Strange as This Weather Has Been (43 page)

He spoons the cereal into his mouth like a duty. Mrs. Taylor is at church. Mrs. Taylor has finally decided. Before very long, her house will be empty, too, she is just too worn out to stay.
If we all last til then.
He likes Mrs. Taylor, but if she leaves, she’ll take the stories with her, but then how much does it matter anyway, with the stories in him already?
Turrible. It’s just turrible
. He’d be going to school anyway, he’d be working way less hours even if she stayed. Him going to the new middle school. New kids to discover new meannesses for Dane.

They fought hard last night, fought nasty. Lace was very late getting home from the Dairy Queen, but Jimmy Make was mad enough to sit up for her, Bant slipping in the back door while they were at it in the living room. The fight had been a bad one, but Dane hadn’t thought it that much different from most of them. Until later when he had to pee.

He had woken up, and often when this happens, he tries to hold the pee, wills himself back to sleep, but there is always also the very
real risk he will pee the bed. He hasn’t for over a year now, Dane believes he’s outgrown it. But last night, the fear of backsliding and bed-pissing outweighed his fear of the dark. He could feel the almost morning in the dark, it was graying a little, but it was still dark enough to threat. So Dane ventured out on his nighttime bathroom ritual, screwing his eyes tight shut in the dark down the hall—he runs his hand along the wall, he knows exactly where to stop—until he hits the bathroom doorjamb, reaches inside, and flicks the light. Only then does he open his eyes. He’d done all this last night, and after he peed, he turned the light back off like Lace made them do, clamped his eyes closed, and began groping his way back to the bedroom. Then something happened.

He felt a pull on him from behind. Something down the hall magneted his back, it commanded
look and see,
the command deeper than voice or tap or clutch, even more insistent than the pamphlet pull, and Dane clenched his jaw against it; he stiffened his back. But it would not ease up. It yanked. It ordered. It forced. Until finally it was worse not to look than it was to look, finally this Dane knew, so without turning his whole body, without exposing his front to it, at least he could hold onto that, he craned his neck around over his shoulder. And saw.

At the end of the hall, at the entrance to the living room, lay the monkey. Even though it was too dark to see that far, even though there was no way his eyes could have adjusted that fast, Dane could see. The monkey wasn’t sitting up looking at him, no. It wasn’t alive. The pull had come off it dead. It lay crumpled in its usual death pose, Dane recognized the way it lay even though he has never actually seen the monkey, still Dane recognized that pose. He knew. Limp on the carpet, twisted funny unlike any live thing would lie, and its dirty fur swished a little, Dane saw it move, the way it swishes when water passes over it. That was the only thing about it that moved. At Dane it cocked its empty dead eye.

Then, abruptly, it let Dane go. He was suddenly turned loose and tearing back to his bed, slamming his arm in the bedroom doorframe and stubbing brutally his little toe on the leg of Corey’s couch. Corey didn’t twitch. Dane shot under his covers, snatching them all the way over his head, and he lay trying to hold the outside of his body rigid as ice while inside his whole self was abeat. He grasped after prayer. Felt it air in his heart.Then he heard the whispers. End-of-the-world mutter, voices soft-chutter, moany. Moooany in their mouths. He heard.

This morning, he’d had no fear about walking back into the hall. He knew, even though it hadn’t been a dream, that the monkey would be gone. Knew that with the same recognition he’d had of how the monkey always lay.

Baron scratches the screen door, wanting out. Dane ignores him, reaches his hands up to stretch his arms on the rail. He hears a motor start down the hollow; a motorcycle or ride mower or four-wheeler. Then he realizes it’s coming all the way up into their part of the hollow, where nobody has much reason to come, especially with the gate locked back up. Dane looks towards the bend in the road to see who it is.

The first thing he can tell is that it’s two kids on a four-wheeler, and the next thing he can tell is that it’s Tommy and Corey—the chamois rag fluttering—but then he reminds himself that’s not possible. But then it’s clear that it is. They aren’t going very fast, just kind of sputtering along, and Dane knows they’re trying not to draw attention to themselves. That’s the only reason Corey wouldn’t be gunning it. Chancey trots along at a safe distance behind.

