Criminals

by Valerie Trueblood

  Mark got up on his knees in the sawdust and hugged the dog to his chest, which she let him do, twisting to give Shannon a flat-eared look.

  Every evening the powertrains shut down at the same time and a quiet descended that was as full in the ears as noise. Garth had a wheelbarrow by the handle but there was nothing in it and he wasn’t moving. At first she thought he was listening to something but he didn’t have earphones any more.

  “How’s it going?” she said.

  “Look at that.”

  “At what?” The sunlit green above the dug foundations ran up to the tree line where the woods climbed into foothills. Pink ribbons fluttered among the near trees, where Mark and Dane had found an old half-buried trail. Maybe the cows had made it. The plan was to get it in shape for easy walking, but without cutting any trees. “So . . . wooden houses. Kills me. Wood from someplace else.” There was no way now to tell if Garth was seeing the funny side. In fact, it seemed safe to assume he never was. “Who are the fuckers, anyway?” he said. “Gotta have a place like this to die in?”

  It did take money, she could see that. These were not the old you saw in the city with two coats on, pushing a Safeway cart down the street.

  So far it’s kind of virtual, she told her friends. Her mother drove out in the UPS truck to see inside a house. “This would be OK with me,” her mother said, opening a refrigerator. “That new smell in everything.”

  “Except where the raccoons get in the garbage.”

  “They have garbage here?”

  “Compost, I mean.”

  After that they took the dog up the hill and at the top her mother looked down on the rooftops and lit a cigarette. “Guess I better not leave a butt.”

  “Ha. Garth empties the truck ashtray in the parking lot.”

  “I didn’t see him down there.”

  “He goes off at lunchtime.”

  “Look at all the little green fire plugs. That’s cute. Is he doing OK?”

  “Yeah. Yes and no.”

  Her mother smoked for a while and then she took a dog biscuit out of her pocket and Zena sat. “Good dog. Look how polite. And they don’t ever bring you to see me.”

  “This is the only place she goes. He has her ride in the truck bed, and this is where we go.”

  “Ivan Krall.” Duška would repeat the name as if Shannon should recognize it. “He was my professor. A boy, just like your husband. In his classroom that year, he was the youngest. ‘We see—’ he would say. ‘We see here—’ But of course we did not see! Ah, but I saw that boy, with his chalk.” Her made-up eyes sparkled and narrowed at once, over the boy who would be hers. And for life, a long life. Though without all that much of it ahead of them, or ahead of her, to be exact, as she had let Shannon know with what seemed like pride.

  To Shannon, Ivan Krall did not seem like a professor of mathematics, a man with chalk. He would have looked good on a horse. But he had won a prize, an international prize, Duška said, in the field of manifolds.

  “Wow,” Shannon said. That would not be an engine. Garth would know. “My husband was good at math. I’ll tell him. They had him tutor the football players.”

  “Yes, your husband when he is digging, he stops, he thinks, he forgets what he is doing. He is a thinking boy.”

  “Maybe he’ll win a prize,” Shannon said. She didn’t like the sound of her voice. She sounded like his dad. “He works hard,” she said.

  Half the time in the two rooms she seemed in her own ears to be chattering loudly as if they had an upstairs and Garth was up there. When she told him about Ivan Krall’s prize, he said, “No shit.”

  “But what’s a manifold? Where are you going?”

  “Gonna go get a phone. Phone died.” He never used his phone and his driver’s license had expired. She did the driving to work, but he would take the truck to the Asian grocery for beer. Since he got home he had gained ten pounds because of not working out. His collapsed cheeks had filled in and he couldn’t get his wedding ring off.

  “Why are you trying to get it off?” she said when he was twisting it. “Could you . . . could you just sit on the couch?” If they had a movie on he would be up and down, or go out and smoke on the sidewalk, or if he stayed put for a while it would be in the Goodwill armchair, lying with his eyes shut unless he heard the faint scratching she thought might be a mouse. That would get him up—a mouse.

  “Here, really, I won’t grab you or anything.”

