The Fence by Jeremy Griffin
The trailer is a shabby doublewide the color of a coffee stain, nestled amidst the weeds at the top of the hill like a dozing animal. A vinyl awning sags over the door, which opens to a set of warped wooden stairs. Beyond it, the land slopes down a hundred yards or so toward the highway. That’s where the kid was killed.
“The mom was in another room,” Emmitt explains to Holt on the twenty-minute drive from Christiansburg, into the circuitous network of mountain backroads. “Kid was autistic, something. Wandered down to the road, got squashed by a semi. Driver went nuts. They got him in the hospital over in Augusta.”
In order to pacify the horrified neighbors, the city stepped in and determined that there should have been a fence surrounding the property to begin with, an overlooked county statute. And so now Emmitt pulls the large New River Valley Fences truck up the winding graveled drive, the trailer full of digging gear clanking along behind them, and then around the base of the hill so that he and Holt can install fifteen hundred feet of rail fence.
The morning is hot and dry, no clouds overhead, only the scorching August sun beating down on their arms and necks as Holt unloads the auger and posthole diggers and shovels and lumber, while Emmitt tromps off with his measuring wheel. The knee-high grass, still damp with dew, brushes against Holt’s bare legs as he works. He got the job through his PO, who went to high school with Emmitt, following his release from Blue Ridge State Correctional four months earlier. The ad-hoc interview took place at the rented stand-alone garage where Emmitt houses the truck and trailer. The place resembled a hardware store that had been sacked by a tornado, oil- and grease-coated workbenches cluttered with tools, stacks of unused lumber and bags of Quickrete piled haphazardly against the corrugated metal walls. Spools of hurricane fence propped up in various corners.
“Way I see it, don’t matter you’ve been in jail, so long as you’re willing to work and don’t cause me no problems,” Emmitt told Holt in his husky baritone. “Had my son-in‑law working with me for a while, but the boy couldn’t hardly swing a hammer, was so stoned most of the time. That ain’t how I run a business, you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You use drugs, son?”
“No, sir.”
“I’m talking anything here, even a little weed.”
“I don’t.”
The man nodded. He was resting his brawny arms on the top of the tailgate. Holt put him somewhere around three hundred pounds, a walrus of a man, with skin as dark as fresh asphalt. “Good. You drink?”
At this Holt paused. Technically speaking, he hadn’t had a drop of anything since before being locked up. But like they were always saying at the AA meetings he’d been required to attend in prison, getting sober only means you stop drinking, it doesn’t mean you stop being a drunk. The meeting moderator had been a high school geography teacher for twenty-two years until he’d driven his truck through the front of a Starbucks, and he was full of clever sayings like this. Another one that stuck with Holt was, We are capable of change, just not the kind of change we’d like.
And so finally Holt cleared his throat and looked at Emmitt and said, “Not anymore, no.”
Emmitt’s hooded eyes lingered on him for a moment, and in that silence Holt suspected that the man could see him for what he truly was: a loser, a wino criminal whose fiancée didn’t want anything to do with him anymore, whose would‑be stepdaughter would only ever know him as the man responsible for almost killing her.
But then Emmitt finally nodded to himself. “Good deal. I’ll pick you up Monday morning at seven. Be outside.”
Now Holt maneuvers the broad spiral blade of the auger through stubborn pockets of shale in the earth so that Emmitt can plant the posts. The powerhead bucks violently in his hands, making his entire body quake. By the time the sun is at its peak, his t‑shirt is soaked through with sweat, clinging to his lean frame. As he works he keeps an eye on the doublewide at the top of the hill, hoping to catch a glimpse of the kid’s mother. He wants to know what it does to you, losing a kid like that. But other than the battered red Pontiac in the driveway the place is lifeless, the blinds drawn like the eyelids of a corpse.
* * *
Before being sent to prison, Holt was a grill cook at the American Buffet in Christiansburg. This was back when he was living with Charmaine and Kaylee in Charmaine’s blocky little foursquare near the train depot. One afternoon he showed up to work to find his manager trashing the closet-sized office with an industrial ladle. Apparently, the corporate office had decided that their branch’s numbers were too low – the restaurant was located in a failing strip mall where the only traffic seemed to be the teenagers who would show up in their jacked‑up trucks at night to smoke cigarettes and blare their stereos until the cops arrived – and had shut the place down, effective immediately.
