The Diviner's Tale (17 page)

There was Jimmy Moore, whose sallow, round face was sprayed with a constellation of freckles, and whose tiny eyes were dull as a sow's. Jimmy was possessed of a mean streak and took pleasure in throwing rocks at sparrows and other small creatures, though I never once saw him hit any of his targets. Then there was Bibb Spangler, who always reeked of his father's aftershave. He seemed forever in a daze, which made me wonder if the heavy odor of cologne might have affected his mind. Bibb was always ready to do anything. If the gang decided it was a good idea to hike up to the cliffs overlooking the quarry and dive headfirst onto the shale below, he would do it without thinking twice. Less that he was stupid than staunchly committed. There was also Lare Brest, whose name was a constant source of nasty gibes that I, tagging along with the gang, didn't comprehend, although I laughed long and hard with the rest of them, sure that whatever they were saying must have been funny.

A boy named Roy Skoler came around sometimes. He was the oldest, the only one who smoked publicly and could get away with buying cigarettes and beer for the others if he wasn't asked to produce identification. Nobody knew where he lived, and he never seemed to have to answer to any parents, a freedom the other boys openly envied. He owned a rifle and was always followed by a big friendly hunting dog. Chris and Ben went shooting squirrels with him and that dog once or twice, as I recall. His thin upper lip was shaded with the hint of a mustache, and I remember he always wore polished shoes, Sunday shoes, even in the woods. There wasn't much Roy Skoler and I ever had to say to one another—an unspoken lack of ease defined our relationship, such as it was. He more or less ignored me and I, by turn, tried not to get in his way. One thing about Roy I remembered with absolute clarity. He never smiled. Not only that, but when you smiled at him, he looked away. Almost as if it was too painful for him to witness. The guys in the gang took this as a further sign of Roy's superiority and coolness, but it made me uncomfortable. I reassured myself that his demeanor—not only didn't he smile, but he rarely frowned, his face a mask of remoteness—meant I ought to feel sorry for him, since he must have been unhappy. But for the most part I tried not to think of Roy at all.

Last was Charley Granger, who always treated me the kindest and spoke up on my behalf whenever the others didn't want me coming along on some adventure. With his hair a rich chestnut color always tousled and spilling over his forehead, with his broad shoulders one higher than the other, with his warm hazel eyes forever attentive, Charley was plainer than most good-looking boys, but his spirit gave him what I would later think of as an almost Apollonian attractiveness. It was always Charley who intervened when the gang, sharing a bottle of whiskey Roy had managed to procure, got it in their collective head to make me the brunt of some stupid whim.

— Hey, Chris, how long you think your sister can stand on one leg holding the bottle for us? Bibb might say.

— On top of her head, Lare would add.

— While she's saying the Lord's Prayer, Ben might chime in.

— Not sure. I could imagine Christopher shrugging, wary but unwilling to stop the flow of banter.

— Maybe we better find out.

— Once you find out, then what? Charley would inevitably ask.

— Then nothing, is what.

— What's the point in knowing nothing?

— Ah, Charley, shut up.

And so the moment would pass.

I hate to admit it even now, but Charley brothered me much more than Christopher when the gang was gathered, and protected me as best he could against the others.

Our rural truck culture required a vehicle with which to nurture its youth. Decades ago, a horse would have been a boy's dream, but now the four-wheeler served that purpose. I dreaded the day when the twins awoke to its irresistible necessity in their lives. It was loud. It went fast. It was dangerous. It burned fossil fuels at a furious rate. It could be souped up, driven illegally. It got broken, which meant you could fix it and have a legitimate excuse for getting grease all over yourself. Black smeary badge of honor. What more could you want?

During those last months of Christopher's life, racing his four-wheeler with the gang became a consuming mania. His four-stroke, single-cylinder red turbo was intended as Nep's birthday and Christmas gift rolled into one, though my brother would never make it to Christmas. Rosalie was, predictably, dead set against it.

— He's going to kill himself on that thing, she said.

