Before Familiar Woods

by Ian Pisarcik

  “Elam’s about six foot tall and thin as a whip. Wears a hat that says BROWNING on it. I want to know if you seen him yesterday.”

  “He ain’t here.”

  “Horace is short and wide, walks with a limp like he’s dragging a chain.”

  The boy held Ruth’s eyes. “Are you deaf or just fucking old?”

  Ruth felt Cecil’s hand on her back.

  The boy smiled at Cecil. “You looking for your husband too?”

  Ruth peered past the boy. There were towels lying on the floor outside the bathroom. The trash underneath the side table was full, and more trash had gathered beside it. The man on the bed continued to flip through the television channels.

  Ruth looked back to the boy in the doorway. He was tall and lanky. His face was smooth and unblemished save for his nose, which looked like it had been broken more than once. She turned to the man in the lawn chair. “What are these boys—sixteen?”

  The man in the lawn chair took a drag but didn’t say anything.

  “You must be proud of yourself,” Ruth said.

  “Let’s go, Ruth,” Cecil said.

  “You ought to listen to your friend there.” The man flicked the ash from his cigarette onto the pea gravel.

  Water dripped from the gutters. The damp mixed with the smell of smoke. Ruth turned back to the motel room. A bone-thin girl wearing just her underwear opened the bathroom door and quickly pulled it closed.

  “Who else is in there with you?” Ruth asked.

  “Time to go, lady,” the man in the lawn chair said.

  “Who is that—who else is in there?”

  The boy turned to the man in the lawn chair. “You want me to get rid of ’em, Dwyer, or do you want to do it?”

  The man in the lawn chair stood.

  Ruth took a step toward the room. “That girl’s not more than a child.”

  The boy pulled a six-inch blade from his pocket and held it close to his thigh.

  “Whoa,” Cecil said. He stepped in front of Ruth.

  The boy glanced over at the man that had been in the lawn chair, and the man suddenly lunged at Cecil and wrapped his arms around his waist. Cecil grabbed the man’s shoulders and the two wrestled. The man’s leg struck Ruth’s knee, and she fell to the ground and scraped her palms. She looked up in time to see the boy duck and drive the blade into Cecil’s upper thigh.

  “Motherfucker,” Cecil yelled.

  Ruth got to her knees as Eddie came from somewhere behind her and grabbed the boy around the neck and begin pulling and punching him at the same time. The black man came out of the motel room with his fists up. Cecil broke free of the man that had been sitting in the lawn chair and rushed the black man. The knife stuck straight out of his thigh, and blood poured down the front of his jeans. He slipped his fist through the black man’s raised guard, and Ruth heard a sound like the hood of a car slamming shut. The black man’s nose exploded and his head snapped backward and struck the metal door frame. Cecil pivoted and tackled the man who’d been in the lawn chair, just as the man was reaching for his pocket, and started pounding on his head. Eddie was on top of the teenager punching him in the face while the boy struggled. Ruth saw blood and heard footsteps rushing over pea gravel.

  * * *

  THE KNIFE WAS deep, but it had caught Cecil in the meaty part of the leg. Eddie pulled out a smoke and gave it to Cecil. One of the men from the bar brought out a shot of something and Cecil took it down fast, spilling a little on his beard.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said.

  Ruth tore a section of Cecil’s jeans. Someone behind her shined a light on his leg. “You got to get to Southwestern Medical,” Ruth said. “I don’t want to risk pulling it out here and springing a leak when we got nothing to close it up with.”

  “I’ll take him,” Eddie said.

  Ruth nodded and slowly got to her feet. Her back hurt and she laid her hand on it. She could hear people talking now. Whispering and saying her name.

  “Son of a bitch,” Cecil said again. He spat blood onto the ground.

  Ruth looked over at the motel. The black man had gone back inside and closed the door. The man in the lawn chair was still unconscious on the gravel. One of the men from inside the Whistler stood over him smoking a cigarette. Making sure he woke up and that he didn’t do anything stupid when he did.

