Before Familiar Woods Read online

  Milk drove south toward town. He reached for the Merle Haggard disc and put it in the stereo. He turned up the volume and grabbed the bottle and pulled from it.

  I can’t stand to see a good man go to waste.

  He came flying down the hill toward the center of town. In the distance he saw the streetlights and the diner, and suddenly everything went black. He looked in his rearview mirror and saw that the power was out in all the houses that lined the road.

  Cause I’ve got a heartache to hide.

  He thought about Reggie and the bloodied limbs and the woman’s stomach torn open like a zipper, and he turned up the music. He thought about Rachel bent over the desk and the kids she had in the apartment somewhere and the two boys in the shed, and he turned off his headlights the way he and his friends had done as teenagers to show off for each other. As teenagers they had only kept the headlights off for a second or two, but he kept them off much longer. He kept them off for four or five seconds, and then he reached to turn them back on and brought his hand back down instead.

  Everything in front of him was dark and still. He could see no road. It was as though the surface of the earth had turned into a hole. He knew the road he was traveling on turned sharply before the diner. He took a deep breath and let the music settle in his mind.

  So I never go around mirrors. Cause I’ve got a heartache to hide.

  He thought of the raid in Hawija just before he was discharged and the family of four and their dog. The dog barking nonstop and the little boy trying to keep it quiet. And he thought about Gomez and how he shot that dog clear through the snout so that it spun wildly and then ran in tight circles with blood pouring out of its face. He thought of the boy trying to catch his dog—trying to help it—but the dog just turning wildly, hurt and scared and not wanting to be caught, not knowing anymore what anyone was capable of.

  And suddenly the lights in front of Milk turned on. All the streetlights lit up, and one light shone particularly bright, like a soft moon over the diner that Milk was headed straight for. He turned the wheel quickly and pumped the brake. One of the tires leapt the curb, but he managed to get the truck straightened out and back on the road, where he gathered himself and took her down to fifteen and drove her like that, slow and steady, the rest of the way home to his boy.

  RUTH FENN

  There was no sleeping. The two sat at the table and tried to hold down black coffee. The morning came and the splintered light shone through the trees and they could see how much snow had fallen from where they sat at the kitchen table.

  Ruth decided she would take Della to the stand. She would take the hog pistol. Elam hadn’t argued with her about that.

  “I still think we ought to call Leo,” Elam said.

  “You’ll go to jail.”

  “I’m prepared for it.”

  “I’m not. I won’t see you locked up for what Horace done.”

  “Della won’t believe you.”

  “Maybe not.”

  Elam had drawn Ruth a crude map of the stream and the old stone foundation and the hunting stand beyond it, but Ruth knew the general area. She put on her boots and tucked her pants inside the cuffs and grabbed the keys from the table.

  Elam stood in front of the window and watched the snow still falling. “I should go with you.”

  “No. You need to rest. It won’t help anyway. It will only make things worse.”

  Elam continued to stare out the window. “It looks like three feet. It might be less under tree cover. Still, you’ve got to be careful. You’ve got to keep along the stream like I told you.”

  Ruth secured the pistol in her inner coat pocket.

  “I don’t know what she’ll do,” Elam said. “I thought about it some, but I can’t figure how she’ll react.”

  “Not good is my guess. I suspect something like a cat that’s come to learn its tail is on fire.”

  Elam turned to Ruth. His cheeks were shallow like a dried riverbed. “Horace won’t give you no trouble. He’s in bad shape.”

  “I hope to God he is. I hope to God he don’t have nothing left inside of him.”

  * * *

  THE TIRES SLIPPED and caught on the road. The truck groaned. A dense winter fog had gathered and it hung in the distance. Ruth leaned over the steering wheel and tried to make out the road through the white flakes that hurtled toward her as though she were passing through some sort of ghostly star system.

  Her thoughts didn’t leave Mathew. She thought of him as an infant, naked and small in her arms, and she pictured him older but still frail, and then all of the sudden she saw it, like an image from a dream that came to her long after she woke. She was driving her mother to the hospital early one morning before Mathew died. She’d found her on the floor outside the bathroom repeating words that didn’t go together.

  They were somewhere on Main Street. It was still early and there were hardly any other vehicles on the road. But Ruth remembered one. A white Ford Galaxie with a mud-colored hardtop. There was a man in the driver’s seat with white hair and beside him a boy the spitting image of Mathew. It was all out of context, though, and the car passed in a split second, and so she told herself it couldn’t have been her son. That her boy was home sleeping in his bedroom.

  Ruth struggled now to see the image more clearly. She tried to see the boy’s face, and when she did she slowed the truck and came to a stop in the middle of the road. The snow continued to fall. She laid her forehead on the steering wheel and cried. She wondered if Mathew had seen her. She wondered if he had been mad at her for being so blind. For not knowing. For not making it stop.

  The heat roared through the vents. She picked her head up and wiped her eyes and pressed her foot to the gas. She blinked as she passed buried fences and snow-covered hills and cragged trees whose branches reached across the road to each other. She slowed the truck at the black mailbox and turned into the drive and came to a stop and shut the engine. The lights were on inside the home. A thin gray smoke rose from the chimney.

