Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley (33 page)

“It's your land, Lloyd. You can do whatever you want with it. It's your business.”

“Besides,” Granddad said, and now Jos could hear his indignation running down as it always did. He had a fraction of the fury reserve Derek did. “If we hadn't leased, they probably wouldn't of signed the Hackerts.” He pushed his plate back. “It was the neighborly thing to do.”

LATER, ON DEREK'S
bed, Joslin tried to study for her social studies quiz. Her uncle'd snuck back in right before dark, and now he hammered away on his laptop like usual. All around them hung his childhood relics, things he never seemed to notice were still there, his sports trophies, his 4-H ribbons, photos of him with his teams, football, basketball, track, Derek's dark hair cut neat, him skinnier, but even back then, Derek didn't smile. Jos plucked at the rubber bluejay band on her wrist with her thumbnail. Every time she looked at Uncle Derek's hunched back, anger tightened between her eyes, anger over what he'd said about the Hackerts, anger at herself for wanting to be near him anyway.

Although you could start soccer when you were five, Jos had never played on any sports team before this season, this year the first Granddad and Grandma would pay for the uniform and league fees, and only after the Hackerts offered the rides. The next game was Saturday, three days away, and looking towards it opened a little blossom in her chest. To be on that field and moving, her body knowing exactly where and how to go without any mind thinking to it, it had always been that way, her body smarter than she was, but before
soccer, no one cared about that. She looked back at her textbook. The dirty-clothes air of Derek's room was cottoning in her mouth. She slid off the bed and slipped through the floor clutter towards the door.

Derek turned in his chair. “What's wrong?” He pushed his hair back out of his face and held it to his head with his fingers the way he did when he really looked at her and expected her to look back.

Joslin shrugged.

Derek continued to hold her eyes. “It's because I don't like your friends.” Jos said nothing. She pulled her gaze away from his and towards the door.

“Do you understand what your granddad and Hackert have done?”

She looked sideways at him and nodded, knowing as she did that he wouldn't be fooled.

He still didn't move, so Jos couldn't either, suspended just a step from the door and freedom. Then, so abruptly that she flinched, he dropped his hair and shuddered his head, reaching for his laptop. “You need to understand,” he muttered. “You do. Especially for after I leave.” He rammed his chair against the side of the bed, computer in his lap, and lay his hand on the mattress. Jos knew that meant sit. She did.

Not until later that night, when she was in her own bed, unable to fall back asleep, did she unnumb enough to feel what he'd said. She lay on her side, looking towards the window across the room. The house was tucked tight against the hollow side, and her second-floor view, if there'd been light enough to see, was a groundhog shale bank. No, Uncle Derek had said, it wasn't groundhog shale that they wanted. It was Marcellus shale. Darker, older, so deep under the ground they ran a drill for a mile before they blasted the water and the secret chemicals sideways into the earth. Besides, he said, I already told you. Groundhog shale isn't shale at all. It's pressed clay.

But groundhog shale was what Granddad called it, and he and Jos both loved it for the fossils layered there. The rock so scaly you could nearly dig them with your fingernails, but she and her granddad would bring a trowel, a never-painted-with paintbrush, and an old tackle box. Joslin squatted while Granddad gentle-scraped, and almost all the fossils they found were shells, no matter where they looked, in the groundhog shale, in the chunky creek rocks, in the slatey woods ones. Different sizes, different shapes, but shells all, and despite how hard Joslin stretched her brain, she could never quite believe it. The impossibility of ocean ever over where she and Granddad stood now.

Then she found herself leaving her room, floating it felt like, and in the dark hallway her nightgown seemed to glow against the leftover summer brown of her arms and her legs. She flowed down the hall and into Granddad's room, past the humpled bed where Granddad and Goldy burred their separate snores. The desk caught Jos right at her hipbones. The rocks a startling distance from her face, how much she'd grown since she'd visited last. She reached out a hand and pressed one finger in a small fossil print.

