The morning of the first snow, Kelly
drove an unexplored length of the zone,
coasting the truck slowly from driveway to driveway, assessing
doors left open, windows missing,
porches collapsed by the removal of their metal supports.
Some of the houses had been scrapped already
but he knew he would find one more recently closed
with boards in the windows and an intact door.
A space empty but not yet shredded.
The zone sprawled beneath the falling snow,
cast its imperfection wider than he could accept,
but eventually he chose a house.
Two floors, blue paint on the siding,
gray boards over the windows, a yellow door,
surrounded on both sides by vacant lots,
with only a burnt shell standing watch across the street.
He went to the door and knocked, yelled
greetings loaded with question marks.
He waited, yelled again.
He raised his hood, returned to the truck for a pry bar.
He moved out of the front yard and along the side
of the house, the brown grass crunching beneath the snow.
Beside the blue house was a metal gate
and a chain-link fence, but the gate wasn't latched.
At the first window he pried back the covering board,
found the glass gone.
He peeked inside, searched for furniture, a television,
or a radio.
Instead stained carpet, signs of water damage,
a kitchen with no dirty dishes but an intact gas range,
a sink and faucet he could wrench from the countertops.
He lifted himself through the window.
Leading away from the kitchen was the staircase
to the second floor and also a basement door
closed and latched with a padlock.
He'd cut the lock later after the other work was done.
Upstairs the bedrooms were small,
sloped to fit beneath the peaked roof.
But there was enough room to swing a sledge.
Back downstairs he opened the front door.
The door not even locked, but he hadn't
thought to check before climbing in the window.
Then crossed the snowy yard to the truck
for the rest of his tools.
Already his first footprints were
buried beneath the accumulation and afterward he
wouldn't be able to convince himself
there had been others, no matter how insistently he was asked.
In the master bedroom he flicked the light switch
to check the power, then aimed above the outlets and swung.
He took what other scrappers might have left behind.
With a screwdriver he removed each metal junction box
from the bedroom.
Then in the bathroom he cut free the old copper plumbing
from under the sinks and inside the walls.
He smoked and watched the snowfall
through a bedroom window, the world
hushed wet under its weight.
In the South he'd forgotten the feeling of a house in winter,
the unexpected nostalgia of watching the world
disappear under snowfall.
He put his forehead to the cool glass, watched
the stillness fill the pane.
Downstairs he dismantled the kitchen, disconnected the stove
from the wall, cut the steel sink from the counter.
He worked quietly, in what he thought
was the wintry hush of the house,
but later he would be told about the amateur soundproofing
in the basement, about the mattresses nailed to the walls,
about the eggshell foam pressed between the basement rafters.
The soundproofing meant the boy screaming in the basement
wasn't screaming for Kelly, but for anyone.
There would be talk of Providence,
but what was Providence but a fancy word for luck?
If the upstairs of the blue house
had been plumbed with PVC, Kelly might not
have gone down in the basement.
But then copper in the bathroom, then the copper price.
It wasn't until he cut the padlocks loop
and opened the basement door that he heard the boy's voice.
The boy's hoarse cry for help rising out of the dark.
As soon as Kelly heard the boy's voice,
the moment split, and in the aftermath of that cry
Kelly thought he lived both possibilities
in simultaneous sequence.
There was an empty basement, or else there
was a basement with a boy in a bed,
and it seemed to Kelly he had gone into both rooms.
Kelly thought if he had fled and left the boy there
and disappeared into the night, he might never
have had to think about it again,
couldn't be held responsible for everything that followed.
Instead he had acted, and now there
would be no knowing where this action would stop.
Kelly climbed downward descending
the shaft of light falling through the basement door.
His clothes clung to the nervous damp of his skin
as he stepped off the stairs toward the bed
at the back of the low room, toward the boy
restrained there, all skin and skinny bones,
naked beneath a pile of blankets,
and howling in the black basement air.
