One Story

Shackteau

That was the year they lived in the shackteau. They didn’t give it that name, the guy who built it did. He built it perched and leaning on a wooded hillside, built it so you could walk straight onto its roof from the ground behind, or stare out at the trees through its wall of windows stitched together like a patch quilt, or lean over the railing of its balcony swaying on stilts over the sloping drop. The door on the side stepped onto a path that wound up the woods to a clearing. Inside was a propane stove with two burners beneath a propane lamp, a counter wedged between cupboards painted crimson, and a table and chairs beneath a loft bed that nearly reached the ceiling. When they arrived there was also a squat metal file cabinet that had become a nest for mice. After dragging it up the hill they spent the first days scrubbing the stain on the floor and wishing away the stench. The mice didn’t leave with the nest but stuck around in the nook full of spare wood and windows behind the back wall under the roof along the hillside. At night the mice ran laps along a board in the nook, right behind the head of the bed; they came inside to check for crumbs, skittering across the floor, climbing up to the counter, scratching at the cupboards. The bed was camping pads and sleeping bags piled on a wooden platform. It was a lot like camping. It was impossible to get any sleep. The noise was significant, persistent, and prompted a compromise of their vision: they would use traps. While eventually this stilled the patter long enough for sleep to come, it initially forced an unsettling ritual on the early stretch of nights in the forest. The scratching would come, then the waiting, then the snap. He would climb down and pry open the lever, release the weight from the tiny machine, take the tail between his fingers and hurl the body out into the dark. They carried on under the assumption that the mice would learn or leave. They got used to the snap of the traps but never to the racket when the traps didn’t work. Then making it quiet again did not always help them sleep. They kept count until the number felt extraordinary. It was almost like naming, a reminder of something, but soon became something they preferred to forget. He could not forget the eyes of those he had to help along. 

It wasn’t a whole year, just a few months where spring and summer met. Cold enough when they arrived to run the heater all night, hot enough when they left that ice melted in their cooler after a day. Before they left the city everyone was talking about living off the grid, it was a trending topic, though no one they knew had actually done it, just a handful of almost mythical characters who had crafted the lifestyle into an online brand, presented with incredible production quality, immodestly bankrolled while professing thrift, an advertisement of uncertain purpose. Then there were ads for tiny homes, whose pictures everyone enjoyed, whose prices everyone ignored. Then the pleasure of rugged dreams gave way to worried contemplation as people began to lose their jobs at a scale and rhythm that brought the force of swell to the surface just before the crash. Houses were foreclosed by the millions, they heard; rents were outrageous, they were beginning to learn. Getting back to nature began to feel less like luxury than necessity. For a while Chris and Corey kept their jobs, or rather their jobs kept them, until they too were no longer needed. It was as if dozens of websites suddenly realized they had employed too many people to repackage other websites’ content, as if they had been forced to recognize their redundancy and responded by forcing that redundancy on their employees. Chris and Corey both wrote stories, which they shared and occasionally published, and they both talked about the novels they’d write, talked late into the night about how it was impossible to find the time, then nearly panicked when they got all the time back. Chris burned through several restaurant jobs and moved in with Corey, who lived in her parents’ otherwise empty West Village apartment. They showed up one Sunday morning unannounced and dressed up after mass at St. Joseph’s, just about walking in on Chris and Corey wrapped up in bed, and it was all Corey’s mother could do to keep Corey’s father from kicking Chris out on the spot. Something had been violated, perhaps the apartment, though Corey’s parents insisted it had to do with god. Chris couldn’t stay. For a week he paced the rooms demanding to know what year it was. Corey couldn’t just kick him out, but she didn’t really want to leave herself. Finally Chris recalled his aunt and uncle, who lived in a yurt up by the Finger Lakes and had offered one of their extra cabins if he ever needed to get out of the city. For a weekend or a month or whatever, they had told him. He began to shape the urge to flee into something like a plan. He never seriously considered all he would be leaving. He never really thought about going alone. He marshalled a picture of authentic literature to make his plea. 

They fashioned, together, a kind of shelf, from extra lumber his uncle kept in a barn built with bricks of hay, three floors of barn none of which stored hay or straw but rather engine parts, tools, lumber, signage, camping outfits, appliances, sinks, cupboards, shelves, windows with and without glass, mantles without their fireplaces, a gramophone, a cabinet radio, several toilets, one of which they would need, partly dismantled steps, lamps, chandeliers, pottery, lawn statuary, frames missing paintings, paintings missing frames, curios from yard sales and all manner of assorted nostalgia, including, up at the top of the labyrinth, down at the end of the mezzanine looking over the stockpile through which they’d climbed, a handmade, household bar shelf, adorned with antique beer cans nailed in place to make a shrine, the same monument to good old times that had lurked in the basement of Chris’s grandfather’s, his aunt’s father’s, house, way up in Cheektowaga, a basement that also had a bumper pool table and shelf upon shelf of sporting trophies won by his father and his father’s numerous siblings. Whose is the biggest, they would ask. The bar shelf sat there as though it had been lying in wait, it appeared, in the dust in the windowlight, as though it had only just now been hauled up and placed there, and by Chris himself, unwitting, or as though with both eyes closed. His uncle, who had chaperoned their trip through the barn like a proud parent, asked if they’d ever had moonshine. Before they could respond he pulled a bottle from a lower cabinet and a couple shot glasses from an upper shelf, blowing into and wiping the glasses cleanish with a ragged finger. Will it burn? Corey asked. This is Tennessee clearwater, he answered. A buddy of his got it from the guy who made it for a race car driver. It goes straight to your head, he said, filling the glasses. They smiled, clinked, drank, dizzied, giggled, and paid their respects. They did not build the shack shelf that day. The next day they put it up along the windowed wall that looked out at the woods, a shelf on which to place their small selection of books and to write standing, just like they’d read some famous dead authors had done. The first morning of the shelf’s life they stood together in the chill over coffee gazing at the lightening green where out of the fog stepped a small deer, then another, then a third, a doe with a pair of fawns, pausing to nibble and drink, following the trail of what was not quite a stream that ran across the slope. The deer passed very close, their eyes big and dark, passed close enough that Chris and Corey could hear the gentle crunch of their steps, passed close but did not startle. They took it as a welcome. They kept whispering after the deer had gone, following with their eyes the trail that had been revealed. He held her as the heater warmed them, pressed against her from behind, pressed her palms flat on the shelf, gazing out at the green which seemed to nod, even to bow, and right in his direction, but when he pulled at her pants she took his hand and led him up the ladder to bed. 

