Strange as This Weather Has Been (15 page)

Then Dane is back in his bed, staring into the dark mesh cloud. The imagined hurt he did Corey doesn’t quiet him because Dane couldn’t help but see, before he flipped Corey, Corey naked. How Corey’s put together. How all Corey’s parts match. And then, after that, Dane sees Corey when he was little. Corey in his Pampers, the always grimy circle smudged around his mouth.
There’s your charge,
Mom would say, and Dane would take Corey’s hand. The fish keep ripping. Dane’s insides bleed.

Things are gettin awful,
Mrs. Taylor will say.
Things are gettin awful.

His grandma called him Minnow. Minner, she called him, his grandma tendered him, didn’t mind his soft. Didn’t hate his softness like Corey does, didn’t deny it like Jimmy Make does, didn’t ignore it like Lace and Bant do. He still keeps up there in her trailer spot his pieces of God. He went up there just this afternoon, after Mrs. Taylor finally made him dust off the stereo top. He finished and snuck up the hollow, couldn’t think of what else to do. The sky sagging over his head, sneaky with unfallen rain, and Dane’s fingers, scrubbed, but still tainted. “I am only twelve years old. And I’m going to see the End of the World.”

He hadn’t asked Mrs. Taylor for help with the dusting, of course not, it didn’t even occur to him, and if it had, he wouldn’t have asked anyway, because then he would have had to explain why he was asking. At first he kind of bunched up the junk mail, thinking maybe he could
scoop up the pamphlet with the other papers then throw the whole heap on the bed. But then he understood to toss the pamphlet like that would be a deep disrespect, and the pamphlet most likely wouldn’t let that go unnoticed. So he tried to figure out how to move the pamphlet without touching it. Him standing there staring at it, his insides waiting, not moving because they had no place they could move to, his insides completely jammed full. Until he realized there was no way around it. The pamphlet would have to be touched.

He put one hand in the bottom of his T-shirt and reached for the pamphlet with the shirt covering his fingers like a glove. He picked up the paper between his two fingers, twisted at his waist, and laid it gently on the bed. He dropped the shirt.Then he stood quivering, the fish loosened now, risen almost into his throat. And in the distance, he could hear the whispers of the End. A mutter. Soft-chutter. Moany, moany in their mouths.

After the dusting, he returned the pamphlet the same way he’d picked it up, wanting to put it back facedown but fearful of its retribution. So he didn’t. Then he went to the kitchen and scrubbed his hands, again, afraid of insulting the pamphlet, but it couldn’t be helped, he had to take this chance. He told Mrs. Taylor he was sick to his stomach, and Mrs. Taylor looked worried and told him go home early. He wasn’t lying. On his way to the trailer spot he stopped at the house to change shirts, and the shirt contaminated by the pamphlet he shoved deep under the couch Corey slept on.

The mountains shall be thrown down, and the steep places shall fall, and every wall shall fall to the ground,
Mrs. Taylor would say.
Ezekiel 38:20.
Open your Bible, please, and read.

Although his grandma’s trailer been gone two years now, you can see clear the rectangle it left behind like a shadow on the ground. The trailer spot grows a different kind of weeds than the old yard does, kind of weeds crave such poorish rubbly soil, rabbit ear and mullein
and pepper grass. The multiflora rose creeping in. It is Dane’s place now, and the rosebox he calls it, not just for the multiflora rose, but because it’s shaped like a rosebox, which he saw once, on Jimmy Make and Mom’s anniversary in North Carolina. Usually not much is made of the anniversary, but that one, Jimmy Make sent Lace a box of roses, and the trailer shadow is shaped like that. The rosebox is the first box.

It used to be all Dane had to do was walk across the line marking the rosebox and a heat of God would come in him. That hasn’t happened since April, but this afternoon Dane had stayed hopeful. He’d had to.When he stepped over, he did pause, he had opened for it. But his heart felt nothing but a light dry wheeze. He’d moved on to the TV a little more quickly than usual, moving fast so as not to think. Getting the TV into the rosebox hadn’t been easy, but Dane had done it, over a year ago, walking it corner to corner like the corners were legs. Before they’d sold Grandma’s trailer, they’d taken all the furniture out, sold what they could, put some in their own house, and stored most of what was left in the Ricker place. Somehow, though, the TV got forgotten and left behind outside. So there the TV sat, its finish dissolving in the rain, until Dane found the picture at Tudor’s Biscuit World. Then he knew where the TV went. The TV is the second box. When he’d knelt by the TV this afternoon, he’d prayed a real prayer. He balled up behind his eyes the reach for God. He’d pushed. But still nothing came, and even if it had, he knew it wouldn’t have counted, he’d had to try too hard.