  It was true what Elam said. Della might not believe her. And for that reason she hoped Horace was still alive. But for every other reason she hoped he was dead. She couldn’t help but hope he was dead and that his death had been slow.

  She remained in the truck for a moment more and then opened the door and stepped outside. Flakes of snow found their way underneath her collar and melted against her skin. After several steps the front door opened and Della stood in the doorway wearing a black turtleneck and long pants. She held a mug that steamed.

  “Della,” Ruth said. “I got to talk to you.”

  “Inside or out?”

  “I think we ought to go inside for this.”

  Della looked past Ruth. “Is that Elam’s truck?”

  “It is.”

  “Tell me outside, then.”

  “I think you ought to sit down.”

  “Go on, Ruth. Go on and say what you have to say.”

  Della’s eyes were wide, and save for the wrinkles around them, she looked the same as she did when she was much younger. She had always held a beauty that made Ruth jealous. It wasn’t a traditional beauty. It was a beauty the way a crow walking across the snow could be beautiful.

  “It’s about our boys,” Ruth said. And then she wiped the snow from her brow and told Della. Not about the hunting stand. But about what Horace had told Fred Easton and what Fred had told Elam.

  Della didn’t flinch. She just stood there for what seemed like a long time, and then the mug slipped from her hand and shattered on the metal threshold.

  The sun had risen to the top of the chimney, but because of the falling snow and the thick fog, it appeared only like a glow and not a solid thing.

  Ruth took a small step toward Della. “There’s more,” she said.

  RUTH FENN

  A thick waist-high fog parted and swirled around the women as they moved along the unmarked trail through the hardwood forest and into the driving snow.

  “How fa
r is it?” Della asked.

  “Not much further now.”

  “It had to be so far?”

  Ruth turned and saw the breath plume from Della’s mouth. The woods around the women were dense and the branches sagged with the weight of the snow. “I guess it did.”

  The stream flowed north through thick stands of maple. The wind blew and the snow hissed and the water lapped the stones.

  Ruth’s thoughts drifted back to the night before Mathew died. She had come home from the factory and found him alone at the kitchen table with a block of clay. It was a warm summer night and the windows were open and the wind pushed and tugged at the curtains. A stack of index cards and torn pieces of paper sat piled in the middle of the table.

  For several years Ruth and Mathew had taken the three-word descriptions that Ruth’s students had come up with and tried to sculpt the objects themselves. But they hadn’t sculpted together in a long time, and that summer the two were hardly talking. Ruth figured it was a stage he was going through, a stage all boys had to go through, and she tried to give him space, but it hurt her just the same. She knew Elam had picked up on it, and Ruth figured he had talked Mathew into pulling the clay out of the cupboard.

  Some other day she might have let it go. But she had worked an extra shift inspecting LED boards and she was tired from being up late the previous night tending to her mother, who had begun to wake in the darkness unsure of where she was, and so Ruth was in no mood to be pitied and she told Mathew as much—a little sharper than she should have.

  A crow cawed in the distance and branches rustled.

  “You could have told me where to go,” Della said.

  Ruth passed between beanpole poplars and stepped over a section of crisscrossed rabbit prints with spots of blood and clumps of gray fur. “This is a bad place to get lost.”

  The two women slugged through the woods. The fog had smothered the trunks in the distance, but the tops of the trees were still visible.

  “You’ve been out here before,” Della said.

  “A long time ago.”

  They continued north and the fog thickened. Ruth’s upper body moved through what seemed like a light drift of snow while her legs worked through the heavier mounds below. The long branches of the trees blurred as though laid beneath wax paper.

  “I don’t know that he’ll come back with me,” Della said.

  “I can’t say what he’ll do.”

  “It might be we should stop now. Go back and call an ambulance.”

  “It’s too late for that.” To the east the fog seemed to move. Ruth studied the movement and saw that it was smoke.

  “What is it?” Della asked.

  “Smoke.” Ruth pointed. She studied the smoke but could not locate its source.

  “Who else would be out here?”

  Ruth headed toward the smoke. The crust broke and sank underfoot. The wind quickened and the snow continued to lash down on them. Ruth followed the smoke through a stand of pines. When she reached the spot where the smoke rose, she still could not tell where it came from. It seemed to rise directly from the snow.

  “What is this?” Della asked.

  Ruth shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know what causes that.”

  The smoke was like that of a campfire, but there was no fire. Ruth reached out with her gloved hand and held it in the middle of the smoke, but it only felt cold. “It’s like something come up from the ground.”

  Della turned to the east. “I have to piss,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I have to piss.” Della scanned the woods. Her snow hat sat unevenly on her head and her black hair came down over her shoulders and was dusted with flurries. “I’ll only be a minute.”

  Ruth watched Della push through the pine boughs and become enveloped by the fog. She turned back to the smoke. It rose and captured the muted light. She watched the coiling strands of gray and thought of Mathew sculpting figures from clay. She imagined him sculpting the woods from the fog, giving shape to the trees and the bushes. The lost bull wheels and the rusted derricks.