Uncle Mike and Aunt Miriam, after several years of driving across the country behind the Grateful Dead, selling grilled cheese sandwiches out of their Volkswagen bus, dancing and singing night after night and making a gang of friends, resting between tours down where he was from in west Tennessee, after those years of roaming they had decided to plant themselves like a pair of trees and followed a friend’s advice to Watkin’s Glen, New York, where they found a man selling some acreage up on a mountain east of Seneca Lake, up past where the paved road turned to gravel, with an address in Montour Falls, an even smaller town than the Glen. They purchased eighty acres for the price of a used car, on a loan whose terms they negotiated direct with the owner, then sold half to a man who shaved his share down to a par three golf course, paid off most of the rest with the proceeds from the sale, covering the last of it in just a few years, a friendly transaction, no banks involved, low price, low risk, except there was no house and moving in meant sleeping in tents, but there would be no permits needed either as no ground was broken for the yurt they built, propped up as it was on a foundation of old tires and concrete in the small clearing that sat well back from the road, down a dirt drive through a tunnel of trees. They camped out with friends who helped hoist the yurt from the earth. They kept a photo album of the process on the table by the sofa inside. The interior was one big round cozy room under a conical roof, kitchen over here, sofa over there, a wood burning stove dead center, its chimney rising to the peak, a loft with a bed to one side, underneath it the curtained room belonging to Rosemary and Pearl, Chris’s cousins, eleven and nine years old. Mike and Miriam were childless when they first arrived. For the first ten years they drove to a spring two miles away to gather water while they saved up for a well. They dug the outhouse soon after the yurt was raised, and it smelled about how you might expect after seventeen years. They were in the midst of building an addition to the yurt to give their daughters some space, now that they were getting older. Rosemary and Pearl were homeschooled by Miriam in another structure they called the schoolhouse which sat just south of the yurt; on the north side a school bus fitted out like a camper was parked forever in a clump of weeds. Part of the plan for the new addition included a bathroom with composting toilet. The old head was just downhill from the yurt, a considerable walk from the shack. At first Uncle Mike said to use the hillside in the woods if needed, just toss the paper wherever, the earth would welcome it, he said, but it very soon became too much so Mike showed Chris the spot off to the other side where their friend had begun clearing space for the hole he never dug. Uncle Mike had shovels, a pick axe and a digging bar. He let Chris get started, then came by to help, sometime after Chris had struck the first layers of shale, which was almost immediately, given how deep the hole needed to be. After that it was like digging in concrete. They took turns with the bar and the pick, worked until Chris was aching, until the bar rattled his spine. Uncle Mike said to let him know when the hole was so wide and so deep and he’d bring over the head, told him to take a few days, not to rush, and left him with the rest of the job. It took a week and a half. Chris was astonished by the pain in his back, and yet marveled that he did not quit digging. Each day Corey called across the stretch of woods to say that she had fixed their lunch. Calling back he felt as though they had entered a game, taking up roles without discussion, performing some frontier charade. Corey didn’t mind making lunch, it’s not like it was cooking, but she found it difficult to concentrate, alone in the shack, with the echo of Chris’s digging and grunting reaching her through the trees. Even when he was there, beside her, or standing at the shelf while she sat at the table, she found it hard to understand what she was doing, what she had hoped to see on the page and what was, or, for the most part, was not appearing there. More than once Chris told Uncle Mike he was done only to have his uncle look and tell him, with a pat on the back, that he was not. Eventually, when it no longer seemed possible to widen the hole’s bottom, when he could just barely chip away at its tail, when his back began to seize with every thrust, then his uncle brought out the pot with a cushioned seat and handcut wooden lid. Later they would build the house, paint a moon on its door. For now, perched on a platform, exposed to the trees, they had regained a little dignity. 