“So, what’s that mean?” Holt asked the man.
The manager paused his bashing of the printer. He adjusted his red checked tie. Beads of sweat clustered in his scanty mustache. “Means we’re out of a job.”
“But they can’t do that, can they? Without telling us?”
“They already did, amigo.” He brought the ladle down on the paper tray, snapping it off with a fat crack.
Back at the house, Holt went through a six-pack in half an hour, downing the beers in only a few gulps apiece. What was he supposed to do now? File for unemployment most likely. Go stand in line at the job center downtown alongside all the other deadbeats with their sob stories. Not that he was in any position to judge. With no high school diploma to speak of and no technical skills, he’d been lucky to have a job at all.
When Charmaine got home from the salon, having picked up Kaylee at daycare, she found Holt slumped in the La-Z-Boy in front of the blaring television, his knuckles bruised and bloodied from the hole he’d punched through the wall in the wood-paneled hallway. He hadn’t meant to do it, not really. He’d just needed to put his fist somewhere, and the wall had seemed as good a place as any.
“Oh, this is great!” she howled. “This is exactly what I wanted to come home to!” Her midsection pooched over the waistband of her skinny jeans, too skinny for her chunky figure. Flaxen-colored roots shone through her dyed black hair.
Holt tried to explain to her about the restaurant’s closing, but as far as Charmaine was concerned he had no one but himself to blame for his misfortunes. Before the American Buffet there was the drywall job, which he’d held for a year until the owner of the company retired to Florida to be near his grandkids, and before that the house-painting gig that he’d had for six months until the housing market drop, and before that a host of other jobs that had lasted several months at a stretch before the powers that be determined Holt was no longer essential. To Charmaine, the solution was simple – Holt needed to get his GED, maybe enroll in the community college downtown. He needed real skills, not just the use of his hands. A job, she claimed, wasn’t the same as a career. After all, there was Kaylee to think about, now four years old, and what if they ended up having more kids? A day laborer gig just wasn’t going to cut it – time for him to start thinking ahead.
Holt didn’t bother pointing out that he provided for Charmaine and Kaylee more than Charmaine’s ex ever had, an ATV salesman who had refused to have anything to do with the pregnancy. Nor did he point out that he – Holt – was the one who had taught the girl to count to a hundred and had gotten her over her fear of the monster-infested closet and had even turned the spare change jug in the bedroom into a college fund. If that wasn’t thinking ahead, then what was? Instead, he hefted himself out of the chair and stumbled to the door, just as Kaylee began bawling, her plump face folding in on itself like a hand curling into a fist, her customary response to their fighting. Ordinarily, he might have swept her up in his arms, twirled her around the room to get her giggling, but he didn’t have it in him to be reasonable. Better to go grab a drink at the Cellar, wait for all of them to cool down.
Charmaine grabbed angrily at him as he crossed the room, her voice rising in pitch, but he swatted her hand off like a pesky insect, not even turning his head to look at her. As he reached the door he felt her grip his wrist with a sudden ferocity, her fingernails digging into his skin. Had his better judgment not been superseded by his booze-fueled temper, he probably would have been able to tell that it was Kaylee’s hand, not Charmaine’s. But as it was, he was too slow to stop himself from jerking his arm backward to free his hand, catching her under the chin with the back of his wrist and slamming her backward into a bookcase, her tiny head connecting against the corner with a hideous crunch. Like a beetle crushed beneath a boot. She collapsed face-first on the floor, blood blackening her fine blond hair.
Charmaine let out an animal shriek and fell to the floor beside her, hauling the girl up into her lap and patting her cheeks to rouse her back to consciousness. “Come on, baby,” she sobbed, “just open your eyes! Open your eyes for Mama!” After a few seconds, Kaylee’s eyelids creaked open and Holt, who’d been standing motionless in the doorway, let out a long shaky breath.
It wasn’t until much later, after the hospital and then the holding cell at the police station, that he would find out he had fractured her skull. That she hadn’t slipped into a coma was nothing short of a miracle, according to the doctor. The judge, notoriously unsympathetic toward domestic abusers, was unmoved by Holt’s plea that the whole thing had been one big accident and decided instead to make an example of him: a year in prison. Holt’s publicly-appointed lawyer, a dumpy woman who carried pictures of her three Boston terriers in her wallet the way other people carry pictures of their kids, assured him that he could be out in five, maybe six months if he played his cards right.
