Strange as This Weather Has Been: A Novel Page 3

  We were standing at the edge of a big field of rocks that jumbled the space between the last pond and the bottom of the fill. Strange rocks that pushed me away when I looked, the rawness of them, no weather to them yet, despite all the rain. Jimmy had spread his legs and jammed his hands on his hips, and when he reared back to look up, the shirt jerked loose of his jeans. I watched him watching. He was all the time bragging about how he’d worked in the industry for years. He was supposed to be able to tell something about this. “Fuck,” he said. The sky was making to rain again, pushing breeze ahead of it. Jimmy Make tightened one bootlace and started across.

  I swallowed. He was picking his way, his arms winged out for balance, his chin tipped down. The breeze pimpled me along my arms and in the small of my back, even though there wasn’t enough chill in the breeze to do that. Then I shut down my mind and plunged after him, taking the rocks like a bear would, bent all the way over so I was walking on my feet and my hands. I didn’t want to touch those rocks with my hands, but I figured it would be worse to walk upright, then slip and skin an ankle, let it get in your blood. No. In the cracks between the rocks, gooey liquid stuff. Dark greens and blacks that turned blue when light hit them.

  I reached the base of the fill on all fours before Jimmy did on his feet. I pushed my neck back to see to the top again, and now I noticed how it looked like it maybe had two tops, one in front, one behind. But I couldn’t be sure. It was like I’d see two, but then my eyes would bend, and it would look like just one top again. And this close up to the fill, it was even harder to take it all as real. It was like my mind didn’t want to make a place for this here.

  By now, the sun had started dropping behind the blasted-off ridge, but we could still see easy the leaks in the bottom of the fill, water drooling out here and there even though it hadn’t rained in a couple days. I watched Jimmy Make. He just stood there. All I could read on his face was mad.

  “Maybe Lace is right,” I said.

  Jimmy spat into one of the leaks. Lifted his eyes off that and upswept them the height of the valley fill. I asked him again, “Do you think she’s right? There’s water standing up behind it?”

  Jimmy Make still didn’t look at me. But he usually didn’t. “That ain’t no dam,” he finally said.

  “I know it’s not no dam. Do you think there’s an impoundment behind it?”

  “Well,” said Jimmy, “I doubt that.”

  I looked at him. His belly paunching out under the untucked shirt. His brown eyes narrowed under the camouflage cap. Then I understood that he wasn’t exactly bullshitting me because he was bullshitting himself first. And right there I knew for sure what I’d suspected all along—Jimmy Make couldn’t tell any more about what was going on than I could.

  It was me was going to have to climb up that fill and see what was behind it.

  Corey

  IF I HAD me a four-wheeler. If I did, now. Seth has a four-wheeler, and Seth’s only nine. And Seth hardly ever rides his four-wheeler, just goes to waste in the shed, why should Seth have a four-wheeler? If I had me a four-wheeler . . .

  But Corey has to make do with his bike. Dad says they can’t get an ATV because it’s too dangerous, but Corey knows it’s because it’s too expensive. So he makes do with his bike. Which he can ride better and do more tricks on than anybody up and down Yellowroot, and probably better than anybody in town, too. If town would have some kind of bike contest, like Corey has seen on TV, but not their town. Some town.

  Last day of school, early dismissal, and now Corey and Tommy sit under the house, each holding one foot turned up in one hand. Since the flood rammed loose some of the underpinning, they can get up in there easier, and with the flood-ripped insulation dangling around, it’s like a spookhouse.The flood knocked loose the washer’s drainpipe, too, and Dad won’t fix it, says Lyon Energy can, so now when Mom runs the washer, the water gushes straight into a runnel it has worn under the house, so you can pretend it’s an underground river. Gold in it. Corey and Tommy sit up under there, and also Chancey, the outside dog, flopped on his side in a dirt hollow he’s dug. Corey has an old steak knife he keeps hidden in the tape that Dad wrapped around some of the pipe joints, and him and Tommy are testing how tough their feet are. Corey drills the dull point of the old steak knife, slow, into the calluses on their feet, and he counts until the person being stabbed yelps, cries, or winces.Tommy, who is six, tends to yelp or cry. Corey, ten, tends to wince or cuss. You can cuss and keep counting numbers. Then Corey writes the number of seconds with a ballpoint pen on the inside of his arm after each of their initials: C and T. There are four numbers total because they drill four times: ball of the left foot, ball of the right, heel of the left foot, heel of the right.

