Cementville (4 page)

Maureen stuck her diary into the waistband of her shorts and followed her father across the yard to his shop. She ducked through its low-slung door and sucked in the lush air, the smells that belonged specifically to her father: pinewood and machine oil and red cedar and varnish. This was where her father made his living, machining mysterious parts of this and that from hunks of metal. But it was also where they worked on projects for the house, Maureen and Willis and Billy too, before he went off to the war. Whatnot shelves, magazine racks, ashtrays. She climbed into the driver's seat of the old Hupmobile that had stood in the center of the shop for as long as she could remember. Willis's uncle had left it to him, and over the years he had restored every inch of it, inside and out.

“Can we take the Hupmobile out today?” Maureen said.

“They're calling for rain. No sense in chancing it.” Her father always cleaned and polished the old Victoria's body after they drove around the countryside so that it gleamed like new.

“Will we go to the parade for Harlan O'Brien and the dead boys?”

“I'm not sure that is on your mother's to-do list for today. It wouldn't surprise me if they postpone it anyway. Storm's coming.”

Maureen sat down at the small workbench her father had built for Billy (she had laid claim to it after her brother left for the army), a
scaled-down version of Willis's own. She sanded the spurdle she was making for Katherine, a late Mother's Day present that she hoped would be an even better surprise for being late, plus it might cheer her after the recent bad news. Her mother was against war. Well, maybe not war in general, but
this
war. When Katherine and Willis's friends with sons in the Kentucky National Guard were notified that their boys' unit was shipping out to Texas for training and then on to Vietnam, some of them were baffled and outraged. They had understood the Guard to be meant for emergencies close to home. Katherine had gone to Frankfort to protest with some of the parents, despite Willis's efforts to talk his wife out of it. Maureen kept expecting Katherine to say to Willis,
I told you so
, but so far she hadn't.

She stopped sanding her Mother's Day project and hovered at her father's elbow, watching him drill tiny holes of progressively larger diameter into odd shapes of metal. She hopped from one foot to the other and waited for him to turn off the drill and take off his mufflers and safety goggles and look at her.

“What do you think's going to happen when Uncle Carl comes?” she said.

“I expect we'll welcome him home and see to it he's got someplace to sleep.” Willis drew his goggles over his eyes again.

In front of Maureen her parents pretended not to be concerned about the fact that a certifiable nut was about to move into their house with them. But she had heard them talking when they thought she was absorbed in
Johnny Tremain
, sitting in the glider on the porch. Katherine had made clear to Willis that she did not intend to move Willis's crazy brother Carl into Billy's room. “Well, what is it you plan to do with him then?” Willis had asked her last week, which Maureen thought was a good question. Her mother did not appear inclined to answer. Maureen had watched out of the corner of her eye as Katherine took a stack of sheets and blankets out of the closet and put them on the daybed out on the screen porch that wrapped around the house. Other than that, no particular plan had been put in place.

“You're not scared?” Maureen asked her father now.

“What, of Carl? No!” Willis rarely got as exasperated with Maureen as her mother did, or if he did, he was better at not letting it show. He blew metal shavings away and went back to his work.

She tapped her father's elbow once, twice. Repeatedly. Willis turned off the drill.

“Mother said that once Billy gets home we'll have to wait and see.” It's not that Maureen was trying to stir up trouble; she needed to get the lay of the land. It was still almost a whole year before her brother was to return from Vietnam, but still. All Maureen wanted to know was what would happen once Billy—the person who was
really
supposed to be coming home at some point—got home. “Will Uncle Carl have to go back to the insane asylum?”

“People do not call them that anymore, Mo.” Her father breathed in long and let it out slow. “Why don't you let Curly into the garden. She can root out the old corn stobs. Your mother's on me to get the soil turned over before the rain comes.”

This new summer was not even started and was already so deadly dull that even small tasks were welcome. Maureen sighed with exhaustion and obeyed. She knew it was wrong of her, but she was almost glad for the bodies coming home—at least it was something. There would be a whole week of funerals. She could barely remember the last time she was at a funeral. Would her mother even let her go? She picked up a stick on the way to Curly's pen and jabbed at her foot with it as punishment for thinking so selfishly. She stabbed a little more, hard enough to make a tiny spot of blood pop out on her white skin. Of course she wasn't glad those boys had died. It was awful and sad and the worst thing her town ever had to face. Her eyes watered and she clamped her mouth tight.

The enormous pig lay on her side in the dust, her broad belly rising and falling with the gentle effort of breathing. Through the fence Maureen poked the pig's bristled back.

“Curly, you fat thing, get up.” The sow groaned with pleasure, thinking Maureen meant to give her a good scratching. “I said, get
up.” Curly rolled upright and waited with somber grace for Maureen to lift the wire strap from the gatepost. She followed Maureen to the garden. The garden sat on a rise near the bluff and was edged by a loose amalgam of wire and post meant to keep Levon Ferguson's hounds from running roughshod over the vegetables. Maureen noticed without alarm that the clouds had come to occupy a third of the valley's ceiling. At least a good storm would be something to write about.

Yesterday, she had begun writing her memoirs in the new diary. She had written about her mother's refusal to buy her a bra, and about the mean thing a girl had done to her at the last-day-of-school party. But she had run into a dead end at the bottom of page two after crossing out
I wonder what Eddie Miller is doing today
. Maureen and Eddie were in the same grade at Holy Ghost, eighth come fall.

She went to the swing under the big white oak, where she and Eddie used to take turns being pushed by their pretty young mothers. She stood on the swing's plank seat and pumped herself high enough that her head brushed the new leaves. She could not let herself think about Eddie now, because thinking about Eddie made her think about his brother Brandon, who was one of the seven dead boys coming home today. Maureen's mother had been visiting Eddie's mother, Raedine, often since the Millers got word. “That woman is prostrate with grief,” Katherine said each day when she came home from taking soup and muffins and little presents and puzzles to distract the Miller kids from the fact of their family being torn to pieces.

