Strange as This Weather Has Been (32 page)

“You know where Tommy and Corey’s at?” Dane asks them when they get close enough. B-bo had come up with his head lowered and his right hand jerking his gearshift. Now he jogs in place, his motor idling in his mouth.

“They’re up in the Big Drain,” David says. “Corey and Seth are having a bike contest.”

“Idiot!” B-bo shrieks. “We wadn’t supposed to tell nobody.”

“Oh, idiot yourself,” says David. “Ain’t nobody. Just Dane.”

B-bo squeals his heels in the gravel and speeds off, David following, both moving fast in the direction of the Big Drain. Dane watches. He weighs whether seeing the contest, being there with the others, is worth the dangers of the Big Drain. He sucks on his bread, the nuggets lodged between teeth and tongue a comfort in his mouth. No fish moving. Doesn’t look like rain. Even if it does rain, the water probably won’t come out of the Big Drain because the water always comes from where it shouldn’t, and the Big Drain is where it should. Dane leans over, ties his shoe, and jogs after the twins.

The Big Drain sticks out of Yellowroot Mountain about a third of the way up its side, kind of above Mrs. Taylor’s house, but of course you can’t see it from there. It is hidden, deeply buried in woods and in brush, it’s a secret place, despite how big it is, and the only people who even know about it are those other people have shown. Exactly why it’s there, Dane does not know, he knows only that it’s been there
all his life. It’s twice as tall or more than he is, higher than a regular room, and where it disappears into the mountain, about forty steps from its mouth, it’s capped with a grate. Many people have tried to get through this grate, including Bant one afternoon a few years ago while Dane squatted on the concrete side, watching. Praying that she wouldn’t make it, but the grate is a thick rusted criss-crossed steel and nobody has ever managed to get past it. On its other side, the grate is hung up with shale and slate and rocks and coal, mountain guts, and the guts wash onto the floor of the culvert now and then, the water behind them coming from who knows where.

Dane hauls himself up to its mouth, huffing and stumbling, him made even clumsier than usual by the slice of bread remnant he still carries in one hand, and he passes the NO TRESPASSING signs.
How come they can do what they please with my property, destroy it however they want, and I can’t set a foot on theirs?
Mrs. Taylor again. He pauses at the opening, taking in the scent, a heavy odor of cool dirt and old concrete and get-in-the-ground.
We worked for our house.They can destroy my property we worked for, but I set foot on theirs, they’ll arrest me and haul me off to jail.
He rolls his bread in his mouth, peering into the Drain. Up overhead, the grind of the machinery, them working on Sunday. It is hard to see from light into dark, and although Dane squints and strains, he still makes out only the boys’ drain-distorted voices and their shape. A mucky ankle-deep spit crawls out of the Drain and dribbles from its mouth, and
who knows what all’s in that water,
but the want to see is strong in him, the rain far away, so he steps up inside.

The temperature drops as soon as he enters the tunnel, and now he’s surrounded by the smell. He likes the smell, he hangs his mouth open to taste it, careful not to lose the bread ball in his gums. He walks the culvert spread-legged, straddling the gooey water, his tennis shoes slanting awkward down the concrete walls. His eyes slot open
to the dark like a cat’s, and he sees it is Corey and Tommy and B-bo and David, and also Clyde McCaffey, Seth not here yet. They have to know Dane has come in, but they act like they don’t. This is what they always do, even Tommy ignores him, here where he can afford to, when he doesn’t need Dane to listen. B-bo is trying to climb the drain wall by reversing up one side of the tunnel as far as his tennis shoes will take him, then barreling down through the bottom and sprinting up the other side until he crashes to his knees. The drain rocks and booms with the muffler noises from his mouth. Clyde, a boy about fourteen, catches on and starts shouting his own voice through the drain. His voice is changing, he can holler from low moany
hooooos
all the way up into whistle-pitched shrieks, the concrete rolling and largening his voice, and that sets off David, who sings a commercial tune at the top of his lungs, and Tommy, who makes like a fire whistle, and B-bo, who simply screams. Dane shrinks. He feels the crotch of his pants stretch from the pressure of the straddle, and he wills it not to split. The noise sluices back and forth along the drain walls, deafening and crazy,
and it ricocheted down that hollow. Didn’t shoot straight down. It would bounce from one side to the other. That’s how it completely missed some houses on one side set even lower than houses it hit on the other side,
and he wants to slap his hands over his ears, but he’ll lose his bread.

