Sourland (17 page)

 

Tell Nose Pick c'mere, Michie said to me.

Nose Pick was one of the names they called Arvin. On account of him always picking at his nose, his mouth, his ears like he had terrible itches all over. Arvin had a way of watching the rest of us, kind of smiling at us, laughing if we did something meant to be funny, wanting to be with us except most of the time, at school, if we were outside on the school grounds, he couldn't: there was a yellow line painted on the pavement dividing one part of the paved ground from the rest and the special ed. students were not allowed to cross this yellow line or vice versa. This was a school rule. You could figure that it protected some of the special ed. kids from being teased or tormented but also it was meant to protect other kids from being teased or tormented by the special ed. kids who were bigger and older and kind of unpredictable in their behavior. Arvin Huehner was between these, you could say. He'd be picked on by the guys but, tall and kind of bossy like he was, Arvin sometimes picked on younger kids himself. That high-pitched nasal voice scolding
Bad!

The Hugh-ners as they were called lived on Red Rock Road in a
house that was just a basement, you could see the basement windows and part of the first floor that resembled a skeleton, just boards and planks where rooms would be, except work stopped on the house years ago and never started again. There was no outside to the Hugh-ners' house only just raw planks and strips of something like canvas that became ripped and flapped in the wind. This house, that people called an eyesore, and were contemptuous of, was about a mile from where we lived, and the Dungarves lived, toward the dead end of the Red Rock Road. The older Hugh-ners were said to be “normal” but the children were all special ed. Arvin had only younger sisters and a brother, no older relative to protect him.

Hey Arvin, I said, Michie wants you to come with us.

Arvin narrowed his eyes at me not trusting me exactly. This was in April, a day that smelled of wet earth. Warm when the sun came out and chilly when the sun went in. Arvin was wearing a parka that was an ugly mustard color and corduroy trousers that fitted his legs narrow as pencils. That Arvin would believe my cousin Michie and his friends would want him to join them, that Arvin was so stupid hardened my heart against him.
Why'd you think you could be their friend
I wanted to laugh in his face.

Arvin adjusted his glasses on his nose, blinking at me. He was licking his loose rubbery lips excited and scared.

O.K. c'mon, I told Arvin.

We weren't taking the school bus after school. There was a way we hiked home along the railroad embankment then along the creek for maybe a mile.

So Arvin trotted with us like a scrawny dog. Along the railroad embankment and into a thicket of trees and there was the edge of the swamp and the ravine you had to cross over some fallen logs. Below was a marshy ditch thick with rushes and cattails and water that smelled like sewage, that was high after some days of rain. Below were bullfrogs croaking so loud and hoarse, you can't believe the noise is coming from something so small. The guys threw rocks at the frogs but the frogs
were too quick for them. Turtles sunning on logs, they'd slip off and disappear at the sound of a voice.

A surprise how a turtle can see you and hear you and maybe feel your footsteps at a distance. How a creature with such a thick clumsy shell can move so fast, to save its life.

Michie told Arvin go climb down into the ravine where there was something glinting in the mud, looked like a car hood ornament. Arvin began to whimper saying he didn't want to, his mother would be angry if he came back muddy. And maybe then Michie or one of the other guys pushed him. Or maybe Arvin decided to climb down. We told Arvin we'd be friends with him, he could come home with us. So he climbed into the ravine which was maybe thirty feet deep, slipping and sliding in the mud. I said to Michie what if there are water moccasins in that water and Michie just laughed. Arvin managed to get hold of the hood ornament but his feet were sinking in mud. He began to cry, he was stuck in the mud. The guys were laughing and yelling down at Arvin it was quicksand he'd gotten into. He was red-faced and snivelling and his glasses were crooked on his nose. I saw a swirl of something in the water just a few yards from where Arvin was struggling. I saw the ripples, I saw the rubbery-thick black snakes just below the surface of the water. We were waiting for Arvin to be sucked into the quicksand. Like in a TV movie where a man was trapped in quicksand in a jungle, you watched as the quicksand sucked him down, the lower part of his face disappeared into the mud, his mouth, then his terrified eyes, then he was gone, the quicksand shut above his head only just frothy bubbles.