  “No, don’t grab me,” he said without a smile.

  Dozens of them in desert camo were streaming off the escalator. Who thought up those runny splotches that made people stop and look? Somebody had to design that exact thing, ugly and at the same time stupid. Halloween. But serious and real, in another place, something that hid you. Necessary. You had to remember that. There was Garth at last. Others were hurrying past him, waving, kneeling with arms out to kids. Some of the kids hung back.

  Garth took a long time to get the duffel in behind the seat. He knew about the truck but he didn’t say anything about it and he didn’t want to drive. She had finished laughing and crying and reaching for him with one arm while she drove. When Zena ran up to him at the door he did not squat down to greet her. He said, “Is this ours?” She was sniffing his legs, wagging her tail. “Look, she knows your smell!” Shannon said. “She knows you live here! I swear she knows you’ve been away.” The dog ran into the bedroom and came back to drop her worked-over knucklebone at his feet with a thud. Maybe she had been a man’s dog. “And I mean, yeah, she’s ours if you like her. I know you will. I bet you will.”

  “Sure,” he said. Later, when the dog sat panting beside Shannon, he said, “Could you get it to lie down? Could you get that bone out of here?”

  The custom refrigerator had a huge drawer. Duška rolled it all the way out on its quiet tracks. “We do not yet require the morgue.” She pushed the ice lever and ice in the shape of orange sections clattered into the drawer. She knows I have the kind with two ice trays, Shannon thought. “This thing, this factory!” Duška went on. “It is as someone, someone, says, is it not? Factories in the private life. Isn’t that right, Ivan?” Ivan didn’t answer right away because he was looking at Shannon. Then he said, “The private life!” spreading his arms wide and smiling at them both.

  “Oh, he is a bad man,” said Duška.

  “You, my dear,” she said to Shannon when they were on their own, “I think you will not judge Ivan. About women, he is a like a little boy who will not come in when we call him.”

  Unpacking boxes for the Newell sisters, whose hands trembled and whose bright landscapes stood propped in every room, Shannon said, “Wow, you must have a hundred brushes. And both of you are artists? That’s amazing.” The shy sisters appeared to be twins, but she didn’t ask in case one was younger and didn’t look it. Mark came in and spread out street plans for them to look at.

  When he reappeared she was sitting in the truck half asleep and had to start it to get the window open. Garth didn’t like power windows; you could go off the road into water. She had tried for wind-up but you couldn’t find them even in a truck like this, parked in a barn with seeds sprouting in the liner. Mark said, “So Shannon, at the Newells’ today. I was thinking. I wonder when social services are up and running if you might want to think about that. You’d be good. Oh, I don’t mean quit your crew. Just, you’d let the others do that stuff.” He didn’t say “clean.”

  “Wanta know something?” She revved the truck a couple of times before she shut it off. “I like to clean. I like to move. You think I want to sit around all day typing up what somebody else oughta do with their life? Guess what, I have a business. I have two more people ready to clean when you have the things built. I have two more guys coming on—Garth has—for Grounds.”

  “OK, sorry, sorry.” Mark backed away from the window.

  “Maybe just put it in my contract and I’ll talk to everybody and all like that.”

  “Is this about money?” Mark
said, putting his hands up. “Want to go have a beer?”

  “I’m waiting for Garth.”

  “He’s down at the machine shed. So tell me, how are things?”

  “Good.”

  “So I guess we’ve been a little worried about Garth.”

  “Who has?”

  “Dane and I. Because it seems like he’s having some trouble.”

  “You think so? Shit, I wish I would have noticed.”

  “You don’t have to talk like that, Shannon.”

  “Gosh, did I say a bad word? Do you want me to fire him?”

  Mark’s face went red. “It’s the war.”

  “Right, you were over there too? That’s how you know? Why don’t you fire me? Don’t you know we’re not supposed to yell at the boss?”

  “Go ahead and yell.”

  “You go ahead. Go ahead and fire me. I don’t care. I don’t care what happens.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen.”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s the whole point of this place.”

