Fellow Mortals

by Dennis Mahoney

“There’s two ladies in the yard at number eight,” Henry yelled.

  “Where’s eight?”

  Something terrible collapsed, an entire piece of roof, sending sparks sky-high from the Baileys’ second floor. Out the corner of his eye he saw the window of the dormer, and a person at the glass, barely real, like a mannequin.

  “There!” he yelled. “Upstairs, number six!”

  “What…”

  “Someone in the dormer!”

  The rookie hesitated, frazzled by the extra information. He sent a firefighter after the Finns and ran to the Baileys’ with another pair of men. Henry followed them, adrenalized and charging at the flames. He stumbled on a hose and landed on his palms, mailbag spilling out before him in the road. A gust of wind picked a letter up and took it to the flames. Henry gathered up the rest and crammed it into his bag. A policewoman pulled him off the ground with a jerk, swearing in his ear and telling him to go.

  Henry checked the dormer but the figure wasn’t there. He moved away, searching every window of the house. The fire shifted and he saw her—there, downstairs. A woman, like a sculpture, burning in the living room, standing with her arm raised gracefully above her. She was beautiful aflame and Henry almost swooned.

  Then he took another look—it really was a sculpture, and it must have been a statue he had spotted upstairs. Everyone was out. Everyone was safe. But he staggered once more just looking at the damage, sitting on the ground and seeing what he’d done. The water barely helped. They’d be fighting it for hours. He tottered back and forth, clutching at his hair, staring at the flames until his eyes went dry.

  Nan and Joan Finn joined him at the curb. They were small and holding hands, kid sisters in a storm, oblivious and trusting him, believing he had saved them. Joan was right beside him, wearing slippers in the grass. The hem of Nan’s bathrobe swayed near his leg. Pain like a hammer claw mounted in his chest, squeezing in deep and prying up his ribs.

  He constricted there, airless, at the sight of Laura Bailey.

  The rookie hauled her out, bowed across his arms, in a rainfall of water from an upturned hose. Mouth open, eyes closed, wearing nothing but a nightgown. The fabric of the gown clung tightly to her breast, and her head hung limp, and her hair unspooled. She was sooty from the bottoms of her feet to her throat but her face looked rinsed and immaculately pale.

  Henry tipped to his knees and Laura vanished, blocked by the medics and a pop-up stretcher. All around him it was dark—nightlike and evil—and the Finns pressed close and put their hands on his back. They were holding him. Their fingertips were skeletal and real.

  6

  Henry pulls around the corner onto Arcadia Street and has to roll the windows down because the car’s a thousand degrees and full of dog breath. Nan insisted that he eat before he left—“to buck you up,” she had said—but then instead of sitting down and offering advice, she’d made him a turkey sandwich and retreated to her room, leaving him to eat and brood about the trip. Now he wishes that he didn’t have a morsel in his gut. He hasn’t returned to the block since the fire and braced for something else—not the char-blackened ruins of his memory, of course, but not the plain drab neatness of the neighborhood, either. The homes are just gone. The Carmichaels’ house looks the way it always did except for a plastic tarp covering a section of the roof, and even that looks crisp and kindergarten blue. Billy and Sheri’s house is worse for wear, lacking siding on the wall that used to face the Finns’, but the underlying wood is new and nobody would guess how close it had come to burning down.

  The trailer’s at the trees, farther back than he expected. He turns around to park and brakes too hard. Wing jerks against the dash, nose smearing up the glass: he doesn’t know this place and wants to check it out. Peg’s Audi isn’t here. Billy’s car is parked in front of his house but that’s it. There’s not a single other vehicle that might belong to Sam.

  Henry rolls up the windows and takes a double breath, leaning on the wheel before he unclicks the belt.

  “Okay,” he says. “Okay.” And then to Wing: “I’ll be back.”

  Wingnut answers with a wag, but when Henry steps out and shuts him into the car, he cocks his head and stares in disbelief: surely not. His confusion only grows watching Henry walk away, his desperation rising to a high-strung whine.

  Henry doesn’t hear it. The fresh-laid dirt is dry and uncompressed, picking up prints like he’s walking on the moon. He’s sensitive to places, a walker by profession, able to read the safety of surroundings, sometimes even a resident’s personality, merely by intuiting the nature of the property. Here the lack of anything is difficult to gauge.