“I’ve never cared much for cards,” Holt responded dryly as the bailiff came to escort him back to his cell.
“Now’s a good time to learn,” the woman rejoined.
* * *
Drilling through the rocky earth proves to be more difficult than either Emmitt or Holt expected, and it ends up taking most of the week to plant the hundred and fifty posts. But Holt doesn’t mind the work. It’s good to be out in the sizzling sun, building something with his hands, his skin becoming tanned and his muscles thickening. Each day they work from seven-thirty until noon, at which point they break for half an hour to wolf down their sack lunches in the truck cab, Emmitt blasting the AC and listening to sports radio. After that it’s back to work until four, by which point the sweat on their skins has dried to a tacky salt rime. By the end of each day, Holt feels like a prize fighter emerging victorious after a brutally prolonged match.
At the base of the hill is a windbreak of scrub pine insulating the property from the highway, where they go if they have to take a leak and where the whooshing sound of traffic from the highway on the opposite side blasts through like hurricane winds. Every time he’s down there, Holt can’t help thinking about the dead kid. He must have tromped through these very trees on his way down to the road. What had he been hoping to find? If his years with Kaylee have taught him anything, it’s that kids’ curiosity is a powerful and sometimes dangerous thing: it needs an outlet the same way the men in Blue Ridge State Correctional needed their free weights and cigarettes and board games, because without it what else is standing between you and the world?
This is what he’s thinking on the afternoon that, standing in the chamber of trees, he hears voices coming from the other side, a man’s and a woman’s. The sound of the traffic drowns out the words, but he can tell from the shrillness of their tones that they’re arguing. He shoulders his way through the pines, clouds of brambles scratching his shins and tugging at his clothes, before he emerges onto the graveled shoulder of the road. A few yards away is a battered black Tercel with a flat-back passenger’s side tire, the car canted crookedly to the side. A man is hunkered down fumbling with a scissor jack. He wears baggy shorts that hang down low enough to expose his lime green boxers and a long blue tank top that draws attention to his thick biceps, busy with cheap-looking tattoos. Holt can’t make out the face of the woman in the passenger’s seat, but he can hear her shouting something indecipherable at the man through the rolled-down window. “Well, then you get your smart ass out here and do it!” he fires back as he cranks the handle. The woman rattles off something else, and the man barks, “I am twisting it! Goddammit, Darcy, would you let me work?”
Holt inches toward the stalled vehicle, his body buffeted by the airstream of the traffic to his left. “Need some help?” he calls out.
Flinching, the man springs to his feet. “Shit, dude, where’d you come from?”
“Doing some work up here.” Holt gestures in the direction of the hill beyond the curtain of trees behind him. As he gets closer to the vehicle, the woman cranes around the headrest to look at him. She’s a bottle redhead with a big nose and closely-set eyes and acne-scarred cheeks. In the backseat he notices a pair of boys probably no older than Kaylee. They have the woman’s broad forehead and harshly-contoured face, chins like blades. By the time they hit their thirties, they’ll look ancient.
“Think I’m all right,” the man says, twitching his fingers at his sides anxiously. “Must have run over a nail or something. I already got the donut on, just gotta tighten the nuts.”
Standing only a few feet from the man now, Holt takes in his raw, watery eyes and the droop at the corners of his mouth, the slight waver in his posture. You go to enough meetings, you learn to recognize when someone is wasted. He can hear it in the man’s voice, the edges of his words bleared like wet ink.
“Want me to call somebody?” he asks.
“No, I’m good. Thanks.”
“Maybe you ought to let her drive.”
“Hey, man,” the fellow says with a note of annoyance, squaring back his shoulders, “I said we’re good, all right? Why don’t you go on back now, lemme fix this tire.”
But Holt takes another step forward. He’s thinking about the sharp clack of Kaylee’s teeth as his arm connected with her jaw. “Just seems like you’re not in the best condition to drive.”
“Motherfucker, my ain’t none of your business.”
“What’s he want?” the woman yells from inside the car.
“Nothing,” the man replies.
“Does he know how to use the jack?”
“Darcy, I swear to god!”
“You okay to drive?” Holt calls over to her.
“Hey!” the man caws. “You got nothing to say to her, you hear me?”
