Strange as This Weather Has Been (7 page)

By this time, Mrs. Taylor was hammering her walker against the inside of the aluminum door, trying to wake him that way. But only the idea of his own house finally moved Dane. He wheeled and sprang towards the back porch, pot still in his hands, he didn’t think to drop it, liquid sloshing up its sides, the pot itself awkward, heavy, slowing him, but still Dane without the sense to drop it, until it did leap up and splatter his arms and stomach and hands, and that’s what finally told him let go. And he did, and vaulted onto the back porch just ahead of the water wall and its battering logs, flattened himself against the side of the house while the current and all the debris it carried in it smashed against the upstream house wall and broke and split and spun around it, never reaching as high as the porch. Behind him,
inside the screen, he could hear Mrs. Taylor wheezing even over top the water rush, and he could smell the odor of urine and shit on his arms, and he thought of Mom and Corey and Tommy up at the head of the hollow where the waters had to have hit first, and a big chunk of something rose in Dane’s stomach and slammed into the bottom of his chest. But Dane didn’t cry.

Ever since then, day after day in the darkened house, while Dane cleans or between chores, Mrs. Taylor tells the horrors of Buffalo Creek, February 26, 1972. And she doesn’t tell them as history or legend. She tells them as prophecy, as threat. The twin lights in her twin lenses flash, a signal, a flare, and Dane, trapped, listens, Dane gulps what she tells him. The stories filling his already crowded guts, them full of nerves, and of logs and fish, and now of stories, scrawled all over his insides, but Dane listens. She doesn’t do it to scare him, it’s not mean like the kids on the bus, it’s simply what Mrs. Taylor has to do, and it’s what Dane does, too. Dane is the listener. So he listens, wondering when he’ll finally get so full he’ll bust, have to bust, and day after day after day he strains, braces, he prays, just to keep from busting. Flood inside.

Dane is the darkest of his family. He has fine black hair and skin that darkens fastest of the four kids even though this summer he is the least out in the sun. He’s the darkest, and, at twelve, the shortest for his age, and, he knows, the weakest. Sometimes, when Lace is at the Dairy Queen and the five of them are eating supper, Dane will study everybody’s arms. His arms are shorter than the others, pudgy and stumped, puffing down along their bones to end in even puffier hands. When Dane looks at his arms, he shrinks another ounce in his chest. Beside his own arms lie Tommy’s. Who is made to wash his hands before the meal, so Tommy is clean to his wrists, while above, the arms are grimed in rings and the elbows chuffy, but even at six years old, Tommy’s arms are stronger, more solid, than Dane’s arms
are.Then Bant. Nothing but a girl. Her arms peppered with blue paint and odored, mildly, of gasoline, board-shaped and hard-boned, sharp-angled in the elbows and wrists, steady and broad. Those are Bant’s arms. Next there is Jimmy Make, at the table head, his arms dark-skinned like Dane’s, but with none of Dane’s fragility. Jimmy’s arms are blocky and tooled with scars, cut scars, burn scars, the muscles having collapsed under the skin like they grew too big too fast and fell, yet still visible. Sleeping lumps, lazy flesh that can flash into hardness when Jimmy wills it. And last, Dane studies the arms of Corey. Two years younger than Dane’s.They are blunt and thick and already swept with hairs, already making muscle, bulges that Corey gloats over, flexes, draws attention to in any way he can. Steel-made Corey. Little man. And all those arms, and the bodies and heads they are attached to, are sounder and stronger and better matched than Dane’s, Dane knows this.Yet it is Dane who must take and carry the stories.

Somehow that makes a scary kind of sense.

Mrs. Taylor is saying, “And Avery’s going to pester me the whole time he’s here. And what can I say back? I’d rather sit in this hollow and drown than live in Cleveland?” Her emphysema rises, Dane can hear it over top the spigot running in his dishwater. “But you see, Dane. That’s exactly what Lyon wants.” The wheezing. “Scare us to death and make everybody miserable to where we all just move out, then they can go on and do whatever they want. And you know what I say to that?” Dane knows. “This is my house!” She slams her palms on the kitchen table, jumping the salt shaker, her canisters of pills. “There have always been Ratliffs in this hollow! My father bought these two lots in 1928, and we
worked
for what
we
have!” She pauses, her throat straining after breath. “I won’t be run out,” she murmurs now.

Dane wipes his dishes. Cleveland. Just to taste the word, the foreign citiness of it, makes a homesickness thicken in the back of his throat. But at the same time, he sees the map of America in his room
at school. The way the paper is drawn in rumples, lines, and swells to show where the mountains are. West Virginia nothing but a slant of rippled lines, dense, relentless, the lines marked thick and deep.While Cleveland at the top of Ohio is blank. Where the land lies flat. Which means the water has no way to rush down on top of you because it has no place to start.

