deer stew on a cookstove all day. The heat felt like nothing else, radiating from the iron surface, and the height was all wrong, too low for work. Bending over a cookstove for hours, I was so hot and tired I forgot to be hungry.
It seemed the drudgery and the work would never end for us at Skate State.
“Oh, there’s barely electricity here,” Grayson said. “Generator only.”
“Has the grid failed?”
“I think they just didn’t pay their electric bill. All the power they have goes to the important stuff. You know, flat-screen TV, gaming, stereo...”
I thought of the shed where Jamey, the woman on the floor called Kaylee, and the little girl slept: unheated, freezing, the blankets mounded on the ground. A structure more suitable for junk, not humans, not fit enough for chickens.
“I can only be gone for a little while, or they’ll get suspicious,” Grayson said. “The woodpile is supposed to be around here somewhere.”
“Over here.” I had seen it on the walk from the shed. “What’s Dance doing?” I asked as we picked our way through the trees.
Ice and snow cast the leaves in silver. It should have been pretty. But nothing in the foothills of Appalachia was just pretty. The snow couldn’t cover all the trash, the bits of paper and plastic bags, the hulks of old farming equipment and junk cars.
“They separated us ri
ght away. But from what I saw, they have him working pretty hard. There are dozens of cars and trucks here. And it looks like just about every single one has something wrong with it.”
“Why do they have so many?”
“Some people collect china figurines, some people collect broken-down cars? I think they’re for parts.”
“So, when do we get to leave?”
Grayson tore through a plastic bag that got caught on his cast, ripping it away like a spiderweb. “Nobody’s said anything about leaving.”
We had reached the woodpile. It wasn’t a huge stack of wood, not nearly as much as Lobo and my mama and I would have stockpiled by this time of year, in a regular year, for just the three of us. And who knows how many people needed firewood here, how many people Jake was supposedly keeping warm.
The crudely constructed overhang hadn’t sheltered the woodpile very well. It tilted with rot. Snow had drippled through gaps in the shingles. The ends of the logs in the pile looked black, which was not a good sign.
Grayson picked up a log and examined it. “This wood is wet.”
“It’s never gonna burn,” I said.
He threw the log down and picked up another one. “This is all wet.”
The baby on my hip began to whimper.
“Hang on,” he said. “I saw a tarp around here somewhere. Maybe there’s more wood underneath it.”
“Tarps aren’t any good, either,” I said. “They collect moisture.”
But we went around the side of the woodpile, anyway, looking. There it was: a flash of blue plastic. But it didn’t shelter firewood.
Grayson ripped a corner of it off, revealing a dusty hood. The tarp covered a car. The windshield was pollen-yellow with filth, leaf crumbles collecting in the seams.