He squatted by the hinges and listened but the wind was too strong to hear anything. After waiting one moment more, he braced his shoulder against the door and shoved in. A sudden warm room and a man who twisted his neck to face him, calm as sleep. Mason looked in. A scavenged table, hot plate, a pyramid of dented canned goods: corn, stewed tomatoes, Van de Kamp’s beans. The wheelchair in which the man sat, spokes thin and rusted.
His hair was gray and fine, soft as a dog’s ear, grown to his shoulders. One eye glanced off from the steady line the true one held.
“I live here,” the man said simply. “Knock.”
“Does Hammond know?”
The man shrugged, turned back to his hot plate with its open can of burbling red sauce.
“You won’t need that scatter gun.”
Mason looked down at what he held before leaning it against the block wall within reach.
“You got anything to tell me?”
The cripple answered like one well rid of patience, “All of this tells enough, don’t it? I got nothing else. Nothing has me. Call the fucking cops if you want.”
Mason turned some of the cans to read their labels. Weighed the contents in his palm.
“This is expired. Come up tomorrow and I’ll see what there is we might swap out.”
He didn’t wait for the man to answer before he went back out and softly closed the door behind him. The wind continued to bark through the nightscape, brandishing the world.
SHE WOULD TAKE SAM TO TOWN for a new suit. He had been awakened by the spring, made better. She could see it in him, something working its way through his chemistry, solving inner riddles. How long the reprieve might last didn’t matter. Only that he was alive and aware, surfacing from the poor distractions of what had held him under for so long.
She dressed finely. A peach wraparound dress tied off over the hip. A tilted straw hat that pricked her shoulders with small holes of overhead sunlight. Perfume on her clavicle. Lipstick and nail polish bright as cardinals. She wore it all like armor.
She had seen Mason three weeks before, tending the small vegetable stand in town. The first sight of him flipped her stomach and brought heat into her face, but she had kept driving on, managing the difficult science of keeping the car in its lane all the way home. Once she was stopped she had leaned over while long grieved breaths sucked out of her and the sky bleached palely. Her head began to throb, but as the pain entered her some sense of what was real did too. She steadied. The ground would not open to consume her.
Now she no longer feared seeing him. If he was back and had not come home, the decision was already made. Drifting in his absence had been all she could endure for those two years. There was another life to live, another sadness to obey. Sam and later Dennis had been enough to command her loyalty and prove her trust. Mason, however, was a face out of another time, a marriage to a part of her that had become impossibly distant and uncanny. He had killed that version of her long before he’d been sent to prison, made sure it was buried under for good.
Sam met her at the car. This trip in had been his idea, but as soon as he had uttered it she knew it was what they both had needed. She placed a call to his nurse to let her know she wouldn’t be coming in for the day. Dennis too had given her no problems about a day off on such short notice. The stolen day had been exonerated.
On the drive in they saw early blooms: pears and plums, wisteria heavy and full. The whole valley gorgeously festooned, occupied with new life. They parked on Main Street and walked Canon City’s small downtown, the great courthouse on the hill looming over everything like a writ. She took his hand in hers and they watched gliding twins of themselves in the sunlit facades of the stores, talking easily through a peerless half hour.
At Spivey’s department store they met a kindly young man who took Sam’s full measurements while he stood on a small platform near the back. The boy chatted, discussing the weather, the coming Memorial Day parade, the new pastor at First Baptist Church. He advised a seersucker for the hot months ahead. Sam momentarily lost his concentration when his eye was caught by a shelf of porkpie hats, and Lavada feared she might have lost him, but he sharpened when the boy brought out the chalk to mark the final tailoring lines. He stood as trim and correct as a recruit.
They stepped around for lunch while the alterations were made. It was a slow afternoon workwise and the tailor said he was happy to turn the job around within a couple of hours. Sam drank coffee and waited for sandwiches made behind the counter at the drug store. Lavada sipped a vanilla coke, kicking her legs from the high stool.
“Why doesn’t my son live with us, Daughter?” Sam spoke casually as he watched his reflection in the buffed metal flashing above the soda fountain. He did not appear upset by his distended image.
“Who are you talking about, Sam?”
“My son, the one who comes to see you. Whom you walk with.”
Her breath eased. He meant Dennis.
“He has to work, Sam. To pay his way. He’s very responsible. It’s something to be proud of.”
Sam grimaced, trying to find sense in the strangeness of her words.
“He should be with us, though. With family. That’s always best, isn’t it?”
Lavada did not tell this to Dennis when she saw him the following night in Pennington. He lived above the restaurant in a small one-bedroom apartment. The iron balcony out back looked over a deserted block where a textile mill had once supplied the community with its primary industry. The sky was bright, humid and clean above the shuttered windows of the derelict building. Dennis would let her smoke there on the balcony and sit beside her with the local weekly paper folded across his knee, swatting at carpenter bees that circled and ducked. She liked the desolate peace of dusk, the thin current of cigarette smoke unspinning from the tips of her fingers before it was caught by a breeze and tumbled away. On the corner above the post office the American flag snapped and huffed. She wondered if it might rain.
