Sarah St.Vincent - Ways to Hide in Winter

Most days, the stranger would invite me up to the game room to play chess during my lunch hour, and in that, too, I was brisk and resolute. I still lost, but my moves were crisp and decisive, and that counted for something, I thought.

Twice, I came home to find the light on the answering machine blinking. The first time I pressed the button, John’s voice emerged, steady and cheerful, telling me he’d gotten the horses, two mares, and he’d be glad if I came over to try them out.

The second time, it was Beth. She was sorry; these things had been on her mind for a long time; she’d wanted to help; obviously the words had come out wrong. After I listened, I stood there for a moment, then erased the message. When I’d hung up, I could sense my grandmother hovering behind me like an owl, blinking, watching me with her watery eyes while she leaned on the walker my father had forced her to get. I turned away and ignored her.

In the store, I combed through the shelves, homing in on dented cans and torn packets, hauling them out to the dumpster until my hip ached and my face was covered with dust. First Loretta Lynn, then Patsy Cline sang out of the cassette player. I warbled loudly along with Patsy as I dragged boxes toward the door, refusing to acknowledge the stinging in my shoulder.

Eventually, I emerged to find Martin standing by the dumpster, eyeing the boxes and trash bags. “Dispensing justice with an even hand, I see.”

“As always.” I wiped the dust from my eyes with the back of my wrist.

“Mind if I bring some stuff down and work on the porch?”

I hefted a box into the metal bin and shrugged. “Do what you want.”

I’ve got your memory …Patsy sang woefully. Or…has it got me? I hit the fast-forward button impatiently; sometimes, the woman sounded like she’d never had a moment of happiness in her life.

Martin’s “stuff,” it turned out, was a bag full of parts for the mystery machine. I paused on my way out the door with a full garbage bag, looking down at the jumble of metal.

“It’s a bicycle,” I said.

He moved down into a squat, holding a washer up to the light. “I’m not saying anything. You’ll just have to wait and see.” Reaching into his back pocket, he pulled out a pair of reading glasses I had never seen, pushing them onto his nose. They made him look worldlier, I thought, almost sage-like.

After watching him for a moment, I sighed and sat down, propping the bag against the wall.

It was the first time I had truly been still all week. I folded my hands and felt my back relax.

The stranger had found a guitar in the game room a few days earlier, and the sound of it drifted down the hill. I didn’t want to tell him he could be heard, although I knew I probably should. The meandering tunes always made me imagine him as a student, just like any other, sitting outside a bar or café in his mysterious city and picking out a tune, surrounded by laughing friends, an admiring future wife, people smoking and drinking merrily around him, beckoning to passersby on the street. There was something about the vision that left me unable to shake the feeling that it was real, that this really had been him in earlier and happier days, the plucked notes floating through the night air, soft and invisible, like seeds from a dandelion.

“What are we going to do about him?”

Martin was glancing over the parts that surrounded him, looking contentedly mystified. “Who?”

I nodded toward the hostel. “Him.”

He followed my gaze, then looked at me over the rims of the glasses. Picking up a bolt, he rolled it between his thumb and forefinger. “You know, I worked in a pet shop once, before everything. We didn’t name the animals, because the theory was that that way we wouldn’t get attached to them.” He seemed to wait for me to answer. When I didn’t, he said, “It didn’t work, in case you were wondering.”

I let this pass, partly because I was still taking in the words “before everything.” Everyone knew about the stretch of years when Martin had left, although no one had ever asked him directly where he had gone during that time. I had been young then, too young to hear more than mutterings or understand what they meant. If anyone had ever tried to press him for details, he hadn’t given any, and he and I had certainly never talked about it.

“I sometimes wish you weren’t so smart,” I said instead.

“And I,” he replied, “am grateful every day that you are.” Reaching for two hollow bars, he held their flattened ends together to see if the bolt would fit through the hole, but it didn’t. He scratched his head and put the bars back down.

“I’m sorry,” I said, looking down into my palms. “I feel like I haven’t been as kind to you lately as you are to me.”

“Well, I tend to agree with you, to be honest. But it’s okay. We all have our rough times, I know.” He sat back on his heels. “Anything you want to talk about?”

“No, I’m okay. But I do want to figure out what we should do about—”

“Danya. Yes, I know.” He found a washer that matched the bolt, but closed his hand around it. “I don’t think there’s anything to be done,” he said after a moment. “He’s an adult, so it’s not like anybody can force him to go anywhere. And I’m not going to kick him out. As far as I’m concerned, there’ll always be a room here for someone who needs it. He’s not much of a burden, and he’s good about helping me out.” He sat back and stretched out his legs. “Sometimes, I’m tempted to ask if he wants to take over the place so I can go riding off into the sunset.”

“I’m serious.”

“Yeah, I know. I just don’t know what else to tell you. Wish I did.” He folded his legs back under him. “We’re all trying to do what we think is best.”

The isolated notes continued to reach us, sliding by as the invisible presence uphill felt around for the tune. I imagined his bowed head and lowered eyelids, the concentration in his face. The pictures, the ones from my searching about Uzbekistan, appeared in my memory, and I found myself looking over my shoulder toward the hill that led to the road, the one that ran past the prison camp. A thought came into my mind, and I turned it over, pondering it without fully understanding its shape yet.

“Did you ever hear,” I said eventually, “anything about a sweat box?”

Martin had resumed trying to fit metal pieces together. “A what?”

“A sweat box. Up at the old camp. Like…some kind of shed where they put people in the summer to punish them. To make them too hot.”

“You mean that POW camp they had during the war? No, I’ve never heard anything like that.” He thought about it, his expression puzzled. “Actually, I almost never hear anything at all about that place. Why?”

I looked down at the toe of my shoe as it swung above the boards. “Do you think it could be true?”

He scooped up a handful of screws and began sorting them into piles with a finger. “Well, I don’t think I could say without knowing more about it.” I watched him look up and think of something else. “Also, you know, this is America.”

“And?”

“Oh, don’t be so cynical. I mean, I’m as clearheaded as the next guy about some of the stuff we’ve done. My uncles were all in the ’Nam. But no, I’m not sure I could believe we brought a bunch of guys back here so we could stick them in some kind of torture device.” Still holding the screws, he began arranging the bars around him, like a skeleton. “Doesn’t that seem a little inefficient to you?”

“I heard there was one. And I think people will do just about anything if they think they have a right to do it.”

He shook his head.

“I prefer,” he said, “to have some faith in my fellow man. I assume people are good until I have a reason to believe otherwise.