THE VISITORS by Jerry Gabriel
The mechanism was simple: a phone call to a laundromat payphone in Rush, all the way up in Wyatt County, nearly forty miles north of Shallsville – an anonymous place on the square, Hansen Cleaners and Laundry. No one knew them there. The call only ever arrived at eight in the morning on a Saturday. Camille – pronounced in the French style after her Breton grandmother – and her father would drive there nearly every week, occasionally with her little brother Robbie in tow, though mostly not. With more than a couple of dryers running, it was hard to hear much of anything in the sprawling room, perfect conditions. He had examined every payphone within a hundred miles of Shallsville, she knew, because she had been along with him for most of the search. She knew, too, that in his head he had a list of backups strewn across southern and central Ohio: one in Mapleton, one in Collier, even one in Columbus, which she knew he didn’t like to go into for fear of getting lost.
At Hansen’s, they did the week’s laundry, stationed adjacent to the bathroom corridor at the table closest to the black GT&E payphone on the wall back there. Camille often did her homework sitting there next to her father. When she was older and would think back to the strange days of their safe house, she would sometimes think about the unspoken tenderness that passed between them as she puzzled over French conjugations or the Missouri Compromise.
A few hours or a day or maybe even a week after a call, someone or sometimes several somones would show up at the house outside Shallsville, looking tired, stinking of sweat and sometimes alcohol, their hair tangled, their clothes rumpled. They would have a nondescript decade-old car, usually a dark sedan or station wagon whose plates could have been from just about anywhere; Camille remembered the colors of the common ones – Illinois and Texas, white; California and New York, blue.
Her mother, a thin and delicate woman who had a closet full of frayed floral print dresses, smoked her way through the visits. She was just twenty-nine in 1972 – young to have a thirteen year-old – but she looked nearly forty from a lifelong bout with insomnia, a two-pack-a-day Pall Mall habit, and her strained marriage to Luc Mills, Camille’s misfit father.
It was obvious to Camille from the start, late in the summer of 1970, that the visitors had to do with her father and that her mother was enduring the arrangement, even if neither of them had ever really taken her aside and explained the situation. On occasion, Camille would hear them bicker about the visitors, usually just before an arrival or after a departure. They bickered about other things, too, but there was a special intensity to these arguments.
Their house stood a couple miles outside of Shallsville, discrete and sheltered from the world by a long forested lane. It butted up County Road 28 on the west, and Bryant National Forest on the north and east; there were neighbors a few hundred yards distant on the fourth side, the Smolts – a compound of trailers and squat cinderblock places that housed a large extended family of ne’er-do-wells, nominally mechanics and auto body guys, but Camille’s father had confided to her, by way of telling her to steer clear, that they were chopping up stolen vehicles and probably dealing drugs. Real drugs, he’d said, which she eventually came to understand meant heroin. It obviously didn’t mean the pot that the visitors sometimes smoked out in the woods.
But the Smolts kept to themselves. A few times she and her dad had come across one of the Smolt men in the forest, all three of them holding the shotguns with which they were hunting deer or pheasant out of season. The man and her father would exchange nods and that was about all.
There wasn’t exactly a steady stream of visitors, but for nearly two years it was rare that a season passed without one. They never stayed long, usually a day or two, and then they were off again, on toward one coast or the other, maybe Chicago.
When they didn’t lodge in a large storage closet across from the bathroom, they were put up in a converted shed out along the property line. It had a potbelly stove and a Quikrete floor and tarpaper walls reinforced with straw stuffing. On rare occasions, the same faces reappeared. A woman who went by Sam stayed with them three times during the period. She was memorable because she spent most of her waking hours pecking loudly on an ancient black typewriter, at work on what she told Camille was a treatise about the failure of capitalism in the West. She carried a large cardboard suitcase full of books on this topic – her only real luggage – which she read in that storage closet room, the picture of which was fixed in Camille’s mind: Sam laconically turning the pages of those tattered books as smoke from her Lucky Strikes curled into the ceiling fan above her. Sam was unique in her willingness to talk about herself, and Camille’s conversations with her were some of the first sparks of knowledge of who these people were and what their family was involved in. Sam told her that she had attended a revolutionary conference in Cuba in 1969; even at twelve and thirteen, Camille knew that Americans couldn’t go to Cuba anymore.
Most of the visitors had a studied look of nonchalance and downward mobility. They wore clothes that suggested labor – lumberjack, longshoremen, seamstress – though there were things that belied the subterfuge: smooth hands, obviously, but also the language that slipped out unwittingly – “insatiable,” “taciturn,” “ascertain”; even their gait didn’t always seem quite the part.
They laughed easily, though, and were surprisingly good with kids – telling jokes and asking about school and sometimes even reading bedtime stories to Robbie. Camille was always especially struck by the beauty of most of the women – their faces symmetrical and lightly freckled, their skin unblemished, their necks long like Jackie Kennedy’s even though they attempted to conceal all of this with bad haircuts and ill-fitting pants.
Above all else, the visitors wanted to talk about Vietnam. It came up the way Camille knew sports scores came up in other houses – battles, White House maneuvers, responses from Hanoi, demonstrations around the country and world. Her knowledge of Tet and My Lai outstripped her knowledge of photosynthesis, which she was supposed to be learning in 3rd period Life Sciences the last winter of the visitors.
Years later she pieced all of this back together the way you might a dream after waking with just a shard in your mind. Even then, she knew that there was something strange about all of it. She didn’t need anyone to tell her that other kids had no such visitors in their homes. There were many things that she did not get from her father in the end, but she did get his common sense and his practically infallible intuition about people. She also got his complex moral compass, which was for her, as it was for him, at once asset and liability.
* * *
A young man who went by Hunter stayed with them in the winter of 1972. He was memorable somehow, or at least noteworthy, even before all that happened, in part because he seemed to lack many of the qualities and social graces of the others. He was arrogant and lazy, lounging around the shed extravagantly, sleeping, drinking when he could convince her father to purchase some Ten High bourbon for him. There was a bigger tell, though: he wouldn’t leave. The average stay there was two days; after two months, he still had not left. This wasn’t deep cover, but a way station, and two months was far too long for the sake of safety.
