Strange as This Weather Has Been (41 page)

But Corey doesn’t trust them—he doesn’t think they’re deliberately lying, just isn’t sure they’re bright enough to really know—so he checks on the house for two days from the creek before he decides David is right. At least about them being gone. Who knows about the two weeks part, which means Corey and Tommy need to act fast. Although it’s not like they’re doing something wrong or bad. It’s just Corey picking up his prize.

Because this is where things have got to: Corey’s bike is totaled, he’s tried for hours to fix that wheel, but all he’s done is make it worse. And Bant says he can have hers, but Bant’s is a girl’s. Rabbit in jail for who knows how long, could be years, and Dad more cranky and hateful-acting than ever, him and Mom fighting day and night, and Corey’s not exactly on his good side either, after getting a DUI with Rabbit while under Dad’s watch. Mom didn’t like that at all. Not a snowball’s chance in hell Dad will help Corey now, and there in the old house the parts sit, oh, all that time and muscle and brain Corey put into gathering them together. Because of all that, Corey is being watched close these days, it won’t be easy to pick up his prize, even with Tommy’s help. He was whupped on good, both for going with Rabbit and for tying Tommy up, but ha,
don’t care. Just pretended like it hurt.
The real punishment is how close he’s watched.

So on the third day, when Corey leaves the creek and sneaks through the yard to the shed, it’s after Bill Bozer showed up to see Jimmy and Mom’s long gone at work. Because of the high redwood-colored walls, no one can see him from the road. The shed is one of those portable aluminum things you buy someplace like Lowe’s in a couple pieces, then haul home in your truck and put back together. It doesn’t have a floor. It just sits on these wooden struts and the floor is ground. The double doors in the front of the shed that swing open to let out the four-wheeler are locked, but not with a padlock, although there is a part of Corey that would have liked a padlock, because then him and Tommy could have busted it off with a blowtorch and hacksaw like Dad and Bant did up the hollow. The double doors are locked with a deadbolt you can open from the outside with a key or from the inside with a lever. Corey has a plan.

The next day, after Mom leaves, Corey makes a lot of noise under the house with toy trucks he doesn’t even like anymore, and just when
he figures Dad can’t stand it a second longer, he asks can him and Tommy go to David and B-bo’s house. Dad says go.

At the shed, Corey and Tommy work fast because who knows how long Seth and them will really be away. The bigger the hole grows, and the achier and sweatier Corey gets, the more he not only doesn’t see it as stealing—he’ll put it back after he rides—but the more he sees it as coming to his own rescue.
Righting a wrong,
and Tommy agrees, Tommy was there. They have just the one shovel, and when Corey gets tired, he has Tommy spell him, but it becomes clear fast that Tommy isn’t much of a digger. He gets bored too easily, and he whines. Still, Corey must stay nice to Tommy, both to keep him from telling and because to make a hole big enough for Corey might take extra days. It turns out the ground is not as easy to dig as Corey had thought. And it turns out that Tommy is a lot thicker than you’d think by looking at him, which Corey discovers each new time he makes Tommy try the hole. Ole Chancey is much more taken with the digging than Tommy is. He lies on his stomach with his ears cocked and in his eyes a look similar to the one he uses on squirrels, and now and again, Chancey sails in and helps, but he doesn’t understand how to throw the dirt in the right pile. This is not the first time Corey has wished that Chancey had hands.

It’s late afternoon when Corey decides the hole is big enough for Tommy to squeeze through. His head goes through easy, but right away his shoulders get stuck. Tommy is on his belly in the hole with his head in the shed trying to pull his shoulders and arms after him, and he looks like a dying fish, his spine scooped out the wrong way, squirming his knees to drive himself on through. Corey squats behind him and pushes.

“Don’t poosh!” yells Tommy.

“We gotta get you through, boy. I want this done by supper.” Corey is thinking ahead.

“Let me back out! I’m gonna put my hands in first this time.”

Corey heaves his own shoulder against Tommy’s butt and Tommy kind of squirts ahead and screams at the same time—“Keep it down!” snaps Corey—and then Tommy is through the hole to his waist, and Corey can hear that he is crying, and then Tommy drags his hips on through.

“You scraped my back!You scraped my back!” Tommy has already worked up an abundance of snot, you can hear it in his throat.

Corey hisses, “Tommy! Ain’t you a little man?”

