Strange as This Weather Has Been (28 page)

Although he pretends that he doesn’t, Avery understands what you lose to leave. What his mother learned she’d lose was different from what Avery learned he’d lost, but both of them learned it firsthand. She and his siblings closed up in the swelter of Baltimore for the two years Dooley tried to get out of the mines. Avery not yet born, and his mother trying to keep all five of them clean in the rundown row-house, Avery imagining, the gritty stoop and no yard, trash sweeping up and down the street, catching in their railing, and the stink of rotting things. But that wasn’t it. In Baltimore or Detroit or Cincinnati or Cleveland or whatever city, it’s not just a matter of keeping down the dirt, Avery knows his mother knows. It is a matter of you yourself being perceived as dirt.To leave home is not just to leave a piece of land and family and friends, it is to leave your reputation, the respect you’ve earned from others, your dignity, your place. That’s the dilemma of
his mother, how much more you lose than you’d ever imagine unless you’d already left and lost it before. Avery knows.

The leaving out, the education, how he paid. His mind forever after speaking to itself in two Englishes, there were many ways he split, but for him, they were all embodied by that double language. The hard sharp language spoken by the educated, clever language, language you pull out of your head . . . all the time shouting down his first language, an English smooth and wet, soft and loamy. Language you can wrap around, language that will work for you, play for you, easy in your mouth, welling up from a deep-knowing place under your tongue. His first language never bound him, it didn’t pen him in, while the other language’s words—“standard,” “proper,” “correct”—you must use like coins, shiny and rigid. The value of each one already fixed before you get hold of it, you can use each word in only one way. Although eventually, it wasn’t a split at all, couldn’t really call it a split, because a split would have meant he became both, and he didn’t. He fell in between both. He became neither.

He got the business degree at Marshall although it was the history classes that spellbound him, because even at nineteen, he knew he would eventually need job security a history major wouldn’t give him. Neither of his parents had enough schooling to know to warn him off the humanities, Avery somehow already knew that, so he worked on his business degree while taking as many history, philosophy, and sociology classes as he could, staying on a ninth semester because of it. Mom still liked to believe Bucky went to college because he was smart, but Avery learned why it was people went to college. And just how much or how little it had to do with brains.

Now he is rounding the final crook in the hollow, and then Avery finds himself face-to-face with the inside-out mountain. The perversion towers directly over his head. A wall of dead world the height of a small skyscraper, it is the biggest valley fill he’s ever seen, as sterile as
a recently erupted volcano. Behind the top of the fill, there are some kind of heaps, might be a second wall, but it’s hard to tell, and behind those, the edge of the nearly level butt of the used-to-be mountain. But although he’s never seen anything quite like this, and although he is already dizzy from the climb, the sight does not make Avery stumble or gasp. It doesn’t surprise him. To the contrary. Avery feels calm. He stands with his neck craned, sweat weeping down his temples, dribbling the small of his back, and he knows this is the best view of the hollow head he’s ever going to get. He cannot tell, of course. It could be just a valley fill, but it could also be a dam, could have a sediment pond behind it or even a slurry impoundment. But he cannot tell, and you never know what they might be up to now, what new system or “technology.” That’s part of the reason what he sees doesn’t surprise him, even though he’s never seen land destroyed in quite this way, on this scale—and quite a few man-made disasters Avery has seen.

He drops his head, casts his eyes over the plain of bleak rocks filling what used to be a creek where he and his cousins fished, caught crawdads, built their own little dams. He can see between the rocks in some places, even from this far away, glossy colors of deep turquoise and brass orange. No, it not only doesn’t surprise him, it also, if Avery is honest, doesn’t horrify him either. And if he is more honest, the way he responds to it is even more revolting than feeling no horror and no surprise, because what Avery feels deepest—tell the truth, go on and say it—is a kind of satisfaction. Yes, the sight satisfies him in the way it confirms all he knows and all he suspects, and it brings with it too a perverse relief. Because if the entire truth be told, the slaughter also fulfills a secret unspoken urge Avery carries always. This itchy voice, this desperate chant, that begs: Okay. Let’s just get it over with. Let’s go on and get it over with, and at least then we won’t have to worry about what’s going to happen next. If we just go on and get it all over with.

Because there was one thing his mother was right about: nobody who went through Buffalo Creek was ever the same. Even though in the years immediately following it—the years his mother told her stories—Avery didn’t give it much thought, at least not when he was awake. Then, during a sociology class his sophomore year at Marshall, everything changed.