Also, Hunter had very few questions for anyone. The visitors were, to the person, information gatherers. They wondered, even though they usually didn’t leave the premises, about the location of things in Shallsville – banks, municipal buildings, schools, fire and police stations. They wanted to know what things had been going on locally; they wanted to see the newspaper. They wondered if the postman or the electric company man came to the door, if neighbors or friends were likely to drop by, if they – the Mills – knew, personally, any law enforcement. Most of this information they got from Camille’s father, but some of it they seemed to feel more comfortable asking Camille and Robbie. On more than one occasion, Camille helped one of them draw a map of the area that included their house, the railroad, the river and as many roads as she could remember.
From early on in his stay, Camille guessed that Hunter stood apart from the others, that he had merely gotten mixed up in the rebellion. There could have been a girl, she speculated, or it could have been as simple as the drugs and lawlessness. Perhaps he had stumbled into their network, perhaps he had cagily knit himself into its fabric, masquerading as a believer – it was anyone’s guess, which. In the end, it didn’t matter much how it had happened; he had done some things bad enough to worry over, and so, like the others, he ran. The amazing thing was that he had remained at large, because he was sloppy.
When he was sent to them that winter he had the same credentials as the others. Things with him were different from the first day, however; the car he was driving had broken down just south of Twin Ponds, some thirty miles from Shallsville, and he said he had walked the rest, sleeping along the way in a barn under some horse blankets. He came to the door a full day after he was expected and told them what had happened, that his car sat on the road along US 99. They could do nothing about it, she overheard her father tell him. Hunter claimed that it was his and not stolen, but her father had been insistent: they had to leave it. They just couldn’t risk rescuing it. And so Hunter had no car.
He was a handsome figure, tall and lanky with rippled arms that fit snugly in his two Western-style shirts. He had a drawl that was not quite southern, but perhaps Texan or Arizonan. His lips, Camille thought, were redder than normal lips, a striking thing on a man; it was almost as if he wore a subtle lipstick. His long, sandy hair curled slightly at the neck, and he wore a beard, though nearly all of the men who came to the house in those years did; the thinking apparently was that it hid their features.
On all but the coldest nights that winter, Hunter slept in the small shed, stoking the potbelly stove with wood that Camille and Robbie had helped their father poach from the national forest. It was tight quarters in there, but most of the visitors seemed to prefer it for its privacy. In other houses and apartments in other states, things were probably awkward with shared bathrooms and bedrooms. Here, you could be rid of the whole world; you could disappear into your tiny bungalow and never come out except to use the outhouse back on the edge of the woods.
The one thing she knew about Hunter was that he had a tape player on which he listened to someone’s speaking voice, perhaps some sort of a book. He used an AC adaptor for it in the shed – the light fixture had room for one plug-in – but he sometimes carried it out in the woods with him, running it on D batteries. She could not tell what the recording was, but the reader of the book – she had overheard the tape several times, because he played it loudly – was old and certainly not a professional: he coughed and stumbled over his words, seemed to included asides of his own and apologies for his performance. Likely it was someone in Hunter’s life who had recorded the book for him. It made her wonder if Hunter was perhaps illiterate. She didn’t know anyone who was, and the idea seemed unimaginable, historical, as if living among them was a character from Twain or Dickens. She was dying to know what the book was and had considered stealing into his quarters to see if the title was scrawled on the tape.
In truth, she had had but a few encounters with Hunter during his stay – a brief greeting one evening as she was bringing wood to the shed, another as she was on her way down the lane to the bus one frosty morning. It was normally easy to avoid the visitors if she wanted to; they were there for a short time and tended to be private people. But as the winter of 1972 dragged on – snow coming just an inch or two at a time, but never melting and gradually mounting depths of nearly two packed feet – this strange boy seemed to grow increasingly erratic, like a rabid animal. He came out of the shed more and more, wandering around the yard and the forest, apparently inspecting things or looking for something. She saw him in the house a few times, talking wildly with her father and, once, awkwardly, with her mother.
By the first week of March, it seemed that neither winter nor Hunter would ever move on. She overheard a conversation between her parents about him early one morning that week. They were in their bedroom with the door closed and she only knew it was about him from their tone; she couldn’t make any words out. What else could they have been talking about with such muffled bursts of language?
The following Saturday, at Hansen Laundry and Cleaners, her father did something she’d never seen him do before: using a number from memory, he dialed the mysterious disembodied voice.
This is Harlan, he said when a voice answered. She’d never heard the name in her life.
We have a problem with our last shipment, her father said.
The voice said some things that registered to her ears not as language but syncopated static, and then her dad said, It’s time to reship, he said. Yes, he said, answering a question. Another yes. Transpo not available until next Saturday? He was quiet. Sooner would be better.
There was a very long silence. Okay, her father said. Saturday.
He hung up and looked at her. There was an exhaustion in him she hadn’t noticed before. He glanced around the room. The owner came in late in the morning to empty the coins, but otherwise, there was no supervision in the laundromat. On this day, the room was empty but for one woman who was using a bank of four washing machines and holding an infant as her toddler tried to get into a trash can.
Her father looked back at the phone, which he still held and which was now beeping with a disconnect signal. He unscrewed the handset and looked into the mechanism.
Come here, he said.
She approached and looked at it.
This is the transmitter, he said, pointing to a cylindrical device with a pencil he pulled out of his shirt pocket. And here is the power and the outgoing line. Do you notice anything strange?
This? She was pointing to a bulky green square with a miniature coil and a tangle of wires soldered to it, one of which was grafted onto the red power source.
Yes, he said, shaking his head. This.
He didn’t remove it, but screwed the cap back on.
Are the clothes dry?
Yes.
On-y-va, he said. Let’s go. He had a small handful of French from his childhood he still used.
Walking along the street toward the truck, her father hefted the U.S. Army laundry bag full of clothes. It dawned on her only then that this had been her Uncle Stephen’s bag.
He shook his head. What a world, he said.
He stole a quick glance at her. My father, he started to say. She’d never heard him mention his father. She knew then very little about the man, only that he had died in 1960. Well, he said. Somebody oughta write this stuff down in a book. You couldn’t make it up.
She said nothing.
You’ll probably do that one day, he said.
She laughed. I can barely get my book reports done, she told him. And anyway, I wouldn’t even know what I was writing about.
He nodded and then a moment later shook his head.
