Shelter (1994) Page 14

  Part of the rabbit game was silence, and touching each other was a lie they were allowed to tell inside the game. When Cap was judged to be lying, Lenny often sent her downstairs to steal another bottle of sherry or wine, or more cigarettes; Lenny's customary penalty was to have to lie on her stomach under the heavy, silky fur while Cap took off her own coat and crawled under Lenny's from behind. She started with her fingertips on the soles of Lenny's feet, inching her hands upward. Then she slid her whole body under—her long arms, her boyish broad shoulders, her breasts, face, laughter. It was like she crawled under Lenny's skin, licking, tickling, pinching with her teeth, pushing her fingers into Lenny's mouth to try to make her speak and lose this version of the game. Lenny almost never lost. But late at night, somewhere in their dark sleep, Lenny always lost. She was the one who woke to hear Cap's funny cooing moans, saw her trap her hands between her thighs in a neat pyramid as though she were praying to wake up and couldn't. Her eyes moved rapidly behind their shell-smooth lids. Once, tears coursed down her expressionless face. Watching her, Lenny ached. She tensed until her muscles stung, knowing she could shake Cap, try to rouse her. But Cap never fully woke, only reached blindly for whatever she could touch. She would get too close. She might straddle Lenny's thigh and press against her in a rhythmic, rolling motion. Lenny would pull back and push her away, hoping Cap wouldn't wake up enough to get scared and flail wildly around in the bed. Or she let Cap do it, not helping her, only watching how she tensed and pushed, moving toward one moment again and again until she was in the moment, falling through it. She opened her mouth and panted, delicate short pants. Lenny looked away then, into the meaningless space of the room, and cried, she was so desolate. She cried silently, like Cap, but she was awake and alone.

  Finally Cap's mother found an empty sherry bottle and cigarette butts under the bed, and Lenny wasn't allowed to stay overnight anymore. Even after Cap's mother left town and went back to Connecticut, the girls continued to follow her edict. Sometimes in the spring they'd still joked about the game. Cap would say she was hungry, starved, but now she was allergic to rabbits. They'd never played the rabbit game at camp, as though it were all part of the old world of stories and lies. This was the new world. The new world opened, one secret opening against another.

  Today when Buddy found them at the stream and talked about secret pets, about rabbit traps and Frank, it was as though he knew about the old game. He was strange, he knew things, he really could move like a rabbit or a raccoon. He was like an imp the grownups ignored. Maybe he'd followed them, seen them with Frank—he might have been out late at night, alone in the dark. Or he might have been in his house nearby with Hilda, the big cook, Hilda cooking all night like she cooked all day, their little house an oven in the warm night, and Buddy dreaming about Turtle Hole, seeing whatever touched the water, knowing everything. The old games were over and Frank was part of the new world, the world that opened. It was like all the sick wanting Lenny had pushed under in herself had burst out of her in the warm dark of Turtle Hole, and it wasn't bad or good or anything she could think about. She wanted it again but she was afraid, afraid without Cap and the water and the dark. And where were the shoes?

  If she didn't find them she'd have to call her mother, and Audrey would drive out with new shoes and lecture her, and want to see the tent, and eat in the dining hall. Lenny thought of home with a kind of panic. Nothing from home belonged here, home would take it all away. She thought of her father at the dinner table, his mouth, his teeth on his food, his hard, sinewy arms, the way he would sit outside after supper, spring, summer, fall, Gaither darkening around him, lightning bugs lighting the field he watched, while Alma and Audrey banded together in the house and Lenny was forced to choose. She remembered the other life and she felt soppy and indistinct, warm, banked, saved up. She heard herself moan with frustration and she peered into the depths of the rushes, sweeping them aside with extended arms. She began to walk systematically back and forth across a small area. It was from here she'd first seen Frank on the rock, she was sure of it. She stopped and turned.

  Then, somehow, a break in the forest cover caught her eye. It was a sort of path, or a place where the green of the cover was mashed into what might be a path, as though dogs had run there, or kids, breaking things down a little. Just up a rise, nearly hidden in leaves, something shone, caught the sun. The light cut and turned like a tiny knife. Lenny felt herself startle, as though someone saw her, watched her. She walked toward the light, seeing it turn and glint, and when she got to the cover of the woods she bent and saw the shack itself, the glass of its broken windows shining in jagged shapes. Tar paper hung from the sills in strips. The little building was a lopsided rectangle. One end of it seemed to have sunk into the earth, and the other had buckled up and tilted, as if the shack itself had seized up, or tried to stretch itself around a curve like a house in an animated cartoon. Buddy could live here; it was just the place for a woods elf. Lenny had heard he lived in a shack with his mother, but this one was much too small for Hilda. Poised in its twisted shape, it seemed a house for rabbits or mice, a child or a lost wraith. Lenny never considered going inside but she wanted to see, to look without touching, as though to touch would taint her, bewitch her, cast a spell she'd feel for years. She walked soundlessly closer. There might be animals inside. From here she could see the ground was dug out a bit along the front side of the shack; there was a long, narrow hole under the floor. Like a crawl space, and Lenny could see bits of dirty burlap merged with earth as the space descended into dark. She could barely see inside the shack—there was a melamine plate on the floor, and beside it an old bucket. Cicadas were trilling in the trees. Maybe they had sounded all along, but now Lenny heard their noisy, urgent rattles rise to a crescendo.

