Something Rising (Light and Swift) (2 page)

O
n Thursday, in the middle of June, she waited for her father. He hadn't been home for two days, so she got up early, because sometimes he showed up very early and went straight to bed, and then the whole agony of having waited for him to come home was compounded by having to wait for him to get up. He could sleep fourteen hours at a time, hardly moving, she'd studied him. She got out of bed without making a sound, pulled on the clothes she'd worn the day before, didn't bother with brushing her teeth or looking at her hair. There was little left of it anyway, after the episode with the ticks and Poppy's clippers. She got up very early, before Laura or Belle, and crept down the stairs and into the kitchen tinged with morning light, the pale green kitchen that smelled—above and below food, laundry, visitors—of Laura's cigarettes, and took out a bottle of chocolate milk that was made of neither chocolate nor milk. Her favorite drink. She took a banana, too, because bananas are by nature quiet foods, and snuck out through the living room, through the foyer with the two glass
cases filled with her dead grandmother's figurines (frolicking baby animals) and out onto the screened porch. The rocker closest to the front door was splintered, the one closer to the road groaned, and in neither did her feet reach the porch. She chose the one that groaned and hoped she wouldn't move. Even this early the air was warm; later a breeze would come up, she guessed, but for now the trees were still. The view from where she sat dazed her with familiarity, the horseshoe-shaped gravel driveway with the holes no amount of dirt or gravel could fill, the yard on the other side of the drive. Nothing in it, just grass. And then her road, the King's Crossing, bumpy asphalt with glass sewn in, in sunlight it shone like diamonds. Across the road a ditch that collected stray papers, detritus, once she'd found a child's tennis shoe, just the one. Beyond the ditch was the fencerow that stretched the whole six hundred acres. To the left of her vision, in the field, was a stand of tall trees—a windbreak—and far to the right was another. Between the stands of trees the corn was pushing up in little shoots, it had been a dry spring, and barely visible to her were the power lines, four gigantic silver men in a row, standing with their hands on their hips, displeased. She knew that if she crossed the field, or rode her bike down to 300 West, also called the Price Dairy Road, and turned left, and got near the power lines, she would hear what Poppy called an infernal hum. The way power speaks. She had no interest in it.

The chocolate milk was gone, the banana was gone, its skin lay bereft next to her rocker. She had hardly moved. When the sun was almost up, the gray burned off, everything that had crouched in the shadow of dawn fully revealed, she knew he wouldn't come, but still she waited. There was nothing else for it; other people pretended to go about their business, whatever business
they fabricated, but really they were waiting, if not for him then for someone else. From its spot behind the house, she heard the door to Poppy's Airstream open; the sound carried clearly across the early morning silence, she could almost hear him feel the weather, decide if he needed a hat. He didn't. The dogs clambered down the metal stairs and into the backyard, then rounded the corner of the house, Poppy following.

“That you, Cass?” Poppy asked, shading his eyes and looking through the screen.

“It's me.”

His three dogs, Marleybone, Juanita, and Roger, stood or scratched or rolled around Poppy's legs, impatient for their constitutional. Marleybone was Poppy's favorite, the leader of the pack. His fur was a crazy swirl of dark blue and white, he had one brown eye and one blue, his left ear was bent at the tip, and he stood on three legs. He kept his right rear leg lifted off the ground always, had the crazy look of a herder in his eyes. Juanita was a medium-size black dog who shook and mostly kept her tail tucked. There was a painful history on her face, and sometimes, sitting on the porch, looking at the clouds, she would start to shake. Roger had been Poppy's latest acquisition, a wiry little blond dog with a big square head that resembled a cement block. There was mange in his past, but he'd managed to keep the tuft of yellow hair that shot up like a patch of weeds between his ears. Although he seemed to have no legs, so low did he hover over the ground, he could, without warning, leap four feet into the crook of his favorite tree in the backyard.