“Not every place has fossils all over like here,” her grandfather'd told her many times. Another reason their place was special. Another reason to be proud of their state. She paused and tuned again to the snoring, made certain both of them still slept. Then she laid her whole left hand on the rock that used to awe her deepest, a slab shell-tracked densely as a tablet that reminded her of the Ten Commandments. She hefted in her right hand a blocky creek rock. Then with both hands full of rock she closed her eyes and waited for the old feeling to come. A funneling of her down from her mind to gather, solid, in her chest. And eventually it did come. At least some and for a little bit.

Not until a few years before had it dawned on her that she and Granddad had never found the original shell that created a print. All
the creatures left were shadows of themselves. Had the way she felt about them changed between now and back when she hadn't known anything was missing? A little, she thought. A little of the feeling had.

SHE SAT CROSS-LEGGED
on the living room floor, her animal bands spread out on the carpet in front of her. After Granddad and Derek had agreed on the coyotes, they'd all three spent a good half hour searching for Goldy, first up the hollow behind the house, then in the field on the other side of the road. No one had more than scant faith the coyotes would have given up the body, especially so near the house. Still, it seemed the respectful thing to do, at least to look a while. Jos untangled the bands for the three she always wore for luck at soccer games: Cardinal, the state bird. Eagle, the American bird. Blue jay, their team name, and the most potent of the three.

“I'm going in town to check my email. You all need anything?” It was Derek, in the kitchen.

“Kickoff's at noon,” her granddad reminded.

“You could pick up some milk,” Grandma said. “Get you five dollars out of my pocketbook.”

“Don't worry about it,” Derek mumbled.

The old people continued banging around in the kitchen, revving up for the Mountaineer game. More spirited than they'd been in weeks, they'd splurged on pepperoni rolls for a special game-day lunch, and they'd want both her and Derek there, at least for when the team rampaged out of the tunnel. Jos felt glad for them, but she felt gladder for herself, her own game starting a little late today, the Hackerts picking her up at 2:15. She smiled. Sylvie and her little sister Madison had been on teams since they were five, most of the kids had, but Jos had outplayed Sylvie by the end of the first game, outplayed everyone else, including the boys, by the end of the second. She had “a way with the
game,” all the grown-ups said it, although she'd told her grandparents none of this. She knew how they felt about bragging. She rolled the good luck bands onto her right wrist, then picked up a couple others to trade with Sylvie and Madison on the long ride to the fields.

It was when she slipped out to practice again that she saw Bunker's chain slack. Her heart cramped quick, and her lips already going to “B” when she remembered it'd be best Granddad not hear her call. “Wasn't no creek water got Cuddle Dog,” her grandfather'd told her several times, including twice when she'd caught Granddad in the liberating act. “She just got into something somewhere.” Jos nudged the chain clasp with her foot. When Granddad had pressed the tuna to Goldy's lips, the dog'd cringed away like it hurt. If Bunker was fresh let loose and not in sight, Jos knew pretty well where he'd be. She lobbed her soccer ball underhanded back to the porch.

She jogged directly behind the house, towards the pony shed and then on past it. The quickest way to the big bottom hollow was over the ridge above the pony shed, and the fastest way to the ridge was straight up the groundhog shale outcrop. So then Jos was scrambling it, the scabby earth colored the dullest butterscotch, her cutting footholds with the sides of her tennis shoes and using her hands, too, and she thought of her cleats—Mr. Hackert had given them to her after that third game—but she dare not use them on something not soccer, and besides, the damage they could do to the fossils right under the surface. Then she was passing through the oaks and hickories on the ridge, heave-breathing a little, a breeze driving leaves towards her, them glancing off her head and shoulders like slow unshy birds. When she got to where she could see down into the hollow's broad bottom, she stopped to quiet the leaves under her feet so she could hear the leaves under Bunker's. This was another place she and Granddad had little by little stopped going as his legs got worse.

“Bunker!” she shouted. “Bunker! Here, boy!” She went still and listened again. As she did, she couldn't help but listen not only for Bunker, but also for the other. But what would the other sound like? Engines idling? A boom underground? A giant hish like a thumb-blocked garden hose? She heard only a pileated woodpecker laugh.