  She looked back at Turtle Hole and saw a man walking around the water, round and round it—one of the workmen, she supposed. He was wearing khaki pants and no shirt. Lenny thought he couldn't see her but she crouched, watching. She saw that he held something dark in his clasped arms and strode purposefully along, not looking at it, like an Indian chief walking a private ceremony. He came abreast of the path to the shack and suddenly flung his arms out; the dark thing he'd held against himself snapped out, rope-like, toward the water. Then he let it hang in one hand and turned toward the woods, his arms outstretched. Lenny saw that he held a snake. He walked toward her, into the cover of the trees. She lost sight of him but felt him moving toward her, along the path.

  ALMA: PHANTOM RADIO

  McAdams marched them to hobby hours at Great Hall. She even called out double time as the line of girls broke from the trees into the quad. Double time meant they raised their knees high and more or less danced across the open green, heads bobbing. Double time was a gait unlike any other, unlike running, certainly. Alma watched from the rear as her compatriots hit the clearing and swung into rapid action. The line of girls resembled a giant centipede in electroshock, but no one giggled anymore. Delia didn't and Alma definitely didn't. Double time was a grim odyssey, almost as grim as required swim in Mud River. Staying in step while galloping in a controlled jerk and bounce required concentration. There was no room for laughter, as double time engendered its own weird momentum. By the time they reached the overhanging porch of Great Hall, Alma felt jangled and listened for a ringing in her ears. She'd assumed everyone marched, since McAdams was so fond of it, but Lenny had set her straight.

  Alma usually tried to talk to Lenny after breakfast, before the Seniors picked up supplies and hiked back up to Highest. The older girls had to carry jugs of Kool-Aid, boxes of hot dogs, bags of potatoes, graham crackers, water bottles.

  "Do you have to march all the way up, toting that stuff?" Alma had asked, trying to make her tone disinterested.

  Lenny laughed. "They march you because you're too old to hold hands, like the Primaries. It's just to keep you in line and rush you along."

  Cap gave Alma a look and a sigh. "Crowd control," she said, "purely for Jun
ior crowds."

  Now Alma smiled, imagining how B wing must look from above, glimpsed from one of the lookouts along Highest trail. She thought of the Seniors as rugged angels, able to view the whereabouts of the younger girls at any moment. Alma knew she would spy on everyone if she were a Senior, on the girls and the counselors, on Frank, on Mrs. Thompson-Warner. But Seniors had no interest in lower camp. They were up there in the woods like soldiers, cooking, chopping trees for lean-tos. They never set foot in Great Hall except for opening and closing assemblies.

  Great Hall was beautiful. Standing in the massive doorway, Alma could already feel herself enter a wash of cooler air, night air collected through dark hours in the vast, eaved space, sheltered from morning sun. The air was chill and smelled of stream water and pine, the knotty pine of the walls and ceiling, of the enormous beams that angled high above the girls' heads, a series of inverted V's. Looking up, Alma thought of church, a deserted church; no matter how many girls converged in the space below, their bodies, their noise, seemed temporary. From each towering apex of the ceiling beams hung powerful lights, their green glass shades shaped like Chinese coolie's hats. The hall was so cavernous that the lights stayed on all day. Before McAdams switched them on there was a wonderful dim ocher in the big room. The stone fireplace at the far end was a shadowy monument six feet across, flaring to the ceiling itself. Mrs. Thompson-Warner had positioned the state and national flags to either side, and hung the banner of Girl Guides from a pole. The three brass poles stood mute below the picture of Jesus. It was the same picture Alma remembered from church school, but this version was so large that it seemed entirely another likeness. Jesus was nearly in profile, his face bathed in golden light. Behind him wavered a fluid darkness, as though he stood in the foreground of an oily water. His visage was lengthened and gaunt, his eyes soft, uplifted, mournful. He was clothed like an angel, like a Roman, in the requisite white gown. Where had the face come from? Someone had invented it. Now it was shown to children at camps and schools, printed on keepsake cards for funerals.

  Alma knew who had built Great Hall. Wes used to drive big machines before he began to sell them to the mines; he knew about buildings and he'd told Alma that all of Camp Shelter was WPA work.

  "What is WPA?" she'd asked him.

  "Means it was built during the Depression. Jobs for people who wanted to work, feed their families. Stonemasons, carpenters, road builders." He fixed her with a quizzical smile. "You're going into seventh grade. Haven't you studied about the Depression?"

  "No, not yet."

  "Nineteen thirties, when I was a young kid. Everything went bad. I remember standing along the road when I was seven or eight, and a flatbed truck would come by and pick up my dad and my older brothers, take them off to dig ditches. Dollar a day."

  "Was that in Gaither?"

  "No, we lived in Bellington then." Wes shook his head, considering. "People worked with their bodies more, had a pride about it."