Only Corey doesn’t holler. Corey stands near the grate to the side of the water, up the wall a little, his arms crossed over his chest, his bike leaning against his hip. His heavy bangs shield the top part of his face like a visor. Dane’s stomach logs grind. Corey wears his camouflage pants and an army green T-shirt, its sleeves pushed up to his shoulder nubs to show off the chamois rag he has tied around his bicep.

Suddenly, they all shut up. They’re watching something behind Dane. Dane turns and sees Seth pushing his bike to the drain mouth. What has shut up the others is not so much Seth’s approach as it is
Seth’s clothes. He wears some sort of racing getup, maybe motocross, and, true, he has outgrown it, the waxy groundhog blubber popping through so the shirt can’t stay tucked, but, still, it is a racing uniform, neon colors and a big black 44. For a moment, it strikes everybody silent.

Tommy is the first to crack it. “Coor-EE! Coor-EE! Coor-EE!” He chants his loyalty, which triggers Clyde again, and then David and B-bo, and Dane, caught off guard, claps his hands over his ears and loses the last of the bread slice to the poison water trickle.

“What’s the winner get?” Clyde asks.

“Ten bucks,” Seth says. Something Dane knows Corey doesn’t have.

“That’s if he wins,” says Corey. “I win, I get to ride his four-wheeler.” B-bo revs the engine in his mouth.

“Clyde’ll mark it,” Corey tells Seth. “Three tries.” Seth nods. Everyone knows Clyde is impartial and has shown up only to see somebody get hurt.

Corey pulls his bike as high as he can up one side of the culvert. Lace bought the bike last summer at the IGA lot off some man from McDowell County, a mock mountain bike with no gears, and it was rusted, so Corey and Tommy have sanded it down and repainted it with some old paint they found that didn’t stick good to metal, which turned the bike into a kind of mess that Corey has convinced himself and Tommy looks tough. Dane watches Corey climb the wall.

Once Corey gets the bike as high as he can up the side of the twelve-foot-tall drain, he pauses and gauges where he’s headed on the far wall. He pounces on the bike. Then he’s pedaling as hard as he can down the face of the wall, Corey so close to the bike it’s like he’s melted to it, and he sprays through the slime in the drain bottom, still pedaling, B-bo shrieking when he gets splashed, and Corey sails up the opposite wall, pedaling still, as high as he can until he has to
spring off the bike to keep from wrecking.The bike crashes back down to the floor of the drain, but Corey lands like a fly on his hands and feet on the curve of the wall. Clyde jumps up with a piece of coal in his hand and scratches a black scrape to mark how high Corey has gone. Corey slides back down, brushes off his hands and knees, and picks up his bike. With an I-don’t-give-a-shit air, just short of a strut, he saunters to a spectating position.

Seth’s bike matches the motocross outfit, a neonish grasshopper green with jet black piping, and Seth claims the bike has twenty-one gears. He clambers up the culvert wall, trying for the offhandedness Corey carried. He doesn’t start quite as high as Corey did, and although he begins pedaling, by the time he hits the bottom the pedals get ahead of his feet so he has to throw his legs out and away from the bike, the pedals spinning free, and he has barely mounted the opposite wall before the bike, not moving fast enough to keep its balance on the incline, starts to sway. Seth slams a shoe to the ground and catches himself before he tips.

“Coor-EE! Coor-EE! Coor-EE!” hollers Tommy.

“I didn’t get a decent start on that one,” Seth says. It’s a mutter, but the culvert swells it to where they all hear.

“You can’t be worried about hurting your bike,” says David.

B-bo and Tommy scream, “Coor-EE! Coor-EE! Coor-EE! Coor-EE!”

Corey sidles back into view. Dane feels himself shrinking, and then there comes to Dane a picture of Corey as a toddler in Pampers, half Dane’s size, Dane holding Corey’s hand, Lace’s voice: “Now you keep an eye on your charge.” Dane looks at Corey climbing up the Big Drain wall and hunkers tighter in his squat.

