Strange as This Weather Has Been, page 26
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.
Bant
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.
The third time he touched, it was my elbows and wrists. Me squatting, the backs of my thighs sweating on the backs of my calves, and he rested a hand on each of my arms. He cooled me to my shoulders and down into my hands. And it stopped my brush for as long as he held.
The fourth time he touched, I was painting around a corner, where Hobart couldn’t see. I was standing, and he came behind me again and just barely laid his whole body on mine, his body nearly matching me there. This time it made not cool, but heat. He stepped back. I heard his breath lift into his throat. He pressed again, but now it was hard, it was full. I felt a hot streak from my belly button down. I’d never known about that before.
Then, during lunch, I saw Sharon less often. I’d have to kneel on the floor of his cab so nobody’d see me leaving with him, me against the door on the passenger side, watching. The dirt on his boots, his hard hand pulling gears. At first all he did was kiss me. At first, kissing was enough for us both.When he’d come back in the mornings, before he showered, he wore dirt like a snakeskin ready to shed, but under that, I felt what was in him. Not many people you could do that way, feel what was in them like that, and even if you told yourself you didn’t like what was in them, it was a thing you were feeling and not with many you did. I never asked him, “Some hills in Ohio look like these here, how can you?” And I could not stop. Like getting up on a high place and the ground down under calling you to jump off.
I wasn’t scared of it anymore. It wouldn’t have happened the summer before. Just a year and a half ago, me standing on the outside of the school steps, waiting for the bus, my hand up on the railing at about the second stair, when someone came and pushed up against my fingers with the zipper of his jeans. Donald Glen. I felt a hardness also spongy, hardness with a give, and I knew what it was, but I could not move. He had his jacket spread open so it was hard for other people to see, and me, shamed to tell it, shamed to think it now. Me frozen there. It was like I feared if I jerked my hand away everyone would notice then, or maybe I was thinking if I didn’t jerk my hand away, Donald would think not even I was noticing, it would be like it wasn’t happening at all. His teeth bared in this gone-away grin, him looking off and his eyes all glass. Then the buses finally pulled in, and I snatched my fingers away and grabbed my books. I wanted to spit on the back of my hand. I wanted to raw it past the skin clean.
But R.L. made me want to touch him even when he wasn’t trying to make me, and me not wanting to and at the same time wanting to so bad it was like the not wanting made the wanting worse. And he wanted me back, he did, me, this bony body, this bony face. Before, it had only been the Donalds and only in the Donald ways, dirty and sneaky and low snicker voices spoken in huddles. But this one, along with the bad he brought in me, the shame, the guilt, he also softened my bones. He cleared up my face.
I rode on the floor, no secrets in this town. Jimmy Make dropped me off a minute before my shift started, picked me up right after it ended. Hobart always got his money’s worth, he watched me close, and R.L. shared a room with an older guy named Ray who slept all day.We didn’t talk much when we were together. We were always lying low. It was grope and touch and rub, hand skin mouth, it comes natural when you’re always only hiding together, to take advantage of your bodies there. When you are fifteen years old and there is nobody to see.
Hover of gasoline. Something about to flame.
Noon sun in a thicket of willows, little thrashy close-together things down along the creek. Rocks hard under your back, and it was very bright. Too much to see. Or the cab of the truck pulled up some dirt road and nosed into brush, leaf shadows and a shiver across my back, the somebody’s coming, the getting-caught fear. Soon, I did want more than the kissing, but he was already way ahead. Some things he did I didn’t even understand until later—his hand pushing my head towards his lap, his fingers searching for places I just barely knew—but I understood where to stop. Push his hands away. We didn’t talk, not ever, it was all by touch. And I’d mark him, later you could see. Blue wrists.
When we did talk, eventually I asked him about Yellowroot. “Shit,” he’d say. “I don’t know what’s behind that fill. I don’t even go near there. That’s not what I do, that part of the site.” Southeast Ohio boy. Talked more like West Virginia than the workers from other states did, walked more like West Virginia, motioned his hands like men here did. Familiar, it would lull you. Make you trust. Then I’d go home, hear the destructing overhead, Lace talking, and I’d come back to myself. I’d come back full to myself, it wouldn’t be just the him parts ruling me, and I’d think, how can you? Now, Bant, you know bettern that. Sometimes, lying in bed at night, I’d punch myself. Sock my right fist into the muscle of my other arm. Feel it. Ohio scab-boy. He’s up there right now.You know he is.