In the movie, monkeys were flying through the trees overhead and chattering and shrieking. At the top of the ravine, the guys were laughing at Arvin. I said, Hey we better pull him up. Laughing like the guys but getting scared. I didn't say anything about the snakes because the guys would only laugh at me. I wasn't sure I had seen snakes, maybe it was just wind blowing the rushes.

Arvin was trying to grab hold of some vines, to pull himself up. His legs were sunk in mud to his knees. He was crying, bawling like a calf.
A calf bawls for its mother, just a few hours old and already its lungs are strong enough it can bellow. But a human scream is thin and weak and can crack if you're afraid. Arvin was bawling like a calf, bawling with no words, like he'd forgotten what words were. Michie and Steve were tossing stones and mud-chunks at him. Dan Burney dragged a heavy rock to the edge of the ravine, let it drop and roll down the slope at Arvin but missing him. There was a broken tree limb shaped like a spear, I threw. The spear fell short of Arvin where he'd fallen in the mud and was bleeding from a cut on his forehead, he was bawling but not so loud as before. The guys got into seeing who could hit Arvin with the most stones. The biggest rocks. The sky was darkening like something begun to boil. It happens that fast, east of Lake Ontario. There came a harder wind, and rain like warm spit. We backed off and left Arvin in the ravine.

Hiked through the woods to Red Rock Road, and to our houses. Michie, Steve, Dan. And DeeDee who was me.

 

Two years later in ninth grade my name would be Diane. I had a close girlfriend through high school who called me Di. And Frank calls me Di sometimes. Nobody calls me DeeDee now, if I heard this name I would freeze.

 

It was years later my cousin Michie was arrested for what he did to a girl named Sheryl Ricks over at Alcott. Michie denied it at first saying it must've been some other guy, Sheryl was seeing other guys not only him. The rumor was, Sheryl was pregnant with Michie Dungarve's baby but that turned out to be false, the Niagara County coroner reported.

When you die every fact of your body can be exposed. Not just are you pregnant but have you ever been pregnant. Have you ever had a baby. Are there “bruises and lacerations” in the vaginal area, meaning have you been raped. Or maybe not raped but you've had sex. Once you are dead they can know everything about you.

By the time of Sheryl we were out of school. Michie was twenty-
two. What he'd done was beat his girlfriend then twist her head with both his hands so that the vertebrae in her neck broke. In his bare hands. Michie was that angry and that strong. He'd been in the navy for two years and the family was proud of him then he tested positive for amphetamines and was discharged “less than honorable” and came back to Herkimer where his family was living then. Then there was a few months he worked for a bail bondsman up at Watertown and was apprenticed to a licensed bounty hunter which was work he liked, he said. His name wasn't Michie now but Mitch.

Mitchell Dungarve
is my cousin's actual name. In the papers and on TV it would be
Mitchell Dungarve, 22
.

Mitch would tell anyone who asked him, Sheryl Ricks had it coming. She'd known it, too, which was why she'd tried to run from him in the parking lot. Mitch told the
Herkimer Journal
reporter he'd kind of wanted to see what it was like killing somebody, anyway. Since he'd been a kid, he was curious. And in the navy, he'd never seen “combat.” The reporter said, well—what was it like? and Mitch said it happened so damn fast like a fire flaring up almost he hadn't felt anything at all.

Mitch said it isn't that big a deal killing somebody who deserves it except for all that comes afterward. People make so much of it, Jesus! That's what he hadn't guessed, how his life would be fucked up afterward.

It was his freedom he missed. Worse than in the navy, once you get arrested. Fuck Sheryl, she had it coming.

Cold-blooded murderer lacking a soul
it was said of Mitch Dungarve but anybody who knew Mitch, his family and relatives, his close friends, knew Mitch wasn't all that different from anybody else.

What had happened to Arvin Huehner was different, it never got beyond what was reported in the papers. A “special education” student at the Rapids school had a “fatal accident” coming home from school. He'd tried to cross a deep ravine on some rotted logs but fell and injured himself on rocks below, fractured his skull and died. Arvin had been a clumsy boy even his family conceded. They could not understand
why he hadn't come home from school on the bus as he always did. It was revealed that, that day, the special ed. teacher had had to discipline Arvin for harassing a girl in their class, and Arvin had been upset about that and hadn't wanted to ride the bus home. There was no witness to what had happened to Arvin but Sheryl Ricks was a different situation, plenty of people had seen Mitch Dungarve with her at a tavern in Alcott the night she'd died.

