Strange as This Weather Has Been (29 page)

After a good while, Bucky sneaks a peek down past his feet. No further. He sees he’s hauled himself way far up the hill, much higher than he needed to go, this he can tell by the oily black watermark all those yards under him. He has no idea how long he’s been knocked out, or asleep, or whatever he was, that stretch of time is no different from the stretch of time during which he studied the dog, it seems time left with the dark when the dark dissolved that morning, and Bucky hasn’t touched time since. And he feels nothing. Not for Tad, not for his family, not for the little figures making motion in the bottom of the hollow that soon he won’t be able to ignore.

The dog pushes up against Bucky, but Bucky doesn’t touch him back because of how dirty he is. The smell of the dog is not a dog smell, just like the smell of himself is not a boy smell. Both smells are coal smells, coal as familiar to Bucky as dog smell, almost as familiar to him as boy, and also familiar to Bucky is how this gluey taste-smell lies at the base of your tongue, on the back of the roof of your mouth, like it wants to speak itself. Bucky spits. Then at some point in that unraveled time which lies limp and unspooled around Bucky, he’s sitting up and hugging his bare legs against his chest. The legs can’t yet stand, but he gets them bent like that. They’re bad scraped in the nastiest ways, Bucky traces the raw places and gashes with his black fingers, but the legs aren’t paralyzed. Bucky knows that the way the legs won’t move is the way they won’t move in bad dreams. Although he continues to study the dog like it’s a new species, occasionally he’s now stealing glances through the narrow trunks of the second- and third-growth trees down into the valley. Another glance. Another. Until the glances start running together.

The water wall’s gone, he knew that as soon as he woke by the quiet. The water that’s left is what followed in the wall’s wake, shallow cranky wastewater, black and trash-glutted, butting its way through the lowest-lying places. Part of the bottom’s scoured bare. Other areas are jumbled in a crazy misarrangement, houses stacked up against each other like they’re pushing in line, others tipped at odd angles, and then all kinds of splintered piles might have been houses but now no telling what they were before. Power poles toppled, wires tangled spaghetti, and he tries to gauge where he is, how far downstream from Lorado he’s washed, but he can’t tell, wouldn’t be able to tell if he’d lived in Lorado his whole life. His mind tries to spread and wrap around what he sees, but his mind won’t stretch that far, and it snaps back, dizzying. What holds his eyes tightest is the railroad. The waters have peeled the railroad right off the ground, scattered ties everywhere, then coiled up the rails into lassoes. Water did that, Bucky thinks. Then, without really noticing it himself, his legs stand up. And he knows to go home.

He’s not sure exactly how far home is. He’s always ridden from Lorado to Braeholm in a car. He knows it’s longer than you can walk easy, but he knows, too, that it is walkable. Now his body’s coming back to itself, an ache all over, and he feels the more concentrated particular stings in the cuts and scrapes, and finally the cold, the goose pimples, him unnumbing, but still he feels only the outside of his body, his insides are yet empty. He does not wonder if his family is dead, his house washed away; he doesn’t wonder about Tad. He feels nothing inside but the call to get home.

His body, working by itself, drops into a crouch and part-creeps, part-slides, down the steep side of the hollow. The dog’s right with him. His naked feet skid the icy leaves, them soppy underneath and that cold rain still fizzling down, and Bucky is jarring against root and rock, scraping over rotten half-buried logs, the thorn brush, the
saplings. Bucky’s skin is bared to all of it, his feet bared to it, his pimpled legs and arms. Then he knows he has to get some shoes. The get-the-shoes crowds the get-on-home out of his head, and he grabs hold a root to lower himself down the last steep slide, the root jerking free and dropping him, skittering, scratching, onto level ground, hurting him all over again. But he picks himself up, and he heads for the nearest house.

To reach it, although it’s not far, he leapfrogs from debris pile to debris pile, over the black water braids between them, and Bucky is careful about where he steps, the glass, metal, wire. From the back of the house, he can’t see how to get in except through a busted-out window that’s bound to cut him even worse than he’s cut now. He picks his way to the front, again, careful of his feet, and the dog sticks close, never acting doglike, never pausing to sniff or piss or dig. It’s as though the dog has given up his dogness just to keep alive, and Avery realizes a long time after that the same thing happened to Bucky.They find the front door blocked by trash and by most of a twisted car, so Bucky eyes the next house, downwater from this one, a house that looks like its side is bashed in.