It was an upper-division class, fairly small, maybe twenty students. Avery kind of got into it by accident. The professor, a youngish man, took an interest in them all, and through that interest, he somehow discovered Avery had lived through Buffalo Creek. As soon as he learned this, he asked Avery for his story—actually, he pleaded for it, pleaded even before he knew whether Avery would resist or not, which Avery didn’t. He didn’t think he cared. He told Dr. Livey he didn’t remember anything before he woke up on the hillside after the water passed, which was what he’d told everybody all along (which was, almost always, what he told himself ), but Dr. Livey wasn’t disappointed. He’d take anything he could get. He asked Avery to speak about it into a tape recorder, told him he’d pay him as a research subject. Avery hadn’t understood his enthusiasm, but it flattered him, and he didn’t speculate too much about the professor’s fascination with his story. He just considered, first, the money, which he needed badly, and, second, pulling hard against his desire for the money, nearly overriding it, his fear of being alone in a room with a man so different from anyone he’d ever met before coming to Marshall. That worried him. Dr. Livey was not a West Virginia name, and he definitely didn’t have a West Virginia voice. He didn’t look local, either, and not just his clothes, but the long nose with its rounded lobes, the coarse longish black hair, the dark droopy moustache, and dark droopy eyes. In the weeks before he recorded his story, Avery mostly worried about what he would say in the office with this Dr. Livey before the tape recorder started. Telling the story itself seemed no big deal.

So one afternoon late in the semester, he found himself perched stiff on an orange-cushioned metal chair at a little round table, clutching a Coke Dr. Livey had bought him and talking into the purr of the black recorder. After a year and a half in college, he was acutely conscious of his accent and how it would replay through the machine, but he hadn’t yet learned how to tame it. He went on anyway, speaking as close to how he imagined a research subject should sound, while Dr. Livey nodded and made silent encouraging
yes, yes, and?
expressions, mute so as not to mar Avery’s precious story. The office had a single tall window that took up most of the only wall not gorged from floor to ceiling with more books than Avery had ever seen in a room so small, and through the window, the tepid November sun fell mild and full over every surface: the flat of the table, the tape recorder, Avery’s arms. Avery, the Coke can sweating in his hand, told his story as straightforwardly as he could, beginning with waking up on the side of the hollow and continuing into a few weeks after, while Dr. Livey scooted in closer and closer, as though the sharing of the story created a familiarity between them, when Avery felt exactly the opposite. And he tried not to look at Dr. Livey, the watery lemon light exposing every blemish on his face, the black pores, the errant hairs, but he could smell him, a smell like clothes closed up for a long time in an airless closet. Avery concentrated so hard on his accent, on his story, on keeping as much distance as he could from Dr. Livey without drawing attention to it, that it wasn’t until the next day it dawned on him he’d never told the story straight through like that to anyone. And he didn’t think he’d told it even to himself in the light. It had always been for him a wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night story when, half asleep, he was too unprotected to stop it.

When he got done, he looked up at Dr. Livey, waiting for him to pay him so he could get out. But Dr. Livey was in no hurry. First he praised Avery for how well he told the story, then he puffed up
with righteous anger—this didn’t surprise Avery, he’d seen it in class before—and he paced around and lectured at Avery a little about how Avery and all the rest of them had been exploited and abused, the companies, capitalism, and Avery nodded obediently, the urgency of his need to escape crushing any attention he could give this speech. Then Dr. Livey selected for him a book from his shelves, told Avery something about it that Avery didn’t listen to and stuck the check between its pages, and finally Avery was hurtling out the door, down the stairwell, and into the day.

It was mid-afternoon the Tuesday of the week before Thanksgiving. The sun thin and steady without heat in it. Avery, the book still in his hand and his backpack over one shoulder, found himself seeking dark. He ended up in Boney’s Hole-in-the-Wall on Sixth Avenue, the bar completely windowless and the lighting inside so weak you could hardly see the bartender. That afternoon, he was the only customer. He tucked himself into a back booth and waited. No one came over to see what he wanted. He placed his hands palms down on the sticky table, steadying himself, and he tried to think, but all that came to him were odors: the sour beer soaked into the table, the faint urine and sharp disinfectant from the bathroom behind him, the smell of Dr. Livey’s sweater. He felt that something had happened that he needed to figure out, but he couldn’t think. It was like he’d left part of his mind behind in the office and it hadn’t caught up with him yet. Something brushed his leg, and he leaned down and squinted and saw a dog under the table. The dog collapsed on its side and closed its eyes. Avery waited a little longer, burrowed there in the cave of his booth, the booth, in turn, buried in the bar, the bar also a close dark cave, and finally, without buying anything, he stuffed the book in his backpack and left.

