SoMa Literary Review

Shelter

By Doug Mort

August, 1970. She and my seventeen-year-old brother Wayne were alone in his bedroom, with the door closed. As the house sweltered I tried to listen in.

“The houses were still down there,” she said. “People had lived there; people with dreams. Then somebody flooded the whole fuckin’ valley for drinking water.”

She started to cry. A song started up on Wayne ’s record player – The Rolling Stone’s, “She’s A Rainbow” – and nothing else could be heard.

I stayed for another minute. I tried to think of a way to promise her that I would save her from the flood. Then I slapped the sweat from my nose, returned to the backyard to resume my work.

For the past day and a half – ever since Wayne had introduced me to Janice, when she said I was a lot cuter than him, that I might just steal her away – I had been cleaning the wooden shed at the edge of our patio. Drying sweat from my face with an old rag, I’d thrown out my father’s empty whiskey bottles and crumpled cigarette packs, the pin-up calendars and magazines of questionable taste. The dark cobwebby structure was where my father had drunk and plotted his assaults on the house proper; but he had disappeared again, for longer than usual this time, and I imagined him dead in a hole somewhere, buried and forgotten. Thus I had big redemptive plans for the shed. Specifically, a new abode for me and Janice.

So I swept and swept. Half done, however, something tried to be recalled.

Memory jogged, I dropped the broom and bolted for the rabbit cage.

George was dead, splayed on his stomach, his grimacing face still reaching for the water bottle spigot. Not long before, George had been Wayne ’s rabbit, but he had given him to me after our drunken father had killed and eaten mine. The gift came with a stipulation, however: the rabbit’s welfare would be my responsibility – my first real chore, Wayne had called it. I liked the sound of “chore.” I took it to mean I was now a “grown up.” Which led me a month later to tell my father that I was kicking him out, and that my mother wouldn’t have to work two jobs anymore because I would find work. My father had laughed uproariously. It was that laugh that I now heard at the rabbit cage – the same sarcastic tone, the same pernicious quality. Made me feel like I’d never do a fucking thing right.

I could not stop staring at George. I wanted to call my mother (I always wanted to call her), but I was tired of the man with the smarmy voice who always answered and said she was busy. On my last call he had snapped. “Don’t be a mamma’s boy!”

I didn’t like being called a mamma’s boy. Reminded me of fathertalk.

The backyard began to spin. I felt like I might barf. Luckily, Janice’s voice brought me back.

“Where is my little sweet one anyway?”

I looked down the patio. She was standing outside the glass slider door. Her long blonde hair was in two long braids and she was smiling at me. Barefoot, she wore frayed Levi cutoffs and a white hippie blouse. Wayne was next to her, grinning at me. He was the enemy at the moment.

“Hi Meyers, I’ve been looking all over for you,” Janice half-sang.

The way she said it changed everything. Suddenly I believed that she had been looking all over for me, especially in Wayne ’s room.

I choked up.

“Meyers?”

She ran to me – like she couldn’t get there fast enough, like my mother used to do long ago.

She reached me and I pointed at George. She took a long hard look herself. She turned back to me with tears in her eyes. She said it wasn’t my fault. She said rabbits die all the time in heat waves. She hugged me tight, rocked me back and forth and cried, “You poor, poor thing!”

We dug a hole and buried George against the back fence. Janice drew a peace symbol on the grave with her finger. That finger looked like a magic wand that could turn dirt into shiny new kingdoms. When she asked me for my favorite song, I knew exactly what to say.

“‘She’s A Rainbow.’”

“That’s mine too! How’d you know?”

I shrugged.

She held my hands in front of herself and sang the song to me. My face quivered. But I didn’t want to cry again. I didn’t want her to think I was a mamma’s boy.

She walked me inside and made me an egg sandwich. She ordered Wayne to pour me a Doctor Pepper. When Wayne started to interrogate me about not filling George’s water bottle, Janice shot him a look of disgust. “Why would you say that? Especially right now?”