Then he reached out and unthreaded the screws, the dryness in his heart now moving up into his mouth. He lifted off the back and set it aside, his mind moving ahead of his body, and every fish stood still. Everybody waited. He reached in and took hold of the third box (three’s a charm), a lunchbox Lace had carried to Prater Elementary School. Each side was painted with a scene from an old show
Lace calls Gentle Ben. Dane studied the lunchbox pictures, the boy leading his faithful bear, the boy playing with friendly cubs while his smiling parents watch, the boy’s father bandaging the leg of a deer. Dane stroked his hand across the raised metal surface of the pictures. He saw how that hand trembled.
Cut the mountains all to pieces.
Mrs. Taylor again.
Nothing left to hold the water back. Just listen for a rumble, now, that’s all we can do
.

He unclasped the lunchbox lid.The faint odor of overripe bananas, somehow twenty-five years still present.The “Safety Instructions” on the inside of the lid about how to be careful on the playground. He paused a second, then pulled out, one at a time, his pieces of God.

There was an order to it (three’s a charm. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, three crosses on a hill, on the third day he rose. Rosebox). First, an acorn he’d taken from the white oak beside the Freewill Baptist Church, the acorn three years old now and shriveled up in an unusual way acorns never got when left alone outside. He placed the acorn on the ground in front of him. He took out the second piece, the broken-off leg of a plastic horse, its foot with a black shoe painted on its bottom. He lay the tiny horseshoe beside the acorn.

The third piece was by far the most powerful, so powerful he kept the paper folded in fourths so he wouldn’t accidentally see it. He had to open it, take some time. He’d gotten it a year ago at the Tudor’s Biscuit World in Nitro. It had been in a pile of old magazines left for customers’ entertainment in the condiment area. He, Jimmy Make, and Corey were headed home after visiting Jimmy’s father in his retirement apartment in Poca, and Dane was leafing through a magazine in his lap under the tabletop while Jimmy and Corey argued over something Corey had done.

When he hit it, at first he hadn’t understood. A page-load of black and gray billows and blurs. Clouds or smoke, yes, he knew that, but why were they pictured in a magazine? He could read well enough
to understand all of the caption except the name of the town and the state, and the state he figured out later. “Face of God in clouds over T—, Oklahoma.”

Dane’d slapped the magazine shut, his finger in the page. He was terrified to look twice, but, at the same time, not only did he have to look again; he had to have the picture. He peeled the page open. Ducked his head and squinted. Now the God face came into focus, in the upper-right-hand corner of the page. He closed the magazine once more, this time more casually, wondering if Corey or Jimmy had noticed. They had not. They were too angry at each other to notice Dane. He knew he had to act quickly, and he wanted the whole page, even though he was afraid a whole page would be missed by the Tudor’s Biscuit World workers. He would take the risk. But it would be hard to smuggle a whole page home without Corey and Jimmy Make noticing because Dane was wearing sweatpants without pockets.

Now Corey and Jimmy Make had shut up, each glaring at his food. Dane could hear the raw onions crunch in Jimmy’s jaws, the metal on plastic stab of Corey’s fork trying to work a very gnarled piece of fried chicken. Dane waited, his left hand holding the page in his lap, his other hand feeding himself his pepperoni and cheese biscuit. Finally, Jimmy cracked. Busted into another tirade at Corey, hissing, not loud enough to attract everybody’s attention, but loud enough to cover at least partly the sound of Dane’s rip, and Dane tore out the page, folded it roughly, and tucked it in his sock under the sweatpants’ elastic, pretending like he had an itch.

The picture warmed his calf the whole way home.

It has to be done right, it must be done in order, but Dane kept moving a little faster than usual, the need to get there desperate. The feel of the pamphlet, End Times, still prickling his hands, and he closed his eyes again and prayed. He prayed good, a proper beginning, middle, and end, and he didn’t only ask, he tried to praise God, too, he tried to
thank, give something himself, a trade. But the words dried up soon as they left his mouth. Dropped in the wasteweeds and blew away.

He was shaking so much now it was hard to pick up the picture. He wiped his hands on his pants to smear away the pamphlet, didn’t want that to touch the face. Then he took a breath and reached back in.

