Strange as This Weather Has Been (2 page)

“I’ve got some weed out in the car,” Roger was saying.Then Roger and Missy were ambling away, and me and Jimmy Make were following, him closer to my shoulder than he should be, and later I’d swear—I felt it off him for the first time right then. The hot wet. I learned it right there before I ever touched him. Us drifting towards the part of the field they used as overflow parking, star-pricked sky with a crackle to it, so dry and cold, new cold, and us drifting through those other October night dramas. Mothers beating cowbells in the stands, and little boys playing their own games of tackle in the shadows. The twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls huddled outside the bathrooms, whispering, and the older girls walking in twos and threes round and round the field, while the boys leaned on the chain-link fence where they could watch both the game and the girls. In the parking lot, the smell of pot. Low-laughing voices. By the time we reached the car, Roger’d forgotten about getting high. Him and Missy climbed straight in the backseat, and then it was me and Jimmy Make by ourselves in the dark.

I climbed up on the hood, braced my feet on the bumper. Jimmy Make did, too. I leaned back with my hands splayed behind me, and then Jimmy did like me, and we were side by side, not touching, and not facing each other, either. Then I could feel not only the hot wet, but also the nervous off him. I felt, too, his soberness, felt him there in a way all the drunk flirting and groping and messing around in Morgantown hadn’t been there at all. And I felt also, although I only named it later, the familiar of him. Again, after all that Morgantown,
how so simple and familiar Jimmy Make felt even though I’d never been near him before.

“Where you live at?” I finally asked him, when I realized he wasn’t going to talk on his own.

Jimmy reached up his hand and rubbed the back of his hair under his cap so the bill tipped forward over his forehead. “Oh, out there on the other side of Watson,” he said. Even from the side, I could see his teeth in the dark. I saw they were hard, straight, and white.

“You got any brothers and sisters?”

He did the thing with the back of his head again. “Two sisters and a brother way older than me,” he said. “I guess I’m the baby.” He laughed a little.

I kept asking him stuff, and he answered back, all serious sounding, but then the little laughs. Our hands still there behind us on the car hood, just far enough apart. I thought I could feel the want off him, but I wasn’t sure, and him not trying to touch me was unfamiliar in a way that made me excited, and worried. And hungry like I hadn’t been in some time.

Then the car started bouncing up and down, to where it bucked us right off onto the ground, and at first, both of us were embarrassed. Then Jimmy Make busted up laughing, and I did, too. And we took off running at the same time, through the cars and on out into the field, and then Jimmy Make fell and rolled over once, flopped out on the dew-damp grass like a dog. He grinned up at me with his white teeth. “Why don’t you come on down here?” he said, patting the ground. When I did, he still didn’t touch me, he never did touch me that night, but it didn’t matter. Because by that time I knew for sure what was coming off him, and it wasn’t lack of want.

I woke up the next morning with a Jimmy Make blaze. Stunned golden inside with the dream and the crave and the new of that boy. Daddy asked me did I want to walk with him up Cherryboy a ways,
and I did, but I didn’t see the mountain, didn’t see that October I’d come back for, didn’t hear Daddy talking and didn’t hear his breathing, either. Too busy with that Jimmy Make and me movie in my head. The second I got a little privacy, which wasn’t until early afternoon, I called Missy, and Missy said yeah. She’d already talked to Roger. Jimmy Make felt like me.

I cloudwalked the rest of that afternoon. Mom asked me to peel apples for apple butter, oh, I had no problem with that. Sheila asked if she could take down my posters in our room, I said go right ahead. Only worry I had in the world was when I’d see Jimmy Make next, and I held onto that golden until right before supper. When Mom started talking about church the next day.

“Well,” I said, and I tried to make it sound as offhand as I could. “I’m not sure I’ll make it to church in the morning.”

Mom stood at the stove with her back to me, moving potatoes in a skillet. “Well,” she said. “I reckon you will.”

And then I felt things folding down to how they were before I left, and I drew a hard breath because I had to keep them braced. “Mom,” and I tried to sound reasonable. “I’m eighteen years old. I don’t even live here no more.”

Mom didn’t bother to turn around, and that she wouldn’t fight me in a real way made me even madder. “Long as you’re part of this family and visiting, you’ll go with this family to church.” She hit her taters with a shake of salt.