  A branch rustled behind her and a gray squirrel emerged. The squirrel studied Ruth with its black-pellet eyes, and Ruth wondered why it wasn’t somewhere safe waiting for the storm to pass. She pulled her glasses from her face and wiped her eyes. The snow crunched somewhere close but beyond the fog. The squirrel’s eyes darted side to side and it skittered up the tree. Ruth put her glasses back on and turned to the sound.

  “Della?” Ruth studied the fog. She thought of wolves and black bears and coyotes. “Della?” She grabbed hold of the zipper of her coat. “Who’s there?”

  The crunching stopped. The wind came up from the north. Ruth held her breath and listened, and then the crunching started again and Della cut through the fog. Her eyes were wide and unsettled. “The fog is getting worse,” she said. “I can’t hardly see.”

  “We don’t have far,” Ruth said, relaxing some. “We’re close now.”

  MILK RAYMOND

  Milk entered the duplex and set his cigarettes on the table and walked down the hall to his boy’s room. He stood in the doorway and watched Daniel sleep under the covers. Milk could smell the alcohol on himself and it bothered him. He wondered what Jett would say if she were here and figured she probably had a number for him to call. A support group for the alcohol and probably the reckless driving and the headaches. He wondered if she had a number to call after you fucked a stranger in a gas station and then followed her home in the middle of the night believing she might be the solution to your fucked-up, miserable life.

  The light from the hallway was low and soft and Milk felt worn out. The hamper sat beside the wall still full of clothes and toys. Milk picked it up and brought it over to the bed and sat down on it, trying not to put his full weight on the cheap wicker. He watched his boy breathe. Heard the faint whistling sound as the air moved through his lips. Studied his arm pulled to the side of his face with his fingers spread out as though he were pushing something away. Watched his eyes flicker and then still.

  The poster of the solar system leaned against the boy’s closet door, and Milk stood from the hamper and went to it. He unrolled the poster and examined it and then reached into his pocket and removed the tacks he had kept. He took the poster over to the wall opposite the boy’s bed and quietly tacked it there. He stood back from the wall and saw that the poster was crooked, and so he removed the tacks, and when the poster was finally straight he secured it to the wall and turned again to his boy and watched him. The steady rise of his quilt.

  In the living room he pulled a cigarette from the pack on the table and removed his shirt and his jeans. He sat down on the pullout couch in the half nude and smoked his cigarette. He wondered what he would do about work and about the bills piling up on the table. He thought back to Rachel and her station wagon with the car seats and the folder from the community college and told himself that he would have to do something. He couldn’t just sit around waiting to be saved. He couldn’t just get drunk and drive around all night looking for answers. He pictured the rise and fall of his boy’s chest and thought back to himself as a boy and saw his father drunk and passed out on the kitchen floor. His mother dead at thirty-seven of a brain aneurysm. His father dead at forty in a car wreck. No one saving either of them. He watched the sun begin to rise, and then he put out his cigarette on the cardboard box and pulled the blanket over his tired body and tried to steal a little sleep.

  RUTH FENN

  The hunting stand was surrounded by pillared hardwoods. It would have been difficult to see in the fall. The timber frame and four spidery legs would have disappeared behind the brown leaves. But in the winter it stood out.

  Ruth stopped in front of the stand and looked up at the timber frame that supported tin walls roughly twelve feet in length. The wind carried the scent of damp pine. A ruffed grouse exploded from a cranberry bush in a shower of flakes and wings.

  “I can’t go up there,” Della said
.

  Ruth turned to where Della stood, partially hidden by the fog. “You can.”

  Della shook her head and looked down at the ground.

  Ruth turned back to the stand. A window had been boarded up with two sheets of plywood. Somebody could have been inside it or not and nobody would have known the difference.

  The wind whistled off the tin walls. Ruth pictured Horace inside the stand. Bloodied but alive. She heard a sound and turned and saw Della with her eyes closed praying under her breath.

  “That’s enough,” Ruth said. “That’s not helping anyone.”

  Della wiped her nose. She kept her eyes closed for another moment, and when she opened them it seemed as though something inside her had changed. She nodded her head several times in quick succession and wiped her nose again and headed for the ladder. Her boots kicked up snow. She grabbed the wooden rails and began to climb. Snow came loose from the rungs and fell to the ground with a whisper.

  The fog seemed to be getting higher. It enveloped the lower half of the ladder. Ruth swept her hand in front of her face as though she might be able to disperse the fog and felt the pistol shift in her coat pocket. Della reached the top rung and opened the trapdoor. Her arms disappeared into the stand, followed by her legs.

  Ruth heard muffled sounds but couldn’t distinguish them. She knew most hunting stands were lined with carpet to cut down on the noise. She listened to the sounds and thought of Mathew and the way he used to sing to himself in the woods. She would open the window above the kitchen sink in the summertime while she was making dinner and listen to his far-off voice traveling between tree limbs and around thick trunks; shaped by the woods so that when it reached the window, it sounded like her boy was singing in some language partly born from him and partly born from the forest. Though she knew better, there were days after he died that she opened the window above the sink and listened, as though some of those sounds were still out there nestled under the wolf trees and caught in the thorny bushes.