Mike and Miriam’s shower was outdoors, another little house on the bus side of the yurt. When the weather warmed they took down the walls and washed in the open. The water ran from the well through a heater which needed a half hour or so to get cooking. The first time Chris and Corey tried it too soon and the spray made them jump out the door. Their clothes lay in a pile as they huddled in the doorway, shivering. Bruno, Mike and Miriam’s german shepherd, who roamed the woods like his own master, found them waiting and nudged his nose at their bare cheeks, making them jump back in the water. Soon it began to warm. Corey pressed her face into Chris’s chest, inhaling the sour, sniffing out the sweet. She could not recall ever having been so close to someone who had not bathed in so long. The water warmed and they stepped in together. She thought he was joking, of course, when he proposed the adventure. And now, she smiled, he can’t get away. Her friends refused to believe, kept asking over text where she really was, invited her to parties next week in the city. She didn’t mind letting them wonder, but wondered as well on her own. She could not tell with Chris where determination became delusion. But their long walks in the woods were something she hadn’t known she needed, and the drive around the lake was stunning and somehow hopeful, even the abandoned town in the north, less so the Walmart in the south. Soon the cafes and wineries along east and west would open for the season. Soon they might swim in the glacial lake. Soon she might understand what she wanted to write, or why, though she suspected this wasn’t the place, that the retreat would not do what he imagined it would do, that they both would find out what that meant soon enough. Meanwhile a simple shower rarely felt so bracing. He wanted her there, but the girls were around, Bruno lay at the door, she made him wait. The dog led them downhill to the shack where curled in the sun on the stone by the door lay a small black snake. Bruno caught its tail and whipped it wildly, then laid it dead on the stone and sat. They patted his head and stepped inside. The quiet hit Corey like a bus. Time to take me to town, she said. 

Night came early to the woods. They cooked dinner after basting themselves in bug spray, which his aunt had assured them they would not need up there on the mountain. They cooked simply, pasta with a sauce, rice with vegetables, two pot maximum, often with a bottle of wine. A small speaker run on batteries, hooked to an ipod, gave them music when they preferred rhythm and swing to the chant and hum of crickets. Sometimes they would read aloud from a book, very rarely from something they’d written. Chris was shy about sharing until it was ready, which often seemed to be never, while Corey felt she was doing nothing but tracing lazy designs on the page, drawing the same leaf, over and over, passing time. This didn’t bother her on its own, but next to someone who, she began to notice, treated the work of writing as though through it lay salvation, her wandering about the page as though circling a favorite tree felt somehow dissonant, judged. She worried she had lost some edge, he some tenderness. She didn’t know what he was writing, but guessed he wasn’t describing the trees. She traced flowers, dipped a pen in dirt, folded beetles into pages, and waited. Back in the city, on the train, in coffeeshops or bars, against the noise, they had read to each other, read entire books that way, read them as though this alone could hold them together. Very soon after they had met, she had dared him to read Infinite Jest, literally dangled her worn copy. She explained to him how it had found her, how it had kept her going, how it leapt off the oddest shelf at just the right time. No one else I know will read it, she told him. He wanted to know what it meant. The more he read the closer they became. They argued over it, over its shape, about what it was trying to say. Their disagreements often fell upon the book’s theme of addiction and depression, its long interrogations of a treatment program’s demand that patients submit to a higher power, its parallel caricature of the struggles between parents and children. The searching obsessions struck Corey as right, the submission necessary and inevitable. The discomfort they caused Chris seemed to him more than just an intended effect. The isolation feels true to her, mistaken to him. In the shack those positions held, as neither yet understood what they concealed. They kept their readings separate: he Magic Mountain, she Malina. Yet they continued discussing Wallace, even brought him along for reference, as though they needed more than his spirit. They kept his book on the shelf just below a window on the far left where the shack’s builder had placed a sticker that read, one word on top of the other, Don’t Jump. They could pretty much always see it, except when they slept. They’d been told he’d been working things out, and that he’d gotten out, gotten over, gotten on. They were conscious of having chosen a place that had been to him less than a choice, though they were not always careful with that knowledge. 