* * *
Things moved quickly then, as if some force outside of them had decided that everything must now come to a head. First, Hunter disobeyed the fundamental rule of the house, and wandered off the premises, the very next night. Camille saw him go. She sat just after dark staring out the icy dormer window in the bedroom she and Robbie still shared then, and watched as he left the shed and trudged through the snow down the lane toward the road. For reasons she couldn’t name, she sat and waited for him to return, thinking he had maybe just gone to check something in the woods. Time passed. Hours, eventually. She thought often about waking her father. Why she didn’t was also a mystery to her and, she knew, a betrayal. As the baby grandfather clock in the living room downstairs rang out the early hours, she continued to sit on her perch. Robbie breathed heavily, as he always did in his sleep.
Sometime not long after three, snow blowing around the yard in gusts, she crept down the stairs and out the back, careful to shut the door behind her softly. She needed to check to see that her eyes had not betrayed her somehow. If he was not there, she knew she would have to tell her father, though she didn’t know quite how that would happen.
She wore only a ratty Ohio University sweatshirt and jeans, some slipped-on snow boots. At the shed, she peered into the one thick-glassed window. There was no light, no movement. She saw no sign of Hunter anywhere, no footprints in the nearly inch of snow that had fallen since dusk. The wind whipping across the yard stung her face.
But as she turned to go back to the house, she was startled by Hunter’s boots crushing the snow behind her.
What the shit you doing out here? he wondered.
She turned to see him hunched over against the cold, ice in his beard.
Dad asked me to make sure you were okay, she thought to say. Because of the cold.
Your dad didn’t send you out here.
And so he wasn’t a fool, she thought. Buried in his statement was the insinuation of something she knew to be there and not there at the same time.
I didn’t see any smoke from the chimney.
He smiled, came a half step closer to her, as if to lean in and tell her a secret. The smell of alcohol was strong enough to reach her through the cold and flurries.
I was just starting a fire. Come inside.
She recognized the invitation from a hundred books.
The cold snow crunched beneath his boots as he shifted his weight, feigning indifference. Above them, a full moon obscured by clouds.
She neither said nor did anything for a moment as he pulled the tarp off the wood pile.
Why is it not Kuh-meel? he asked, picking up several sticks and then pulling open the rusty hinged shed door.
It’s my grandmother’s name, Camille said, making a decision to follow him inside. She was French.
Inside, he began messing with the old stove. One 60-watt light hung from the center of the room, which ran to a single wire that traced back to the corner of the house, supported along the way by two bamboo poles spaced fifteen feet apart.
French? he said. And you get the folks around here to say it that way?
French-Canadian, I guess.
Well that’s different, ain’t it?
She watched while he swept out the stove, which was choked with ashes. She took a glance toward the house through the window.
People say it Cammy, she said. Which is close.
He lit a sheet of newspaper beneath some frosty twigs.
What do you know about all of this? he asked obliquely.
Probably about as much as you do, she said. She was a pro at this information game. Her father had taught her over the years by example. On many occasions, she had seen him deal with men whose land they were poaching on, crafting not lies, but subtle occlusions of the truth.
More, probably, Hunter agreed. It’s odd, though, ain’t it? I bet it’s odd living here.
She figured he was dying to tell her something, to unburden himself of some heavy piece of knowledge. Or perhaps it was simply that he was trapped in his own subjectivity, couldn’t see beyond himself and was asking her for some verification, something in which he could believe and be grounded in.
She wasn’t interested in any of this, though. Not really, she said.
Those other people who stay, Hunter said. They’re nuts, though.
He seemed desperate to find accord on this point.
Why would you say that? she asked.
He watched her, shaking his head. Why am I talking about this stuff to a little girl?
She was supposed to protest this, she knew, but she did not. Some men, she had already gathered, marshaled all of their resources in order to get women. Girls.
She was from Montreal, she said. My grandma. But she was born in Bretagne, in France. My dad grew up in Montreal until he was six.
Canada, Hunter said pensively. I doubt I’ll ever make it up there.
The fire was popping now, eating up the dry wood. He pulled off his jacket, even though it was still very cold in there. It wouldn’t take long for the fire to warm the small room now.
Take your coat off and stay a while, he urged her, getting up now to get some more wood. She looked at the single bed against the wall for the first time. Now is the time to go, she thought.
When he opened the door again to get the wood, she was on his heels. Before he was even aware of her there, she was past him and ten feet toward the house; he was leaning over, picking up wood.
Goodnight, she said.
He stood and turned and just watched her go.
From the darkness of her room, she looked down once more at the shed, wisps of smoke issuing now from the stovepipe jutting out at an odd angle from the roof. The thermometer out her window read 4 degrees.
* * *
Over five years passed between the funeral of her Uncle Stephen, in December 1965, and the arrival of the visitors. So the connection between those events was not readily apparent to Camille at first. She was only seven when Stephen’s body was shipped home from Gia Lai province, where he had caught a four-inch piece of shrapnel in his jugular during a nighttime firefight; Camille was too young to make any sense of the strangeness of Stephen’s being gone and why – or her father’s reaction to the event. Stephen had been his little brother, nearly a decade his junior – more like a son, she later came to understand, so involved was he in Stephen’s upbringing.
The truth was, her father was a strange man, an outsider, long before Stephen’s death. His record of employment revealed this from her earliest memories, when, for a time, he worked rebuilding lawn mower engines for a hostile old man named Tallmadge whose shop was little more than a junkyard for small engine flotsam. Even this work was sporadic, and then one day her father and Tallmadge had a fistfight – over what, Camille never knew – that ended his employment at the shop.
There were a number of years when he did not work for money at all, the years just before and just after Stephen’s death. That was the period in which he had begun to trap and hunt and fish – most of it illegally – to support the family. Though unemployed, he was far from idle, always busy in one of the three sheds that sat on the back lot of the small house they had inherited from her mother’s father when he passed away. Among other things, he was tanning the hides he had hunted and trapped, canning tomatoes, cucumbers and beans, making syrup, even for a time forging nails that he sold to the Museum of Eighteenth Century Settlers in Mason.
The last steady job he had before the visitors began to arrive, before things began to unravel, was as a paid-under-the-table lathe operator at Shallsville Foundry, a dilapidated nineteenth-century structure that butted up against a defunct lock factory. He had once taken Camille there in the middle of the night to watch for cars while he machined a blown head gasket for his ‘54 GMC, a truck that by 1968 was more rust than steel. She was just ten that night, but already, against her mother’s fervent protestations, her father’s trusted assistant in his many operations.
