Strange as This Weather Has Been, page 6
“Yessir,” I said.
“And I hear you’ve done some painting before?”
“Yessir,” I said.
I waited for him to ask me more, but he just kept looking at me, so I looked off to the side. Wanted to drop my hair in my face, but I did what Jimmy Make’d said.The recliner was patched with duct tape (WD-40 makes it go, duct tape makes it stop, Jimmy again in my head), and the room smelled like air closed up for a very long time, and in it, an old man with no woman. Him not talking made my face glow hotter in its spots, but all he did was that huff-breathing, the wordless speaking at the end. Then the TV audience suddenly clapped, and I just took a breath and told him. “I painted the bleachers at the Little League field with my church group summer before last. And I painted Mrs. Glenella Taylor’s fence, lives up Yellowroot near us.” I had Mrs. Taylor’s phone number in my pocket.
Right then, somebody else knocked at the door, and first thing I thought was Jimmy Make had gotten impatient and was coming after me. “C’mon in,” Hobart hollered. We waited. “C’mon in!” Hobart bellowed, then the door swung in.
“Your pop machine’s jammed up again.”
Hobart kind of snuffled. “I got somebody coming from Beckley take a look at it.”
It was a man a little older than Jimmy Make. A man who had to be staying here. Which meant he was a scab. That was one of the few things Lace and Jimmy agreed on anymore, even if some of them were union, didn’t matter, scab, and I looked at him there, he was the first one I’d ever seen for sure. Olive-green T-shirt, greasy creased jeans, just like any man around here wore. Cap like a cap any man would wear pulled over a face could’ve been on any man’s head. But then I saw the difference. His boots. The dirt on them a different color than Jimmy’s used to be. The scab would know what was behind that fill. I looked away from him. Saw Hobart was back to staring at me.
“I lost sixty cents in there.”
Hobart hacked his throat, paused a second. Swallowed. “I’ll settle up with you later. I’m talking to this girl now.”
The door shut. Hobart shifted on the end of his recliner and reached for a dirty cup in the mess of motel check-in cards and what looked like shredded newspaper covering his coffee table. His breathing kept itching my memory. Somehow it carried both a pleasure and a sad, and neither one made any sense in that office with Hobart. “How old are you?” he said.
My throat hardened. Jimmy Make had told me not to lie about my age, but not to bring it up either. “Fifteen,” I said.
It was the first time he nodded. “Can you start tomorrow morning, nine o’clock?”
“Yessir,” I said. “I’ll be here then.”
“Good job, Cissy!” Jimmy Make clapped one fist on the steering wheel, then reached down for the ignition and gave the gas a good loud stomp. Don’t call me Cissy, I said to myself. “When do you start?”
“Tomorrow.” We were pulling past Hobart’s sign. SPECAL WEEKLY RATES. I could still hear the breathing. Hear that air conditioner run. The look of the dirt on that man’s boots.
“How much is he gonna pay you?”
My face flinched, but Jimmy Make was busy driving. I hadn’t thought to ask. “Minimum, I guess.”
Jimmy Make grunted. “Minimum. Should pay you more than that, a painting job.”
I looked out the window.
“Well,” Jimmy Make decided. “That’s all right. Your first job and all.” Then suddenly he braked, pulled off on the shoulder, and U-turned back up the road. “Know what I’m gonna do?” he said. “Gonna buy you an ice cream cone.”
I knew it was in part an excuse to check up on Lace, or maybe he actually missed her, who knew.They were both crazy that way, couldn’t stand the sight of each other, but then when one or the other was out of sight, they’d want that sight back. So they couldn’t stand each other again, I guess. Hobart’s was on our side of Prater and the Dairy Queen on the far side, so we drove back through town past the sunfaded FOR RENT and FOR SALE signs in the storefronts, and then the storefronts with nothing in their windows at all, had just given up, and you could see clear through to their empty backs. Poor old Prater. I can remember when there was ... A movie theater. Three clothing stores. A Ben Franklin, a real hotel, and that was Grandma talking years before where it had got to now. Two of the three stoplights were either broken or just turned off, but the video store/tanning parlor was still going, and Maria Lake’s beauty shop, and the post office. In the old IGA lot, weeds pushed high and thrashy out the pavement cracks, and people came in from out in the country and sold stuff out of their pickup trucks there. Old bikes, greasy tools, ceramic figurines, sometimes strange things like a load of brand-new paper towels I’d seen one time. Permanent portable yard sales, you never knew what you might find there, Corey was all the time begging to stop. And we’d bought a VCR there to replace our broken one, but then that second one didn’t work either, and we never did see that man in the IGA lot again.