  The trailer fronts the woods instead of the street and Henry walks around it, onto the narrow span of grass hidden in the shade. No one answers when he knocks, so he knocks a second time. The thought of going home and coming back is too disheartening. His only other choice is waiting here awhile. He notices a very faint trail into the woods. Worth a shot, Henry thinks, peering into the trees, listening for any kind of movement in the depths.

  He can’t leave Wing stranded in the car and wouldn’t mind the company anyway, so he walks back and leashes him up, aware of how brazen it’ll look if someone sees him walking his dog around the property. He doesn’t feel safe until they’re entering the woods, where a different strain of fear comes with every step. Branches, twigs, and roots crackle all the way; he’s as subtle as a Sasquatch tromping in the wild. The trees buttress one another, meshing overhead and struck, now and then, by kaleidoscopes of sun. Wing’s so excited he’s choking himself with the collar. There must be animals around, there behind the tree, behind the bush, there behind that tree. Mud and birds, scat, things rotting in the understory. Smells on smells and everything alive.

  They come upon a clearing—goldenrod, leaves, thick green ferns massing at the border. It’s sunny here but shady in the back, where the rock face trickles on a small, mossy hill. Dead center is a bag and a Styrofoam cup. Henry hesitates, pondering the evidence before him, till he notices that Wingnut’s staring farther off.

  Sam partially emerges from the corner of the clearing. He’s carrying an ax and stands behind a maple, wary of the visitors and ready to defend himself.

  “Hello?” Henry calls.

  Sam reveals himself and stares. He’s wearing work boots and dungarees and doesn’t have a shirt. Dirty sweat accentuates his muscles and his bones, and his hair’s unkempt and shadowing his eyes. He has a feral, almost mystical appearance in the trees, like a reindeer standing on his two hind legs.

  Wingnut barks and it’s embarrassing, offensive.

  “Quiet,” Henry says. “Stop. Settle down.”

  He ties the leash around a tree and walks across the clearing. Sam advances several steps but doesn’t leave the shade.

  Henry greets him with a nod, moving in a hunch. When he’s close enough to talk, he draws a breath and straightens up, lungs so full he feels the pressure in his ribs. They’ve never met before—Henry always missed him on the route—and it suddenly occurs to him that Sam might be wondering who he is. He’d gone to Laura’s funeral and sat in the back with Ava, convinced he ought to be there but terrified he’d make matters worse if people noticed. He snuck out early, having stared throughout the service at the back of Sam’s head until the light played tricks and he could almost see an aura.

  “I’m Henry Cooper.”

  Sam blinks but the blink looks purposeful and slow. “What do you want?”

  Henry’s at a loss. He’s been picturing the pale young man that he remembered, scorched around the eyes and fragile to the touch, but here he is now, vigorous and lean, with a strong, ruddy sweat and brandishing an ax.

  What’s the question? What does he want? Henry shakes his head until he can’t really see and says, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I had to see you, I had to say that, I could kill myself, I’m so sorry.”

  Sam retreats half a step, leery of the outburst. He double-grips the ax, opening his stance.
Wingnut barks, only once but with a comical effect, like a hiccup, and yet it doesn’t seem to register with Sam, not at all.

  “Was it an accident?” he asks.

  “Was it … my God, of course it was,” Henry says. “I didn’t know she was home. I’d have run right in. I tried to and fell, they wouldn’t let me…” and he stops, looking down at the dark crust of mud ruining his sneakers.

  “You’ll have to live with it,” Sam says.

  A cicada buzzes, right in Henry’s brain, followed by the far-off stutter of a nuthatch. Ten or twenty seconds and the lull could be forever, stronger than whatever they could do to break away.

  “What are you doing out here?” Henry asks, so faintly that he wonders if his words are even audible. When Sam doesn’t answer, Henry looks at him and says, “I’ll do anything you need. Anything at all.”

  “I want you to go.”

  Henry slumps from the inside out. It’s like his blood’s given up, barely pumping anymore. He reaches into his pocket and hands Sam a card with his phone number written in permanent marker.