She rubbed my head. “Don’t listen to ‘im. If he keeps up, we’ll lock ‘im out.”

I took a bite and dreamed of our new home.

Then there was soccer. It was new in our parts, and somehow/somewhere I had heard that short skinny people could excel at the sport. Maybe so, but not so with me.

Wayne drove me. His old car took forever to start. Then it died halfway there and he had to mess with the carburetor. When we arrived thirty seconds before game time I was losing my nerve. I saw the refinery next door, smelled the oil and saw the hard, cracked playing field and wondered if Janice would even like such a place.

Things got worse.

My coach put me in with a minute to go, the other team up by 1. I took the field with heavy heart. I leaned against my teams’ goal post and kept a lookout toward the dirt road that led from the highway to the field. “Get in the game!” my coach hollered and hollered at me. Oh how I wished I could.

The night before my mother had unplugged the phone in the dining room and carried it into her bedroom and closed the door. I tried to listen in, but all I could hear were her sobs. I imagined the worst: not only was my father coming home, he would announce his return at the soccer field just to spite me.

The other team quickly tied the game. Then with ten seconds to go, the ball rolled in front of me as I faced my own goal and tracked a suspicious-looking truck on the highway. When I looked at the ball an opposing player tricked me. “Kick it!” Pent up and pissed off, I kicked the ball with such authority that it actually left the ground and hit the net with a resounding swoosh! A sound so sweet I thought I had finally achieved something. I jumped up and down, raised my hands and arms in the victory dance. A second later the team bully was shouting in my face: “Dope on a rope! Dope on a rope!”

At home I retreated to my bedroom. I forgot all about the shed and domestic bliss. Two days later, however, I had a phone call. Wayne grinned as I walked with trepidation toward the phone. Since my team had another game that afternoon, I thought the team bully was calling to issue a threat.

It was Janice.

That afternoon she warmed me up on the sidelines. “Look at you! You are amazing!”

The coach didn’t want to put me in. Janice let him have it. “Okay,” he said to me, “but let the other boys have the ball.” Janice gave him a glare of disgust, one that made him bow his head in shame. She kissed me on the cheek. “Go get the ball, my little superstar!”

Play resumed and Janice was my personal cheerleader. She jumped up and down and pointed at me and hollered, “That’s my boyfriend! They’re scared of ya, Meyers! Lucky number 13’s an all star and everybody’s afraid of ‘im!”

After the game she wiped my forehead with a bandana. “Did you see yourself? Huh? Why, you had them quakin’ in their cleats!”

On the ride home she sat in the middle and put her arm around me. I started to put mine around her but stopped and looked across at Wayne .

“Sorry,” Janice said to him.

Wayne grinned. “What can I say? I guess the best man won.”

Janice laughed, reached over and put my arm around her. “Maybe he can hang around with us every now and then, huh?”

“Maybe,” I said.

The next day I put a nameplate on the shed door – a piece of masking tape on which I had written in blue felt-tip pen, MEYERS PLAYCE. I sat on the floor of the shed in my soccer uniform and dreamed of a new floor plan. If I could get some money, I’d buy appliances. A stove for Janice…a refrigerator…maybe even an air conditioner. Definitely an air conditioner.

My thoughts turned to security. I had the key to the shed’s padlock. I’d lifted it off of my father one afternoon when he was passed out in a drunken stupor. But a lock needed to be on the inside of the door as well, in case my father had a spare key and came home to resume his little rotten reign of terror.

So I found a second latch in his junk and put it on the inside. If and when he did return, Janice and I could stay inside until he croaked. Then we would emerge and I would continue my rise in the soccer world.

When I was through with the latch, I pulled on it to test its strength. I figured I’d do the same later on for Janice. I’d show her that even though I was only eight I could protect her way better than Wayne .

