Strange as This Weather Has Been (34 page)

The third time he touched, it was my elbows and wrists. Me squatting, the backs of my thighs sweating on the backs of my calves, and he rested a hand on each of my arms. He cooled me to my shoulders and down into my hands. And it stopped my brush for as long as he held.

The fourth time he touched, I was painting around a corner, where Hobart couldn’t see. I was standing, and he came behind me again and just barely laid his whole body on mine, his body nearly matching me there. This time it made not cool, but heat. He stepped back. I heard his breath lift into his throat. He pressed again, but now it was hard, it was full. I felt a hot streak from my belly button down. I’d never known about that before.

Then, during lunch, I saw Sharon less often. I’d have to kneel on the floor of his cab so nobody’d see me leaving with him, me against the door on the passenger side, watching. The dirt on his boots, his hard hand pulling gears. At first all he did was kiss me. At first,
kissing was enough for us both.When he’d come back in the mornings, before he showered, he wore dirt like a snakeskin ready to shed, but under that, I felt what was in him. Not many people you could do that way, feel what was in them like that, and even if you told yourself you didn’t like what was in them, it was a thing you were feeling and not with many you did. I never asked him, “Some hills in Ohio look like these here, how can you?” And I could not stop. Like getting up on a high place and the ground down under calling you to jump off.

I wasn’t scared of it anymore. It wouldn’t have happened the summer before. Just a year and a half ago, me standing on the outside of the school steps, waiting for the bus, my hand up on the railing at about the second stair, when someone came and pushed up against my fingers with the zipper of his jeans. Donald Glen. I felt a hardness also spongy, hardness with a give, and I knew what it was, but I could not move. He had his jacket spread open so it was hard for other people to see, and me, shamed to tell it, shamed to think it now. Me frozen there. It was like I feared if I jerked my hand away everyone would notice then, or maybe I was thinking if I didn’t jerk my hand away, Donald would think not even I was noticing, it would be like it wasn’t happening at all. His teeth bared in this gone-away grin, him looking off and his eyes all glass. Then the buses finally pulled in, and I snatched my fingers away and grabbed my books. I wanted to spit on the back of my hand. I wanted to raw it past the skin clean.

But R.L. made me want to touch him even when he wasn’t trying to make me, and me not wanting to and at the same time wanting to so bad it was like the not wanting made the wanting worse. And he wanted me back, he did, me, this bony body, this bony face. Before, it had only been the Donalds and only in the Donald ways, dirty and sneaky and low snicker voices spoken in huddles. But this one, along with the bad he brought in me, the shame, the guilt, he also softened my bones. He cleared up my face.

I rode on the floor, no secrets in this town. Jimmy Make dropped me off a minute before my shift started, picked me up right after it ended. Hobart always got his money’s worth, he watched me close, and R.L. shared a room with an older guy named Ray who slept all day.We didn’t talk much when we were together. We were always lying low. It was grope and touch and rub, hand skin mouth, it comes natural when you’re always only hiding together, to take advantage of your bodies there. When you are fifteen years old and there is nobody to see.

Hover of gasoline. Something about to flame.

Noon sun in a thicket of willows, little thrashy close-together things down along the creek. Rocks hard under your back, and it was very bright. Too much to see. Or the cab of the truck pulled up some dirt road and nosed into brush, leaf shadows and a shiver across my back, the somebody’s coming, the getting-caught fear. Soon, I did want more than the kissing, but he was already way ahead. Some things he did I didn’t even understand until later—his hand pushing my head towards his lap, his fingers searching for places I just barely knew—but I understood where to stop. Push his hands away. We didn’t talk, not ever, it was all by touch. And I’d mark him, later you could see. Blue wrists.

When we did talk, eventually I asked him about Yellowroot. “Shit,” he’d say. “I don’t know what’s behind that fill. I don’t even go near there. That’s not what I do, that part of the site.” Southeast Ohio boy. Talked more like West Virginia than the workers from other states did, walked more like West Virginia, motioned his hands like men here did. Familiar, it would lull you. Make you trust. Then I’d go home, hear the destructing overhead, Lace talking, and I’d come back to myself. I’d come back full to myself, it wouldn’t be just the him parts ruling me, and I’d think, how can you?
Now, Bant, you know bettern that.
Sometimes, lying in bed at night, I’d punch myself. Sock my right fist into the muscle of my other arm. Feel it. Ohio scab-boy. He’s up there right now.You know he is.