  The Newells’ niece Chelsea was in high school. She had short, teased hair with longer strands pulled free and waving around her head. “Who’s the hot guy?” she asked Shannon the day she got there with her backpack and pillow. “His name’s Garth,” Shannon said. In an hour the girl was outside in shorts, pulling a board out of the scrap lumber. Her legs had dark bruises up and down them. She set up her aunt’s easel near the bed of sand Garth was leveling for flagstones and she put the board up on the easel like a canvas. Shannon waited to see how long it would take Garth to leave. But once the girl was talking, twisting a brush handle in the belt loops of her shorts, he leaned on the rake and appeared to listen. Above the low shorts she had a roll of belly.

  Mary Newell came into the kitchen and looked out with her at the two of them in the yard. “Oh dear,” she said. “I’ll explain to her. We forgot to say you’re married. You and Garrett.”

  “Garth,” Shannon said. “I am, anyway. I don’t know about him.”

  Duška would have had an answer, several answers, but Mary Newell did not. She gave Shannon a look of frightened pity, wiped her dry hands on a dishtowel, and said, “Chelsea is our brother’s daughter. We have her come every summer before school starts. I don’t know. . . .”

  “Can she really paint?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes indeed, she’s very good. She’s still in high school but her teachers think if she can just . . . somehow . . .”

  “Grow up,” Shannon said.

  “Yes, if she can emerge from the . . . troubles, if she can just . . . She’s an artist.”

  Did that help you? A girl with bruises, Goth lipstick, troubles—troubles meant pregnant, Shannon was willing to bet: could being an artist help her? Did it help these two old women? Maybe not so old, if this was their brother’s kid.

  The girl had begun to put paint on her board, talking all the while to Garth, who did not seem to know she must be painting him. Could he be listening, as he looked off at the woods? Shannon wanted him to answer. She found herself wanting, in fact, to see him drop the rake and close his hand on the girl’s heavy upper arm with its large blue tattoo of a bird. Maybe just to shut her up. Shannon could almost feel the skin herself. She almost willed him to take off his work glove and touch the bird. The girl had stopped painting and had the brush in her black Goth lips while she wiped her fingers on her shorts. Then she was showing him a bruise on her thigh. He bent to look at it.

  Shannon was not going to open the door and go out. She was thinking it through and if she said anything it would be later, at home. She’d say, “Hot stuff, huh?” If he didn’t answer, or even if he did, or if he turned his back on her she’d get up in front of him and maybe slap him, not to hurt him but just—and although he had never hit anybody he would hit her back, though not with the strength that must be in him still, or how could he work the way he did? She would yell and that would bring the neighbor out into the hall and Shannon would say a mouse ran out of the chair.

  “There is your husband in the rain,” said Duška. “He is in a hurry.”

  “Training for a marathon,” Shannon said.

  He went by fast, bent over, hands stuffed in the pockets of his overalls. Not the way anybody who ran would run. Shannon didn’t know where he was going but she knew there was an army regulation that said you could not put your hands in your pockets.

  “Don’t have him deal with a lot of disorganized stuff,” the chief warrant officer told her. His sergeant was the one she had gotten along with but his WO Mr. Coombs was back and had e-mailed that anybody could call him.

  “Disorganized stuff. It’s a building site,” she said.

  “Well, keep an eye. Is anybody bothering him?”

  “Bothering him? No. Sir.”

  “You had a question?”

  “About what happened. Like you say, I don’t want to bother him . . . sir.”

  “It’s a forward base. If they didn’t get hurt they saw hurt.”

  “I know that.” She said it in a friendly way so he would not put her with the antimilitary wives.

  “In his case, that would be bones and fat where there was a kid, his buddy, a minute ago. Let’s see. What else.” They both knew a WO or anybody else with rank was not supposed to offer information in those terms, let alone over the phone. She could tell something was wrong with Coombs so she went ahead.

  “OK if I ask you another question?”

  “Fire away.”