Gentle as cupping a butterfly, Dane lifted the paper out. The page in fourths resting on one hand, he passed his other hand over it without touching it. Then he unfolded the first crease. Now the paper overlapped his palm, he balanced it there, a driving inside him to open it, fast, but he pressed that driving down. He touched the page and started the final unfold, but, suddenly, the desperation took him, and he snatched the page by its corner and shook it, just a little. The page unfurled to its full self. Dane heard in his mouth an animal
uhh
that shot out his soul, and he leapt back on his knees and dropped the page in the weeds. Where it fell upright and open.

The page was held in one piece by a little bit of paper at its top, a little bit at its bottom. In its middle, a tear ran through the face of God.

The paper in the weeds, Dane’s breath quick-ripping, the fish fast dull blades in his belly. Horse hoof, heat fear, his eyes little color dots swirling, and he saw he was smashing under his knee the hand that had shaken the page, but he couldn’t feel it hurt. He knelt even harder on the hand, until he had to wince, and then it all started slowing. It slowed down, much more quickly than you would have thought, his heart, his breathing. The fish relaxed into a meandering slash. And Dane was still afraid, but now it was a calming of-course kind of afraid because he realized he wasn’t surprised. After the initial shock, he wasn’t at all surprised. Because, truth be told, Dane had known for over a month that God wasn’t working around here anymore. God had been leaving ahead of time to get safe from this mess. Save Himself.

The rain finally started, just a little, sloppy careless plops. Dane hurried his pieces back into the lunchbox and clicked it shut, shoved the lunchbox into the TV and rescrewed the back. The picture would be ruined by rain, and despite the rip, Dane couldn’t let that happen. Couldn’t take that chance, because that much stayed with him, the punishment stayed, even if the reward did not. Although there was no longer any comfort, there was still plenty of threat.

Dane lies in his bottom bunk, his ears straining for rain. He knows it’s still falling, sneaky and gentle, and Dane listens, the fish a restless hateful school that ram and slash each other. Corey has gone to bed, Bant has gone to bed, Jimmy Make has gone to bed, Dane has heard the tooth-brushing, the toilet-flushing. He listens.The murmur of Tommy’s mouth as he dreams of killing monkeys. Jimmy Make’s uneven snores, like cloth tearing. Barking dogs down the hollow, answering each other. The rain gathers itself at the head of the hollow, and Dane listens.

He hears the car crunch over the broken asphalt and into the gravel. Mom’s ride. Several minutes later, he smells her Dairy Queen odor, french fry oil and the pink-orange cones. The shape of Mom enters the room, a shape formed of smells, the smell-shape floating to the bunks, Dane can’t hear her feet on the floor. First she checks on Tommy, Dane able to see only her body, her head gone, and he smells Dairy Queen strong. Now she bends down to Dane. That’s when she notices the lumps in the bed.

“What you got under those covers, Dane?” she says.

“Nothing,” Dane says. “Me.”

Mom reaches down and pulls loose the sheet and the spread from the bottom. She lifts them up.Then, despite Corey and Tommy sleeping, she switches on the lamp to make sure.

Dane wears an old pair of Jimmy Make’s steel-buckled black rubber boots. Lace doesn’t ask why.

IN THE DEAD afternoons, when the days got a sag, I’d be the only thing moving in the world. Hobart hiding in his air-conditioned office. Sharon home chewing ice cubes and writing Donnie’s name on her arm. The night miners snoring behind the walls I painted. Snuffling. Coughing. Sometimes pissing.Yeah, I heard them. But the only thing moving would be me. The mornings went easier, the mornings had a hope to them, in the mornings, I stayed careful. But by two o’clock, the paint would be dribbling down my arms, I’d be turning all over that bad blue, and my thoughts would start following my brush, covering the same spaces, again and again. And always, the hover of gasoline.

Twice in two nights in early July, somebody spraypainted a wall I’d finished that day. First they graffitied “Scab Resort” in black, and the night after I repainted that, they did “Local Jobs for Local Miners” in red. Each morning after it happened, Hobart waddled out the second Jimmy Make dropped me off and ordered me to take care of it right then. Before too many people saw, I knew, but I didn’t want to paint over what they wrote. I thought about sloppying up my repainting so at least people passing could see something had been there, but
Hobart would never let me get away with that, so the most I dared was not blend the fresh blue with the old very well. Scab. I dragged the blue over the black letters. I said them to myself,
S-C-A-B
. I said each letter again and again until finally, the blue smudged them out.