  “Call me day or night,” he says. “Even if it’s twenty years from now.”

  Sam takes the card and holds it at his side, looking like he might just drop it in the leaves. Henry starts to go.

  Sam says, “Wait,” and then he pauses there, expressionless, long after Henry turns to look at him again.

  “Did you see her?” Sam asks.

  Henry nods, feeling ill.

  “Was she still alive?”

  “I don’t know,” Henry says. There’s a fracture in his voice. He coughs and says, “They carried her out. She wasn’t moving.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “I can’t…”

  “You told me anything I need.”

  Henry looks down and wrestles with his hands, wishing he could sit and seeing, for an instant, Ava’s face instead of Laura’s. He concentrates, focusing the picture in his mind.

  “She was soaked from the hose. Her nightgown was sooty but her skin looked clean. She was pale. Not a mark … she was perfect. Her eyes were closed. Her hair was loose. She didn’t look hurt.”

  Sam’s eyelids sag. He looks more drained than confrontational, a man who hasn’t slept well in weeks, almost too exhausted to sustain a real emotion.

  Henry gets a long, fine prickle up his arm. Once again they’re in a lull and he’s afraid of staying put, scared to make a sound, and scared to move away. He’s just about to turn but sees something odd and does a double take, staring over Sam’s left shoulder. Off behind them in the woods, maybe forty yards away, there’s a long, pale arm rising in the shade. It appears to be a branch, vertical and thin, but the top of it is clearly, unmistakably a hand. It reminds him of the sculpture on fire in the living room. All except the arm is hidden by a thicket.

  “Is that…?”

  Sam’s face pinches at the center. He takes a step, one step so menacingly quick that Henry flinches and his hands shudder up to come between them. The look on Sam’s face—the glare, the wooden jaw, the first expression that he’s shown throughout the conversation—sends Henry in reverse and makes him want to run.

  “I’ll go,” he says, backing up more, but then it’s Sam who turns away and leaves him in the clearing.

  Henry watches him retreat toward the thicket with the ax, where he lifts it overhead and thumps it in the ground. The soil’s so soft, the blade disappears. Sam ignores him and attempts to move a weather-downed tree, a twenty-foot birch with most of the branches still attached. He lifts it with a grunt and tries dragging it along, but the tree’s so heavy that it doesn’t move at all.

  Henry waits another minute, flexing out his arms, and then he frowns, rubs his eyes, and leaves him there alone. Wing’s straining at his collar hard enough to wheeze. Sam struggles with the birch and there’s a great crash of branches—just the kind of sound Wing’s dying to investigate. Henry halts in front of him and doesn’t take the leash. Wing wags more emphatically and happy-whines a little, but instead of coming closer, Henry holds up a finger, says, “One more minute,” and departs, yet again, for the stranger in the trees.

  * * *

  The scored bark is easy to grip. Sam is able to lift one end of the birch off the ground, but the tree won’t budge no matter what he tries. He moved the tree this morning, just enough to get it started, and he doesn’t understand why it isn’t moving now. He’s underfed and underslept but can’t accept that he simply isn’t strong enough. The branches must be snagged. He tries to shimmy it around. It’s a stupid piece of wood, hardly taller than himself, and yet it may as well be iron given the effort he’s expending. He could go and get the chain saw but all he has to do is move the goddamn thing thirty feet. He can still feel Henry right across the clearing, but instead of looking over he commits himself again, digs his boots more firmly in the dirt, and pulls until his biceps burn. His toes begin to slip; he has to walk without moving just to keep purchase on the ground, and he growls with his eyes shut, breathing through his teeth, straining like he’s tearing someone’s arm from its socket.

  Suddenly it floats, magical and airy. Instead of feeling satisfied he pulls it even harder. He could lift it, he could swing it, he could throw it in the air. He’s tremendous in his fury, monstrously endowed, ripping up the forest with his own bare hands. When he finally has to quit and drop it to the ground, it wobbles there and hovers, eerily aloft.

  He turns and finds Henry right behind him in the weeds, grimacing and huffing, trunk balanced on his shoulder.

  “Give me room,” Henry grunts. “I don’t want to hit you with the end there.”