Dane has risen up on his haunches by now, clutching the rail over his head with both hands, tensed, and now they’re putting right past the house. Dane sees they’re none too glad to spy him spying on them, which he can tell by the way Corey ignores him so hard it turns inside out and becomes the opposite and the way Tommy’s mouth
ohs
in
frightened and disappointed surprise before he buries his whole face in Corey’s back. Now Dane is standing, paralyzed by three cross-pulling feels: the temptation to get revenge on Corey’s meanness by running inside and telling Lace; a jaw-drop awe that Corey has managed not only to steal Seth’s four-wheeler but knows how to drive it; and, louder than anything else, curiosity over what Corey will do next.

They jiggle past and on up the hollow, the camouflage fenders rocking with the bumps in the road, their legs spraddled over the big engine, the chamois rag flagging. Dane hits the ground in his bare feet and sprints to the road to see whether they’re heading for the valley fill or the snake ditches, then Corey takes the hairpin turn that doubles back up to the above-the-hollow road. The moment the four-wheeler’s out of his sight, Dane hears it explode into speed. The snake ditches.

He springs back up on the porch and snatches his tennis shoes from just inside the front door.Then he’s across the yard and road and clawing straight up the hill to the above-the-hollow road where Corey and Tommy will have to pass on their way back down the hollow to the snake ditches. But the bank is steep and viney, and Dane slips two times, three times, four, he tangles himself, cussing without words his awkwardness, his broadish woman hips, these he blames, and while he’s thrashing around to regain lost ground, he hears the four-wheeler barrel by above him. Then he busts free and finds himself staggering out into the higher road before he expected to, and over the noise of his own breath, he can hear that they are idling now, no doubt looking for the turnoff to the snake ditches.

The snake ditches are not a place Dane would ever choose to go, and would never go alone, even though snakes, like dreams, are the least of his problems now (him little, and Jimmy Make bringing them up on the dirt bike, and Dane scared
skeered
of snakes while Bant was not, Jimmy was quick to point out, although later Bant told him not
to feel bad, she had been scared, too, but still later, Dane wondered if she just said that to make him feel better). The snake ditches are a bad place, but, like the Big Drain, Dane’s need to watch mutes the dangers of the snake ditches. As does, although he would never think it to himself, his want to be a part of the others.

He runs down the road after them, but not in the middle. He sticks to the sides in case they should look back and see him. The reaching sides, overgrown and heavy green, the road in August a tunnel of plant. Balancing on the top of a rut, he tries to keep clear of puddle, water, mud, but he slides into it a time or two anyway, and over top his own gasping, over top the swish his side makes against branches and weed, he hears the four-wheeler engine holler and strain off-road. He hears Corey yell something at Tommy.

Then he’s left the road and is creeping through the underbrush on the side of the track they have begun to tear to the snake ditches, Dane terrified that if they see him, they’ll abandon the ditches altogether and speed off somewhere he can’t follow. Sweat slicks up and down his back, spills between his two little breasts, he feels it tickle, he smacks at it to go away. Suddenly Corey comes into full view, and Dane ducks behind an umbrella magnolia to watch from behind. Chancey has already spotted him, but Chancey doesn’t care. Still mounted on the four-wheeler, Corey forces it forward, then gentles and coaxes it, forces, then coaxes, alternating like that, while Tommy sweeps back and forth in front dragging away bigger obstacles.

Dane burrows deeper into the understory, away from the makeshift track, prowling ahead until he is no longer behind Tommy and Corey, but parallel to them, hidden in leaf. Then, from the side of his eye, he realizes he can see the snake ditches. They are there. And they always come at you like that, he remembers, a crack in the natural. Creepy concrete unexpect.The snake ditches see you before you see them, and the sight of them shrinks him a little, and in his mind, quick then gone,
he sees again the monkey. The four-wheeler has already reached the base of one of the ditches, and Tommy is scrambling back up behind Corey. But Dane sees Corey has miscalculated.The snake ditches are too narrow for a four-wheeler. The tires completely straddle the concrete span.You cannot drive a four-wheeler up a snake ditch.