They’d gotten into the building through a torn-away section of aluminum siding hidden behind two oil drums he’d rolled out of the way. First he’d lain down on his back on the damp concrete and shimmied through the hole and then she’d done the same. Inside, they used none of the electric lights, but navigated by the spare glow of a small mining headlamp her father wore. He stationed her at a large window facing the empty parking lot; there were probably two or three hundred square panes, though the glass was missing from many of them and had been replaced with rectangular sections of plywood. He found her a bench to sit on while she watched for movement.
I’m there, he said, pointing. If a car comes into the lot, don’t yell. Come and touch my back. She nodded.
Camille remembered little of the noise of the lathe from that night in the foundry or the danger of getting caught; she was already accustomed to danger. Mainly, she remembered the heavy smell of petroleum in the air and the strange darkness of the place and then the long walk through the woods afterwards, next to her dad, who carried the refurbished head gasket in a rucksack he frequently brought along on excursions. Back across the highway to a borrowed car parked on a side street near the Bryant River.
* * *
Two days after the night in the cold, Camille woke up sick with a fever and achy bones, a throat on fire. Whether or not it had been her early morning trip outside in only a sweatshirt that gave the bug its in, it was impossible to say. When her father entered the room to wake her and Robbie for school that morning, he turned and left almost immediately, coming back a few minutes later with some cold medicine for Camille, as well as some toast and orange juice and a pack of cards. He knew she liked to play solitaire. She hadn’t said anything of how she felt.
Rest, he told her. I’ll check on you in a bit.
She closed her eyes and was only marginally aware of her father coming into the room every minute or two to harass Robbie, who kept crawling back into bed. After he had finally cajoled Robbie into getting dressed, he knelt next to her again.
If you are better by Friday, we’ll check the Snake Creek lines. It was Tuesday morning.
Can I come? She heard Robbie ask from his side of the room.
On-y-va, Robert. School starts in an hour.
I want to come trapping, Robert said again.
We’ll see, her father said on their way out the door, which almost always meant no. By Robbie’s age – he was nine that year – Camille regularly went along with him everywhere, but Robbie was a different sort of kid. He was emotional, sometimes petulant and sullen, but also given to moments of wildness. He had never totally left the terrible twos behind, falling into fits on the floor of the grocery store if his body chemistry hit some low point. He was a good kid, a smart kid, but just too unpredictable.
Because the vent in her room was right above the kitchen, Camille could hear everything as her mother coaxed Robbie toward his oatmeal and then his coat and hat and gloves in the small mudroom off the kitchen and eventually the long walk down the lane toward the spot along State Route 28 where the bus picked them and the Smolt children up.
After Robbie was finally gone – her father had left quietly before, though she didn’t know to where – the house was quiet for a long time. Hunter was no doubt holed up in his shed. It may have still been morning, or just after, when a knock on the door woke her with a start. It was rare that someone showed up at their door.
She heard then her mother’s chair in the kitchen scoot back; she had probably been doing a puzzle or crocheting, something to do while she smoked. Camille tracked her movement across the kitchen’s old hardwood floors to the mudroom, which led to the only door that they had shoveled a path to. There, she could hear her mother greet the visitor familiarly. That it was a woman was all she could discern, their voices muffled by the door onto the kitchen. The woman and her mother spoke there for a minute and then made their way back to the kitchen, where she could hear every exhaled breath and clanging spoon. Her mother poured them both coffee, which sat on the back of the gas stove warming every morning.
I’m sorry to barge in on you, Mrs. Mills, the woman said.
It’s okay, Lana.
Camille didn’t know anyone named Lana. Sometimes it felt as if all the world was a web of secrets that everyone was keeping from everyone else.
I didn’t want to come, but Mom said I should.
Camille’s mother said nothing to this.
Your kids doing okay? Lana asked.
They’re doing fine. Camille is on the honor roll always. Robbie’s thing is more physical. Basketball these days.
Camille thought it curious that she hadn’t mentioned her sickness, her presence in the house.
It’s amazing how they grow up and become these little people, Lana said. My little Ryan is already four.
It’s something. Her mother’s tone was still warm, but becoming less so.
Camille’s thoughts returned to the shed, to Hunter. She doubted he was up, so there probably wasn’t smoke issuing from the chimney, one less thing to explain.
Well, said the woman. I know it’s sort of a strange thing to show up on your doorstep. I have something I need to show you.
She dug around for something in a bag while she explained. You know that I’m working as a secretary at the sheriff’s office.
I’d heard that.
It’s just for a while, until Van can get back to work.
Sure.
Camille guessed that Lana was probably the daughter of someone at the Catholic church in Shallsville, where her mother alone went to mass on many Sundays. Lana found whatever she was looking for, presumably putting it on the table.
This is from the new Xerograph machine the department has. It’s sort of like an APB. Do you know about those? It stands for All Points Bulletin.
I’m familiar with the term.
I never knew until I started there. You always hearing it on TV shows, but no one ever says the whole thing.
What am I looking at, Lana? Her mom said very calmly.
We saw this man at Lehman’s two nights ago, she said. Van and I went down there for a while. Mom was watching Ryan and we went down to Lehman’s to celebrate our anniversary. It was our fifth. A big one, right? We were out pretty late.
Her mother was silent.
It’s none of my business. I am not judging anything. But at the station, I see all this stuff that comes in. Ten Most Wanted and all that. And I remembered this one because, well, this boy is hard to forget.
So you saw the boy in this picture? Her mom said. What about it?
Do you see why he’s wanted? There?
Yes, she said. Terrorism. Murder. It’s hard to miss. I understand all of that. What I don’t understand is why you’re bringing this to me.
That’s the thing. Terrance Cotter said that he passed this boy after he left the bar on Sunday. He said that he saw him turning up your lane late that night.
I don’t recognize this person, Lana. He could’ve been running into the woods. He could’ve been going to the Smolts. He could’ve been doing any number of things. If it was even him.
The Smolts, Lana said. I didn’t even think of that. That’s a more logical explanation, isn’t it? It’s just that Terrance thought it was your lane. God knows what they might be doing over at the Smolts.
God knows, her mom agreed.
Camille drifted off then and did not hear the front door shut when the woman left. Her mother was at her bedside not long after that.
How you doing? She asked her, pulling Camille’s hair out of her face.
The fever was coming on strong now.
