Strange as This Weather Has Been (17 page)

He crawls to underneath the next window, then stands, leery, half expecting to pop up and be staring Seth’s mom in the face. But he’s gotten it right this time. He’s looking over Seth’s shoulder at Seth’s computer screen.

Seth is shooting people-looking shapes that rush around his screen. The carpet is littered with toys and videogames, more videos and videogames jammed in bookshelves. A Washington Redskins trashcan stands in the corner filled with every kind of ball, and the TV plays a video, looks like
Aladdin,
maybe, Corey thinks. Seth has just got his hair cut again, gets it cut every other week, seems like. An arrested three-quarter inch of brick-colored bristle across the crown of his head. Corey watches the fat wrinkle at the base of Seth’s haircut while Seth continues to blow people away on the screen. He drops back to the grass, this time in a football HUT! position.Then he duckwalks to the far side of the shed, where Tommy crouches, clinging to Chancey’s collar, his lips still sucked in his mouth. Corey reaches for the side door. Before he touches it, he crosses eight of his fingers.

When the knob turns in his hand, he clenches both fists in silent victory.
Had me a feeling on this one. I did.

He steps in, quick, Tommy attached to his waistband, Chancey’s collar hooked in Tommy’s other hand. Corey shuts the door behind them. The shed is dark and unventilated, ten degrees hotter than
outside, and livid with the odor of gasoline. Corey pushes his eyes to adjust, tugs at the little daylight cracking through the unstoppered eaves, but he can feel the machine, feel its every detail, before he actually sees a thing.

Three times he has looked at it up close. A thousand more he has dreamed it. A 2000 Suzuki Quadrunner 250 4 × 4, four-stroke engine, advanced drivetrain design. Front differential lock, massive suspension, three-speed subtransmission with thirty-five forward gear combinations, and finally, here it comes, out of the dark, and oh, it is beefy, and rugged, and tough tough tough. Green with camouflage fender covers, cargo racks front and rear, those blocky bad-ass tires, and now Corey is circling it. He circles, studying it from every angle, and when his sight’s full up, he starts to touch. The speedometer, the key in its ignition, the choke, and then he strokes the fenders and the vent, he grasps the handlebars, he thumbs the throttle. Finally he kneels, all the time inhaling the shimmer of gasoline, and he lies on his back on the dirt floor to look up under it in awe. There is not much to see down there in the dark, it is really simply that he needs to be under it, needs to have it over top his body. But then. Something occurs to Corey. The dirt floor. Most of these prebuilt sheds come with floors. This shed just sits on the yard.

Corey lies there a minute longer before he rolls out and gets to his feet. Then, slowly, savoring, Corey climbs on. He straddles the seat and stretches his legs to reach the pedals. He spreads his arms to grip the handles. And now Corey extends in four directions. Corey’s a big man now. Corey is not just as big as Corey spread out, no, Corey can feel how Corey keeps on, how Corey courses right into the four-wheeler parts. The handlebars a lengthening of Corey’s arms, the clutch and gears and brake an amplification of his legs, the engine under him a swelling of Corey’s guts and crotch. Corey. Corey. Corey Turrell and his kick-ass four-wheeler.

“IF PEOPLE would just stand up . . .” Lace was talking towards me, but I knew it was Jimmy Make she wanted to hear. She’d been going on with the usual for some time, us eating supper, fried baloney sandwiches and fried potatoes, it was a supper we were eating quite a bit, and when Jimmy Make had come to the table, he’d snarled his lip and said, “See we’re eating steak again.” Us eating, and nobody but Lace talking, and nobody at all listening, until she said something a little off the routine. “I heard that over in Malwell, too, people are starting to organize against it.”

“Huh?” It caught Jimmy’s attention. “What are you talking about? The union?” I knew why he was confused. The union hated Lyon. But it supported mountaintop removal because some outfits had a few union jobs.

“No. Not the union.” Lace took another bite of her sandwich.

