Strange as This Weather Has Been (33 page)

Dane swings his face back towards Corey in time to see Corey’s mouth drop, the first nondeliberate emotion he has let slip. Then it snaps shut, and his loose hands seize into fists. The mouth bawls back open, and Corey is yelling, “You sonofabitch!You promised, you sonofabitch! You lyin sackashit!”

Seth has stepped clear down out of the drain so Dane sees him only from his thighs up, but he turns, and in the light like Seth is now, Dane can see his face lifted in a sneer, again, casual. “At least I ain’t got a faggot for a brother,” Seth tosses back. He sinks away down the bank, until Dane’s seeing only the back of his pinkish head, and then nothing at all.

Corey has started after him, forgetting his hurt leg, and when he comes down on it with his second step, he screams, “Fuck!” in pain and falls again. At the “faggot,” Dane’s face shoots full of warmth and
he shuts his eyes to hide himself. But he’s been called faggot more than once, and coming from the defeated Seth, it doesn’t mean as much as it might have, means mostly the embarrassment that the others heard, and the faggot humiliation is dampened by Dane’s worry over what he should do now that Corey is hurt. The others have pulled in around Corey again, stunned by his sudden vulnerability, and finally Dane is moving towards Corey, Corey is his little brother and he is hurt. Dane is moving to see how bad it is, then run down and fetch Jimmy Make, this is Dane’s plan, and he creeps into the collar of boys around the fallen Corey and leans down to get a better look. Dane can see the bright water in Corey’s eyes from the anger and the pain, and Dane knows Corey has his mind jammed down on keeping those tears tight in their sockets. Corey stares right back at Dane, hard.

“You,” Corey hisses. “You goddamned homo.”

For several seconds, they are all quiet in a new way. A quiet that waits, nose poised, ear raised, for its own end.

Then David steps away from Dane, a delayed flinch. And B-bo states, at a normal volume, like he’s just trying it on for the fit in his mouth: “Homo.” Then, deciding he likes it, a candy fireball on his tongue, he calls, “Homo! Homo!”

“Homo!” Clyde echoes with a crooked snicker. He cackles. “Homo! Homo!”

And then it’s all five of them at the same time, even Tommy, who has only the vaguest notion what the word means. “Homo! Homo! Homo!” Homo-hollering and homo-hooting and homo-squealing, they slosh the tunnel to its brim with the word, they ricochet it side to side. At first they shout at cross-purposes, one voice’s word overlapping the end of another’s, the
homos
knocking against each other, but soon they hit it in unison, a harmonized cheer, the
homo
sluicing from concrete wall to concrete wall, the drain doubling the word’s volume and size, tripling it, quadrupling
homo,
and Dane turns and runs.

He jumps out of the Big Drain and tears off in the opposite direction from where Seth has gone; he doesn’t want to reach the road too soon, cannot bear to be seen. Smashes through third-growth trees and scrub and vines, angling the steep thick-weeded bank, slipping and picking himself up before he full hits ground, his hands and arms beating a way in front of him.Then, before he sees it, he’s crashed into an immense thicket of blackberries. He’s snared deep before he even knows where he is, their canes whipping at him, thorns ripping, they snag in his oversized pants, Dane swims and wheels. Writhing and twisting, little animal noises from his mouth, Dane thrashes through the confusion of bloody bushes, but on the inside of his eyes, he’s fighting the boys. He’s beating them silly. He’s already kicked Tommy, B-bo, David, and Clyde into weepy balls curled at the end of the Drain like wadded hamburger wrappers, he hears the Drain echo-swirling with their groans and sobs, and now he’s turned to take on Corey. Dane turns to Corey and slams the heel of his hand into Corey’s chin, Corey springs back. Dane fights Corey with fingernails and fists, feet and teeth, he punches, pinches, pulls hair, bites. He kicks, slaps, trips, rolls, the blackberry patch continuing far past where he thought it would end, he is in it forever now, canes pricking and tearing, Corey coming at him, Dane hammering back.

Suddenly, he finds himself at the brink of the four-foot drop to the road fifty yards from his house. His momentum carries him right over it, and he hits the road so hard his shins ring, but he does not fall. He hears his tennis shoes smack through the broken asphalt, the chunky gravel, and he is just starting to ease off because he is almost home, when he spots the black Ford Explorer parked at the far side of the house. Jimmy Make has company. Bill Bozer, who comes around only when Lace is gone. So Dane veers through the yard, Chancey surging out from under the porch to follow him, and Dane sprints to where the footbridge used to be and tries to jump the creek, but lands
not just inches, but feet, shy of the far side, and, wet to his shins, he scrambles up the eroded bank, Chancey right with him, both of them using all fours, and then Dane is loping up the old road towards the Ricker Place.

