A flurry of ducks took wing. They flew toward the sun and banked high above. A shotgun fired upshore. A duck dropped from the chevron, tumbling down and down to thud in the cattails at Winslow’s feet. Its head shimmered like green metal, one wing broken beneath its body. He lifted the bird, its neck flopped over his fingers, body still warm, tail feathers damp.
Quickly came a breaking in the reeds and a hound had Winslow’s arm in its teeth. The dog thrashed its head. Winslow dropped the duck, yanked the dog up into a bear hug. The hound snapped at Winslow’s face and Winslow squeezed and the dog yelped.
Orange flashed from the reeds. A hunter swung his rifle, its stock exploding against Winslow’s jaw. Then Winslow was on his back, his vision blurred. He rose to flee. He staggered, his legs failing as cattails rushed at his face.
Winslow woke to sparks in his vision. Searing pain spiked his eyes. He lay in the hull of a metal boat, his hands and feet bound with fishing line, his jaw so swollen he couldn’t lift his head.
Clouds slid passing, the sky graying to night. Soon came cypress branches draped with moss, a dock’s haloed light. The hull scraped the shore. The hunter dragged the boat onto land, each tug a sledge to the spike in Winslow’s skull.
Solitary minutes passed, but the pain in his face kept Winslow from trying to move. Then three men stood over him. One at each elbow, the other at his boots, they lifted him from the boat and carried him to a truck bed stinking of fish.
They drove slowly, but the road was rutted and Winslow moaned against the jostling. They hauled him into a tiny stone building, onto a cot in a cell with metal bars.
They cut his bindings. Winslow didn’t struggle. The men retreated to folding chairs outside the bars. The man in hunter’s orange was rotund and horse-faced, his cheeks ruddy and whiskerless. Beside him, a man sat cross-legged, dark gouges for eyes, dressed head to toe in lawman’s tan. The third, his old flesh the same color as his smoke-stained dentures, said slowly and loudly, “This—is—Barclay—County.”
Winslow tried to speak, to say who he was, but his jaw was destroyed, his words gibberish.
“See them eyes?” the old man said to the others. “That boy’s wild as the wind.”
A gaunt man with pomaded hair carried in a black satchel and stood beside Winslow’s cot. The lawman was there, too. He used his pistol to part the beard on Winslow’s chin. The doctor squinted over Winslow. “It’s busted terrible,” he said to the lawman. “Hand me my bag.”
Winslow searched the man’s eyes for intent.
“Easy now, fella,” the doctor said down to him, like calming a mule. Winslow felt alcohol cool his biceps. A needle jabbed him.
He stared up at the cracked ceiling. A moth flitted about a light shielded in wire. Soon the light blurred, the moth became lambent confetti, and his heavy lids closed.
6
Daylight shone through a barred window high up the wall. Winslow batted his eyes, tried to focus himself. Tiny wires secured shut his mouth. He gingerly ran his fingers over the wires, over his teeth. He knew it was over. He wondered what would happen to him now.
The doctor entered the cell. In his shirt pocket was a prescription pad. Winslow lifted his hand, pointed at the pad, wiggled his hand denoting his desire to write. The doctor glanced to the door, where the lawman stood. The lawman tapped a thumb against his teeth. He nodded to the doctor. Winslow took the pad and pen from the doctor.
He wrote: I MEAN NO HARM
The truth would send him home. He couldn’t go home. So Winslow wrote that his name was Red, that he’d been a rancher before some big company bought his cattle and cut him loose. At some point he’d decided to hike the woods. BEEN LOST A LONG TIME. As the doctor read aloud, Winslow had the sensation Sadie stood just beyond the cell bars, hearing all these lies. He couldn’t fight it off and began to cry.
The lawman patted Winslow’s boot. “Any family we can call?”
Winslow pressed the pen point to his lips. He thought long on how to respond. Finally, he scrawled: ALL DEAD
He heard only murmurs of their discussion out in the hall. Then the lawman, whose name was Bently, came in and motioned at the hunter trailing him, explained that since Ham had busted Winslow’s jaw he’d volunteered to take him in. Winslow could stay in a trailer at Ham’s farm. If he felt up to it, he could work the turkeys, make a few bucks.
“Just until you get back on your feet,” Bently said. “But you’re a free man. Can leave now if you’d like.”