Then in the middle of the week a freak rainstorm fell. I sat on the floor of the shed with the door open and watched the rain drip off the roof’s overhang and drain off the patio toward the dirt that constituted our backyard. Then I looked up. When I saw that the roof didn’t leak I was pretty sure a flood would not be mine and Janice’s lot. Nonetheless, I knew that airtight things could float; and I figured if the roof ever did leak, I could plug the holes with Bazooka bubble gum, same with the airy places in the siding. Maybe I could mix in some Elmer’s Glue for extra measure.

But then the unimaginable happened.

On Friday morning, after spending a few hours making chalk outlines where the new furniture would go, I came in from the shed and found Wayne seated and hunched over the telephone. He was sniffling, like he’d been crying. “I told you she wouldn’t do that. You know what, I have to go.”

He hung up, turned around and wiped his eyes.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

He looked up. He looked hollow, as if some horrible thing had passed through his body and cannibalized everything in sight. Only a shell remained.

“Nothing. Give me a second and I’ll get you some breakfast.”

That afternoon, however, I saw it on the front page of the newspaper. Wayne had a route, and when the newspapers were dropped at the curb he was on the phone again, crying, saying something about Janice having a premonition, a dream. He told me not to listen, so I ran out to carry the papers through the house to the patio, where we usually rolled them before setting out. Underneath the bag of rubber bands on the top paper was a picture of a camper shell floating in a pond. The headline read, LOCAL GIRL DROWNS IN POLLARD POND.

Wayne found me standing frozen at the front curb. He brought me inside and told me what had happened.

Late the night before, Janice had gone to a local pond. She had parked on a steep incline that led down to the water. The ground was wet from the freak rain storm – muddy – and the truck slid into the pond. Wayne said Janice had slept there before, when she couldn’t go home, and that she was probably sleeping when the truck slid. He said that she always slept with the windows up and the doors locked, and that when and if she awoke she probably panicked and couldn’t get out of the cab.

“It wasn’t airtight?” I asked.

“No,” Wayne said, “water leaked in.”

“What about the shed?”

“The shed?”

“On the back of the truck, it floated.”

“The camper shell? She never slept back there because it wasn’t secure. It only floated because of a spare tire in the bed of the truck.”

“Oh.”

Wayne got a substitute for his route. When he wasn’t looking I put a paper up my shirt and took it in my room. I stayed there until the next morning. I couldn’t stop staring at the picture of the floating camper shell, then Janice’s name in the article below. I might have gone insane right then and there had I not found a pencil and crossed out all of the words in the article and the caption below the picture, had I not revised the article.

Janice is okay becuz Meyers Mendelson made the camper shell air tyt and water sucure.

I put the newspaper under my pillow and went to sleep. The next morning, before I got out of bed, I read the news. Then I made a list of what would be needed in the shed.

And the next day when Wayne said he would attend Janice’s funeral on Tuesday, I heard him say that he had a doctor’s appointment, which would now explain the sadness in his face as nothing more than the flu. And when Wayne asked me if I’d like to take over his route for the afternoon, adding that Janice had said he should let me do it someday, suddenly I couldn’t believe my luck. She was setting up Wayne so that I could get a job. She knew that I could make collections that would pay for new appliances. That and she wouldn’t have to work; she could stay home and bake cookies and work on her cheerleading skills. According to Wayne, she had also suggested that he hem the bag up for me; that I probably wouldn’t like it dragging the ground like a skirt. I figured after Wayne left for his appointment she would come and join me and after the paper route we would move into the shed.

On Tuesday morning Wayne and I sat in the living room. Wayne looked at his watch. “I wonder where Louise is at.” I refused to hear it. Louise was my imperious baby-sitter. Wayne had said something about her when he mentioned the route, but I was having none of it.

“Well, be nice to her – she doesn’t charge Mom anything.”

“Do you want me collect for you?”

Before he could answer, Louise knocked on the door. Wayne went to let her in. I heard mumbling, and the door open and close, followed by the sound of Wayne’s car trying to start.

