Strange as This Weather Has Been (20 page)

I swallowed. “A little,” I said. Not because I was, but because I knew what he wanted to say next.

If you’d asked me later, I couldn’t have told you if that day had been cloudy or clear. I remember it was cooler than it looked because I had to go back in the house to get a padded flannel for Daddy. I remember I went bare-armed, I remember how I craved that cold. Give me some pain from the outside for a change. I seized the chair handles, I shoved the wheels into the leaves, I forced it hard up the hill, trying desperate to drown out the
what you gonna do? What you gonna do, Lace, now?
I jammed it over rocks, I split dead branches in two, it felt good to have something solid to push against, and I did stop once and ask Daddy, I heard my voice at a distance, “You okay?” and
him, “Don’t bother me none. I’m fine.” When we reached the place we usually stopped, I just tilted the chair and pushed harder, higher, until I came up against a long thick log I was finally too winded to get around.

I’d almost forgotten Daddy until I was stooped over and hunting for rocks, and “Thank you, honey,” I heard him say. Then I looked at my daddy. Bundle of chicken bones in flannel and jeans. A hand gripping each knee, the gap where the two fingers were missing, him glassy-eyed as a mounted buck, not speaking, not knowing, not even enough lung to talk, and
what are we going to do? What? Why us?
I chocked his wheels, my mind moving so fast it tripped over its own legs and somersaulted wild, me grabbing at it to get hold of it long enough to think clear, when all of a sudden, I heard, outside and on top of all that racket in my head. The one breath. One breath. One breath more. Then my mind was screaming, I squeezed my ears between my hands, and
Shut up,
I yelled at him and me both without a sound leaving my mouth, then my mind jumped a track, and it came to me—he’s being buried by it. He’s being buried by it.

His lungs are being buried by it, by coal, which is earth, which is this place, and, still, he wants nothing but to be out in it. On the land, like me, like us, despite the burying it does, and what the hell, what the hell is it? Why do we have to love it like we do? The Bible says we are made of dust, but after that making, everybody else leaves the dirt and lives in air, except us, oh no. We eat off it, dig in it, doctor from it, work under it. Us, we grow up swaddled in it, ground around our shoulders, over top our heads, we work both the top and the underside the earth, we are surrounded. And still, Daddy wanting nothing at the end but to sit and look at land. Even though inside it drowns him.

Within a month, Daddy died. And if I’d thought my life was over when I got Bant, I realized how little about over I understood until I got Dane and Daddy died. If I’d thought my choices were narrow before,
well. And although I’d spent a lot of my life laughing at those old-time stories, it is hard to ignore them completely, especially around birth and death. Because while Bant was inside me when I grew up and lost the self I thought I was, Dane was inside me when I lost Daddy and what little independence I’d hung onto with Bant. So while Bant was born aged, old people in her, Dane was born peculiar, mournful, and sad. Sad Dane. The way Dane never did get quite right seemed a mark of the marriage.

Because that time we did marry. Shortly after I missed my period, before I’d even told Jimmy Make, Jimmy’s cousin helped him get on at a union underground mine, making real good money. Me with two kids, no job, the loss of Daddy—it all forced my hand. The union job gave Jimmy Make courage, the second baby must have amped up his guilt. He asked me for real. I told him yes.

I STEPPED out and let the screen snock shut behind me. But even when I walked to the very edge of the porch, I couldn’t shed the sound of them, despite that they weren’t fighting loud. They’d started in the bedroom, and Jimmy acted like he was going to walk out, but then he stopped in the hall. Now he stood there with his back to the outside wall of the bedroom where Lace sat up in bed, him clenching and unclenching his fists, taking a step or two towards the front door, then a step or two back, and they fought each other without looking at each other, through the bedroom wall. I reopened the screen, reached in for the regular door, shut that. Then it was just Lace I heard, through the window. Her and the machines working up overhead.

My face surged full. I pushed back on it. Corey and Tommy sat in the road with their bike and trike upside down, resting on handlebars and seats. They called it working on their cars. I’d thought I’d been right, about the phone yesterday, what I’d overheard. Now that Jimmy Make had said what he did to start the fight, I knew I was right for sure. My nose tickled way back in, my hands started to tingle. I made my face hard. And then I felt the need to go.