  Sam backs up, trembling from the work, out of air and too delirious to fully comprehend.

  Henry readjusts and lets the back of the tree totter to the ground. He gets a grip and plods ahead, dragging it with ease, whipping Sam’s shins with the branches when he passes. He’s early middle age and dressed like a retired gym teacher: golf shirt tucked into his shorts, belt way above the navel, lots of hairy thigh, and tube socks stretched to his calves. It’s a fifty-dollar outfit, plain white sneakers included, tidy as the haircut squaring off his head.

  “Where do you want it?” Henry asks.

  Sam’s looking at his face but doesn’t hear the question, too preoccupied with Henry shouldering the weight.

  “Over here or over there?”

  “I just wanted it out of the way so I could walk…”

  Back to the sculptures, Sam nearly says, but the partial answer’s good enough for Henry, who nods and says, “Right,” and sets to work dragging the tree so far beyond any conceivable footpath that Sam begins to wonder if he plans to take it home. He finally puts it down and readjusts it where it lies, as if he means to build a wall and needs the bottom just so.

  “What else?”

  “That’s enough,” Sam says.

  “What about that one?”

  Henry strides toward another fallen tree, a shagbark hickory that’s quite a bit thicker than the birch. Sam follows him along as if magnetically attached. He hadn’t dreamed of moving that one, not without a saw.

  “I’ve got to cut that first.”

  “Nah, I can move it,” Henry says, straddling the hickory to pull it off the ground.

  Sam allows it just to see if he can move it. Up it goes.

  Halfway out of the thickest vegetation, Henry meets his stare, gives him a kind of quick thumbs-up with his eyebrows, and keeps working through the bracken, bandy-legged and snorting through his mustache. It takes him ten minutes to get the hickory halfway to the birch, and then he turns around to Sam and says, “You mind if I let my dog off the leash?”

  Sam checks the dog, who’s been sitting there in silence, panting in the sun. He wags when Sam regards him, raising up a faint poof of soil with his tail.

  “Just go,” Sam insists, meaning he should leave.

  Henry takes it as a green light and smiles at his dog. He drops the tree—it quakes the ground at Sam’s
feet, a serious piece of wood—and jogs across the way to fiddle with the collar.

  “His name’s Wingnut!”

  The dog comes bounding like a lunatic, thrilled to be out and looking everywhere at once. He zeroes in on Sam, who backs away alarmed, but the dog runs past and sniffs him on the fly, capering off and wagging his rump, reaching all four borders of the clearing in a single mad dash. When he finally slows down, he trots over, licks Sam’s hand, and does exploratory laps around the woods. Henry’s back at the hickory tree, hauling it over a shrub.

  Sam wanders to the clearing, where the sun is so abrupt he closes both eyes. It softens him and tires him, its gentleness and color too alluring to resist, and so he sits and feels it pulsing on his shoulders and his neck, how it smells so familiar in a way that makes him weary of the day. He thinks of Laura’s feet, pale white, with cozy arches and her toes like buds. For the life of him he can’t recall the color of her nightgown. Henry didn’t say—only sooty. Only soaked. But he’s certain Henry’s memory is vivid as a mural.

  Wing jumps a fern and vanishes into the trees.

  “Your dog ran off.”

  “He’ll be back!” Henry says, closer than expected.

  Sam turns and there he is, finished with the tree, heart-attack red and veiny at the temples. He cups his hands to his knees and waits for something else.

  “That one,” Sam says, picking out a log a hundred feet distant in the shade, nowhere near the sculpture or the path he meant to forge.

  Henry doesn’t question it or hesitate at all.

  Sam thinks about the nightgown and pops himself a soda, sugary and warm from the bottom of his bag. As long as Henry’s game, he finds another and another: idiotic labor in the afternoon sun. Was it white? Was it blue? How could he forget? He thinks until his memory dissolves altogether and he can’t remember anything about her with precision. He checks a pair of wallet photos, all he has left. She’s laughing in the first, freckle-tan from their honeymoon and naked at the shoulders. The second one’s a profile, Laura with a book. She’s wearing a turtleneck. Her eyes look strained, almost sad, and he can’t remember when or where he took the picture.