A Shelter of Others

by Charles Dodd White

  An excitement flooded his system as he broached the full daylight. The air seemed light and renewed. The sun gently brushed his skin. He stretched out on the ground facing the sky, his mouth and eyes open to its entirety, filling himself with boundlessness any way he could. For a moment, he was as dumb and happy as a babe at the breast.

  He rose slowly to his knees, leveraged himself up by placing his good hand against a cobbled tree trunk. The woods were empty, soughing. He did not register the decision to strike out for higher ground until he was already on the trail, cutting across where the dogs and men had passed. The ground rose up before him perfectly, the ridgelines yielding themselves to him in processional.

  They would not find him now. He was let go. He was a man outside of what they understood. The strain in his leg was sharp, but he did not slow. He had the company of no countrymen, but that did not matter. He carried something beyond companionship. He was becoming his own story, his own shining heritage.

  SHE DREAMED that she had died. Or perhaps it was no dream. Perhaps it was a conscious vision, a loss she had sensed when she believed her life at its outer compass. She may have opened her eyes or they may have never closed. Sight was a riddle now, an unestablished theorem. But she was alive, she knew. She had a responsibility to the soul still inside her. She stood.

  The side of her face was bloody. She wobbled to a mirror in the den, saw the loop of swollen flesh at her cheek. Her fingers found quick pain at the lightest touch. She remembered Irving. It became hard to breathe.

  She rinsed in the sink, the blood running thinly down the drain. She held a dishrag to her face while she stared out at the storm. Sam was out there somewhere, and she would have to find him before someone else did. Try and bring him back to himself somehow.

  She gathered herself in an old plaid raincoat, buttoned it to her neck and turned the collar up. Put on one of Sam’s broad-brimmed hats and walked straight out into the downpour.

  The rain confused the way ahead, the lowered clouds running into the valley like listless tails. She turned her face to the ground to look for Sam’s tracks. Though she saw nothing, she knew he would make his way toward the national forest, the protected land. Its wildness would be a draw to his own. She went down to the Plum.

  She heard the river long before it came into sight. It was rising quickly, calling up unusual rapids, mirrors of swift water over creviced rock. The storm surge would put terrible energy into the river, bend fury into its bed, tear new threats through the land. She eased toward the bank, praying for no sign of tracks. Even a young man would have difficulty crossing the stream in its turbulent state. For Sam it would have been impossible. Thunder cracked close overhead; she hurried away.

  She began to shiver, clutched at her arms for heat. She was relieved when the darkness of night made the storm invisible. She was glad to be given to the body of such force without having to directly face it. There was consolation in being completely consumed, made into a minute iteration of natural power. She was freed from the meanness of details. She moved like a particle through current.

  She cried out for Sam, her voice smothered by the sound of so much rain. Her lungs were weak already, and soon her calls were little more than a conversation with herself. The world was unbuilding around her, dismantling its own pieces. Her voice seemed an audible nothing against it all.

  Her feet slipped from beneath her on the side of a black hill and she tumbled in a long slide of mud and rock. A savage downward corrugation, an insult. At the bottom, she turned her head and spat dirt, blood. Closed her eyes, let the rain beat down. Her fingers burrowed into the soil like worms. She began to climb again.

  She lost track of the hours and her trail became aimless, elliptical. The forest continued to stream with rain, was tattered by it. Lightning appeared in metered tableau, renewed the emptiness, until one time emptiness filled.

  A superstructure of iron reached high into the canopy of tree tops. A staircase with guardrail zigzagged up its center, disappearing into the bottom of a large platform more than a hundred feet in the air. Lavada stepped back, tried to see to the top, but the strata of overgrowth blocked a clear view. One of the abandoned fire towers the forestry service had maintained long ago, deserted for decades. A solitary outpost that survived to no purpose. Its tall legs groaned in a river of wind. Mad with weariness, she imagined it might stumble.

