Strange as This Weather Has Been (42 page)

We hadn’t hardly spoke a word the whole way up, but now I felt a tight flutter in his quiet, and I knew he was scared. I was past scared, I had got that way once what had happened happened. I had in me a few streaks of hope, but more than anything else I felt numb unbelief. I was finally here, so close, but most of me still couldn’t believe I would at last see, at last know. It was like when I was little and waiting for Christmas, waiting so hard for so long that by the time we got within days of it, I no longer believed it would come at all. So that when it really did come, it had already been stolen by the unbelief. He stopped the truck behind a rise that would hide it.

We were on a part of the mine they must have already worked out, and we stepped out in a big shadow there, beyond the reach of the lights. The machines destructing right alongside of us sounded different than they did destructing overhead. I craned my neck and my back to take in the dragline, its own neck swinging. All lit up along itself like a ski lift I’d seen on TV ads for Snowshoe. He started off with my hand in his, but I hung back enough so that our fingers slipped apart. I was looking around, trying to figure out in what direction Cherryboy might be, the impoundment, but nothing has no direction. Upside-down peel of moon,
skin you alive,
she’d tell us in second grade, and I’d see that inside-out kid, bloody snagged in a barbed wire fence. Ohio boy, Scab-boy, sorry scared boy, I followed him, still straining
for where the top of the valley fill might be, and the unbelief in me knew he didn’t know where he was going.

I followed him, the dark tank top, floating, the Skoal can scar in his right hip pocket, and over that killed ground, I’m telling you, you didn’t walk so much as coast, there was nothing in such ground to hold you, only the dead crunch under your feet. And lying naked to sun like the ground had all day, it had sopped up heat, and now the day heat fogged up off the surface, rising around us. He moved quick, keeping to trenches, behind mounds and rock piles. At times, he crouched to listen, tugging me down with him when he did. The layers that had pulled me to him had dropped away like snakeskin, and then he was stark to me, normal to me. Finally he was less than that.

Then it wasn’t just distance and direction I lost track of, it was time, too. I could mark a few places by things that happened—the time we were all of a sudden to our shins in some nasty muck-filled pond; the time a truck passed not far away, and he outright dove into a ditch and knocked me down with him; the time we almost walked off a high wall. R.L. first, him catching his feet like he was slamming on brakes, throwing out his arms to his sides, and when I crept up to see, I was peeking over a sheer rock drop some twenty feet high. Sometimes I could see clear where we were walking, in the foil-colored fake light. Other times I moved by foot feel. I did it without fear while feeling all along the fear off him, and he didn’t talk to me, and I didn’t talk to him because I didn’t want to know for sure that he didn’t know at all. What I had lost for it. What I had paid.

Then we came around a high dozed-up mound of dirt, and there sat a pickup truck. First thing I thought was it was somebody else’s truck. Then my stomach turned and dropped, and I knew it was his truck, and anger tears almost flashed hot in my eyes, and the near tears made me even angrier. And I heard him say, “I told you there wasn’t no impoundment up here.”

My chest surged, and I felt my arms stiffen, and I heard myself say, “You tricked me. God
damn
you.”

He stepped back, hackled his shoulders a little, and if I could have seen his face, I knew it would hold some self-righteous glare. “I did not trick you. I got you up here, didn’t I? It just ain’t here.”

“You have no fucking idea whether it’s up here or not. You had no fucking idea where you were going the whole goddamned time.” I heard myself almost sob, and it made me hate myself, I held my breath to make it stop, and the next thing he said, he didn’t sound mad so much as confused.

“Listen, baby, I wouldn’t trick you. I love you.” He paused there, like he was giving me time to take that good news in. “It just ain’t here.” He reached out his arm, like he was going to comfort me, but that just made me harden. I backed off to where he couldn’t touch me, and I said, “I’m going on. See for myself,” and I turned and walked away.

I walked away, and he came after me, snatching at my bare arm, he accidentally scratched me with the nail, and I about hauled off and punched him, but something held me back, him rambling, “Are you crazy?You ain’t gonna find nothing. If I couldn’t of found it, how the hell will you?” Me still walking, faster now, jerking away when he touched me. “You’ll just get stuck up here and they’ll arrest you. If you don’t kill yourself first.”

