Things that Fall from the Sky (Vintage Contemporaries) (10 page)

Jason Cooley asked, “Now
when
did God create the waters?” and Coach said, “Chapter one, verse two: and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Kyle Hoftyzer asked whether “male and female created he them” meant both Adam
and
Eve, and Coach said that it meant first Adam, then Eve. Jeff Cypert asked when our next test would be, and Coach said he would let us know.

Then Ryan Biggum raised his hand and asked about the dinosaurs. “Where do
they
fit in?” he said. I had known Ryan Biggum for eight years, and in that time he had questioned every adult in our school on this matter—every teacher, every parent, every visiting speaker. He was dissatisfied with the suggestion that the dinosaurs had perished in the Flood, and he frequently said, in class, that he considered their absence “a hole too big to fit through.” Ryan Biggum was a mess.

“I’ve done some searching,” he continued, “and as far as I can tell they’re not mentioned
anywhere.
”

Standing at the window Coach Schramm looked as shadowy and grave as any ancient pharaoh. He sighed in a way that seemed to suggest he’d taught a few too many Ryan Biggums in his time. “God Almighty,” he said, rainwater battering against the glass all around him. “Can’t we give the dinosaurs a rest?”

My school building stood on a bluff overlooking the river and the highway, and its western face was as much window as brick. Wide bands of glass stretched from the roof to the ground—on those evenings when my father drove me to football games or drama productions, they shone in the light of the sun like open doorways—and a window cleaner’s scaffold hung from a derrick at the fourth floor. It was this scaffold that ruptured in the wind that day, releasing a coiled hose, a washrag, and a metal bucket secured to a guy rope—and it was this bucket that lifted like a jackstone into the storm, shot to the end of its rope, and as Coach Schramm sighed his displeasure, came spinning down into the side of our building. It shattered through our schoolroom window—I thought for a moment that I was listening to the dumpster lid slamming open outside. Then it struck Coach Schramm on the spine of his nose and went swinging back into the rain.

Of course, none of us knew that the scaffold had split, or the bucket had toppled, or the rope had turned at the time. We knew only this: that Coach Schramm had taken the Lord’s name in vain, then fallen in a cataract of breaking glass.

He landed with an awful crack, his whistle clattering to the floor beside him.

For a moment, everything was silent. A yellow maple leaf blew in through the window, and the bucket flashed back and forth there like a bob weight.

Though his lip showed only the barest splash of blood, Coach Schramm was not moving.

The ceiling vent began to whisper with warm air.

“Someone should probably go tell the office,” I said.

Robert Shriver dropped his pencil.

Max Krain sneezed like a cannon.

My fourth-period English teacher, Mister Schramm, was an open, gregarious man who was quite popular in our school. He hosted field trips to plays and museums, recited stories with a performer’s voice, and wore neckties with prints of woodland animals on them. He was Coach Schramm’s younger brother. Earlier in the week, he had announced that we would compete as teams that day in a vocabulary contest. Instead we arrived in class to find him staring up at the mercury light, his eyeglasses propped on his forehead, his necktie draped across the corner of his desk. A note was waiting for us on the chalkboard: “Pick up worksheets from podium. Study quietly for preposition exam.”

For fifty-five minutes, until it was time for lunch, Mister Schramm sat at the front of the classroom running his thumb down the tines of a plastic comb. It sounded like the throating of frogs in a creekbed.

“So where did they take him?” asked Lelah Holeman, twisting the cap off a chocolate sandwich cookie.

The lunchroom was filled with a pale steady light that buzzed from the overhead fluorescents. A veil of rain shimmered down the high windows, and crushed ice rattled from the mouths of vending machines. It was me and Allison Downey and Mollie Wicks and John Peacock and Lelah Holeman and Robert Shriver.

“Most likely to the hospital,” I said. “They wheeled him down the hall on a gurney, and that’s the last we saw of him.”

Robert Shriver pinched his sandwich bag shut along the zipper. “I was watching when he fell,” he said. “It was mostly shock, I think. The bucket just barely tapped him, and the glass didn’t cut him at all. To tell you the truth, I almost laughed when it happened: I mean, a bucket—who would figure?” He swept a few crumbs to the floor. “He’ll probably be back on Monday.”