  She mounted the stairs, climbed steadily without looking down. She did not fear heights, but even if she had her only experience of it would have been softened by the proximity of thick tree boughs closing around the corners of the tower. This elevated forest, though it batted and sloughed with the energy of the storm, was fortressed in quiet. The higher she climbed, the more certain she became that she was ascending to a point of complete stillness, beyond the lesser puzzlement of the ground.

  At once the protection of trees fell away and she braced against a full tilt of wind. She swung open the trap door on the bottom of the observation platform and quickly clambered up, dropped the door shut with a thump. In every direction whistling darkness, storm clouds like gunpowder. She huddled against the nearest parapet. Gathering her nerve, she edged forward to glimpse over the side. Her stomach convulsed when she saw the limbs and leaves in frantic motion, swaying arms that beckoned her to leap.

  Alone, in this island in the air, she was able to fully comprehend her failure, her betrayal. She had seen the changes in Sam in the past few months, but did nothing to correct them. She had surrendered to the idea that her perception had been compromised, that she was simply imagining his shifts in mood and manner. But it had been real all along, terrifyingly so. She had missed something so violent just beneath the surface of his everyday calm, a force as deadly and reckless as the passing impulse to jump from the platform.

  She possessed the advantage of inhibition. That was what made the difference. Something in Sam had loosened and sprung free, damaged his common acceptance of the laws of consequence, whereas she was trapped by her fear, secure in it. She was able to hold on.

  She rummaged around, found a pile of old supplies under a mildewed canvas tarp. Cardboard boxes of park pamphlets, old topography maps. She would have given anything for a flashlight and working batteries, but most everything of value appeared to have been picked clean. She did find a small olive case with a red cross on a white field stamped in the metal. Inside there were cloth bandages, iodine, tape. She tore into the package with her teeth and cleaned the cut along her face before applying the bandage.

  It grew colder. She hunched beneath the canvas, tenting it about her shoulders while she watched the sky. She no longer minded the storm’s company. It gave pace to her thoughts, justified their turn. She realized that she had expected this night for so long. She had seen it fretting the dimmest corner of dreams, known its inevitability as surely as if it were her natural born child. Since Mason had gone to prison this night had waited for her, patient and vicious. How many small alternatives had she plotted in her head to survive his absence, to avoid this outcome? Countless and fruitless. The fool that thought she could dodge time. Were this a warmer and more amiable setting, she may have managed a laugh at her own expense.

  She moved again to the platform’s edge, tested the attraction of gravity. In the dark she suffered no vertigo in looking down. Instead, there was a powerful comfort in the profound elsewhere it offered. Only a single step and she would be retrieved into the silence. A slow erotic thrill seized her in her lower stomach and spread upwards. But she knew she could not leave the height. She moved away and huddled down again. She still felt too much. She was not stoic enough for self-homicide. Something would have to be built out of all this wreckage, and only a survivor was fit to build a house shaped by truth.

  CODY WAS writing up paperwork from a mid-afternoon domestic assault at the Waverly Arms Apartments when the call came in from the Laws place. The first deputy on sight was Ponder, a boy not three years out of high school. Had ridden the bench as a backup halfb
ack for the Canon City Mustangs the year they’d made a run as far as the state semi-finals. Cody remembered losing a hundred dollars on a bet with his younger brother when Ponder fumbled the ball the single time he touched it, late in the third quarter, literally handing the game to the other team. Consequently, Cody had never had much of an opinion for Ponder, neither as a ballplayer or a lawman.

  “What’s that hysterical sonofabitch crying about?” Cody called over his shoulder to the dispatch officer, Ellen Ludlow. She leaned over the radio, talking quickly and scribbling in the duty log, ignoring him. He knew she despised him, had made it plain the few times he’d tried to hint it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to spend a little time together outside of office hours. She was tall, thin, just good looking enough to think she was entitled to a life beyond regular. She likely had eyes for some man in town with money, education. He turned back to the computer screen to dribble out the details of the routine arrest, putting Ellen Ludlow and her tan legs as far back in his mind as he could.