The tapwater foams out of the spigot, boils into the sink, and Mrs. Taylor says, “Honey, make sure you get them glass rims.”

I STOOD in front of the office door, an old metal screen with a curly metal pattern, and behind that, a heavy door shut. Looked like a kick dent in it halfway up.When there weren’t any cars passing in the road, I could hear the window air conditioner, a flapping wheeze with a rattle underneath. The place was a flaking green the same color as the high school bathroom walls, and with all the fresh money Hobart was making, he’d decided to get his motel repainted. Jimmy’d heard it from a friend who was Hobart’s nephew. Nobody called it a motel but Hobart, it was the boardinghouse to everyone else, although nowadays I’d heard some calling it “Scab Resort.” And I knew Hobart’s was the only place in Prater doing decent business besides the Dollar General and Scott’s Funeral Home because Hobart rented to the miners the companies imported from out-of-state to work the mountaintop mines. “Miners, shit,” Jimmy Make would say. “Nothing but ditch diggers, what they are.” Jimmy wasn’t crazy about his daughter painting scab walls, and Lace was even less happy, she’d fought him for a while. But eventually, both gave in. There wasn’t anyplace else around where I could get work.

My chest felt like two hands pressing on it, but Jimmy Make was watching me from out in the truck. He called it an interview and had given me pointers. I stepped up on the stoop. I opened the screen, nervous about doing even that without permission and half afraid it would make the inside door open and there I’d stand. I tapped near the kick dent with my knuckles. I waited, but no one came, so I figured he couldn’t hear me with that air conditioner running. But when I knocked harder, somebody right away called out, “Now just hold on. Hold on,” and I stepped back quick. I brushed off my pants in case I’d sat on something riding in and checked to make sure all my buttons were done.
Shake hands
, Jimmy’d said.
Speak up. And keep that hair back outta your eyes.

When Hobart opened the door, I stuck out my hand, but he turned around before he could see it. Jimmy’d told me to wear a pair of pants not jeans and a fake-silky blouse that belonged to Lace. Hobart was in mud-colored sweatpants and plaid bedroom slippers cut open across the toes, and I followed him, that air conditioner gasping, the office still warmer than it was outside. “Sit down,” Hobart said, pointing behind himself because he still had his back to me. It was a lawn chair he pointed to.

He was lowering himself onto the front edge of the recliner, straddling his legs around the footrest still in the air, the recliner must have stayed stuck reclined all the time. I was already noticing his breathing, and I thought it was because it reminded me of the air conditioner. He was staring at me, but I couldn’t tell how, this blank to it that hid something behind. I could feel the places on my face. Red spots with a heat behind. At the start of each breath, his throat rattled, but the exhale sounded like speaking, only you couldn’t catch the word.

“You’re Jimmy Make Turrell’s girl?” he asked.

“Yessir,” I said.

“And I hear you’ve done some painting before?”

“Yessir,” I said.

I waited for him to ask me more, but he just kept looking at me, so I looked off to the side. Wanted to drop my hair in my face, but I did what Jimmy Make’d said.The recliner was patched with duct tape (
WD-40 makes it go, duct tape makes it stop,
Jimmy again in my head), and the room smelled like air closed up for a very long time, and in it, an old man with no woman. Him not talking made my face glow hotter in its spots, but all he did was that huff-breathing, the wordless speaking at the end. Then the TV audience suddenly clapped, and I just took a breath and told him. “I painted the bleachers at the Little League field with my church group summer before last. And I painted Mrs. Glenella Taylor’s fence, lives up Yellowroot near us.” I had Mrs. Taylor’s phone number in my pocket.

Right then, somebody else knocked at the door, and first thing I thought was Jimmy Make had gotten impatient and was coming after me. “C’mon in,” Hobart hollered. We waited. “C’mon in!” Hobart bellowed, then the door swung in.

“Your pop machine’s jammed up again.”

Hobart kind of snuffled. “I got somebody coming from Beckley take a look at it.”

It was a man a little older than Jimmy Make. A man who had to be staying here. Which meant he was a scab. That was one of the few things Lace and Jimmy agreed on anymore, even if some of them were union, didn’t matter, scab, and I looked at him there, he was the first one I’d ever seen for sure. Olive-green T-shirt, greasy creased jeans, just like any man around here wore. Cap like a cap any man would wear pulled over a face could’ve been on any man’s head. But then I saw the difference. His boots. The dirt on them a different color than Jimmy’s used to be. The scab would know what was behind that fill. I looked away from him. Saw Hobart was back to staring at me.

