Her cell phone rang. She checked to see it wasn’t Freely, then answered it.
“Sheriff?” It was a man’s voice, soft, hoarse.
“Yes.”
“Gil Henderson.”
Helen straightened herself. Gil Henderson was a marshal from the county seat, an old brand type who didn’t call for leisure. “How’s things, Gil?”
“Busy, sister.”
“That’s a song I know.”
“Well,” he said, “afraid I’m going to have to add to it. Got to come down there. Thought I’d phone ahead.”
“Appreciate it, Gil.”
“It’s a courtesy.”
“Appreciate it,” she said again.
“You know a Jorgen Delmore?”
Helen winced at the name. Her mother had taught the boy in 4-H, schooled him in taxidermy. He’d mounted a pheasant for her once, won a ribbon at the fair. Last she knew he’d enlisted in the army and was off in Iraq. “Yes, sir.”
The marshal explained Delmore had been arrested in the city on felony possession, got out on bail. Said he’d missed his court date and now there was a warrant for his arrest. “Got to hunt him out,” he said. “How’s this look from your end?”
Helen’s jaw tightened. She hadn’t heard Jorgen was home, hadn’t heard any of this. “Those Delmores,” she said, considering how much to tell. “Well, they just ain’t right.”
The marshal grunted. “How well you know the boy?”
“His family’s rough, but he ain’t bad.”
“Hell, he ain’t.”
“Well—”
“Got to bring him in.”
Helen’s cheeks flushed. “Yes, sir.”
“You help us out?”
“Help?”
“Go talk with him,” he said. “Smooth the road for us.”
Helen tapped a knuckle against the steering wheel. “All right.”
“It’s a tight leash, Helen.”
“That right?”
“Be there tomorrow, a.m.”
“That soon?”
She heard a clicking on the line. “You help us or not, sister?”
Helen shut her eyes. “Sure, Gil,” she said, rubbing her brow. “I’ll do what I can.”
The cabins were circled like battlements against the overgrown woods. Kids played in the middle, stomping puddles, kicking about a green plastic bottle. Some barely out of diapers, boys and girls alike shirtless and filthy. They watched Helen as she trolled the circle, searching out the address Henderson gave her. A redheaded boy, twice as tall as the rest and nothing but legs, spat on the cruiser’s hood.
Helen found cabin 17. The yard was a mess, a tricycle with no front wheel, a sandbox steeped in weeds and brown water. Garbage bags covered the windows. The kids followed the car. She opened the door and told them to go home, but they didn’t.
She walked a path of flat stones around to the door. She was just here to talk, tried to put on a smile, look at ease. She heard movement inside, a woman shouting.
As Helen stepped onto the stoop, a door banged at the back of the house. She heard quarreling, voices. Instinct told her to move, and she hurried around to find a bald man in jeans and no shirt, his muscled back riddled with cuts, trying to run while another man tugged his arm to keep him in the house. But the bald man tore free and dashed into the woods, the other giving chase and calling, “Jorgen, goddammit.”
Helen shouted after Jorgen, too, then a shadow cast itself over her, and she spun to face a large bearded man in a red shirt. His fist struck the base of her throat. She crumpled as if her legs had lost their bones, her face hitting the ground.
Sparks hissed across Helen’s vision, blood in her mouth. She tried to take her feet, couldn’t catch her breath. Gasping, she bear-crawled toward the cruiser. The muddy feet of children blocked her way. She reached to push them aside, then, groaning, her lungs bucking, pulled herself up the cruiser. She opened the door, fell into the driver’s seat.
Helen shut the door. Kids pressed their faces to her window, laughing. She started the motor and switched on the siren. Breathing came strained as she slipped the car into gear, rolling slowly away so as not to crush the children.
Helen gathered herself in a turnout a quarter mile down the road. Her lip was bloodied, a front tooth loose. When she inhaled, her breastbone burned. Everything that was Helen that was not her body told her to drive away, to just tell Gil Henderson she’d tried but couldn’t find the boy. But her muscle and blood wanted to clutch something and not let go.