That evening neither was very hungry, so after a couple of beers and some crackers with cheese they decided to go for a walk. Except for the occasional passing of one of the two cruisers manned by the on-duty sheriff’s deputies, the streets were empty and they strolled down the double painted center strip. Mourning doves were going to roost in the power lines.
They found themselves at the railroad switching yard, freight cars sleeping in a long iron line. Dennis stepped up to an open car first and helped Lavada in beside him, their legs hung over the side. At one distant end an engine was coupling, slamming down in a great metal shuddering, coming fast and loud before it was through them and suddenly gone. It frightened and exhilarated her. She clutched his arm, her fingers like arched spiders.
Not much later they returned to his apartment. She called Sam’s nurse to see if everything was alright. It was a new girl named Peggy, a young woman working on becoming an RN at a small two-year college over in Asheville. Lavada liked her, trusted her. Knew she was that rarest creature, a caretaker who treated her charge with dignity. While she talked to her on the phone, the cord curled itself around her finger like black vine.
“It’s gotten later than I meant for it to,” she said, looking at the main street below. A quieted storm had stacked itself under the moon glare. Rain pattered down on the cooling sidewalk.
The phone was silent on the other end. She was almost to the point of giving up when Peggy answered, “Why don’t you just stay over. I can sleep here tonight.”
She could feel pricks of sweat rising along the backs of her arms, her neck.
“Thank you, Peggy. That would be wonderful if you could. If you really wouldn’t be too put out.”
She could feel something being given to her across that distance. A pardon. The room seemed to become smaller, more definite.
“Of course, Mrs. Laws. I’ll see you in the morning.”
The line clicked dead and Lavada held on to the receiver a moment, pleased by the numbed weight in her hand. She set it back o
n the cradle and turned to Dennis. He had switched on a standing lamp and was sitting with one of the books Sam had given him, some of the old volumes from when he’d been a professor.
“What are you making of that?” she asked, amused that he’d wade through such old things, scrawls out of an imagined world.
He answered with a thin smile, hefting it up on one flattened palm like a platter. He turned the cover so she could see it, Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown.
“Slow, but good. Stormy.”
He set the book down, disinterested in anything in the room but her. His eyes were soft as old maps. She went to him.
He was unhurried, kissing her and making her take off everything she wore before he reached between her legs. His hand laid upon the surface of her sex for a long time, drawing out the heat until she began to press against his palm. The friction quickly eased as she wet him and he spread her slick up into her wiry hair and belly, rubbing into her skin what she’d given up.
As he rolled onto her she could feel her breath catch sharp, an unexpected pain driving up through her throat as he went into her, bringing a small white cry. He stopped to see if she had been hurt but she drew him on, bringing their bodies together in an agreement of skin. He loosened in her with a gasp, eyes drunk, face tight as rope. Later, they coiled together and let the darkness cleanse them.
In her dream she was alone in a large building, grey walled and sparely lit. Thin ice frailed the windows. She was wandering room to room, the smooth floor polishing the soles of her feet. Mason was shooting pool in the back by himself. She could not see him but she could hear the faint clicking of the balls as he ran the table, racked and ran the table again. She wanted to go to him, but her legs were impossibly tired and he receded in time, replaced by a vision of her grandmother’s face, pained, close to the hour she died.
It was a counterfeit of a face really, a strange wronging of features, the paralyzed remnants after the second stroke. Lavada wanted to take her hands and pass them across the tangled muscles, iron the sickness away. When she reached for her, the old woman slackened, her inner form giving way so that the skin left behind was as light and drawn as a wish.
She sat awake, spent tears beginning to dry. Dennis slept deeply beside her. She moved slightly to see if he would stir but he remained sealed in his own weighted world. She went to the window and looked down on the faintly lit street. It had stopped raining. A few shallow pools gleamed blackly.
She dressed and still Dennis did not wake. She did not write him a note, waiting to slip on her flats after she had descended the steps and locked the restaurant’s front door behind her. She looked up the long and empty street only once before she stepped into her car and cranked the engine.
The digital clock on the dashboard told her it was just shy of four. She drove slowly, letting the road string her home, as if she and the car were a paired realization of its mere surface, its distracted truth. Once she came into Sanction County she wanted to keep on and she drove past the hollow and beyond that the Smokevine National Forest, an abiding yield of loamy silence. The radio would not tune to any strict signal, so she rolled the driver’s window down and let the sound of the vehicle’s own slipstream beat softly against her like a voice.
She had not thought of her grandmother in so long. She had stepped through that regret, defied it, but now it rose up in her, captured her reason. The old woman had been the closest thing Lavada knew of a mother, before her body had revolted against herself, made her a bitter and unpredictable version of the person she had been years before. She of the long elegant arms and who played bridge and practiced calligraphy. The unexpectedly galloping laugh, quieted when Lavada signed her over to the home. Attendants in fuchsia scrubs, pants lisping as they walked down the hall to check on detached IVs, shit bedsheets. The rare visits growing ever rarer. The broken and squandered time.