“Another environmental group.” It came out in a muffle, but Jimmy heard fine.

“Environmentalists!” He threw his fork down on his plate. “I’m
telling you again, Lace.” He was glaring at her. “I’ve told you a hunderd times.You stay clear of the shit-stirrers.You get too close to the shit-stirrers and we really will get killed.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Lace said. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“Like hell I don’t.” He had each hand on a table corner now, and the muscles leapt up in his arms. “You know, there is a reason people don’t speak out. A damned good reason they don’t stand up. I’ve worked for these outfits. I know what they’re capable of.”

“Do you think you can tell me anything I don’t already know?”

“What do you think they did to them environmentalists over in Hernshaw last summer? That slip your mind? They hit an eighty-year-old man in the head. An eighty-year-old man who is also a politician, if they beat up old-man politicians, what do you think they’ll do to people like you?” He was raised halfway up from his chair now. “I hear stuff, too, you know. That woman had her house burned down. Environmentalist. And that crazy Caspar Seeber, he got joined up with them, put bumper stickers all over his truck, and next thing he knew, he was run off the road and totaled the thing—”

“And what about burning up them dummies in Logan?” Corey chipped in.

“Shut up, Corey,” I said. If it had been my fight, I would have pointed out how nobody’d got killed yet. But Lace, like Jimmy, always went for the drama.

“Well, I’d rather die showing some spine and get shot in my front than sit and watch them kill everything matters to me.”

“You are crazy, woman.” Jimmy Make skidded his chair back from the table. “I’m getting the hell out of here.” He reeled through the kitchen and slammed out the front door.

“You just do that,” Lace said, quiet.

It was all in the wrist.
I thought in time to my hand. How many flicks in eight hours can you do? But at least with the painting you could see what you’d covered, at least you’d see you were moving ahead. Sometimes, those long humid afternoons, after R.L.’d already come out twice and talked to me, when I knew I probably wouldn’t see him again until the next day, I’d try to push my thoughts past high school. Where my mind wouldn’t go. Graduation my mind could get to, two years from now. The gowns and picture-taking, the caps, I could see. But all I could think past that was a little unlit space smelling like a cave. And not a real cave, but the rockledge cave up on Cherryboy, where you could get your body in, but then you crawled about ten feet and hit where the wall closed down in a V. That kind of cave.

Eventually, he told me. It turned out he was a big talker, he told me plenty after a while. He didn’t ask much back, but that was okay, around him I found it hard to put my words in a line. “Jesus, I hate those fuckers,” he’d say, “makin us work ten, twelve hours, hell, you never know when you’re gonna get off. And fifteen minutes to eat somethin, and breathin that dust.” Him leaning against a dry scraped wall I hadn’t reached yet, my brush moving towards it. “But I gotta have me a job, and it’s good money. It is that. But once I save up enough, I’m quittin. Goin home and open a gunsmith shop. Work for my own self.”

Good money. Twenty-year-old R.L. with his badass truck, bigger’n Jimmy Make’s truck. Newer, too.

“What mine is it you work at?” I finally asked. Bitex 4, he told me. And that was the one. What the industry called Yellowroot now.

I’d pray against it, I would, I didn’t know where else to turn. I’d pray not to feel for him like I did. I’d start out praying to God, but somehow it always slipped into praying to Grandma, that’s how my prayers anymore tended to do, and I didn’t want Grandma even knowing about this here. But no matter who I prayed to, didn’t nobody
help me. He put the pull on me. I could feel this pull from his skin, it made me need to touch it, and I had never felt such a pull before. And it wasn’t only that, it wasn’t only the skin pull. It was also like he made me small, or cut me up into only a few parts, so I was only parts of myself, but those parts controlled me. On my days off, I’d force myself not to think about him. Practice at it. But next day, there I’d be back at the motel. He started getting up earlier, sleeping less. He’d bring me stuff to eat and drink, he’d tease, tell me stories. He’d watch like I was something worth watching.

