Soul's Road: A Fiction Collection (15 page)

***

Steven asks her to go swimming at the health club he has just joined. When he turned forty and had a physical exam, the doctor said he needed more exercise. Sunday is family day at the health club. Judith repeats that to herself. Family day.

The pool is large and empty. Henry cannonballs off the side and challenges his father to a race. Judith dangles her feet in the cool water but does not go in. The smell, the dancing shadows, and the colored tile remind her of vacations with her parents. Every summer they took a trip, staying in hotels with pools. Her mother and father would toss her back and forth between them, a watery nest.

When the boys go in the hot tub, she joins them.

“Hey Jude,” Henry says when he surfaces from making bubbles. “Isn’t this radiforacious?”

She agrees, then dives for him, and the three of them roll and tussle until half the water has splashed out of the hot tub.

“Times. Times,” Henry calls, laughing and holding his sides. “Hey, Jude, listen to this.” He cups the palms of his hands to his mouth and blasts an exodus of air. “Looks like you ripped one, Dad.”

“Who cut the cheese?” Judith says.

“That was an air buffet,” Henry laughs. He makes a higher, longer sound. “Seismic.”

Judith waves her hands in front of her nose. “Put a plug in it, Sparky.”

“Please,” says Steven. “I prefer the more cultured term, pass gas.” And then he does—pass gas— and they laugh harder. Steven lies back and closes his eyes. “I demand to be undisturbed for five minutes. If anyone lays a hand on me—”

Henry and Judith dive on him at the same time.

***

The director’s assistant has written a more urgent email. They must hear from her if she is to be considered for the position. If she has changed her mind, could she please let them know immediately? There are many other applicants but as the director was a close personal friend of her father’s, he would like to speak with her first.

There is also a message from the assistant on her voicemail.

Judith picks up her violin and plays.

***

Judith is at their house for dinner again. This makes three nights in a row. She stirs the spaghetti sauce at the island while Henry and Steven kick the soccer ball around the kitchen. It’s raining again, big clacks beyond the skylight, and Henry needs to expend some energy.

Steven gives an extra thrust and she dodges the ball, which ends up on the counter. “Out of the kitchen.” She puts on her best Cruella de Vil face and points her arm.

Henry taps the ball between his feet. “Did you ever want to be pregnant?”

Judith is getting used to these questions but is not sure how to answer. She thinks immediately of how fragile new life is, how it can be snuffed out so easily. It is enough that Steven must let Henry out of his sight every day, and she can hardly bear it.

“My friend Tyler’s mom? She’s having triplets.” Henry puts the soccer ball under his t-shirt and moans.

“Second husband,” Steven says quietly.

“That’s a foul, buster.” Judith takes a swipe at the ball. “No carrying the ball.”

Sitting down to dinner, Henry asks them to hold hands. “Rejoice, and live less,” he says.

“Do you mean, rejoice, and live more?” says Judith.

“No.” Henry laughs the word, as if she should know better.

Filled with comforting amounts of spaghetti, garlic bread, and wine, Judith and Steven sit on the couch. Henry puts a song on the iPod and takes a stance. “Watch me crank that Soldier Boy,” he sings along. He leans, waves his arms, and snaps to the music. He executes a combination of knee lifts and foot taps. He sidles over to the couch and reaches out his hand. “Jude?”

“Henry?” she says. She doesn’t move.

“Come on. It’s fun. I’ll teach you.”

She never imagined that if she were to dance, it would be to Soldier Boy with an eleven-year old. She kicks off her shoes, though, and she’s up, standing behind Henry, trying to follow his steps. Steven laughs and claps from the couch.

“Now watch me YOOOUUUU,” sings Henry. He points to her for a solo. She leans back and snaps her fingers.

***

When Judith books her flight to New York, she notices it is flight #1312, leaving at 6:43 in the morning on May 15. Her interview will be in 6 days. There are no elevens anywhere. Maybe, it is time to invite a few other numbers into her life.

She waits for the confirmation email. One comes from Alicia instead. There’s a link to go to the site called Survive 2012. The end of the world, Alicia writes, for those who aren’t prepared.

Judith will not mind the end of the world. The end always comes.

