Before Familiar Woods

by Ian Pisarcik

  Ruth pulled the sheets back and listened. The snow continued to crunch, and then there was silence followed by the sound of the porch boards creaking. The dog let out a low growl. Ruth snapped on the bedroom light and made her way to the closet. She pulled the rifle from the magnets and pressed the slide release and chambered the shell and raised the gun to her shoulder.

  The wind rapped against the shutters. She stood in the hallway with her bare feet on the cold ground. She flexed the fingers of her right hand and brought her index finger down lightly on the trigger, her palms damp with sweat. The gun felt heavy.

  She heard a scraping sound, and then the bent metal pin rubbed against the hinge and the door opened. She blinked her eyes and waited. She could not see the door from where she stood, but she could see the edge of the braided rug in front of it.

  The wind blew through the house, and she felt the sweat dry on her forehead. The boards creaked and a man emerged from the living room.

  “It’s me,” he said, and raised his palms.

  “Elam?” Ruth lowered the rifle. “What’s happened to you?

  Elam’s eyelids were swollen like curled slugs. His face was thin and dark underneath his tattered hat. The dog ran up to Elam with its tail wagging and sniffed his boots.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Ruth set down the rifle and turned on the hallway light. She studied her husband. There was dried blood on his coat and on the front of his pants. “You’re covered in blood.”

  “It’s not mine.”

  “You’ve got to get changed. You can’t stand here like this.”

  “Ruth.”

  Ruth went quickly to the bedroom and removed a white shirt from the top drawer of the dresser and a pair of long underwear and set them on the bed. Elam followed her and stood in the doorway of the bedroom, dripping melted snow onto the floorboards.

  “You’ve got to get changed,” she said. “Get changed and I’ll put on some coffee.”

  “Ruth. I got to talk to you.”

  “Not in that. Not in what you’re wearing.” Ruth left the bedroom and walked past Elam to the kitchen. She got the woodstove lit and poured the remaining coffee into the pot and turned on the burner. She sat down at the table and rubbed her fingers over her temples and then over her eyes.

  She could hear her husband in the bedroom. His heavy boots on the rickety floorboards and his shirt being pulled over his head and then his leather belt slipping through his belt loops. When he reached the kitchen, he was wearing clean clothes. His hair still dripped water, and thin red scratches ran up and down his arms.

  Ruth stood and went to the stove.

  “Ruth.”

  “Sit down at the table there.”

  “I got to talk to you, Ruth.”

  “Sit down. You can do that much.”

  Elam sat at the table. Ruth poured two cups of coffee and brought them over to the table and set them down. Then she looked her husband in the eyes.

  “Okay,” she said. “Whose blood is it? You can start with that.”

  “It don’t matter.”

  “It matters. It matters to me and whoever it is that blood belongs to.”

  “Ruth. I got to tell you something.”

  Ruth studied her husband. His eyes were glassed over and he looked almost scared.

  “I got to tell you something, but I don’t know if I can.”

  “You can,” Ruth said. “That’s how this works after thirty-five years.”

  MILK RAYMOND

  It seemed this was how it was going to be. Milk waking in the middle of the night to some dream that had him pinwheeling through the air or burning in a Humvee or, more often than not, not even him pinwheeling or burning but someone else pinwheeling or burning and him watching. Helpless from the end of a mile-long convoy.

  He pulled back the covers and sat there a moment and then put on his jeans and coat and grabbed his cigarettes and his keys. He stopped when he reached the door and went back to the kitchen and pulled the plastic six-dollar bottle of Maker’s Mark from the cupboard, feeling like every sort of used-up cliché about broken war veterans.

  He stepped out into the cold. In the distance he heard coyotes howling like injured dogs. His boots crunched the thin layer of snow. He took a pull of whiskey and looked toward the balsam fir branch pointed downward and got in his truck.

  He wondered about the stages of his life. For some time he had felt he was at the beginning. That he was choosing a path out of several that lay before him. But he felt now that he had chosen a path and that he had chosen the wrong path and he didn’t know how to turn around. He still thought it was possible. He didn’t believe in fate. He had seen enough violence to know that if God was all-good, then he wasn’t all-powerful. And he didn’t know if that made him more or less comfortable. To see God not as supreme but as another man trying and failing to do right in a world where mistakes never seemed to stay with the person who made them.

  He followed the road through the center of town, where the streetlights created halos through which falling snow flickered and disappeared. The lights from the diner shone bright, and he could see bar stools lined up on top of the white counter.

  He pulled from the whiskey and thought about Jessica and whether there had ever been something more than Daniel between them. He used to think he loved her, but he wondered now if it was love he had felt or obligation. It wasn’t something he wondered about with his boy. He felt the obligation, but he felt something else as well, something faint but warm and consistent like a fire burned down to the coals.

  He continued along the road. The only sounds were the engine and the busted heater and his own chapped hands regripping the wheel. He slowed as he approached the gas station. The lights were on, and he recalled late nights after Daniel was born when he would drive there for diapers. Half asleep, swerving along the empty road.