His breath’s worn thin, tearing in his throat. The bones in his legs wobbly as grass stalks.When he’s far enough up the draw to lose sight of their house, he drops from a lope to a trot, and, finally, Dane walks.

He stiff-walks. His legs trembling, his hands on his hips now. Him shuddering for breath. Greasy with sweat, it’s running down the middle of his chest, the small of his back, and the strange new smell that sweat carries these days. His face is down-turned, and the old road under his feet has gone to grass, kind of grass calls you lie down on it. Rank and pillowy. He passes the old pigpen, wooden slats atumble, empty now even of pig odor. The old chickenhouse, an exhausted slump. Finally, he does drop down into the fine humped grass, at a spot where he can see the trailer stain, the TV. But it doesn’t even occur to him to enter his boxes. And he sits with his head on his knees, heaving after his breath, but he doesn’t cry. Dane never cries. “Corey does,” Dane whispers. And although his belly grates chock-full of hard stuff, grinding, he almost never throws up. “Almost never,” Dane whispers out loud.

Once Dane sits down, Chancey turns back, tempted by him lowered like that. He pads over and noses Dane’s ear, then he notices the blood on his arms and starts licking it. Dane lets him. “Dogs got stuff in their mouths can heal cuts,” Jimmy Make will say. Chancey licks the blood down, the smears and the runs. Licks the blood back to where Dane can see the exact holes the thorns have made, each hole with a little blood bead hard on it. Lined pricks of blood beads Chancey leaves all over his arms. Then he realizes the front of his T-shirt, too, has been ripped, and he lifts it to get a look at the cut on his stomach.

The
homo
ringing in his ears, once he’s lifted the shirt, he has to see more, so he pulls it over his head. He stands up to where he
can see himself better.
Homo
. The blocky ill-fitting yard-sale pants—Dane has outgrown his pants, but not his shirts—soggy with sweat over his thick lower parts. Hips and thighs, womanish, mismatched. The stomach and the chest still a little boy’s, a softness to both. The slack fatness in the belly drooping down, the slight droop around his nipples, them peaking out, just barely, and Dane wonders if this is how a homo looks, and he feels pretty sure, yes, he thinks.

Quick, he slips the shirt back over his head and looks up the road to the old house. He never enters the old house, rarely even approaches it. He sticks to the trailer stain. In the house there’s too much chance of running into the ghosts of Grandma and Pap. The trailer box isn’t capable of ghosts, but the house feels fertile with them, even though Lace has told him, “You know your grandma wouldn’t come back and scare you like that.” But now, Dane, still pumped full of the Corey-hate, the homo-shame, something draws Dane to the house. No room left in him for fear, and he’s drawn to it. Dane finds himself walking right up and stepping into the ruin of the porch. Dane stands on the slant of boards in the stale odor of abandoned house, kudzu snarling up the Insulite walls on either side of him, and he stares at the front door knob. He knows it is not locked.

Chancey snuffles the porch rubble. Thunder rumbles, distant, but thunder, even though it hasn’t looked like rain all day. The fish wake up in Dane. Flash and flicker, hateful busy fish with steak-knife fins,
I try to stay off the nerve medicine.
Mrs.Taylor’s mouth a dark hole in her batter-colored face.
But this has turned into one nervous place,
moany. Moany in their mouths. Dane takes a step backwards, off the boards, but then he hears Corey’s voice, twisted steel:
Goddamned homo
. Dane reaches out, touches the knob, turns it. He pushes open the door.

At first his eyes won’t focus, and it has nothing to do with dark. It’s how what he expected to find just isn’t, and there’s too much of what is and in the wrong places. All that’s left from his grandma’s
day is the stern coal stove, the Naugahyde couch foaming with burst stuffing, the wallpaper dangling in tongues, but Dane just barely sees that. He mostly sees nothing but metal. Rusted metal, mud-crusted metal, broken metal, Dane cannot right away even separate it into things, and less than the metal, but still everywhere, plastic and wiring and cable and rope lengths and tires. Dane steps up onto the floor, his anger gone for the moment. It’s pushed out by surprise. But then he understands, and the anger rushes hot right back. This is Corey’s doing. It’s where he’s been storing his parts. The trash they’ve been pulling out of the creek and along the road for their plan, Dane has many times come up on them when they’re talking of it, they bait him to eavesdrop, then shut up fast in an obvious way when he gets close and stare knowingly at each other, it’s sheer meanness is all it is. And here now they’ve turned his grandma’s house into a genuine dump with their mean secret mess, and the anger doubles in him, thickens, heats. But at the same time, mixed up and way down under, he feels for a moment a little bit of scared.