Corey pulls the throttle back, softens the motor a little, and he and Tommy consult. Dane is huddled behind a log, gnats in a loose globe around his head, but he is afraid to reach up and wave them away. He dips and shakes his head instead. He’s sweating heavily, Dane nearly nauseated with his own just-adolescent stink, and inside him, along with all the other fullness, the contraries running: the black-red hate, a bite-your-lip-to-keep-from-crying I feel so much hate.Then, tightly twined around the hate, a desperation to be part of this thing so hated. And, finally, fitting with the hate snug as a puzzle piece, the tenderness for what you know is younger and weaker and blood. Love.

Dane knows what they’ll try next. The concrete spillway between catchment ponds. Dane knows they are full of wet summer’s runoff, and he can see the spillway—putrid algae-colored and slimed. But today no water flows over it. They are arguing now, Tommy cocking, then ducking, his head, his elbows flapping in powerless indignation. Finally Tommy gets off the four-wheeler, stomping his feet as he does, and Dane knows Corey has had to promise him a ride the second time around in order to get rid of him now.

Corey rams the machine at the steep ground alongside the spillway while Dane crawls behind kudzu to sneak a better view, and twice Corey stalls the machine while climbing the bank, both times slipping backwards some before he gets it restarted, but he does get it restarted, and he does climb the hill. And there rises in Dane, again, entangled with the hate and the love, an admiration very close to pride, of Corey and his talent with machines. Man-talent. Metal-made.

Reaching the top of the spillway, Corey turns the wheel to the left
and eases out along the concrete. Apparently, there is a ledge there, or the edge of the top pond is shallow enough that he can drive in it, Dane can’t tell. The spillway is steep, maybe as steep as a sliding board, but it is higher than even the tallest sliding board they took down at school because it was too dangerous. Of course, it’s far bigger across than a sliding board, about as big across, Dane figures, as five four-wheelers parked end-to-end. And when Corey pauses there on top, Dane understands, instantly and precisely, what he will try to do. He’s going to chute down the spillway, rip into a turn before he hits the water, then gun his way back up to the top. A U-turn on a steep slant slicked with algae.

The first time, he doesn’t go all the way to the bottom, doesn’t get real close to the water—unusual for Corey, but there it is. Corey swoops down the concrete with the rag flagging, his oil-colored hair streaming in air, that hard little body moving with his machine the way other people move with horses, like his body is welded to it. And then, about two-thirds of the way down, he jams the wheel, his torso torqued from the hips, and whizzes back up, Dane can even hear the tires spit in the wet algae, in the tiny concrete grooves. Tommy is yelling and bouncing up and down in triumph, having completely forgiven Corey’s kicking him off, and then he begins clambering up the side of the spillway to claim his own turn. But Tommy’s not going to make it. Corey is already revving for a second run.

Dane is standing now. He no longer needs to hide because it no longer matters if Corey knows. Corey is plunging down the spillway, it’s happening very fast, and like in the Big Drain, he ups the ante. He deliberately dips under his tracks from the last trip, flirting with the water. Taunting. Then, an instant before he touches the poisoned-looking pond, he leans into the machine and jerks the front wheels, his face set serious as cast iron. Then it happens. Either the turn angle is too sharp, or Corey wrenches the handlebars too quick, or
he’s simply gone too far down for the four-wheeler to recover. The machine flips over backwards with Corey under it and crashes into the catchment pond.

A blurb and sucking in the water. The empty in the air where the engine used to be.The slime already drawing back over, and in Dane’s mind, a high-speed repeat,
he’ll come up, he’ll come up, he’ll come up, he’ll come up, come up come up come up,
while Tommy slides violently down the hill, falling but not bothering to pick himself up, still moving, his mouth making whooping noises that match no feeling at all. Chancey races up and down the pond edge, head lowered, ears cocked, Dane’s head swelling with a pressure that feels like a tire pump tapped into his skull
come up come up come up come up,
and he can hear all his blood moving in him, the flood roar to it, like fluid rushing between his bones and his skin, and he hears his breaths as something apart from him, rapid blasting
huhs
as though he’s started running again.

When he has not. When he cannot, when he should be, he should be running into the water, pushing the machine off his little brother,
got to listen for a rumble
kiddie pool spinning
you young people can run for the hills
Corey’s biceps, rag fluttering, stink of the slop bucket open your Bible, please, and. Dane cannot move.