I’m okay, she managed.
We had company, her mother said.
Camille said nothing, drifted toward sleep even as her mom spoke.
Her mom’s hand was on her for a very long time, too long, but she was too weak to say something, to address her. Later, she thought her mom was crying, but there was the fever, too.
* * *
That evening, her father came up the stairs carrying a hot cup of tea for her. He’d been ice fishing, he told her. She knew just where, a lonely pond just to the west of the forest. They’d gone there together a month back. It was very hard to get to, which was why he liked it. The farmer’s name was Woolton, an old cuss that her father actually knew from somewhere or another. His farming days were over, though, and he just sat around his cold house and nursed old grievances toward people no longer living. His land was safe to use, because he would never be able to check on the back 40.
Her father didn’t mention anything about the visitor from the morning, but she could tell he knew. There was just some muted apprehension.
He asked her if she needed anything, and she said, No, just sleep. He left her and turned out the lights again.
That night, Camille’s fever broke. She got up to change her drenched sheets very early in the morning, very weak from the battle. Robbie woke and in a rare show of maturity, made her sit in a chair while he found clean sheets and put them on her bed. He also dug out some dry pajamas for her. Thanks, was all she could say. As she drifted back to sleep, she was thinking about Hunter, a venom rising in her.
By morning, she felt well enough to finally look at the homework that Robbie had brought home from her teachers – more difficult biological processes coupled with some algebra and five more chapters of Anne Frank’s diary. She made some slow headway, before drifting off to sleep again. At various points in the day, food was brought to her – once by her father, twice by her mother – which she was regaining an appetite for. After dinner, she was well enough to stand without fear of falling over, and she stood and looked out on the shed. Smoke billowed from the stove there. Saturday, she thought.
On Thursday, she dragged herself downstairs early in the morning. She knew that if she didn’t, her mother would use it against her on Friday.
Uh uh, her mom said when she saw Camille come into the kitchen.
I’m fine.
Back to bed.
I can’t miss any more school.
The mind is always working, isn’t it? she said. You two are of a piece. You see where it gets you, I hope.
She poured herself some cereal, ignoring these allegations.
Sit down, her mom said. I’ll make you something. You can’t make it to lunch on Cheerios on top of being sick.
They’re not actually Cheerios, she said, setting the generic box back on the table.
For that, she got a very cold look, as if in this comment she had criticized her mother’s entire life.
* * *
Of her father’s many sidelines, trapping was by far the most lucrative. He had a man in Quebec who bought the pelts at a good price – apparently there was a market for them up there. God only knew what they did with the things. The contact was an old friend of his parents, she later learned. She liked imagining how this arrangement had been formed.
But her father cleaned, skinned, stretched and dried them in what he called Building #4. The joke was multilayered. He was making fun of his production line livelihood – the syrup and tomatoes and nails. Also, then there were only the three outbuildings.
When he had enough pelts, he packaged them in a box that indicated suction lines and other oil drilling implements and he mailed them north, stamping the box with an oil company logo and return address of his own devising. He drove to Hamden to mail these packages, a small city big enough to be anonymous in. Nobody bothered oil drilling supplies at customs anywhere. That her dad would have known this was indicative of the type of knowledge he seemed to have been born with – knowledge not useful to normal people, but for him, an entire cottage industry could be formed around it.
In the evenings, he ran traps out in the hills, the southern Ohio landscape thick with streams large enough to sustain beaver and mink. Sometimes he did this in one of the two massive sections of Bryant National Forest that filled a great swath of their corner of the state, though frequently it was on private land, the back lots of large farms left unattended. Rarely did he have anyone’s permission – neither government’s nor farmers’ – and since none of it was above board anyway, he didn’t bother adhering to the Department of Natural Resources’ limits. The government owed him one little brother, she later figured his thinking was, which no pile of pelts, however high, would be able to pay him back for. It was less clear how he justified the trapping on private land, except through an unarticulated though deeply felt philosophical ethos about the boundarylessness of the natural world.
For her part, Camille cherished the evenings with him in the hills, where it was almost always just the two of them in the one place they both felt most comfortable, the caw of crows drifting along the dusk treetops, the sun truncated early by the steep rise of the hills out of the narrow glacial finger valleys.
* * *
When he showed up on Friday to collect her after school, many of the busses hadn’t returned from the high school run yet, so the kids from Chelsea Junior High School milled around in the snow and on the salt-slush of the sidewalk in front of the decaying building.
Usually, he would wait in the truck for her to come find him on Maple Street, but today she saw him wading through her loitering classmates. She did a double take as he approached where she was leaning against a wall, talking with a few friends.
Dad, she said. I didn’t see you pull up.
He raised his eyebrows, tilted his head. There was a reason for everything, that gesture meant, most of which will never be explained to you by me or anyone else. You will have to figure it out for yourself.
At moments like this, when he was on display in front of her classmates, she knew that her shaggy, underemployed father was supposed to be an embarrassment, but she felt no such thing. Quite the opposite, she felt a kind of pity for other children who had to go home to a different, lesser father each night.
The jalopy of a truck alone would have been enough to elicit ridicule toward another kid, but, save the three girls she was now talking to, the seventh and eighth graders of Chelsea Junior High School kept their distance from Camille; she was dangerous somehow, a cloud of mystery about her. Her father was perhaps a part of that danger, part of that mystery, though its main source was really Camille herself. In a world dominated by physicality – something in which she could, in any case, match just about every classmate, boy or girl – she possessed a kind of super power of reason and verbal ferocity. She was in effect a grownup with respect to wit. She had, for instance, recently diminished the junior high wrestling team’s heavyweight class starter, Bill Gough, to a sullen retraction of an insult about her homespun clothes. She belittled his intelligence so swiftly and profoundly, it was clear to everyone in the study hall where the exchange took place that he hadn’t even understood most of the insult. When the bell had rung afterward, he approached her, chastened. I’m such a idiot, Cammy, he’d said. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I would say that. I really don’t. I actually like your dress.
She had shrugged, neither comforting him nor taking the opportunity to explain the lesson.
Girls, her father said now to the small group of Camille’s friends.
Hello Mr. Mills, they said. They mostly looked at his shoes.
I guess I gotta go, Camille told them. See you Monday.
On the way down the long block, they passed the turn off for Maple Street and it dawned on her what had happened.