Winslow stared out the cell window. The sky was a dark, wet snow dripping down the glass. He knew it’d be tough in the woods with his jaw broke. Ham, eyes full of regret, smiled at him.
Winslow scratched the pad as if etching the word in stone: WORK.
7
They drove crumbling roads up into the hills. Winslow wore a new jacket, overalls, socks, and boots, a sack filled with canned soup in his lap, all bought by Ham, an advance from his first paycheck.
“Turkey’s the future,” Ham said, having talked without pause the entire way from town. “Folks want healthy. They want turkey. Nutritious as an apple. More versatile than chicken. It’s the future, buddy, and that ain’t just talk. Got fifty ways to put turkey in the place of beef and pork—” and he began going one by one down the list.
Soon they turned onto a dirt lane between leafless stands of ash and bounced into a clearing that was the farm. A corral of turkeys sprang to life, black feathers shifting, the birds shrieking. Beyond the corral sagged a weathered barn. They drove behind it and parked beside a silver trailer wedged between spruce trees, the trailer vertically dented from the trees, which bowed over the fuselage like weary giants.
“Keep her here to block the wind,” Ham said, like an apology. “Don’t look like much, but she’ll keep the cold off you.”
The warmth of blankets made Winslow uneasy. Back in the woods, he’d constantly been gripped by figuring how to keep a fire, how to fend off mosquitoes, how to find water and know it was clean. Now Winslow’s mind teemed with thoughts of home.
This time of year, Ced Raney always had an Oktoberfest party in his barn, and Winslow worried how people spoke of him in his absence. He thought of Jon Debuque, a bachelor who’d had eyes for Sadie ever since high school, and imagined Sadie crying in her rocker and Jon stroking her hair, telling her he’d make everything all right.
Winslow threw off the covers and rushed out of the trailer. Icy wind braised his skin. The frozen dirt burned his toes. Winslow stepped to the spruce. He held a branch and crawled beneath the limbs. Lying on his back, trembling on the bed of needles, Winslow peered up into the tree’s cold wavering guts.
At daybreak, truck lights bobbled into the clearing. Winslow was relieved the night was done. He hustled into the trailer and dressed, and met Ham as he climbed from his truck, as did a boy, a teenaged version of Ham, and an ample woman in a denim jumper. Ham introduced them as Jim and Sheila, his son and his wife. Winslow shook Sheila’s hand, and Jim stared dumbly at Winslow’s wired jaw.
Winslow followed Ham into the corral. Turkeys woke gobbling as Ham kicked them out of the way. They entered the old barn. A large section of roof was missing. Through the gap the snow came gently down. Ham turned his face to the sky, tried to catch snowflakes on his tongue. Then he smacked his lips, looked over at Winslow.
“Red?” he said. “How you feel about killing?”
8
The turkeys were so loud Winslow hadn’t heard the boys enter the barn. He carried a bird under his arm and watched Ham’s son, Jim, lead several boys up a ladder. One by one, they disappeared into the loft.
All morning he’d worked without a break. Pegs all along the back wall were hung with bleeding carcasses. Then Winslow stepped to the block and threw down the bird. He lifted a cleaver, chopped its neck. Its head fell into a bucket and its body flailed, flailed, fluttered to still.
Something wet struck Winslow’s cheek. He heard laughter from above. He looked up, found the boys silhouetted against t
he hole in the roof. One in a yellow cap waved to Winslow. The boy hawked, spat again. All the boys laughed. Winslow kept his eyes on that yellow cap. He raised the cleaver high. Off came the turkey’s feet.
At lunchtime, Winslow walked out into the corral. The boys were waiting for him. He passed cautiously through the pack. The one in the yellow cap stepped forward. He was lanky but well muscled, acne pocking his cheeks. “Pleased to meet you, new guy,” he said. He gave a snaggled grin, extended his hand.
Winslow moved to shake his hand. The boy lunged to punch Winslow’s gut. Winslow tensed and the fist struck awkward. The boy fell clutching his arm. Winslow knelt over the boy, who wailed, rolling about, the bone of his broken wrist pressing the skin.
Ham raced through the birds and screamed, “What the hell’s going on?”
Jim pointed at the boy on the ground. “Was Harold’s idea,” he told his father. “Harold wanted to see how the new man would holler with his mouth wired shut.”