He gives Holt’s shoulder a firm poke that makes him stagger back a step, and before he can stop himself he shoves the man, a prison yard reflex, although it’s about like trying to move an oak tree. He has an instant to realize the stupidity of what he’s done before the fellow’s melon-sized fist crashes into the side of his face, sending him sprawling on the ground. Gravel slices his elbows and the back of his head, his face screeching in pain from the blow.
Now the man stands over Holt, the sun casting jagged shapes across his face. Thick snakelike cords bulge in his neck and forearms.
“Get up, see what happens, asshole,” he growls.
Clutching his throbbing jaw, Holt glances from him to the kids in the backseat, who are watching the spectacle over the headrests with the beseeching expressions of hostages, open-mouthed and grubby-faced. The woman, too, is still eyeballing him from the open window, deciding whose side to take in the squabble. It’s one of those tip-the-scale moments that he’s come to know well, when any decision you make is bound to damn you in some way. A couple years ago he might have scrabbled to his feet and charged the guy, fists flailing. Maybe he would have gotten his ass kicked, but a man has to stand up for himself if he wants to command any respect. Or at least that was what he used to believe, back before being locked away. But if there’s one thing he’s picked over the past year, it’s that the right thing to do isn’t always the responsible thing to do. Being a coward, he figures, is better than being busted back to Blue Ridge State Correctional for scrapping with a stranger.
And so finally Holt, reclining on his bloody elbows, lifts his bloodied palms in surrender.
“Good decision,” the man grunts. He continues staring down at him for another few seconds, his fists still poised at his side, before turning back to the car.
From the cigarette butt-strewn ground, Holt, still too dizzy to stand, watches him tighten the lug nuts and then cram the flat tire in the hatchback, tossing the jack and the handle in on top of it with a clank. “You oughtta learn to mind your own business,” he says as he stuffs his bulky body into the driver’s seat. Holt can see the boys still watching him as the vehicle lurches back onto the busy highway, the brakes whining, and then rumbles away.
* * *
That night Holt calls Charmaine. Legally, he isn’t supposed to have any contact with her, but his altercation with the man has shaken something loose in him, and suddenly summoning the wrath of her lawyer seems like a risk worth taking. It’s close to nine; by now she’ll have a couple rum-and-cokes in her, which means she might be more amenable to talking. His plan is to blindside her with the speech he concocted about mistakes and forgiveness and the importance of a male authority figure in a child’s life. But when he hears her pick up, everything he planned to say scatters from his mind.
“What do you want, Holt?”
“Please don’t hang up,” he sputters.
“You’re not supposed to be calling here.”
“I was just hoping we could talk.”
She sighs. “Nothing to talk about.”
“How’s things at the salon?”
“Didn’t you hear me? We’re not doing this.”
Holt’s apartment is a stale studio on the second floor of a boxy brick tenement, with a single closet and a rusted half-stove and a modest balcony onto which he now steps, lighting up a cigarette. The first drag makes his jaw ache. His fingers drift up to the fleshy knot near the angle of the bone. “How’s Kaylee?”
Charmaine chokes out a humorless laugh. “I’ll tell you how she is. She’s got a big ugly scar on the back of her head, and she gets headaches when it rains. Does that answer your question?”
“Can I talk to her?”
“Are you out of your mind? Of course you can’t talk to her. She’s already in bed, anyway.”
“She ever ask about me?”
“We’re seriously not having this conversation.”
Holt sucks deeply on the smoke, wincing at the flash of pain. “Goddammit, Charmaine, you know that girls who grow up without their fathers always turn out to be fucked up.”
“You’re not her father, Holt,” she fires back. “Don’t call us again, you understand? Or else you’re gonna be in a world of shit.”
Before he can respond, she clicks off. For a few moments, Holt stares at the phone in his hand, willing her to call him back, tell him the whole thing was a big misunderstanding. When that doesn’t happen, he whips the thing across the room. It strikes the wall by the counter, leaving a dent in the drywall before clattering onto the cheap tile. When he picks it up he sees that the screen is spider-webbed with cracks, permanently frozen on the red CALL ENDED notification.