She pulled into the empty lot where she had seen Mason with his vegetable stand. A gypsy was what he was, a weakness. She closed her eyes and tried to root out what he infected her with. How long that had been the case. The trying and the failing. The severe fact of him, like a blow. Dennis was too good. He would learn to desire a life apart. Even with him inside her a piece of her retreated, played a sick brand of impersonation. Hating Mason is what sealed her devotion to him. Loving Dennis, she feared, would divide her from him forever.
When she admitted this to herself something uncoiled inside her belly. The phantom of the daughter Mason and she had together and lost. Never born, but miscarried in the final trimester the year before he’d gone away. The loss of the child and then the loss of the man. Like the sea drying up before the river feeding it. The barren and cracked bed. But not everything was dry. Even now, she still held milk, and it would sometimes rise sorely to the faded burst of her nipples. But it was never enough to stain.
She smoked for a long time, not knowing what stayed her until she saw the first dawn light picking up the heavy bull neck of the distant ridge. Perhaps he would come and say something to her. Make the slightest promise, the injury of hope. There was a time she would have died on his whims, but this, she decided, was a poor day for tragedy. She started the car and drove.
Teach me, Son. Tear down the truth I’ve learned. Now that you are back, now that you are true. Break apart what we’ve lost, what I’ve raised like castles of cloud. You have seen the ache in me, the vagrant hopes. All my mastery of words and the words behind the words, the bedrock of genius, the dreams of great men. All that slipping from me, sifting down like sand into an iron pipe. The burial of everything that has comprised your father’s heart.
Remember when times were hard? When I was awake late into the nights over my Hawthorne and you were always at your mother’s side? That was the poverty of a scholar’s life. The hidden price for a chance to delve into pages, sound out the minds of men dead for a century. Not a pursuit for the average man. The prudent one either, I admit. But it was a tool in my hand that had to be used. I wanted to escape the physics of an ordinary, productive life. I wanted to bend meaning, to see things new. Like all fathers want from their sons, I wanted you to love me for my ingenuity.
But you were not born yet, even though I imagined you, even though I saw you lingering in the house like a haunting not yet realized. Those were the lonesome years, the fraught labors. Anticipation of a life I was never meant to have. There are these two lives inside me always, these competing realities that have set me along a strange path.
HAMMOND SOON gave Mason larger responsibilities. A low slung brick building with a dozen separate units just down the road from the general store. It overlooked a small river dam where the poor would come to fish with kernels of canned corn. These apartments belonged to the old man, but he was derelict in his attention and the rooms had a tendency of finding premature ruin. He wanted Mason to put a few coats of interior paint on the walls and to repair what other varied elements of the building might be repairable. In exchange, he was to be allowed to live rent free in the smallest unit, live like a man making his justified way. He accepted.
Several of the rooms were cluttered with old pressboard tables and shaky chairs. These he hauled to the curb for garbage pick-up. What remained were small single rooms with attached kitchenettes and leaky bathrooms, each unit nearly duplicating the last. Small black snakes climbed up the drains. He carried them out back to a jungle of kudzu for release. He hoped the noise of his work and the paint fumes would keep them away.
By the end of the first week he had finished three of the dozen apartments. Hammond came down with the old dog and they stood for half an hour watching Mason work. He did not say whether he was pleased with the progress that had been made but he left a pair of twenty dollar bills for the day before stepping down to the river for an afternoon’s worth of drowsy fishing. When he came back Mason saw his stringer was empty.
At night he still slept in the back room of the general store. The cripple would come to the door and tap on the glass before lett
ing himself in. They talked long into the night while sharing bottle after bottle of Old Crow.
His name was Irving and he claimed Cherokee blood. He spoke with a lisp from missing several upper teeth, removed for undisclosed reasons. His wheelchair, he claimed, was found by the side of the road, and he used it only when the pain got past bearing. Often, he was able to shuffle along on foot, making slow distance with patient will and humility, still better than his battered wheels permitted. He told of sheriff’s deputies who pulled him off the side of the road and said they would beat him to death if he wasn’t across county lines by dark. There were some, he said, who were National Guardsmen newly back from Iraq, and when they said they would hold him under the river until he stopped breathing, he believed them.
Mason liked him and decided to bring him along to finish the work on the apartments. Irving ran errands back and forth from the truck, keeping him in beer and paint while he worked quickly, doors and windows thrown open to the bracing spring weather, wasps bouncing themselves off the windowpanes and the brick façade under the hard sun. It was a fine rhythm, a regularity that seemed to take on its own intelligence. By sundown of the first day, Mason was done with four more units and they sat together on the concrete stoop drinking the last of the day’s iced beer and watching a few college girls walk down the sidewalk toward off-campus parking.
Irving asked, “You ever think of doing that?”
Mason thought he was talking about the brunette they’d been watching and laughed.
“Hell, brother. They’d have me thrown in with the child molestors.”
“Not the women. College. Getting some education might keep you from painting walls all damn day.”
Mason looked off at all the grass that needed cutting.
“No, I’m afraid that’s not exactly my style. Dumbest people I’ve ever met have got their PhDs. I can’t afford to lose whatever brains I’ve still got. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with a little painting.”
A Shelter of Others Page 5