Shelter (1994) Page 10

  He was safe with Mam, her tilting, gentle lurch the only indication he was where he should be. She walked her slow, considered, heavy walk and he moved in her wake where there was no resistance, just a cleared path whose view was blocked by her bulk. He didn't need to see, it was all like blindman's bluff, walking down the road to the school bus fall, winter, spring, sucked into a tumult of voices as the bus wheezed and clamped shut its shuddered doors. Mam rode too, sitting always behind the driver, a woman she knew, and the kids on the bus first taunted him, your mother is fat, big as an elephant, a house, and he spat back threats, challenges, shut up or she'll sit on your belly and crush you dead, she's done it, I've seen her. What's the ruckus back there? the driver yelled. You kids sit down, and Mam would turn and fix them all with a silencing look. When she worked in the lunchroom she wore her hair in a net. If they went to the grocery or the welfare or the welfare clinic they walked home or caught a ride with someone who let them off at their road. Behind her, Buddy didn't care if he saw where they were going, he could feel by the air and the weighty sound of densely leaved branches above them that they were on their road, he knew the ruts and turns and the narrow, broken bridge where the stream ran under, the stream that bled its sound behind his house, through Camp Shelter, the stream that went underground in the cave and fed Turtle Hole. Behind the big rock near the water, a slanted hole opened like a hideout. Buddy didn't go in the cave; it was too low and still, and water rattled inside like something in a drawer. At the prison there'd been no sound but footsteps on cement, the buzzing of the lights overhead a low drone like insects trapped in glass tubes. In the prison he'd been glad he couldn't see, he'd wished he didn't have to see Dad, look across the counter and through the window. Dad wore pajama clothes and his eyes were burnt. Stand him up there beside you, let me see if the wise guy has growed. Eh? You still a wise guy? Mam lifted Buddy before he could run and Buddy was higher than the half walls of the cubicles. Clusters of huddled visitors looked up, dark rumpled men opposite them looked up, a guard started over and Buddy jumped down. He hid then under the counter while Dad was laughing, Jesus! You think he's gonna storm the gates? After an instant Mam laughed, polite and quiet, the guard had sat down again but Buddy stayed hidden. Mam's black boots were wet and the white flesh above her rolled woolen socks was veined with blue, like she was too big for her skin. At night in the cold Buddy slept with her and dreamed he was running, running like this in the woods, higher and higher, cleaving sideways and upwards on a loose dirt bank, moving on all fours to grasp roots and vines under the canopy of trees. Make no sound, leave no sign, that was not a rhyme but a song he sung, hearing the girls near him now, above and to the right, up the airy mountain all in a column like a green centipede. Buddy knew it all, every move they made: they were marching to breakfast, having raised their own flag at Highest, he could circle round behind and watch, follow them down, find Lenny and Cap near the rear of the line and tell them about the rabbit, promise he'd trap one, they could touch it, he'd let them as a secret, away from the rest. He ran with the promise in mind, sensing at his fingers the loose, thick scruff of the rabbit's neck, its hide like a fluid glove over a clockworks of small hard bones and long pink slides of muscle. He could smell the rabbit, waiting somewhere and looking, its pounding heart like a seed that jumped.

  LENNY: OFFERINGS

  Lenny knelt over a jumble of empty bowls. Her reflection in their empty surfaces wavered back at her. Mess kits were the only mirrors Senior girls ever saw in camp; Lenny thought the ripply mirage of a shape, a face, was better than the real picture, more honest, because, really, nothing was so clear. With the flaps down the tent was still shadowy and dim inside, but light pulsed at each break in the canvas. None of the flaps actually met despite their string ties; daylight fell through in illumined bars. She crouched on her haunches in one of those bright lines, smelling the meadow beneath her through the wide slats of the board floor. A dark smell, still sweet, like clover and soil. Dense, heavy. Safe.