  The front porch thuds, the screen door slams. Slippers scuff overhead. Quick, Corey wedges the knife back into the wad of tape. “That was Mrs. Kerwin on the phone,” Mom calls. “She thinks our back steps might be in the creek behind McWain’s.” She stops. “Corey, you all get out here where I can see you.”

  He army-man crawls through the shallow dirt and broken cinderblocks, Tommy behind him, Chancey behind Tommy. “I want you-all to go down make sure they’re ours before I send Dad after them with the truck.” She looks at their bare feet. “Get your shoes on, and stay out of the creek. And come right back after you’re done. You head up past that gate—you know what’s gonna happen.” She fixes Corey in the eye.

  She watches while Corey ties his tennis shoes, Tommy Velcros his, and then Tommy heads towards the road, Chancey already trotting ahead of him. After that, she disappears inside. Corey hacks his throat to spit.Tommy catches the signal and looks back. “This way, boy,” Corey hisses. On the way to the creek, Corey stops behind the refrigerator that the flood dropped in their yard and takes off his shoes. Tommy does the same. Corey peeks towards the house, then opens the refrigerator door and puts his and Tommy’s shoes inside on a rack.

  Since the flood, Corey can stand in the creek and just about touch the wall of the house, and Bant, she can touch it.When the water rushed off the mountain, it blew out the backyard and washed a chunk of it downstream, the steps with it, leaving only two feet between the back corner of the house and the new sharp bank, cut straight up and down like a mattock was took to it.Tommy stands on the steep bank, patient, not asking, until Corey reaches up and swings him into the water. They have to go by the creek so as not to waste a chance to look for parts, and as soon as they’re out of trailer eyeshot and can slow down, Corey feels his mouth water. He really does. Because before the flood, it is true, you could occasionally pick up an interesting thing or two in the creek if you looked careful and often. But since the flood, well . . . Corey won’t even let himself think too hard on it out of fear he’ll jinx it. Because with all the stuff people had dumped up the hollow above their house before the gate was put in, added to everything the company threw over the edge of the mine. Well, if you can unfocus your eyes right—and Corey can—wading the creek is like walking the aisle of a Wal-Mart made for Corey, with all the price tags saying free.

  Water heaters and kerosene stoves and tires of all dimensions, lawnmowers and roofing, bike frames and car axles. Barrels and plastic toys, washing machine parts and oven racks, and on top of all that good stuff is the great stuff, the mysterious could-be-anything stuff dumped off the mine—rusted metal contraptions and cogs and wheels and iron bars and yellow steel sheets. On the way back, Corey will collect as many parts as he can carry, and he will bribe, blackmail, or flatter Tommy into carrying some, too, all these unmade, unbuilt parts, just waiting, and they will tote the parts back to Grandma’s old house, where Corey stashes them and threatens Tommy with the monkey if Tommy ever tells Mom or Dad. Because Corey has a plan.

  They slosh through pigshit-colored creek water that comes to right below Corey’s knees, right above Tommy’s. Used to be too deep to wade, but every year it gets more shallow, and the water with a bad odor to it, even though it was two years ago all the fish and
crawdads died. A different thing to watch. The flood ripped and rearranged the neighborhood, and from here in the creek, behind the houses, you can see how people’s property has changed. Some yards are smaller now, like theirs, while others have been stretched longer and higher with rock and trash and the dirt off the yards of the people who lost theirs. Corey likes the change. He watches Chancey wiggle into drift piles like the pick-up-sticks game they got once for Christmas and lost most the sticks down the heater vents. Chancey’s blond-gray hind end twitching in the open air with his front end buried in the drift, until he gets bored, pulls out, sneezes, and trots to the next one. And Corey can’t blame him. What a sorry-ass boring place this is.