The first few times I pushed his hands off, he was gentle about it. He’d just go back to what he was doing before, not even open his eyes. I would open mine, I’d see. But after not too long, all I’d do was take hold his wrists, and he’d jerk clear away. Heave his back against the truck seat if we were in there, flop over on the rocks at the creek, always with a pissed-off grunt (
you know how they are, it’s the same with them all. Babified.
You go on and want them anyway). And when he did that, he would open his eyes, but he wouldn’t look at me. He wouldn’t any longer see. Then, without me thinking, my fingers would go to my face.

“I’m just fifteen,” I’d tell him.

“So? I was doing it at twelve,” he’d say.

I knew, do it and get a baby and you’ll never be your own self again. Like Lace did with Jimmy Make. Like Lace got with me.

“I’ll use something, darlin,” sometimes he tried to reach me sweet, but then I knew it wasn’t just the baby. It was partly that I didn’t need to do it no further, I’d had enough before anything between my legs. But also it was something beyond that that I needed to keep.That had nothing to do with my body.

I’d taste that dust on him no matter how hard he washed. Far too many times I savored Yellowroot grit in my mouth.
I don’t even go near there.
I thought he was lying, how could he work up there every night and some days and not see? Along the creek one time, while he lay beside me after I’d had him in my hand. The blanket messed up, me sickish in my stomach, wiping with leaves. The narrow little willow leaves that did no good, the bigger dead leaves swept down by the creek, them falling apart and sticking in crunchy bits to my skin. Even then, I felt the pull. Boy like the way a thunderstorm before it happens sizzles invisible in air. How can you, Bant. How can. This different Bant the boy made.

Scab. How one called you to pick it. Until the pink hurt under the crust.

A MONTH after we came home, I got on at the Dairy Queen. Jimmy Make wouldn’t take a job like that, and I knew it was my fault we’d come home, so I got on. Still, I believed if Jimmy Make would just lower himself to do something regular along with me, we’d get by okay, it was a whole lot easier to be poor up Yellowroot than in Raleigh, North Carolina. But, no. If he couldn’t find a “real job,” he had to “work for himself,” so he started cutting grass and doing handyman jobs. Problem was, most people around here know how to fix their own stuff and couldn’t afford a handyman even if they needed one. I didn’t say much, though. Didn’t feel I could, not then, not yet.

Even though I was working thirty-five, thirty-seven hours a week, I tried to get up into the woods that summer as much as I could, and I made sure to take with me what kids would go. City’d made me understand again how little else I had to give them, but city’d also made me see how woods were almost enough. Tommy was old enough to go by then, and Dane’d come most of the time. I’d leave Bant to look after Corey, Corey never took much interest in woods for woods’ sake, and Bant, going on fourteen, wouldn’t do anything with me anymore
unless I made her. The boys and me’d blackberry some, but mostly we just walked, or sat and listened, or played in the Ricker Run. And it was only in the woods I felt less lonesomeness for Mom. I tried to feel her in the cemetery, but there it never came, I felt her only in the woods, so I’d lead the boys to certain places without telling them why. Feel Mom’s seat on logs where she’d rest. Lay my hand on trees where I knew Mom’d laid hers. But I stuck to Cherryboy during those roamings, I almost never took the boys up on Yellowroot or even up Yellowroot Creek. That’s how I knew later that I knew then, I just had to keep it still a secret from myself.

I was already hearing a few things at the Dairy Queen, though. And in truth, I was already seeing it in the creek. I tried to fool myself about that too, said,
well, maybe you just remember the water as clearer than it really was, memory does that kind of thing.
But nothing could cover that day in August Corey and Tommy brought back two of those big margarine tubs full of rotting crawdads. Or the afternoon a week later when I looked out the back window and saw what Tommy had in his hands.

I was rushing around getting ready for work and arguing with Jimmy Make at the same time—“Me working a full shift, and you can’t take twenty minutes to pick up this place?” “I’m working, too! Just because I’m not out there cutting grass don’t mean I’m not working, I’m working just as hard drumming up business, it’s an investment, what I’m doing now”—when something caught my eye out a window I was passing. Tommy standing in the creek in nothing but a pair of shorts, mud smeared over his belly, and studying something he held in each hand. I stopped and squinted. It was full-sized dead fish that he held.

“Drop em!” I heard myself scream.

