A Shelter of Others

by Charles Dodd White

  She wrote a note for him and placed it on the kitchen table. Out for just a few minutes and to wait for her should he wake. Out into the night, the familiarity of the car. To be sealed from the disgrace of what the outer world concealed in these seemingly ordinary hours. She cracked the window and smoked until the last of the trembling left her. With calm, she returned to the cabin and locked the door. Pretended sleep but wanted nothing of the poor dreams that might twine with her. Turned and faced the swift shadows plying her bedroom wall. Imagined shapes that turned her eyes into her heart. She could not dislodge one smooth word of prayer.

  At work the following day Dennis filled orders, but did not speak with her directly. His eyes were slow and angled. Cook smoke and steam reddened his face. Plates passed from his hands like spent coins.

  During the slow hour between lunch and supper, after the tables had been wiped down, she sat at the counter drinking black coffee and watching him until she couldn’t be ignored.

  “What?” he said.

  “You know what. I can feel it coming off you like it’s enough to knock me over.”

  He jammed his shoulders, looked away.

  “I’d say your actions speak clear enough. Walking out without saying a word. Not seeing fit to place a call since. Then showing up like nothing’s new.”

  She knit her fingers through split ends, the finely broken bits of her. Suddenly old.

  “It has nothing to do with you, Dennis. You knew what I was. I never pretended otherwise.”

  “Yeah.”

  She felt hurt swelling and beating in her throat like something that would steadily grow in time. She stood, circled round to meet him, put her hand against the small of his back, the slow and equal joining of what each would have liked to hold. He stayed there for a while, letting her soak into him, before he stepped away, washing his hands in the deep sink, drying off with a white towel hung over the slender neck of the faucet.

  “You can go on home for today,” he said. “I’m not feeling well. We’ll close down for supper. Lock the door on the way out if you don’t mind.”

  He didn’t turn to look at her on his way up the stairs, clumping through the darkened back of the restaurant. She listened for his steps overhead before she dumped out her mug and slammed the front door behind her.

  Back in Sanction County she drove directly to the lot where she’d seen Mason with the vegetable stand. Seeing now instead an old man, wheelchair bound, dozing under the shade of a tarp. When she parked and walked over to speak with him his eyes and no other part of him roused. He did not offer hello when she came to the table and glanced over the produce. He appeared to care no more for her than if she were a passing inconvenience of weather. She turned some lettuce in her hand, put it back.

  “There was another man here the other day,” she said, attempting a noncommittal air, knowing she could never make the lie pass. She had always been awful at lying and felt envious of those that could possess themselves in the face of it. The best liars, she knew, were the ones who always remained beloved.

  “Yes, Ma’am. That’s right,” he answered, giving her nothing else.

  She reached for a cigarette, saw him watching her intently. Handed him one and lit his before her own. He thanked her.

  “I would like to talk with him. Is there some way I can do that?”

  “I’m not sure if I should...”

  “I’m his wife.”

  The words were sharp, irrecovable.

  “Yes, Ma’am. I wondered if you might be.” He drew on the smoke, savoring it like something that might flee. “He’s tending Mr. Hammond’s general store, around the back side of the college campus. Do you know where that is?”

  “Yes, I do. It’s very old. I didn’t know it was still open.”

  “It’s falling apart. But that’s where he is alright. All day.”

  She thanked him, tendered a smile. He nodded, given completely now to the steady contemplation of his cigarette. An old man who enjoyed his solitary pleasures. She left him to it. In the short time it took to drive to the store, her mind tumbled against itself and then tumbled back again, a ceaseless revolution of what she might say to Mason, what she might do with him when they were alone. She decided to trust in momentum, believing in the ethic of forward movement, an arrow pointing toward an approximate destination, propelled by something too forceful and intuitive to resist. She pulled onto a hardened rise of scorched grass and cut the engine, sat looking down at the old clapboard structure built into the side of the hill. The entire place listed toward the downslope so that the facade resembled a slackened and weary expression, gravity deepening within the timbers holding it together, weight finding its own hidden seat within the sealed lower rooms, known now only by the suggested dimensions because the understory windows were blocked with faulty rectangles of ply board. The upper level, flush with the hilltop and fronted by its slatted porch, seemed only slightly more habitable. Green paint, the faded color of old water towers, was peeling away in long whiskers. The store was entirely sunken and obscure. No great wonder that he should have found a place to conceal himself here, a retreat that practically gave itself back to the land supporting it. A skin growth accommodating to its host, disturbing but benign.

  She entered, all the long aisles leading to where he sat behind the high counter, head bent over a newspaper or perhaps a book of accounts. When she walked to him, her footsteps thumped deep into the space below, the hidden parts of the house rebounding this single moment like echoes heard underwater. He looked up at her, held her in his eyes for the first time.

  “I’ve wondered...”

  When he did not complete his thought, she felt chided, bruised. Minutes made themselves into thick, distorting glass. She was the one to finally move through it. The real courage was hers. Always had been.

  “You look thin. I’ve worried you might not be taking care of yourself. If you even know what that means anymore.”