  "Did your dad work to build Camp Shelter?"

  "I don't think so, but men like him did. Those halls will last into the next century, if they don't burn down. Those stone chimneys, all by hand."

  Alma was enthralled that he knew of the camp, admired it. It was almost as though he knew of her life. "Have you been there, Dad? Did you go to camp there?"

  "No, they didn't send kids off to camp then. Kids weren't kids. I mean, we worked. But yeah, I been there."

  When Alma looked at the giant fireplace, she wished there were a fire burning in it. The iron grate was the size of a baby's cradle. Alma had never seen it full of logs and flames, but the stones and mortar behind the big portrait of Jesus were discolored, as though some heat had passed blindingly over the surface.

  Now she walked away from the fireplace toward the rear table, the one nearest the windows. Delia had already reached it and staked out seats. It was the table most removed from supervision; Alma would do Delia's picture as well as her own, and they could eavesdrop on McAdams and Pearlie. Resolutely on break during hobby hour, the counselors sat nearby and talked openly, as if the younger girls had been struck deaf. Even their trivial remarks were of great interest. Pearlie sat sipping a soda she'd bought from the machine in the hallway. Alma was already leaning over to inspect bowls of materials set out for the day's collage—sunflower seeds, lengths of brown twine, cotton, pastel paper straws, a quantity of the smooth pebbles people bought for goldfish bowls. Alma actually liked hobby hour, though she pretended to be bored. Delia sat gazing aimlessly into the hall.

  Nickel Campbell had died four months ago. Alma thought it miraculous that Delia was still Delia after her father disappeared so suddenly, buried in a box that Alma herself had touched. Alma was usually afraid to ask questions, afraid to remind Delia, afraid Delia would see through to what Alma knew. Every time she thought of Nickel Campbell, Alma heard the pitch of her mother's voice rising and falling, droning on like a phantom radio no one could turn off. Nickel Campbell comes from a good family up in the north of the state. Nickel was his mother's surname, and where they got their money ... The family were mighty unhappy when he married Mina, and moved down to Gaither to start over with no help. Of course, now he admits they were right about Mina, if nothing else. Sometimes we talk about how it could have been if he'd met me before I tied up with Wes. Lights in Great Hall flicked on as McAdams and Pearlie stood long enough to call out instructions. Under their directions, Audrey's voice raced on in Alma's head, as though time were limited. Her hand was on Alma's wrist, arm, shoulder, like a restless bird trying to light. You remember that barbecue we all had summer before last, your dad's birthday? We invited the Campbells and Lenny asked the Briarley girl? Well, I guess that was the start of it. He walked down through the yard to stand at the fence and watch a Piper Cub land at the airstrip across the field, and I realized he'd wakened up, like me, and found himself in the wrong life. And you don't even know what I'm talking about, do you, sweetie?

  "Alma! Hurry up. Sit here." Delia indicated the chair to her right and shifted her own seat to make room.

  Dejected, Alma sat. More than anything, she wanted not to be her mother's sweetie, but miserably, she knew she was. The metal folding chairs of Great Hall were sharply cold, as though they'd been refrigerated. Later, during archery or hiking in the heat of the day, Alma would want nothing more than to come back here and lie down across four of their hard, cold seats. Not many women can talk to their daughters like I talk to you. Thank god I have you. I can't talk to any of my friends. Why, I'd sooner print everything in the newspaper. Oh, I know he's not my husband, but he wishes it were different, the things he says. No one ever talked to me like he does.

  "I'm going to set up my picture," Delia hissed, "to make them think I'm interested. Then you can change it around. Do yours now, OK?"

  Alma dumped a fortress of white pebbles into the center of the manila sheet. What did it mean, the wrong life? Nickel Campbell had died because he drove off the bridge. Alma knew the facts, but it seemed to her that Audrey was guilty. Well, Audrey had always been guilty (seemed like always) but the guilt was secret. Now the secret was bigger, deeper. And a secret had to be paid for. Delia was angry, angry at everyone and everything but Alma. Alma wanted to feel the anger rain down on her, wanted a series of screams that opened out until the earth shook, howls that would shatter glass and stone, cries that were empty like the wind is empty, a voiceless keening that would let Alma go, let her betray her mother.

  BUDDY CARMODY: A GIRL DOES

  Below him the empty quad sits still like a square green jewel as above it he tilts and leans, nearly falling closer, he moves so fast. His steps on rocky slants and layers of leaves are so sure that even as he stumbles he rights himself and slides into balance. He doesn't even think about his body, he hears a heartbeat and the air he moves through, and the other snatches of sound, birdsong, skitter of dislodged pebbles, simply fold into what he enters. He breaks the cover of the woods, finds level ground, feels the lack of resistance
as a push from behind and runs flat out, as though some winged predator glides above him, poised to strike. Across open space the dining hall sits like a stone shape meant to echo Great Hall, and he must run past the steps and the columned porch to the back, where Mam is cooking, she must be, breakfast is nearly over. The girls are inside. He feels at this distance a surge of buzz and clamor, more vibration than sound.