They never have to grow up,
Lace would say,
stay babified
.
Never have to because the women always take care of them, first their mothers, then their wives, and then they die. The women always wait and die later,
Lace blowing smoke through the screen.
Everybody around here is raised to take it and take it,
Lace would say,
to put up with it and take it, that’s what makes us tough, but especially the girls, the women, are tougher than the men, because the men just take it from the industry and the government, and then they take that out on the women. So the women are tougher, because they take it from the industry, the government, and the men, which means the women are stronger and for sure older, because the men never have to grow up because . . .

Didn’t keep you from wanting them anyway.You go on and do.

Then it wasn’t just Sharon closed to me in places, but me closed to Sharon, too. I finally knew where Sharon’d gone. Each of us in our separate places now.Together in that separate sense, talking of it sideways, Sharon and Donnie way, way ahead of me, who hadn’t even touched R.L. yet. And Sharon not bright enough to know how much she was letting on.
What do you think, Bant?
Her face lowered, Sharon picking grass.
If you love him, is it still a sin? I mean, I’m not going to, but what do you think? If the girl loves the guy, is it?
I told her they said it was a sin if you weren’t married, the love didn’t matter. But it was not sin I worried about (this I didn’t tell her), it was the punishment you
got for the sin. It was the baby. But on the other hand, I was starting to think, what did it matter? Stay here and lose myself like Lace had, like Sharon would. Leave out and lose myself a different way (and what do you remember of North Carolina?).

But I wasn’t going to touch him. All I needed was the sight of him, or, no, it was even less than that. All I needed, all I was taking, was just knowing that he was and that he saw me. My brush blending. Skinny-strong boy, his boots bigger than his legs, the sweet lift of his butt in his Levi’s. Freckles under the dust-blown, and his hair colored like white corn, and the eyes dark brown where you didn’t expect such dark to be. Arms like snakes. Them big snakes in Africa, in India. Skin calling me to touch it.

 

We celebrated the Fourth of July that year on the fifth because Lace had to work on the holiday. Hobart went on and gave me the fifth off, too, maybe because he liked seeing me work on the Fourth. And it was another of those coolish blue-domed days we had that summer, strange weather, beautiful skies, and for some reason, from the time we got up, Jimmy Make and Lace were working with each other instead of against.

We put picnic stuff in the truck and drove all the way to Holly Creek Park, which was empty, just a bunch of overloaded trash cans. Corey found some fireworks, fountains and Roman candles and even black snakes, that somebody had overlooked when they were leaving the night before in the dark, and we set them off, Tommy so excited he ran around in circles making motorcycle sounds until he dizzied himself and fell down. Me and Corey built a fire and all of us cooked hot dogs on coat hangers, and Jimmy Make was sipping a beer, then I saw him sharing a can with Lace, they never did that anymore, and I saw that Dane was smiling. There was Dane smiling. Tommy was running in circles again, hollering, “I’m drunk! I’m drunk!” and
Jimmy Make and Lace were laughing and teasing at each other, Lace pretending like she was going to squirt mustard on him, and Jimmy grabbed her from behind and held her around the waist. He was shorter than she was, he kind of rocked her there. Then Tommy nudged up under Jimmy’s arm to get in on it, and Jimmy Make’s face went even softer, and he said something into Lace’s ear.

I couldn’t hear it, but when Lace ripped away and wheeled on him, I knew it was about North Carolina. I knew it was soft because of the hurt in his face. Maybe “C’mon, baby, please. Let’s just try it down there one more time.” Then, quick, he hardened that face and stagger-stomped off to his truck where he stood with his back to us, hands clutching the bed and elbows cocked out. Shoulders heaved up and his head hung, his toes kicking at a tire. Tommy made more motorcycle noises, louder now, and he ran around Dane in little circles, pinching Dane’s fat when he went, Dane trying to push him off, but Tommy dodgy as a fly, and I said, “You quit that,Tommy, or I’ll pinch you so hard you’ll have places for two weeks.”