Before Familiar Woods Read online

  “Dixie,” the old man shouted again.

  The dog got about a hundred yards down the road, and then she turned around and started running north along the side of the road. Vehicles were passing. A station wagon blew its horn.

  The old man looked like he might have a heart attack. He stood on the side of the road with his fingers jumping around like he was playing the piano.

  The dog stopped on the other side of the road and looked toward the old man.

  “Dixie,” the old man said. He took a step toward the road.

  An eighteen-wheeler was coming from the north. The old man turned toward it and then looked back to the dog. He put his hand up as though to tell the dog to stay right where she was. The air breaks hissed and the eighteen-wheeler rolled by, and Milk held his breath until he saw the dog sitting on the other side of the road.

  The vehicles kept coming, and Daniel took a step out onto the road.

  “Daniel,” Milk said.

  There was a break in traffic and the old man continued to call for the dog, but the dog just sat there tilting her head.

  Daniel took another step into the road. He bent down a little and slapped at his thighs.

  The dog looked at Daniel and then started trotting across the road. Milk watched for traffic, but the road was clear and the dog reached Daniel, where she dug her nose between the boy’s legs and then rolled over in front of him. Daniel scratched at the dog’s stomach with both hands.

  “Come on, Daniel,” Milk said. “Away from the road.”

  Daniel stood and the dog followed him back to the old man’s truck.

  * * *

  DRIVING THE TRUCK had loosened the lug nuts, and Milk removed the tire. He put on the new one and tightened the lug nuts while Daniel watched from his truck.

  Milk put his gloves back in the utility box. Then he went to the old man and told him he was all set.

  The man shook Milk’s hand. “I appreciate it,” he said. “And thank your boy again for me. My wife tells me I got no reason to take that dog with me everywhere I go. I’m too old to run around after her and she don’t listen to me none.”

  Milk looked out at the road. Vehicles passing by now.

  “You military?” the old man asked.

  Milk faced the man.

  “Your sticker there.” The old man pointed to a sticker on the back of Milk’s truck that a recruiter had given him when he was in high school.

  “I was a motor transport operator in Iraq.”

  “How long you been back?”

  “Six days.”

  “Six days—shit. How are you getting along?”

  Milk shrugged. “It’ll be fine soon as I can find some work. I’ve about blown through my hazard pay paying the first and last on an apartment.”

  “It’s getting harder to live out here. You got these people coming from New York City buying homes and tearing them down and rebuilding summer homes twice as big with twice as many bathrooms. Something in the city water’s got everybody shitting twice as much as the rest of us.” The old man shook his head. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I got a lumberyard just east of here in Wilmington. I can always use help in the winter. Why don’t you come on by tomorrow and I’ll get you set up. I can’t promise nothing past this winter—but it’ll get you started.”

  “I can’t take a job from you.”

  “Sure you can. They ought to have jobs lined up for you boys, as far as I’m concerned. Oh, wait a minute.” The old man scratched at his ear. “Tomorrow won’t work. I got to be out at one of the sites tomorrow. How about you come by on Thursday—four o’clock. All you got to do is take this road north.” The old man faced north and pointed. “You’re going to pass a gas station. After about three miles you’ll reach Bennett Hill. Take a left on that and just follow the son of a bitch for about six miles. You’ll pass a torn-down barn and then you’ll see a small building on your right. That’s the office there. The yard is a couple miles out. You’ll see a sign out front.”

  “I’ll be there,” Milk said.

  “All right,” the old man said. “Thanks again for the help.”

  Once Milk was inside the truck, he turned and faced Daniel. “You okay?”

  The boy nodded.

  “I didn’t know you liked dogs.”

  “Did you have one in Iraq?”

  “What? A dog? No. We didn’t have no dogs.”

  “My teacher said some people that were in the war get dogs.”

  “That’s true—afterwards. Some people do, I guess.”

  The boy looked out the window.

