Before Familiar Woods Read online

  Ruth put the spare key in her pocket and pulled down the tailgate. She climbed into the bed and stepped over fresh snow and knelt down in front of the toolbox. She pulled the padlock from the loop and flipped open the hasp.

  The toolbox was mostly full. She dug through battery cables and light sticks and several metal tools whose utility she didn’t recognize, and then she leaned back on her heels and studied the contents feeling like something was missing.

  “I’ll be damned,” she said. She slammed the toolbox closed and got down from the bed of the truck. She opened the driver’s side door and looked around the truck again and then pulled the seat forward. A silver space blanket lay folded behind the seat. She lifted it and a couple of Sterno heaters, and a half-drunk bottle of whiskey fell from the blanket. She pulled the blanket to her nose and smelled Elam—cigarettes and loam.

  She climbed into the driver’s seat and shut the door and turned it all over in her head. Elam was coming back to the truck to sleep at night. She was sure of it. It didn’t explain the blood and it didn’t explain where he was coming from or why he didn’t just come home, and that worried her. She figured whatever he was doing was bad enough that he wanted to keep her out of it, and she felt ashamed for allowing him to think he could. She knew she had brought it on herself by keeping her distance. But that wasn’t how it was going to be anymore. They’d promised themselves to each other a long time ago, and if he wouldn’t come back to her on his own, she was going to force his hand. It was a gamble, but if she took his truck and left him without a place to sleep at night in this cold, he wouldn’t have a choice but to come home to her, or at least he’d know she’d found him and was asking him to come home.

  She looked out the window at the woods. “Whatever this is,” she said to the young beech trees still holding their leaves, “it’s gone on long enough.” She put the key in the ignition and got the truck to start after holding the key for several seconds and pumping the gas. Cold air pushed through the vents. News radio played quietly. She clicked off the radio and backed the truck over stiff weeds and then got herself turned around and pulled out onto the paved road.

  * * *

  SHE HEADED EAST and turned onto Putnam Road and followed it past broken split-rail fences and one-hundred-year-old homes. The pale sun followed in the rearview mirror like a stray dog. The town looked abandoned in the cold winter morning. Nobody out in the fields or driving the roads. Only Elam’s truck moving against the steadfast quiet. She approached Steele Road and made a quick turn.

  The Flakers lived in a post-and-beam house with a stone chimney and a large garage with four square windows attached to the side. Dottie Flaker was the boy’s grandmother. A stout woman who’d taught the second grade when the school was located behind the First Methodist Church. Lou Flaker was a wiry man who had worked just about every job there was in his lifetime. Last Ruth heard, he had taken on woodworking and was selling pieces out of his garage and at flea markets on summer weekends.

  That would have been several years ago. Ruth didn’t know what the Flakers were doing now, save for housing a grandson who was supplying heroin to half of North Falls.

  She was careful to park Elam’s truck on the side of the road at the bottom of the driveway under an old oak tree. She glanced in the rearview mirror at the empty road and then got out and started up the drive. Her boots crunched the gravel, each step like the spade of a shovel biting into the ground.

  A Honda with tinted windows and an oversized exhaust was parked in front of the garage. Fart pipes, Elam called them.

  The wood of the door was marked with low vertical scratches, like some animal had tried to claw its way in. A welcome mat like the one at the Whistler sat on the ground dusted with cigarette butts. Ruth raised her fist and knocked. The door rattled.

  Somebody was in the house. She could hear them moving around. Someone said “Shit,” and another voice asked a question, and then she heard the creaking of stairs and someone said, “I don’t know.” A moment later the door opened.

  Johnny Flaker stood in the doorway in his jeans and no shirt. A gold necklace hung down from his bony shoulders.

  “What do you want?”

  “I got to talk to you,” Ruth said.

  Ruth could see into the house. Piles of clothes lay on the hardwood floor next to slumped cardboard boxes. The door that led to the basement was open and the light was on below.

