Strange as This Weather Has Been (30 page)

Then, not paying enough attention, he comes over the top of a gully too quick and finds himself at the edge of a crowd of people around a big fire. He starts to angle back above them and slip away, but they spot him and holler for him to c’mere.
Hey! C’mon down in here, honey,
they call.
C’mon now.We gotta tell you something.
Despite himself, Bucky drags a little—it’s not just the urgent in their tone, it’s how he’s been raised to obey grown-ups—and
listen, sugar,
one insists,
it’s dangerous. Get on down here, you hear?
When he finally does give in, though, it is mostly because the dog goes first.

As soon as he’s within the heat ring thrown by the foul-smelling fire, a voice warns,
Second dam’s gonna blow.They say this one’ll be worse
than the first.You better stick close here.
He’s in a commotion of more than a dozen panicked or numb people, most of them staring at him, and he heats with self-consciousness over his naked legs, the barely covered underwear, all the new voices, the new faces, like confetti in his head. The fire gushes a greasy black smoke, nasty-odored, and what are they burning? Tires? Ties? Plastic? big ash flakes funneling up off it, clashing with the snowflakes funneling down. The woman who’d been hollering at him loudest, the most persistent, is saying, “Lord have mercy. You went through it, didn’t you? And here we are without even any water to wash you off with.” She’s in a big puffy coat, her body under that puffy, too, like angel food cake. In Bucky’s head, the glob of people starts to divide into individuals, him seeing now that some are fully clothed, others stripped and blackened and huddled in blankets somebody’s fetched up, and Bucky notices most a man wrapped in a pink quilt on the far side of the fire, Bucky drawn to something funny about him, but Bucky can’t place what the funny is. “Oh,” the puffy woman is saying, “wish we could get down in the house and find you a pair of pants,” and somewhere past her, he hears a man:
I couldn’t even tell how many bodies I seen hung up in that bridge abutment
. The people continue to divide out like cells, and Bucky recognizes two kids from the school bus whose names he knew yesterday, but not today, and he notices a stringy-headed woman, wattled in her throat, who’s counting everybody, over and over again. One to seventeen, she does a round every three or four minutes, and when she hits seventeen, she crows, her voice nearly cheerful, “Well, we’re all here. We’re all still here.” Bucky watches the man in the pink quilt, studying on what’s funny. “Believe I’ll just go on down, get you them pants,” the angel food lady is saying
. “
Mommy!” this a teenage girl. “What if it breaks while you’re in there?” “Well, now, I’d hear it. I’d hear it, and it wouldn’t come so fast I couldn’t get back up here.” The gray flakes, the snow ash. A woman lies curled under a blanket, not pink,
a second woman sitting beside her, holding her hands. Bucky turns back to the pink quilt man, studying on it. “Seventeen!” the stringy-headed woman crows
.
“Well, we’re all still here!” “Why, that’s Dooley Taylor’s boy,” a man’s voice now. “What are you doing up here above Braeholm, buddy? Why ain’t you home? That’s Dooley Taylor’s boy.” He’s speaking to the angel food lady. “I work with his daddy.”There’s a little girl won’t come out of her mother’s coat.You can see nothing but her legs under the hem. Screams if the coat falls open. “Mr. Roberts’s gone down, get you them pants,” the angel food lady is saying. “He works with your daddy.” “Well, we’re all still here!” Bucky studies the pink quilt man, the something funny worrying him like a brier in his thumb. “It had to have been the number three went, that much water, and can’t be more water left up there than what just come down.” “Well, Grady, I don’t know.Who knows what all they got up there. I wouldn’t take no chances.” The pillowy snowflakes falling on Bucky’s face, an open-mouthed cold kiss. “Seventeen! Well, we’re all still here!” One of the school bus kids, who Bucky remembers now is Angie, comes up to him with a two-week-old box of Valentine chocolates hived in a soiled heart box, the box now mostly empty. Bucky’s stomach surges sour into his craw, the coal dirt flavor all through his head. He shakes his head at Angie. “Here’s Mr. Roberts with your pants, honey.” The pants so big he can pull them on without taking off the boots. He blows out his stomach to keep them up, then he just holds them bunched at the waist in his left hand. Then, like a clap, Bucky knows what’s funny about the pink-quilt man. His scalp has been ripped two-thirds off his head and there it hangs. “Seventeen!” They stop attending to Bucky. His newness is fading. He’s just number seventeen. Soon, between countings, he creeps away, but the dog stays behind, close to the heat of the fire. It was there that he lost the dog.