I had seen the faces of the paramedics as they left our room—they had looked like soap bubbles draining of color—and I knew that he wouldn’t be back any time soon.

“Let’s talk about something else,” I said, swallowing the last of my sandwich.

In the weeks since my mother had left home, my father had grown concerned about my diet. Each morning before he went to work, he wrapped my lunch in a brown paper bag and left it for me on the kitchen counter—a peanut butter and sprout sandwich, a bag of coarse blue corn chips, a red apple drizzled with green, and a sealed tray of crackers with pocked yellow cheese and a spread wand.

I never ate the apple.

Every day I swaddled it in my napkin and backpack with the thought that I might eat it on the bus, and every day I threw it in the garbage when I got home. I planted it beneath chicken bones and paper towels, depleted tins of cat food and packets of soured condiments, in the hope that my father would not find it.

Mollie Wicks was attempting to untwine the decorative white icing atop her chocolate cupcake. “When my grandma died,” she said, “we held the services in our living room. I wanted to see her, but my mom wouldn’t let me—she sent me to stay with the neighbors.” She paused, ticking at her fingernail, and her gaze seemed to split its focus. “I was only three or four at the time, and I’d never known anyone else who died. I tangled her up with God somehow. I used to imagine God sitting in Heaven with frizzled gray hair and my grandmother’s blue flower nightgown.”

John Peacock, spooning up dollops of pudding, told us a story about his uncle, who cared for him when his parents were fighting. His uncle, he said, kept the grounds at the Rivergarden cemetery. A few years ago he had found one of the burial vaults split open. Sod and concrete were everywhere, and the tombstone was rent in two. He reported it as an act of vandalism. Then, a week later, it happened again. He was weeding the fenceline when he heard a sound like the sudden
whoompf
of a gas fire. Fragments of soil rained down around him. An ash sapling landed at his shoulder. The yard was otherwise deserted. “It turns out,” said John, “that some of the caskets were sealed too tight. Bacteria was filling them with pressure. They blew open like bombs.”

“Weird,” said Lelah. Behind her, a vending machine stopped with a quick little shudder.

“My mom,” said Allison, “told me once that she thinks my grandma was reborn as a cat. She died when Mom was in college, before I was born, and that’s supposed to be one of the last things she said—that she would come back as a cat. The story goes that exactly one year after my grandmother died, my mom opened the door to find a cat on the stoop. She carried the cat inside, and fed it, and ended up keeping it as a pet.” Allison plucked at the ribs of a plastic fork. “The strange thing about all this is that Mom’s parents never really liked cats. My grandmother was apparently a dog person.”

“What happened to her?” asked John Peacock.

“The cat? She was killed by a car, I think. That’s not part of the story, though.” Allison blew a twist of hair from her eye. “She also knocked down the birdcage once and ate my mom’s canary,” she said. “Uncle William.”

A tiny wry smile flickered over her lips.

Outside, a sudden gust of hail came rattling across the windows.

“What about you, Jeremy?” Allison shifted under the table, and the tail of her skirt swept into my leg. “Have you known anyone who’s died?”

I could hear Walter Bozeman at another table delivering a pun he had heard—the effectual phrase was “kicking the bucket”—and I could hear his squirrelly friends laughing and nibbling potato chips.

“No,” I said. My leg was tingling with suppressed motion; I was afraid that if I moved, Allison would notice me and withdraw her skirt. “No, this is my first.”

Allison tucked her hair behind her ear and bit into a chunk of pineapple, a thread of which remained on the curve of her lower lip. John Peacock pressed his finger to the top of a drinking straw, suspending a column of bubbling root beer inside. Lelah Holeman buttered a muffin and Robert Shriver licked a tootsie-pop and Mollie Wicks took a salami with her sharp white teeth.

The front panel of a coke machine was shining with a silver haze inside my apple. I cupped it in my palm and displayed it to the table. “Does anyone want this?” I asked.

The bell rang and they all shook their heads.

Let me tell you about Allison Downey.