  “Let’s get home,” Milk said.

  “We’re not going anymore?”

  “No. I got what I needed for now. Besides, I want to show you something I found last night.”

  Milk started the truck. He looked in the rearview mirror and saw the old man. He didn’t look like he was in a hurry to get anywhere. He was just sitting in his truck wrestling around some with that dog.

  * * *

  BACK AT THE house, Milk led the boy around the side of the duplex to the red angled doors of the storm cellar. “This is ours,” he said. “You ever been down in one of these?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Well, you’re going to start doing stuff now. You’re going to start learning about stuff.”

  Milk bent down and pulled on the door handle. The steel door popped loose. He lifted the door, and some dirt fell onto the grass. He went to the other side and lifted the second door. The door made a loud creaking sound.

  “We can fix that with oil,” he said. “That’s what you do when there’s a door that squeaks. You put some WD-40 on the hinge.”

  The boy looked down into the cellar.

  “What I got to show you is down there,” Milk said. “This cellar ain’t it.”

  A vehicle pulled into the drive in front of the house. Milk couldn’t see it from where he stood, but he could hear it idling. He had parked his truck in the garage. There was only one spot and it was supposed to go to the other tenant. But Milk was paying rent too, and he had a nice truck that didn’t need to be sitting outside where it would collect salt from the passing vehicles and rust.

  “I’ll hit the light when I get down there,” Milk said. “You ain’t scared, are you?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Good. I’m glad I don’t have no scaredy-cat for a son.”

  Milk started down the wooden steps. “I came down here last night looking for a breaker box. You know what that is, don’t you?”

  The boy didn’t say anything.

  “It’s where all the power comes from. I was trying to figure out why our washer and dryer don’t work. I thought maybe the power had been turned off.”

  Milk reached the bottom of the steps and pulled the string that hung from the ceiling. The cellar was probably fourteen by twenty feet. It wasn’t much to look at. The walls were stamped concrete, save for the piece of Sheetrock that separated Milk’s half of the cellar from the other tenant’s half and a partial wall that came out a few feet. Eight or nine solid plastic chairs with bright nickel-chrome legs, the kind that belonged in a high school classroom, were positioned in front of one of the walls. Milk didn’t know what the chairs were doing in the storm cellar, but the chairs weren’t what he wanted to show the boy. What he wanted to show the boy was under the workbench.

  The boy started down the stairs. He moved slowly, and when he reached the bottom, he just stood there looking up at the ceiling. “Is this under my room?”

  Milk looked up at the wood beams and hot water pipes wrapped in yellow fiberglass insulation. “I don’t know,” he said. “It could be.” He tried to picture the layout of the house, but he couldn’t remember where everything was. “It don’t matter,” he said. “This is what I wanted to show you.”

  Milk led the boy to the workbench. The surface of the bench was crowded with scrap wood, and over the bench was a piece of wood that came down from the ceiling and held pla
stic jars full of nails and screws. “Look under here,” Milk said. He bent down and pulled a black tool bag from the bottom shelf. He set the bag on the floor and opened it. It was stuffed with electrician’s tools—wire strippers and crimping tools and meters and testers. “And look at this.” Milk pulled a pin nailer from the crowded bottom shelf and set it on the floor next to the tool bag. “See all this stuff down here? This is probably five or six hundred dollars’ worth of tools. I never had nothing like this before.”

  The boy stood staring at the tools.

  “You know what this is?” Milk rolled out an air compressor that sat against the wall next to the workbench.

  The boy shook his head.

  “What’s that?”

  “No.”

  “Well—this is an air compressor. You hook up this pin nailer to it, and the air compressor builds enough pressure to fire these nails off like a gun. You don’t got to do nothing but pull the trigger. What do you think?”

  The boy didn’t say anything.

