Strange as This Weather Has Been (10 page)

Dane looks down at his feet. Obedience tells his foot to move, his heart says no. Obedience wins. Dane steps in.

Besides the stereo, the room holds the smaller guest bed they swapped for Mrs. Taylor’s double, covered with a dark blue chenille bedspread Dane’s always having to shake out, and a chest of drawers with strange burn marks on top, and a pile of wilted cardboard boxes. Mrs. Taylor has her car packed with more boxes, Dane helped her, all the family photos, and the family Bible, and her important papers, and a pile of quilts passed down.
The young people can run for the hills when they hear the rumble,
Mrs. Taylor always says. Apparently forgetting what happened to Dane in May when he heard the rumble. But for sure Mrs. Taylor cannot run. She’ll have to shuffle to her Taurus and try to drive away.

He edges on into the middle of the bedroom, keeping his body well distant from the broken stereo. But no matter how hard he tries to look away, his eyes won’t leave it. His eyes are pasted to the papers scattered over the stereo’s top, mostly junk mail and old magazines, and he watches like he would watch a copperhead, a black widow, he was somehow forced to pass. On top of the junk mail, full out open, not an inch of it covered, is the pamphlet. He can see.

He wants to throw the pamphlet in the creek downstream from the house. He wants to take a match to it and burn it to ash. He wants to plant it on Route 9 for a coal truck to run forty-eight tires over it and crush it to dust. But he can’t do any of that. He’s afraid to even close it. Even to turn it facedown. The pamphlet has a liveness in it, its paper, its ink, its staples, throb, every pamphlet part throbs with this power. The pamphlet, he knows just by standing nearby, can, in its own pamphlet way, feel and think, and worse. Do to you.

The cover of the pamphlet, which Dane can’t see because the
pamphlet is open to a particular page, announces “The New Millennium: What Does the Future Hold For You?” Exactly two weeks ago, Dane had come in and there sat Mrs. Taylor, poring over the pamphlet. She waved Dane over to show him a special page that listed a bunch of categories, like a list of school subjects—“Economics,” “Health,” “Human Relations”—but then Dane looked more closely and realized it was a way to organize the End of the World. Even without reading very well, he saw that each category had written under it Bible verses about that subject and what would happen around the subject during the End Times, and then, under the verses, were some sentences that explained in plain English just how near the End was. The world is teetering-tottering right on the brink, the pamphlet says, get out your Bibles, please, and read: 2 Timothy for the personality traits people will exhibit during these “critical times.” Matthew and Luke for the “last days.” Jeremiah for “To earthling man his way does not belong,” earthling man, Dane said that again in his mind. Open your Bibles, please. Mrs. Taylor, though, was tapping with her clean horny nail the category titled “Environment.” “God will ‘bring ruin to those ruining the earth.’ Revelation 11:18.” She shook her head. “Now will you just look at that.”

Dane sidles through the bedroom, his eyes darting from pamphlet to floor, pamphlet to bedspread, pamphlet to boxes, checking for bits of fallen plaster. Before Mrs.Taylor had shown him the pamphlet, she had mentioned the End Times, which Dane had heard about at church, too, and he thought both Mrs. Taylor’s talk and the church talk scary. But he knows now, after seeing the pamphlet, that before, he hadn’t truly believed. He hadn’t truly believed that it could possibly happen before he was well dead and gone until Mrs. Taylor showed it to him in writing. And it’s not just some old funny-sounding verse in a beat-up Bible, it’s all recently written, like a magazine or newspaper, new, and after he saw it there, everything changed. After the pamphlet, the
thought started coming all the time in Dane’s head: “I’m only twelve years old. And I’m going to see the End of the World.”

Finally Dane backs out of the bedroom, keeping close watch on the pamphlet, then he’s clear, he breathes, and he calls to the kitchen, “Nothing fell.” His voice like a piece of ripped plastic caught on a branch and waving in wind. He goes in to use the bathroom but can’t make anything happen, and he’s all the way back to his tuna bowl when it comes to him: since he told her about the plaster, Mrs. Taylor hasn’t spoken a word back.

Dane freezes. Her silence means she’s thinking about something. Given the blast, he has a good idea about what.

“You know last fall two of em drownded over at Arnette? A woman and a teenage boy in a car?”

Dane swallows. He shakes his head.