You have the man with you, she said. She didn’t know why she couldn’t use his name. Probably because it wasn’t actually his name.
I have to keep an eye on him until tomorrow.
Someone will come to the house to get him?
He shook his head. I’ll drop him at a spot. Later, they’ll pick him up. He will be the last one.
We’re still checking traps?
We are still checking traps.
He’ll come with us?
All she could think was, she’d have to ride out to the county with her legs up against his in the front seat.
I’ve already talked all of this over with him, Camille. He’ll stay in the truck. How are you feeling?
Much better, she said. She was some better, not much better.
As they approached the red pickup, she saw his profile in the passenger seat, his uncut hair wildly curled. She stood outside the door and waited for him to open it and get out so that she could climb to the middle. She was sure he would not be willing to ride on the hump.
Hunter probably should’ve been embarrassed with the trouble he was causing them, but instead he was looking around the town of Shallsville like he had just arrived back from ten years at sea, apparently amazed at the place, the people going about their law-abiding lives. He probably knew, as Camille and her father did, that his time was short. They would keep him safe until tomorrow, but after that, he was back in the real world, on the run with his faulty credentials and ID-driven life.
They were silent on the drive. The radio played the Beach Boys then Carole King. After that, there was news. A conflict of some sort in eastern Pakistan. An ROTC cadet and some police officers killed in Puerto Rico during a riot about the presence of ROTC on a campus. A massive snow storm in Quebec and the maritime provinces of Canada that had closed down that part of the country.
Quebec, Hunter said, looking up, pronouncing it the American way. You have people there, right?
Her father, a warm man full of concern for the world and the people in it, would never ease the way of someone who had crossed him. He did not acknowledge the utterance, though Camille was sure he had noted its specificity and had already calculated its provenance.
Just making small talk, Hunter said to himself. Jesus. And then he returned to his landscape watching.
The drive to Snake Creek followed a series of county roads, the snow plowed into dirty, crusty piles along their edges. Beyond the piles lay the small tributaries responsible for carving out the valleys through which the roads ran. Further out from Shallsville, houses were scarce, crowded into small clearings or built in the flood plain. Snake Creek itself ran through a broader valley, nearly a mile across, filled with bottomland farms mostly, here and there dipping, along the borderlands of two properties, through a copse of renegade cottonwoods or birches.
Her dad had a well-concealed pull-out up a lane that had probably once been the head of a logging road, but was now overgrown with oak saplings and multiflora rose. But first, they did a long check of the area, up and down a two-mile stretch of road, assessing the houses and any movement, looking for hunters, though there shouldn’t be any in March; her father was a great one for surveillance, and sometimes they would watch a building or farm for hours, tracking movement. After half an hour of this, as the sky finally began to darken, he slowed the truck to a stop in the middle of State Route 12 and backed it up the lane, its engine grumbling about the last bit.
Camille was happy to be able to get out – they’d been in the truck nearly an hour – and she was looking forward to getting away from Hunter and into the water. It had begun to dawn on her that his arrival at their house two months back had been the beginning of a steep drop from a great height for their family. She’d never seen her father so troubled. His confidence in the world – his sheer ability to produce for them, to light the world for them – had never felt so shaky. She couldn’t see into the future, and so didn’t know how fully it was all in shambles, but she read people and situations well enough to know that the stakes were very high now. So high, in fact, she couldn’t really bring herself to name what could possibly be lost.
Hunter peed in the weeds as she and her father fished their tools out of the bed of the truck, a feed sack, a Bowie knife, and a pair of shabby waders for each of them.
This is some real backwoods shit, Hunter said, rejoining them.
He might as well not have been there, as neither of them were willing to acknowledge him now.
Her father got into his waders first and waited while she struggled against the vulcanized rubber. He absently checked his watch and the sky and a small thermometer that was safety-pinned to the sleeve of his coat.
Tu es pres? He asked when she looked done. She nodded.
How long’s this going to take? Hunter wondered.
We’ll be back in no more than an hour and a half, her father said.
Jesus. An hour and a half? It’s too cold in that truck without the heater, he whined. You gonna leave me the keys?
If we can be in the cold river water for that time, I think you’ll be okay here dry.
He pouted and swore under his breath.
Her father nodded for them to go. As they descended the steep path to the road, Hunter stood in front of the truck and watched them, yelling after them when they were almost to the road. This is bullshit!
Soon, they were away from him, and Camille felt a burden lifted.
They listened for traffic and when they were sure it was quiet, they crossed the road and then hiked about a quarter mile through a fallow field and into the trees of the flood plain. They were silent except for the heavy breath Camille exhaled, her respiration strained still from the sickness.
Near the creek, they stopped and her dad pulled from an interior pocket a thick plastic packet of hand-written maps he kept of all the creeks he worked, each with the locations of the traps they had out. He found the right one and compared it to where they stood. Snake Creek ran almost north to south here. She knew he knew exactly where they were, but he was very careful always, very thorough.
They traced a deer path along the banks of the creek until they came to the first trap and then they lowered themselves into the water and began to tend the long lines scattered from this point north for nearly a mile, climbing onto the bank where it was convenient, but mostly moving along the edges of the water. Camille’s waders had a hole just below the crotch, which was a problem when she had to maneuver through the center of the creek, where the water could be deeper and rise to her hips. She’d tried to duct tape the waders a number of times, but the water always found its way in. She knew her father’s was even worse.
As he tended a trap, she moved ahead to the next one, and in this way, they moved quickly. He had taught her how to safely locate the trap, and how to remove the dead animal and reset it without endangering her own hands or damaging the pelt. As with all else, she had mastered the system quickly and efficiently.
When they’d been in the water for forty-five minutes – enough time to collect a male beaver and, unfortunately, a juvenile mink – they heard some voices nearby. Her father handed her the mink.
Stay here, he said. She watched as he maneuvered around a birch branch, now empty of leaves, dipping into the water. She could see down the creek channel to where it bent, perhaps fifty yards distant, where for a brief instant, she saw a dim flash of orange. A hunting cap.
She slid back, very slowly, toward the bank, underneath the tree. She could just make out her father in the dusk, climbing up the roots of the bank to get a better look. After a moment, he came back down and very cautiously moved to where she waited. He raised his index finger to his lips and grabbed Camille’s arm and he directed her further under the tree and deeper into the eddy, where water flooded into her legs through a second, higher hole at her waist. Her head felt light with the cold.