Then it fell, crashed down for real. I was fourteen again, the two months away hadn’t happened at all. I snatched up my jacket and slammed out the house, managed to knock my elbow into a porch post, but I kept going, crossed the edge of the yard, and climbed on up into the trees, yelling at myself in my head,
why the hell did you work so hard to get back here? Haven’t you yet learned any better than that?
Once I reached the big white oak where I could watch the house
from high up but they couldn’t see me, I pulled out a cigarette I had hidden in my pocket, and I smoked it for spite. And glaring down at the house, I saw it again how I’d seen it before I left. Grubby, grim, gritty, covered with that asphalt shingle stuff with fake brick shapes pressed in it. The bubbled greasy place where the coal-stove pipe came out of the wall. The old outhouse still tilted in the corner of the yard, we hadn’t got an inside bathroom until I was two, and even now, Daddy sometimes used the outside one.

I dragged deep on my cigarette, wishing it was pot. I held it in my lungs and mouth as long as I could, still staring at the house, trying to shoot towards it the hate I had for Mom.

But then it seemed I could see Mom and Sheila behind the walls, day in and day out, moving like humped animals. I saw the slowness, the heaviness, that had come on Sheila in the three years since she graduated high school, a heavy that had only a little to do with extra weight. I felt the dread of church tomorrow, two hours of boredom and too-simple-to-any-longer-believe, and the old ladies gossiping about me in their heads. Then I saw myself heading back to Morgantown after church, and sharp, the homesickness came again.

And I asked myself, what is it about this place? What? I pressed my forehead against the oak. Because for a long time, I’d known the tightness of these hills, the way they penned. But now, I also felt their comfort, and worse, I’d learned the smallness of me in the away. I understood how when I left, I lost part of myself, but when I stayed, I couldn’t stretch myself full. I twisted the cigarette out on the trunk. I reached for the sweet peach-pink. College, I almost said it out loud, was just something you had to get used to. Then I flinched. Because it was Mom’s voice that had come in my head.

 

Once I was back in Morgantown, Jimmy Make took on in his absence an even greater glory than he’d had in the flesh. I’d dream his padded
jean jacket up against me, I swear, for two weeks that’s as far as I went. Lying on my back in my room when I should have been studying, I’d let down my chest and breathe the Jimmy memory in. Hunched over a library table, I’d read the same page three times straight because on top of the print would be a picture of me and Jimmy Make in damp October grass.

The beauty, beauty of that boy. Like what you feel off animals, big cats.Wet horses. It was a beauty could carry you a ways. I needed that right then. Against the grimy foreignness of Morgantown, the stale stink of dorm rooms and apartments, how hard it was to really get outside, the rain that started in November and never did stop. But it wasn’t just his beauty, I wouldn’t understand until later. It was also how, compared to college, Jimmy Make was simple. Straight. Something you could understand exactly where, how, why, he was.

I didn’t see him at Thanksgiving because he’d gone deer hunting with his family up in the Eastern Panhandle, but we made plans through letters about Christmas break. I had to go get him because he was still fifteen, and at first, Mom nor Dad neither one wanted to let me take a vehicle all the way to Watson. But when my grades came and I got 2 B’s and 4 A’s, they both gave in.The grades surprised even me. Made me bolder. Later I’d wonder if my grades had been a little worse, would I have taken the risks I did that break.

Jimmy Make was waiting out on his porch when I pulled into his driveway. Boy moved down those porch steps like a bobcat, and like a bobcat, he had no idea how he moved, and that made me want him even worse. He wore the fleece-lined denim jacket. I could feel his blood running in him from clear across the seat.We hadn’t made plans to get pizza, go to Beckley to see a movie, we both understood this wasn’t what you’d call a date. Jimmy Make knew the Watson backroads as well as I knew the Prater ones, and he told me how to get there, he found a good spot. All these years later, I can still smell that good
no-cologne scent of him. Soap and boy. His soft skin face, barely any bristle and only on his chin. The simple, the familiar, a beauty I could get my mind and arms around. I couldn’t tell if he’d done it before. I guessed that meant he had.