All of which made Maureen think morbid thoughts about her own brother, upon whom they had not laid eyes in a year. She had not forgotten the day Billy left, saying the hell if he was going to throw his life away grinding Portland cement same as every other poor bastard in this shit-hole town—this he'd said to Maureen, of course, not to Katherine and Willis. Billy was not yet at the point of cursing in front of their parents. He was only seventeen at the time. It occurred to Maureen, thinking on it now, that he'd had a birthday in a foreign
country, lucky duck. But was somebody really lucky, being in a place where things were exploding every other minute? Her brother had wanted to go, he wasn't drafted by the government or tricked like the guys who were in the National Guard. He'd signed up for it. She remembered sitting on her brother's bed, watching him throw T-shirts and underwear and a toothbrush into a sack. “I'm the kind of man that demands adventure, Mo, here tomorrow, gone today,” he said. She took the underwear out and folded them neatly—the way their mother would have done if she was still speaking to him—and she put them back in the sack and reminded him that seventeen was not, strictly speaking, what you could call a man. To which he had squinted at her all James Dean. He peered into the mirror on his dresser. “
Asia
,” he whispered to his reflection, like he was conjuring a steamy land where flying howler monkeys and screeching birds made your spine tingle in the night. A blind person could see Billy Juell had plans.

Maureen had not blamed her brother one second for itching to get over there.

She wrote to him early on, but he did not write back, not once, not ever. Their mother was faithful, and now and then Maureen stuck things in her envelopes to Billy. A drawing of the horse they did not own, a stupid poem she'd gotten an A on, or lame drawings of Billy's dog Paco whose skull had been squashed flat by the wheel of Jink Riley's Corvette on Halloween. She remembered all the blood, and running home in her costume, wailing all the way.

She clambered down the stone steps now to the springhouse half-submerged in the side of the hill and took a ladleful of water that came from the ground, so sweet and cold it made her teeth hurt. This was where her father's father and his father before him had drawn water as a boy. In the olden days, water had to be toted up to the house a single wooden bucket at a time, Willis told her, until they got to where they could pump it through a pipe up the hill. Now the city has dammed the river ten miles downstream, making the big lake everybody calls The Reservoy. Gradually all
but the remotest areas are going on city water. The big blue water tank can be spotted from almost any direction.

Maureen caught a skink and carried it to the swing and sat petting it with one finger. When she turned it over to tickle its soft scaly belly, the skink slipped between her fingers and ran down her leg and into the tall grass by the fence. She sat, barely moving like the air around her, waiting, waiting. But for what? For her crazy uncle to come and turn their lives upside down? For her brother to get home—another whole year from now? For the funerals of the dead National Guardsmen? Yes that, all that. And this other thing: She was ready for her life to begin.

She pumped her legs half-heartedly a few times but quickly gave up and hung there from the tree limb, still as a windless bell. She sighed deeply. Katherine's fat sow grunted soft agreement from the vegetable garden.

Maureen pulled the diary out of her pocket. The anvil-shaped cloud that had been assembling itself into a purple caul at the end of the valley moved almost imperceptibly closer. Maureen dragged a winter toe, pink and tender as a baby's, through the worn spot under the swing, pausing now and then to jot down a note.
For my life to begin
. She fell to imagining someone watching her, rested her chin in her hand, and set her gaze across the valley, picturing in her head how she might look to her voyeur. Her wrist fell asleep. She pitched the diary to the ground and twisted the swing's ropes tight, then let herself spin out, dragging her foot in a narrowing spiral in the dirt. She was sick to death of this edginess, of the way the second hand of a clock seemed to sweep in slow motion around the inside of her skull, reminding her that time was passing and the world was passing and she was just here, here, here. Instead of winding down like a normal clock, she could feel springs inside her being coiled tighter. She was amazed that pieces of her didn't suddenly go shooting off this bluff, blasting across the valley in bloody rain. She shoved her feet into her new flip-flops—it was the first day her mother had let her wear them—and flapped her arms awake to get the pins out.

A cool breeze brushed her neck, and in minutes the purple curtain wrapped the whole sky. She heard the grating screech of the screen door and waited for what she knew was coming.

“Maureen, get inside right now,” Katherine called.

Maureen gave a last good twist to the ropes of the swing, leaned back, and whirled around, her body a stiff plank spinning in air like an acrobat. She stood and staggered a bit, relishing the dizzy buzz, then headed for the house. She was still giddy and grinning when, halfway across the yard, the hair on her forearms lifted and the air split and crashed together again and everything went white.

Suddenly her mother was lifting her off the ground and her father was running to them, still wearing his safety goggles.
It's not even raining
, Maureen meant to say out loud but wasn't sure whether she had or not, it was all so dreamlike. A vibrating burning shock ran from her heel to her pelvis and feathered out into her belly. In the dream the three of them turned together in slow motion toward the garden where Curly lay on her back as if playing a serious game of possum, four legs stiff in the air. Maureen did feel rain then, spare gentle drops glinting through wan sunlight.
Look, the sun!
she tried to say. A second snapping strike hit so close her mother screamed, its clap a gunshot in their ears, and they were running toward the house, Maureen's legs dangling and flopping from Willis's arms. She was looking over her father's shoulder and was the first to see it: The giant oak hanging over the machine shop shuddered and swayed as if to some music only it could hear, and in that long moment Maureen wondered if it would refuse to fall. The only sound was of her father's heavy breathing in her ear. And then the sky unfastened with a sudden driving rain, the kind that makes dry ground roll up into little dirt balls for a split second before everything gets soaked brand new.