  The boy in the hooded sweat shirt had run to his car holding his side and peeled out of the gravel lot weaving all over the road. Ruth overheard somebody say that it was Dottie Flaker’s son.

  Della had come out sometime in the middle of everything, and she sat in Horace’s truck with the door wide open. She was holding something. Turning it over in her hand. Ruth watched her a moment and then caught a glimpse of what it was. Saw the bluish-black steel and wondered what Horace was doing with a gun that wasn’t used to hunt.

  “Son of a bitch,” Cecil said, quieter this time.

  MILK RAYMOND

  In the evening after the two had eaten fish sticks for dinner and the boy had finally stopped asking questions about the woman from the Department for Children and Families, Milk sat on the couch smoking a cigarette and flipping through the stack of papers. There were insurance forms and lists of transition centers and home modification resources and workforce investment sheets, and every time he flipped to the next sheet he got more upset. He thought he was putting his life on hold when he enlisted. He thought he would come back to North Falls after serving his time and hit the play button again. He even thought that so long as he managed to keep all his limbs from being blown off, he might come back as something more than when he left. But that wasn’t what happened. Instead he returned to a life that hadn’t bothered to wait for him. He had a stack of papers telling him how to start a new life, but there wasn’t a single one telling him how to get his old one back.

  He set the papers on the cardboard box and leaned back on the couch. The television was showing a Boston Red Sox game from 1960. The one where Ted Williams homered in his final at-bat and then skipped out on the last three games of the series to go fishing in Maine. Milk watched Russ Nixon ground into a double play and then he put out his cigarette and stood and went down the hall to check on his boy.

  The light was off in the bedroom and the door was closed. Milk listened for a moment and then quietly turned the doorknob. The quilt was on the floor between the bed and the wall, and the sheet stretched from one of the spindles on the headboard to the wall, where it was attached somehow. Daniel sat underneath the sheet, shining a flashlight down on a book with pictures of planets open in front of him. He wore his goggles and the pajamas he had worn all day with the flying saucers running up and down the legs and arms.

  “How’d you get that sheet to hang like that?”

  “Thumbtacks.”

  “And then it looks like you tied it around the bedpost here?”

  Daniel looked toward the bed. “With rubber bands.”

  Milk nodded.

  “Are you mad?”

  “Mad? Hell, why would I be mad? I like it. It’s a nice setup you’ve got in here. I used to make something like this when I was your age. It wasn’t as good as this, though. I used to prop up a wiffle ball bat on my mattress and drape the blanket over it, sort of like an A-frame. Then I’d pretend there was a big storm outside and I was inside a tent in the middle of the jungle. I had a plastic knife I used to pretend to sharpen. Listening to them big animals out there in the dark. Thinking about what might try to get me—how I might fight it off.”

  Daniel held the head of the flashlight in his palm so that his hand glowed orange.

  “They’re showing an old Red Sox game on television. The last game Ted Williams ever played. Teddy Ballgame, they used to call him. Or the Splendid Splinter. That was another one. You ever watch the Red Sox?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Some of your friends must—some of your classmates.”

  The boy shrugged. “Some people talk about the games sometimes.”
>
  “It’s all we ever talked about when I was your age. I went to a game one time with my father before he died. We drove all the way to Boston in the morning so we could get there to watch batting practice. He was too cheap to get a motel, so after the game we drove the whole three hours back. They didn’t win that game. They got blown out. It was a good time, though. We weren’t anywhere near the field, but it was something to be in the same place with all those players. My father didn’t like Boston. Too many people. He couldn’t figure why so many people would live in the same place. Stacked up like sardines. I guess that’s how come he settled on North Falls.” Milk scratched at his chin. His beard was coming back, and he thought it was just as well. “You warm enough? You warm enough in here?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Tell me if you get too cold. We might have to get you some storm windows.” Milk looked around the room. The walls were bare, and he thought it might be good to get some pictures hung. “All right,” he said finally. He slapped his hand on the door frame and turned from the bedroom and then stopped before closing the door. He turned back to his boy. “Don’t stay up too late. You got school in the morning.”