* * *
The idea of spending one more night alone in the cramped apartment, chain smoking to stanch the alcohol cravings, makes him think he might lose his mind, and so he decides to walk down the road to the 7-Eleven for a burrito. Having had his driver’s license revoked, Holt’s only occasion to leave the place, other than work and going for groceries, is the one day a week his sponsor picks him up for his court-mandated meetings. Beyond that, it’s not much different than being in prison, the crippling loneliness, the insufferable boredom. He shuffles along the littered shoulder of the road, past the vacant machine shops and the squalid paper mill that lends the air a flatulent odor. A squadron of bats flits about the lighted industrial spires, gobbling up insects. He thinks about that night in the hospital, sitting in one of the waiting room’s molded plastic chairs with his head dangling between his shoulders, looking up to see the two cops approaching, their faces set into looks of stony accusation. He thinks about his first night in prison, his cellmate, a monstrous fellow everyone called Train, waking him shortly after lights out with a series of expert blows to the back of his head – a standard punishment among the inmates for laying hands on a kid – making Holt’s eyes feel like they might pop right out of his skull. And Kaylee, he thinks about her too, her clean powdery little girl scent, how he never got a chance to apologize to her. To explain.
Up ahead is the store, the fluorescents over the door flickering unevenly, but his attention is drawn instead to the bar on the opposite side of the road. He’s passed it hundreds of times but has never paid much attention to it, a dun-colored brick cube with bars on the door, the windows blacked out and adorned with blinking beer signs. This, he understands now as he finds himself migrating across the road, was the reason he left the apartment.
A nervous film of sweat breaks out on his forehead and the back of his neck as soon as he steps inside, as though the temperature has abruptly spiked. The place is muggy with decades of smoke and beer vapor, the nicotine-yellowed walls plastered with outdated ads, their colors bleached to a palette of dull greens and greys. A trio of burly men in camo hats shoots pool, while a lone geezer on the end of the bar watches a baseball game on one of the wall-mounted televisions.
Holt takes a seat at the opposite end of the bar. The bartender, a lanky fellow in a bleach-stained Grateful Dead t‑shirt, sets down his Wordsearch next to the register and plods over to him.
“Yuengling,” Holt mutters, “and a shot of Jack.”
Moments later the bartender sets the drinks in front of him and then returns to his puzzle, all without a word. Holt studies them, the thin layer of frost on the bottle, the liquor’s smooth amber shade. His armpits are damp. More things are coming loose in him, he can sense it, pieces of himself he’ll never be able to reclaim, and he doesn’t know how to finagle them back into place. And what’s really troubling is he isn’t even sure he wants to. Being capable of change isn’t the same as wanting to change – that’s another one of the AA moderator’s favorite expressions – and increasingly Holt is having a hard time seeing the point of doing the right thing when the outcome doesn’t seem any different.
11He shuts his eyes tight and downs the shot, the liquor singeing his gullet, and then chases it with the beer. Swallowing sends a flare up the side of his face but he ignores it, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. After nearly a year of sobriety he soon begins to feel his muscles going liquid, his mind loosening like a deflating balloon. That old reckless hunger yawning in his gut. What he wants is to tear something down, or stitch something back together, he can’t tell which.
The beer is gone within minutes, and Holt orders another round, and then another. He drinks until the last call bell rings out, by which point he’s the only customer left. When the bartender, who’s already started turning chairs over on tabletops, drops off the check, Holt, remembering that his phone is out of commission, says, “And call me a cab, will you?”
* * *
He has the driver drop him off at the shop. Emmitt keeps the sliding metal doors sealed with a chain and a combination lock, though lucky for Holt he has a habit of whispering the numbers to himself as he dials through them every morning. Once inside, Holt latches the trailer to the truck hitch and then he loads up the auger and nailgun and chainsaw and as many two-by-fours as the trailer can handle.
Navigating the snaky backroads is treacherous, his vision blurry and unsteady, the truck drifting in and out of the lane, but he manages to make it to the doublewide a half hour later without landing the vehicle in a ravine. He pulls into the driveway and then cuts over through the cheatgrass to the line of posts standing like sentries around the base of the hill. It’s close to midnight, a yellow half-moon cowering behind a thin veil of clouds. The air smells like honeysuckle and fresh dirt. Gusts of wind stir the pines at the base of the hill as Holt drives around the perimeter depositing armloads of two-by-fours in the wet grass. Once he’s unloaded them all he climbs out of the cab and grabs the nail gun from the bed.