  Too narrow even to run a railroad track through, is Yellowroot Hollow, so narrow that if you drove a tractor trailer into it and tried to park with its cab against one side of the hollow and its back wheels in the other, well, it wouldn’t even fit. That’s how narrow this sorry hollow is, and the whole skinny mile of this sorry-ass hollow plugged with little houses and little trailers and their little chain-link fences. At times Corey torments himself by thinking what if Paul Franz and them from school came up this hollow and saw where Corey lives. He’ll devil himself with this vision, although he can’t really think of any reason Paul Franz and them would come up here. Unless it was to trick-or-treat. So what if they did, what if they came up to trick-or-treat? There are only two good things about Yellowroot Hollow, and one just happened this May. The stuff in the creek. The second and only other good thing about Yellowroot Hollow is the way the hardtop road breaks down before their house, leaving a big asphalt lip above the gravel and mud, a lip you can use to do bike tricks. Like a readymade ramp, where you can fly into the air and jerk the handlebars and, your body gripping the bike body, you can pull it and spin a little in the air, then crash, POW, on two wheels and not tip. But besides that.What a nothing narrow hollow. Not even enough room to run a railroad track through.

  Now, Slatybank Hollow. That’s a hollow.

  “Where’s the monkey at?” Tommy asks.

  “Oh, you wanna see that monkey again, do you?” Corey says.

  “Nooo,” says Tommy. “I’m just wondering where it’s at.”

  “It’s not til up there behind Chester’s,” Corey says. “You know that.” He spots a metal bar, what may have been an axle, camouflaged in a pile of sticks. He writes in his head to pick it up coming back. He can’t see to the bottom of the creek even though it’s no more than five or eight inches deep in this part, but you never know what might be down there, too, so he feels careful in the silky muck with his toes.

  “There it is!” Corey lies about the monkey. “In that pile right there!”

  “Nooo,” Tommy wails.

  Corey starts to run away from Tommy, through the water, high-stepping his feet and plunging. But then there is Seth, watching them from his yard. Corey stops.

  If I had me one . . .

  Seth’s fat body is draped in a new sports outfit he’s put on just since they got off the bus. Potato legs sunk in Nike shoes with the tongues creeping up his ankles. Mesh shorts to below the knees, UNC basketball jersey to below the crotch. Seth watches them with his arms forked out from his body, which is too round for his arms to lie flat.

  “Your dog stinks,” Seth says.

  “Rolled in something dead,” says Corey. “Where’s your four-wheeler at?” he asks, even though he knows exactly where it is.

  Seth cocks his head, just an inch, back towards his house. “There in the shed.” Seth always talks like he has too much spit in his mouth and can’t swallow.

  “You decide about what I said the other day?” Corey asks. If I had . . .

  “My mom don’t want me going up in them snake ditches,” Seth says.

  “How would she find out?” Corey says. It’s hard to stay nice with him, but you have to be.

  Seth turns suddenly and yells. “Hey, boy, you better not have your shoes on there!” Tommy has slipped past and got on Seth’s trampoline.

  “He didn’t even leave the house with shoes on,” Corey says. “C’mon, Tommy,” he calls. “We got things to do.”

  Corey and Tommy turn their backs on Seth and walk on down the creek. Chancey must notice he’s being left because Corey hears him thrash out of the pile he was into and splash to catch up. Corey beams Chancey a mind order to rub some dead stink on Seth’s new outfit, but he won’t lower himself to turn and look at Seth to see if Chancey does. He flexes his bicep under the chamois rag he’s tied around it.

  “Where’s that monkey at?” Tommy is saying again.

  “Up here behind Chester’s, I told you.” Corey spies what looks like a car battery trapped in the crotch of an uprooted tree. He’s now carrying more parts in his head than he and Tommy can carry in their arms, even if they make three trips. He decides to be nice to Tommy in case he needs him for four or five. “I’ll protect you,” he says. “It won’t get you.”