We pulled into the Dairy Queen, and Jimmy Make slammed out the truck and headed for the door without waiting for me, like he always did. His walk had a kind of curve to it, he’d been hurt at work when he was real young, and although the doctor said it was his back, it showed itself in the leg. Either way, it didn’t matter. Jimmy had made the limp a swagger. It’d cooled down since yesterday and clouds’d moved in, unusual cool for June at two o’clock in the afternoon, and inside the air-conditioned Dairy Queen, it was downright cold. I caught up with Jimmy Make right at the door, which he slammed through like he owned the place, calling out to Lace, “Bant got her job! I’m gonna buy her an ice cream cone.” Lace, standing at the milkshake machine with her back to us, didn’t turn around.
“Heeey, Jimmy.” A voice crooning from somewhere back in a booth. “Heeey, there, Jimmy Make,” kind of lazy and jokey, and I couldn’t see who it was, but Jimmy spotted him, grinned all big, and forgot about me and Lace. Lace had turned back to the counter where she was taking the milkshake buyer’s money, but she was looking both at the customer and past him at me. Her face told me she wasn’t as excited about my new job as Jimmy Make was, but once the customer left, she said, “That’s real good, honey.Your first interview.You must’ve made a good impression.” She turned to make the cone, and I watched her, in the blue DQ polo shirt and the visor cramping down her blonde hair. Kind of things she would never wear except for the job, it still surprised me a little to see her like that, even though I saw it every day. And her face sometimes looked to me like a fox and sometimes like a prism. But it never looked like mine. She handed me the cone. “Tell Jimmy Make I’ll be over in a minute. And tell him he owes me a dollar fifteen.”
I looked back into the eating area and saw Jimmy sitting across from some guy I didn’t think I knew, but sometimes they all looked alike, especially in their caps and their beards.Washed down to all the same, like the scab had looked. I walked on back, my places going warm again, my hair shawling down around my face, even though there was nobody there besides Jimmy’s friend and a pack of big women and little kids working silent and serious on hot dogs and sundaes. I slipped into the booth behind Jimmy and his buddy, them teasing each other over something that meant nothing, then laughing like it was the funniest joke ever heard. Licking my cone careful to catch every drop, I looked past Jimmy and back to Lace, idle behind the counter now.
She was talking to somebody who didn’t seem to be ordering, a woman standing off to the side, out of the way of the cash register, and I wondered why I hadn’t noticed her while I was getting my cone. Then the woman turned to where I could see the side of her face, and I thought I recognized her. I was pretty sure it was Loretta Hughes. Whoever it was did all the talking, but I started studying Lace’s face, and what was traveling across it made me know it was Loretta for sure.
I swabbed my tongue around my cone. It was beginning to taste like nothing but cold. Jimmy Make and the crooner had moved on to the glories of Jeff Gordon, and I cut in. “Lace says you owe her a dollar fifteen.”Without looking at me or breaking the Jeff Gordon sentence, Jimmy reached in his wallet and pulled out two bills. I reached over and took them. I held them still for a second, the pressing on my chest again. But the need to know got stronger.
When I handed the money to Lace, she didn’t look at me or speak either, just rung up the price while listening hard to Loretta, shaking her head and making the growly sound she used when she was somewhere it wasn’t good to cuss. I listened to Loretta, too, pretending that I wasn’t, but Loretta was talking mostly letters that I knew stood for government agencies, but I didn’t know which ones. Then, when I reached down to take the eighty-five cents from the counter, I saw that what I’d thought was some kind of menu or tray liner wasn’t that at all.
I knew because it was black and white. I squinted at it, wanting to lean down, but not wanting to draw Lace’s attention. It was pictures that had been printed off a website, I could tell that, and they hadn’t come out so good, smeary and dotty. Lace was still concentrating on Loretta, so I ducked my head, did lean over a little, and squinted hard. They were upside down, facing Lace, and I’d never seen pictures of it before. But I understood right away what it was.