The first few times I pushed his hands off, he was gentle about it. He’d just go back to what he was doing before, not even open his eyes. I would open mine, I’d see. But after not too long, all I’d do was take hold his wrists, and he’d jerk clear away. Heave his back against the truck seat if we were in there, flop over on the rocks at the creek, always with a pissed-off grunt ( you know how they are, it’s the same with them all. Babified. You go on and want them anyway). And when he did that, he would open his eyes, but he wouldn’t look at me. He wouldn’t any longer see. Then, without me thinking, my fingers would go to my face.
“I’m just fifteen,” I’d tell him.
“So? I was doing it at twelve,” he’d say.
I knew, do it and get a baby and you’ll never be your own self again. Like Lace did with Jimmy Make. Like Lace got with me.
“I’ll use something, darlin,” sometimes he tried to reach me sweet, but then I knew it wasn’t just the baby. It was partly that I didn’t need to do it no further, I’d had enough before anything between my legs. But also it was something beyond that that I needed to keep.That had nothing to do with my body.
I’d taste that dust on him no matter how hard he washed. Far too many times I savored Yellowroot grit in my mouth. I don’t even go near there. I thought he was lying, how could he work up there every night and some days and not see? Along the creek one time, while he lay beside me after I’d had him in my hand. The blanket messed up, me sickish in my stomach, wiping with leaves. The narrow little willow leaves that did no good, the bigger dead leaves swept down by the creek, them falling apart and sticking in crunchy bits to my skin. Even then, I felt the pull. Boy like the way a thunderstorm before it happens sizzles invisible in air. How can you, Bant. How can. This different Bant the boy made.
Scab. How one called you to pick it. Until the pink hurt under the crust.
Lace
A MONTH after we came home, I got on at the Dairy Queen. Jimmy Make wouldn’t take a job like that, and I knew it was my fault we’d come home, so I got on. Still, I believed if Jimmy Make would just lower himself to do something regular along with me, we’d get by okay, it was a whole lot easier to be poor up Yellowroot than in Raleigh, North Carolina. But, no. If he couldn’t find a “real job,” he had to “work for himself,” so he started cutting grass and doing handyman jobs. Problem was, most people around here know how to fix their own stuff and couldn’t afford a handyman even if they needed one. I didn’t say much, though. Didn’t feel I could, not then, not yet.
Even though I was working thirty-five, thirty-seven hours a week, I tried to get up into the woods that summer as much as I could, and I made sure to take with me what kids would go. City’d made me understand again how little else I had to give them, but city’d also made me see how woods were almost enough. Tommy was old enough to go by then, and Dane’d come most of the time. I’d leave Bant to look after Corey, Corey never took much interest in woods for woods’ sake, and Bant, going on fourteen, wouldn’t do anything with me anymore unless I made her. The boys and me’d blackberry some, but mostly we just walked, or sat and listened, or played in the Ricker Run. And it was only in the woods I felt less lonesomeness for Mom. I tried to feel her in the cemetery, but there it never came, I felt her only in the woods, so I’d lead the boys to certain places without telling them why. Feel Mom’s seat on logs where she’d rest. Lay my hand on trees where I knew Mom’d laid hers. But I stuck to Cherryboy during those roamings, I almost never took the boys up on Yellowroot or even up Yellowroot Creek. That’s how I knew later that I knew then, I just had to keep it still a secret from myself.
I was already hearing a few things at the Dairy Queen, though. And in truth, I was already seeing it in the creek. I tried to fool myself about that too, said, well, maybe you just remember the water as clearer than it really was, memory does that kind of thing. But nothing could cover that day in August Corey and Tommy brought back two of those big margarine tubs full of rotting crawdads. Or the afternoon a week later when I looked out the back window and saw what Tommy had in his hands.
I was rushing around getting ready for work and arguing with Jimmy Make at the same time—“Me working a full shift, and you can’t take twenty minutes to pick up this place?” “I’m working, too! Just because I’m not out there cutting grass don’t mean I’m not working, I’m working just as hard drumming up business, it’s an investment, what I’m doing now”—when something caught my eye out a window I was passing. Tommy standing in the creek in nothing but a pair of shorts, mud smeared over his belly, and studying something he held in each hand. I stopped and squinted. It was full-sized dead fish that he held.
“Drop em!” I heard myself scream.
His face snapped up towards the window in surprise, and he did, the fish sliding out of his hands. Then I was rushing out, I was jerking him up over the bank to the outside spigot, and then I was scrubbing his hands, “Bant!” I heard me hollering. “Get me some soap!” Then Bant was there, handing me the dishwashing stuff off the sink and saying, “What’s wrong, Mom? They’re just dead fish.”