The voices up above grew stronger. Closer by, she could see one of the men crest his head over the bank and look into the channel. It was dusk and hard to see much of anything. Hard for her, harder for them, since everything in the creek bed was dark, including their coats and hats and waders.
They gotta be out here somewhere, the voice said, frustrated.
You know goddamn and well they are, another said. I wouldn’t forget that old truck. I seen that thing poking around here fifty times if I seen it once.
A minute later, she could hear boots along the banks above them, crunching the snow and winter-dried leaves and fallen tree branches. Her father was looking directly above himself, as if toward God. Her legs were now numb.
The men moved on downstream. They waited five minutes more, and then they pulled themselves out of the water and sat on the bank for a minute while her father again consulted the map, this time with a pin light inside his jacket, so that the light would not be visible. While he did this, Camille reached down to the water and cupped a handful and drank it.
One day a couple years ago, her father began, studying his map. A man called the house and told me he’d been a friend of Stephen’s at Kent State. You may not remember that Stephen’d gone to college for a few quarters. Your Uncle Stephen.
He glanced up at her.
His name was Brian and he said he’d been to Mom’s house with Stephen one weekend that fall. I remembered him actually.
She was trying to concentrate on the story, but all she could think of was getting dry. The two dead animals lay on the snow between them now.
He told me he had some things of Stephen’s. I thought it was strange after nearly three years and I asked him what, because it was probably okay for him to keep them. He said I would want these things, but when I asked again what they were, he said he couldn’t talk about it over the phone.
This sounded strange, made me worry some. I couldn’t imagine what the items were. But I agreed to the visit. And I wondered all that week how he had found me, since our number is unlisted, and back when he knew Brian we didn’t even live in Shallsville.
But when he showed up, I saw immediately that he was there for some other reason. It was in his face, you know. All of these people have had that look. I expect I do too now. But he came to the point quickly, right on the stoop. He said he was involved in an organization, a sort of resistance. Do you understand? He looked at her again. He was folding up his map now. She nodded.
They wanted my help, he said. They were trying to end this thing, the war that took Stephen. This was in early 1970.
She was silent, the cold gone for the moment.
I told him I couldn’t do it, whatever it was, because, well, I had more than myself to think about. We talked about it a little more, but in the end, he said he understood and he asked me to forget about the conversation. I said I would. He left and that was that.
He had put the map back and he got up and crouched on his haunches. She could hardly believe he was choosing this moment to tell her all of this.
Then, well. It’s odd. Stephen came to me, Camille. Perhaps it was in a dream. I don’t know. We talked for a while.
He looked out into the stream, perhaps embarrassed, perhaps baffled still by that visitation.
It stuck with me. I just couldn’t shake it, the things he had said. And a few weeks later, I called the number Brian had left and told him what I would be willing to do.
This is the man you speak with on Saturdays? she asked.
He shook his head. That is someone else, possibly several others. It’s very secret, this organization. It has to be. I am very sorry to have involved you and Robbie and your mother in this. I can’t explain to you how sorry I am now.
It’s okay, Dad, she said.
You couldn’t understand – I couldn’t expect you to understand – because Robbie’s so different from you. But sometimes your brother is more than just your brother.
I think about that moment a lot. I wonder why this boy thought he could come to my house and invite me to participate in treason. Why did he think I wouldn’t just get on the phone and call the sheriff?
Camille was silent, but she knew the answer to that question at least. There was probably more than one, in fact. Even in her earliest memories, Stephen’s presence in the house brought about a shift in her father, a lightness. Everything about him changed in those moments; he was no longer brooding or embattled. Stephen, she had surmised, was someone who even more than her father saw the hidden alignment of the world, like a man armed with a chest of tools for peering into the mystery. Including an ability, she guessed, for understanding his older, misfit brother.
Also, one look at her father and you knew there were almost no circumstances over which he would ever go to the police.
We should go, he said.
Once they were walking, she wished she’d pulled the waders off, but now there didn’t seem to be time. They hugged the eastern bank of the stream, staying amidst the bushes there, keeping a safe distance from the men by heading north, though this also took them away from the truck. To their right, the bottomland fields were full of stubs of cut corn stocks poking through the cloddy soil, here and there a kernel-less deer-eaten cob on the ground, just barely visible in the gloaming.
They moved just a little bit at a time and then stopped while her father surveyed ahead. Finally, they crossed the field toward the road, keeping low, just in case. At the road, over which only a very occasional car ever travelled, they were especially cautious. By Camille’s reckoning, they were probably nearly a mile north of the truck.
The hills rose steeply here, and they scrambled up the bank until it crested and then they turned south. Unable to find any deer paths, they mostly scudded along through briars. Camille’s legs were numb now – her body, she guessed, on the verge of hypothermia. The going was very slow, up and down rises in the hills and through the sometimes thick undergrowth.
When they’d been walking for nearly 30 minutes, her father stopped them on a sandstone outcropping to listen. As they stood, the chatter of her teeth was audible.
Camille, he said.
My legs are numb, she admitted.
Numb?
I can’t feel them. She couldn’t help it. Fear was creeping in.
He felt her body. You need to take these off, he said, pulling at the rubber of her waders.
She did as he said. Beneath them, she wore wet jeans.
The pants also, he said. He wasn’t whispering, but talking very softly.
While she did this, he was pulling off his own waders and then his jacket and sweatshirt.
How far up are you wet?
Just my legs.
Take off the underwear, too.
Soon she was naked from the waist down and her father from the waist up. She was glad for the darkness, because though their relationship was extraordinary for a father and daughter, she had begun to feel the inevitable awkwardness about her ascension into womanhood. She knew that this would eventually alter things.
You need to get into the fetal position, he told her.
When she was on the cold rock, curled up, he took his dry sweatshirt and fit it over her legs – it was very large and her body slight – and then he covered her with his coat. Camille felt his body’s warmth still in the fabric of the material.
I’m okay, Camille said, breathing quickly.
She couldn’t see him well, but she knew he was very concerned.
He paced. They waited, listened, Camille deep in her own mind. Her father eventually sat down next to her, shirtless. It was maybe 35 degrees Fahrenheit, but dropping.
Don’t worry about me, Camille managed to say, her speech interrupted by a burst of teeth chatter.
It was then that they heard the unmistakable guttural whine of the GMC’s ignition engaging, and a moment later, the pop of it catching.