His face snapped up towards the window in surprise, and he did, the fish sliding out of his hands. Then I was rushing out, I was jerking
him up over the bank to the outside spigot, and then I was scrubbing his hands, “Bant!” I heard me hollering. “Get me some soap!” Then Bant was there, handing me the dishwashing stuff off the sink and saying, “What’s wrong, Mom? They’re just dead fish.”

I couldn’t help telling my work friend Rhondell about it as soon as I clocked in. She was busy refilling the soft serve machine, on her tippytoes hefting the sloppy mix bag over the machine’s mouth—“Well, my god. My god. Uh-uh-uh. Uh-uh-uh”—I wasn’t real sure how close Rhondell was even listening. Then all of a sudden there came a voice right behind me: “Poisons in the runoff got em.”

I wheeled around, and here of all people, it was Dunky talking.This girl no more than nineteen, came from farther than anybody else to work, from clear over in Boone County. And I’d tried to be friendly with her at the beginning, but Dunky always acted real nervous, so I gave up. Now I looked at her behind her big purplish glasses, and said, “What poisons?”

“Mercury.” Dunky took one finger and pushed her glasses back up her nose. “Lead, arsenic, cadmium, copper, selenium, chromium, nickel.” She stopped and swallowed, got this look on her face like she’d just realized we might think she was showing off, and that’s not what she meant at all. “At least that’s what’s in the slurry,” she said kind of apologetically. “Do you know what’s over top you-all?”

Rhondell actually busted out laughing. I just stared at Dunky, her round cheeks under her cheek-shaped glasses, her skin completely without lines, unlived, I’d thought that skin said, but now I saw I was wrong. I’d never even heard the word “selenium” before. “How do you know?”

“My mother-in-law learned about it.” She looked down at her feet now. “You should see what all they’re doing back in where we live at.”

Now we all knew who Dunky’s mother-in-law was. Loretta Hughes,
the woman Rhondell was convinced was having an affair with Charlie Blizzard. Sometimes Dunky drove herself to work, but often Loretta dropped her off, and usually during those drop-offs, Loretta and Charlie Blizzard would hole up in a hard red booth in the corner farthest from the counter, kind of behind the trash cans, each of them nursing a small black coffee or maybe nothing at all. They’d crouch forward there towards each other, talking furious and shoving papers back and forth, Loretta sometimes getting so worked up she’d throw her hands around, but always, always, keeping it low enough that you couldn’t exactly hear her words. Rhondell had it in her head it was an affair, and up to that day Dunky spoke, I’d played along, it helped to pass the time. Even though I knew it was no affair, not with Dunky right there watching and the way Loretta and Charlie would get so mad, but not at each other.

The next day when Loretta came in, I watched her and Charlie in a different way. I even made a point to empty the trash can near them, and although I couldn’t tell exactly what they were up to, I thought I overheard Loretta saying something about blasting. The time after that, I thought about getting Dunky to introduce us, but part of me still didn’t really want yet to know. A week later, though, I asked Dunky, and she said sure.

We walked up to them during my break. I saw they were working with a magnifying glass on something that looked like newspaper classifieds. Charlie was on the far side of the table facing us, but we could see only Loretta’s back, and as we got close, he glanced up, nodded sharp and quick, then brought his arm around the paper to shield what was there. Then Loretta swung her head around, and Dunky said, “She’s the one’s just got the fish kill behind her house,” and when Dunky said that, Loretta Hughes’s face sprung wide open. I saw Loretta’s face wasn’t scared of nothing.

“Well, you just set right down here, buddy,” Loretta said, “you just
set yourself down.” She scooted over and slapped the seat beside her. “What’s going on up above you all?”

After that, I learned fast. Loretta and Charlie had educated themselves, they were two of the first, but there were other people too, like Patty McComas, and Jim Corbin and his wife Mavis, and Jeannie Thurst. They were ahead of people like me because their places were already being destroyed, and the Dairy Queen was their main gathering place. Most other restaurants around had closed except for Fox’s, and Fox’s didn’t allow that kind of talk. It was a permit they’d been studying that day I first met them, they’d learned how to interpret them, and they’d taught themselves chemistry, geology, hydrology, biology, politics, law. It was amazing what all they’d taught themselves, Loretta with nothing but a high school diploma and Charlie without even that, but when I mentioned it once to Charlie, he just grunted, “You’d be surprised how quick you can learn about something that’s on the verge of killing you.”