After dinner they boiled a pot of water to wash dishes outside on the hill, holding sponge and plate, fork, spoon, glass, out at arm’s length to keep their feet dry, typically in the light of their headlamps. One of the first pieces of practical advice offered by Mike and Miriam was to get flashlights that strapped to their heads. So from evening on when they wandered out they felt like miners in a cave. They washed, rinsed, and left it all on the porch to dry. Inside they sat down to read or pour more wine and talk, often about what they needed, a running list of adaptation that displaced literary discussion, a growing desire to understand where they were, who they were with, what it might become. The chairs on the balcony were rickety wooden loungers, the chairs inside were old patio pieces, white metal frame with silicon straps stretched across like weavings. They sat on opposite sides of the table or scooted around to be close, to offer up a foot or two for a rub as they assessed their condition. Miriam showed me her garden today, Corey said one night as Chris poured more wine. They had begun, she had noticed, and not just to herself, to more frequently finish an open bottle the same evening. Did you offer to help again? Chris said. She showed me a tiny spot, like footprint size, that we could use if we want, Corey said. But does she want? Chris said. Corey shrugged. Miriam doesn’t use fertilizer, she said. Organic? he said. Well, she has fertilizer, but she doesn’t use it, she said. What do you mean? he said. She uses the idea of fertilizer, she said. The idea? he said. Well, no, not the idea, but its energy, she said. The idea’s energy, or the fertilizer’s energy? he said. She has these tiny glass jars, she said, like vials, with a tiny amount of, like, nitrogen, or phosphorous. Phosphorous? he said. Nutrients that plants like, she said. Do plants like phosphorous? he said. The vials look basically empty, she said, a dash of dirt, a pinch of sand. Are they like salt shakers? he said. No, they’re vials, she said. She doesn’t sprinkle, he said. She doesn’t even take the tops off, she said. Why would she? he said. To be honest most of the vials looked pretty much the same, she said, I don’t know how she tells them apart. But she never opens them, he said. But she uses their energy, she said. But how does she use the energy if she doesn’t open the vials? he said. She told me that the energy of the nutrients isn’t confined to a physical body, that all the energy of the phosphorous or whatever is available to us, if only we can learn how to use it, she said. So how does she use it? he said. She shows the vials, one by one, to the garden, to the earth, to the seeds, to the plants when they grow, to help them grow, she said. Shows them? he said. Shows them, she said. Can seeds see? he said. It’s not about seeing, she said, it’s about energy. She waves the energy, he said, like smoke in a censer? She kind of just holds it there, she said. Does she close her eyes and chant? he said. Are you calling your aunt a witch? she said. Not exactly, he said. Did you know your other aunt is a healer? Corey said. Deborah, Chris said. She had cancer, went to a healer, learned to heal herself, and the cancer went away, she said. I think maybe she met the healer first, he said. You know about this, she said. Energy medicine, he said. Did you know that she taught, or is teaching Miriam to be a healer too? I heard that she’s starting an energy medicine consulting enterprise. Miriam told me the name, she said. It’s astrological, he said. So you know your father is into it too? she said. I heard he read a book, he said, but I thought he was just being a brother. Apparently he’s also a student, she said. I didn’t know this had gone so mainstream, he said. You should talk to your parents more often, she said. Or maybe less often, he said. Miriam told me she would lend me a book, Corey said. Fantastic, Chris said. He poured more wine. They emptied the bottle that night. Before climbing the ladder to bed they brought the drying dishes in from the porch so they weren’t covered in ants in the morning. Chris strapped on a headlamp, stepped out the door and stopped. The forest pressed upon him transformed, unrecognizable, a glittering cage. He leaned back against the door and slowed the waving of his light until it fixed on a floating body, a tiny wiggling worm, just before his eyes. It was the length of a finger digit, a little fatter than a pencil, ridged into sections, and very pale, almost translucent. Slowly it curled and stretched and turned, then fell from the light on a thread. Countless threads glimmered in the light as far in the woods as it shone, descending like frozen raindrops, weaving a milky web. Chris went back inside and put Corey’s lamp on her head without speaking, as though silence would preserve the scene, turned off the propane lamp and drew her out into the dark, trying to watch her face without blinding her with his light. They stood on the porch, under its awning, gazing at the gossamer woods. The worms writhed as they fell, landed on the porch about their feet, and crawled with purpose, inching into the brush. For a long time they watched the threads, for a long time they hung there, as more worms continued to follow, joining the slow descent. 

Chris was lugging cans of propane from the car through the clearing when Uncle Mike stepped out of the woods and asked if they could talk. The heat was beginning to find its way up the mountain, burning off the canopy of clouds that hung over the clearing in spring. Chris was getting used to the cans, carried two at a time for balance, his hands recalling that summer he had a job building swimming pools, recalled the grip on a shovel as though regaining some old strength, adopting a familiar clench, a clench that seemed at times to hold all on its own, to refuse to relax and open. He set down the cans in the grass. With no preamble, Mike asked about his plans for work. Chris began to talk about writing, but his uncle stopped him to talk about money. They were still getting unemployment checks, Chris explained, forwarded from a friend in the city. Mike knew this, as the checks arrived in their box at the post office in town. But money was not entirely the point. Mike told his nephew that the checks would not come forever, and that they did not want to find themselves still in the shack facing winter. Chris didn’t quite know how to say that their plan wasn’t to settle down up there, and began to wonder what Corey had told his aunt. He quickly realized that he could not defend not working for a wage. His uncle drove around picking up cans of food waste for a compost business, and in the winter plowed snow with one of the trucks parked beside the barn. As Mike tried to give his nephew a little encouragement, Chris felt an old, familiar shame and began, without moving, to withdraw. He noticed that Mike was holding an unopened can of Pabst, fitted in his hand like an arm in a sleeve. Miriam had mentioned early on, proudly, that Mike could always be found like that, holding a can of Pabst, which at first sounded more like myth than reality, or like nostalgia, but this had begun to change, as Chris had accumulated a collection of images of his uncle stepping out of doors, of the yurt, the barn, his truck, with his rounded grip fastened to a shining cylinder, as though it were a plug and he had just pulled himself from an outlet. The can slipped in his hand like it was there for its cold, it somehow resembled a steak slapped against a black eye, just like in the movies, a salve for the strain, recompense for endless exertion. We don’t have anything open right now, Mike said, but I talked to Jim who owns the diner down in Montour Falls. They could use a dishwasher. Part time, but better than nothing. Let me know if you want me to give him a call. Chris said alright and picked up his propane. He thought of Orwell. Orwell was a dishwasher, he thought, a plongeur. This thought was dispersed by another, something he had read about Thoreau, whose writings from his own infamous shack could not credibly be deemed inspiration for this adventure, yet whose spirit now and then haunted its edges, whispering something they did not want to hear about the conformity of their decision. Thoreau wrote about building his own home, catching his own fish, walking his own walks, reading his own books, thinking his own thoughts, alone in the woods. What never appears in Walden, Chris had read somewhere, was that he was not out in some wilderness but squatting on land that belonged to his friend, famous scholar and speaker Emerson, and that his mother regularly walked out to his house to bring him sandwiches. Chris thought of Thoreau’s mother, walking in a dress with her hair in a bun on a path in the woods with a plate in her hands, little slices of packed bread with the crust peeled off and peanut butter jelly spread between, as he arrived at the shack with the jugs of gas. Inside Corey had a giant smile. I’m going to learn how to make cheese, she said. 