“You waiting for Jimmy?” Poppy asked. He slipped his right hand into his pants pocket, meaning he was embarrassed.

“Naw,” Cassie said, shaking her head.

“‘Cause you might find yourself sittin' a long time, if you are.” Poppy dressed carefully every day in a flannel shirt and cotton trousers, suspenders. He carried a handkerchief in his breast pocket, shaved every morning, even when he was sick, and kept his white hair cut short. One of his real teeth, in the back, had a gold crown, he smelled like Ivory soap and cherry pipe tobacco. Since Cassie's grandmother, Buena Vista, died two years ago and before Poppy had begun to collect dogs, he'd moved out to the 1967 Airstream at the back of the property. The world had disappointed him in every imaginable way, but he seemed a happy man. “Want to go with me? On my walk?”

Cassie shook her head.

“All right, then,” he said, and started off down the road.

She waited. It was a fine summer day. Inside the house her mother and sister began to stir. Cassie imagined them: Belle floating down the stairs in her white nightgown, Laura lighting her first cigarette of the day, making coffee. Time was and not so long ago that Belle would have been out here with her, but all had changed in the blink of an eye; it seemed so to Cassie. On her twelfth birthday, in May, Belle had awakened full of dissatisfactions and resolutions, all of them spoken and written in her notebook then spoken again, and now it seemed that more than two years separated her from her sister. Something deeper than the river had carved itself out, Belle on one side. Cassie on the other.

“Don't even tell me,” Belle said from behind the screen door.

Cassie tipped up her empty chocolate milk bottle, pretended to drink.

“Don't even tell me you're out here thinking Jimmy will come home.”

“I'm not,” Cassie said, studying the field across the road.

“Did Poppy come by? Laura wants to make sure he got some coffee.”

“He's out on his walk.”

“That doesn't tell me if he had any breakfast or coffee.”

Cassie turned and looked at her sister; Belle's outline behind the screen was ghostly. Her thin arms were crossed over her stomach.

“Edwin will be here soon,” Belle said, glancing at her wrist as if a watch were there. But there was no watch.

Cassie looked off down the road, back at the screen door, Belle was gone. She was right—soon Edwin Meyer would appear, because he'd bought the hardware store from Poppy and felt it was his duty to check in every day, and because Edwin and Poppy were best friends in the way that duty binds. In the kitchen Belle and Laura, Cassie knew, were already working out the morning in silences and gestures that operated like a code Cassie couldn't crack. It was another summer day, and all things considered, Cassie lived in a predictable house, and none of it mattered if Jimmy didn't come home. She moved out to the cement steps at the edge of the driveway. She waited.

They came walking down the road with a purpose. Cassie lived in the flattest part of a flat state and could see them coming from a great distance, Leroy Buell and his foster sister, Misty, who lived at the end of the King's Crossing in a tumbledown house with what Laura called a Plague of Relatives. The house was in bad shape, but Leroy's aunt Betta, who was crazy in all other ways, knew how to step outside the front door and throw a handful of seed at exactly the right time, so that everywhere you looked around
their house, all along the sagging fence and covering the old walkways and right up against the dead trucks and cars and tractors, were
flowers
. No one tended them, no one planted or fertilized, but Laura said the Buells' house was like the virgin prairie, only crazy. Leroy was actually born there, but Misty was an addition, a child taken in a few years ago from the county home who pretended she had been adopted, so fiercely did she wish it to be true.

Leroy and Misty sent up the alarm in all God-fearing normal people. God-fearing normal people meant nothing to Cassie, who would happily take their names and kick their asses, as Jimmy was fond of saying. The only way to be safe in the world, as Jimmy would have said, was to be the person other people feared, this is the law of the jungle and among all thinking organisms, and just because we have been given the capacity to imagine it might not be so, or to hope there might be another, more enlightened way to live, is no reason to deny that it is so.
Trouble
, he liked to begin a story by saying,
it is widely known
.

