Out of the Woods: Stories

Moscow, Idaho

Tilden stopped digging and wiped his sleeve across his forehead, leaving a brown smear on his skin. The afternoon sunlight shimmered in the air. He jabbed the shovel into the ground. His arms were sore and his back hurt, but anything was better than prison, even moving graves in Idaho.

The cemetery sat on a rise outside of town, surrounded by wheat fields that were ready for harvest. The grain rose high and golden, swaying in the wind. Next spring the state was building a highway through the cemetery. Tilden and a fellow ex-con named Baker had spent the last few weeks unearthing coffins. They’d been hired to replace a mini backhoe that damaged the caskets, sometimes cutting them in half. A separate work crew hauled the coffins to the other side of Moscow for reburial.

September still had some hard heat and the two men moved to the lacy shade of a tamarack. Sweat evaporated from their skin. Baker reached into his shirt pocket for a cigarette without removing the pack. Tilden recognized the prison habit and wondered what traits he still carried.

“You know,” Baker said, “back in Minnesota they got the biggest mall in the world.”

Tilden nodded. Baker liked to talk and needed periodic proof that someone was paying attention.

“There’s six bars in that mall,” Baker said, “and nothing but rent-a-cops. You can get drunk and walk from one bar to another and nobody fucks with you. Not bad, huh?”

Tilden nodded.

“I ever tell you the best thing about getting locked up in St. Paul?” Baker said.

“The view.”

“That’s right, partner. The river was right there. You could watch boats all day from my cell. Bet you didn’t have no view in Kentucky, did you?”

Tilden had been among the first prisoners assigned to a new facility in Morgan County. People called it the Pink Palace due to the pastel color of its outer walls. The prison was surrounded by hills. Sometimes groundfog prevented the men from going into the yard because the sharpshooter in the tower couldn’t see well enough. On clear mornings, each tree leaf was distinct in the mountain light. Their presence was a tease, like a friend’s wife who liked to flirt.

Tilden wondered if a view of the river made men sadder or gave them hope. He figured the prison psychologist would like it, since he favored anything that was different, even a new coat of paint. Tilden had learned to give the shrink what he wanted, which was mainly the impression that you wouldn’t shank the first son of a bitch who looked at you mad-dog. Getting through the joint took the ability to make everyone think you were crazy enough to be dangerous. Getting out was the opposite. Tilden wasn’t sure what it took to stay out.

Heat was on him like water, pressing against his sunburnt face. He and Baker took a break on the shadowed side of a stand of pine. The oldest tombstones were pale with black stains, the lettering nearly worn away. Faded plastic flowers surrounded the newer stones. Beyond them lay fresh earth waiting for the dead.

“You know something,” Baker said. “I ain’t spent a whole lot of time in a graveyard.”

“Reckon not.”

“I was just a kid last time, for my grandmaw’s funeral. I ever tell you about her?”

“No.”

“She died.”

“I guessed that.”

“Hung herself from a clothes pole in a closet. Knocked her own wheelchair out from under her. The only suicide the nursing home said they ever had, but you can’t trust them bastards.”

“You got that right.”

“They ought to lock that home down. A little blue-haired lady with no legs hanging in a closet like an old dress.”

“No legs?”

“She had diabetes,” Baker said. “Know what they did so nobody else would do it?”

“Threw them in the hole.”

“No, man. They took away the clothes pole in every closet. They can’t hang nothing no more. All them old folks wearing wrinkly clothes. Just like Deer Lodge. We had a man shoot somebody in the belly with a staple gun he’d rigged to fire a homemade bullet. He’d stole it from Art and they shut down Art tight as a fucking drum. It was my best class. I made pictures of the ocean. Ever see the ocean?”

“No.”

“Me neither. That’s why I made them pictures. Anyhow, my grandmaw got her gravesite picked out and paid for about a hundred years ago. It was waiting on her, but coffins got big over the years and there wasn’t enough room. They had to dig up a whole row of my family to get her in there.”

“Guess those others died too soon.”

“Or her too late.”

“I ain’t knocking your grandmaw,” Tilden said, “but I can’t see owning a burial plot. It’s the same as having your own cell in case you get put away.”