I hadn’t felt that in a while. It was that need I used to get when I was younger, twelve or thirteen, back when my body was coming on me rapid-quick, and it brought with it this thrusty urge to go. My guts standing up and pushing forward, thrusting against the front of me go, it was like if I pushed fast enough, I’d bust through something and be free, and I hadn’t felt it in some time, but I did feel it now, and
go,
I thought.
Just go.

Corey and Tommy pumped their pedals with one hand and felt the spin of the tire through the other.Then Corey stood up on his knees, put his hands on his hipbones, swiveled his head, and spat. Just like Jimmy Make would. I looked at Corey there, that stupid rag tied to his arm. And all of a sudden, the go thrusting in me, I wanted to smack Corey. I wanted to shake Corey (
there at the end it was like driving a boat
), I wanted to rub his face in it, show him (
you can live off these mountains
) because Corey did not understand. Jimmy Make copycat did not understand, and now the go was behind my teeth, a mad with a whipping pleasure in it, and I knew another way, a most likely unguarded way, not to the top of the fill, but to the very edge of the mine.

I jumped off the porch and ducked under it, jerked out my old bike, too small for me now and coated in flood crust. I was in my paint clothes, I’d been waiting for Jimmy to quit fighting and take me to work, but I didn’t care anymore. I pushed my bike over to the boys, clamping back the go in me so they wouldn’t see. “C’mon, Corey,” was all I said.

Corey squinted up from under the heavy bangs, that oil-colored hair. “Where we going?” he said, still pedaling with one hand.

“Up on the mountain. I want to show you something.” I straddled the bike now, but the go I tamped down. I wanted Corey to think I was doing him a favor, not him doing me one.

He kept pedaling with his one hand, looking at his spokes instead of me. I looked away from him, too.

“I’m going up through the snake ditches.”

Then I saw the pedal hand slow, just a little. I started to walk my own bike away.The pedal hand stopped. Corey stood up, tossed back the bangs, wiped both palms on his just-too-short jeans, and as he flipped his bike upright, he eyed his piddly bicep under the chamois rag. Tommy hurried and turned his trike, too.

“Tommy, you can’t go,” I told him, keeping my voice even again. Hiding the urgent in it.

“You think that rusted-up sorry-ass tricycle could make it up them snake ditches, boy?” Corey said.

Tommy whimpered and scrambled onto his trike, but me and Corey were already moving. Tommy left the trike and ran after us with a chunk of coal in his hand that he let fly with a shout, and it thumped me in the small of my back. But we were gone.

And then me and Corey were moving. We were shooting, tearing, flying, we were leaving behind. We went. Gravel spitting off our tread and ringing the bike fenders, and then there came the hardtop ledge, but I still knew what to do, wheelie up and twist a little, crash down on the hardtop flat and steady (like we used to do), and then we could really travel. The houses and trailers and sheds little run-together color lumps in the edges of my eyes, and the wind we made cooling us against the already humid day, and it was like it used to be, me flooded with them punchy gusts of got-to-go, part joy, part rage, part hope, part put-behind-despair, my body thrusting to get ahead of itself, no mind to it, and I’d forgotten how good this here felt, body grunting: Move, girl. Move.

I was always in the lead, despite the bike being at least three years too small, midgeted up under me, my knees splayed. I was back to twelve, eleven, ten, pistoning my pedals in too-short-for-my-legs strokes, and we took a turn and pumped through the Williamses’ backyard, cranking as hard as we could in the grass to get a good run on the rutty
diagonal path that would shoot us up onto the above-the-hollow road. The old dirt road that had been dozed before I was born for a strip job long over, and trees and brush had pushed in on the road, like a tunnel it was, and water had worn it, rutted and puddled it. This was the way to the snake ditches. When I was real little, Jimmy Make used to bring us up here all the time, me and Dane, on the dirt bike he had back then. Now me and Corey balanced our bike tires on the ridges of the ruts, the road bombed with puddles as long and as wide as cars and deep to above your knees (wet spring, wetter summer, this crazy weather), then, pushing as fast as I could go on that rut edge, I saw a monster puddle looming. I kept balanced, I hung on, and it came to me, as the water sprayed and I won, I remembered again, what I had known when I was younger and tended anymore to forget. I knew again what the truck meant to Jimmy, what the speedwagon did to Corey, why Tommy and B-bo and David ran around with motorcycles in their mouths, I remembered, the glory of forgetting and that stun of blind power that came with that gut-urgent go.