She swung the car around, drove in without slowing, the kids chasing her like dogs. She drew her pistol and strode around the cabin, avoiding the front. Mosquitoes swarmed the back door. Gun poised, she turned the knob, crept inside.
A short dark hall entered onto the main room, lit by a bare-bulbed lamp set on the floor. A young woman lounged on a couch. Dressed in a long black T-shirt, a silver-hoop ring in her nose, she hollered, “Gert!”
The bearded man stepped out from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a little towel. Helen trained the gun on him, screamed for him to get on the ground. The young woman shouted, cursing. The big man didn’t obey. The young woman rose, arms flailing, and again Helen yelled for the man to get on the ground. He stepped hard toward her and she fired.
The man dropped to a knee, gripping his arm. He pulled his hand away and looked at it. No blood. The young woman shrieked and Helen yelled for her to shut up, then shouted at the man to lie on the ground. He did as told, his hands over his head like he’d done this before.
Helen drove a knee between his shoulders and with one hand slapped on a cuff. She holstered her pistol, wrenched his other arm and cuffed it, too. Then Helen jumped off like he was ablaze and redrew her pistol.
With one hand, she helped the man to his feet. His face was scrunched tight, drenched in sweat. The young woman shouted, “I’m calling Daddy Fay. I’m gonna.”
Daddy Fay was Faylon Delmore, Jorgen’s father. Helen knew it was a threat. “You shut your mouth,” Helen told her, and shoved the big man out the back.
“I’ll call him,” the girl cried, as Helen stepped back out into the daylight and mosquitoes. “Don’t you worry, Gert.”
The kids were still around front, jumping up and down, the redheaded teen perched on the cruiser’s hood. To Helen’s surprise, the bearded man hollered, “Get off the lady’s car, Casey.”
The boy hopped off with a gangly dance, flipping the bird with both middle fingers. Helen opened the door to the cruiser, held the man’s head so he wouldn’t bump it on the roof, and ushered him down into the seat.
Helen drove the long way, south of town, to avoid the main drag. The road flanked the Big Squirrel River, its current muddy and frothing, then the new development where all the old houses had been demolished and streets of identical felt-papered frames were erected on the floodplain. Then came the old Victorians, the entire row of houses under repair, their yards planted with fresh sod and saplings.
Soon she turned into the alley behind the brownstone that was the grocery on the bottom floor, the sheriff’s office on the second, her own apartment on top. She stepped out to the scent of grilled meat, and through the side alley saw people gathered in the strip.
Helen escorted Gert, who’d declared nothing beyond his right to say nothing, up into the office. The room was long and spare, the new drywall unpainted, the only two furnishings a desk and two chairs. At the back of the room was a dented metal door, the only thing salvaged from the flood. Gert balked at the jail’s doorway, complained he couldn’t go in when there weren’t no lights. Helen told him to be a big boy and sat him on the cot, the cuffs left on, and closed the door.
Then Helen went down and around into the strip. She stayed tight to the building and slipped into the grocery. Plywood covered the storefront, and she struggled to see, had to hold a soggy magazine to the door to see a grinning hunter on its cover. Down a different aisle, she found scented candles in little glass jars. She sniffed the
jars, picked one that smelled like lavender. She found matches behind the cigarette counter, then put the magazine and the candle in a plastic bag, and returned to the jail.
Gert sat where she’d left him. She lit the candle and set it on the floor, tossed the magazine at his feet. “I’ll uncuff you if you behave,” Helen told him. “Move wrong and I’ll Mace you.”
She showed him the spray, and he nodded.
Uncuffed, he stretched his arms and rubbed his wrists.
“Hungry?” Helen asked.
“Fuck yourself,” he said.
She locked him in the cell, then went back down into the road. Much of the town was here, milling and gabbing. At one end of the strip was a horseshoe of grills, with Freely down there cooking burgers and steaks and chicken and fish, long tables in the street covered with buns and chips and sodas. A sign by the grills read LIGHTS-OUT SPECIAL: $5.