“Hell, if I owned a grave, I’d have hocked it on jump street.”

They laughed together, the sound fading in the still air. Tilden ate an apple while Baker smoked. Each tombstone threw a narrow shadow that lay over the adjacent grave like a puddle. According to the dates, many people had been dead longer than they had lived. Tilden knew men who’d spent more years in prison than out, and it occurred to him that time didn’t move forward as he’d always thought. People moved through time instead.

“Ever miss the joint?” Baker said.

“I don’t reckon.”

“I do. The dope especially. I had good connections inside. Out here, I don’t know nobody.”

“Well, you best watch or that mandatory sentencing will eat you up. I celled with a guy did two murders and he was on the street before the dopers.”

“I like that mandatory law,” Baker said.

“Do you.”

“You bet. Fill them cells up with hopheads and they ain’t got room for you and me.”

“They don’t need room for me.”

“Big talk,” Baker said. “You know why they called me Storebought inside?”

Tilden nodded.

“My first beef. They popped me on some over-the-counter caffeine pills. I kept telling them it was storebought dope but you can’t tell the law nothing.”

“I hear that.”

“Tell you what else I miss,” Baker said. “All the different guys you meet. I thought it would be like high school and you went to whatever prison was close. I met guys inside nothing like home. They were from all over the country. Sometimes I miss those guys. I miss them calling me Storebought, too.”

“I know what you mean.”

“What I don’t like about being out, I never had to hang in a graveyard before.”

Tilden didn’t miss anything about prison, but he could understand Baker’s desire for routine. They ate lunch under the same ponderosa pines every day, and after work they went to the same bar. Baker was like a bee, needing to follow a pattern over and over. Prison was his hive. In custody, he flourished.

“Eight years in the can,” Baker said. “TV was the biggest thing that changed.”

“Some.”

“I seen a guy on it saying you shouldn’t eat eggs because raising chickens was slavery.”

“Talking out his neck, ain’t he.”

“Only thing good are these true cop shows. They think they’re bragging how great the police are, but all they really show is how the chumps get caught. A guy can learn something.”

“Not exactly.”

“I guess you’re Square Johning on me.”

“Aim to.”

“Shouldn’t be kicking it with me then.”

“Way I see it,” Tilden said, “maybe I’m a good influence on you.”

“Best influence I ever had was inside. A fence told me what not to move, and a paperhanger said what to look for on funny money. Hell, even the government’s doing me good with the gun laws. TV says they got people walking in off the street and giving their guns up. I, for one, am all for it. That’s one less bullet to hit me on a job. Citizens are a bunch of morons. The government figured that out a million years ago.”

“I never thought about it that way.”

“Well, if you watched TV, you’d know something.”

Gravestones rose like teeth from the earth. Tilden wondered how many people buried here had been killed by a bullet. Baker would no more blame a gun for somebody getting shot than he’d scapegoat a shovel for the graveyard. Laws would never slow him down. He didn’t think far enough ahead and getting caught would never happen. There were thousands like him. Tilden wondered if he was lumping himself in with that group. He didn’t think so, but he was an ex-con, working a job that no one else would take.

He threw a piece of apple to a squirrel. He’d prefer to feed the birds, but since the squirrels got it first, he went ahead and fed them. He considered it a lesson from prison — not trying to force what he wanted. Still, Tilden knew how the birds felt, compromised right out of the deal.

“You get anything else from being down?” he said.

“Muscles,” Baker said. “I worked out every day. And my tats.”

One forearm said FTW, and the other showed the number thirteen and a half. He unbuttoned his shirt and slid the collar over one shoulder to reveal a blurred tattoo. Two crudely drawn dice had snake eyes showing. Below them, in block letters, was the phrase BORN TO LOSE.

“No,” Tilden said. “I mean anything worth keeping in your head.”

“You talk like a shrink.”

“Come on, man.”

Baker cracked his knuckles one by one. He stretched his legs until his boots reached the last lip of shade. He stared into space and Tilden decided that he’d forgotten the question, led somewhere private by the skipping of his thoughts. He’d noticed that prison often made stupid men turn smart, and smart men become dumb. He wondered which he was.

Baker lay on his back and spoke.