Like most people, I’d never really seen a mountaintop removal mine, only seen their edges, down the turnpike and along Route 60 towards Charleston when the leaves were off. Up Yellowroot with Jimmy Make two days before. But although I’d never really seen one, and these pictures weren’t color and weren’t clear, and although I only looked for seconds, I knew.
A dead terraced the whole width of the frame. Hacked gray stumps where mountain peaks had been, and flung all over, skinless white snakes. Roads. A gigantic funnel, sloppy and dark, running down off it, funnel big as the mountain itself, is the mountain itself, then fill, it made a dry place in my mouth.
I wanted to look longer, and didn’t want to look longer, and I for sure didn’t want Lace to see me looking, although I also knew that didn’t make sense. But it was like dirty pictures I was seeing, and I peered from the corner of my eye to make sure Lace hadn’t caught me—she hadn’t—and I shoved off away from the counter. Then I was back in the booth against the window, Jimmy Make laughing like there wasn’t a thing wrong in the world, my ice cream cone melting onto my fingers, and I leaned out and pitched it in the trash. I pushed my forehead against the streaked window, the pull in me to go back to the counter, look harder, get it clear in me for sure, like looking at pictures of naked people. Like looking at pictures of dead bodies. My breath making a greasy steam on the dirty window, and then I was hearing Hobart’s breathing again, pricking at my mind, just a-smothering to death all along, and all of a sudden it came to me. Pap. One of the only pictures of him I carried in my mind, Pap wheelchair-bound and drawing breath through straws in his nose. And how when I was little I never even questioned it, I’d just thought that’s how old men got their air, worked for it, sucked it through straws, until I grew up and found out most old men didn’t and Pap wasn’t that old anyway. The huffing, Pap, the printout pictures scalded and bald, the look of the dirt on his boots.The gate behind the house. I swiped the back of my hand across my eyes and forced the wet back down.
Then Jimmy Make’s buddy was getting ready to leave, and Jimmy slid out the booth to let him. “Don’t do nothing I wouldn’t do,” the buddy said, and Jimmy Make laughed again, then turned. And saw Lace and who she was talking to.
I didn’t know how he knew. Lace had told me Loretta Hughes was one of the people getting involved against the destruction with a bunch over in Boone County and that Loretta felt strong Lace should join the group, too, but that was not something she’d tell Jimmy Make. Still, he knew. Went rigid as a crowbar from his ankles to his shoulders, I could feel that cold hard off him.Then he swagger-stomped past Lace, his bad leg swinging out like a bolt had got loose, him louder in not saying good-bye than he would have been if he had. Lace, though, just glanced at him go, then turned back to Loretta. Her mouth looking always on the verge of breaking in, but then Loretta would start on something else, and Lace’d hold back a little longer to hear that too.
Standing there by the empty booth, I realized Jimmy Make might just take off without me if I didn’t get out there right away. I don’t really remember leaving the Dairy Queen, don’t remember crossing the lot, but I can recall passing the counter. The pull of the pictures again. I was climbing in the cab when Jimmy was putting it in gear, and for a few seconds I felt pure rage at the both of them, but quick, the scared came back. Then I just wanted the whole thing to not have happened, and the first way to start erasing it was to calm Jimmy Make down. So I said, “Thank you for the ice cream cone.”
Jimmy Make spun out of the lot, throwing a little gravel as he did, then he braked right away. Pinky McCutcheon was slumped in his sheriff’s car by the pumps of the shutdown BP. Pinky lifted one finger, a point or a wave. “That was a loan,” Jimmy Make said.
Corey
THAT TRUCK is his dad’s “pride n joy.” When Dad calls it that out loud, says, “pride n joy,” he always slaps the fender, and the truck grunts back. Yeah, that truck can talk a little, even when it isn’t running. And when it is running? The WHOOOM whoom whoom whoom whoom WHOOOOM whoom whoom whoom, muffler clearing its throat like before you let fly a big hawker. But better than a hawker, more muscle to it than that, who knew what that truck might let fly. Six-speed suspension lift limited slip rear axle one-ton F350 custom pickup. Vampire black, eight cylinders under the hood, rippled panels over it like a weight-lifter’s chest, pecs, Corey thinks, and the roll bar. Could you put a roll bar on a bike? He’s pretty sure you could put one on a four-wheeler.