  “We can use this stuff. We can get it cleaned up a little down here. Have us a whole workshop. There’s a couple things in the apartment that need fixing, and I was thinking of a couple projects we could work on. I used to love doing stuff like this. I missed it over in Iraq. I got to work on the vehicles some. But that ain’t the same. There’s nothing like fixing up your own space. Building stuff that didn’t exist at all until you built it.”

  Milk looked over the tools on the bottom shelf. He reached in and pulled out a circular saw. He studied it for a moment. “You ever use one of these?”

  The boy shook his head.

  Milk stood. He unwrapped the cord and blew the sawdust from the blade. “You want to see if this bad boy works?”

  The boy shrugged.

  “Here—help me clear this scrap wood from the table.”

  Milk and Daniel moved the scrap wood from the table to the ground in front of the partial wall.

  “Now take one of them pieces of wood there.”

  Daniel grabbed a piece of old crown molding.

  “Not that one. One of those flat ones.”

  Daniel picked up a two-by-four.

  “Set it on the table here.”

  Daniel set the wood on the table.

  “You learn to use these tools and you won’t ever have to ask anyone for help. You’ll save yourself a ton of money too.” Milk slid the wood so that a couple of feet hung over the table. “Hold the end against the table there.”

  The boy pressed the wood against the table with his left hand.

  “Not like that. With both hands.”

  The boy hesitated and then held the wood with both hands. Milk studied him for a moment. “Do you want to try the first cut?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Come on.”

  “I don’t know how to do it.”

  “I’ll show you.”

  The boy shook his head.

  “All right,” Milk said. “You’re going to have to learn eventually, though.” He positioned the blade a couple of inches from where he planned to cut the wood and turned on the saw. The noise exploded in the quiet basement, and Daniel let go of the wood and jumped backward. His foot came down on the pile of scrap wood, and he turned to steady himself and slammed his face into the side of the partial wall.

  “Jesus Christ,” Milk said. “What the hell was that?”

  The boy held his face with both hands.

  “The blade ain’t anywhere near you.”

  The boy lowered one hand. Milk could see tears running down the boy’s cheek from underneath the palm of his hand. “Let me see it,” Milk said.

  The boy took a step back.

  “Goddammit, Daniel.” He heard something behind him and looked up at the cellar doors. A large woman stood looking down at them. Milk raised his arms. “What?” he said.

  “That your truck in my garage?”

  “You’re goddamn right it is.”

  The woman looked over at the boy. “Is he all right?”

  “Mind your fucking business, lady.” Milk could hear the boy sniffling. A dull pain shot through his temples and settled behind his eyes. “Goddammit,” he said. He turned back to the boy, who was still holding his eye. “Come here,” he said. “It’s all right. Just come here.”

  * * *

  THAT EVENING MILK couldn’t sleep. His head ached, so he went outside for a smoke. He didn’t need to smoke outside, but he wanted to feel the cold and see the night sky. His body shivered as he adjusted to the temperature. He wore his coat and his jeans and his boots, and the sky must have been cloudy because the stars were scattered few and far between like crumbs on a mess hall table where only a handful of soldiers sat. He took a drag and looked around at nothing.

  That’s what he’d first thought about Iraq. A whole lot of nothing. A country in the middle of nowhere that didn’t mean a damn thing. But that’s only how he thought of it at the beginning. After a while it became obvious it was much more than that. It was everything. The whole of human existence stretched out as far as it could go and then stretched even further beyond that.

  Milk took a long drag from his cigarette. He stuck his hand in his pocket and felt for the truck keys. He looked back toward the bedroom window, where the blinds were drawn, and then he took one last drag and put his cigarette out on the concrete step.

  He took the truck slow out of the drive and didn’t turn on the headlights until he could no longer see the duplex. His night vision had kicked in by then, and when he turned on the headlights, everything seemed so bright he almost turned them back off.

  He headed south toward the center of town and wondered about some of the men in his platoon. He had no intention of seeking them out. To combine one life with the other would be like a bad science-fiction movie where two species were bred together. Nothing good ever came of that.