But Nep, who personally built it from parts stripped off junked machines, understood the magnitude of the moment in a Corinth County boy's life, the transition toward manhood that it marked. And he prevailed.

The gang did their racing as far away from their parents as possible. They liked their sport rough and tumble. The more eroded and difficult the terrain, the better. Helmets, goggles, gloves were spurned. Any of the boys who left home wearing safety gear in order to convince their folks they were being responsible dumped this extraneous stuff in a heap, like the worthless debris they considered it, once they got to their makeshift speedway. I came along, piggybacking on my brother's ride, but was left literally in the dust once we got where we were going. Charley was the only one in the bunch who didn't own an ATV, so when they got together to race, he and I were sidelined. We'd watch and chat a little, except when one of the other boys loaned him his dirt muncher for a turn.

— Get it together, Gumshoe, Chris had said, one afternoon.

— I'm going as fast as I can.

Our mother had left me in his care. The story was, we were headed over to Ben's to meet with the guys and check out Bibb's new wheels. And the story was true, if incomplete. We did swing by Ben's. And Bibb did in fact have a refurbished ATV that was chopped down to the barest essentials—no mudguards, no lights, no rack, nothing beyond its frame and mufflerless engine. But once everybody had converged, the lot of us went tearing off down a steep hill behind the Gilchrists' house, fording a treacherous quick-running creek, and up a wooded hillside until we reached the summit, a mile from anywhere. Here was a rugged track that snaked up and down pitted ravines, gullies, across flat stretches, on land nobody seemed to own. We—well, the gang—had the run of the place, no matter whether it was private or state. Could create mayhem and make as much noise as they wanted without one single soul knowing the better.

A steamy afternoon, humid and with green thunderclouds building in the northern sky. The ball of sun had lowered into a snarl of maples along the west apron of this makeshift arena, causing the world to glow solemn purple. They had run a few races. Bibb pulled an airborne wheelie over past the hairpin turn, he claimed, though I never saw it, and Bibb was ever one for hatching stories, especially when they made him look heroic. The clearing went from smelling redolent with mushrooms and the heavy dank perfume of rotting and living leaves to the acid tang of scorching oil and unfiltered exhaust. I kind of liked both scents equally, truth to tell. Charley and I sat on a long beech log, not talking much, in part because of all the whining, reedy racket of the engines.

— Wish you knew how to ride one of these? he asked, cupping his hand to my ear.

— I already do know.

— That's not what Chris says.

— Chris says wrong.

— So you been taking it out in the middle of the night for a spin?

— Did last night.

— Did you now.

— Sure did. Laid down some rubber, too.

— Well, Cass, you've always got a surprise up your sleeve.

— Don't tell Chris.

— Oh, he said with the affectionate, knowing smile of an older child who can see through a younger child's white lie. —My lips are sealed like the seal of Solomon.

In retrospect, and even at the time, exchanges such as this were a sign of Charley's decency. He was well aware I didn't know a clutch from a kick starter but wasn't about to betray me to the others.

Jimmy Moore had won two or three races, and before the light dimmed much more, the time had come for the gang to play their most insane game.
Turding
it was called for reasons that were utterly obscure to me at the time, though I sensed it wasn't a word to repeat at the dinner table back home.

What turding resembled most was jousting. Another instance of engine and wheels displacing the horse in country life. Four-wheeler supplanting four-hoofer. Lare Brest had seen a reenactment of a medieval tournament when his family vacationed at some theme park in Florida, and he came home full of stories about knights and lances and throwing down the gauntlet. Nobody agreed with him that the guys should wear costumes like those of the stuntmen-actors he witnessed, but it wasn't long before the gang became knights manqué in heavy metal T-shirts and camouflage cargo pants, armed with stiff branches fallen off trees, and began testing their wills against one another on an uneven straightaway in this wood-ringed clearing.