In the Monday morning assembly at which we began our seventh-grade year, I sat behind a girl I hadn’t seen before. She was wearing a lake-red pullover with a dangling hood, and her collar dipped at the root of her neck, revealing a little chain of vertebrae. During the morning prayer I followed this ridge of bone with my eyes, sliding occasionally into her hood, then climbing to her collar like some tiny mountaineer. We stood and sat for the pledge of allegiance, and Principal Raymer took the microphone for his introductory address. When I noticed a loose hair on the girl’s shoulder, a certain tidiness in me insisted that I remove it. I remember feeling anxious and slightly abashed as I reached out my hand. The instant I touched her she turned around. I started in my chair and, coloring, presented the hair to her. I expected to be met with a show of irritation, but I wasn’t. Instead, she signaled me near, then demonstrated something to me that I have not since forgotten: how if you hold a hair taut and draw your fingers toward the root, it will make a short, thin sound like the hum of a spinning top.

This was Allison.

Allison wore long sheer skirts that rustled against her shoes, and she spoke in a scramble of words when she was nervous. She walked down the stairways of our school like a demonstration of motion, her left hand sweeping the banister and her feet skipping the final step. (She took great pleasure, I think, in practiced gestures like these— blindly shutting a familiar door, perfectly striking a matchbook match.) I had three classes with her that year: earth science, English, and geography. One evening, as we sat in her bedroom plotting a posterboard map of Brazil (an assignment for Mister Ullom’s geography class), a small down feather floated from my winter coat and settled on the fringe of her eyelashes; we worked for half an hour before she noticed it. One afternoon as she waited for the bus, she found a woolly orange caterpillar bunching and elongating over her sandal, and when she showed it to John Peacock, he stepped on it. She glowered silently at him for the next three days. At the last football game of our seventh-grade year, a night when the cold shaped our words into little white mushroom puffs, I asked her if she wanted a drink from the concessions stand, and after a prolonged quiet, she said that she’d been thinking recently about the difference between
good guilt
and
bad
guilt
and that though she wasn’t sure, and there was certainly room for disagreement, she thought that she might have a lot of bad guilt. I hid a smile and arched my eyebrows at Matt Newton. Allison began to say something, muffled herself, and nodded. “You know what I’m sick of?” she said after a moment. “I’m sick of significant glances.” And when she seethed off through the bleachers, I hurried behind her to apologize.

Allison collected glass snowstorm balls, which she kept in neat rows on the shelves of her bedroom. I remember shaking them with her and watching the water churn inside: what would it be like, we wondered, to live in such a place—a home that might stagger and right itself, a silver eruption of snow? She liked to walk through the revolving doors of shopping malls and multistory office buildings without touching the partitions, and she could do this with such casual grace that it seemed as if she were simply passing through an empty doorway, sheets of glass whirling around her. Once on Halloween she gave me a plastic ring crowned with a flared orange spider, and I wore it like a talisman until its band split in the laundry.

Allison lived with her mother and small brother (her father was remarried). She was careful and muddled and dreaming and lovely. And though she would move with her family one winter to the forests and slate-blue skies of the Pacific Northwest, and I would not see her again, for a long time I believed in my sleep that I was still living in those months and years, awakening with the thought that she’d be waiting in the lunchroom.

That afternoon, while we were waiting to hear about Coach Schramm, the wind carried the rain away over the mud-brown river. The air took on a glassiness that made each object seem sharp-edged and bright, wholly contained within itself. From my algebra and health classes, I watched trees and concrete parking stones glistening with daylight. An aluminum can rolled back and forth on the sidewalk, and a blackened tree limb lay in the grass. Cars and the reflections of cars passed down the highway in a jet of standing water.

We were scheduled to have a pep rally at the end of the day, but whispers suggested that Coach Schramm had not pulled through, and the prospect of organized chants and the clapping of hands led Principal Raymer to cancel the event. Instead, when the bell rang for seventh period, we found ourselves congregating outside the gymnasium and cafeteria, waiting in the lobby for our parents or freely wandering the hallways: this was something that never happened in our school, but on that day it did. Allison and I decided to head for the bluff overlooking the highway. As we walked around the building she ran her hand along the brick wall, tracing the rise and fall of a line of mortar. “It’s like bobbing over the ocean,” she said, and I wasn’t sure whether she was referring to the motion of her fingers along the brickwork or to some other, more interior current.