Almost immediately,Tommy quiets. Corey can hear him snuffling and swallowing back the snot. In the meantime, Chancey has tunneled right after him, Chancey and Tommy are both in the shed, and Corey, who has felt the anticipation building in his bladder for some minutes now, has to pee. Desperately.

“It’s dark in here,” calls Tommy.

“I know it’s dark in there. Just walk to the front of the four-wheeler, then feel around the door for the lock.” Corey is jogging from foot to foot.

“Where’s the front of the four-wheeler?”

“Feel for the handlebars, stupid.” Now he’s gripping himself with his hand. He turns towards the back of the shed, pulls down the elastic waist of his shorts just far enough—they don’t have a fly—and pees against the aluminum.

“What’s that noise?” Tommy says. Then, “Oh, here it is,” and just like that, long before Corey expected Tommy to find the lock, he hears the metal doors open with a kind of crack and wump. Corey wheels around towards the front, some pee still coming, it wets his shoes, and he dashes to the shed doors pushing his wet self back in his shorts as he runs.

“They’re in there,” Tommy says with a kind of awe, and Corey knows he means the keys are in the ignition.

“Yes!” Corey whoops. He leaps up in the air and smacks a high five at Tommy’s hand, which he misses.

He dashes to the four-wheeler, touches the ignition, makes sure for himself. Then he climbs the footrests, straddles the machine, and leans his whole body forward over the front, drapes the metal with himself. He half lies there, his stomach gouged by the steering wheel, in the brutal aluminum-soaked shed heat, inhaling the good gas and oil, and Corey feels, for the first time in months, the hard want dissolve away.

It won’t be a problem to start it or drive it. Corey has driven one before, over at the ATV rodeo last year, Dad paid for him to ride around the track, any dummy could drive this here, and Corey is no dummy. But they’re not going to ride it right now, no, he’s already thought through the best plan. They can’t be seen running around on it on a Saturday afternoon. They’ll do it tomorrow, Sunday morning. Not at the crack of dawn, when the engine would draw too much attention. And not in the afternoon, when too many people would be out. But around ten o’clock, when three-quarters of the hollow will be at church and the ones left won’t think nothing of a four-wheeler starting because everybody’s used to engine noise. Four-wheelers, chainsaws, tractor lawnmowers, drills, monster machines working overhead. Everybody’s used to it.

ON WHITE shorts it’s going to show, you know that it will. I hadn’t known about the blood, I’d brought nothing for it. Had nothing with me but my lunch in a Kroger bag which now I wouldn’t eat, and he dropped me off behind the funeral home so the motel people wouldn’t see me leave his truck. I came out from Scott’s parking lot and hobbled up the street, not from pain, but to keep what I thought was more blood from dripping out. To use the bathroom, I had to pass through Hobart’s office, so most days I held my pee a long long time. He was watching some show about men fishing in a swamp, the little office reeking its Hobart smell, crushed stale crackers and old man body. Made me want to spit. I shuffled through with my legs together, wondering what he could see on the seat of my pants, and then I was thankful for the fishing show, the air conditioner. It would have been past bearing if on top of everything else, Hobart could hear me in the bathroom too.

Once I got my shorts down, I saw most of the stickiness was not blood. I had to take toilet paper, ball it up, hope it stayed steady in my pants. Back outside, I took my brush from the gasoline jar, dipped it
into paint, pulled it out, and watched it spray blue across my thigh. That was the first I knew I was shaking.

We’d argued for some time, which would come first, me giving it to him or him showing it to me. Finally I gave in because I thought I had way more to lose than he did, and if I’d give up all that, why wouldn’t he do his little bit to help me out with the other? What reason would he have not to?

His finger first, a hurt both dull and sharp. Raggedy nail edge. He decided he didn’t want it along the creek, didn’t want it on the rocks, so he’d scouted out a secret daytime place where he could park his truck. Then he wanted it in the truck bed, not the cab, he wanted it stretched out on a blanket on the ridges there, but I couldn’t do it out in the open like that, up some dirt road just one hill over from Left Fork. There were for me no secret places here. And he said if they can see us in the bed, they’ll see us in the cab. But I needed around me at least that steel.