Helen nodded at folks she passed, afraid they’d noticed her swollen lip, worried someone would ask who she had up in the jail. Freely smiled as she approached, hollered at a teen manning a grill to pick the best steak for his sheriff. The old man wobbled over, his arms thrown wide, and though he’d never been much of a drinker Helen could smell the liquor on him.
Freely hugged her. “Sorry about earlier,” he muttered.
Helen nodded, glancing up at the second-floor window, at the salt-white flood line near the roof. She asked the teen for a burger, too, and filled the plates with chips and potato salad and grabbed two sodas, the load precarious as she walked up the road.
Back in the office, she set her plate at her desk, then knocked on the jail and hollered she had food and that he should move to the back unless he wanted to get Maced. She opened the door. Gert stood at the back wall, barely visible in the candle’s light. She set the burger and chips and soda on the floor, asked if he was okay. He said nothing, so again she locked the door.
Helen ate at her desk, chewing steak in the watery light from the windows overlooking the road. She knew there’d be a trial and she thought about the report she’d have to write. She’d fired her gun. It’d been an impulse, and it worried her now, not because it’d be deemed unjustified, but because she was uncertain she’d meant to miss.
Then she wasn’t hungry and sat listening to the people down in the strip, Harriet Meyers singing church songs like love songs. Helen crossed to the window and gazed over the scene. Teens lounged in truck beds. Kids ran with sparklers. Men threw horseshoes in the empty lot where the SuperAmerica once stood. Others talked in the road, and though Helen had once been one of them, she was no longer sure what they said to each other, these people who saw each other day after day, week after week, until they died.
Her cell phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number, thought about letting it go to voice mail, but answered at the last moment.
“Helen?” a woman’s voice asked.
“This is.”
“Winnie Delmore.”
Jorgen’s mother had been a Henderson before she married Delmore, and long ago she and Helen had been in the same class at school. “Been a while, Winnie.”
“Well,” she said, “seems we got a little mess here, Helen. Think we ought to get together and chat?”
“I’d surely like that, Winnie.”
Helen followed Winnie’s directions out into the knobs, down a snaking dirt road, and over hills bunched with sumac and sassafras. Then the road was blocked by a chain drawn taut between two trees. Helen shut down the car. For a long minute, she held her pistol in her lap. I’m just here to chat with an old friend, she thought. She set the gun inside the glove box. But then she felt all the more afraid, and retrieved the gun and snapped it back into her holster.
Helen stepped over the chain and onto a sloping dirt path. Dusky light feebly lit the canopy. The path soon opened onto a grouping of low tattered buildings. Boxes that were beehives filled the yard. A long porch fronted the house, and a portly young man in dead-leaf camos called through a window for his mother.
Helen waited in the yard, eyeing a group of men off in a corrugated shack who stared down into an aluminum crate Helen guessed was an old freezer. Then Winnie Delmore was there, drying her hands on an apron and stepping off the porch.
Helen shook Winnie’s rough hand and they smiled at one another. There’d been a time they’d run in the same circles, swimming at the quarry, hunting mushrooms, drinking gin and Fanta in the Indian caves. Winnie’s face had gone fuller through the cheeks, but her blue eyes, her snaggled smile, were just as Helen remembered.
“How long’s it been?” Winnie asked.
“Too long,” Helen said, and meant it.
Helen followed Winnie into the porch’s shade and through a screen door. The house smelled of kerosene. The electricity was off here, too, and they passed down a long dark hall into a parlor with windows facing west. The sunset leached amber light over everything. Helen sat in an armchair facing Winnie and two young women, one being the girl in black from Jorgen’s cabin. Two others sat back in the shadows, ancient creatures slumped on a love seat, an afghan smoothed across their laps.
Winnie asked about friends she hadn’t seen in a while, smiling, talking about the old days, how things seemed simpler back then. “That’s getting old for you, though, ain’t it?” she said. “Always thinking things were simpler.”
She asked about Helen’s mother.
“Got her over in that Quail Ridge senior home.”
“You put your mama there?”