The doublewide is far enough up the hill, he assumes, that the woman won’t hear the gun’s airy popping. Nailing up the rails proves tricky without Emmitt there to counterbalance them, and the alcohol percolating in his veins doesn’t make it any easier, but it seems vital that the job be finished as soon as possible, with or without Emmitt. And in fact soon he’s fallen into a rhythm, measure, cut, nail, over and over again, a calming reverie. A man needs a goal, he’s always believed this, even if that goal is building something for someone else. An unoccupied mind will get you into trouble – just ask anyone in Blue Ridge State Correctional. Problem is, the older you get the more out of reach those goals begin to seem: you just keep chasing them and chasing them, and how long can you do that before finally accepting the fact that you never had a shot in the first place? Figuring out which things to hold onto and which ones to let go, that’s pretty much all a life comes down to.
Measure, cut, nail.
“What are you doing?”
At the sound of the voice, Holt lets out a yip and wheels around to see a woman in a ratty brown robe standing in the grass, the breeze whipping her stringy brown hair across her face.
When he doesn’t respond, just gawps at her as he waits for his nerves to stop ringing, she repeats the question: “I asked you what you’re doing.”
He scratches his head with the business end of the nailgun, swaying on his feet. He can’t think of an answer that doesn’t sound like a lie.
“Finishing this fence,” he says.
“It’s midnight.”
“Yes, ma’am, I know.”
“So, why are you out here at midnight?”
“I just want to get it done,” he replies. “I didn’t mean to wake you up. I’ll leave if you want me to.”
“You didn’t wake me. I don’t sleep too good.” The woman seems to consider him for a moment. “You’re drunk,” she comments, though there’s no recrimination in her voice, no hostility. She could just as easily be commenting on the weather.
Holt, toeing a patch of dead cheatgrass with his boot, nods and says, “Yes, ma’am. A little.”
She swipes the hair out of her eyes, revealing a pale and expressionless face, like an unfinished sketch. It reminds him of an old sci-fi movie he and Charmaine watched about alien slugs that attached themselves to the backs of peoples’ necks and took over their minds. The people moved about as blank-faced as robots, doing the aliens’ bidding.
Slowly, she turns her head to look beyond him toward the tree line at the bottom of the hill, a maneuver that seems to require a great deal of effort. She scratches the back of her thin wrist.
“You hungry?”
“Ma’am?”
“Let me make you something to eat.”
She begins back up the hill toward the house. Something about her aloofness makes Holt uneasy, like being in the wicked calm of a hurricane’s eye, but he’s not in a position to refuse her, so he drops the nailgun and brushes the sawdust off his shirt and follows her up the slope and then up the rickety stairs into the doublewide.
The place looks as if it’s been ransacked, the floors buried beneath a crust of dirty dishes, junk mail, and fast food cartons. He has to step over an overturned plantstand to make it into the living room. Piles of clothes clog the small hallway between there and the bedroom. On the cluttered coffee table, a green ceramic ashtray blooms over with cigarette butts. The fetid smell of old grease and smoke hangs thickly. Amidst the mess Holt notices a scattering of kid’s toys, action figures and plastic trucks and crumpled coloring books and, in the corner of the room, a child’s rollercoaster table, the multicolored wires spiraling and loop-de-looping like the trajectories of flies. Kaylee has one too, although as with most of her toys it only took her a few weeks to lose interest in it. Now Charmaine uses it to air dry her tops.
The woman, however, seems completely unfazed by the filth. “Here,” she says, guiding him over to the counter. “Have a seat.” She pulls back one of the stools and pushes off a stack of old coupon mailers. Then she drifts over to the cubby-sized kitchen on the other side and begins riffling through the fridge. Photos of a young boy, auburn-haired and sweetly dimpled, hang from alphabet magnets on the front. In one image, he stands in the foamy surf of a beach smiling up at the camera, a pair of orange floaties on his stubby arms. For some reason, Holt finds it hard to look away.
“Sorry for the mess,” the woman says. “We don’t get a lot of visitors.”
“It’s no problem.”
“How do you like your eggs?”
“You really don’t need to go to any trouble.”
“Scrambled okay?”
“Sure, that’s fine.”
He watches her rummage through a cabinet for a bowl and then whip the yolks with a whisk, her face maintaining its droopy-eyed gloss. From her thin, delicate features Holt can tell that she was once beautiful. Now her eyes, dark and deep-set, are edged by deep creases, like the grain of old wood. Veins the same bluish shade as mold mottle her forehead. Her dirty hair falls around her face like a frame, the front of her robe open just enough to reveal the gaunt knobs of her collarbone.
