Strange as This Weather Has Been, page 22
He drops his head, casts his eyes over the plain of bleak rocks filling what used to be a creek where he and his cousins fished, caught crawdads, built their own little dams. He can see between the rocks in some places, even from this far away, glossy colors of deep turquoise and brass orange. No, it not only doesn’t surprise him, it also, if Avery is honest, doesn’t horrify him either. And if he is more honest, the way he responds to it is even more revolting than feeling no horror and no surprise, because what Avery feels deepest—tell the truth, go on and say it—is a kind of satisfaction. Yes, the sight satisfies him in the way it confirms all he knows and all he suspects, and it brings with it too a perverse relief. Because if the entire truth be told, the slaughter also fulfills a secret unspoken urge Avery carries always. This itchy voice, this desperate chant, that begs: Okay. Let’s just get it over with. Let’s go on and get it over with, and at least then we won’t have to worry about what’s going to happen next. If we just go on and get it all over with.
Because there was one thing his mother was right about: nobody who went through Buffalo Creek was ever the same. Even though in the years immediately following it—the years his mother told her stories—Avery didn’t give it much thought, at least not when he was awake. Then, during a sociology class his sophomore year at Marshall, everything changed.
It was an upper-division class, fairly small, maybe twenty students. Avery kind of got into it by accident. The professor, a youngish man, took an interest in them all, and through that interest, he somehow discovered Avery had lived through Buffalo Creek. As soon as he learned this, he asked Avery for his story—actually, he pleaded for it, pleaded even before he knew whether Avery would resist or not, which Avery didn’t. He didn’t think he cared. He told Dr. Livey he didn’t remember anything before he woke up on the hillside after the water passed, which was what he’d told everybody all along (which was, almost always, what he told himself ), but Dr. Livey wasn’t disappointed. He’d take anything he could get. He asked Avery to speak about it into a tape recorder, told him he’d pay him as a research subject. Avery hadn’t understood his enthusiasm, but it flattered him, and he didn’t speculate too much about the professor’s fascination with his story. He just considered, first, the money, which he needed badly, and, second, pulling hard against his desire for the money, nearly overriding it, his fear of being alone in a room with a man so different from anyone he’d ever met before coming to Marshall. That worried him. Dr. Livey was not a West Virginia name, and he definitely didn’t have a West Virginia voice. He didn’t look local, either, and not just his clothes, but the long nose with its rounded lobes, the coarse longish black hair, the dark droopy moustache, and dark droopy eyes. In the weeks before he recorded his story, Avery mostly worried about what he would say in the office with this Dr. Livey before the tape recorder started. Telling the story itself seemed no big deal.
So one afternoon late in the semester, he found himself perched stiff on an orange-cushioned metal chair at a little round table, clutching a Coke Dr. Livey had bought him and talking into the purr of the black recorder. After a year and a half in college, he was acutely conscious of his accent and how it would replay through the machine, but he hadn’t yet learned how to tame it. He went on anyway, speaking as close to how he imagined a research subject should sound, while Dr. Livey nodded and made silent encouraging yes, yes, and? expressions, mute so as not to mar Avery’s precious story. The office had a single tall window that took up most of the only wall not gorged from floor to ceiling with more books than Avery had ever seen in a room so small, and through the window, the tepid November sun fell mild and full over every surface: the flat of the table, the tape recorder, Avery’s arms. Avery, the Coke can sweating in his hand, told his story as straightforwardly as he could, beginning with waking up on the side of the hollow and continuing into a few weeks after, while Dr. Livey scooted in closer and closer, as though the sharing of the story created a familiarity between them, when Avery felt exactly the opposite. And he tried not to look at Dr. Livey, the watery lemon light exposing every blemish on his face, the black pores, the errant hairs, but he could smell him, a smell like clothes closed up for a long time in an airless closet. Avery concentrated so hard on his accent, on his story, on keeping as much distance as he could from Dr. Livey without drawing attention to it, that it wasn’t until the next day it dawned on him he’d never told the story straight through like that to anyone. And he didn’t think he’d told it even to himself in the light. It had always been for him a wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night story when, half asleep, he was too unprotected to stop it.