After that, he keeps hidden in the trees. Pretty soon, he knows he really is close to home, recognizes for certain the shape of the hollow
floor through the tree trunks and brush. And then he begins to recognize the trees themselves, the rocks, he’s played up in here, and Bucky feels, despite himself, his mouth tug up, the corners pull against the black coal crust. As he steps up his pace, his feet butchered in the boots, the pants hobbling him, he thinks he hears cracking noises. Bucky looks over his shoulder.

He sees a man, not running, but a kind of stiff hurry-walking, his arms and hands held up in front of him to break the branches and brush before his face. Elbows out, forearms up, fingers splayed, he crashes through the woods like a blind man, and Bucky can tell now he is shirtless and black-slimed. At first, he doesn’t worry Bucky much, but even so, Bucky hurries up a little, the red rubber boots chafing at his heels and at the sides of the widest part of his feet. Now the crashing and snapping gets louder, and Bucky looks again, and he sees the man is gaining on him. Sees he’s broke out of his quick-walk into a trot. He sees his belly, big and round and tight, jiggle, and now the man calls, “Johnny!”

Bucky begins to jog, still not truly scared, just too close to home to fool with this character right now. He grits his teeth against the tearing in his boots, stumbles into the huge pants legs, and the hand holding the waist not able to pump, that hinders him, too. “Johnny!” the belly man calls again, and Bucky gets more worried. He feels his feet bleed in the red boots, the man hollers, “Johnny! Wait there, boy!” his voice carrying a rockslide in it, and Bucky finally shouts back, “I ain’t Johnny!” But the man, shocking fast despite the enormous shimmying belly and his bare busted feet, sprints a circle around Bucky, then floats in front of him, jogging from foot to foot like a football tackle, his arms spread wide, and it’s all quick, quick, but Bucky somehow has time to see not only the hair all over his chest and belly black with coal slime, but the stripes and scrapes whipped into the slime by the branches, and the blood in the black, too, the man’s eyes streaming white out his black face like he’s coming off a shift. And Bucky, as he
dodges and feints, starts to unnumb, he’s thawing all over, the crust drops away, and Bucky screams, “I ain’t! I ain’t Johnny!” Still the man blocks him, can sidestep Bucky in any direction, Bucky is crying now, and the belly-man takes a different tack, baby-talks him, syrup in his mouth, “Johnny. C’mon, boy. It’s your ole daddy, Johnny.You know it is. Johnny.You know you are,” spooning, crooning, sweet candy voice, like tricking a dog so you can snatch and pen it up. “C’mon, Johnny. Johnny-boy, c’mon, Johnny-cake now,” and Bucky, acting entirely out of instinct, darts, baits the belly man to the right, then spins and tears left, his sores screaming in his boots, but he is gone, the belly-man behind him in his bare feet, booming out that swelled belly-chest: “Johnny! Johnny! You know you are! You know you are now! Johnny! You know it now! Johnny! Johnny!”

Then Bucky grew up, became Avery, and learned. Dr. Livey stuck the money in the book so he’d have to open it up. Avery’d never been a reader before, grew up in a place where you do things, don’t just read about them, and, besides, what books he had read had nothing to do with him, with them. But he opened this book, a study of the disaster aftermath by a sociologist, and there he was, there they were, Buffalo Creek, a little of their history, a lot of their grief, of what they carried with them past 1972, and after that, Avery never stopped learning. He never spoke to Dr. Livey again, either, after finals, and never, to his shame, returned Dr. Livey’s book. But that first book made him find the second book, and the second one made him find the third, and each lesson he learned, far from glutting him, just made him lustier for the history. His greediness for learning it like alcoholism or being in a destructive kind of love.

He taught himself, because they’d never been taught their history (the first thing he learned). Sure, they’d had West Virginia history, in eighth grade, fifty minutes of free-floating information on an overhead projector.The teacher sat humpled, cozy in her fat, behind her desk in
the rear of the room where she could watch them without even shifting off her seat, her mouth moving only to scream threats and order Missy Combs to crank the plastic sheeting. They copied the splintered facts, pencils pressing into greasy desks—highest point in the state (Spruce Knob), lowest point in the state (Harper’s Ferry), geographic center of the state (Flatwoods)—later spat them back to pass or fail multiple choice tests, and when the bell rang, the teacher only had to waddle to the middle of the room and rewind the rollers for the next class.

