Strange as This Weather Has Been (44 page)

Now Tommy is screaming in a way Dane has never heard before, deeper and louder than any little kid should be able to scream, moan in it, and Dane, still not moving, strains his eyes into the surface of the pond, clouded and boiling—and Dane’s insides finally go.The fish rip a hole and the logs spew free, the water torrenting after them, let-go loose loss pain, and Dane falls on his knees
him shit himself, him did, him did. Him shit himself, him did,
Tommy screaming—

Then he hears different yells. He snaps his head around, sees Jimmy Make stumbling through the fresh track in the brush. The look on Jimmy Make’s face so unfamiliar that at first Dane knows it’s Jimmy Make only by the stagger.

SEPTEMBER came like it always did, that no-season month between summer and fall. The woods still green, but exhausted from the heat, you could see it in the leaves if you pulled them close. They looked ready for the change. We waited, too.

Two weeks after Labor Day, I turned sixteen. I’d been looking forward to that birthday for a couple years, but now I didn’t want anything made of it. Only thing I had to celebrate was not missing my period in late August, and that was relief, not happiness. Lace tried anyway, brought home a Dairy Queen cake nobody but Tommy could enjoy. Me, Lace, and Dane just filling our places at the table while Tommy ate up on his knees leaning forward. Lace let him have all of our pieces.

Past my candles, I watched Dane across from me, in that old army jacket of Avery’s that he’d taken to wearing all the time since Mrs. Taylor moved to Cleveland, a little before Jimmy Make left. He’d grown over the summer, now he was near tall as me, but he was always trying to hide the growth under the jacket like it was a tarp. I watched him. His face marring up with pimples right when mine was finally
starting to clear. I was scared to think what might become of Dane. He never cried over Corey. Tommy did, and I did, and Lace did, and Jimmy Make did, too. Dane just tighter shut. Since Corey’s funeral, Lace had gone to the cemetery on the edge of town a couple times a week, and usually she took me and Tommy with her. Dane, seemed he’d know when she was going before she did, shut himself up in his room and not answer back even when she opened the door and spoke right to him.

The fall stayed unseasonable, just like the summer had been, and a strange skiff of snow fell that first weekend of October, cold setting down like a lid that lifted three days later. Uncle Mogey said in his life he couldn’t remember a snow early as that. Then, a week after, we heard an enormous slurry impoundment had busted over in Martin County, Kentucky.

That was on the West Virginia border, not far from us, and the first few days we couldn’t get any real news on the disaster, only word of mouth. Then when Lace finally got hold of a
Gazette
with the official story, it was even worse than the rumors had been. It said the impoundment had been sitting on top of a mountain just honeycombed with abandoned deep mines, and finally its bottom simply gave out. The sludge lake dropped into the shafts, shot through the mine tunnels and out through the blocked-up drift mouths, and 306 million gallons of poison muck killed everything in the waterways for a hundred miles. Didn’t kill any people (and that was the real act of God, Uncle Mogey said, because, of course, an act of God was where Lyon blamed it), but it buried their properties in what they said was a toxic black pudding some places seven feet deep. And nights after that, I’d wake and taste it. Toxic black pudding. The way the sounds cut sharp, then stick gobby and bitter on your tongue.

That put the fear into even the holdouts, the ones who said it would never happen, at least not that bad. For a little while, people kind of
came together like they used to back when I was small. Uncle Mogey’s turned into a gathering place. Loretta and some of her people came, Charlie too, and Maxie and the Williams, Bell Kerwin and the Hills, and other people I’d never even met. I saw in the way Mogey moved he was feeling worse than he ever had, but he turned nobody away.We sat under the Jesus poems and the blast cracks in the walls, and they told memories and hearsay of Buffalo Creek. They named to each other the slurry impoundments we knew about around here—the ones behind Deer Lick, the one at Mayton that people said was 900 feet high, the one behind the elementary school in Raleigh County—and when they got done talking about that, they’d wonder on the ones we didn’t know about, the ones that we’d just heard tales about—like Yellowroot—and the ones so deep hidden we didn’t have any idea. No one knew where all those impoundments might be.