She knew he would feel abandoned, almost betrayed, but she couldn’t help it, she was feeling a little abandoned and betrayed herself, or, in more prosaic yet significant terms, she was feeling bored and secluded, and had to do something. Maybe he really was filling up that notebook, but he no longer wanted to talk about it, while she had begun to sleep more, or as much as she could on a plank of wood, and had let her writing about wind in the trees become halfhearted sketchings of leaves. She had begun to insist they take a drive, somewhere, anywhere, every day. The novelty had worn off, and the whole endeavor had begun, in no time at all, to feel endless. They had agreed, in the spirt of adventure, to keep things offline and analog, which was easy enough in the woods, with no internet or even electricity. But her phone got a decent signal uphill and she began checking in with friends back in the city more often. Corey had not taken seriously Chris’s proposal that they not even take photos, but it turned out that he had, and could even be mean about it, suggesting it had less to do with cultivating a lifestyle than with guarding some pain. She hoped he would work it out. At least he stopped the weekly count of their visits to the library for internet. She started searching online for meetups or calls for volunteers, anything that might take her out of the woods and into the company of other people. There was not so much on offer, at least not much that was appealing and relatively close. What she found was a woman named Frankie who needed a few hours of help making cheese. Corey sent her an email. To her surprise and delight, she received a reply. They spoke on the phone. Frankie’s voice boomed, her laughter embraced, her welcome made Corey feel her inexperience was a virtue. I just need a hand moving these rounds, that’s all, Frankie said. She paid nothing, which bothered Corey none. You can have some cheese, Frankie said, and as much curd as you can stomach. They agreed on a time and Corey told Chris, all smiles and excitement to head off any objection and to disguise, for a moment, the fact that she was giving him a chance to do what he could not yet admit he did not really want to do, which was be left alone in the woods. She hoped for but did not hang on a show of support. Predictably, he joked that she was leaving him, which she took as a gesture of recognition, ambivalent but not blind. She drove out in the morning, gripped by a tiny thrill. Frankie lived alone on a small farm outside Montour Falls, easy enough to find but farther away than expected, the way everything seemed around there. She greeted Corey out by the car with a hug that nearly swallowed her whole. Did you say you worked on a farm before? Frankie said. Corey felt more teased than judged, but once they got down to work, which was pretty much right away, she understood the distinction. The rounds Frankie needed help moving from the big room with the bathing machines to the small room with the sealed shelves were as large as a torso and heavy as a slab of concrete, or what Corey imagined a slab of concrete might feel like if one were handed to her. Strong as she was Frankie could not carry the rounds on her own. Yet try as she might Corey felt she was dragging Frankie down, putting the cheese in danger of smashing to pieces on the floor. Frankie was encouraging but checked her smile until the last round was nestled in place. Then they cleaned and talked and Frankie shared some cheese, a kind of gouda she called farm cheese, on the hard side but smooth and light on the tongue. Corey tried to explain how she had ended up in the Finger Lakes, and Frankie gave the impression that she understood. She told Corey she came up here ten years ago, after leaving her husband, shook her head and said, Let’s go get some milk. They drove in Frankie’s truck to another farm where an old man named Bill handed over crates and a jug. Now you can say you worked on a farm, Frankie told Corey. On the drive back Frankie made a dispirited sound and pulled over. You better stay here, she said, getting out. Corey watched in the mirror as Frankie, as if sneaking up on somebody, crept around the back of the truck into the grass and over the ditch along the road, crouching, her jaw moving gently, toward the wood. Corey leaned to keep her in sight until she vanished into the trees. Just as the wait began to feel long enough to make Corey wonder if she should follow, Frankie appeared again in the mirror alongside the truck, approaching Corey’s door with her arms full of deer. She put the fawn in Corey’s lap and told her to hold tight. The fawn tucked its legs and shivered. Corey pulled it close, fingers pressed in its bristling fur. It gave a leap when the engine turned but Corey held tight. She heard herself whispering to it, cooing even, searching its frightened eyes. At home Frankie put a nipple on a bottle of cow’s milk and they sat on the floor as it wobbled about the living room. They took turns holding out the bottle and watching it drink as it watched them back, its dark eyes wide and hesitant but softening, Corey thought, warming to their company. Frankie called a friend. They had to find a way to give it to another doe. Corey had not seen what Frankie had not mentioned lay on the side of the road. The fawn had stood waiting at the edge of the trees, stood as if it would wave waited near forever, Frankie told her. You don’t need to stay, she said, I’ve kept you longer than I said I would. Corey said she would like to help. Some kind of flush moved under her cheeks, troubled the corners of her mouth, tickled her eyes, which she kept on the baby deer. Frankie’s friend Sarah came and they went together in Sarah’s car, Corey in back holding the fawn again, which trembled less this time, she thought, and seemed to sneak glances into Corey’s eyes. After a gravel road and then dirt they pulled over and Corey handed the deer to Sarah. Frankie and Corey waited, and Sarah returned with a smile that lifted her arms. She took her, she told them. They pulled off and drove back. Do you do this all the time? Corey asked. They laughed and said of course.