When he got done, he looked up at Dr. Livey, waiting for him to pay him so he could get out. But Dr. Livey was in no hurry. First he praised Avery for how well he told the story, then he puffed up with righteous anger—this didn’t surprise Avery, he’d seen it in class before—and he paced around and lectured at Avery a little about how Avery and all the rest of them had been exploited and abused, the companies, capitalism, and Avery nodded obediently, the urgency of his need to escape crushing any attention he could give this speech. Then Dr. Livey selected for him a book from his shelves, told Avery something about it that Avery didn’t listen to and stuck the check between its pages, and finally Avery was hurtling out the door, down the stairwell, and into the day.
It was mid-afternoon the Tuesday of the week before Thanksgiving. The sun thin and steady without heat in it. Avery, the book still in his hand and his backpack over one shoulder, found himself seeking dark. He ended up in Boney’s Hole-in-the-Wall on Sixth Avenue, the bar completely windowless and the lighting inside so weak you could hardly see the bartender. That afternoon, he was the only customer. He tucked himself into a back booth and waited. No one came over to see what he wanted. He placed his hands palms down on the sticky table, steadying himself, and he tried to think, but all that came to him were odors: the sour beer soaked into the table, the faint urine and sharp disinfectant from the bathroom behind him, the smell of Dr. Livey’s sweater. He felt that something had happened that he needed to figure out, but he couldn’t think. It was like he’d left part of his mind behind in the office and it hadn’t caught up with him yet. Something brushed his leg, and he leaned down and squinted and saw a dog under the table. The dog collapsed on its side and closed its eyes. Avery waited a little longer, burrowed there in the cave of his booth, the booth, in turn, buried in the bar, the bar also a close dark cave, and finally, without buying anything, he stuffed the book in his backpack and left.
As he reflects on it now, sitting on a gray-mucked log at the foot of the fill, the badness in the land looming over him, he decides he understood as early as Boney’s that he’d made a tremendous mistake. He decides he understood what speaking the whole story in the daylight had done. Because that afternoon in Dr. Livey’s office introduced into Avery two irreversible changes: it made him start thinking about it in the daytime, and it made him want to learn.
He never asked for a copy of the tape. After that semester, he avoided Dr. Livey altogether. Avery never heard the tape, so he isn’t sure what all he told on it, but he does know what he didn’t tell, because his mother was also right about how nobody would ever forget. He remembers, for instance, that old steel bedframe where he slept that night, and the chill of Tad’s room more real to him right now than the July sweat tickling down his front. He remembers the cube steak they had for supper, how it made Bucky feel grown-up, a special guest, he remembers its flavor sharper than he remembers the stew he ate at his mom’s last night. Remembers Tad’s little sister, something bad wrong, her head droopy like a tomato when it’s time to pick it (and Avery found out later that even though the parents and the little girl survived, she died when she was eight or nine anyway). He even remembers the smell of Tad’s breath.
He hadn’t known Tad before that year, and it was his first time to spend the night at Tad’s house. Tad’s family had moved into Buffalo Creek just that past summer, so Tad was new at school. It was a Friday night. They’d watched the Brady Bunch, and, on top of the cube steak, Tad’s mother made Jiffy Pop, something Bucky’s mom never bought. Spend the money on that when you can buy regular cheap and pop it in a pan? Even at twelve—they were young at twelve back then—Bucky was impressed with that Jiffy Pop, but Tad was more taken with the Brady Bunch. Not so much the charismatic California kids, but their house, Avery remembers. Look, Bucky, how their living room’s sunk down. And how their steps are kinda like a ladder.When I grow up, I’m gonna get me a house like that.
Tad slept on the bedroom floor, bundled in blankets on a woven rug. He gave Bucky the bed because Bucky was the guest.They talked for a while, covers drawn up around their chins in the chill room and the rain pelting the tin roof. Then Tad went quiet, and Bucky lay there awake a good while longer. Avery can’t recall what they talked about. He’s pretty sure the rain didn’t bother him because he can’t remember that it did. He does recall what Tad wore: a pair of too-small pajama bottoms, pants legs halting halfway between his knees and ankles, the fabric splotched all over with cabooses, those and a long-john shirt. Bucky can recall the dried spit in the corner of Tad’s mouth the next morning.