One by one each element of the scene came into focus,
the room's angles resolving out of the darkness, each shape
alien in the moment.
The experience too unexpected for sense.
The humidity under the earth, the musky heat
of trapped breath in sweat, the smell of burrow or warren,
then the filth of the mattress as Kelly slid to his knees
beside the bed, his headlamp unable to light
the whole scene.
The boy, atop the stained and stinking sheets,
confusing in his nudity, half hidden by the pile of covers,
a nest of slick sleeping bags and rougher fabrics
partially kicked off the bed.
And beside the pile of blankets a folding metal chair.
The boy's screaming stopped as soon as Kelly lit his features,
but Kelly knew the boy couldn't see him through the glare.
He shut off the headlamp, removed the glow between them,
let their eyes readjust to the dimmer light.
He leaned closer, close enough to hear the boy's rasping
breath, to smell his captivity, to touch the boy's hand,
to try to bring the boy out of abstraction
into the sensible world.
Kelly's body was moving as if disconnected from thought,
but if he could retouch the connections he
would begin to speak.
He tried to say his name, pointed to himself,
failed to speak the word.
He shook his head, reached down for the boy.
The boy flinched from Kelly's touch
but Kelly took him in his arms anyway, gathered him
against his chest and lifted quick.
And then the boy, crying out in pain
as Kelly jerked him against the metal cuff shackling the boy's
feet to the bed, hidden underneath the bunched
blankets.
The sound of the boy's voice naming this
hurt into the black air.
This was not the incomprehensible idea
of a boy abducted, but the presence of such a boy,
real enough.
And how had Kelly come to hold him?
To smell the boy's sweat, then the sudden stink of his own,
the thickening musk of fear?
Because what if he had not left the South?
If he had been able to find work instead
of resorting to scrapping?
If there had not been the fire in the plant
so that afterward he worked alone?
If he had not met the girl with a limp?
If she had not been working today?
If she hadn't had another attack the night before,
keeping him from drinking so much he couldn't scrap?
Providence or luck, it didn't matter.
He told himself he believed only in the grimness
of the world, the great loneliness of the vacuum.
You could be good, but what did it buy you?
You could be good and it meant more precisely
because it bought you nothing.
Kelly cursed, lowered the boy back in the bed,
felt the boy's heat linger on his chest like a stain.
He touched the place where the boy had been,
felt the thump of his heart pounding beneath the same skin,
listened to their bodies huffing in the dark
as he relit the narrow beam of the headlamp,
its light scattering the boy's features into nonsense.
"I have to go back upstairs," Kelly said.
"I'll be right back."
"No," the boy whispered, his voice
swallowed by the muted room.
"Please."
Kelly removed his coat and wrapped it
around the boy to cover the boy's nakedness,
then moved toward the stairs as fast
as he could trying to out-distance the increasing
volume of the boy's cries, but there
was no way of freeing the boy without his saw,
no way of getting the saw without leaving the boy.
The basement door opened into the kitchen.
In every direction Kelly saw the destruction he'd brought,
the walls gutted, the counters open, the stove dragged free
from the wall waiting for the hand car.
The day was ending fast.
The light fading as Kelly moved across the dirty tile,
looking for his backpack, the hacksaw inside.
Outside the open window the wet whisper of snow
fell, quieting the world beyond the house's walls.
Inside the air was charged and waiting.
When Kelly turned back to the basement
he saw the door was closed, the boy and the boy's sound
trapped again.
It was habit to close the door when he left a room,
but this time it was a cruelty too.
Back downstairs Kelly found the boy sitting with his bare knees
curled into his chest, all of his body cloaked
under Kelly's coat.
Kelly raised the saw so the boy could see what
it was, what Kelly intended.
"I'm here to help you," Kelly said, or thought he did.
The boy was nodding, or Kelly thought the boy was.
But after he switched the headlamp on he
couldn't see the whole boy anymore, only the boy in parts.
The boy's terrified face, the boy's clammy chest, the boy's
clenched hands and curled toes.
