Strange as This Weather Has Been (31 page)

After Avery read this, he looked up from his book. Took several shallow breaths. Even now, thirteen years later, Avery can remember how, with those shallow breaths, he gradually became conscious of his own body. Not the twenty-seven-year-old body cramped in the carrel, but his twelve-year-old body, the memory battered into that. The disaster was carved into his body like grooves in a phonograph record, and the page about the prices, they played his skin back. Freezing, bruised, torn, naked, black, his own skin and muscle and mind and bone, how hard he fought, from Tad’s crushed bedroom to his own flooded house, to save that body. The sacrifices he made in the eight hours it took. He saw Bucky’s body, and Tad’s, and the pink-scalp man, and the lady under the pallet, and the one hundred and
twenty-three others who died that morning on Buffalo Creek, and then the thousand who lived, irreparably damaged, body and mind.

Nobody was ever the same after. Bucky grew up fast after February 26, everybody did, the adults turned old, the kids either brittled or they broke. Avery brittled. He sees right off the worst in everything, doomsday in his head. He lives in nonstop knowledge something bad’s about to happen—and again today, standing under decapitated mountains, he feels that sick trickle of relief—and no matter how often it doesn’t, he can’t stop looking for it to come. He keeps to himself, doesn’t get close to anyone much, drove his first wife crazy that way, found a second one who doesn’t mind it too bad. Turned smartass, cheeky and moody, for a dozen years after the flood, although now he knows to keep that to himself, and, always, the insatiable appetite for confirmation of how bad things really are, the only comfort Avery gets. And the Clancy boy, Steve, the one Mom brought up, who lived through the flood, then died in a wreck driving too fast drunk. How people tried to tell that he risked it because he thought nothing could kill him after he beat that flood. Avery smiles. Avery knows it wasn’t that, even back then he knew it. Avery knows it is the opposite. Knows it isn’t a sense of invincibility, but a consciousness of your own vulnerability, of your own insignificance, an awareness so profound it shakes hands with suicide. There were lots of people, Avery learned, who didn’t want to live after Buffalo Creek. And what’s a body.What’s a body. What’s a body to do? What’s a body. What’s a woman, man, a girl a boy a stream a tree a hill . . .

Because of course it wasn’t just people who were sacrificed. This sacrifice of land, what he stands in now, is nothing new, it has been regularly slaughtered for well over a hundred years, Avery learned that, too, the whole region had been killed at least once. Trees razed, mountains stripped, streams poisoned, and for a long time, not even any deer to speak of, no bear or turkey either, and the buffalo and panther will never
come back. Although the trees have tried, and Avery looks up towards Cherryboy, though degraded, fewer-specied second- and third-growth. And the deer have come back, though adulterated, imported Michigan mule deer crossbred with the whitetail. And a few streams flushed themselves, and some of the slashed mountains are camouflaged with grass. And Avery remembers a hundred rides home, driving the state from top to bottom, Wheeling to Yellowroot, the land suspended in its fragile reincarnation, and Avery, near delirious with exhaustion and homesickness, watching how the brush tries to cover the mess.Watches the vegetation, an obscenity or grace, vining over ruined industry and failed farms, the plants lush against the machinery, the dead rusted metal. Against abandoned drift holes, barns, depots, houses, tipples, steel mills, glass factories, oil refineries, wrecked cars, chemical plants, failed theaters, packing sheds, gutted stores, chickenhouses, leaning silos, broken bridges, shut-down schools, busted dams. Only the churches fresh, it seems to him, and the Wal-Marts hacked into hillsides, and the chain convenience stores governing oft-traveled crossroads. This place not pure, and how that somehow makes him more tender for it, makes him love it deeper, for its vulnerability, for its weariness and its endurance. This place so subtly beautiful and so overlaid with doom. A haunt, a film coating all of it. Killed again and again, and each time, the place rising back on its haunches, diminished, but once more alive . . . Only this, Avery knows, will finally beat the land for good.