Avery didn’t say anything to Dr. Livey about how Tad was a good half foot shorter than he was. Nothing about how Tad sat with one leg tucked under him and bounced up and down when you played board games with him. Nothing about Tad’s breath. He’s not real sure what he did tell Dr. Livey, but he knows he didn’t tell him any of that, and he knows what he tried to tell him happens over and over in his own head like this:
He comes to on the hollowside with a dog curved against his body. He’s lost his own pajama bottoms in the water, he’s barefoot and wearing only his T-shirt and underwear. He wakes there on the ice-crusty dead leaves, that cold rain still drizzling down, but what he feels first, more than cold, fear, or panic, is shame over his near-nakedness. Then he realizes he is coal-dirt all over. His hair is crunchy with it, coal-dirt is greasy in his ears, and he digs in to clear them only to discover his fingertips are greasy, too. He raises himself up on his elbows—only his arms will work for him, his mind tells his legs to move, but they can’t hear him yet—and he turns to study the dog, pushed against him for the warmth he carries in him. The dog is colored and slicked like Bucky is, and when Bucky shifts, the dog sits up on its haunches and whines in Bucky’s face, and Bucky studies the dog. At first, he thinks the dog is a black dog, like the dog, if it was thinking about Bucky, probably saw him as a black boy, then he realizes the dog’s really beaglish-marked, and Bucky studies the beagle dog for some time.
After a good while, Bucky sneaks a peek down past his feet. No further. He sees he’s hauled himself way far up the hill, much higher than he needed to go, this he can tell by the oily black watermark all those yards under him. He has no idea how long he’s been knocked out, or asleep, or whatever he was, that stretch of time is no different from the stretch of time during which he studied the dog, it seems time left with the dark when the dark dissolved that morning, and Bucky hasn’t touched time since. And he feels nothing. Not for Tad, not for his family, not for the little figures making motion in the bottom of the hollow that soon he won’t be able to ignore.
The dog pushes up against Bucky, but Bucky doesn’t touch him back because of how dirty he is. The smell of the dog is not a dog smell, just like the smell of himself is not a boy smell. Both smells are coal smells, coal as familiar to Bucky as dog smell, almost as familiar to him as boy, and also familiar to Bucky is how this gluey taste-smell lies at the base of your tongue, on the back of the roof of your mouth, like it wants to speak itself. Bucky spits. Then at some point in that unraveled time which lies limp and unspooled around Bucky, he’s sitting up and hugging his bare legs against his chest. The legs can’t yet stand, but he gets them bent like that. They’re bad scraped in the nastiest ways, Bucky traces the raw places and gashes with his black fingers, but the legs aren’t paralyzed. Bucky knows that the way the legs won’t move is the way they won’t move in bad dreams. Although he continues to study the dog like it’s a new species, occasionally he’s now stealing glances through the narrow trunks of the second- and third-growth trees down into the valley. Another glance. Another. Until the glances start running together.
The water wall’s gone, he knew that as soon as he woke by the quiet. The water that’s left is what followed in the wall’s wake, shallow cranky wastewater, black and trash-glutted, butting its way through the lowest-lying places. Part of the bottom’s scoured bare. Other areas are jumbled in a crazy misarrangement, houses stacked up against each other like they’re pushing in line, others tipped at odd angles, and then all kinds of splintered piles might have been houses but now no telling what they were before. Power poles toppled, wires tangled spaghetti, and he tries to gauge where he is, how far downstream from Lorado he’s washed, but he can’t tell, wouldn’t be able to tell if he’d lived in Lorado his whole life. His mind tries to spread and wrap around what he sees, but his mind won’t stretch that far, and it snaps back, dizzying. What holds his eyes tightest is the railroad. The waters have peeled the railroad right off the ground, scattered ties everywhere, then coiled up the rails into lassoes. Water did that, Bucky thinks. Then, without really noticing it himself, his legs stand up. And he knows to go home.