“I lost sixty cents in there.”

Hobart hacked his throat, paused a second. Swallowed. “I’ll settle up with you later. I’m talking to this girl now.”

The door shut. Hobart shifted on the end of his recliner and reached for a dirty cup in the mess of motel check-in cards and what looked like shredded newspaper covering his coffee table. His breathing kept itching my memory. Somehow it carried both a pleasure and a sad, and neither one made any sense in that office with Hobart. “How old are you?” he said.

My throat hardened. Jimmy Make had told me not to lie about my age, but not to bring it up either. “Fifteen,” I said.

It was the first time he nodded. “Can you start tomorrow morning, nine o’clock?”

“Yessir,” I said. “I’ll be here then.”

 

“Good job, Cissy!” Jimmy Make clapped one fist on the steering wheel, then reached down for the ignition and gave the gas a good loud stomp.
Don’t call me Cissy
, I said to myself. “When do you start?”

“Tomorrow.” We were pulling past Hobart’s sign. SPECAL WEEKLY RATES. I could still hear the breathing. Hear that air conditioner run. The look of the dirt on that man’s boots.

“How much is he gonna pay you?”

My face flinched, but Jimmy Make was busy driving. I hadn’t thought to ask. “Minimum, I guess.”

Jimmy Make grunted. “Minimum. Should pay you more than that, a painting job.”

I looked out the window.

“Well,” Jimmy Make decided. “That’s all right. Your first job and all.” Then suddenly he braked, pulled off on the shoulder, and U-turned back up the road. “Know what I’m gonna do?” he said. “Gonna buy you an ice cream cone.”

I knew it was in part an excuse to check up on Lace, or maybe he
actually missed her, who knew.They were both crazy that way, couldn’t stand the sight of each other, but then when one or the other was out of sight, they’d want that sight back. So they couldn’t stand each other again, I guess. Hobart’s was on our side of Prater and the Dairy Queen on the far side, so we drove back through town past the sunfaded FOR RENT and FOR SALE signs in the storefronts, and then the storefronts with nothing in their windows at all, had just given up, and you could see clear through to their empty backs.
Poor old Prater. I can remember when there was ...
A movie theater. Three clothing stores. A Ben Franklin, a real hotel, and that was Grandma talking years before where it had got to now. Two of the three stoplights were either broken or just turned off, but the video store/tanning parlor was still going, and Maria Lake’s beauty shop, and the post office. In the old IGA lot, weeds pushed high and thrashy out the pavement cracks, and people came in from out in the country and sold stuff out of their pickup trucks there. Old bikes, greasy tools, ceramic figurines, sometimes strange things like a load of brand-new paper towels I’d seen one time. Permanent portable yard sales, you never knew what you might find there, Corey was all the time begging to stop. And we’d bought a VCR there to replace our broken one, but then that second one didn’t work either, and we never did see that man in the IGA lot again.

We pulled into the Dairy Queen, and Jimmy Make slammed out the truck and headed for the door without waiting for me, like he always did. His walk had a kind of curve to it, he’d been hurt at work when he was real young, and although the doctor said it was his back, it showed itself in the leg. Either way, it didn’t matter. Jimmy had made the limp a swagger. It’d cooled down since yesterday and clouds’d moved in, unusual cool for June at two o’clock in the afternoon, and inside the air-conditioned Dairy Queen, it was downright cold. I caught up with Jimmy Make right at the door, which he slammed through like he owned the place, calling out to Lace, “Bant got her job! I’m
gonna buy her an ice cream cone.” Lace, standing at the milkshake machine with her back to us, didn’t turn around.

“Heeey, Jimmy.” A voice crooning from somewhere back in a booth. “Heeey, there, Jimmy Make,” kind of lazy and jokey, and I couldn’t see who it was, but Jimmy spotted him, grinned all big, and forgot about me and Lace. Lace had turned back to the counter where she was taking the milkshake buyer’s money, but she was looking both at the customer and past him at me. Her face told me she wasn’t as excited about my new job as Jimmy Make was, but once the customer left, she said, “That’s real good, honey.Your first interview.You must’ve made a good impression.” She turned to make the cone, and I watched her, in the blue DQ polo shirt and the visor cramping down her blonde hair. Kind of things she would never wear except for the job, it still surprised me a little to see her like that, even though I saw it every day. And her face sometimes looked to me like a fox and sometimes like a prism. But it never looked like mine. She handed me the cone. “Tell Jimmy Make I’ll be over in a minute. And tell him he owes me a dollar fifteen.”