He ran the beam along the boy's dirty, bony legs,
inspected the cuffs, the bruised skin below.
Kelly put a hand on the boy's ankle
and they both recoiled at the surprise.
"Hold still," Kelly said.
He lifted the chain in one hand and the saw
in another, as he cut he had to turn his face away
from the boy's rising voice speaking again
it's awesome need.
The boy was heavier than Kelly expected,
a deadweight of dangling limbs.
He asked the boy to hold on, and the boy said nothing, did less.
When Kelly looked down on the boy
he saw the boy wasn't looking at anything.
Out of the low room, up the stairs, into the dirty kitchen,
all the noise the boy had made in the basement
was gone, replaced by something more ragged.
A threatened hissing.
The front door was close to the truck,
but the back door was closer to where they stood,
and more than anything else Kelly wanted out
of the blue house, out into the fresh snow
and the safety of the truck, it's almost escape.
At the truck Kelly lowered the boy
into the passenger seat then stripped
off his own flannel shirt.
Kelly's arms were bare to the falling snow,
but he wasn't cold as he helped the boy stick
his arms into the shirt, its fabric
long enough to cover most of the boy's body.
He bundled the boy back into the coat, too,
but the truck was freezing, and the boy's legs were bare,
and Kelly wasn't sure the boy's shivering would stop no matter
how warm he made the cab.
Kelly walked around to the driver's side, opened the door.
Without climbing inside he reached under the steering
wheel, put the keys in the ignition, started the engine.
He punched the rear defrost, cranked the heat, hesitated.
"I have to go," he said.
"I have to go back into the house,
but I will be back for you."
The boy didn't speak, didn't look in his direction.
It wasn't permission.
He didn't know if the boy understood.
This was shock, trauma.
The boy needed to go to a hospital.
He needed Kelly to call the police, an ambulance.
He needed Kelly to act, to keep rescuing him a little longer.
However many minutes it took moving back into the kitchen
to gather his tools into his backpack,
then down in the basement for the hacksaw he'd left.
Each minute was its own crime.
In the basement Kelly knew the bed was unoccupied,
but when he entered the low room there
appeared a vision of the boy still chained
to the bed, an after image burning inside him.
He knew he'd saved the boy, but when he made it back
to the truck the doors were locked, the boy gone.
A new panic fluttered in Kelly's chest,
but then he looked again, saw the boy hidden
in the dark of the snow covered cab,
crouched down in the space near the floorboards
beneath the passenger seat.
A space, which Kelly remembered, as a kid he had called the pit.
The boy wouldn't come out of the pit, wouldn't unlock the doors,
or turn his terrified face toward Kelly.
Kelly waited until he was sure the boy was looking away then
pulled his undershirt sleeve over his bare elbow
and shattered the truck's driver's side window.
And before he drove the boy to the hospital
he had to clear the safety glass from the boy's seat,
from the thick scrub of the boy's hair.
As Kelly pulled into the hospital parking lot,
his cell phone rang.
Without looking he knew it was her.
He wanted to answer, but there wasn't time.
There weren't the right words yet
for what he needed to tell her, what he wanted to ask.
He parked the truck under the emergency sign, stepped out
into the unplowed parking lot.
The snow turned heavier than at the blue house.
He walked around the truck, opened the passenger door,
lifted the boy's limpness into his arms,
said his own name to the boy for the first time.
The snow fell on Kelly's face and on the boy's face,
and neither said anything else as Kelly carried
the boy across the parking lot.
The boy didn't look at Kelly, and Kelly
thought he had to stop looking at the boy.
Had to watch where he was going, instead
of taking in every feature, every eyelash and pimple
and steaming exhale, had to concentrate
on making his body move.
"A few more steps," he said to the boy.
A few more steps and they would be inside passing
through the bright and sterile and inextinguishable light
of the hospital, toward the company
of others, where they would be safer than they were now,
alone.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]