Then I realized we’d passed the turnoff to the snake ditches, and I slowed down and hollered at Corey to come back. I knew exactly where the turnoff was, I could spot it even in the jungle of July, Jimmy Make had taught it to me good. Dane was wee little, he would ride in front between Jimmy’s legs, and I’d hold onto his back, so much older Jimmy Make seemed then. “It’s in here,” Corey was shouting from way down the road, and I knew he was wrong, little pissant know-it-all, but I didn’t care. I just thrashed on into a big web of honeysuckle towards where I knew the snake ditches were, and I noticed for the first time since I’d left our yard the machines working overhead.

Then I heard Corey burrowing behind me, but he didn’t say nothing, he’d never admit out loud to being wrong, he was like Jimmy Make that way too. Our wheels and pedals hung up in the vines, we had
to rip and tear, it was not just honeysuckle and kudzu, but tougher woodier stuff, and greenbrier, too. The mud on me was beginning to itch, and I could smell the gasoline mixed in the mud, and R.L. came up in the odor of gasoline, but I pushed him away by gritting my teeth and throwing hate at myself (
you know bettern that
). Finally we got into decent-sized trees you could walk normal under, but we still weren’t finding the ditches, and Corey started whining about how I didn’t know what I was doing. Then there they were.

That was how you’d always hit those snake ditches, with a startle. Even if you were looking for them, they were a startle when you hit them. You moving along, feeling woods, hills, wild—then, sudden-smack, that crazy concrete zigzagging all over the mountain.

Because that was the other part of it, the other way it was in these hills. You had your quiet places, Grandma places, your places where peace would settle in your chest—then you had these places, places with a sharpness, a hardness, so utterly opposite all the rumpled deep green, you’d have to slow down and refocus your eyes. Like the Big Drain, and the crumbling-down coke ovens at the far side of Yellowroot, and old driftmouths covered with rusty steel bars, and tilting-over tipples, and the mine cracks like earthquake scars in the ground, all my life I’d stumbled onto these used-up left-behind places, and sometimes I saw ahead—only these places would be left. And then there was the newer places, places they were getting ready to use up, bulldozers and front-end loaders, surveying tape, raw muddy road gashes, yellow and copper with black flecks in them, like a nasty kind of shit. And then there was the way these places made you feel, the way they could draw you to them, draw you with something I didn’t believe in but that I knew. I remembered.
We’re going snake hunting,
Jimmy Make would say, and before we left the house, he’d put on me my toy pistol, metal and plastic, in a holster around my waist. I’d hang tight to his back while we rode, his smell in my face, the laundry soap
and gentle sweat. Sleepy smell. I lifted my bike into a ditch.
Go girl,
I said in my mind.
Go.

Those snake ditches were a smooth ride, but they were steep.There was a trick to riding those ditches.The ditches themselves were scummy white veins, but here and there they drained into each other over broad flat tall spillways, algae-slick, and then the ponds branched out into yet more ditches. Grandma’d told me they’d been poured in the early ’70s for the same strip mine that went with the above-the-hollow road, and that cement had held up good. By the time Corey was old enough to go along, Jimmy Make had gotten rid of the dirt bike and lost interest in the snake ditches. We weren’t allowed up here by ourselves, it was too dangerous for all kinds of reasons, but Corey couldn’t keep his want off them and I knew why. I knew why because of the way Jimmy Make used to be contagious to me, but Jimmy was contagious to me no more, and I’d break Corey of it, too. Learn him.

We stood on our pedals, leaned forward into the switchbacked drains, fought for enough momentum to keep the bikes from tipping. I could hear Corey huffing.The ditches ran with water only right after it rained, and the belly-warmth of the concrete drew lizards and snakes. Mostly we’d just throw rocks at them, make them coil up or wiggle away, and Jimmy’d tell us what they were, garters and blacksnakes and watersnakes and copperheads. Once or twice he said
rattler,
but he may have made that up. I called him Daddy back then. He got younger the older I got. Sweat started melting the dried mud on my face and dripping gray drops onto my handlebars, my hands, but that kind of moving, that kind of grunting along, there was no good go in it to drown your thoughts. I thought of what Jimmy Make had said that morning—a deep mine was opening in Mingo County and he was going to apply. If they didn’t hire him on, he was going down to North Carolina and find him a job there—and I thought about how he had said it.
Go girl,
I thought.
Just go.