Avery takes a slow final look, the corpse-colored ground, the strangled creek, the lopped-off mountains, and on the edge of the mine, three spindly trees. This is a disaster less spectacular, more invisible, than Buffalo Creek. This disaster is cumulative, is governed by a different scale of time. Chronic, pressing, insistent, insidious. Kill the ground and trees by blasting out the coal, kill all the trees you don’t kill the first time through acid rain, kill the water with the waste you have to dump, and then, by burning the coal—Avery smirks, he’s on a roll—heat up
the climate and kill everything left. Because Avery has come to understand (not learn, but understand, confirming) that the end times his mother obsesses about won’t arrive with a trumpet and Jesus come back all of a sudden and everybody jump out of their graves. No. It is a glacial-pace apocalypse. The end of the world in slow motion. A de-evolution, like the making of creation in reverse. The End Times are in progress right now, Avery is walking on them . . .

Tad’s mother screaming, and at first Bucky, thought-fumbling, couldn’t place where he was, but the scream pulled him far enough out of sleep to hear a roar like a hurricane happening in his ear, its volume shooting louder by the second, and in that roar, the
pops
and
cracks
and
whush.
Then Tad’s father screaming back at his mother, and then an enormous grating noise, closer than the screams, and Bucky saw out the window opposite the bed—again, him thought-fumbling, he saw and he heard, but he could not understand—that the house next door was coming into Tad’s room.

The window shattered. Tad sprang off the floor and into bed with Bucky, and now Bucky could tell Tad’s parents were screaming Tad’s name, but he couldn’t tell where they were, inside, outside. He felt the house shift a little, it clenched its teeth against the pressure, it tried, but he felt it give, and he and Tad bounded off the bed and to the top of the stairs, saw black water torrenting through the first-story rooms.

The house groaned and swayed. Still clinging to each other, they ran into a bedroom on the downstream side of the upstairs, away from where the neighbor’s house was coming in, Bucky reaching for a chair to break out the window but Tad already had the pane up, and then there was the screen, Bucky socking at it, butting his body into it, and he popped out enough of it that they could struggle through onto the roof over the side porch. Now the house is truly moving, the roar so deafening they can’t hear each other unless they pull up and scream in an ear, even though they are linked by their arms. Bucky whips his head to the left, glances out over the narrow bottom, sees a mountain of black water tearing through Lorado carrying big stuff all in it, sees people splashing, sees a house fall forward on its face, then he sees across the way a man in a crouch on his garage roof, suspended, his arms extended like wings, choosing whether to dive off or hang on. A car gallops down on him and knocks him into the flood. Tad’s house coasts, free, and the roof begins to tilt, and they start sliding down the slick tin, at first scrabbling with fingers and nails and knees the ridges in the roofing, but finally Bucky grabs Tad’s hand and they leap into the water, off to the side as far away from the path of the house as they can jump.

Bucky loses hold when they hit the thick cold greasy water, then he surfaces and spots Tad’s blond head in the black slush. Tad’s mouth and eyes are bawled open, he is screaming, then a wave chops into Bucky’s mouth, the horrible taste to it, death and coal dirt, and Bucky realizes his own mouth had been as open as Tad’s. Bucky goes under. Spinning, a pressure like pliers on his chest, he can’t tell backwards from forwards, up or down either. Something bigger than he is clips his shoulder and his legs are tangled in long thin metal sheeting, and as he fights that, yet another object kicks him to the top again. Eye-level with the debris, he catches sight, between the black peaks of waves, of Tad not far away.Tad’s climbed up on something, and Bucky
thrashes towards Tad, they’re both moving in the same direction, Tad spread-eagled on his stomach on a mattress and screaming directions to Bucky that Bucky can’t hear. Bucky gains on Tad, more from the push of the torrent than through his own effort, then Tad reaches both hands to Bucky, the mattress twisting and bucking, but Tad still reaches. Then he has Bucky, jerks him towards him, and Bucky snatches hold the mattress, and the mattress buckles and lists and twists as Bucky tries to mount it, and it almost overturns and throws Tad off, but Tad somehow balances it. And then the two of them are tangled on the mattress, clinging to its edges and to each other, the mattress spinning and pitching. Tad bleeds on the fabric, but Bucky can’t tell from where, Tad is too black-coated, and neither can he tell how much blood there is because of how the rain and the floodwaters have thinned it and spread it.Then Bucky is distracted from the blood by a flash of light, wild sparks, then a series of explosions—power poles toppling, a transformer blowing up, the wires hitting the water with sizzle and smoke—and then the mattress slams into something he doesn’t see and he and Tad are tossed back in.