  Chancey has already found it again. He’s scrambling into the spot where he always stands to bark at it, on top of a big gray metal box must have come off the mine, and once Chancey gets squared away up there with his special monkey view, the barks pour out of his mouth like big brass bubbles. Corey feels a little floaty in his head. The stinky gray water around his ankles, the way you can’t see under it. He and Tommy plod their wide circle through the water, keeping a safe distance from the heap of wood and trash, but the heap sucks Corey’s eyes to it, even though he knows you can’t see the monkey but from one certain angle. Chancey barks like he’s got something holed, his legs stretched out rigid in front of him and his hollering head tucked down between his shoulders, pointing at the monkey, and Corey and Tommy take smaller careful steps towards the spot where they can see it, Tommy sticking very close, his hand clutching the tail of Corey’s T-shirt.

  There it is. The blond curly knots of drowned hair on the twisted body and part of the creepy face. A face Corey can’t put with any animal he has ever seen, but not all the face shows, mostly just an open eye too big for the body, and then a kind of what must be a snout, but most of that turned away and part buried in mud. Corey has no idea, really, what this thing is. He knows it can’t be a monkey, yet that seems the best thing to call it. Corey stands, trapped by the sight of it, just like Tommy and Chancey are. He can’t help it, can’t help the staring. It’s like you can’t get your eyes to adjust, the thing won’t come into focus, but, no, not like the focus of your eyes, but your mind, your mind can’t focus it. Until Corey gets a little dizzy. And he backs away from it, Tommy still attached to his shirt, and when they get a safe distance, he turns his back and hurries a little on down the creek.

  The big monkey drift is caught in a bend, and after the bend, the flood trash slackens, the monkey drift a kind of bottleneck. Then Chester’s backyard, his garden, a few leftover seed packets impaled on stakes and crusted with dark flood muck—even dried up, it’s dark, that kind of mud. A rusted swingset his kids used to play on, them grown and long gone and the swingset tipped over. Sorry-ass Chester’s backyard, then the sorry-ass yard of Little Scotty Piles, and, Slatybank . Corey is thinking. Not like this hollow, this place. What if they lived in Slatybank Hollow?

  Slatybank has trains moving through it, and not just any old trains. Dad went up in there to see a man about a truck part, and he took Dane and Corey with him, and Corey has seen many a train, but not a train like that train in Slatybank. Slatybank is a nice-sized hollow, wider than this one, and emptier, too, lots of people having left out from Slatybank Hollow, a leaving place, which is better than a stuck-in hollow like theirs.The houses and trailers and stands and churches up and down Slatybank Hollow in various years-along of abandonment, some just abandoned to where the grass is too high, and others abandoned to where the windows are busted out, and others abandoned right down to rubble. Of course, some people never left at all, like the man with the truck part, and Dad drove them up in there, tracing the train track, then crossing it, then tracing it on
the other side, then crossing it again. The hollow way, way longer than Yellowroot. The train track drawing your eye to it, fresh rail and rock, so much newer, shinier, than the buckling paved road. Then they got to the man’s house, and Dad told them to stay outside and be good. They filled their pockets with big pieces of gravel off the railroad bed and then whizzed the rocks at beer bottles they’d set up on the rails. Dane always missed. Corey always hit. Then they heard her coming.

  The train came from up the hollow and three locomotives it took to pull her, the very first one blasting the beer bottles into the air to shatter on rock. And then the gondolas, so neat-heaped with even mounds of coal the coal looked clean, and the black gons, too, that was the thing, the gons new as fresh-baked bread, the gons hauling out their virgin load of coal, gons that had never felt dust nor rain nor cinder nor mud and chock chock chock chock them passing beautiful. So just-out-of-the-factory brilliant Corey wondered was there a train assembly line up the hollow chock chock chock chock them passing beautiful. Corey couldn’t help but draw up closer CHOCK CHOCK CHOCK CHOCK heatful they feel, and the odors of metal and oil and creosote the train weight pumps from the ties CHOCK CHOCK CHOCK CHOCK Corey creeping up to where he could no longer hear Dane’s yells, Corey washed in the breath of the just-made train, him gut-feeling the train breath in a place in his body he didn’t know he had, a place deeper than he knew his body got, the train force humming the teeth in his head, and how the air breaks between cars staggered him back, the sudden miss of metal making more there the smash force of the gon following CHOCK CHOCK CHOCK CHOCK a no time dangle time train wash wafting up and over them time and then. Finished.