The rules were few. It was forbidden to aim the tip of a lance at the head of the opponent. A chest shot was fair, as was a hit to the shoulder. For the most part they simply played chicken, swerving at the last moment to avoid a head-on collision, or bashing the front of the other's machines with their lances rather than the riders themselves. Their injuries were generally cuts and bruises to the hand that grasped the branch, which often snapped and splintered on impact and went flying into the air. Whoever was left holding his weapon intact and had made the run without falling off, won. Whoever lost his lance, broke it, fell off his ride, bailed in any way, was deemed
turded.
If there was no contact and neither rider swerved away, it was a scratch and immediately replayed.

Jimmy was on a tear that evening. Both Christopher and Ben lost on their first charge, my brother escaping injury and, more important, humiliation by simply being left with the stub of his lance at the end of the run. He'd made a pretty valiant effort at jamming the thing into the front suspension of Jimmy's four-wheeler but aimed too low and caught his lance in the dirt. Ben, for his part, lost control of his wheels and nearly crashed headfirst into a thick ash tree, tangling himself instead in its lower leaves and toppling his ATV. Bibb was no match for Jimmy. He dropped his ramrod long before he and Moore were within striking distance, and Jimmy caught his shoulder with a clean blow, knocking him hard to the ground. Fortunately, he hadn't been moving too fast and rolled a few times like a thrown doll. When he climbed to his feet, I thought he was crying at first. Instead he was laughing—a bit hysterically, but laughing, which meant he saved face. Lare had already taken off for home, and Roy Skoler, who was hanging out with us that night, lit another cigarette and begged off quietly, saying he had no interest in getting killed, so it came down to Charley to end Jimmy's streak. The defeated kids lined up their vehicles, like soldiers on metal stallions awaiting review, and revved their engines while they waited for the two to get positioned at the far ends of the track.

Roy took Charley's place beside me on a rock outcropping well behind the line of drivers, where Charley and I had moved to a safer distance from the action after Bibb lost control and went flying. He had a flask and offered me a sip.

— I don't want any, I said.

—Just a little to toast your boyfriend Charley good luck.

— He's not my boyfriend.

— Sure he is. Everybody knows. Now come on and give him a toast for luck.

— Let me smell it, I said, and recoiled at its harsh burned-sugar stink.

— You're not supposed to sniff it, you're supposed to swig it, Gummy.

— Don't call me that.

— Okay, he said. —I won't, but only if you take a sip. One won't hurt you.

My first taste of alcohol. My tongue and throat were scalded. I felt as if I were breathing bitter fire out my nostrils.

— Ain't that yummy, Gummy?

Coughing as hard as I was, I couldn't speak.

— Take it easy. You all right?

I continued to gag as he clapped me lightly on the back.

— What you need's another tug. That's what the pros do.

— I don't want—

— No, here. That's a girl.

I could hear the engines racing wildly, crazed, as he held the flask to my lips with his right hand and, with the open palm of his left hand pressing against the back of my head, eased more down my throat.

— There now. Much better.

He must have worked swiftly because I cannot remember him setting down the flask, cannot remember any sequence of acts between that second drink and his moving one of his hands between my clamped thighs, kneading me with rough clumsiness. With his other hand he gripped mine and forced it on his hard pulsing lap. I bit his tongue when it pushed itself past my teeth into my mouth, and I remember hitting him as hard as I could on the side of his head with my fisted free hand, at which he slapped me right back with far more strength than I possessed.

We sat stunned, silenced, each of us in our different way. Though I wanted to, I refused to allow myself to cry. It was Roy who spoke first.

— That's not very friendly.

— You're not my friend.

— I thought you'd like that. You like watching it enough.

— Do not.

— You got a pretty good eyeful last week.

— I never saw anything, I lied, heart racing.

— Keep it that way, he said, and forced another hideous kiss on me, his thin tongue in my mouth once more. I didn't dare struggle again but blanked my mind of all thoughts and waited for it to be over.

This can't have gone on for too long, but it might as well have been a vile eternity and only ended—violence interrupting violence—when we were abruptly torn away by shouts, though not at us. A pandemonium of yelling kids at the center of which were terrible shrieks like those of a rabbit being carried off by a fox to its final destruction.

—Say a word about anything to anybody and you die, he told me, holding my head back with a tight fistful of my hair. —Believe that.