“Yeah, they put the families on our prayer list. They were driving to church, downstream of one of these things we have in here.”

Even though it doesn’t need any more stirring, Dane whips his tuna and mayonnaise hard, the spoon ringing loud in the metal bowl. Mrs. Taylor sucks her spongy lungs full of air and lets loose a three-second sigh, the end with a tremor in it. He’s held off until now because he knows if God listens to prayers at all anymore, He listens only to a certain number of them. You better be careful, ration them out. But, finally, he can’t help it. He balls up a place behind his eyes.

God says nothing back.

“Here I’ve moved right back into it.” Mrs. Taylor sighs again, squeezing a crumpled napkin in her hand. “Thirty years later, and I’m right back in it. That was Pittston, this is Lyon. But one company or another’s bound to drown me before I die a natural death.” Then Mrs. Taylor reaches out her hands and grips each corner of the table, the skin purpling where the wedding ring sinks in.

“Dooley never wanted to talk about it, you know. He’d get up and
walk right out of the room.” She always says this, and when she does, Dane always feels close to Dooley, since walk right out of the room is what Dane wants to do. But Dane is the help, not the husband. “A lot of em,” she goes on, “just heard the roar and looked outside and seen that black wall of water a-coming straight at their houses. But we was further down the hollow. It had room to spread a little, you see, by the time it got to us. It was a Saturday morning, around eight o’clock, and me and the kids was sleeping in a little. Dooley wasn’t home.

“He was coming off hoot owl so he was one of the ones saw it happen. Actually watched the dam break. Now can you imagine, standing up there and seeing that dam go with your family sleeping in your house down below it? Just imagine that,” and Dane imagines. Not standing at the drift of Buffalo Creek Mining Company in a cold February rain twenty-eight years ago, but standing in Mrs. Taylor’s backyard in a warmish one last month. “He tried to call us—all the men coming off that shift tried to call their families—but the lines was already down. It happened that fast. A lot of people just heard the noise and saw that black wall, but we was staying at Braeholm, further down the creek. What woke me was those folks who’d been driving up the hollow and seen the water coming at them, then threw their cars around and tried to outrun it, you know, with their hands blamming their horns to warn the others of us. Those crazy car horns, at a little after eight in the morning, and, at first, half asleep like I was, it made me kind of mad. I thought it was kids. But then I thought, not at eight in the morning. And I got worried and got up.

“Now you know them pictures of the clouds in Japan when they dropped the bomb?” Dane has never seen these pictures, but by now, he carries his own version in his head. “That’s the kind of cloud that dam made when it caved in, Dooley said. They all said that.When the dam broke, the water behind it shot out onto the gob pile. And when
the water hit that smoking gob, it exploded up in the air like a volcano and threw this steaming mud all over their windshields.

“Well, I got up and got my robe on and went out on the front porch. I could hear car horns above and below, but wasn’t any cars passing right then. But once I got outside, I heard it. I did. Thought at first it was a thunderstorm, but that was February, and then I saw our next-door-neighbor’s, Clarey Mason’s kids, running out their side door to turn loose these goats they was keeping, and Clarey’s one boy screamed at me, ‘Mrs. Taylor, the dam’s broke.’ And I understood everything right then.

“I turned to run inside. I whammed my hip into the door frame and almost fell down, but the whole time I was screaming at the kids to get up. It wasn’t until then I remembered Avery wasn’t home. Avery—we called him Bucky then—was spending the night up the hollow in Lorado with a friend of his, Tad Compton. It wasn’t until my other three come down out of the upstairs that I remembered Bucky, my baby, was up the hollow in Lorado.”

Mrs.Taylor stops. Dane waits, his back to her. Mrs.Taylor wheezes a bubbly sigh.

“I thank the Lord to this day that my kids was big enough to get theirselves out of the house and up the hill. Deed, I don’t know what I’d done if I’d had any little ones then. A lot of little ones died, you know.”

This means she’s going to spare him the middle because this is what she says before she gets to the very end. Dane slowly lifts his hands from the counter, swabs the tuna onto bread, and turns and sets the sandwich in front of her. He lowers himself into a chair, staring at the sparkles in the tabletop. It is sunny outside, but Dane can feel the weight.The water hovering overhead. Mrs.Taylor finally gives her ending, her benediction, which never alters, just like the prologue never does.