  “You got to get off my property is what you got to do.”

  “You can talk to me. Or I can call down to my friend to come up here. The one you stabbed in the leg.”

  “That big son of a bitch?” The boy looked past Ruth. “Why ain’t he up here?”

  “I told him to wait at the bottom. I didn’t think his temper could take looking at you.”

  “Shit,” the boy said. “Tell him and his temper to come on up here.”

  Ruth turned from the boy and started down the drive.

  “Hold on,” Johnny said. “What the hell do you want? I got shit to do.”

  Ruth stopped. She wondered if the boy’s grandparents were dead. She and Elam used to read the obituaries every Sunday morning, but they had canceled their newspaper subscription after Mathew died. She turned back to the boy. “You knew the men I described. Horace at least. I could tell.”

  The boy licked his teeth. “That’s what this is about? Your husband ran off and you expect me to know where he’s gone to?”

  “He ain’t my husband.”

  “What is it to you, then?”

  “He was with my husband. Both of them are missing. And I don’t think they run off.”

  The boy laughed. “I don’t know where he’s at.”

  “You’ve seen him, though.”

  “The short one. With the limp. I seen him a few times. I don’t know the other guy.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Couple nights before you came up, I guess.”

  “A couple? Not the night before?”

  “I said a couple. He was asking for Dwyer. He wasn’t there, though.”

  “Dwyer’s the one in the lawn chair? The man with the red muttonchops?”

  The boy didn’t say anything.

  “You sold to him? To Horace?”

  “I sell to anyone that’s got money to pay.”

  Ruth looked past the boy. “I knew your grandmother,” she said.

  “Everybody knows everybody in this hellhole. What’s your point?”

  “I knew your parents too. Years ago. When you weren’t doing much more than sucking on a pacifier. I wonder what they’d think of what you’re doing now.”

  The boy laughed. His teeth were white and straight across his mouth like a picket fence. He scratched at the back of his neck and studied Ruth for a long moment. Then he smiled and shook his head and pulled out a small plastic bag from his pants pocket that looked like it held a clod of dirt. He opened the bag and licked his thumb and stuck it into the bag and brought it to his nose and breathed in and out slowly, and then he shrugged. “You see anybody here who cares?”

  When Ruth didn’t answer, the boy turned to the staircase. “Kelly,” he shouted. “Come up here a minute. I got something for you.” He turned back to Ruth and held out the bag. “First time is free,” he said.

  “That’s the only time, though, ain’t it?”

  The boy started to laugh. “That’s like some poetry-type shit.”

  Ruth started down the drive. She heard the girl come up to the door and ask Johnny what he wanted. But Ruth didn’t turn around. She heard Johnny say something and close the door. She remembered the night his parents were killed. She’d seen the car after, in the tow lot, folded like an accordion with the other car’s license plate melded onto the engine. Maybe it was better for them that they were gone and didn’t have to see what had become of their son. But then, things might have turned out differently if they were still alive.

  Ruth got in the truck at the bottom of the drive. The flurries we
re coming down slowly. She knew it was here, then. The first snowstorm. Some people pointed to sparrows or the direction of the wind or the way dogs started sleeping against walls, but Ruth knew it wasn’t any of those things. The first big winter storm in Vermont announced itself by the speed at which the snow came down from the sky—when it wasn’t in a hurry, when it fell like it was going to be around for a while.

  Inside the truck, her eyes watered. She felt like she had gone somewhere past tired and her body was stuttering on fumes and her mind was worn down flatter than a plate of piss. She turned on the radio. The same news radio that had been on when she first started the truck. She hadn’t known Elam to listen to news radio. But then there were things about him she didn’t know. And it seemed to her that not knowing things had become about as common as sitting her bare ass down on a cold toilet seat.

  She put the truck in drive and pulled onto the road. She hoped she was doing the right thing. Hoped that by taking the truck, she was forcing Elam home and not into some more dangerous fate. She wouldn’t bet on her decisions anymore, but she figured she had to keep making them just the same.