That night, Winslow followed Ham into Barney’s Tap, a shotgun bar with its doors left open though it was cold. Ham felt bad about what happened with the boys and set up a game of poker as a show of goodwill. A dozen or so people drank in the bar. They all eyed Winslow as he sat across from the lawman, Bently, and Rico, the old man from the jail.
They played with peanuts worth a dime. Winslow motioned for cards, knocked the table to bump, found he didn’t need to talk. He lifted a bottle to his mouth and beer trickled between his teeth. After several bottles, Winslow was drunk in a room full of strangers. He passed a note to Rico, who smiled his denture smile and held the note at arm’s length to read. “Red says he had him a son.”
“A son?” Ham said. “Where’s he gone off to?”
“Don’t be ignorant, Ham.” Bently looked Winslow in the eye, as to say he didn’t need to respond.
Winslow scribbled WHISKEY, handed the paper to Ham.
A voice hollered his name. No, not his name. The voice hollered Red. Winslow turned to the voice. His eyesight bleared, he could barely make out Ham in the bar’s back door. Winslow stumbled to stand and banged his way through tables to lean on the wall beside Ham.
“Need you to meet some fellas,” Ham slurred, staggering down three steps into a dark grassless lot.
Two young men waited outside. One wore a thin beard and smoked against the stoop rail. The other had an upturned nose, like a snout, and eyes that didn’t blink. Winslow stepped down by Ham. The pig man balled a fist. Winslow instinctively tightened. The punch cracked like a dry branch, and the man ran in circles with his wrist between his thighs, dropped to the dirt like an animal shot.
Ham hugged Winslow’s neck. “Told you my boy’s a rock,” he cackled into the night. “A goddamn human rock.”
The next day, Ham sauntered across the barn, hands stuffed in the pockets of his coveralls. Winslow saw him coming and turned to the wall of pegs, his mind fuzzed from smoke and whiskey, and peered into a turkey’s dull feathers.
“Jesus, Red,” Ham said. “How many times I got to apologize?”
Winslow stepped to the chopping block.
“I got a deal for you,” Ham said. “So just hear me out.”
Winslow gripped the cleaver, gave Ham his eyes.
“You’re about the toughest fella I ever knew. And now”—he jutted a thumb out at the corral—“these kids want to bet a hundred bucks their boy can knock the wind from you with a punch.” Ham rapped his knuckles on the block. “I know this boy. He’s big as a bus, and just as big a pansy,” he said. “What say, Red? Forty for me, sixty for you?”
Winslow’s hands glistened with blood. He disgusted himself. I deserve this much, he thought. He lay down the cleaver, nodded to Ham.
Winslow followed Ham out to the gate where the boys bounded about like puppies. One boy, a head taller than the others and wide as a door, threw off a green and gold letterman’s jacket and flexed a meaty fist. Ham stood Winslow against the fence. The boy hulked before him.
“This is for Harold,” he hissed.
Winslow nodded he was ready.
A roundhouse like a brick on a chain flung Winslow against the fence and he tripped forward but kept his feet. He exhaled through his teeth. Inhaled with ease. Ham’s voice rang over the lot of cussing boys, “That’s my wild man. That’s my rock.”
9
Ham announced in Barney’s he’d give the highest bidder a chance to punch Winslow in the stomach, promising to double the money if the person could knock his wild man clean out of wind. Winslow listened from the back door, Bently smoking a pipe out on the stoop.
“You all right with this, Red?” the lawman asked.
Winslow shrugged.
“Ham gets bad ideas breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I’ll make him stop if you like.”
Winslow wrote on his pad: DON’T CARE.
Just after midnight, Winslow braced himself against the long oak bar, and a red-nosed man in a VFW ball cap flailed at his gut. Winslow didn’t budge, didn’t blink. The small crowd chortled and shrieked and Ham cried in Winslow’s ear, “Sixty bucks, lickety-split.”
Nightly biddings drew new faces: a foundry worker missing an ear; a bent old woman mumbling her dead husband’s name; a man in a white-collared shirt, his fist wrapped in a gabardine scarf; an elementary school teacher apologizing before she swung, wild-eyed and cursing Winslow after.