Over dinner in the yurt, Miriam told them how a friend of a friend had been bitten by a rabid bat nesting in their barn. Mike squeezed a circle with his finger and thumb and said this was how small they were, folded up, this was the size of the hole they could slip through, this was all the space they needed to nest. Barn rafters needed frequent checking. They were drinking wine around the table, Mike and Miriam and Chris and Corey, while Chris’s cousins sat on the sofa watching a VHS tape of Saved by the Bell. Dinner was lentils with potatoes and carrots and spinach, Mike’s cooking. He didn’t just show the spices to the pot, but sprinkled them in, Chris had whispered in Corey’s ear. Miriam had something like a veil draped over her wineglass, a square of chiffon with silver balls stitched to the corners, because a single fruit fly will ruin a whole glass, she told them. She was saying how people burned sage and even garlic to chase the bats away. Does garlic really work? Corey asked. People like to think it does, Mike said. Chris asked Miriam when the restaurant where she worked opened for the season. Memorial Day to Thanksgiving, she told him. And what do people do for work in the winter? he asked. They collect unemployment, Miriam said. Every year? Chris said. It’s seasonal work, Miriam said, and there’s nothing else. The state supports the tourist economy, Mike said, by making sure all its workers don’t just leave. For how long? Corey said. Ten years so far, Mike said. It’s just a fraction of what I make during the season, Miriam said, but it helps. Mike opened another bottle. Corey asked if the girls wanted to go to high school. Pearl does, Miriam said. Rosemary’s not so sure. We’re talking about you darlings, Mike called over, to no response. Pearl might go to middle school, Miriam said. We told them middle school was their choice, but high school was not. They got to go, Mike said. All their friends will be there, Miriam said. After dinner the four of them wandered outside, where Mike pulled a joint from a pocket. As she passed it, Miriam said it was homegrown. Where are the plants? Chris said. Right in front of the bus you walk by every day, Miriam said. In that clump of weeds? Chris said. You don’t smell it? Miriam said. Neither Chris nor Corey had noticed. Miriam asked Corey if she had started reading the book. Corey said she had, just a bit, not much. You should read it too, Miriam told Chris. Energy medicine? Chris said. You know Deborah’s a healer, Miriam said. Chris nodded. Anyone can do it, Miriam said, you just have to tap into the energy. Let me show you, she said, stepping toward Chris. Put your fingers like this, she said, making a circle with her forefinger and thumb. Chris wanted to say no thanks, but his resistance seemed to be buried way down where the smoke had gone. He did as he was told. Hold tight, Miriam said, hold them as tight as you can. Chris held tight. Miriam entwined their finger circles. A giggle bubbled up from somewhere deep down and before Chris could choke it off Miriam pulled and the bubble burst and the circle broke. Okay now, she said, you pull. Again she hooked their fingers. Again Chris felt the laughter rising to the surface, ascending through his cheeks and out his ears, escaping with a sound like a duck. He looked at Corey. She wasn’t smiling. Pull, Miriam said. Chris mimicked a deep breath as he settled his eyes on the finger loops. When he pulled he released a snort. Their fingers held tight. Are you pulling? Miriam said. Chris pulled, watching the circles, and thought of arm wrestling, which did not stop the giggle. You can’t break it, Miriam said, because I have the energy. Okay, Chris nearly cried. Corey watched him now but he couldn’t meet her eyes. Now I’m going to give you the energy, Miriam said. Okay, Chris whispered. Are you holding tight? she said. Chris nodded. Miriam pulled and Chris stared as the loops tugged away on a line, he watched his pinching fingers and felt the yank up in his shoulder. You feel that? she said. That’s the energy. The giggling had gone, chased off by a gathering sadness, which he thought he saw reflected in Corey as he finally met her eyes. They said good night and began the walk back. The stars pressed down, lifted their gaze, drew them close. How did it feel? Corey said. Magical, Chris said. The clearing hummed with moonlight that fell from their shoulders as they entered the wood. 