  Waking up scared was like sleeping on mirrors, or sitting on reflective ice so thin it might crack if she moved in any direction at all. Some dream had made her cry, and she'd overslept, but before she could begin to worry about having no shoes or seeing Frank at flag raising, standing back in the line to stay hidden, their counselor had appeared in the tent and dumped twelve mess kits onto the floor. They were all still dirty, apparently, and would have to be washed again; Lenny and Cap would have to do the job properly and catch up with the group later. If they wanted breakfast in the dining hall, they'd better hop to it. "Hop to it?" Cap had asked, her pillow over her face. "You mean, like a rabbit?" But the counselor had ignored her. Probably they'd all been told to ignore Cap's remarks, since Henry Briarley had helped the camp open, and provided at least one Full Supplement—for Delia Campbell, Alma's friend, whose father had worked in the office at Consol Coal. Wasn't just a car wreck, Cap had said, Nickel Campbell drove into the river on purpose. A big gamble. What if he'd lived and had to answer everyone's questions? Drowning, you always tried to save yourself. It was a reflex. That's why people put rocks in their pockets when they walked into water and didn't plan to walk out. Right?

  Lenny glanced over at Cap now. "You know, you could help me with these dishes instead of lying there on your cot like a rich housewife in some soap opera."

  "Soap opera. I like that." Cap laughed, stayed prone, and pantomimed a long drag on an imaginary cigarette.

  "You don't know what I'm thinking about," Lenny said.

  "I don't have to. No matter what you're thinking, I gotta have my cigarette."

  "Not likely. There's not a cigarette in this entire campsite, no matter whose tent we searched."

  "Then I'll have to make do. Isn't that the term your mother uses, Lenore, 'make do'?" Cap took another long drag out of the air, and exhaled. "It's sad, that term. Don't you think?"

  "I guess." Lenny began sorting aluminum forks from spoons, so familiar, so oddly shaped, as though campers shouldn't touch sharp edges. There were no knives in Girl Guide mess kits; the handle of the spoon was to serve a double function, and both implements were meant to be secured by a metal clip inside the larger dish. No rattling in a regulation mess kit.

  "On second thought, I don't want to make do. There's got to be a cigarette in this camp. Frank could get them, I bet, from the work crew by the river. They're always sitting around on those pipes, smoking and doing nothing." She sat up. "Those flunkies would give Frank a pack of cigarettes for us. They'd think it was cute."

  "You addict."

  "Lenny, that's boring." Her feet hit the board floor of the tent and she walked over to stand just beside Lenny. Her ankles and toes were still smeared with the dried mud of Turtle Hole. "How about 'you nasty delinquent/ or 'you fledgling degenerate'?"

  "Not so fledgling."

  Cap knelt down, her face just opposite Lenny's. "Stick with me, Lenore. We're OK." She smiled. "They can't get us if we're together."

  Lenny shoved half the plates and bowls into a confusion of shapes around Cap's dirty feet, and looked into her green eyes. Or not green—emerald, Cap liked to say. There was still a smell of the Chanel No. 5 she sprayed in her hair from a bottle Catherine Briarley had left in her bathroom in Gaither. The bottle now sat incongruously under Cap's bunk beside a sterling silver manicure set that was zipped into a silk pouch.

  "Together," Lenny repeated, and let her face nearly touch Cap's. "Are we going to get married and have kids and live in a split-level ranch house?"

  Cap sighed. "What am I going to do with you? Ranch houses are never split-level. They're all on one floor, like the ranches of old. Like Ben Cartwright's place on Bonanza." She backed off and began to throw the dirty dishes into an empty backpack, then looked up at Lenny. "Is Frank more like Adam or Little Joe? Let's decide."

  "I don't want to talk about it. And you might want to put on some clothes. Like that uniform over there in the corner."

  "This one?" Cap retrieved a wrinkled mas
s from beyond the footlockers. "What's the matter? You don't like my clothes? Just because you got yourself dressed under the covers in something nearly clean? How incredibly modest."