  MILK RAYMOND

  It was full light when Milk arrived at the small cottage with the Betty Boop windmills and wood cutouts in the front yard. Jessica’s grandmother was on the porch in her nightgown, pushing a broom over the concrete steps. The grass was overgrown and the leaves unraked. There was mold growing on the side of the stone birdbath, and some of the mesh had come loose from the chain-link fence at the south side of the lot.

  Milk waited in his truck with the engine idling. He had come home to find a note on the door from Jett informing him that she would be visiting Marcy to get some of the boy’s things and that if he wanted to be there to help pick some toys out he could. Milk looked over at his boy, who watched Marcy from the passenger seat. He glanced at the clock and then the rearview mirror. Milk knew Jett wanted to be there to make sure he didn’t do anything stupid, but he wasn’t going to do anything he’d regret, and besides, he was already running late for his interview.

  “You wait here,” Milk said.

  “I want to come in.”

  “Wait here.” Milk shut the engine and got out of the truck and headed toward the house.

  The flat stones that served as a path to the concrete steps were cracked and barely visible underneath the tall grass. The curtains were drawn closed, and mail had collected in the wall-mounted mailbox.

  Marcy didn’t look up until Milk reached the steps. When she did, she had a worried look on her face, and she held the broom close to her chest with both hands.

  “I’m just here for some of the boy’s things,” Milk said. “I don’t want to get into it with you.”

  Marcy shook her head.

  “I won’t be but a minute.”

  Milk came up the steps. Marcy took a small step backward and pulled the broom closer to her chest.

  “I’m going inside now,” Milk said.

  Milk moved past Marcy and opened the door. The house smelled like something had crawled inside the walls and died. There were ten or fifteen empty cans of tomato juice stacked on the coffee table.

  “Fucking hell,” he said.

  He went to the boy’s bedroom. The bed was made and his toys put away in yellow bins, save for a worn plastic box of wildlife discovery cards that sat open on the floor. He opened the closet doors and grabbed some clothes from the top shelf and stuffed them into a wicker hamper that sat in the corner of the closet. He looked around the room and picked out some toys and stuffed them into the hamper. He spotted the poster of the solar system above the bed and pulled the tacks free from the wall and put them in his pocket and then rolled up the poster and set it on top of the laundry basket.

  He left the boy’s bedroom and stopped at the door of what had been Jessica’s room. He set the laundry basket on the ground and peered into the bedroom. There were clothes piled on the floor and the sheets were pulled back. The blind hung crooked over the window. He went to the nightstand and pulled open the drawer and found empty bottles of pain pills.

  “She’s already gone.”

  Milk turned and saw Marcy standing in the doorway holding the broom.

  “Who?”

  “You’re too late. She’s gone to be with her boy. I know you never wanted that. You only wanted her. Well, she’s wised up now. She’s had a reckoning.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “She’s gone. That’s what the hell I’m talking about.” Marcy mumbled something unintelligible. Her eyes began to dart back and forth.

  “I’ve got all I need,” Milk said.

  “Get the hell out of my house.”

  “I’m leaving.”

  Marcy stood shaking her head. Her eyes suddenly flashed something different. “You won’t take her from me,” she said. “You won’t.” She raised the broom and started toward Milk. She got four or five steps before her knee struck the side of the bed and she lost control and fell hard. The broom skidded across the pine floor.

  Milk reached down to help her, but she made a fist and swung and struck Milk’s leg weakly. “Get out of here,” she shouted. Spit hung from her bottom lip, and her nightgown had fallen from one shoulder and exposed her sagged breast. “You won’t take my granddaughter. You won’t take my Jessica.”

  Milk pushed past Marcy and grabbed the laundry basket and continued down the hall and out the front door. Jett was getting out of her car when he stepped outside.

  “Milk,” she said.

  “She’s crazy,” Milk said. “She don’t know what she’s saying.”