On a low pane of the side window opposite the shack’s door, there was a small hole in the glass, a corner cracked and fallen out. Chris thought about that hole sometimes, during the coldest nights, or when mosquitos kept them awake, or other bugs fell in their cooking pot. It was not the only crack, but it was the one he thought about. The longer they stayed the less he worried, the flimsier the walls became, the more the line between in and out dissolved, though it never disappeared. One night Chris startled awake, popped up and sat with sluggish eyes, waiting for the dark to part, listening for the noise to return when the air moved across his face and the tiniest of sounds brushed him with the night. A muffled squealing wheeled through the room and threw him back down to bed. Corey woke and sat straight up, asking what it was. Chris neither moved nor answered. She asked again; he could not respond. Finally he whispered that she should lie back down, to which she responded by nearly shouting now, What was it. The sound seemed to have gone. He grabbed the headlamp and traced the room, finding nothing. I think it was a bat, he said. Inside? she said. He climbed down and said they had to look for it, or he did, she could stay up there, which she answered by climbing down. Chris lit the lamp and took the broom from its corner, wielding it like a weapon. They rehearsed what they’d been told, how bats folded themselves as small as the pit of a plum, and began checking seams and corners, under the shelf and the loft and the counter, up in the rafters, Chris trying and failing to take the lead, to keep the broom somehow in front of both of them. He pointed at the hole in the window. It must have come in through there, he said. Maybe it’s been with us for a while, she said. Pretty soon they had checked the whole shack, all its possible hiding places, and began returning to the same corners. A fluttering scraped the windows, lifting both their heads. A moth, big as a thumb, searched a pane for the light. They ignored it and continued the hunt. It probably went right back out that hole, Chris said. Or it went right back to its nest inside, Corey said. The fluttering intensified. Maybe a dozen floating, fuzzy faces now pressed against the glass. Chris started brooming empty corners, as though the bat had become not just small but invisible. There was a dull bang on the window. That was a big one, Chris said. It banged again and Corey stopped to watch. They were different sizes, mostly shades of white, scratching legs and drooping antennae, some with eyes on their wings still visible through the fluttering, as she waited for one of the smaller ones to find its way through a crack. The banging came again and this time she saw it. Chris, she said, look. Chris watched the windows. Because of the night out there and the light in here they could only see the moths, everything beyond them vanished into darkness. And out of that dark, or as if the dark itself sprouted rapid plucking fingers, something snatched a moth off the glass. They stood and stared. It came again, and then again, in deliberate rhythm, another small bang lifting another moth away, and in each instant, with each disappearance, it became clearer, the shape slowly resolved, its feet and fur and wings, its flattened nose and waving ears, as it, or probably they, the rhythm suggesting more than one, feasted in the broken night. Corey and Chris stared a while, as though the windows were a screen, or a tapestry with moving patterns. The moths never seemed to realize. Eventually they had enough. They shoved a wadded paper towel in the hole, turned off the light and climbed back to bed. It was a while before they slept. 

He worked short shifts, four to six hours, no more than twenty a week. The earliest he started was seven, by which time a pile of plastic plates and silverware that wasn’t silver but dulled and bent steel lay in or beside the giant sinks, sometimes piled with uneaten scraps, sometimes scraped more or less bare, depending on who was working out on the floor. The latest he worked was ten. The commute took ten minutes, door to door, shack to diner. The diner leaned into its uncertain age, sank into its embedded perfumes. The other dishwasher was fifteen years old, all lanky agitation. His name was Xan. The day they met he looked surprised, even confused, maybe worried, and never seemed to lose that look. The owner, Lee, was friendly enough, but rarely entered the dishroom and often stayed away entirely, arriving in the morning to set the sails before shoving off, as it were, waving his hat from the docks as the crew set off once again on their own. Cheryl was the most regular and reliable server. Clarence was the cook every day. The kitchen was out in the dining room, behind the counter, separate from the dishroom, which was entered through a swinging door by the toilets or from the exit door out back by the dumpsters. The dishroom steamed with soap and food, its machine churned and clanged, its radio speakers raged local country at a volume unfit for thought. Sometimes, in the evening, they left the back door open. Sometimes Chris smoked outside with Xan. Sometimes Xan talked about Amber, the occasional hostess, about how she was dressed, what the older high school kids said about her, trying to disguise desire with disgust. Amber was nineteen, Lee’s niece. The old men who ate at the counter tracked her under hats and over shoulders, some turning right around, unashamed. Chris rarely saw the floor, only on arrival or departure, or when he brought a stack of plates or a pile of cutlery out to Clarence. The locals regulars generally looked comfortable but not like they were having a good time. Chris never talked to them, so it was hard to say if it was the diner or whatever went on outside. The shifts kept him busy. Hour upon hour, bent over the sinks, dumping, scrubbing, rinsing, reaching, loading, running the machine, unloading, drying, stacking plates and bowls and cups and returning them to the kitchen, a monotonous loop that seemed compelled by the plates and cups themselves, the echo of a distant assembly line sheering off their waxen, unbreakable — the cups especially just bounced off everything, and could be cracked or smashed but somehow muted any desire to do so as much as they dampened what pleasure might be gained from their use — and reproducible form. Chris did not bother to pursue the question of whether the food was actually awful or whether it only seemed so when piled into cold mounds in a garbage barrel or soaked and sprayed with blistering water, scrubbed with the harshest soaps and scooped in mushy clumps from the drain to be splashed on the pile in the trash. He could not escape the radio, could not close his ears to it, and so absorbed its repetitions, its envy for cheating lovers and its longing for beer and whiskey, the polished bend in its voice. The words crept in as he scrubbed and he would catch himself muttering along and then shake his head, wondering where he was headed, pondering the direction of his sluggish, unmoving story, by now clearly just a story, too threadbare for a novel, too wandering and unfocused to resist the demand to become one. Sometimes he accepted its fate, other times he searched for escape. Often he thought of Corey, wondered what she was doing, and depending on how the shift was going resented her for doing it, whatever it was, flinging part of the blame for the job her way, as he could not see past the sink, could not hear beyond the speakers’ keening, could not figure out who to hold responsible. He had finished reading Magic Mountain, and could not figure out the ending, could not figure out how to feel, or how the book felt, about the image of Hans Castorp marching off to war, if everything that preceded the march had been preparation or waste. Bending, scrubbing, scrubbing, bending, he would think, This is my war, but that was all, he could go no further. His thoughts would turn back to Corey and he would wonder, again, what she was doing, and sometimes even wonder what they were going to do. While a part of him that he did not listen to hoped she would figure it out, that she would somehow take care of them both, he could not guess that in a way she would, that her refusal to get comfortable with the shack was what they both needed. After Frankie and the deer Corey began checking the listings more often, and it was not long before she came across a help wanted ad for a farmhand, full time, no experience needed, and, most importantly, an apartment available for rent on site. The ad asked for just one person, but she was convinced that they would take two. She told Chris, excitedly, picking him up from a hectic morning shift, that she had already set up an interview, they would go see the farm next week. Chris felt an objection arise, felt the need to defend his story, and so responded coolly, throwing out questions that sounded increasingly pointless even to him, and so came to recognize, before their drive was done, that this was something he could not escape. Back in the shack, daylight still full, he opened a bottle of wine and poured them both a glass, lowering his eyes to avoid disapproval, handing her a glass and raising the other in toast. The distance closed as their gazes came together. To the farm, he said. 