“Biggest thing I learned is how to make people leave me alone. Next is how to sleep. I never slept good before, but now I can sleep fourteen hours.”

“Nothing else?”

“I damn sure know I like women.”

Passing clouds pushed patterns of shade along the ground. A breeze carried the scent of wheat mixing with the smell of fresh-turned earth. It occurred to Tilden that people always buried their dead on hilltops, often the highest around. Tilden liked the silence. Prison was filled with noise — the crash of steel gates, howls of rage and pain, blaring radios. The only quiet time came after homicide. Tilden had never seen murder until he got put away, and he’d been amazed at how fast it could happen.

Now he sat surrounded by dead that went back a hundred years. Tilden wondered how far into the earth he’d have to dig before he’d stop hitting bone. He understood that the planet was a skin of grass that covered acres of bone, like a skeleton for the earth. Dirt was sinew. Rock was muscle.

After the break they walked to a grave that had been tough to work. They’d dug two days, chopping through roots that veered around the coffin, sometimes holding it tight as if the earth wanted to keep the bones. Tilden was reminded of an old con who’d finally been cut loose. He’d done a twenty-five-year flat bit for a bank robbery that had earned him high status in prison. Outside, he was an old man no one cared about. Nine days into freedom he held up a bar, set his pistol on a stool, and called the police. He returned to prison smiling, glad to be home. A week later he was stabbed three times with a knife made from the instep support of a crippled con’s shoe.

Footsteps pounded in the lane behind Tilden and he turned to the noise. A man was running toward him. He wore green jogging tights and a spandex shirt. Mirrorshades covered his eyes and an antenna bobbed above yellow headphones.

Baker lifted his shovel like a baseball bat. Tilden wanted to shout a warning to leave the man alone, but it went against yard ethics. The jogger came abreast and Baker fell in step behind him.

“Run!” he yelled. “Crank it up, punk.”

The man doubled his pace, puffs of dust rising from his feet. He veered around a bend and disappeared among the pines. Baker grinned. There was a wild expression on his face that Tilden had seen only in prison.

“I was in that big a hurry,” Baker said, “I’d by God get me a car. See me doing that, you can drop me in a sack. Know what I’m saying?”

“I’ll pass on that.”

“I know you’re standup, Til. But if I didn’t, I might wonder what you’re afraid of.”

“I’m chicken of one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Myself.”

“You bet,” Baker said. “I wouldn’t mess with me if I was me.”

“That ain’t exactly what I meant.”

Tilden began moving earth, thinking of the last time he’d seen Baker’s look on someone’s face. Two men had circled each other in the rec room, slashing with weapons made from a razor blade embedded in a toothbrush handle. Each man wore magazines strapped to his torso by strips of sheet. They bled from the arms, but the crude armor protected their bodies. The crowd drew guards who beat both men unconscious. Tilden had still been a new fish, so scared he couldn’t sleep, stunned by the savagery of the guards. The look in their eyes had matched Baker’s.

Tilden and Baker worked through the slanting red light of afternoon, continuing until dusk. They carried their tools to the storage building. Ripe wheat gleamed as though the surface of the earth had caught fire. Nine cars were parked in the gravel lot reserved for a funeral party.

Tilden heard the neigh of a horse, and he and Baker followed the sound to a rise overlooking the cemetery’s edge. A line of people followed a horse-drawn buckboard that held a coffin. Two of the men wore ill-fitting suits, but most were dressed in work clothes, boots, and hats. A few women wore black. Four children walked close together. The horse stopped beside a fresh hole and the men used straps to lift the coffin from the wagon and ease it into the grave.

“Look at that,” Baker said. “Guess they don’t know about the highway coming through.”

“Maybe they already got the grave paid off.”

“Long time since I was at a funeral,” Baker said. “They wouldn’t let me out when my mother died.”

“That’s tough.”

“I never even seen her grave.”

At the bottom of the hill a man was removing shovels from the wagon. He passed them to each mourner as if handing out weapons. Tilden realized that the fresh earth would be easy to move.

“Hey, man,” Baker said, “I ever tell you about a guard I knew on a firing squad in Utah.”

“No.”

“He said it was just a job, but I think he was fucked up. I mean, who’d want to live in Utah?”