He’s scrabbling across piles of wreckage again. He pulls at his nose over and over to stob its running, the nose raw, his fingers greasy. Twice, when he walks upright, his weight’s too much for the trash and he crashes through to his hip, then the right leg is torn and rawed all over again, but the leg does not break. At times his body shivers so hard it’s difficult to keep his balance. The dog follows close, and down here, Bucky can’t see any figures moving, sees nothing alive but the dog. He thinks nothing besides getting the shoes. Finally, they reach the bashed house and stoop in where the green aluminum siding has parted.

The moment Bucky sets foot on the floor, he’s lit by a bolt of fear, in his shoulders and head, that the house is about to shift. He thinks
he does feel it lift a little, throws out his arms for balance, digs in the mud with his bare toes. He waits. It’s not a fear he recognizes. He’s standing in a living room, all its furniture toppled and pushed towards the upstream wall, and waves of black muck lie terraced across the floor, the terraces rising on the upstream end to two feet deep against that wall. The house seems to hold steady, so Bucky wades the mud to the closet and forces the door open partway against the weight of the muck outside it. He sees only coats, no shoes, and he chooses one, a heavy plaid wool, and pulls it on. Its lining is nearly dry, the wool having shed the floodwater for the brief time it surged through the house. Bucky pauses, tensed for the shifting of the house like listening for a noise. But the house stays put. He slops on through the muck, it sucking his ankles and feet, him scanning everywhere for shoes poking out, and then the dog gets himself bogged down nearly to his belly, and he cries like he has a whistle in his nose. Bucky considers looking upstairs, but the fear of the house moving stops him.

The kitchen appliances have rocked out of their places, the refrigerator overturned, the stove tethered at the end of its cord still plugged in its socket. Bucky studies the room from the door, and spies, against an upended table, among sopped cereal boxes and plastic bowls, red rubber. He jerks them free, red rubber woman’s boots, red laces and a matted fake fur cuff. They are full of mud, and he turns them over and works on squeezing out the mud, then he loses patience and carries the boots to the sink where he opens a tap and stands bewildered for some seconds when no water comes out. In the other room, the dog, still stuck, has given up whistling for panicked yelps. Bucky claws the mud out of the boots as best he can with his hands and forces his feet into them. They are squishy, but too big by only a little bit. He pauses once again, feeling for the house to move. Then he struggles back into the living room, where the dog has unstuck himself from the mud, and Bucky hauls him back through the wall and into the rain.
The plaid coat covers him to five or six inches below his underpants. The sleeves mitten his hands.

While still on the hill, he’d assumed he’d follow the road home, but he never does find any road. It’s either buried or washed away. He picks a path through wherever the debris lies most open or most shallow, Bucky mazing it with his eyes to the ground, the dog right behind him, Bucky thinking nothing but where it’s safest to step. Step. Step. He steps over railroad ties and asphalt chunks, sticks, furniture, and trees, aluminum siding and aluminum cans, Insulite and trailer underpinnings, plastic, barrels, cars, roof slabs, cats, tires, washing machines, and, most often, splintered lumber. He’s passed a motorcycle and is approaching a pallet with something under it, he can’t tell what it is (he doesn’t pay any attention, really, to what it is; it’s only Avery, later, who slows it down, isolates out of the rest of the memory Bucky’s first sight of the pallet), and Bucky draws closer to the pallet, not because he’s curious about what’s under it, but because the channel he’s following, his path, goes that way. Then it occurs to Bucky it’s a kid’s doll there, and then he doesn’t consider it again. He’s just watching where to step. And now he’s right up on the pallet. And Bucky sees a woman’s rings on the doll’s hand.

Bucky stands still. He stands poised in a time hole, time pools around the hole’s outside, but Bucky’s inside the hole, timeless. Looking. There is no how-long to this stare, no matter how often Avery re-conjures it later, Bucky stares, and the dog stares, too, undogly, never smelling the body or using his paws. And there is really no sight to the stare, either, no sight that Avery can remember, until finally, Bucky is leaving the bottom.

Bucky is leaving the bottom. Bucky is running when he can, Bucky is crawling when he has to, he is scrambling, he is falling, he is picking himself up without stopping, he is scratched, pulled, tripped, bumped, scraped, he no longer worries about finding the most open way, no,
Bucky heads for the hills in a crow-flies line. And all the way, he is murmuring, he is soft-talking himself down, the voice like a mouth over sponge cake, like the kindest mother ever to the scaredest ever child:
this is how you go, honey; yes, this is the way
. At one point, the only point he remembers vividly, he sprints around a toppled garage and finds himself vaulting headlong into a triple line of electric wires, and he manages, some brilliant instinct, to leap all three, boom boom boom, like hopscotching tires in an obstacle course, the voice sweet-talking,
this is how you go, honey, up there will be safe.
And he’s at the base of the hill,
go on now, almost,
and he’s mounting straight up, easier than it was coming down,
almost, up there now, you’ll travel safe,
and he is passing the watermark, the brush turns from black to a rain-wet deep brown, and,
see, honey, here,
he skids to a stop, doubled over, his breath spearing in his chest and his ribs.