You’d have thought Martin County would make me want worse to find out what was behind our own fill. And I did wait a little for that want. But the want never came. I hadn’t been up the hollow since before Corey’s accident, hadn’t seen the mine site since the night with R.L. Yeah, the impoundment bust scared me, scared me bad, but worse, it made me even more helpless than before. And from helpless, I had learned, what a short step it was to I don’t care
.
How else could you grow up, how you could walk around in your body every day, unless you learned not to care. And by that standard, I realized, I’d been wrong when I was younger. By that standard, it was Jimmy Make, not Lace, who’d been grown up all along.

Corey could have made Lace give up, too, but I wasn’t surprised when it did the opposite. Lace got heavier and heavier into the environmental group, especially once Jimmy Make left, which meant now she was telling me not only stuff she picked up at the Dairy Queen but stuff from the meetings, too. She heard that the Martin County spill was twenty times bigger than the Exxon Valdez—then
she explained what that was to me—“and some scientists are calling it the biggest environmental disaster in the history of the eastern United States.”

But all the news died down real quick, like it always did when something happened around here, if the news got out at all. Who matters and where. On the other hand, it turned out somebody did think we mattered, only in a different way, because that was the last months of the election campaign, and a second Bush was campaigning in our state harder than anybody had, people said, since John F. Kennedy.

Another thing that changed after Corey died was that Lace started going to church again, even though before she’d been mad at the churches. I heard Loretta and Charlie Blizzard get into it over the church-going up at Mogey’s one evening, Charlie asking Loretta how she could still stand it with so many preachers preaching, “God gave man dominion over the earth” and “The good Lord put this coal under the ground for us to use.”

“Bullcrap and foolishness!” Loretta snapped back. “Them preachers are the ones have always spoke for the companies, you know that, you were raised in a coal camp. Anybody with a grain of sense can see we’re destroying what God made. ‘The Earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it,’ Psalm 24. He wants us to fight for it, and I pray every day for God’s help in this fight.” As she said that, I knew she was right, I heard Grandma’s voice deeper under hers. But I still couldn’t go myself.

In the middle of all this, Jimmy Make came back. In October, a month after he left, and October’d always been the month I loved the best. The mountains blooming good-bye, and how the sky pulls away to show you itself in October. Beautiful blue like we don’t often get around here, and it no longer crouching down on you as it sometimes does. He came back late on a Saturday morning, when he knew we’d all be home, and afterwards, I’d wonder how careful he’d planned it.
Whether he’d spent the night before at Hobart’s, waiting.We were eating lunch, and I heard a vehicle, but I didn’t think much of it because it didn’t sound familiar. But then Chancey and Baron ran to the door, Baron yipping, but not in a watchdog way, more like I-can’t-wait, and I guess we all suspicioned it then, but Tommy said it for sure. “There’s Dad!” Then looked like he’d be in trouble for naming it.

Dane was sitting right across from me, and I saw his eyes change. Tommy dropped his sandwich and ran to the window. I watched Lace without turning my head, but her face wasn’t telling me nothing. Jimmy waited for us to come out on the porch, too scared or too proud to come to the door, and when we did—and we all did, Lace too—I saw he was in a gray minivan with a crumple in the front fender and a long pair of scratches down that side.

He swung out with his head lowered or hung, I’m not sure which, and Chancey and Baron ran to him, and I thought Tommy would, too, but Tommy stayed back. Jimmy wore a navy blue windbreaker I’d never seen and had his hair cut real close. He swung out, flinched at the weight on his leg, and looked at us. Then he called across, his voice pitched a little higher than it normally was, “I got me a good job in Raleigh.” I saw him swallow. “I come to take down there anybody wants to go.”

The screen door slammed. It was Dane going back in. Tommy walked down the steps into the yard, but he stopped there. Chancey was sniffing the North Carolina tires, and you could hear the minivan’s radio playing low, raspy and tough, Jimmy Make’s favorite. Classic rock. The radio playing, and things speeding up now, and in my ears I heard the damped-down roar. Roar that’d come first at the funeral, and now at the cemetery, it came every time, and these days I was always at a distance, even without the roar, but when the roar did come, I’d start watching from even further away. And I heard Tommy say, at that distance, “Why don’t you stay here, Daddy?”

And Jimmy say, “You know staying here’s a bad thing for us all.”

