Witches on the Road Tonight

by Sheri Holman

Tucker watches them dully. It’s bad enough Sonia has photographed celebrities and world leaders. He can understand her interest in them. But Bud Alley? His face is too small and regular, and with his protoarmy haircut, he looks like backwoods Hitler Youth. The longer Tucker travels with Sonia the more he understands none of them are special to her. They are all just subjects that happen to catch her eye.

  “You’ve met Reds?” Bud asks.

  “I have lots of friends who are Red,” Sonia says. “They don’t believe Stalin is all about Stalin. Right now he’s in bed with Hitler, tomorrow he may be in bed with us.”

  “Did you hear that, Cora? A lady who’s been to Russia,” Bud says, turning to his wife. “Cora here’s never left the hollow.”

  “It’s good to know where you belong,” Tucker interjects. “I’d love to live here.”

  “I bet you would,” says Bud.

  While they were waiting for supper to cook, Bud had turned to Tucker. Cora’s firewood’s running low. Help me with a few logs? Together they walked to the barn. Along the back wall hung Bud’s neatly organized tools. He owned planes for hewing and planes for smoothing, a polished wooden drill, a mowing scythe like Death himself would carry. He reached up and lifted his two-person crosscut saw from its nail. Behind the workbench, Tucker caught a gleam of wood in the shadows. A man-sized narrow box stood in the corner, which at first he mistook for a cabinet. Then Tucker understood he was led here not for the saw, but to see this and understand.

  That got anyone’s name on it? Tucker asked, trying for casual.

  Bud reached out and stroked the coffin as he would the flank of a horse. It was no cheap pine box, but a buffed and oiled chestnut casket.

  That’s Cora’s family’s idea of practicality. Gave it to us on our wedding day.

  A coffin for a wedding present?

  That family has ways of keeping a man around, like it or not. I take my freedom where I can find it.

  Bud took up his crosscut and gestured for Tucker to bring along the chains. He walked them a little ways into the woods, to where last time he was home he’d started on an ash that had been felled by lightning. Together they lifted the ash onto the sawbuck and Bud tightened it in place with the chain.

  You done this before?

  Can’t be too hard.

  You got to let go on your stroke. Let me pull. If you push you’ll break the blade.

  The weathered gray log was as thick around as the two men together. They dug into a deep scorched fissure to get started. Bud pulled hard and Tucker instinctively pushed.

  You let your wife go around taking pictures wherever she wants?

  I suppose we must trust our women.

  I wouldn’t trust Cora as far as the general store. Bud pulled the saw again and Tucker pushed, he pulled and Bud let go. Tucker was not thinking of his rhythm when Bud bent down and chucked a stone hard at his shoulder. It landed on his bicep hard enough to raise a bruise.

  What the hell? Tucker dropped his grip and grabbed his arm. He felt like he’d been shot. Bud grinned to show it was all in good fun.

  That’s how I taught Eddie. Don’t ride the saw.

  Now in the kitchen, Cora rises to light the lamp and refill their coffee. Bud and Sonia laughing reminds Tucker of too many holiday meals spent in the company of loud distant relatives who, because they were all at the same table, he was supposed to consider close. The lantern light deepens a scene that electric would show to be perfectly banal. As Cora retakes her seat, her arm brushes his. It’s us against them, right? the contact seems to say. Tucker pushes back from the table.

  “I could use some applejack,” he says. “Be right back.”

  Tucker steps out onto the back porch, breathing in the night air to clear his head. He finds the jug and takes a drink. God help me, Tucker thinks. Soon I will be living with hundreds of Bud Alleys and they will have to become the most important people in my life. Sonia will be gone and I will be sleeping in rows of single cots of Bud Alleys, eating on benches sandwiched between more Bud Alleys. Tucker had heard a rumor that other draftees who were against the war were planning to desert at the end of their year’s term. OHIO they called it. Over the Hill in October.

  He takes another deep draw of applejack. It’s getting low and he can taste the sediment swirling up on the backwash. Across the breezeway, the door to Cora’s bedroom—Cora and Bud’s bedroom—is shut tight. Eddie is locked inside, the key in Bud’s front pocket. Tucker rubs where the stone hit his bicep, the bruise has become a tiny seed like the pit of a stone fruit around which his flesh has grown. Back at the log, when Bud first winged him, he’d thought to rush the man, but then he’d caught a glimpse of red in the trees beyond him, large eyes watching them, and instead excused himself for a pee. He left Bud standing with the saw and walked deeper into the woods.