  The door to the gas station opened, and the girl stepped out in a big winter coat. He could tell who she was from the color of her hair and her boots, and he slowed the truck and pulled to the side of the road. He looked in the rearview mirror, and then he turned in his seat and watched the girl climb into a station wagon and turn on her headlights and start out of the parking lot. Milk looked straight ahead until the station wagon had passed. He sat there for another moment, and then he put his truck in gear and pulled out onto the road and followed her.

  RUTH FENN

  The coffee steamed in front of Elam, but he didn’t touch it. The light over the table buzzed and the wind continued to whip against the side of the house.

  Elam looked down at the table. “I know what happened to him. I know what happened to our boy.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I heard it from Fred Easton. He’s got kids, Fred, two of them.”

  “Heard what from Fred?”

  Elam wiped at his eyes. “Goddammit,” he said. “He was selling him. Horace was. He was selling Mathew down at the motel.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  Ruth shook her head. “That ain’t true.”

  Elam’s hands were pressed against the table white as sawdust. “Horace is using again. He showed up at Fred’s high as a kite talking about how he had sinned and how there wasn’t no God in the world that was going to forgive him. Fred thought he was talking about using again, but then Horace started repeating Mathew’s name and talking about the motel and what he made him do. What he made our boy do.”

  “He’s making it up.”

  “No.” Elam shook his head. “No, Ruth. I found out for myself. Horace knew a guy at the motel, and this guy set up everything. He paid Horace and Mathew in drugs. Horace didn’t know the other men involved. People from out of town, mostly.”

  Ruth’s head felt light, as though it had been stripped of its muscles and skin.

  “Horace got Mathew hooked on that stuff. He got Mathew hoo
ked, and when he needed more, that’s when he took him down to the motel.” Elam lowered his head. “Mathew was going to tell William the night they went camping. He told Horace as much, and Horace tried to stop him, but Mathew ran. Horace went looking for him. Driving along the roads. But he couldn’t find him. He didn’t bother looking long. He said part of him wanted it all to end.”

  Ruth’s hands were shaking. “Mathew would have said something. For Christ’s sake, we would have known.”

  “He was just a boy. What Horace turned him into.” Elam wiped at his eyes. “What Horace made him do.”

  The branches of the tall oak scratched at the back window.

  “We would have known,” Ruth said again.

  “We didn’t.” Elam raised his hands as though he wanted to grab on to something, but he just held them there for a moment and then lowered his palms to the table. “We didn’t know.”

  Ruth held her hands over her eyes. “Where is he? Where is Horace?”

  “I got him tied up in the old hunting stand.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I wanted to kill him for what he done. But I couldn’t do it. I’ve got him tied up there, and I been sitting there with him and going to my truck at night. I been doing it like that for four days. Just going back between the two. Just sitting there. Him talking some. Apologizing. Telling me he had a problem and he wanted to get it fixed.”

  “How’s he not froze to death?”

  “There’s a steel heater and a couple Sternos. It ain’t much. He’s not in good shape. It was the truck that kept me going. But then I saw it was gone—and I knew you must’ve been there. I knew you must’ve come looking.”

  Ruth stood.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To check on my mother.”

  “She can’t hear.”

  “She hears more than you think.”

  Ruth walked to the guest room. Her legs were weak. She held on to the door frame and peered into the dark and listened to her mother’s shallow breaths.

  She wanted to go somewhere. To leave the house and walk through the snow and the cold and keep on walking until she was far away. But she knew she couldn’t outrun the truth any more than she could outrun the past. She had tried that plenty and only wound up old and winded.

  She turned back to the kitchen. “What else did he say? What else did that son of a bitch say about our boy?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That ain’t true. I want to know.”

  “He admitted to it. That’s enough.”

  “What about Della?”

  “What about her?”

  “Did she know?”

  Elam shook his head. “No. She didn’t know nothing.”

  Ruth stood in the doorway. Again she put her hands on the frame to steady herself and waited for Elam to make eye contact with her, and then she held his eyes. “Do you still keep that old hog pistol in your dresser?”

  MILK RAYMOND

  Milk followed the station wagon north along Cross Hill Road. They were the only two vehicles on the road, and he wondered whether the girl could see into the cab of his truck. He figured his headlights were too bright, but he kept his distance just the same.

  They turned onto a narrow road where the dark of the forest seemed to swell, and when the station wagon’s brake lights went solid, Milk eased up on the gas. The station wagon pulled into a driveway, and the headlights moved over a small two-story house. Milk continued past the drive for a while and then turned the truck around and killed the headlights. He crept up the road and pulled in front of the house.

  There was a porch chair outside with a microwave on the seat. In the front yard a plastic swimming pool was filled with snow. Two uncurtained windows were lit upstairs, and a shadow caught his attention. He studied the window and saw the girl. She stood staring directly out at the dark, and Milk held his breath, thinking she must have seen him. But he didn’t think a person could see into darkness from a well-lit room.

  He watched the girl and was struck with the urge to knock on her front door. He felt for some reason that if he could apologize to her, things might begin to fall into place.