Again, the utter loss of direction, of place. Again, the crush in his chest, and Bucky flutters his eyes open and sees a black darker than air ever gets. Bucky spins, lashes his arms around for anything that floats, rams his elbows into debris, his shoulders, his knees, and finally gets his hands into a mess of chickenwire tacked to the side of a shed. And then Bucky sees—and this time it’s miraculous, downright unbelievable (so much so that at times Avery continues to wonder if it happened at all (while the dead-center of him knows it did))—Bucky sees on the far side of the tar-papered shed roof the blond head, ragged full of black coal, but the blond comes through, Bucky sees Tad clawing onto the chickenhouse roof.

Then the chickenwire tears away with Bucky’s weight, vanishes into the swill, and he has to hold onto the shed itself, like Tad is trying to do
across from him. He tries gripping the thin eave of the roof, but there isn’t enough jut for him to get a real hold. He’s thrown all of himself into his hands and into a little piece of his mind that knows how to hold on, and that mind piece tells him not even to bother spreading his arms to clutch the roof by its corners, it is too wide. He is going to have to climb up on top.

Bucky screams this at Tad, what he’s going to do, but Tad just stares back at him, empty-eyed, his teeth bared. He can’t hear what Bucky is saying, and how in God’s name is Tad holding on? Bucky cannot tell. He starts fighting his way onto the roof, first dragging himself with his elbows until he’s flat on it to his waist. From there, he’s able to hook up a knee. He pauses a second, and it comes to him, it seems, it does, what’s going to happen next, and he screams again at Tad, Tad again gazes back, bald-eyed, and Bucky can’t hold the awkward position any longer. He heaves his whole body up using his hands and the knee. Bucky’s sudden full weight on the roof plunges it down on his side, pitches the other side up in the air. Bucky throws himself flat on the roof to stabilize it, and the Tad side of the roof splashes back down to the surface. But Tad is no longer there.

Some dream of water walls, Avery has learned, and some dream of logs coming at them. Some dream of scaling the hills, all alone, the last person left on earth, and some just dream of running, run all night long and wake without rest. His brother Ronald still dreams of stepping on bodies, although Ronald never did, dreams of a body turning up under his feet, and his mother still dreams the loss of Bucky. Some don’t dream because they can’t remember. Instead, they live in the constant horror that one day they will recall, one night they will dream. But Avery dreams this: “Bucky, grab hold my arm!” And he can’t, not to save his mind nor his soul, know if Tad really screamed, or if the scream is dream, too.

ALL SUNDAY morning and into early afternoon Corey and Tommy work on Corey’s bike in the road. Dane pretends to watch the races with Jimmy Make, but every once in a while, he goes to the window to check on them. Jimmy tells him to settle his butt down. NASCAR makes Dane want to fall asleep, and he used to wonder if that was because he didn’t understand it or if what he was understanding was all it was. He has decided he must not understand because it casts a spell on both Jimmy Make and Baron, the two of them paralyzed on the sofa with their mouths slightly open. Finally on one of his trips to peek out the drapes, which Jimmy has drawn to make the races more vivid, Dane sees that Corey and Tommy have gone. He grabs a piece of bread while Jimmy’s not looking and heads out to see what they’re into now.

As he walks down the road, he squishes the soft bread into little packed balls that he sticks in his mouth and sucks, rolling them over his tongue. It seems anymore all he wants to do is eat. No threat of rain in the sky, far as he can see, but the road, the yards, too, are empty, nobody about, and Dane wonders if that is because of the races or the
heat. No fish swim in him. Just the jammed logs, heavy and grating, the chock-full ride in his gut, and still, he wants to eat, pile more in.

He sees two figures trotting up the road towards him, but he knows they aren’t Tommy and Corey because the two figures are exactly the same height. It’s the twins, David and B-bo. Even though they’re identical—each blond mallet head shaved uneven, near bald in spots, brushy in others—you can easily tell them apart. David acts normal, while B-bo acts like a car with bad brakes.