Then Louise materialized. She loomed over me. She was old, and big around and balding. A monster that if left unchallenged would blah blah blah my dreams to death.

I knew I had to work extra hard this time to keep her out.

But she was a formidable foe. “…Did you hear me?” she finally barged in. “Or are you already getting smart alecky?”

She took a breath and gave me a look of contempt. “I will say this only one more time: go get the newspapers, I do not want to miss my television show.”

“Wayne said for me to do it by myself.”

“And you’re a little liar, aren’t you? Your poor mother. First your father, now you.”

“I have a note from ‘im,” I said and pulled the forgery from the waistband of my soccer shorts.

Meyers can do the paper rowt alone. You can go home now. Wayne

She quickly looked at it, huffed and shook her head. “Now you’re starting on your brother? You are a shameless, young man, do you know that? Isn’t it enough that his poor girlfriend is—?”

“We have to roll ‘em in the shed,” I said, switching to Plan B. “That’s where Wayne does it ‘cause the newspaper bags are out there.”

She looked at me suspiciously. “Very well, but if you even think…”

A few minutes later she sealed her fate.

“Meyer’s Place?” she said, giving the nameplate a look of disgust. “Well, we’ll see about that, won’t we?” She tore the tape from the door, wadded it up and tossed it over her shoulder.

I smiled like I didn’t care.

Then I tricked her and locked her inside.

“Meyers Mendelson, open this up! Meyers, there’s spiders in here! Meyers! Meyers!”

I thought of the heat and the absence of water inside the shed. When me and Janice got back from the route and set about boxing up stuff in my room, I’d excuse myself and drag Louise’s body into the garage.

“Meeyeeers!”

I plugged my ears with my fingers and walked back into the house.

An hour later I stood in front of the full-length mirror on the back of my mother’s bedroom door, the rolled papers in the hemmed-up newspaper bag, the bag draped over my soccer uniform. Stuffed in with the papers were several forged collection receipts. As I waited, I played “She’s A Rainbow” at a planet-altering volume on Wayne’s stereo and studied myself in the mirror. Before long I could see her standing in the doorway of the shed, smiling and welcoming me home from a hard day on the route.

After that we were at the soccer field. She screamed and cheered wildly as I charged onto the field, an announcer booming, “Lucky # 13 Meyers Mendelson!”

But darkness always crept in. And when the song ended and I heard Louise again, I became frantic. My heart raced and I felt like I might faint.

I ran to the phone and opened the phone book. I knew her last name was Richardson, but all of a sudden everything was watery and the names looked like blurred black houses at the bottom of a churning sea. I tried and tried, but no matter how diligently I wiped at my eyes, I couldn’t find her. I felt like I had failed her. I began to run out of breath.

I grabbed the receiver and dialed the phone at random. No one answered on the first two numbers; then an old man picked up; then a pizza shop followed by what was clearly the voice of a little girl. Finally there came a voice that I could transfigure into Janice.

“Hello? Hello, hello? Hellooo?”

“Hi,” I finally said.

“And who’s this?”

“It’s me – Meyers.”

A pause. Then: “Well, I knew that; I was just playing.”

I breathed. I felt my body again.

“So what’s up, Meyers?”

“You don’t have to worry about ‘im ‘cause I ran ‘im off for good.”

“Him?”

“I can make the shed airtight and water-secure.”

“The shed?”

“Are you comin’ today?”

“Coming?”

“Cool!” I said and hung up.

I walked to the front door and stepped out to wait for her.

Also by Doug Mort on SoMa Literary Review:

Enlightenment, Shouldn’t You Be Doing Something? & Black Eye

Doug Mort’s fiction has appeared in the literary journals Transfer and Mosaic. His novel, It Don’t Come Be Easy, is currently being rejected by yet another horrified editor. Doug licks his wounds atop a windy hill in Martinez, California.