  Why did you run off like that? he whispered.

  I wanted to warn you he was here.

  There’s no emergency, chum. We’re all fine.

  Eddie was crouching in the leaves, digging in his pocket. In the center of his grubby palm were five underdeveloped roots, their pale tendrils tangled and complicated. If Eddie had presented him with five severed fingers, Tucker couldn’t have been more irrationally disturbed.

  You’ll introduce me to the Yankees like you said, when I find enough of these?

  Hold up, son, Tucker had stopped him. It may be a while before I get back to New York. If I ever do. We don’t know what’s coming.

  I could wait with Mrs. Hayes.

  I’m not sure Mrs. Hayes will be waiting.

  What was he supposed to do? Let the boy hide in the woods his whole life? Bud had already turned to see what was taking him so long. He lifted Eddie by the arm and led him back to his father. You can’t run away from your problems, he would have told Eddie, had Eddie not been struggling so. If there are never any consequences, a boy grows up believing nothing he does—even the good things—has any meaning at all.

  Pick your switch, and meet me in the bedroom, Bud Alley had said, leaving his saw sunk in the wood.

  Remembering it now, Tucker feels his mother’s fingers digging into the meat of his own arm, her answer to his father’s long and silent fishing trips and all the times she’d find her husband standing on the stairs, unable to recall if he was heading up or down.

  “Tucker,” Sonia calls from the kitchen. “You building a still out there? Where are you with that applejack?”

  Tucker takes a final searing gulp and heads back in with the jug. Bud and Sonia sit close together, like old friends or war buddies. She knows how to make men like Bud feel important, and he will need to learn to do it, too. Cora hovers over the stove, avoiding them. Tucker pours shots into their empty coffee mugs then takes his seat next to Sonia. She leans his way now.

  “Before this assignment, Tucker was a playwright,” Sonia says, bringing him back into the conversation. “He had a play on Broadway.”

  Cora turns. “What was it about?”

  “It was a Greek tragedy set in Harlem,” answers Tucker, angry at Sonia for bringing it up. “It ran eight whole performances.”

  “Harlem?” Bud snorts, letting the word hang in the air. “Why’d the hell you write about that?”

  “Because I was not a black man and didn’t read Greek, so it seemed the perfect marriage of ignorance,” Tucker explains dryly. “We all thought it was genius until the reviews came in. Then we understood it was flawed. Flawed is a very useful word, Mr. Alley—it means a little too much genius. Genius that’s gone a bit ripe, like a soft, black banana.”

  Sonia puts her hand on his arm, but he shakes it off. Whose side are you on? he wonders.

  “I’ve been living off the government ever since,” concludes Tucker. “How long’s it been for you?”

  Bud narrows his eyes and Tucker can almost feel the punch connect. Go ahead, he thinks. Let’s get it over with. Suddenly, any lingering ease in the room is gone. The women sit very still in their chairs.

  “We
started blasting at Mary’s Mountain in thirty-four. Since then we’ve laid over ninety-seven miles of road, up to Jarman, then Big Meadows. When the niggers started showing up, we even built ’em their own picnic area on Lewis Mountain. It’s as nice as ours.”

  “Always seemed to me the CCC camps were a good place to stash angry young men so there wouldn’t be a socialist uprising,” Tucker answers. “Keep you building scenic overlooks until it was time to kill Germans again.”

  “You got something against us joining the war?”

  “Not at all,” says Tucker, sick of playing games. “Cora tells me lots of men around these parts are hoping to get drafted. I suppose those of us going should consider ourselves lucky.”

  He’s said it casually enough, but he knows it’s landed.

  “Your number came up?” Bud asks.

  “I report to Fort Dix week after next,” Tucker says. “So you see, we are not so different, Mr. Alley.”

  Tucker has silenced his host, but in doing so has shown himself to be an ungrateful guest, and he suffers for it. Cora glances at him reproachfully.