I saw that Tommy didn’t move.

Now Dane was coming back out carrying a box piled with his clothes. I couldn’t even think where he got that box until later we saw how he’d dumped out the Christmas decorations. He walked right past Lace and me without looking at us, his head turtled down in that army jacket, and when he got to Jimmy Make, he didn’t look at him, either. He slid open the van door, set his box on the seat, climbed up beside it, and slammed the door shut.The sun bounced off the closed windows. I couldn’t see him anymore.

Tommy had not moved. Him in a too-big Marshall sweatshirt all four of us had worn, the cuffs hanging loose, partway ripped from the sleeves. I was watching his back quiver, hard enough that you could see it even under the big shirt, and from my distance, I heard Jimmy Make say, “Tommy, it’s up to you to decide.”

And Lace say, “He’s too young to decide.”

And Jimmy, “You say that because he won’t pick you.”

Now Tommy was outright crying. A new kind of Tommy crying, not crying because he was mad or’d been done a wrong or wanted attention or’d busted something. I saw Lace drop down beside him, and I watched her turn him towards her and pull him against Jimmy’s old flannel shirt that she wore. She said something in his ear. Tommy bawled louder, clung tighter to her neck. I saw her kiss him, then gentle pull his arms loose. She held his hands down with hers and kissed him again. Lace was crying, too.

When she stood, Tommy looked behind at her one time. Then he went. Stumbled across that scraggly yard with his hands over his eyes and his elbows cocked out, his back gone from that high quiver to a full-length shudder with the sobs. The roar in my ears so loud, me so far, everything moving but me. Jimmy Make stepped forward and picked him up and kissed the top of his head, and I’m not sure I’d ever
seen him do that. Then he carried Tommy around to the passenger seat, Tommy kind of pulling away from him, his back arched and his face in his hands. But he didn’t try to climb down. Jimmy slammed the door and came back to the front bumper. He had his head down, like he was going to scuff his feet. But then he looked at me.

“You coming, Cissy?”

Even far away from the van as I stood, I saw he knew my answer already. And once again, I realized Jimmy Make wasn’t nearly as dumb, as young, as I used to believe. I saw the hurt in his face before I said anything back, and I saw at the same time, but not even as part of the hurt, the boy in the face, too. I saw the boy behind the face made man too soon. And right then, it came to me: I was older now than he’d been when he had me.

I felt myself shake my head. The dull roar in my ears. Then something told me that, serious as this was, I should speak to him, too.

“I’m staying here, Daddy.”

That was when he finally crossed the yard. To get to where I was on the porch, if he’d used the steps, he would’ve had to pass Lace. So he crawled up under the railing and pulled me against him. It felt not right, my head turned funny, crunched up in his arms. We’d had no practice at this here. But he hugged me close. And even at my distance, even though I could not catch up, I smelled the sleepy sweat smell.

Jimmy Make idled the van while Lace fetched Tommy’s clothes. Somehow they knew to do that—him to wait, her to get them—without speaking. When Lace carried them out in one of the two suitcases we owned, she passed them through Jimmy’s window. Then she stepped away from it and said something to Jimmy Make I couldn’t hear.

Near as I could tell, Jimmy Make and Dane didn’t look back when they pulled out. Jimmy had to turn the van around, so it was Tommy facing us as they left, most of his face blurred behind the
half-rolled-down window. I thought I saw his eyes still screwed up, crying. I know for sure he didn’t wave.

Soon as we couldn’t see them anymore, I dropped down under the porch railing, same way Jimmy had come up, and I headed up the hollow.

I hadn’t been past the gate since before Corey. I kept my head down and thought nothing but walk. Butchered hollow shocking full of that October sky, so few trees left to block it, I was completely exposed, anyone could see. But I no longer cared.When I hit the rockpile at the toe of the fill, I took it like Jimmy Make had, upright, my arms spread, and I kept perfect balance because I did not care. I didn’t stop when I reached the skun-out slope, I just clamped on and spidered up. I climbed steady without thinking, without feeling, there was no other way to climb it, I knew that now. Time passed funny when I stayed at that distance, roar still in my ears, but before I realized it, I was near the top, and the bank I was depending on was running out.