Helen peeked at the women on the love seat, skeletal and unmoving, one woman’s blond wig crooked on her ashen skull. “Mama don’t know where she’s at. Doesn’t even know me on sight.” Helen forced a grin. “Part of life, I suppose.”
The boy from the porch carried in a silver tray with china cups and a teapot. He set the tray on a delicate little table by Winnie’s chair. Winnie patted his arm. “Tell Daddy Fay he ain’t needed here,” she quietly told him. “He can get to his own business now.”
The boy left and Winnie served the tea. Helen took her cup and saucer as Winnie poured for the others. The room was decorated in pale-blue carpet and flowered wallpaper, a menagerie of taxidermied beasts, a bobcat, a beaver, a turkey with its breast puffed out. Then the women all stared at her, and Helen wasn’t sure if they meant for her to talk.
At last, Winnie said, “Jorgen’s a good boy.”
Helen nodded. “Always liked him.”
“But let me just say a few things. Things you may not understand,” Winnie said. “ ’Cause our Jorgen’s the best of all of us, my opinion. I know a mother shouldn’t have favorites that way, but he’s always been special.” She sipped her tea, glanced off at the parlor’s doorway. “Some different than them others. That’s Jeremiah out on the porch. He’s tame enough, but don’t have much a mind. Different from my oldest. You knew Harlan?”
Helen nodded. Harlan was a known felon, served twice in the state prison for battery and drugs.
“Harlan was hell to raise.” Winnie chewed her lip. “Past few days I been thinking about a coon dog Harlan once kept,” she said. “Skittish blue, would tuck its tail whenever Harlan come around it. Well, Harlan didn’t care for it so skittish, so he beat that dog. To toughen it up, you know. Lots of folks do dogs that way, I suppose. But them beatings just made it cower all the more, which made Harlan all the madder. The more he beat it, the more it shook. Till he took a wrench and broke its skull. Was but fifteen then, still a boy.” Winnie set aside her teacup. “Never been more ashamed of one of my children, the way he done that dog.”
She touched her own cheek, her eyes turned into the window’s light. “You think some are just bad or evil or whatnot, but somewhere along the way they was someone’s baby, suckling the teat like anybody. Then something puts a volt in ’em and they ain’t the same no more. You might think a man like Harlan don’t care much what his mama thinks. But I shunned him and he couldn’t never shake it.” Winnie’s eyes dropped and she crossed her legs, seemed to fold in o
n herself. Then she looked up, rolled back her shoulders. “You got children?” she asked Helen.
“Never got around to it.”
Winnie nodded. “Didn’t imagine so,” she said. “You was never one took to affection, as I recall.”
Helen eyed her, knowing she’d meant malice.
Winnie glanced at the young woman beside her. “Sheila,” she said, and nodded at a big girl with green-streaked hair that spilled down her shoulders. “Sheila was Harlan’s wife. Is his widow now. Widow come three days.”
Helen watched the girl’s blank expression, trying to understand what she was being told.
“Was Jorgen what killed her husband,” Winnie said, her jaw set firm. “What killed his own brother.” She motioned to the girl Helen saw at the cabin. “Beside Sheila sits Luanne. She’s Jorgen’s girl. Was meant to be married the fourteenth of October. Ain’t that so?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the girl squeaked.
“Never much cared for autumn weddings myself,” Winnie said, sadly, staring hard at Helen. “You see them there beside each other? With what’s between them, sitting there like sisters?”
Helen clutched her saucer and cup, watched them intently.
“This is Delmores,” Winnie said. “We ain’t the savages some say we is. Sometime things go crooked, but good or bad we get it straight. Nothing to concern the law, what with so much else to bother with.”
The light outside was fading. Helen could no longer see Winnie’s eyes. “You say Harlan’s dead?”
Winnie’s head cocked to one side. “Why you’re here, ain’t it?”
“No, it ain’t.”
Winnie inhaled deeply, uncrossed her legs.
“Jorgen missed a court date. Up in the city. Drug charge.”
Volt: Stories Page 18