  His eyes could not stay with her for long, sliding and clicking in his face like pieces worn smooth and loose.

  “I’m different, Lavada. That’s all. I imagine it has to be that way for everyone sooner or later.”

  She moved a pile of unopened mail from a stool and sat down with her profile to him, elbow rested against the stained counter. She would let him look on her unguarded, give him this moment’s vulnerability to see what he might do with it. She was close enough to smell sawdust and paint and the vines where he must have worked loading the vegetables for the stand. She wondered if he had showered that morning before work, the needles of spray erasing the muted odors of sleep for a full day’s fresh inscription, rankly complex.

  “The law came to see me,” she said. “That seems kind of backwards, doesn’t it?”

  He did not betray a physical change, but she sensed something gather in him.

  “What happened, Lavada?”

  She forged a smile, glancing at him and these petty objects he surrounded himself with. “Let’s just say it wasn’t all too gentle.”

  His hand reached across the counter. His fingers like shade stealing across her arm, his skin cooling hers. Even that little joy lived within her still, spared from the seeming permanence of what she had thought already decided. Desolate hope suddenly fulfilled. And, at once, tears broke from her eyes. Mason seemed to materialize around her then, growing large and immediate. She put her face to his chest, her hands to his hips. His arms pinned her to him close. There was nothing left that could separate them. She would rage against any particle of distance. They stumbled together against the corners of low shelves, cans tipping and thumping the floor. Some kind of intelligence guided them, kept them tending in a mutual stagger to his small back room with its made cot. Quickly unmade. Confusion of their clothes, accidentally torn. The faint clash of joints and the teeth marking one another’s skin, softly red. The secretly kept record of this unlikelihood they shared.

  She tipped her head back to breathe deeply while she held his full we
ight. She felt his hands rounding her breasts. A single bead of milk rose from her nipple. She twined her fingers in his hair and pressed his mouth there, wanting him to lick her clean, to draw out what she had carried for so long. She would strip her skin and muscle away if she could, let him eat like a goblin the whole heart she presented to him, make a meal of what terrified her.

  Afterwards, sprawled like victims, they drank glasses of tap water and lay together listening to the store’s big emptiness settle in the cool of the evening. Between the narrow slashes of half drawn shades, Lavada could see the night, the first fireflies appearing like bright scatterings of dust. The sight seemed antiquated somehow, restricted to a time out of agreement. She wondered what other visions might one day become unexpectedly forfeit.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  She turned her head, looked at him.

  “Your father needs to see you.”

  He rolled toward his night stand, pulled a pack of Camels from the drawer. Lit one, passed the pack and lighter to her. Smoke stacked above.

  “I know he does.”

  “There are choices that you need to make about him, Mason. Things I don’t have say in.” She put a cigarette between her lips, didn’t strike the lighter, tasted the neutral paper, took it away.

  “Time hasn’t stopped while you were gone,” she continued. “I want you to understand that before we go any further. I don’t feel like I owe you any other explanation.”

  “You believe in saying a mouthful once you get the chance, don’t you?”

  “Oh, fuck it!” She tossed the covers, began to dress. His hand reached out to settle her.

  “I’m just talking. Sit here with me a minute, will you? Just be still for a little while.”

  Not knowing why, she slid back beneath the sheet. Sank down into the cool mattress. She faced him, watched the steady incarnation of his breath. She could let herself forget the intervening years when they were arranged like this. Just them in the house. A vacant parentheses, enclosing what appeared infinite. Remove him from her and there was only tumbling space sprung loose. Or perhaps there was merely nothing, an errant punctuation—proof that any one person was largely irrelevant, even to herself. But this physical juncture bracketed their life, assembled how they thought about who they were when they were together. Here, they could never equivocate.

  “I spent a whole lot of time figuring out what you mean to me,” she said. “You never do know really, until you’ve lost someone. When you were sitting up there at the penitentiary, when I didn’t come...it taught me a lot about us. I started to hate you. I won’t lie. I thought about the hurt you did me, even before you got caught. But that wasn’t all. It was awful to know you were somewhere in the world, somewhere I couldn’t be. My husband, the man that I’d made mine and he’d made me his, alive but gone. So lost. Somehow it got easier to deny you, to pretend you’d never meant anything to me. Goddamn you, Mason. What else was there for me?”

  This time when she rose and dressed he did not try to stop her. She saw herself slide across the surface of a small dressing mirror, the sight of her own face a measurement, a quick confirmation of purpose.

  “I need time, Mason. I need to understand what this might mean. And I need you to take care of this business with the sheriff. Your father’s not fit to have people like that around him. Lord knows what he would make of that kind of carrying on.”

  “I’ll see to it.”

  That was all he said, all he could conjure to try to hold her there a moment longer. Maybe she was a fool for believing anything might ever change between them. Perhaps she’d let the worn comfort of his body and being soften her too well. She walked out, left him to decide how much he was willing to risk. Feared the best of what they were had already been broken between the gears of some ugly machine neither of them could ever seem to stop.