I was home for three weeks. I’d never had it so bad. Daddy let me take the car one other time, and Mom didn’t fight it, but I could tell she was getting suspicious. It had always been like that, a one-way mirror between us, the way Mom could see straight through me, but I couldn’t see nothing back. What Mom did agree to, instead of me going to Watson a third time, was that Jimmy Make could spend an afternoon up Yellowroot, with us, and that didn’t make me happy, but it beat nothing at all. His mother brought him and dropped him off two days before I had to leave.

You know Mom watched us close. Stayed polite long as Jimmy Make was there, but soon as he went home, asked, “How old is that boy?” When he first got to the house, Dad invited him into the living room to visit, Mom gave him a glass of ice tea, but Jimmy Make was too shy to talk much even to me. So eventually Dad stood up, turned on the TV, and said, “I guess I’ll leave you two to yourselves.”

There were no other rooms to go to but my bedroom. We stood outside in the cold bright yard. We sat on the woodpile, Jimmy grinning and snapping sticks in his hands while I talked to him about himself, tried to let slip a few things about me, and I could see Mom through the window at the kitchen sink, and I gave her a look, but if Mom even noticed, she sure didn’t care. After a while, Jimmy Make reached out with a stick and traced down my leg. Once that happened, the other couldn’t be helped.

I flicked my mind around, but everywhere was light, and I knew Mom wouldn’t just let us wander off in the woods, not as far as we’d need to go with all the leaves off the trees. Finally, it was almost time for his mother to come back, and I told Mom I was going to walk him
back to the turnaround. I’d figured it out. On the way, I ducked him off into the old chickenhouse just out of sight of our place.

My bare butt against raw splintery wall. His behind in my hands and the waistband of his jeans just below that. Stale bitter still stink of the long-gone chickens, and it was like gulping a meal without chewing, it was, big, hard, almost hurtful swallows. I can still remember the crunch of dry and very old shit under my shoes, the sun through one lost slat burning my shut eye. And always after, I hoped that wasn’t the time. But always after, I knew it had to have been.

SO HE TOOK a blowtorch to it. He hacksawed it, and he blowtorched it, and I made sure to stay clear of that flame. But every once in a while he’d step back and motion at me take the hammer to the lock, try to spring it that way. I did what he wanted, but I did it leery, listening for a guard after every knock. Until Jimmy Make cocked his head, lifted half his lip, and kind of growled at me, “C’mon now, girl. Hit her harder.”

Then, earlier than I’d expected, that lock fell right off in my hand. Fell off bigger than my hand. It was the biggest padlock I’d ever held, and I dropped it in the road, like it was something live I held, something I’d thought dead that turned out live. Jimmy Make picked it up and pitched it as far as he could up the side of the hill, where it fell with a swish and a thump in the very green brush. That year had been a wet spring and early summer, and it seemed the plants had grown to a green you could taste. Green like the plants were trying to make up for the other.

It was the May flood that finally made him go. Jimmy’d worked in the industry, he believed he’d be able to tell better than Lace what
was going on, and for once, Lace thought so, too. Fuck their lock, he told her, I’m taking the truck. My father didn’t walk when he could ride. That was two mornings before school was out, and all day, I’d thought about it, that feeling I was getting used to. Wanting to know and not. Then while I was helping him get supper, the phone rang, Lace on her break. “I think you should go up with him, Bant,” she said. “I want you to see.”

Jimmy Make hauled his tools back to his truck, leaving me to get the gate, and sometimes I’d wonder if that was why he hadn’t left yet—needed us kids to hand him tools and open gates. The gate was iron bars welded in a longways triangle painted red and orange, and they’d bolted a sign across the bars that said NO TRESPASSING in blue letters. There was a long reason under it I’d stopped reading when I hit the part about my safety. I’d stooped under that gate a couple times since the coal company’d put it in earlier that year, but not often, and I never went much past it. Too exposed it was up in there, too easy to be spotted. Now I walked it open, and as I did, it squealed louder than the lock had rung. Loud enough for a guard to hear easy, so I stopped and listened. But it was near sunset, and the mine wasn’t working twenty-four hours a day on weekends then, and Jimmy’d picked the time because it was the lightest hour with the least chance of us getting caught. Once I got the gate to where the pickup could pass, Jimmy Make gunned it through and waited on me. I let the gate clash back together and climbed in the cab. When I did, Jimmy Make muttered, “I will drive up in here whenever I want.” He said the “will” with a weight to it.