  The boy nodded but didn’t look up from his book.

  * * *

  IN THE LIVING room Milk sat with the lights out and the colors from the television playing on the walls. He wondered how long it would be before the previous tenant realized he was paying for the cable Milk was watching. With one bedroom it was probably someone without kids. Maybe a single guy or someone recently divorced or an elderly person who hadn’t moved out but died instead. If that was the case, he might get to watch cable for a while longer.

  He pulled another cigarette from the pack and thought about Jessica. He wondered if she was watching the same Red Sox game, but figured it was just as likely she was passed out on the ground somewhere. He wondered if she thought about him or Daniel and figured she probably didn’t think about Daniel. If she did, she wouldn’t be able to stay away.

  He knew it wasn’t easy raising a child. He knew it must have been hard for those years he was away. But hard was one thing. Leaving your own child was another. Milk probably never would be much of a father, if his own father was any sort of indication. But he wouldn’t ever leave Daniel. He wouldn’t have left the first time if he had known what was going to happen.

  He lit the cigarette and tried to push the thought of Jessica from his mind. It didn’t matter where she was or what she was thinking about. She was extraneous information. That’s what one of the gunners used to say whenever someone went on about something that had no bearing on the mission at hand. That’s just extraneous information, he would say—and extraneous information will get you killed.

  RUTH FENN

  Ruth could smell it the moment she opened the door and stepped out of the cold and into the home. The fire in the woodstove had gone out and there was nothing to mask the smell. She flipped on the light and took off her coat and hung it on the nail. The dogs stood and stretched. Ruth went to the kitchen and removed the bottle of bleach and a sponge and a plastic trash bag from under the sink.

  It was dark in the room save for the light from the television. The bed was empty and the sheets had been pulled back on one side. Ruth switched on the light and picked up the remote from the nightstand and turned off the television. The bathroom door was closed, and Ruth could hear water running lightly.

  She pushed open the door. Her mother stood in front of the sink in her long flannel nightgown holding something under the water.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Quiet. You’ll wake your father.”

  Ruth took a step toward her mother and saw the soiled underwear in her hands. “Jesus,” she said. “I told you to throw them away. That’s why I get them so cheap. Just throw them away.”

  “Quiet.”

  Shit was smeared on the white porcelain rim of the sink. The drain had clogged, and the water that pooled at the bottom was a brown rust color.

  “That’s enough,” Ruth said.

  Ruth’s mother continued to scrub the underwear with the heel of her hand.

  “Stop it.”

  “I ain’t done.”

  Ruth turned off the water. “Stop.”

  Ruth’s mother stopped.

  “Set them down.”

  Ruth’s mother set the underwear on the lip of the sink. Her palms were covered in feces, and there was some between her fingers and more on the front of her nightgown and on her chin. Ruth sat her down on the lid of the toilet and grabbed the towel from the ring beside the sink and ran it under the water. She held her mother’s wrists gently one at a time and cleaned her hands and then her face. Her mother didn’t put up a fight. She held still like a child who was scared somewhere past the point of squirming.

  Ruth led her mother to the bed and sat her down on the mattress. She found a clean nightgown and helped her change and then she lifted her mother’s legs onto the mattress and pulled the sheets so they covered her shoulders and then laid the quilt over her body faint as a dandelion’s shadow. She gathered the soiled nightgown and the towel and the underwear and placed them in the trash bag and then she went to the bathroom and stuck her hand into the water and clawed the shit loose from the basket strainer.

  “What are you doing?” Ruth’s mother asked. “Is your father in there with you?”

  “Quiet,” Ruth said. “Quiet now.”