They didn’t learn their history. Instead they learned the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, mouthed the “Star-Spangled Banner” after that, bowed their heads for the Lord’s Prayer piped over the intercom. They learned
ma’am
and
sir
and to eat all the food on their tray and how to sit and to stand absolutely still for long periods of time; they learned how to wait. They learned to follow the rules, and they were beaten if they did not, their bodies not too good for a whipping, although the poorest of the poor were whaled on hardest and most often, those children, as always, the lesson (the real poor, the poorer than you, the ones who made kids like Bucky see themselves as not poor at all (until you left out and you learned), stumbling furious defiant out the principal’s office, mouths sealed, eyes a shiny blaze (
how many whacks did you get?
) rubbing violent with crusty sleeves their dirty tear-smeared cheeks). They learned not to ask questions, to do as they were told, expect little, they were raised to expect disappointment, this they absorbed from the air around them, a pessimism so pervasive, even before Buffalo Creek, that Avery never recognized it—it was temperature, weather—until he left out and realized how much the other people, at least the other white people, in this country, perceived, expected, desired. And, always, again, the poorest kids, their warning: look what will happen to you if you don’t work hard, do as you’re told, expect little, American poverty Appalachian-style: the shanties and decaying trailers, the retarded and the crazy, those
without plumbing reeking on school buses, the ringworm and scabies and the lice, your daily meal the free one at school, your clothes somebody else’s first and everyone can tell . . . and almost every one of their bodies as white-skinned as your own. That’s what they learned.

But after those hours in the sunlit office of Dr. Livey, Avery learned what they never learned, and he learned why. He learned on his own, beginning at Marshall on time he didn’t have, his business studies left undone so he almost didn’t graduate, but he did graduate, and then he left the state. He couldn’t bear to stay one week longer (and since he graduated from Marshall seventeen years ago, he has never stayed in West Virginia for longer than two weeks at a time), and through his twenties, he lived in thirteen different places, worked more than thirteen different jobs, but he couldn’t stop thinking. His mind didn’t leave.The history continued to ride him (this place sticky with history, history sticky in it), it was as though the interminable motion, the way he could not stay put, was an attempt to run ahead of the history, although now, looking back, it seems the only common denominator of all those shifting years was what he learned. Was the history.

He learned who could get away with what—where, when, and on whom. He learned the February 26, 1972, dam bust was not Pittston’s first, wasn’t even the first one they’d had on Buffalo Creek. He tunneled into the history of slagheap disasters: Letcher County, Kentucky, 1923; Crane Creek, West Virginia, 1924; Buchanan, Virginia, 1942; Aberfan, Wales, 1966 (the only one more deadly than the one he lived through). He read about explosions and cave-ins: Monongah, 1907; Eccles, 1914; Layland, 1915; Benwood, 1924; Farmington and Hominy Falls, 1968; he studied anti-union militancy and mine wars, Paint Creek and Cabin Creek in the 1910s, Blair Mountain, 1921; Matewan. He learned that over 100,000 people were killed in U.S. mines between 1906 and 1977, learned that 1.6 million were injured from 1930 to 1976. That a U.S. miner dies of black lung every six hours.

All the way across the country, Avery learned. He’d put in his shifts, then, finding the best library in the city, hide out in reading rooms, the homeless snoring alongside him. He’d check out the books, plug his ears against stereo-playing roommates and TV-addicted neighbors. At universities, he’d huddle in library carrels, completely and perversely absorbed, so desperately did he want to read it all confirmed, confirmed, confirmed, that he didn’t eat, ignored his bladder, never felt his feet fall asleep. It was one morning at the University of Washington that he stumbled onto the value of a human body. Buried in fluorescent-lit stacks between yellow walls, a dripping umbrella at his feet, Avery turned a page and saw: right there, laid out in print, exactly who counted for how much where. He held his breath without knowing he was doing it. He rushed over the page, then he went back and read it three more times, slow. He learned that a body in some states can cost a killer millions of dollars. In other states, a person is beyond price. He learned that in the state of West Virginia, at the time of Buffalo Creek, a body’s value was capped at $110,000. He learned that some Buffalo Creek family members got for their dead no more than a couple thousand bucks.