In the prison at Attica, Mitch gave interviews. He said he was not afraid to die, he'd done what needed to be done and that was all. His lawyer told him show remorse but that was bullshit, he would not.

He never spoke of Arvin Huehner, never told our names, that we were involved. It came to me one day, he'd forgotten.

 

The ravine and the logging road in the woods have not changed much in twenty years. I drove out once, to investigate. We'd all moved into town by then. I was married and had my girls by then. What is strange is how much of Red Rock Road is abandoned now, houses collapsed in tall weeds and scrub trees and the Huehner house, what there was of it, hardly visible from the road. Some people live in our old house but the Dungarves' house next-door is boarded up. Properties like my grandfather's old farm are overgrown like jungles. The big interstate I-81 cuts a swath through the countryside north of Rapids so there's heavy traffic only just a mile or so from the ravine but not even an exit at Rapids.

Arvin was found in the ravine the next day, after seven hours of searching it was said.

Everybody in the special ed. class was asked about him. And kids on the bus. The driver was questioned, why hadn't he waited for Arvin, or gone to look for him. Arvin's teacher was questioned, and made to look bad in the paper. Even the school principal. Arvin's sister and brothers riding the school bus had not seemed to miss him. Acted like they hadn't noticed Arvin wasn't there.

Some of us, who lived on Red Rock Road, were asked if we'd seen Arvin after school, where he'd gone, and we said no we had not seen Arvin Hugh-ner, he wasn't in our classes and wasn't our friend and nobody we knew had much to do with him or with any of the Hugh-ners.

That poor boy not right in the head
was how people spoke of Arvin afterward. Like my mother, and my aunt Elsie.
You'd think his parents would keep a closer watch, a retarded boy like that wandering and getting lost.

In Herkimer where I live now, I see Steve and Dan sometimes. I see their families at the mall. Steve married a girl I knew from school, they have two children at least. I think they live on Buell Road, Steve works for a contractor. Dan Burney was in the navy with Michie, got sent overseas and when he came back he got married and later divorced and he works at the stone quarry where my husband Frank Schmidt is foreman. Dan is grown to three hundred pounds muscle-and-fat and shaves his head so his head and face look swollen like something made of hard rubber. Dan lives with his mother who has some wasting disease like Parkinson's.

We see each other at Kroger's, or Eckerd's, or at the mall. There's a glaze over our eyes when we meet. Steve Hauser, Dan Burney. If they tried to call me DeeDee, I'd tell them no: I am Diane. But they don't call me any name at all. We talk together trying to remember why we know each other. The guys always ask about Mitch but there's nothing to say about Mitch, he will spend the rest of his life in “death row” at Attica. The death penalty in New York State is lethal injection but no one has been executed for a long time.

Steve Hauser and Dan Burney and me, there's a nagging feeling between us. But we don't know what.

We ask about one another's families. Dan takes his mother to the Church of the Risen Christ some Sundays, helps the old woman with her walker. Dan doesn't always sit in the pew with her but waits out in the parking lot, smoking. He's a big man but soft and vague in the eyes. Sometimes he will push into the pew beside his mother. I see Dan
Burney, I smile and wave and Dan will wave back. I wonder if Dan sings with the rest of us! The way some men sing under their breath like they don't want anyone but Jesus to hear.

 

I have two daughters: Kyra who will be in seventh grade next year and Tamara who will be in fourth.

Their eyes! The most beautiful eyes. When I tell Steve Hauser and Dan Burney about my family I tell them my daughters are getting to be big girls but I don't tell them how beautiful my daughters are, it's hard for me to speak of it. The other day Frank said, You see those girls, you know why you were born.

Out of nowhere Frank said this. It isn't like him, or any of us to speak in such a way. But I'm hoping it is that simple, what Frank said. All I'd needed to do to be saved was have my babies, that is my purpose on earth. You would not need a soul for that!