Every year at the end of May, Mike and Miriam hosted a weekend music festival called Beanfest. It was small, self-organized, publicized by word of mouth, paid the bands but collected no door charge, though they did take donations for parking, open to the public, though it mostly served as a surrogate family reunion for the collection of companions who had traveled together around the country following the Dead. They came in from around the state and up and down the coast, as far south as Tennessee. They turned a small clearing by the barn into a campsite, filled it with tents and chairs and cookpots, transformed a curious gap in the woods, which Chris and Corey had often walked through, into a kind of nest, an emptiness given purpose, like a garden returned to bloom. In the bigger clearing by the bus the cars were parked just like the tents, pulled to the sides with a gap in the middle like an avenue. A kind of stage composed of a tarp laid on the ground, a canopy hoisted in the air, and speakers anchored to a generator, was fashioned beside the bus. That weekend the whole place changed. The music began early, but even before it began the wind blew voices down the hill to the shack, which suddenly had visitors, a few of whom had even slept inside for a night or three and knew the guy who built it, whose name was Steve and who lived out west and whose figure began to be filled in by people who knew or had known him. There was the smell of coffee cooked in the open, the clatter and holler of campground fuss, even foot traffic in the woods as old friends explored trails they’d been exploring for years, trails Chris and Corey had begun, without realizing, to think of as their own, not owned but intimate, now again become shared. And there was the ringing of children as well, since many of the friends had brought them along to play in the woods or with Rosemary and Pearl, though many had left theirs behind so they could act like they were back on tour. Mike warned Chris which friend might hand him a cup spiked with acid. Miriam and another friend took Corey by the hand to smoke a joint in the treehouse. The music was acoustic by daylight and electric in the evening. Around dusk the pockets of gathering by this truck or that tent spilled together toward the stage. A handful of townfolk, mostly Miriam’s coworkers, turned up later in the night, not so many but more than Chris expected, despite being told about those golden years where cars had lined up for miles down the mountain road. It wasn’t just the dusk but the song of the woman with her electric, sneering yet tender, that yoked a crowd out of a campsite. Her melodies stung and echoed and the last band began setting up. The moon had raised itself above the trees. As the band checked its sound Miriam found her way to the microphone. With a plastic cup in hand she began to talk about Bean. Bean was from Nebraska, and, like many people they met on the road, he made some change by cooking and selling simple food. Bean got his name from what he made, bean sandwiches, bean tacos, bean salads, beans and eggs, bean toast, a whole spread of improbable recipes, some drawn from local tastes, like his bean chili down in Texas, but more often riding in on whimsey, conjured from the cheapest items at the closest grocery store, which somehow almost never seemed to fix a meal in place. Around the time when everyone they knew began to peel off from the caravan and plant themselves in more accepted routines, Bean took off to New York, where he found a loft full of people living just like they were on the road, his ship of fools, he called it, floating on the sea of Manhattan. He boasted that the ship taught him how to cook other meals, but anyone who went to visit knew he never gave up on beans. Yet those who did go visit knew he had found what the road had not given. The last time I saw him, Miriam said, he told me he wished we all could have stayed together. I told him not to lie to me, she said, because David was right there and they met in the city, and he never had anyone like that when he was out there with us. But he just smiled, she said, and many of you know that Bean had a beautiful smile. It could be wicked, she said, full of mischief. He smiled his beautiful, wicked smile and said it again, she said, said he wished we all could have stayed together. She raised her cup and said, For Bean. The crowd returned her toast with a cheer and Miriam made room for the band to wordlessly embark on its song, solemn but steady, a climbing rhythm to lead them away. They spent what they had in the night and fell apart without lingering. Over and down the hill Corey and Chris walked arm in arm, pressed together close against the narrowness of the path. They told each other to watch out for snakes by the door, to check for ants in the bed, but told each other lightly, unconcerned in the dark. Sleep came easy. Much later from far away a light and a tapping began to lift it, a sound that carried from the clearing but came to rest just overhead. A pattering on the roof traced circles into their sleep. After waiting for it to leave and finding that it would not they crawled down from bed and stepped out the door and up the hill to see. Staring back at them without breaking its pace around the roof, a pheasant marched in circles, now slower, now faster, bobbing its head as it went, eyes wide and inquiring, its wings, practically useless, pressed tight against its sides. They watched it a while, or let it watch them back, then went inside to get ready. 

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Kyle Proehl has written for Keep Planning, Hobart, Radical Philosophy, and elsewhere. He lives in St. Louis.