Avery remembers how sometimes walking the hollowside was fairly easy, him traveling a bench or, if not, it wasn’t all that steep anyway, and he was used to walking hillsides like that. At times he’d hit a cliff or a rock overhang where he’d have to climb up above it to get around. The red rubber boots are slippery in two ways, their soles sliding on the ground and his feet slippery inside the boots, and the skin rubs and blisters up, he can feel it. The legs aren’t cold anymore, now that the main part of his body is covered, and the dog sticks close, he hasn’t lost him yet, and Bucky stays up high. Down in the bottom, where he tries not to look, but can’t help not, he sees live people moving. They mill around, sifting through wreckage, as far as he can tell, and their very liveness down there makes it all look more ruined. On the hollowside below Bucky, other people have already cobbled together makeshift shelters from the cold rain, and on the far side of the hollow, a few campfires, he sees, smoke smudges and tiny bursty flames. He feels the torn skin up and down his legs, and bruises in his hands. The black taste still clogs his throat. The pressure to spit. His nose
is running nonstop, and his sleeve reaches up, again and again, and wipes it on its own.

He’s moving fast and easy along an unreclaimed bench under a highwall strip when he meets his first live person. The man pulls himself up on the level some fifty feet distant from Bucky, and then he’s coming at him. Bucky panics. It’s like he’s been gone from people for twenty years, and the man comes on. They pull closer to each other, the collapse of in-between, and then Bucky stops, his legs tensed, and he almost steals off the edge of the bench, flees, but the man comes. As soon as he gets near enough, the man calls, “Hey, buddy, you seen Martha Adkins?” His voice is thinned, tattery, and high, and Bucky can hear that it is already an old, old question.The man is only rain-wet—no black on him—and he wears all his clothes.The rain has twisted his long brown hair into little tails, and when he gets even closer, Bucky sees that under the patchy beard the man is pretty young. The man doesn’t show a second of surprise or even curiosity over Bucky’s blackness, or his lost pants, or the woman’s boots. Bucky is already, like the question, an old old sight. When the man speaks, Bucky shakes his head.

“It’s my mommy,” the man keeps on. “Fifty years old. Dark-brown hair. Stays up there at Lundale. She’s missing these teeth.” The man drops his jaw and grabs a couple bottom teeth on one side.

“Sorry, I don’t know her,” Bucky says. He hasn’t spoken, not even to the dog, since he was on the chickenhouse roof, and now his voice crossing his teeth makes his teeth feel funny.

“How bout a little boy, round six, blond-headed?”

Bucky shakes his head.

“Latricia, she’s sixteen, blonde-headed, too. Heavyset girl.”

“I ain’t seen nobody at all,” Bucky says.

The man pauses. Not like he’s taking the time to feel disappointment. He just seems to rest. Then he nods. “Thank you,” he says, and then he hurries past, on up the hollow.

Not too long after that, Bucky passes a bunch of people holed up in a lean-to not far under him, close enough that they could spot him if they wanted to. But if they look anyplace, they look into the valley floor, not behind them. He can hear a little kid crying, sees two men trying to shelter each other to light a cigarette. Bucky keeps moving, and the men don’t hear his boots in the leaves. It begins to snow, big wet flat flakes, kind of snow you get on just that other side of rain, and below the watermark, when Bucky has to walk near it, he can watch them fall stark white on the black. For an instant, you can see them, then the black sops them under. Twice more, he runs into men looking for somebody. Bucky just shakes his head and goes on. One of the men has an arm so broken Bucky can tell it from yards away even though he’s never seen an unset broken arm in his life. And now and again, he stops, sits, and pulls off the boots, feels at his feet, but there’s nothing he can do for them.The first blisters have already busted and coal dirt got in the sores, and already, a second layer, a third, of fresh blisters coming on. As he walks, he watches the bottom more deliberately, tries to reckon where he is. Downstream here, the valley is still wrecked, but it is less scraped bare. More stuff stands where it should. He even sees a couple people trying to drive pickups in it.