Her father torqued himself off the ground and ran a little ways up a promontory to see what he could see. They were close, it turned out – so close that they could hear the truck’s wheels knocking over saplings as it rolled down the hill. When the truck made it to the pavement, they could see faint lights come on through the trees and then a brief screech as Hunter tried to put it into first while it was still rolling, but then he clutched again and found second. The exhaust coughed loudly as he accelerated. He was heading back in the direction of town, which was also the direction of the highway. She knew they would never see him again and oddly, the first thought that came to her mind was that she would be able to go into his shed and discover what it was that he had been listening to.
They heard the report of two shotgun blasts then.
What’s happening? she asked.
They shot at him I think, he said. Or maybe just at the tires.
As the truck’s engine noise diminished into the night, they could hear the men yelling below. There must have been at least two parties, as the voices were coming from both far off and close by.
She watched her father in the dim light weighing the various options, none of them good.
The yelling continued among the men. We’re over here, one of the men was barking.
Let’s go up, she said to him. We’ll find something.
She meant to disappear further into the hills to look for an empty summer cabin. They’d done it before once, when they’d over-extended Camille’s walking range while hunting. They had come upon a two-room place, neatly kept, a long, steep, rutted driveway connecting it to a county road in the valley below. Her father had jimmied open an ancient window and crawled in and then opened the door. They’d lit a fire and warmed up in front of it for a few hours, had two cups of tea and some saltines he’d found in a cabinet. Afterwards, they washed the dishes and cleaned out the ashes from the fireplace and dumped them in a small creek running nearby.
She knew the problem with this plan was her state.
How do you feel? he asked.
I’m fine, she lied.
He exhaled. We’ve got to move then. Wrap the jacket around your waist and get your boots on. I’ll take the shirt back.
What are we doing?
We don’t have a choice, Camille. We can’t risk being out in this weather tonight.
Dad.
Come on, he said.
He ditched the animal carcasses and waders in some bushes and then they started off up the small promontory. Below them a wider geological feature opened up, the tributary through which the logging road ran. The moon lit the place poorly through some clouds that had set in, but just enough for Camille to be able to see her father’s back as they made their slow way, his head of shaggy black hair. They slid down the bank toward where the truck had been, and then followed the logging road down to the valley floor, where they walked in the direction of the voices, which were all congregated now beside the road several hundred yards from them. One of them had a gas lantern, the rest flashlights.
Whoa there, someone yelled when they got close, swinging a shotgun on them.
We’re not armed, her father said. We need help.
Who the hell are you? The man wanted to know.
My daughter is hypothermic, he said, ignoring the question. She needs to warm up now. Can you take her to your house and get her dry?
She was shivering uncontrollably now at the thought of dry blankets and the coal-fired stove these men no doubt had.
Are you kidding me? You come on to my land and steal from me and then expect my help.
Please, her father said. Just take us to your house. She needs attention. I will tell you what you want to know. You can do whatever you feel is necessary.
The man seemed to think for a minute.
No, he said. I won’t help you. But the deputy sheriff’s car probably has a heater in it.
There was a silence as his words hung there. She could see the rough calculus going on in her father’s mind.
It’s going to take a deputy a half hour to get here, her dad said.
Come with me, another man said. Jesus Christ. You’re an asshole, Ray.
Do not help these people, Ray said.
You do what you want on your property. This here is mine. I’m not going to have this girl go into shock while we stand around and jaw about this. Come down if you want, Ray. I’ll have Cora call the sheriff. I think me and the boys here can handle these two.
There were five of them, total, Ray, the one who was helping them, another man who appeared to be with Ray, and then two teenage boys.
We must go now, her father said.
Christ almighty, Ray said, pointing his gun back toward the earth. Let’s go then.
It was a half mile to the house probably, a good fifteen-minute walk. Camille’s father wrapped his arm around her for a while, but it was clear that they could go faster without that.
Along the way, Ray complained to no one in particular about poachers and about the state of the country. He would have a seizure, Camille thought, if he only knew the truth of who they were, and who had driven the truck off.
When they got to the house, she was set up next to a stove and covered in blankets. A middle-aged woman brought her tea.
What kind of man drags his daughter into something like that? she heard the woman ask in the kitchen. Eventually, Camille was brought some pants and a heavy shirt. Her father was given dry clothes, too, while Ray grumbled loudly about the royal treatment they were getting.
Her father sat on the couch across the big room and fielded questions about his operation, about who the other man was. He told them he’d trapped a few animals in their stretch of the creek, but that he had been confused about the boundaries. He had thought he was on state forest land.
Ray laughed at this notion. Jimmy says he’s seen your truck fifty times out here, always at dusk.
Jimmy exaggerates, her father said. And dusk is when I have time to do this work.
Jimmy scowled. Ray coughed up the word “work.”
What about your accomplice?
Accomplice? her father said. I don’t follow.
Who was the third guy? The one in the truck.
There was no third guy.
So where is your truck then?
That’s what I’m wondering, too. Someone hotwired it, as best I can tell.
I saw you pass by earlier. There were three bodies in the cab.
I don’t think you would’ve seen three people in that truck today.
You’re a liar.
Her father didn’t shrug, but gave the men the same turn of his head and slightly puffed cheeks that he had given her in front of the school earlier. You’ll have to figure this out for yourself.
The deputy was taking a long time.
I need to use the bathroom, she told the woman. She had seen it next to the mudroom on the way in.
I’ll show you.
The bathroom was off a hallway. On her way across the room, she caught her father’s eye. She squeezed her own eyes shut for a very long moment. When she opened them again, he gave her a nearly imperceptible head tilt. It had come down to this, an almost animal communication, so subtle and freighted. They had been through many scrapes up to this point. She wondered, as she disappeared down the hallway, if they would have the chance to go through more. If they could manage this, the odds were good. She felt recouped.
Inside the bathroom, she listened as the woman’s footsteps traced a path back into the kitchen, and then she cracked the door open and slid out. She grabbed her boots as well as a sheepskin jacket that hung on a hook. Very carefully, she opened the door to the outside and was out, squeezing the knob tightly as she closed it.
In the pines up the hill from the house, she waited for her father’s escape.
Jerry Gabriel is the author of two short story collections, Drowned Boy (Sarabande Books, 2010) and The Visitors (forthcoming from Queen’s Ferry Press in 2015).