  By the time he sent the document to the printer, he knew it was more than just idle panic on the other end. Ponder had called for backup and they’d confirmed it: an old man, dead. Murdered.

  He went out to his cruiser, picked up his mike and called himself in route, not waiting to hear Ellen Ludlow acknowledge. He flipped on his code lights but ran silent, watching the vagrant strobe of his blue turning lamp glance from the glass fronts of downtown businesses. Once he cleared the last traffic light and swung out on the state highway proper, he gave the floorboard his foot, put the road to a real hurting. The tires thumped over the cracks, potholes, extension joints. The sounds of rough country miles.

  When he pulled up to the place he could see two other deputies had beat him there, the sheriff too, sitting out in his Jeep Cherokee, still wearing a three piece suit. Fresh from a day of courthouse politicking. Cody grabbed his posse box from the passenger’s seat, tucked it under his arm. Best to look squared away in front of his boss, be as much a poster boy as he could pretend. Play the part, lick the boots, and maybe eventually have it pay off. He ran through the hissing rain, sheltered his hat with the steel posse box.

  “Sheriff, sounds like we got a hell of a mess in there.”

  Nashe glanced up from his cell phone. He had been thumbing the numbered buttons.

  “It’s a right cluster, Gibb. There’s no doubt about that.”

  He went back to his phone, apparently not interested in casting any further light on the subject. He shook the phone like a can of bug spray, held it up over his head and winced.

  “Can’t get a goddamned signal. Shit.”

  Cody waited, expected some direction, but he had always been invisible to Nashe. Today was no different.

  “Anything I can do, Sheriff?”

  “What? Oh, go have a look if you want. Just be careful. Coroner hasn’t turned up yet. Don’t go walking through evidence just because we’ve got something to break up our routine.”

  Cody said nothing in return, went up to the cabin, stood dripping. Ponder was standing on the front porch, his campaign hat in his hands. His face was blanched, damp. His hair plasticine. It looked like he wasn’t interested in much more than keeping his lunch where it already was.

  “That bad, is it?”

  Ponder nodded.

  “You never seen a dead body before?”

  “No, you?”

  “Overseas. Plenty of them. Common as songbirds.”

  Ponder glanced over his shoulder at the front door. “I’d hate to think anything such as that could be common.”

  Cody stepped inside, said in passing, “You’d be surprised.”

  All the lights were on in the cabin, but it remained dim, the dark paneling absorbing much of the lamp light. The other deputy, a silver haired man named Sprowles, sat on the couch, stared off into dark nothing like it was something he could read.

  “Come for the freak show, huh?”

  Cody didn’t care for the tone, but he let it pass.

  “Where’s Old Man Laws?”

  Sprowles laughed, not an ounce of humor in it.

  “Hell if I know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I said. I don’t have a clue where Laws is. Him or his daughter. Now if you’re looking for the dead man, I might be able to help you to that. He’s split like a watermelon the other side of this sofa.”

  Cody thought he was being mocked, but he didn’t care enough to argue. He came around the end of the couch. When he saw Irving’s body he was sure he needed to take a seat himself.

  “You a friend of the newly departed?”

  Cody dragged his sleeve across his chin, an old tic that he’d never found time to quit.

  “I know him, yeah. Stubborn old bastard. Never thought I’d see him like this though. Lord God.”

  “Here, have one,” Sprowles said. He shook out a Benson and Hedges from a soft pack.

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Shut your goddamn mouth.”

  His hand took the cigarette and he leaned in for a light. He did not cough when he inhaled. Sprowles smiled.

  “Well?”

  “Try anything once, I guess.”

  “I’m talking about the dead guy, shitbird. What’s he to you?”

  “Nothing. Just a problem I thought I’d gotten rid of.”

  Sprowles nodded. The smoke slid from his nostrils, as if that was the basic element comprising him. “Dead problems can be some of the worst kind.”