His arms and hands tingling, he weaves through the junk to the kitchen, and there he sees that they’ve been hauling in the parts not through the living room door, but through a hole in the kitchen wall. They may or may not have made the hole, but for sure, they’ve torn it up bigger, and Dane’s fists clench.The kitchen is completely crammed with metal parts, it even smells of old metal, a rust smell like you taste when you bite blood in your mouth. A rusted sorrel-colored barrel, looking crunchy to the touch, wire screens off kerosene heaters and the heaters themselves, aluminum poles, a car battery, a car hood.There is junk piled on the floor and stacked on the old knock-kneed table, junk even wedged on top of the refrigerator, screws and bolts lined up in the windowsills.The only untrashed part of the kitchen a crooked path they’ve made for dragging the most recent stuff to the living room.

Dane stares. Dimly, he recalls, so dimly he can’t even remember
if it’s true or if he’s making it up, his grandma standing at the stove, her back to him. Apron strings. The white socks in black shoes. Her dress color, an overwashed kind of lilac gray. He feels a new kind of ripping. Not in the stomach, but higher up. Then, like a gift, Dane spies what he’s been wanting, although he doesn’t know he wanted it until he sees. A metal bar leaning against the refrigerator. Maybe part of an axle, it’s hard to tell, but it looks hand-fitting, the heft looks right, and suddenly, Dane’s mouth actually waters.

He picks it up. It feels unnatural in his hands. He lifts the bar over his head and brings it down, a practice stroke, and it jerks his arm down faster and harder than he expected. Dane scans the junk and picks a tin bucket, mucked inside with some kind of dried tar. He raises the bar with both hands and heaves down on the bucket, following through with all his weight. The bar glances off the bucket, it topples and rolls rattly away, and Dane almost loses his balance and falls, but catches himself. He steadies his legs and inhales. He hefts the bar again, swings it into an iron pulley-looking thing with dirt-clogged teeth, and again, the bar just bangs and bounces off, leaving no mark on the pulley. Now his breath comes quicker and lighter. Dane hears it at a distance from himself. He whams at a hubcap on the table, sends the hubcap sailing, it ricochets off the wall and wobbles to rest on the floor without so much as a dent, and then Dane is just swinging. Wildman blind, both fists around the metal, he is hammering, he is whaling, he is slamming everything the bar can reach. Metal, tires, empty milk jugs, even Grandma’s old refrigerator, the noise in his ears at first a crashing but soon narrowing to a high hurt whine, until he bashes the sorrel-colored barrel, and this time something happens, the bar does go through the crunchy rotted shell. But then it gets stuck. It somehow gets wedged in the barrel’s side, and Dane jerks and twists and wrenches, but no matter what he does, he cannot pull it out.

Panting, sore in his arms, he looks around himself. As far as he can see, besides the barrel, he hasn’t damaged one single thing.

He climbs outside through the hole in the wall. He hears fresh the machinery working overhead. And suddenly Dane understands, in a wave that washes all his anger away, just how pathetic the junk is. How it’s not even worth destroying. Then he knows Corey will never have a speedwagon, sees for the first time the childishness of the scheme. And after that, he understands that the house is entirely unhaunted. That the old house contains nothing but gone.

Once more, he hears a far-off thunder.
Open your Bibles, please, and read.
“I’m twelve years old,” Dane says out loud. “I’m twelve years old, and I’m going to see it.” But this time it comes without panic. This time it comes with grief.

He stands in the old yard and “Dane,” he says to himself. “Dane. Dane. Dane.” He bows his head. “Dane. Dane. Dane, Dane, Dane, Dane Dane Dane DaneDaneDaneDaneDaneDanedanedanedane.” Until the word loses all its meaning, snaps off, and careens into the dark. Where, still, it keeps ringing. Ringing.

THE SECOND time he touched, it was just my hair. He picked up the long of it and smelled it there. Me thinking nothing but gasoline.