“Oh, we didn’t lose nothing.We didn’t lose nothing. Not compared to what other people lost.”

She falls silent again. Then she seems to wake up and notice her food. “Honey, ain’t you gonna eat something?”

“I ain’t too hungry,” Dane says.

Mrs. Taylor nods. She picks up her own sandwich. When she lays it back down without tasting it, she misses her plate.

BY THE TIME Lace’s ride dropped her off from the Dairy Queen, the rest of us had long been in bed, but I’d hear her. Lace never knew when her shift would end because they stayed open until the manager decided there wasn’t another soul in the county wanted a bite of ice cream, “worse’n working in a bar,” Lace would say. “At least in a bar, you know last call’s before two.” But I’d hear her, even when I didn’t want to. I slept light, and my room was on the road. She’d wake me with the car door slamming. And back in the spring, when I heard her, I could make myself not care, force myself to lie there, will myself to sleep. But after me and Jimmy drove up to the fill, I couldn’t help it. I’d get up. I started having to listen.

Nights that summer I slept light. Penned in my little room, like sleeping in a stall it was. A blast from the mine had messed up my window so it wouldn’t open right, and the gas smell built. Me floating always in a gasoline hover. Hobart was too cheap to buy turpentine, so it was gas I used to wash off the paint, a bad blue that lodged in your eye after looking too long. I found out why Hobart’d nodded when I’d told him fifteen, turned out he was paying me under
minimum because, he said, I wasn’t yet sixteen. “That cheap bastard,” Jimmy Make would say. “I’m gonna report him.” But he wouldn’t.We needed even that little bit of money too bad. The gas took off most of the paint on my skin, but then I couldn’t get rid of the gas, and how much would it take on you to catch fire? Hard to tell. I painted every day in the same cutoff white jeans, in one of two paint-ruint T-shirts I handwashed every night to get out the sweat. I wore those paper caps that came with the paint, but my hair was so used to falling forward to cover my face it was always dragging in the cans and matting up blue. And then, more gasoline.The miners drove nice trucks with out-of-state tags—Illinois, Wyoming, Indiana, Kentucky—and I learned they worked twelve-hour shifts running heavy equipment unless the company wanted them to work longer, and then they did. Few were union, so they had no choice. Besides working, they couldn’t do much but eat, shower, and sleep, but still, to get from work to bed, bed to work, they had to climb the wooden stairs, walk the porches that ran around the place. They had to pass me.

Squatting in my paint clothes, a cloud of gasoline and sweat, drawing my brush or roller back and forth, back and forth, I’d feel the steps shake as they came my way. I’d feel the floor tremble. I’d turn away on my knees, draw up closer to the wall, and stare at my brush, it flicking. Hump my shoulders, toss my hair forward to screen my face. But there was no way to keep their eyes off me. Just them passing at my back put a bad heat in my skin, and then it was not just the paint, the gas, and Hobart I had to suffer, it was being looked at by strange men, too. Although, it is true, they said little to me. Except the one who asked, “You got a sister?” The fat one who teased me for hiding my face. And the youngest one, a skinny boy, who drove a big Ford pickup with Ohio plates.

Then my best friend Sharon started going away from me. We’d been friends since second grade, two of the few girls from then still
around. I had helped her through the grades, let her copy off me. She lived not far from Hobart’s in one of the made-over company houses as you headed out of town, and although she never ate lunch because she was trying to lose weight, she’d sit with me when I did. While I was made of boards, Sharon, she was made of bubbles. She wasn’t fat yet, no, she was what they liked to look at, thigh-squeezing shorts, her chest lunging against last summer’s tops, but she’d be fat soon, Sharon knew. Despite the copying, Sharon was what you’d call a good person, always worried about hurting someone’s feelings, went twice a week to church, struggled over the right thing to do. For the last six months, she’d been going with Donnie, five years older than us, and since Donnie, she’d closed shut to me in places. It was already familiar to me, how a girl’d get with a boy like that. Places you could no longer go with her even when she’d talk about the boy nine-tenths of the time. But Sharon had never gone away on me like that, and now that she did, it made me wonder more than it made me mad. I had been a lot of places, but these closed places were one place I hadn’t yet seen. And at times, I’d think on it. Donnie. He didn’t look like much to me. Then I’d think about Lace and Jimmy.