  “Oh, no,” says Sonia suddenly, breaking the silence. “Mr. Alley, we forgot about your print. I left you between glass in my camera. And now you are in the car.”

  “That’s twice you’ve missed me,” Bud says. “What you got against me, sister?”

  “Not a thing in the world, Mr. Alley,” Sonia replies. “We’ll have to meet in seven years and try again.”

  Cora reaches over Tucker to collect his plate, her disappointment in him palatable. But what was he supposed to do? he thinks. Sit still and be humiliated?

  “I’ve got one for your book, Mr. Hayes,” Bud says, recovering. “A riddle we tell around camp.”

  “That’s fine, Mr. Alley,” says Sonia. “Tucker, write it down.”

  To appease them all, Tucker reaches back into the satchel he’s left hanging over his chair and pulls out their Esso map. He hasn’t unfolded it for a few days and is surprised to see how much he’s written, nearly every inch of the way impenetrable with stories. He searches until he finds the Shenandoah Valley and the ridge of Skyline Drive, then he draws a line from it to a bit of white space and waits for Mr. Alley’s joke. He sees the caption as he’ll write it up and send it off: “The hardworking men forging Virginia’s pristine new parkways relax after a long day with some wholesome joshing.” Bud Alley waits until Tucker is ready to transcribe.

  “What made the broke man sleep so sound?” Bud drawls, leaning back in his cane chair as if dispensing Solomonic wisdom. He continues with a low chuckle at Tucker. No, they are not so very different.

  “’Cause he didn’t have nothing when he first laid down.”

  “I wouldn’t call that a riddle,” says Cora. But Bud is done with these houseguests and rises from the table, stretching to work out the kinks from the long day’s journey home.

  “It’s time for us to go to bed,” he says. “If we miss you in the morning, have a good trip. Send us a copy of your book so we can read all about ourselves.”

  Cora hesitates, waiting for Tucker’s reply.

  “Say good night, Cora,” Bud commands. “You can do the dishes in the morning.”

  “Good night,” she says, slowly trailing her husband out the door. Tucker follows the back of her dress as she crosses the breezeway, the fabric bunching and wrinkled under her husband’s firm hand. At the kitchen table, Sonia sits absorbing the echo of the man who just left the room. Until now, even with its dearth of possessions, the house hadn’t felt empty, but now she has a sense of how Eddie and Cora must experience Bud’s coming and going. When they are gone, Sonia turns to Tucker.

  “He’s exactly the sort of man I imagined Cora would have married,” she says.

  “Really?” asks Tucker. “I don’t see the least bit of Eddie in him.”

  “Maybe Eddie’s not his.”

  “Jesus, Sonia,” swears Tucker. “Not every woman is like you.”

  Sonia chooses to ignore him, which only makes him more irritated. Her good mood has not been about him. His map is spread out on the table and he wants to be left alone to get back to work.

  “I should go to bed, too,” she says, rising from the table. “Are you coming?”

  “I still have to write up my notes from the store,” he replies.

  “Don’t stay up too late,” Sonia says, putting her arms around his neck and kissing him more tenderly than she has in days. He is astounded at how quickly she can turn her attention from a stranger back to him, as if her desire were dependent on having both.

  “Wouldn’t it be something if I’d taken a picture of Eddie’s father all those years ago?” she asks.

  “That would be one more picture than you’ve taken of me,” Tucker says. He meant it to be a bemused observation, but he hears the petulance in it. He really does have work to do, that’s not a lie. So why does it feel like one? Sonia pulls back.

  “I’ve taken many pictures of you,” she says, leaving him alone at the table. “You just weren’t looking.”

  He hears the parlor door open and shut. Across the breezeway, Cora’s bedroom door opens and a bleary-eyed Eddie steps out in his nightshirt. The door closes behind him. He has been given a sheet and put out like a house cat to sleep on the porch. Disoriented, he turns his rumpled face toward the lantern light where Tucker sits at the kitchen table with his brandy and his map and his discontent. Under his injured arm, he is carrying the heavy wooden projector Tucker had left by the bed after he showed his Frankenstein.

  “Daddy says, don’t leave things behind in other men’s bedrooms.”