The crowds grew, and Ham cornered off a stage with chicken wire mounted with trouble lights. Winslow stood bare-chested in the harsh light. Ham, in an ill-fitting suit, a felt hat adorned with turkey feathers, rang a bell and shouted, “Our world’s turned polite, some might say dainty. We all know how things used to be, men uprooting trees with their hands and backs, women fighting off panthers with hairpins and a mother’s scorn. Those days are gone, my friends,” and he paused, eyeing them all. “Yet you still got that rage inside you, don’t you? Don’t you? Well, that’s why you’re here. Who’ll start us at a hundred even?”
Winslow watched faces barking bids. The man who won stepped around the chicken wire, wore horn-rimmed glasses, tugged long hair behind his pierced ears. In this young man’s lenses Winslow saw his own reflection: a lockjawed, feral-haired savage. He prepared his body. The punch was thrown. Winslow took a breath. He always took a breath.
10
In Barney’s bathroom, Ham smeared charcoal beneath Winslow’s eyes, told him to growl through his wires, stamp a foot onstage. Winslow followed Ham into the bar, through men in stocking caps, beers in gloved fists, not even the blizzard outside thinning the crowd.
The same storm had earlier in the day bayed over Winslow’s trailer, the sky whirling like a snow globe shaken. He’d sat in the trailer’s window, imagining the shuddering room was a train engine, a crossing and a truck on the tracks ahead. He saw his own face in the truck window, anticipating the crushing of metal and glass and bone.
Winslow carried that same doom as he stepped onto the stage, his mind plagued by questions. Would it matter if it weren’t my fault? Could I let it go if I knew what’s to blame? How do I aim these ugly thoughts to be rid of them?
He stood before the chicken wire, before faces breathing steam in the cold barroom. Ham drew a riding crop from inside his jacket and lashed Winslow across his naked back. Winslow arched his spine, glared hard at Ham as the audience howled.
“Don’t turn them crazy eyes on me,” Ham scolded out the side of his mouth. “Ain’t me what’s going to pay.”
Winslow lay in the examination room. Through grimed windows, he watched the flurried sky, a string of colored lights swinging from the clinic’s eaves. A knock came on the door. Six weeks he’d worn the wires and now they were gone.
Winslow flexed his jaw, formed the words, “Come in.”
Ham entered, hat in hand, and stood beside a little Christmas tree in the corner of the room. “Strange to talk?”
Winslow nodded. “Jaw’s rusty.”
“You feeling strong?”
“I feel all right.”<
br />
“Good. I’m glad.” Ham stared into the tree, hung his cap on a branch. “Got the Christmas birds sold,” he said, and stepped to the window. He tapped the sill, smiled down at Winslow. “You look good, Red. Look strong.”
Winslow knew what was on Ham’s mind. “I want a steak,” he said. “Get me a steak. But go ahead and tell folks I’ll be on tonight.”
“All right.” Ham patted Winslow’s leg. “Rico and me,” he said, and stared at the door. “We thought it best you don’t talk during the show. It’s just folks don’t see you as a real man.”
Wind whistled off the eaves. “I won’t say nothing,” Winslow said, the colored lights madly twirling. “Just get me a steak. I’ll eat it with my hands if you want. Eat it right there on stage.”
Her blouse read Delsea’s Cafe, and below that Lilian. Ham asked Winslow if he was ready. Winslow just stared at the woman, dismayed by the resemblance; the same build as Sadie, face with the same tapered chin, same sad brown eyes, and she wore a silver chain and cross just like Sadie.
Her fist popped weakly off Winslow. Those in the bar laughed and hooted. Lilian looked at her fist. Slowly her body shook, as she started to sob.
Even her tears fell like Sadie’s.
“I’ll get your money back,” Winslow blurted. “Buy yourself something nice. Some jewelry or a sweater or something. Something nice. Something—” He pulled her to him, her cheek pressed tightly to his pounding heart.
Lilian shrieked. She struggled to get loose and Winslow held her tighter. A wicked smack stung Winslow across his bare shoulders. Ham yanked Lilian free, waving the riding crop at Winslow as a tamer might ward off a lion.
11
Winslow paced the dark trailer. He realized, with the reclamation of his voice, he could simply phone Sadie. But it was very late. He had no phone. I’ll go to town in the morning, he told himself. Can hear Sadie’s voice this very day. I can tell her where I’m at, that I don’t know how I got here. It wouldn’t be a complete lie. He could tell her he wanted to come home. Could say he was lost without her. He’d say as many true things as he could before she hung up.
Volt: Stories Page 2