He’s not sure exactly how far home is. He’s always ridden from Lorado to Braeholm in a car. He knows it’s longer than you can walk easy, but he knows, too, that it is walkable. Now his body’s coming back to itself, an ache all over, and he feels the more concentrated particular stings in the cuts and scrapes, and finally the cold, the goose pimples, him unnumbing, but still he feels only the outside of his body, his insides are yet empty. He does not wonder if his family is dead, his house washed away; he doesn’t wonder about Tad. He feels nothing inside but the call to get home.
His body, working by itself, drops into a crouch and part-creeps, part-slides, down the steep side of the hollow. The dog’s right with him. His naked feet skid the icy leaves, them soppy underneath and that cold rain still fizzling down, and Bucky is jarring against root and rock, scraping over rotten half-buried logs, the thorn brush, the saplings. Bucky’s skin is bared to all of it, his feet bared to it, his pimpled legs and arms. Then he knows he has to get some shoes. The get-the-shoes crowds the get-on-home out of his head, and he grabs hold a root to lower himself down the last steep slide, the root jerking free and dropping him, skittering, scratching, onto level ground, hurting him all over again. But he picks himself up, and he heads for the nearest house.
To reach it, although it’s not far, he leapfrogs from debris pile to debris pile, over the black water braids between them, and Bucky is careful about where he steps, the glass, metal, wire. From the back of the house, he can’t see how to get in except through a busted-out window that’s bound to cut him even worse than he’s cut now. He picks his way to the front, again, careful of his feet, and the dog sticks close, never acting doglike, never pausing to sniff or piss or dig. It’s as though the dog has given up his dogness just to keep alive, and Avery realizes a long time after that the same thing happened to Bucky.They find the front door blocked by trash and by most of a twisted car, so Bucky eyes the next house, downwater from this one, a house that looks like its side is bashed in.
He’s scrabbling across piles of wreckage again. He pulls at his nose over and over to stob its running, the nose raw, his fingers greasy. Twice, when he walks upright, his weight’s too much for the trash and he crashes through to his hip, then the right leg is torn and rawed all over again, but the leg does not break. At times his body shivers so hard it’s difficult to keep his balance. The dog follows close, and down here, Bucky can’t see any figures moving, sees nothing alive but the dog. He thinks nothing besides getting the shoes. Finally, they reach the bashed house and stoop in where the green aluminum siding has parted.
The moment Bucky sets foot on the floor, he’s lit by a bolt of fear, in his shoulders and head, that the house is about to shift. He thinks he does feel it lift a little, throws out his arms for balance, digs in the mud with his bare toes. He waits. It’s not a fear he recognizes. He’s standing in a living room, all its furniture toppled and pushed towards the upstream wall, and waves of black muck lie terraced across the floor, the terraces rising on the upstream end to two feet deep against that wall. The house seems to hold steady, so Bucky wades the mud to the closet and forces the door open partway against the weight of the muck outside it. He sees only coats, no shoes, and he chooses one, a heavy plaid wool, and pulls it on. Its lining is nearly dry, the wool having shed the floodwater for the brief time it surged through the house. Bucky pauses, tensed for the shifting of the house like listening for a noise. But the house stays put. He slops on through the muck, it sucking his ankles and feet, him scanning everywhere for shoes poking out, and then the dog gets himself bogged down nearly to his belly, and he cries like he has a whistle in his nose. Bucky considers looking upstairs, but the fear of the house moving stops him.
The kitchen appliances have rocked out of their places, the refrigerator overturned, the stove tethered at the end of its cord still plugged in its socket. Bucky studies the room from the door, and spies, against an upended table, among sopped cereal boxes and plastic bowls, red rubber. He jerks them free, red rubber woman’s boots, red laces and a matted fake fur cuff. They are full of mud, and he turns them over and works on squeezing out the mud, then he loses patience and carries the boots to the sink where he opens a tap and stands bewildered for some seconds when no water comes out. In the other room, the dog, still stuck, has given up whistling for panicked yelps. Bucky claws the mud out of the boots as best he can with his hands and forces his feet into them. They are squishy, but too big by only a little bit. He pauses once again, feeling for the house to move. Then he struggles back into the living room, where the dog has unstuck himself from the mud, and Bucky hauls him back through the wall and into the rain. The plaid coat covers him to five or six inches below his underpants. The sleeves mitten his hands.