“Ten years I been living here, and no one ever said anything about a fence,” she says as she dumps the scrambled yolks into a pan. Holt gets the impression she isn’t necessarily speaking to him. “Now the county wants to sue me for neglect.”
“I’m sorry,” he says dumbly.
“They act like a fence would make a difference. Like a kid couldn’t just climb over it. Or under it.”
“I guess they’re just trying to cover their own asses.”
She pushes the congealing mixture around the pan with a spatula. “Nothing surprises me anymore. You start to think the world is one way, and then you can’t see it any other way, no matter how hard you try.”
“It’s not your fault what happened.” Holt isn’t sure why he’s saying this, or even who he’s addressing, but he knows all the same that it needs to be said.
“County says it is. They’re probably right. See, my boy, he’s autistic, he don’t understand when something’s dangerous. He just does things. Once, I caught him wandering down the driveway in his underpants, told me he was walking to Wal-Mart. Can you believe that? He was dead serious, too. I think he woulda done it if I hadn’t caught him, walked ten miles to goddamn Wal-Mart. When he gets an idea in his head, he’s like a machine, see.”
She dishes the eggs out onto a plastic plate and sets them in front of Holt and then hands him a fork from the rack in the sink. When she isn’t looking, he wipes the gunk off on his pants.
“I don’t know where he was going that day,” she continues, lighting up a cigarette, her eyes fixed on a point somewhere on the other side of the room. “All I know is I left him watching one of his videos and I went to the bathroom, and when I came out he was gone.”
“How old was he?”
“He’s four. You want any salt or pepper?”
“No thank you.”
From the other side of the counter, the woman watches him with that flat, glazed look as he gobbles down the eggs in only a few forkfuls, and once more Holt recalls those alien slugs manipulating men and women around like puppets, steering them through their own lives, and he considers, distantly, whether or not the people were any worse off for it.
“How are they?” she asks, blowing a jet of smoke toward the ceiling.
“They’re good.”
“You really going to finish that fence tonight?”
“I don’t know. That was the plan.”
“You’re tired.”
And it’s not until she says it that Holt realizes how true it is. The booze is burning out of his system, leaving him feeling drained and hollow. His eyes sting with drowsiness, and the knot on his face aches. All at once, finishing the fence on his own seems like an insurmountable obstacle, a trap he’s wandered into.
“Why don’t you lay down for a while?” she says. Floating over to the sofa, the woman sweeps the heaps of dirty clothes and old paperbacks onto the floor with one arm. She grabs a throw pillow out of the mess and places it against one of the armrests, giving it a friendly pat.
“I should get back,” Holt replies, though not even he’s buying it. “I’m not supposed to be here.”
“Driving’s the last thing you need to be doing. Sleep it off. Over here, come on.”
With some hesitation, he wades his way through the junk on the floor to the couch, a weary weight already settling into his limbs. Easing himself down, he curls up on his side to keep his feet from dangling over the edge. The upholstery smells like sweat and unwashed hair, but he doesn’t care. It’s just good to be off his feet.
“There you go,” the woman says, her voice softer now, tenderer, as she covers him with a quilt from the back of the sofa. “The fence will still be there when you wake up. Just rest.” She brings a fingertip to the reddened knot on his jaw. “What happened here?”
“An accident,” Holt answers, tucking the quilt beneath his chin. “A dumb one.”
“Is there any other kind?”
She takes a seat on the adjacent armchair. She ashes her cigarette onto the mound of butts in the ashtray. Even with his eyes closed Holt can feel her watching him, waiting for him to drift off. Any other time this would bother him, but tonight he’s comforted to know that someone is close by. He tries not to think about what will happen when he wakes up, what he’ll tell Emmitt about having stolen the truck. He tries not to think about the dead kid, the one in the pictures, or about the two boys in the back of the Tercel, their pale faces receding into the distance as the car disappeared down the highway. And Kaylee, he tries not to think about her either, whether he’ll ever see her again. Instead, he thinks about the fence, how beautiful it will look like when it’s finished. He can see it in his mind clear as a photograph, the long wooden rails encircling the property like a pair of arms.
Jeremy Griffin is the author of two collections of short stories, A Last Resort for Desperate People (Stephen F. Austin State University Press) and Oceanography (Orison Books).