  "I'm tired. It's like I didn't really sleep." Lenny felt her eyes well up. Startled, she looked away from Cap and began throwing the rest of the metal dishes into a plastic clothes basket they used as a drainer in the stream.

  "Ask me to iron my shorts, why don't you. Ask me anything." Cap shook out the Bermudas, held them up. "Mice and spiders, out! We'll do anything to restore Queen Lenore to her former power. Quickly now, the regime could topple, the people could rise up. Ask, ask, and it shall be granted."

  "just get dressed," Lenny answered, then thought she saw a kind of shadow flit across Cap's eyes, or through them, or the shadow was in her voice. Say something harmless, Lenny thought, to keep them from talking. "How did 'Catherine' turn into 'Cap'? Did your mother call you that?"

  "Never. I was a baby and my dad called me Cappy, because she forbade 'Cathy,' too ordinary. He did it to aggravate her, then shortened it to Cap. Or I did, maybe."

  "Maybe," Lenny answered, turning to leave the tent. She heard Cap behind her, pulling on clothes.

  It was true, Lenny thought, she was Cap Briarley to everyone in Gaither. No one but her mother seemed to have ever called her Catherine. Lenny called her Natasha; Natasha was a cartoon spy, an outlaw witch. They pretended they were heroes at school, sometimes at home, righting wrongs with one-liners. They considered Rocky and Bullwinkle to be more real than the Beach Boys or Troy Donahue, whose pictures were plastered on lockers in the basement of the junior high. Cap made fun of movie stars to Lenny, made fun of the other girls, talked back to the boys, bright-eyed, her tongue sharp. Cap and Lenny were together at school, and school was life; home was some afterthought they attended to on the phone, doing algebra while they watched TV. Lenny liked the idea of a flying squirrel with a silk scarf and aviator goggles, and the moose who couldn't keep up, but Cap was nothing like Bullwinkle, except she did take up room, so much room, like a real creature from a cold place, a creature born wet, on the shores of a snow lake. The lake would have a silence around it that was clear, like ice, the air so cold it burned, no one could taste it. Lenny felt Cap hover near her, past her, behind her, to one side or another, pushing her, looking at her. Sometimes there was a point of heat in the back of Lenny's throat, like a hunger. The hunger waited, an old, jagged part of her. Being with Cap reminded Lenny of hunger and noise, of aching.

  But when she bent over the stream, she felt empty and clear. It felt good to be so alone in the woods. She could hear Cap's feet on the path, and the clank of the dishes in the backpack. Lenny stacked tin mess plates into sticky piles. If chores weren't done right, the counselors liked to say, Girl Guides could practice doing chores again. Supper last night seemed weeks ago, but it was only last night, and the plates and cups weren't clean enough. It was only because they'd had pancakes. How could you scrub off dried syrup in water this cold? Goofing around last night, she'd lost the plastic scour pad. Well, they could scrub them with rocks. Use more soap, keep rinse water separate, and pour the soapy water on the ground, not in the stream.

  Cap knelt beside her, and they set up their system. Dishes. Soap. Bucket of rinse water. Empty clothes basket for clean mess kits. Later, someone else would have to sort everything and reassemble the kits—they'd all laboriously scratched their initials on each important fragment of the whole.

  "I love having everyone gone," Lenny said. "It's so quiet. Like a real woods, not a camp."

  "They're gone. They'll see him and we won't," Cap said, soaping plates. "He'll be looking at all of them, wondering."

  "I'm glad we're staying here. What if he knew who we were?"

  "What if he did? You think he's going to tell someone?" Cap reached out to touch Lenny's bare foot. "He's part of the secret, isn't he? He did it too. You think he's going to find your sneakers and read your name inside? He doesn't even know you were wearing shoes. He won't know who we are unless we tell him, unless we find him again."

  "I've got to find those sneakers," Lenny said.