“Going down the river to the shack, cook up a mess of frogs,” Leroy said without preamble when he and Misty reached Cassie's horseshoe-shaped yard.

“Build a fire,” Misty said.

Leroy had his right thumb hooked in a belt loop of his jeans, which were six inches too short, while his left hand drummed against his bird chest. He was too skinny, his face too long, he breathed through his mouth with a sound like a train in the distance. Misty stood stiff next to him but couldn't seem to stop making noise. This happened in school, too; sometimes if the room was quiet, Cassie could hear Misty two rows over humming the theme song to a television show called
Run, Joe, Run
. She
whistled and whispered, snapped her fingers to a hectic beat. But worst of all, Misty was driven toward sound effects, and if she'd been able to hear Cassie think of the faraway train, she would have said:
Chug-a-chug-a-chug-a
. A high wind:
Whooooooooo
. A catfight:
Yowwwwwl, screeech
, et cetera. Laura would have said there was no future in such behavior.

Cassie gave Misty a good hard look. Her hair was straight as a poker, cut jagged at the edges near her shoulders, and with bangs made crooked by a cowlick. Her teeth didn't meet up right, and she smelled of trapped smoke. Her clothes, a striped shirt too big and blue pants too small, had obviously come from the charity box at the Church of Christ, and Cassie thought it no wonder Misty's parents had decamped for points unknown.

Cassie stood, stretched herself out, then went inside for her backpack, which had been Jimmy's long ago when he had mistakenly thought himself a Boy Scout. This was a mystery to Cassie, how the true nature of a person can be so thoroughly concealed in youth that he does humiliating things. It meant Cassie herself could do them, and later someone would hold out the offending object—a dress, a party favor, an unsent letter—and convict her. She was trying to redeem the backpack. She carried in it a Swiss Army knife, a compass, a box of waterproof matches, a second box of waterproof matches, a rain poncho, an old snakebite kit, a small flashlight, a harmonica she couldn't play, a worn guide to dressing field injuries. Now she added a ball-peen hammer—a regular hammer was too heavy to carry—and a small box of nails; boards were always popping loose on the shack, and if she left it to the inbreds and malcontents, as Jimmy called them, the shack would fall down around their ears and they'd go right on sucking the heads off crawdaddies. She also added a second chocolate
milk, knowing that everyone down at the river would want it but be afraid to ask; this was the sort of gesture that kept everyone clear about who stood where. Cassie was the person with the chocolate milk and the hammer in her hand, that was all they needed to know.

The three trudged down the road, then cut across the field on Cassie's side, away from the infernal hum of the power lines. “Them new kids is gonna be there,” Leroy said. “Emmy Somethin' from Kentucky, and Bobby Puck from up that Granger School that closed.”

Misty made a
puck-puck-puck
sound.

“I met 'em already. They was down at the river two days ago when I got there,” Leroy continued. “I says, ‘How'd you find this shack? It belongs to us and Cassie Claiborne.' Then that Bobby Puck said something, didn't make
any
sense.”

Cassie watched where she was walking, watched for the shimmer of a cottonmouth or the frightened streaking-past of a vole. She could remember when this walk back to the river seemed to take all day. If someone had asked, she would have said the water was miles from her house, but she'd learned it wasn't even a single mile, maybe only a half. As they approached the edge of the field, she recalled an afternoon she and her parents and grandparents had taken a picnic on the bank, and as they'd reached this point, right about here, Jimmy had swung her up on his shoulders and asked,
Do you smell the water?
There had been only that once when they were all together here, walking this path, it was before Buena Vista had gotten sick; and Cassie could see, too, that there was hope and faith in the gesture of a picnic that had somehow gone sorely lacking. If she had tried to plan one, Laura would have scoffed, and Belle would have said she didn't like the river, she
couldn't stand bugs, or maybe even nature itself for all Cassie knew. But whatever complaints they leveled wouldn't have much relationship to what they meant, which was: that's all over now.