# The Back Porch

The trailer smelled of old coffee and wet cardboard. Billy noticed that first when Ruth stepped through the door. She stood in the doorway with a canvas bag slung over her shoulder, water dripping from the hem of her jacket onto the linoleum. She didn't introduce herself. She didn't need to. He knew her name. She'd told him at the diner three days ago, and he'd told her his, and that was it. They got married in Natchez the same afternoon. No witnesses. No ceremony. Just a clerk behind a glass window and a plastic ring from a drugstore display.

She looked at him the way a stranger might look at a room she's been asked to live in. Her eyes were the color of the river in November, flat and uncertain. Her hair was pulled back so tight it made her forehead shine.

"I don't talk much," she said.

"That's fine," Billy said.

She dropped the bag in the corner and sat on the edge of the mattress. The trailer shook as a barge passed on the river outside. Billy went to the kitchen and poured two glasses of water. He set one on the table in front of her. She picked it up, held it, put it down without drinking.

Where did you come from? he wanted to ask. But he didn't. He just sat across from her and listened to the rain hitting the metal roof.

***

She slept during the day and moved around at night. Billy would wake to the sound of the back door creaking open, then closing again. He'd lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and count the seconds until he heard her come back inside. Sometimes it was five minutes. Sometimes it was hours.

In the morning she made coffee the way he liked it—two sugars, splash of cream—and sat across from him at the small Formica table while he ate grits from a chipped bowl. She never ate with him. She'd push her food around her plate and then get up and take the rest to the sink. Once he caught her eating something raw from a brown paper bag in the kitchen. It looked like chicken. It looked like it had been sitting out for hours.

"What is that?" he asked.

She looked at him. Her fingers were sticky.

"Nothing," she said. "Just something I was hungry for."

She went back to eating. He went back to his coffee.

***

The first time she howled, Billy thought it was a dog. He was half asleep and the sound came through the screen door like a wire pulled tight. He sat up and looked out the window. The yard was empty. The moon hung low over the treeline, fat and yellow.

Ruth was standing on the back porch. She hadn't seen him. She kept howling, low and long, her head tilted back, her mouth open wide. When she finished, she stood there for a long time without moving. Then she came inside and went to bed without a word.

He waited until her breathing evened out. Then he got up and walked to the back door and looked out. She was still standing where he'd found her, even though he knew she'd come inside. Or maybe it was someone else. Maybe he was wrong about who he'd seen.

He went back to bed.

***

Things got worse the way things get worse in places like this. Slowly, then all at once.

She stopped making coffee. She stopped sitting at the table. She'd eat in the kitchen standing up, or on the porch with her back to him, facing the river. The trailer filled with sounds she made when she thought he was asleep. A click, like a tongue against the roof of a mouth. A low hum. The occasional scratch against the wall, like fingernails testing drywall.

He started sleeping on the couch.

At the diner, the waitress didn't ask about her anymore. She'd asked the first day—Where'd you find that girl?—and the second day—Is she sick?—but by the third day she just set Billy's coffee down and walked away. The other regulars looked at him differently too. Not with pity. With something worse than pity. With the careful avoidance of people who know something bad is coming and don't want to be near it when it arrives.

Billy didn't correct them.

***

The porch was where she spent most of her time. She'd sit in the plastic chair his mother had left behind, the one with the cracked armrest, and stare at the tree line. She'd been on the porch for maybe an hour one afternoon when he finally worked up the courage to ask her to come inside.

"It's getting cold," he said.

She didn't turn. Her hands were in her lap. Her nails were broken, bitten down to the quick. Some of them bled. She didn't seem to notice.

"Ruth."

"Almost," she said.

"Almost what?"

She looked at him then. Her eyes were wide, pupils dilated until the brown was almost gone.

"Almost done," she said. And then she turned back to the trees.

He stood there for a while. The wind picked up. He could smell the river, thick and green and old. Then he went inside and locked the door behind him.

***

It happened on a night with a full moon. Billy was on the couch, reading a magazine he wasn't absorbing, when the front door opened and closed. He didn't think anything of it. She'd been going in and out for weeks. He'd stopped counting.

Then something hit the wall. A heavy sound. Like a body thrown against drywall.

He lay still. He listened.

Another sound. Wood splintering. Something glass breaking. The howl, this time from inside the trailer.

"Ruth?"

No answer. Just the sound of things being thrown. A plate hitting the kitchen wall. The table overturning. His breath caught in his throat. He sat on the couch and gripped the edges of the cushion and waited.

She came through the doorway and stopped. He could see her in the dim light from the streetlamp outside. Her back was to him. Her shoulders moved, up and down, like she was breathing hard. Like she was trying to hold something in.