As he reflects on it now, sitting on a gray-mucked log at the foot of the fill, the badness in the land looming over him, he decides he
understood as early as Boney’s that he’d made a tremendous mistake. He decides he understood what speaking the whole story in the daylight had done. Because that afternoon in Dr. Livey’s office introduced into Avery two irreversible changes: it made him start thinking about it in the daytime, and it made him want to learn.

He never asked for a copy of the tape. After that semester, he avoided Dr. Livey altogether. Avery never heard the tape, so he isn’t sure what all he told on it, but he does know what he didn’t tell, because his mother was also right about how nobody would ever forget. He remembers, for instance, that old steel bedframe where he slept that night, and the chill of Tad’s room more real to him right now than the July sweat tickling down his front. He remembers the cube steak they had for supper, how it made Bucky feel grown-up, a special guest, he remembers its flavor sharper than he remembers the stew he ate at his mom’s last night. Remembers Tad’s little sister, something bad wrong, her head droopy like a tomato when it’s time to pick it (and Avery found out later that even though the parents and the little girl survived, she died when she was eight or nine anyway). He even remembers the smell of Tad’s breath.

He hadn’t known Tad before that year, and it was his first time to spend the night at Tad’s house. Tad’s family had moved into Buffalo Creek just that past summer, so Tad was new at school. It was a Friday night. They’d watched the Brady Bunch, and, on top of the cube steak, Tad’s mother made Jiffy Pop, something Bucky’s mom never bought.
Spend the money on that when you can buy regular cheap and pop it in a pan?
Even at twelve—they were young at twelve back then—Bucky was impressed with that Jiffy Pop, but Tad was more taken with the Brady Bunch. Not so much the charismatic California kids, but their house, Avery remembers.
Look, Bucky, how their living room’s sunk down. And how their steps are kinda like a ladder.When I grow up, I’m gonna get me a house like that.

Tad slept on the bedroom floor, bundled in blankets on a woven rug. He gave Bucky the bed because Bucky was the guest.They talked for a while, covers drawn up around their chins in the chill room and the rain pelting the tin roof. Then Tad went quiet, and Bucky lay there awake a good while longer. Avery can’t recall what they talked about. He’s pretty sure the rain didn’t bother him because he can’t remember that it did. He does recall what Tad wore: a pair of too-small pajama bottoms, pants legs halting halfway between his knees and ankles, the fabric splotched all over with cabooses, those and a long-john shirt. Bucky can recall the dried spit in the corner of Tad’s mouth the next morning.

Avery didn’t say anything to Dr. Livey about how Tad was a good half foot shorter than he was. Nothing about how Tad sat with one leg tucked under him and bounced up and down when you played board games with him. Nothing about Tad’s breath. He’s not real sure what he did tell Dr. Livey, but he knows he didn’t tell him any of that, and he knows what he tried to tell him happens over and over in his own head like this:

He comes to on the hollowside with a dog curved against his body. He’s lost his own pajama bottoms in the water, he’s barefoot and wearing only his T-shirt and underwear. He wakes there on the ice-crusty dead leaves, that cold rain still drizzling down, but what he feels first, more than cold, fear, or panic, is shame over his near-nakedness. Then he realizes he is coal-dirt all over. His hair is crunchy with it, coal-dirt is greasy in his ears, and he digs in to clear them only to discover his fingertips are greasy, too. He raises himself up on his elbows—only his arms will work for him, his mind tells his legs to move, but they can’t hear him yet—and he turns to study the dog, pushed against him for the warmth he carries in him. The dog is colored and slicked like Bucky is, and when Bucky shifts, the dog sits up on its haunches and whines in Bucky’s face, and Bucky
studies the dog. At first, he thinks the dog is a black dog, like the dog, if it was thinking about Bucky, probably saw him as a black boy, then he realizes the dog’s really beaglish-marked, and Bucky studies the beagle dog for some time.