  Cody could hear the sheriff calling for him. He stabbed the cigarette into the heel of his boot and carried the butt out with him, didn’t know what to do with it and ended up stuffing the stinking thing into his hip pocket. Went around to the passenger’s side and got in to keep as dry as he could. Nashe was still meddling with his cell phone. When he spoke to Cody, he didn’t bother to shift his attention.

  “I know you want to be helpful, Gibb, so I’ve got a job for you. Need you to run out to Rick Swanson’s place, get his tracking dogs out here. See what we can turn up.”

  Cody glanced out his window at the troubled sky.

  “Think we’re gonna have much luck tracking anything in all this?”

  “Would you rather we let some killer run out into the woods without even trying to bring him in, especially with a woman missing? I’m willing to lay a bottom dollar that if we give those dogs Mason Laws’ scent, we stand a fair chance of being done with all this by sunup. I had a bad feeling about that little cocksucker the first time I laid eyes on him. I should have never let him out of the cell in the first place, the sorry bastard. Once we get a couple of more men on scene I’ll send Ponder and Sprowles over to that general store to get something of his we can have those dogs taste. You get on out there to Swanson’s before this rain gets any worse than it already is. Can you handle that?”

  Cody said that he could, lunged back into the storm before any other gophering was added to the task, and crossed the mud yard for his vehicle. His tires spun in the soft earth before they caught and he ground up the road leading out of the hollow. By the time he achieved the macadam he could smell engine oil burning. It could have just as easily been his blood. He wrung the steering wheel tight enough to feel the hard whiteness leach from his bones to the taut skin of his hand. The rain slashed like whipped rope, snapped in his high beams. He eased off the accelerator, knew he had to be patient if he was to be worthy. Shapes could abruptly step out in such weather and he would not have himself displaced from this duty of running a guilty man toward his end.

  Rick Swanson lived in high country, just the other side of Buckner’s Gap, stuck back among crags and red spruce. Other than his tracking dogs, he was a lonesome soul. Unusual, considering he wasn’t an old man, somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five. Cody had seen him off the mountain only a couple of times, shooting pool down at The Slab or drinking cans of PBR with some older men at the VFW. He’d tried to open a conversation with him several times, knew he kep
t dogs to help with the Sheriff’s office, but Swanson never seemed to hold more than a cursory word for him. Kept to his own thin holding of friends and acquaintances. Maybe it was because he didn’t care to be known as a friend to the law. Or maybe it was something a touch more personal.

  It was a long drive up to the top, and with the rain coming as hard as it had, the unpaved road began to bog. For a couple of minutes hail beat down, knocked on the windshield whenever it got through all the big foliage overhead. He stopped while it came, but when he tried to ease along again, the back tires yelped as they tossed mud, and he could smell them burning.

  “I’m goddamned.”

  He got out, saw how much the ground had swallowed of the cruiser’s back end, cursed once more before going the rest of the way afoot.

  The dogs were baying at him before he could even see the house. Must have sensed his coming despite the overall drumbeat of the storm, knew his character like the faintest change in wind direction. He hadn’t had time to cross to the porch and knock before Swanson stepped out beneath the overhang and pointed a side by side twelve gauge at his chest.

  “Hell, it ain’t that dark that you can’t see a badge over my pocket,” Cody said. He chopped his arm down short, as if the vehemence of the gesture would cut off any ballistic threat. He mounted the steps and stood with a puddle gathering on the boards beneath him.

  “You never heard of a poncho?” Swanson said. He smiled meanly.

  Cody ignored the jibe, swept his hat from his head.

  “Sheriff needs you down in Laws Hollow, down there up against the national forest border.”

  “You come all this way on foot just to tell me that?”

  Cody looked off, hated seeming the fool and having no recourse to correct the fun Swanson was having at his expense.

  “Let me guess, you got mired in that Crown Vic of yours?”

  “Got a winch you could get me out of there?”

  “You need dogs or a wrecker service? Here it is late in the evening and I might have had a drink or two and you want me to drive out in the pitch dark to get you unstuck? That maybe sounds a little bit like entrapment to me.”