In the movies, it was always dark, or close to it. In the real, the windshield blew up the sun like a magnifying glass.We were undressed only where it mattered, his jeans peeled off his hips, no underwear, my shorts dangling off one ankle.We wore our shirts and we wore our shoes. Me forced up against the passenger door, the window handle in my back, the armrest, too, and he felt like a muscle between my legs. The sweat helped, the slickness there. The slickness, the glare of the cab, and a pounding that had nothing to do with any way I’d ever moved or’d want to. That dull pounding after the hurt, my back against the door, my spine crunched up, jammed again and again. Against that door. The sun was in my eyes, and I closed them and saw red, but what happened had nothing to do with fire. Something smelled like rain in loam. Something smelled like fish thawing. The cab rocked to where I heard his thermos rolling a little on the mat below me, and after, he picked his cap off the floor and twirled it on
one finger. I saw blue paint on his face. “God, girl,” he said. “You’re tough.” Like for the first time he respected me now.

 

The strange cool had left out of here and the weather had gone back to how it knew it should be in August, and then it went even past that. Making up for the other. Hard to sleep at night, me skimming along, a heatwet with a weight, a push, a push you awake, my jammed-window room glaring with the bright gas smell, and some nights I would end up like an animal would figure out, down on the floor, the little coolness there, and a few nights I got all the way out to the porch, if the heat was worse than the bugs. I figured Jimmy Make would think that was where I was going, if he noticed me slipping out at all, on the night I was supposed to get my half of the deal. I would leave before Lace got home. It was just Tommy and Dane she’d check on when she got in, Corey only because he was in the same room with them. Nobody worried about Corey and me.

Three days after we did it, R.L. said he’d take me up. Saturday night he had off that week, and he figured Saturday would be safest anyway, they were working a skeleton crew.The hollow screaming with locusts and all the other little things, the way they’d scream loudest in the hottest heat. I felt that green all around me, even in the dark it was green, you knew, it was a wrapping green, overpowering the houses, their puny lights, that green pressing, cradle or stall. Those heavy plants making up for the other, and the hills under plants, and the blackness inside the hills, beating, so you were five times layered, you knew, five layers held, heat, scream, green, hills, and the black inside. Pressing. I’d told him to pick me up in front of Seth and them’s because they didn’t talk to no one and Mrs. Taylor across the road slept early in the back room. He had his headlights off, but his engine idling. When I opened the door, the cool air shocked my skin and the dome light cut on and he smiled.

I liked to ride in the dark with the windows down, night pouring over me, but I knew he wanted the AC. When he wasn’t shifting gears, he drove with one hand reached over on my thigh, and once I looked down to the nail there. I knew what had happened had moved him in the direction opposite from where it had moved me. He’d already said something about me visiting his family in Ohio. I’d said nothing back. I knew by this time you could measure in inches how far this boy went down. I’d got there now.

Before the guard shack, I ducked on the floor, covered myself with a nubbly motel blanket, the stink of old cigarettes in it. I felt those truck guts working right under my knees, the metal surge, and I couldn’t hear what lie he made up for the guard.Then we were in, I felt us powering up the hill, and I climbed back in the seat. Looked out on that wide company road, we were flying, and it was gravel, yes, but it was still smoother and broader than the paved county and state roads the trucks busted all to pieces down where regular people drove. Since we’d done it, I’d only seen him once, while I was painting. We hadn’t yet been alone in this way, and now that we were, I knew for sure.There was no place else in him to go. It was like how me and Dane came up that one time on an electrified fence, and Dane was scared to go through it, and one of us needed to touch it, to make sure. And all I did was walk near the line, I didn’t even touch it, without touching it I knew there was no current there, and I was right. The road got steeper, two coal trucks hammered past us, R.L. gunned the pickup harder, and then we lost all the trees. We were rising up out of the hills.
Out of the holding, out of the holding hills,
I said a little song in my head.

Then I realized we’d come out on the mine top. There was no moon overhead, and I tried to remember if there’d been moon down home because here, of course, there’d be no moon overhead, here moon was underfoot. The bald ground prickled sharp all over with artificial lights, and far beyond those, a few dulled stars. He banged
the truck behind and away from where they were working, away from the brightest lights, him dodging dirt knobs like mini-mountaintops and weird little plateaus, and even though we hadn’t been close to that sky-high dragline to begin with and were now heading away from it, I still couldn’t see to the top of it out the truck window. Could see mostly only the horrible big block of its base. R.L. was swinging and banking through tracks and trenches, the dead land silvered, strangely shadowed, and with the land as tore up as it was, he had to shift often, and I thought, good. Get that raggedy nailed hand off me.