She launched herself over the hollow side, slippery with a decade, with more, of dead brown leaves, the bank so steep that when she was little she would lie against it and still be standing up. She slide-angled down, using again the sides of her feet, the thinking part of her hiding to let her body do its knowing, how quick to move, how far to slant, where to step, her strong hips, her calves, even her stomach muscles helping. “I'm a deer, I'm a deer,” she whispered like she'd done when she was small as though the saying it itself kept her from falling, and she never did fall. Granddad would be behind her, far more cautious, but still nearly magical in his balance, him catching himself from tree to tree, whooping sometimes after a near miss. Now she landed heavy at the bottom in a leaf drift higher than her knees.

“Bunker!” she shouted again. She whistled. The woodpecker
ha-ha-ha-ha-ha'd
. She started wading leaves towards the place where the hollow forked, passing right away the boundary between their land and the Hackerts', white paint slashes fading on trees. She dropped into the bed of a wet-weather stream parched waterless after the summer drought and she followed that. The run was choked with flat, dark, slatey rocks, sharp under her feet where they stood on end. Of all the things Uncle Derek had told her, this was the one she could not put away. How the poisons came not only from the stuff they pumped down in. How they came out of the rocks themselves. Things held safe by the earth until the rocks were shattered and the private things unlocked, and then they became poisons, too. “Then they pull back up
out of the well that poison water and they have to do something with it. Where do you think they dump it, Jos?”

Suddenly she heard the chussle sound of a big animal moving in leaves, and she knew it was not a deer, because it was not explosive and then away. And right after she spotted Bunker in the hollow fork, panting and loose-limbed with happiness, Jos saw at her foot a buckle-sized rock with a deep imprint.

She knelt. Almost the entire surface of the rock was stamped with shell, a perfect cast. Like a flower floating in a squarish bowl. “Now I don't got no education,” Granddad would say. “But all of history is in these rocks. Them's the oldest things that are.” Joslin picked up the fossil and slipped it into her sweatshirt pocket.

SHE HAD TO
stop and tie the sweatshirt around her waist on their climb back up. Midday rising summer warm, and she knew it must be close to noon, kickoff, and she climbed faster. Then she and Bunker were moving through the trees on the ridgetop, dropping towards the groundhog shale outcrop, when Joslin grabbed Bunker's collar and jerked him back.

Uncle Derek's Honda sat behind the pony shed, where cars never went. Uncle Derek himself was just stepping out of the shed carrying with two hands the biggest plastic bag Wal-Mart gave out, a weight swinging in the bottom of it. Jos tucked herself low. Without taking her eyes off Derek, she reached one hand to Bunker's stomach and rubbed. He collapsed onto his back and stayed still.

Uncle Derek laid the bag on the ground behind the car and unlocked the hatch. Joslin rose to a crouch to better see. Her uncle wedged the lid off a big white Styrofoam cooler and dropped the lid beside the Wal-Mart bag. Then he knelt, and peeling the bag back more than pulling something out, exposed the blue towel bundle. Jos shot an arm to the
ground for balance. Uncle Derek lifted the bundle into the cooler, and she watched him shove and shift to make it fit.

Next he dragged a bag of ice from the front seat and set it on the hood. Seizing it at the top on both sides, he jerked at the staples, but Jos saw they wouldn't give, and then he was tearing at it, she heard the “Fuck!” Then he spun around, spotted something, and snatched up what she knew was an old piece of barbed wire that had once topped the corral. He punctured and ripped the plastic with that and dumped the contents in the cooler.

After replacing the lid, he pulled across the cooler the sleeping bag he kept in his car, and over and around that he arranged a casual heap—jumper cables, cloth grocery bags, his CD case, the grimy green backpack he called his survival kit. Then Uncle Derek lowered himself into the front seat and gentled the car back to the house, where it was parked in its usual spot when Joslin got there and tied Bunker back up.