Free Volt: Stories by Alan Heathcock Page B

on a big river. Everything smelled of soil and fish. So much water, so much washed over, but perhaps when they started anew everything could be better, everything forgiven. Perhaps God would allow the girl to be dredged up by the flood and found, her parents granted their closure, yet the unrighteous cause of her death kept a gracious unknown.
    Helen walked to a bureau and searched the drawers, one filled with scarves and nylons, the next with panties neatly folded and separated by color. She moved to the closet and shone her light over the clothes; pants at one end, then blouses, then dresses. Sweaters were on a shelf above the hanging clothes. She pulled the red sweater from the middle of a stack, unfolded it to be sure it was the right one. The silver thread of the embroidered snowflakes twinkled in Helen’s spotlight. She held the sweater to her face; it smelled faintly of Connie’s perfume. It was an impulse, and Helen could not explain why she needed it other than to say it was something clean and lovely in a world of mud. She hugged the sweater to her throat and lay down on the bed, the mattress soft and pulling her in, her boot heels flat and heavy on the waterlogged carpet.
    December 19, 2007: Blue smoke trailed from a pipe in the cabin’s tin roof. His footprints had frozen like fossils in the snow, and Helen tracked them down through the prairie. The cabin belonged to Robert Joakes, who came into town once a month for supplies, and sold beaver and coon pelts to a coat maker in Northhill.
    A dim light came from the cabin’s only window, a small square high up the wall. Helen stood on her numb toes and peered through the window. A lantern on a rough wood table gave a scant circle of light. A figure hunched beside an iron stove. Helen removed a glove and drew her pistol, felt its weight in her hand, adjusted her finger on the trigger. For a good while she watched the dark figure, embers glowing behind the stove grate. Then Joakes moved off into the shadows.
    Helen crouched beneath the window. Whittled gray clouds raced in from the north. The wind tore through her. Her hand on the pistol grew terribly cold. A half mile away in the tree, Jocey’s body was freezing solid, and Helen felt herself at the center of something enormous and urgent, bigger than her mind could hold, and though terrified, and angry, mainly she felt desperately alone. The urge to flee, to hide, was overwhelming. This is how Jocey felt, Helen thought, and clicked off her pistol’s safety.
    She eased each step through the crackling snow, past firewood stacked to the roof, on around to the door where a metal bucket gave off the stench of urine. A dog barked inside the door, heavy and loud barking that did not cease.
    Christmas Eve, 2007: She followed at a safe distance, as children on inner tubes towed behind a pickup made wide tracks in the road’s new snow. More children huddled in the truck’s bed, sparklers burning in their mittens and gloves. The truck took the curve of Elm Avenue and the inner tubes swung out, the last in line dropping into the ditch before the whip cracked and yanked it back onto the road. Helen switched on the blue and red lights atop the squad car. The truck did not pull to the shoulder, but merely slowed and stopped, the inner tubes sliding forward, one knocking into the next.
    Helen grabbed her flashlight and walked out into the snow, the kids splayed and breathing hard on their tubes.
    “We ain’t done nothing,” said the boy on the last tube, a boy they all called Knight, his chin resting on his gloves.
    “Not yet, you ain’t,” Helen said, and kept the flashlight beam on his face just to get him riled.
    “You’re piss mean even at Christmas,” Knight snapped, and all the other kids laughed.
    Helen passed the kids in the truck bed, their sparklers hissing glitter and glistening in their eyes. “You kids cold?”
    “No’m,” said one boy. “I am,” said a girl, and the boy told her to shut up.
    Then