  When the water had drained, Ruth grabbed the sponge and began cleaning the sink. She took deep breaths through her mouth and tried not to be angry with her mother for no longer being the woman she was. She had always been difficult. She seemed to want something from the world but never said what it was and then seemed upset with everyone for not knowing. But she was strong and guarded and it hurt Ruth to see her so vulnerable. It felt like watching an old tree lose its bark.

  Looking back on it, Ruth didn’t think her mother had ever wanted children. She never could give herself to Ruth in the way required of a mother. It was something Ruth had grown up wanting. To be a good mother. Elam understood what that meant, and it was one of the reasons she fell in love with him. He had been born to a caring woman who raised four boys and kept her kind disposition even after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, even after the bills from the hospital started to stack up. Even after Elam’s father took out a life insurance policy and sat down on the tractor in the barn one winter morning and pulled a ski mask over his head and shot himself with a twelve-gauge shotgun.

  Ruth dropped the sponge in the trash bag with the other soiled items. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She had put on weight. She could see it in her face and in the way her shoulders and back and arms had become one solid slab. She could see her mother there too, pushing through and distorting her face like a tussock of pasture grass beneath trampled snow.

  She left the bathroom and stood in the doorway and watched her mother, who had already fallen asleep. The smell of soap clung to the air. Ruth thought to open a window, but it was too cold. She turned off the light and walked to the kitchen, where she stuffed the trash bag into the garbage underneath the sink and washed her hands.

  Woodstock ambled into the kitchen, his nails clicking on the pinewood floor. Ruth poured a glass of water and studied the dog. “I don’t suppose nobody fed you, did they?” Ruth took a sip of the cold water and wiped her mouth. “I suppose that would be up to me.” She set the glass in the sink and fed Woodstock from the container on the floor of the pantry, and by that time the other dogs had come around and she fed them too. They seemed content afterward and lay down by the woodstove licking their lips and waiting for it to be lit. She went to the front of the house and stood looking out the window at the moon and the leafless trees and the empty drive.

  She thought about the gun in Horace’s truck. Della had said it was for protection. “Protection from what?” Ruth had asked.

  But Della just shook her head. “Oh hell, I don’t know. That’s just the kin
d of world it is now.”

  And maybe she was right. Or maybe it had always been that kind of world and people had just grown tired of pretending otherwise.

  In the bedroom Ruth undressed. She removed her glasses and set them on the nightstand beside the lamp and climbed into bed and switched off the light. The rain had picked up and the wind rattled the loose windowpanes. After a moment Woodstock came into the room and lay down on the braided wool rug. Ruth listened to the rain and the rattling glass and the dog’s nasal breathing. She listened to the sounds for a long while until each one became commonplace. But sleep never came, not completely. Heavy stones had begun to gather deep in her gut. She could feel them piling up like a boundary wall.

  MILK RAYMOND

  The sound entered his dream and changed the image from shadows moving over rooftops to dirt skipping in front of him before he opened his eyes and realized what was going on.

  “Shit.”

  He stood and pulled on his pants and his shirt. “Daniel,” he shouted. “Daniel.” He went to the window and pulled open the blind and saw the school bus idling on the road. The sky was overcast and raindrops covered the concrete drive, though it wasn’t raining any longer.

  The horn sounded again. “Son of a bitch. Daniel. Hurry up. The bus is here.” He put on his boots and grabbed his coat and went outside into the cold.

  The bus wasn’t full size. It was short like the ones that carried special-needs kids. It was the same size as the bus Milk had ridden until he bought his 1985 Chevy Cavalier for six hundred dollars in the tenth grade. There weren’t enough kids living north of town to justify a full-size bus. Milk was lucky a school bus came at all.

  The cold wind blew off the road. When Milk reached the end of the grass, the driver opened the door and tilted his head a little. “Is he sick?” The driver wore a pink-collared short-sleeve shirt and a white hat that said ST. PETERSBURG.

  “He’ll be out in a minute.”

  “He’s late.”

  “I know he’s late.”