  He knew guys in Iraq that were superstitious. Some listened to the same song every night. Other guys carried mementos like their father’s watch or a photograph of their girlfriend tucked into a vinyl envelope. Milk didn’t have any superstitions, and it felt odd to him that he should need one now. But for some reason, apologizing to the girl felt something like that. He watched the girl remove her jacket and toss it somewhere out of view. She tilted her chin slightly, and the desire to confront her—to make things right and to put himself on track—rose up inside him. He unbuckled his seat belt and got out of the truck. His muscles twitched against the cold.

  The plastic pool was cracked on one side. He stopped beside the girl’s car in the drive and looked in the driver’s side window. There was a pack of empty cigarettes on the dash. In the back were two mismatched car seats and between the car seats a folder from the community college. He continued past the car to the stone path that led to the front door. Beyond the house he could see a maze of interwoven branches, and from somewhere beyond those branches he heard a faint humming sound that made him stop.

  He looked toward the house and the dead plant that sat in a tall pot on the steps. He could see a second door around the side, and he wondered if the house was split into several apartments. He turned again toward the woods and listened to the humming and thought he saw something move. He took a step forward. The humming grew louder. He could almost make out some sort of rhythm to it. He took another step and then another until he was in the woods.

  Thin branches broke under his boots and scraped against his jacket. Milk stopped and listened and then took a few more steps and stopped and listened again. He could hear it more clearly now. It was music. But he couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. He saw no lights and no other homes.

  He walked for some time, hardly able to see more than a foot in front of him. The moon hung over his left shoulder. The air was still. He pictured the music coming from a hole somewhere in the middle of the woods. Just a hole playing music.

  When he pushed through a tangle of branches, he saw the shed. It was just a makeshift thing. Hardly more than a child’s fort. The music thumped. He looked over his shoulder, but there was only darkness. He could no longer see the house or the truck or the moon.

  The shed had several windows, but they were curtained and the light was dim behind the curtains. Suddenly the door flew open, and Milk instinctively reached for his service weapon, though it wasn’t there.

  “Oh fuck.” A boy stood in the doorway with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and his fingers secured to his fly. “Jeremiah,” he said. “Jeremiah.”

  Another boy came out of the shed. He seemed to be the same age as the first boy. Not more than sixteen years old. He wore a white snow hat. “Jesus,” he said. “Who the hell are you?”

  Milk looked back again to where he had come from. “I heard your music.”

  “What?”

  Milk nodded toward the shed. “Your music.”

  “Yeah, but who the fuck are you?”

  “I was at the house back there.”

  “Are you Rachel’s boyfriend?”

  The other boy with the cigarette started to laugh. “One in a million,” he said.

  The boy with the snow hat motioned toward the other boy. “He lives below her.”

  “Yeah—but I wish I was on top of her.” The boy laughed again.

  “Shut up, Russ,” the boy with the snow hat said. “What do you want?”

  “I just heard your music.”

  The other boy took several steps from the shed and unzipped his pants and started to piss in the snow. Milk could see into the shed. There were blankets on the wood floor and a small coffee table covered with beer bottles and a glass pipe. The song that had been playing stopped and a slower song started up. The boy taking a piss began to si
ng.

  “You want a hit?” The boy with the snow hat jerked his thumb toward the shed.

  “No.”

  The boy taking a piss started laughing again. “He don’t want none of that shit, man. He’s got the good stank waiting for him back at the house.”

  “Don’t worry about him,” the boy with the snow hat said. “He don’t got no women in his life.”

  The boy taking a piss began to sing louder. Take me piece by piece till there ain’t nothing left worth taking away from me.

  “I’ll leave you alone,” Milk said. “I was just curious about the music.”

  “Yeah, well. We’ll keep it down.”

  The boy taking a piss tilted his head back and screamed out the chorus.

  “Jesus, Russ. Shut the hell up, man.”

  Milk looked once more at the shed. He saw some foil on the table next to the bottles. The boy taking a piss was still singing along to the music. And night’s a girl who’s gone too far.

  Milk headed back through the woods until he reached the house, and then he crossed the grass and passed the plastic swimming pool and the girl’s car and stepped out into the road. He turned back to the house just as the upstairs light switched off, and then he got in his truck and started the engine.

  The snow was falling harder. The wind blew wisps like ghost soldiers humping across the road. He took a sip of whiskey and wondered what the hell he would have said to the girl. Rachel. He hadn’t even known her name. He took another swig and balanced the bottle between his legs.

  His best friend in Iraq was a man named Reggie Brenner. He was a skinny kid from North Carolina, and in a lot of ways he was the dumbest person Milk had ever met, though in other ways he was the smartest. For example, Reggie thought that women shouldn’t serve because they were more susceptible to disease and if they were to sweat or bleed they would infect others. But on the other hand, Reggie had a knack for saying something so true it usually took Milk a while lying on his cot away from the noise just to parse it out. Like the time they were casualty collecting and Milk picked up the woman’s torso. Milk had felt a sort of paralysis at that moment and he just stood there. And then Reggie walked by with his own body bag full of limbs and turned to Milk and said, “Killing women is like killing babies. We’re fighting a war of the future and the casualties are piling up.”