  “It would be about you and your wife, sir.” There was a silence except for his ice cubes clinking. “Please don’t hang up on me.”

  “I don’t have a wife.”

  “He said you were married.”

  “I was.”

  “I mean, I’ve been to the VA. I saw the guys. Maybe they don’t have a leg. They’re holding on to their wife, though.”

  “Everybody’s different.” She could hear him breathing. She remembered him, his way of grinning when she saw him in the PX. That was a couple of years back. She thought he was going to say he was different himself, but he didn’t, he said he had to go, and then it sounded like he dropped his phone on the floor.

  What if she yanked the duffel out of the closet and chopped into it with the hedge shears? Would he slap her back to normal, or get her in a chokehold like somebody from another unit had put on his wife?

  She dragged the duffel out and sent it sliding on its cleats into the living room. Zena scrambled up growling.

  “OK what’s in there?”

  “What?”

  “That picture? Is that what you have in there?”

  “What, now?”

  “That day she painted you. Showed you her thighs.”

  “Jesus. A car hit her on her bike. She could be dead.”

  “She’s not, though, is she. What’s in there?” By this time Zena was pressed against her leg, growling.

  “Stuff. My stuff. Elbow pads, gauze, knife. My canteen.”

  “Knife? Elbow pads?” Her voice was loud.

  “To crawl with.”

  “Why do you need that? Why do you need that?”

  “Stop it!” he yelled. Her own elbow came up before she saw he meant the dog. The dog was steadily growling, facing away from them in a kind of shame.

  “Think I’m gonna hit you?” Garth said.

  “No, I—”

  But again, he was talking to the dog. “Gonna growl at me? Gonna bite me?” He squatted, took the dog by the head. “Think you might bite me?”

  “She doesn’t like that. It’s OK, Zena.”

  “Wanta bite me?” The dog whimpered.

  “Don’t do that,” she said. “I can’t believe you’re teasing a dog.”

  “Jesus, can’t anybody just leave me the fuck alone?”

  “Anybody? You mean me? I’m anybody?” For a moment she thought he was going to pick the dog up by the head, but instead he let go and stood up.

  “Good dog,” he whispered, as if it were a secret from Shann
on like everything else.

  “Because something’s the matter, that’s why. You need to get up here and see him—”

  “Up where he’s at?”

  “—because he’s out on the backhoe in the rain.”

  “He don’t drive a backhoe.”

  “Well he’s on one. I can’t catch him. I can’t stop him.”

  “Look, I’m due for my shift.”

  “Right. I’ll just let him know that. You haven’t seen him for two months.”

  “Take me twenty, thirty minutes and I got a job to do.”

  “Fine, Stanley. It’s on you. What he does. You sent him to the goddamn war.”

  “What’s he doing on a backhoe? Track or tire?”

  “He’s driving it, goddamn it, Stanley. Track.”

  “That’s a trackhoe. Excavator. You got excavators out there. Any idea what one of them costs?”

  The backhoe was running along the middle slope. It leaned at a steep angle and moved faster than you would expect.

  “I couldn’t find him, it was Zena that found him,” she told Duška for the second or third time. “I ran, but it was so wet and I couldn’t catch up.”

  Duška took her wet hand and put a tiny glass in it. They could just see the dog, chasing and barking. It was the first time Shannon had known her to bark. They could hear better than they could see through the pane, as the backhoe leaned in a wide circle and headed, increasing its tilt, uphill to the woods.

  “Hear that? That’s trees. He’s running into them. And Duška, Ivan’s out there.” They could see him on the hill behind the backhoe. “I have to go back out.”

  “No, no, no. This is cold and you take it quickly. It’s—” Duška pronounced one of her words, raising her little glass. Shannon’s had a vertical crack leading to a rough edge that could cut you. That’s what Garth would say. Many things could cut or drown you or reduce you to bone and fat.

  The dog was running circles around Ivan, herding him. A rig like that could plow you under. That had happened to someone. A girl somewhere who thought she could stop men.