Fellow Mortals by Dennis Mahoney Page A

as if preparing to kick.
    Wing hops out and tentatively sits, waiting like the world’s most well-behaved dog. Sam holds the cruller down low and doesn’t move.
    “Go ahead.” Henry nods. “There you go. That’s for you.”
    Wing takes it with his ears back and eats it with a snap.
    “Atta boy,” Henry says, and Sam glances up, looking pleased as if it’s him and not the dog being praised.
    Wingnut wags, gentle-eyed now, sniffing Sam’s boot and eventually smiling, much like Henry, with enough easy mirth for Sam to pet his head.
    “You up for a walk?” Sam asks. “Everyone can see us out here.”
    Henry says sure and looks at all the houses, where the windowpanes are glaring in the early-morning sun. They walk across the dirt, off the grass, and into the dark seclusion of trees. Henry wonders why they can’t just talk inside the trailer but he doesn’t want to ask and doesn’t need to know. The back of Sam’s head is maddeningly blank and the hike feels longer than it did the week before. Wing hears a crack and races through the trees, startling a wood thrush and promptly disappearing.
    “Does he ever catch anything?” Sam asks.
    “Nah,” Henry says. “It’d probably scare him to death if he did.”
    They reach the clearing and the pine that Henry felled the other morning. The wide-open light is like a huge breath of air. It’s neater than before—Sam’s been tearing up weeds—and the ground has a quality of careful preparation. There’s a weatherproof chest, far in the back and secured to a tree with a bicycle chain.
    Sam drops his head, shadowing his face, and mutters something brief and difficult to hear. He takes a key from his pocket—he’s subtle about it; Henry would have missed it if the metal hadn’t glinted—and walks toward the chest without a word of explanation. He kneels and pops a padlock, swinging up the lid, and hesitates a minute like he’s having second thoughts.
    When he turns, Henry flinches in the middle of his chest.
    But it’s nothing but a notebook dangling from his hand, pale blue with a little metal spiral up the side. Sam returns and holds it open to sketches of a small log cabin. He has five or six pages carefully designed—several different views, neatly measured and refined.
    “I need your help,” Sam says.
    “You’re building a house?”
    “You offered…”
    “No, of course!” Henry says, snapping to his wits. “I don’t get it, though. Why a little cabin? This is only one room.”
    “I can’t stay in the trailer,” Sam says. “Not with half the neighborhood knocking on the door.”
    “You want to build it out here ?”
    “What.” Sam coughs. “You thought I meant to build it out there? Next to Peg?”
    They picture it and can’t help smiling at the thought: a cabin on the roadside, puffing out smoke. But at least Sam’s trailer has water and electric. Henry tries to sort it out, looking up at Sam as if he’s told him, very gravely, that he plans to raise a unicorn.
    “If you want to be left alone,” Henry says, “why don’t you just get a house away from Arcadia?”
    “Follow me,” Sam says, heading for the trees.
    They hike the woods beyond the clearing, moving slowly in the brush, watching out along the way for thorns and poison ivy. The soil feels rich and fertile underfoot, the kind of ground that you could flip and find a handful of worms, antique coins, centipedes, and bones. Old growth , Henry thinks, mindful of his steps, and then they pass through a grove and there’s a body in the shade.
    Henry stops as if they’ve come upon a white-tailed deer, a figure unexpected but entirely at home. He holds his breath and stares, admiring the sight. It’s a man Sam fashioned from the bottom of an elm—seven feet of trunk, the remainder of the tree chopped away, branches stacked chaotically behind it and the ground soft beige with the shavings and the chips. The man is muscular and broad, powerfully kinetic, chained to a boulder by