Just let me be with those I love, she thinks. And let us be holding hands.

PETER MCMINN

Sanctum

WHEN HE HURLED HIMSELF from the train that morning he scrambled away from the wheels and waited in the wet ditch between the tracks and the highway. The last of the freight cars trundled past and he got up looking around, hands in his oil-skin coat, for anyone watching. Across the road, a single farmhouse with its outbuildings sprawling the top of a hill. The fugitive stood in the ditch, eyes following the rows of a short green crop that swept up to the house in long curves. A trace of night was still rising from the dirt and the tang of manure flavored the air. No one up at the house that he could see, either on the veranda or in the fenced-off yard. Over his right shoulder, in what he guessed a westerly direction, scrappy grassland reached downward to an outcropping of spindly lodge-pole.

Somewhere behind him the sound of a light-duty motor shuddered to life, probably from the rusting metal shed at some fifty yards. He decided in that foil of noise to bolt, lighting across the field in gaping strides toward the pines. He ran with the weight of the .45 in his pocket slapping the side of his leg like something needy. When he reached the cover of trees, he dropped to the ground and lay on his back panting hard, but he stopped to hold his breath and listen. Only the sound of the tractor, which must have come out of the shed by now, rose above the pounding of the blood in his head. He rolled to all fours and crawled to a rotting log where he rested and watched.

The dry, brown grass stood tall and still as a picture. The small machine appeared over a rise in the land; driver’s hunting cap shading his face, arms of a denim coat jerking at the wheel, steering over the bumpy terrain more or less in the direction of the pines where he was hiding. The fugitive took out the gun and gripped tightly the wood-sheathed handle, darting eyes into the forest behind him. He glanced back at the field when the loose metallics of the motor that moment switched to a muffled putter. Moving away from him now upon its new direction, the tractor appeared briefly in retreat. The farmer had jagged onto a service road, the bright orange of his cap just dipping out of sight.

He let his body sink to the moist ground behind the log, relaxing there with bone of his cheek heavy in a thick patch of moss. He breathed through his mouth, resting and listening to the machine drone down the little valley and away. It was respite he couldn’t afford and the muscles in his thighs were loaded springs. In a minute he was up again, moving quickly into the deeper woods. The hard soles of his work shoes kicked up the loamy earth while low branches whipped at his face. He chose every descent, determined, traveling downward to the river.

***

Atop a stump and shading his eyes, he saw the valley flatten where the river flowed. He pitched forward and commenced stomping through boggy terrain, the damp seeping into his shoes. And time slogged along with him, enveloping the movement of his legs, his grappling arms. A low wall of foliage rose ahead but his gait didn’t slow. He dove into it, flailing at the vegetation so that a great deal later, after the welts and scrapes had subsided, the scars from the snapping branches marked him for the remainder of his life. But the limbs became heavier and serpentine, and it was vine maple he was traversing, weaving thick and dense down the bank. He could hear the steady rush of the river and moved faster to the sound, scrambling over the trunks as quickly as he might, plying the density with the charge of a predator or its prey.

In a sparse clearing of a few square feet the fugitive stopped to inspect the gun, which in its large pocket had occasionally cracked against a branch and rattled. Gingerly, he pulled out the weapon and checked the safety. He rubbed with the pad of his thumb at the darkening stains along the barrel before stashing the gun away again. He jerked his chin up, cocked his head. Beyond the folds of leaves, the river was a crowd of murmurs and shouts like something taunting him, drawing him down. He waited briefly, an eyelid twitching, before throwing himself again into the curling gray of the maple thicket. For another quarter of an hour, he thrashed his arms and contorted his body through the diagonal maze of trunks and branches. The rhythm of his motion fell into boot stomp, branch whip, sudden clamor of leaves.

He moved with her fair, clean face before him, all around him, dying: the shattering blast and the oval mouth of her dismay as she fell back and away. That moment upon him now beat its wings about his ears and shoulders, and he leapt, tripping headlong onto a narrow beach of smooth gravel, his whole weight nearly flying into the river for its momentum.

He crawled to the edge and drank with his face in the water.