"Ruth, what—"

She turned. He'd never seen her face like that. Her mouth was open, her teeth showing, but not in a smile. Her eyes were fixed on something he couldn't see. Maybe she could. Maybe she was seeing something he'd been blind to the whole time.

She moved toward him fast, too fast. He got up and put distance between them. She stopped. Her head tilted to the side, just slightly.

"I don't want to hurt you," she said. Her voice was different. Lower. Rougher. Like it belonged to someone else.

"You're not—"

"Go to the cellar," she said.

"The what?"

"There's a door in the kitchen. It goes down. Go down and don't come up."

"Ruth, you're scaring me."

She smiled then, but it wasn't a smile. It was teeth and nothing else. "You should be."

He went to the kitchen. The door was where he remembered—small, wooden, painted white but peeling at the edges. He opened it and the stairs went down into dark. He could hear her behind him, still breathing hard.

He went down. He closed the door. He heard the key turn in the lock.

When he came up two hours later, the trailer was destroyed. Chairs flipped. Walls cracked. The kitchen looked like a storm had hit it. And Ruth was gone. The front door was open. The back porch was empty.

He found her tracks in the mud. Bare feet, leading away from the house, heading toward the road.

***

She found three people before sunrise.

Old man Harlan first. He lived alone on a dirt road a mile from Billy's trailer. They found him in his yard, sitting in his lawn chair, with scratches across his chest deep enough to see bone. He was alive but barely. The neighbors said he kept telling one word over and over. He couldn't remember what it was.

The second was a woman who drove past the trailer on her way to work. She said something to Billy through the window—Is she okay?—and that was the last thing she remembered before her car door opened and hands pulled her out. She woke up in a ditch with a bite on her arm and no memory of what happened after.

The third got away. A boy, maybe sixteen, walking home from a friend's house. He heard something behind him, turned around, and saw her standing at the edge of the road. She was shaking. She was crying. Her arms were covered in blood that wasn't hers. She looked at him and said, "Billy, help me," and then she ran past him into the trees. The boy went home and locked his door and didn't sleep all night.

***

The courtroom was small and painted a color that made Billy think of hospital waiting rooms. The judge was an older man with tired eyes. The jury was made up of people he'd seen at the grocery store and the gas station and the diner where nobody asked about her anymore.

Billy sat in the front row and watched them come in one by one. They didn't look at him. Neither did he.

When Ruth was brought in, she wore a yellow dress he didn't recognize. Her hands were cuffed in front of her. She didn't look at the jury. She didn't look at anyone. She just sat at the defense table and stared at the wood grain.

The prosecutor spoke for ten minutes. He talked about assault. He talked about fear. He talked about how someone had to be held responsible when things fell apart.

Billy's lawyer was a public defender who'd been doing this for twenty years and looked like he wanted to be anywhere else. He spoke for five. He didn't talk about Ruth's condition. He didn't talk about the months of howling and broken walls and raw meat and bleeding nails. He didn't talk about any of it.

Then Billy stood up. The judge looked at him. The lawyer shook his head.

"Sir," the judge said, "you're not on the stand."

"I know," Billy said. "But I need to say something."

The judge sighed. He leaned back in his chair. He looked at Billy for a long time. Then he nodded once.

Billy stood there with his hands on the back of a wooden chair and thought about what to say. He thought about the diner in Natchez. The way she'd held her coffee cup with both hands like she was trying to warm something that had never been warm. He thought about the first morning she'd made him coffee and sat across from him and said nothing, and how that silence had felt okay at the time.

"I loved her," he said. The room got very quiet. "I don't know what she had. I don't know if it was sickness or something else. I just know that I loved her, and that wasn't enough. None of it was enough."

He sat down. He didn't look at Ruth. She wasn't looking at him either.

***

The jury took forty minutes.

Billy walked back to his trailer alone after the verdict. The sky was gray the whole way, the color of the river on a bad day. He opened the door and stepped inside and closed it behind him.

The trailer was quiet. Most of the broken furniture had been hauled away by neighbors who'd done it out of pity, or fear, or both. The walls still had the cracks. The kitchen still smelled like old blood and wet drywall.

He sat at the table. He picked up a chipped plate and set it back down. He poured a glass of water and drank it slowly and set it down again.

Outside, the river kept moving. It didn't care about any of it. It never would.

He sat there for a long time. Longer than he had in months. Long enough to stop hearing the sound of the truck engines on the highway and just hear the water.

Nothing was forgiven. Nothing was fixed. The trailer still smelled of old coffee and wet cardboard.

He closed his eyes and listened to the river go on.

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