  EVEN AS early as seven, Hammond had brought the dog Quest and tied him along the side of the store. Mason heard him snuffling, flipping over his empty water bowl. He dressed and walked around to the side, drawing water from the spigot and shaking out some dog chow in a neat pyramid on the ground. Already it was hot, the sun a glancing shot through the bristling eastern ridges. Mourning doves wailed.

  He scratched Quest behind the ears, saw his eyes shut in pleasure, hind leg shake like a candle flame. He’d become an occasional responsibility, showing up outside whenever Hammond was off on one of his undisclosed errands, sometimes gone for a few days at a time. Mason actually enjoyed the dog’s gentle company. A companion who knew when to hold his tongue would always be welcomed at his side.

  While the dog ate, softly gumming away, Mason got the truck keys from the store and locked up. Tacked up a short note to Irving to not worry about watching the store until he came and found him. Look to the vegetables and keeping up the apartments. He hoped not to be absent too long. He waited for Quest to finish, then helped him into the cab, leveraging up his arthritic limbs. The dog whistled in pain but then hung his scabby head out the window, smiling at the wind the truck made as they drove into town. Mason petted him, feeling the warm hollow between ruined bones.

  He had not slept after Lavada left the night before. He would sink down an immeasurable distance within his own deepest quiet, just at the borderland of consciousness, but the final easy dissolve would not yield. He stayed just this side of himself, calmly breathing, wanting the perfect silence of oblivion. But she troubled him, would not release the smallest aspects of herself from his memory, and that was what bit into him like fever, the endless particulars of her character that he’d been unable to forget when they had been apart. Some details sharpened with absence—the crisp down between her legs, the sly drop at the corners of her mouth, the raspberry birthmark behind her right ear, always brightening when she was embarrassed—but others had retreated, given their discrete nature over to a smoothed over replica of her personality. Being with her again had freed these many trapped qualities. The list of her head when he hugged her to him. The thickness of her voice when she tried to hold back her resentment, her desire. All of the divisions and repairs she’d fashioned so that she might survive and live through what she had to.

  Still, he was unsure if any of this mattered. It was not new to him that he loved Lavada. But the thriving presence of such love was so much more than simply resigning himself to the fact of their attachment. He tried to forget the momentary itch of jealousy when she’d talked of having been with someone else. Though he’d seen the man with her that night when he sneaked down to the family cabin, the image was something seen at a comprehensible distance. Perhaps the night had aided him. Something foreign and dreamlike that assigned all he viewed as belonging to the suffering of another man wearing an identical suit of skin. The hurt had created another person to absorb all it could inflict. At least, he had once believed it had.

  He slowed as he merged onto the back street of Canon City, cruising down the rear loading docks of the old Budweiser brewery, the sawmill, Riley’s Superette. At the traffic light he could hear the fierce cries of college kids pretending to be tough inside the Rokudan mixed martial arts gymnasium. The concrete building had been whitewashed with a long red and white alternating stripe encircling it to signify a karate belt. Mason could still remember when the place had been a muffler shop. Now it was turning out suburban assassins who were more dangerous to themselves than potential foes. When the light changed, he eased on.

  The courthouse parking lot was full so he had to drive past and park on the side of the road in a nearby residential area. He was sure to get under the shade of an oak bough and rolled down the windows for Quest, rubbing his chest until he lay down in the front seat for a siesta. The halls inside were busy, the click and clatter of polished shoes punching along the tile. Papers rustled in small white hands. The men’s as soft as the women’s. Everywhere briskly important inefficiency. Assholes. Safe fucking assholes.

  He went to the big open rooms at the far end of the second floor—Tommy Na
she, Sheriff’s Office. He stepped in, his shoes silent on the padded carpet, glanced at the drooping flags, one for state, one for country. The portrait of the sheriff, smiling in blazer and crewcut, eyes weak behind wireframed glasses. Some few desks piled with errant papers, civilian secretaries bent over them like lamps. The groan of air conditioning, a barely heard labor above the florescent lights.

  A woman, gray and tired, looked suddenly up, scrutinized him.

  “You have an appointment, Sir?”

  The words in her mouth sounded as pleasant as sunstroke. Mason turned his cap in his hands, cleared his throat.

  “No ma’am, but I believe I should talk to the sheriff if it’s at all possible. I believe he’s been looking for me.”

  Her head canted, as if disbelieving what she had heard.

  “Did you say looking for you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What’s your name?”

  Mason spoke it, shifted his weight, his eyes seeming strange and busy in their own sockets. He pinched the bridge of his nose to steady himself.

  “Have a seat, Mister Laws. Let me see if he remembers looking for you.”

  He settled into one of the plastic chairs arrayed along the front wall, tried not to think too deeply about what he was doing. Every nerve in his body raised to run, to get clear of whatever good intentions he’d convinced himself justified this action. A place, as much as any person, could make an argument. And this place was doing that to him now. The controlled atmosphere of the offices smothered him, constricted. He could feel panic rising, chipping away, reducing him. Buildings designed to make others feel small and ridiculed. To humiliate. The secretary returned, sat down, coolly mentioned, “Go on in. He’s got a minute.”