Dad’s pride n joy. Corey would like to find Dad one of those air-brushed license plates people put on front, but instead of something like “Angel n Butch” or “Lace n Jimmy,” the license plate would say “Pride n Joy.” Just gazing at that truck can fill Corey so hard-happy inside he can’t keep his grin pinned back, even though he tries—bite your lip, look like a man—no, can’t help it. And then. Then there’s the way his dad can drive. Can that man handle a truck, you better just get in and hang on. Dad could power that truck over any terrain, using nothing but two-wheel ninety percent of the time, Dad could drive it over anywhere, shit, Dad could drive it over nowhere, that’s how good Dad could drive, and the time Little Scotty bet he couldn’t take the rise to the above-the-hollow road in two-wheel, and Dad did, spin-clutching, all four kids in the bed, then hauled ass to the Dairy Queen with the bet money, them hollering all the way like in a parade. And the only reason Corey would ever want Paul Franz and them to come up the hollow was if Dad would load them all in the back of the truck and take them for a ride. They’d have to just get in and hang on, they’d be dodging low-hanging branches and bloody their faces some, they might get bounced out and muddied up, they might get muddied up even if they didn’t bounce out, but, buddy, that’d be one ride they’d never forget. Wouldn’t it now.
But nowadays. Well, anymore . . . the truck concerns Corey. Just a little. It is starting to rust around the wheel wells, just a little, Corey has noticed. Corey thinks to take some black hobby paint to the rust spots, but then he wonders if hobby paint would be an insult. And some motherfucker in a parking lot opened his little prissy white car door on the truck door and left marks. And sometimes when you run it nowadays, something smells funny. Not every time, but sometimes, and Dad can’t for the life of him figure out what’s causing that smell. And other times, instead of the smell, there’s the sound.
“Hear that?” Dad asks, his head cocked forward and his eyebrows scrunched down. The four of them, Dad, Corey, Bant, and Tommy, are driving into Prater, taking Bant to work. Dane’s already gone to Mrs. Taylor’s.
“Huh-uh,” Bant says, staring out the window like it’s not important. Bant is a girl. Corey listens keen as he can.
Dad leans forward to where he’s not watching the road. He dips his ear here and there around the dash, slapping it in different places. Tommy begins, “I’d—”
“Shut up, Tommy!” snaps Dad. “Shit. Shit. Almost had it.”
Corey crawls down onto the floor and sticks his head partway up behind the glove compartment. Bant kicks at him a little to get out of her way. He tunes his ears into the truck motor as best he can, but he can’t hear anything out of the ordinary.Then Dad busts out laughing. Corey scrambles back into the seat to see what’s going on, cracking his head on the glove as he does.
Somebody is driving a riding lawnmower up Route 9. The right pair of lawnmower tires on the shoulder. The left pair in the road. The lawnmower is yellow, probably a Cub Cadet, and its owner has rigged up a little cart to pull. As they get closer, Corey sees the driver is Rabbit. Rabbit rarely wears hats, and you can tell who he is from far away by his hair. Wet-looking copper coils, like short springs. Dad drives right up on the cart, then blows his horn and rips around it. Rabbit doesn’t seem to care. He just raises one hand without bothering to look at them.
“What’s he driving that on the road for?” Tommy asks.
“Oh, probably got him another DUI,” says Dad. Corey has turned around on his knees in the seat to watch Rabbit out the rear window. Pretty quick Rabbit disappears from Corey’s sight around a bend, but Corey is wondering where Rabbit found the little wagon—Corey could use something like that. He wonders if the wagon came down the creek in the flood, and he wonders how he missed it and Rabbit did not. Rabbit, Corey is thinking. Now that Rabbit . . .
Rabbit lives way down at the mouth of the hollow, and he has back behind his house something between a gully and a ditch just full of stuff, but Corey doesn’t know if it’s trash or parts because you can’t tell from the road. All you can see from the road is a bunch of different colors that aren’t the color of the ground, but Rabbit’s always working on something. He is. Corey has never visited Rabbit, never got close to the gully, not because they’ve been told to stay away from Rabbit, but because most people up Yellowroot just do. It’s not only the drinking and the contraptions, but Rabbit is thought a little crazy, and, further, nobody can tell what color he is and he himself won’t let on. If he was definitely white, nobody’d care, and if he was definitely black, most wouldn’t care, but you just couldn’t tell by looking at him, and you couldn’t tell by his last name, either. He hadn’t come from around here. But the color of Rabbit doesn’t worry Corey. The sight of his little cart has got him to thinking.