Corey leaps on his bike.This time he rises a good five inches higher than the last time because this time he will let himself wreck harder. He splits from the bike at the last second, tumbling into a deliberate
roll like a stuntman, his arms wrapped around his head as a helmet, and just before he strikes the water, he springs to his feet. The bike, in the meantime, has slammed to the drain floor with more force than earlier. When Corey pulls it up, they see the fender is so badly bent Corey has to twist it back with both hands to get the tire to turn free. Tommy and B-bo and David and now Clyde drop the name Corey altogether, chanting instead a massive animal grunt—“
HOO! HOO! HOO! HOO!”—
and the
HOOs
spiral the drain walls, ricochet and loop, until they overlap with one another. Dane hunches his shoulders up around his ears.

This time it looks for a little while like Seth might actually forget the bike and try. He manages to drag it to a starting point even farther up than Corey has reached either time, and he pounces onto the bike after it’s already in motion, and he keeps up with his pedals. But, then, again, the hesitation. The second thought. And Seth, in the process of trying not to wreck the bike, turns it over anyway, gently, without damage, far, far short of Corey’s marks.

“Corey won!” screams B-bo.

“COOOREEEE!” shrieks Tommy.

“He did not,” says Seth. “We get three turns.”

“That’s two outta three,” says David. “Ain’t no way you can win.”

Then they hear Corey’s voice, cool, from down the tunnel. “Let’s just erase the two earlier and do er sudden death. Don’t matter to me.”

The confidence in Corey’s voice, the offhand charity he grants Seth—all of this moves in Dane. A mixed-up moving. Dane sees Seth nod at Corey’s offer, but there’s not enough light to see how Seth feels about it. Corey snatches his bike back up the concrete wall, the wheel under the just-bashed fender making a peculiar click. He climbs so high he has to tip his head to keep it from grazing the drain ceiling, it seems he’s too high to even mount the bike without overturning the
moment he does, and Dane flares up in his chest, a hot-chill panic that has nothing to do with the fish and the logs. But Corey does mount the bike, and he does not turn over, and, again, molded against the frame like a movie Indian on a war pony, he swoops down the wall, hits the water so hard it parts more than splashes, and then catapults up the other side, by some miracle still managing to pedal. Too awed to feel fear anymore, Dane watches with his neck craned back from his squat, his mouth gaping open, as Corey shoots up the other side, passing both his old marks, and then, Dane sees, Corey is flying. He is not pedaling anymore, but the bike’s still going, it’s like the bike is coasting, but up, not down, and all five boys realize that Corey’s going for a 360, a complete circuit of the tunnel, marble in a tube, Corey has busted gravity, and every face is upturned, every mouth sprawled wide, while Corey flies.

He’s maybe ten feet short of where he began the circuit, so upside-down his hair streams straight down off the top of his head, when gravity remembers. Dane’s breath makes a quick moan-suck. Corey is coming down first, because by this point, Corey is underneath the bike, and Dane springs to his feet in time to see Corey slam into the bad water, the bike close after him, landing partly on top of his legs. Corey cringes into a crumple, his knees pulled to his chest, his hands cupping his face, and the other boys rush to huddle around him, Tommy dropping on his knees, David pulling at the bike. But Dane cannot move. Rigid leaning forward, straining after Corey with his chest but not moving, his stomach chock-full with the horror of a dead Corey, his face aflame. When he sees Seth sneaking out.

Not blatantly sneaking, he’s too proud for that, he’s making it look like he’s just quietly waddling home, but Dane knows what he’s doing. And he knows, too, that he has to stop Seth, no one else sees, he can make up for not being able to run to Corey by stopping Seth, and as Seth passes him, Dane tries. He reaches out and takes Seth’s thick
soft arm without really clamping down on it, without a real grab, and he is surprised at how taut is the skin stretched over the flesh. Seth snatches the arm away, the fat popping out of Dane’s fingers, and snarls, “Get your goddamned hands offa me.”

Corey is not dead. From his heap in the putrid water, Corey has already sensed what Seth will try. He tosses the bike off his legs, it clattering against the wall, the four-boy huddle scattering in surprise, and Corey vaults up on his one good leg, half of his body soaked in that who-knows-what-all’s-in-it water, and he screams after Seth, “You damn well better get me that four-wheeler ride!”

Seth stops right there in the entrance to the Big Drain and casually turns around. So backlit by daylight he is, Dane can’t see any particulars of him, can’t see the look on his face. He sees only his sloppy silhouette, a box with bulges. Seth, so smug he doesn’t even bother to raise his voice, speaks into the amplifier of the Big Drain: “Soor-ee. My dad says can’t no kids ride that four-wheeler but me.” He pauses. “Liability.”