“I don’t know,” Tilden said.

“Anyhow, you heard how one rifle is loaded with a blank so each man can think he wasn’t the killer. Well, that’s bullshit. There’s no recoil from a blank so you know if you shot it. He said to make up for it, everybody aims away from the heart. Sometimes all five guys miss and the shot man flops around awhile. The day before, he gets to watch any video he wants.”

The people in the funeral party were filling the grave with dirt. They worked slowly, as if reluctant to finish. A woman rested, leaning on the handle of her shovel.

“They could use some help,” Baker said.

“I don’t know about that.”

“Why not?”

“If it was some stranger wanting to bury my family, I might think it was funny.”

“What’s funny is that damn horse. Think they’re Amish or something?”

“They don’t have them out here.”

“They don’t have a lot,” Baker said. “You like it?”

“What, Idaho?”

“All of it, man. The whole West.”

“Yeah, I like it.”

“I don’t. All this empty space, you know, makes me feel lonely.”

“That’s why I like it,” Tilden said.

A small boy knelt beside the grave and began pushing dirt in the hole. He worked steadily, using his arms to move the soil. A man took his shoulders from behind. The boy shoved him away and began throwing the dirt faster. He lay on the ground with his arms dangling in the grave.

“Probably his mother,” Tilden said.

Tears made clean lines in the dirt on Baker’s face. His chest rose and fell, and he began to pant as if he had lost the mechanics of how to cry.

Tilden walked down the hill to the storage building. He knew he had to be careful. Baker was dangerous now that Tilden had seen him weak. Tilden drank from a spigot and cleaned the shovels, thinking of the funerals he’d missed in prison. Those days had been the worst.

Baker came over the hill, walking with the gait of a mainline con, moving slowly from the hips down, his shoulders swaying in a swagger.

“I’m done, man,” Baker said.

“What?”

“I can’t work that grave.”

“That’s all right,” Tilden said. “I will.”

“No, man. I’m done with all of it.”

“You quitting?”

“I didn’t bury my own mother and here I am digging up strangers.”

Baker ducked along the row of cars until he found one with the keys in it. He eased the door open and checked the lights, the gas gauge, and the turn signals.

“Tell me if the brake lights work,” he called. “I got to hurry. They’ll be here in a minute.”

Baker searched the car, talking fast.

“I tell you about my first juvie pop? Stole a car that ran out of gas. There was a bag of dope under the seat. I’m glad they closed that file at eighteen, man. Nobody knows how stupid I used to be.”

He pulled a pair of work gloves from the backseat.

“You want these?” he said. “Too small for me.”

“This ain’t worth it.”

“What is, man?”

Baker dropped the gloves on the ground and opened the trunk.

“They got a spare and a jack,” he said. “My lucky day, right. Too bad they didn’t leave a purse.”

“You can still walk away.”

“I want to see the ocean. Let’s go, man. We can road dog it out of here.”

“No way.” Tilden used his yard voice, low and quick. “I’m never going back inside.”

“Me neither, man. I been down twice. I’ll kill everybody up before they put me back in the walls. Everybody.”

Tilden looked over the car’s roof to the wheat field in the east. He couldn’t find the seam where earth and sky blended together. The world was blurred by dusk.

“Don’t keep this rig too long,” Tilden said.

“I won’t. Radio ain’t got but AM anyhow.”

“Later, Storebought.”

Baker grinned at his nickname and drove away. Tilden left the cemetery quickly, before the funeral party returned to the lot. He knew what Baker was up to and where he was headed. He was on a run, like riding a motorcycle wide open until he crashed. The state called it recidivism, but as the old cons said, Baker was doing life on the installment plan.

Tilden crossed the road and lay on his back beside the wheat. He spread his arms. Wind blew loose dirt over his body. The ground was soft, and the air was warm. In prison he had figured out that laws were made to protect the people who made the laws. He had always thought that staying out of trouble meant following those laws, but now he knew there was more. The secret was to act like the people who wanted the laws in the first place. They didn’t even think about it. They just lived.

Tilden wondered if he’d ever find a woman, a job he liked, or a town he wanted to stay in. Above him the Milky Way made a blizzard of stars in the sky. There was not a fence or wall in sight.