  He followed the empty road past tall trees that made dark walls against the night ceiling until he reached the center of town, where the diner and the other shops were lit up and the streetlights shone like suspended fortune-teller globes. He thought about stopping by the Whistler but didn’t feel like sitting on a bar stool and risking conversation with someone who remembered him. He just wanted to drive for a while. It felt good to move. It felt like he might be headed somewhere worth heading.

  He turned on the radio and heard a woman singing a song he didn’t recognize. He pulled down the visor and removed a disc from the mesh case he had bought back in high school and put the disc in the stereo. Merle Haggard’s voice cracked through the speakers. He turned up the volume and headed over the truss bridge, turned right onto Steadman Road toward the tree farms and orchards. The road was wider than the road that ran through the center of North Falls and it ran straight for several miles, so that in the far distance he could see the glow from the grocery store. He shifted in his seat and listened to Merle talk about a good man gone to waste. He pressed his foot down on the gas and watched the broken yellow line go solid. He checked the rearview mirror and saw the headlights of a vehicle in the far distance. He turned up the volume some more. I never go around mirrors. Cause I’ve got a heartache to hide.

  He thought of his boy in his fort reading his book about planets. He’d known a sapper in Iraq who could name every constellation. Rae Brakeman. His father was a celestial navigator in the Navy and Rae had memorized the stars as a child. Three months into a twelve-month stint, his wife gave birth to a baby girl. As a sort of memento she sent Rae an expensive telescope, a rigid six-foot contraption. Rae treated that telescope as though it were his actual newborn child. At night he draped it in his flak jacket and duct-taped a protective insert to each side. Lying there in his cot inside the walls of the canvas tent with the telescope beside him, he would go on and on about the stars he had seen over the Iraq desert that were too far south to see from his home in Minneapolis. He even talked about taking his little girl to Iraq someday, when the war was over, to see the stars. They named her
Lyra Celeste Brakeman.

  He was a hell of a soldier. A track star in high school that set state records. Stick-thin and fast as the wind. But in the end it didn’t matter. Not fast enough.

  Milk listened to Merle and pushed his back against the seat. The vehicle in the distance had gotten closer. He studied the headlights and knew it wasn’t a police cruiser, and so he pushed down on the gas and watched the needle cross one hundred. He rushed by a tree farm—the trees smaller than he thought they ought to be for this time of year. He tried to picture Lyra Brakeman all grown up. He saw her as having curly golden hair and a small nose and blue eyes.

  The needle crossed one hundred and twenty, but he hadn’t created any distance from the vehicle behind him. He thought of what his boy had said about the man in the Jeep that came for Jessica. He tried to recall if there had been a vehicle behind him when he was driving through town. He studied the headlights and the darkened outline of the vehicle. A big SUV of some sort, but he couldn’t make out the model. He pushed the truck up to one hundred and thirty. The SUV seemed to be getting closer. He looked ahead to where the road turned into a two-lane road, and when it did he moved into the left lane and slowed the truck a little, hoping the SUV would pull alongside him, but the vehicle followed him into the lane. He continued along the road and then moved into the right lane. The SUV followed. He studied the dark just above the headlights in his rearview mirror, but he couldn’t see the driver past the bright lights. He looked ahead to the distant lights of the grocery store, and suddenly he applied his brakes and pulled into the breakdown lane. He watched the vehicle roar past him, and though he couldn’t see the driver, he saw what he thought was the Jeep logo above the license plate. He sat there with the engine idling and the trees on either side of him and the overcast sky above and waited for two brake lights to appear in the dark, but they never did.

  RUTH FENN

  The last time she had been inside the church was for Mathew’s funeral. She hadn’t grown up going to church, and so it wasn’t something she missed or gave much thought to. But Elam had attended regularly as a child, and he continued to attend on his own even as an adult. All that stopped after Mathew died. After the congregation made it clear he wasn’t welcome.