***

The voice of the river was a loud chorus here of shouts and goading. He looked up and downstream, stepped into the shallows and began walking awkwardly, pulling his trailing shoe completely out of the water and plunging it ahead. In only a few minutes he had clambered up a dry boulder, confounded by the severe cold of the water and the steady draw at his shins. But he persisted and as he worked his way up the river, his feet grew numb and warm, and he took less frequent breaks. The day’s clouds rushed overhead into the elevations and crows swept down to peck among the low bracken on shore.

He’d been humming in the first hours, bits of melodies through the tedium. But now he began to shout above the roar of the rapids, an anguished bellow, yelling his voice out, stumbling in the edgewater like a bear inebriated, losing his balance and bending to steady himself with the knuckles of his fingers curled against a low boulder. He gathered himself straight, leaned back with his arms outstretched, and cried into the canyon ahead: two long syllables echoing against a cliff, a woman’s name. Then he toppled all but into the water before he caught himself and moved with his shaking legs into the slower flow of an eddy. He tramped up a squat mud bank, heeding not so much the choppy tracks in his leave. The weight at his side pulled him down so that he limped ungainly as he made his way to a hollow he’d spotted in the ruddy ground. The fugitive dragged from it a large fallen limb and crawled into the trough to lay there, tucking his knees into his chest. The voices in the river crowded around him and a moth rested its silver-brown wings along the shoulder hem of his coat.

Sleep promptly enveloped him, and in the dream that followed he is standing again in the river, wavering and peering into the sky where a hawk is banking a wide circle, rising. He cannot feel the water at his feet and his arms and legs hang about him in long rags. When his body crashes through the water he keeps falling through the bright quick, the gun pulling him down; but his hands--hands have become shredded cloth--her night shirt, a bloodied fragment floating up now toward the surface where they will find it, trace it back to him even as he falls deeper and away. What else can he let go? He inhales to drown. His feet he can feel stinging and he knows his shoes are off and he will be gone now, released. They won’t find him in the end. Their whining, baying dogs will drown and tumble down the river with him, useless and free.

***

A squealing, high and grating, like the old sow he and a buddy used to bully as teenagers, pierced the heaviness that had settled around his skull. The noise yielded to lower tones and varied in pitch very much like that pig when it learned who they were and why they’d come to her pen those hot afternoons. He saw himself as he was then: a boy of 15 already gaunt in the cheeks like his father. The memory dashed away and voices replaced it, amplified, distorted; an orchestra was playing a piece he might have known.

It was then his eyelids fluttered and with the tinge of light came also the scent of old wood smoke, or rancid coffee. The hellish noise advanced upon him fast too, like that tortured animal finally having its way, coming after him in his death to haunt eternally whatever was left of his mind. The thought tamed him, brought closer the awful scent of himself as he lay beneath the weight his life had become.

The vertical image of a wooden bar crossed his view and as he was having this thought and the wretchedness he’d committed, even that which he hadn’t, it astounded him how in death some things were the same. He blinked and he found that he was looking at a piece of hewn timber, a beam which he followed with his eyes into shadow rafters. The room was dark except for the horizontal glow that flickered near the floor. The fugitive watched in the cracks between the boards darting shards of light from what he soon recognized to be a jittering candle flame.

The music snapped away, replaced by a loud buzz succumbing instantly to an announcer’s voice. He heard his name, or most of it, and words summarizing the crime, the ugliness of which nothing in the world would release him, his innocence of which he alone would ever understand. Beside the bed the oilskin coat draped across a chair, and he knew from the way it hung what it still carried.

The shortwave clicked off in the next room. He flexed his toes and bent a leg at the knee, and beneath the dense quilt there was warmth. Deadening sleep swept him over again, heavy against his muscles as if he were buried in sand.

He awoke, a man rising from a cave. Light swam beneath his lids as bits of matter hovered and drifted. Dreams were still upon him, and although his nostrils flared at the presence of another body close and silent, his sleeping self struggled to remain underground. The light swirled and yellowed and he began climbing out of unconsciousness, unwillingly but induced of the urgent sense he wasn’t alone. And being so, had he been discovered? It rested there, a question at the bottom of his slumber.