  “Who? Marcy? Is she all right?”

  “No, she ain’t all right. She needs help.”

  Milk opened the truck door and set the laundry basket inside and then he got into the truck. He started the engine and left Jett standing in the driveway. He pulled onto the road and glanced in the rearview mirror and saw her starting for the house.

  RUTH FENN

  Ruth parked Elam’s truck in the gravel turnoff at the bottom of the drive so that her mother wouldn’t see it. She sat there with her back aching and tried to pick up more of the scent of her husband on the steering wheel and in the seat, but all she smelled was damp and cold and something close to burning plastic.

  She came up the porch steps and entered the quiet home. The light shone in through the window, and she stood there in the hall for a moment contemplating her next move. Wondering what Elam would do if it were her that had gone missing.

  When she reached the living room, she heard an engine and returned to the front door in time to see a black pickup truck with tinted windows tear up the drive like it was trying to outrun the cold. It surprised her a moment, and then she remembered the young man and the boy and the interview at the lumberyard. She stepped outside and put her hands in her coat pockets and waited. The truck came to a stop, and the man got out and started toward her and then turned back to the truck and opened the passenger door and told the boy to hurry up. The engine ticked and steam rose from beneath the hood.

  “I’m sorry,” the man said. “I know we’re late. We had to pick up some of Daniel’s things.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “I know you said—” The man’s voice trailed off.

  The skin around the boy’s eye had improved, but it still looked like a piece of fruit that had been left out in the sun too long.

  “I hope it’s still all right. I don’t think this will take long. It’s right up the road like I told you—up on Bennet Hill.”

  “It’s all right.” Ruth looked at Daniel, who stood in the middle of the drive with his jacket twisted and only partially zipped. He wore blue jeans stained below both knees, and the laces of his sneakers were untied and traveled in opposite directions. He held a book close to his chest.

  The boy’s father walked around the truck to the driver’s side door. He thanked Ruth again and got into the truck and backed down the drive without saying goodbye to his so
n.

  “He’s in a hurry, I suppose,” Ruth said.

  The boy didn’t say anything. He stood there hardly more than nothing. Like a shadow cast into a narrow crevice. And then he cowered a little, as though trying to hide from even that.

  “What book have you go there?” Ruth asked.

  The boy pulled the book from his chest. “It’s about frogs.”

  Ruth’s mind went to Mathew. An afternoon in August when Mathew was six or seven years old. Ruth was sitting in her chair in front of the tube television. The temperatures that week had broken local records. Hotter than a tin can in hell is what most people were saying. The television wasn’t on, but Elam had set a little metal fan on top, and from it he hung a cloth that had spent all night in the freezer, so it was about the coolest place in the house save for the basement.

  She heard Mathew that afternoon before she saw him. Just a distant whining like an engine that couldn’t get started. A moment later he came busting through the screen door and straight to his room, crying like someone was squeezing the tears right out of him.

  Ruth got up from the chair and followed after him. She didn’t bother with knocking. She just went straight into his bedroom, where he sat on the edge of his bed with arms clenched across his stomach. His face was pink from the sun, and she could see on his collar where he had wiped the snot from his nose. She grabbed hold of his tiny arms and unclenched them and looked him in the eyes and asked him what was wrong. He just looked down at his lap and kept on crying, and so she sat right beside him on the bed and waited there until he wanted to talk.

  It took him a moment, but soon enough he got going. He told her how he had gone over to Brad Hall’s house and how Nick Solomon was there too. He told her how the two of them had been collecting toads all morning and how they had a good two dozen of them in a cardboard box in the grass behind Brad’s house. Mathew wiped at his nose as he told how Nick was standing next to the cardboard box and how Brad was standing about twenty feet from Nick with his back to the trailer holding a plastic bat. How Nick was picking toads out from that cardboard box and tossing them underhand at Brad, who cocked his elbows back and swung hard enough that his back heel dug out clumps of grass from the ground.