  Tucker colors as he rises to take the projector from Eddie. He had taken the luggage to the car, yet forgotten what, only days before and for such a long time, had been so important to him. Eddie takes a staggering step, meeting Tucker in the breezeway. They stand together, those two, and both jump as Cora’s body hits the closed door and the deep hungry growl comes through the keyhole, and if either of them were alone, either of them would place his eye to it, just to confirm, but they are together, alone outside, and so they hear but don’t see Cora’s answering sigh. They stand transfixed, not wanting to hear, not knowing how to pretend they don’t.

  “Can we watch the movie again?” Eddie asks.

  Tucker nods. “Just don’t let me fall asleep.”

  Sonia lies awake listening to them in the next room. At first there was such a violence to it, she thought Cora needed help, and she went to the inside of her own closed door and waited with her hand on the knob, ready to turn. She stood for perhaps five minutes as they ranged around the room, slamming into furniture and walls. She heard the crash of the white glass dish and bobby pins tinkling to the floor. Not long after that, it grew quiet, so quiet she realized it had become the game of Let’s Be Quiet. She had played this game often enough herself, and then it became a game for her, too, to suspend her breathing long enough to catch a downbeat on the mattress or a stifled sigh. Her hand went to herself and rested there, but that’s not what she wanted. She wanted Tucker to come to bed. But no, she didn’t really want that, either. She wanted to be in that room with Bud Alley but whether she wanted to be slammed against the bed or the one doing the slamming, she didn’t quite know.

  Sonia returns to the pallet but she’s not yet ready to lie down. She feels restless, trapped inside this room next to everyone else in the house. Cora and Bud in their bedroom, Tucker in the kitchen, Eddie asleep somewhere—he couldn’t still be inside there, could he? She wishes now she’d skipped Cora’s dinner. Her mother used to say that a pregnant woman should rejoice in her sickness, it meant the baby had taken hold. But the return of her nausea brings Sonia no comfort. For a few hours she managed to forget all about it. But here alone, it is with her again, and she knows it will stay with her every moment she’s not otherwise occupied. She wants the baby to let go of its own free will so that she won’t have to go through it all again. Her doctor in New York is not judgmental, in fact he’s
the opposite, a little too casual, in her opinion, as if he were an obliging Brooklyn butcher frenching the bones of a crown roast for a favorite customer. She wonders if she can make herself step into that office again, smell the chloroform and leather, make small talk with the other career women and the fat cloche-hatted mothers fiercely guarding their teenaged daughters. She thinks of her own stern, jowly mother and the first time they sat in that office together, when she was only a teenager herself. Her mother might have been sitting beside her in court, as straight and defiant, certain, somehow, Sonia would be acquitted. The last time Sonia was there, she sat next to a mother and daughter, immigrants from the Ukraine. The mother told her a gypsy said no child born to her daughter before October 1946 would be lucky. So here they were.

  She opens the front window shutters and lets the moonlight stream in. It is bright enough to read by, and she takes up the book that has been her pillow the last few nights and flips through its pages. It’s an old botanical identifying the plants of the Appalachian mountains, line drawings and medicinal uses and what to avoid. The drawings are delicate and finely observed, each hair and vein of leaf sketched in. You can admire these lovely illustrations and shut the book, or you can take these plants inside you and feel the full power of all they can do. She wonders if Tucker isn’t right. Maybe she could work with wilderness.

  She glances over at the empty pallet. Where is he? So many times over the past six weeks she’d woken alone to find Tucker sitting by the window of their hotel room, smoking into the night, his map in his lap, his hand wrapped around a bottle. She always liked him better at that distance, framed by a window, at work. She liked the intense concentration on his face, the way he grimaced and grunted a bit as he wrote, his hand flying over the page as if he were writing one long sentence that would never come to an end. First he would eat, then he would fuck, then he would drink, then he would let the day spill out as essential as the first three, trying to capture the essence, a person in that day, a passing expression in that day, that would evoke another person on another day who would have to go down on paper, too, until all his days and all their people became as one in his single sentence of understanding. She would watch him until her desire returned and then she’d stretch under the sheet and he’d look up and in doing so, it would be ruined because what she desired was the concentration and the flow and the instant he smiled and set down his pen to come to her it vanished. She could never have both at once, those two things she needed equally—closeness and distance. Sometimes love demanded one, sometimes the other. No matter what, there was loss.