I started trotting. I was to myself enough by then that I was careful where I laid my feet, but I trotted. He kept right with me, then he started talking something else, I should’ve known he wasn’t really worried about me getting arrested or killed. “And what if they catch you? And they find out I brung you up here?” He was huffing a little, trying to keep up. “I’ll lose my job, quicker’n that. They’ll fire me.” Now I heard a wobble in his voice, and it made me hate him harder. “I have to have this job. You know that. Where else am I gonna find work pays anywhere near this?”

“I won’t tell them.” I turned and faced him, still moving.

“Even if you don’t, they’ll figure it out. Guys at the motel know I’m fooling with you.” He was just this side of crying now, babified, and I hardened so deep I wasn’t even mad, I kept moving, and he whined, “I done what I said I would, I got you up here, it just ain’t here. I love you, baby.” He snuffled, little gulping noises coming out of him. “C’mon, let’s just get offa here. I can’t lose my job. Look at what I already risked for you. I done did. Look.” He reached out for me. “I love you.”

All I know about what happened next was I fell. Don’t know if he tripped me or knocked me down, don’t know if I stumbled myself trotting backwards over ragged ground, I only know I was moving in a blackness that was inside me more than outside me, and then I know I fell. And the land. Under me, dead, gone, buried, me thinking, crucified, dead, and buried, the end of something, it just always was, and on the third day; no ma’am. And my grandma said,
You Bant, you’re different.

And I said,
Grandma, I can’t feel any longer for it.

And she said,
Now Bant.You know bettern that.

And I said,
You have to let go of it to keep going ahead.

And she said,
You know what’s right.

And I said,
I’m too young to have nothing but past to believe in.

Then I found myself back in the truck. I didn’t know how I’d got there, but I knew I’d done it myself. The boy was nowhere to be seen. Me bleeding from the heel of my hand, right there above the pulse, and what if that kind of dirt got in? I ground it against my jeans despite the hurt. Then R.L. opened his door, swung in, and slammed it harder than he needed to. I didn’t look at him after that.

I WAKE with the taste of Jimmy Make’s shoulder in my mouth. Not the real taste of it, because Jimmy left early this morning after I fought him. And not the recent taste of it, because it is only the memory taste that can bring water under my tongue. I wake tasting the memory of Jimmy Make’s shoulder with sun in it, freckles on top the brown and sun in the skin. But I never taste the sun in Jimmy Make anymore.

We fought me into tears, fought me into a knot on my knees, but we fought him until he wasn’t angry anymore. Fought him past mad. Started fighting the minute I got home, house hollow-blacked and the light of the TV, and finally, no light at all. We fought to cigarette breaks, to whiskey shots, to try to sleeps, then we’d remember something and fight again. We fought til the little cool came, crack of the night, fought til the gray pushed the black out the land. We fought til he picked up his keys.

He’d shower at the mine, but the places he’d miss, shadows lurking on skin. Shadow Jimmy. Never got to make a man. Him boy, then middle-aged, no in-between, the boy in the middle-aged body, and how much did I take from him? That slow low ruin. Down in a hole.
Sunless skin, coal taste in it, swallow memory back. Linoleum floor and coal stove, smoke in my little girl throat. The soft clot it makes there.

I tell you, each of my kids I love in a different way. Tommy, my baby. Hold him against my body here. Feeling I get with Tommy, with him it’s all feel, yearn to nustle, boy-squirm under my breasts, then the slow settle. Finally the tuck. Sweet nut.Tommy growing up poorer than the others had to, Tommy growing up poorest of us all, and him not even knowing any different.When I’d always thought by the baby we’d be doing better, for your children, how things are supposed to be. Tommy I love from my belly. From the center of me.

Corey.They call him little Jimmy Make. But he’s half little me.The hard want in Corey, thrusting, the anger and envy, open mouth, reach down your hands and him crash right through, Corey. A go, go, go, while everything around here hollers at you
stop,
and I know there is no way we can fill that crave, no way we ever will, and I want to catch Corey, shake him, show him, look at me. Look at me. And if all you’re going to do is want, at least want life. Starving even when you’re full. Because also in Corey is the Jimmy Make part, the hot wet, Corey a flame, a push, a glow, and although of course I love Corey different than I loved Jimmy Make, the same force in Corey draws me still.

I knelt in the dog-smelling carpet, head smashed in my arms, he hadn’t hit me, I wasn’t trying to beg. My body quivering under me, me swabbing the soak of my face—then I heard the ring of his keys. My shaking stopped. I lifted my face. It was undark enough to see. His bare pale feet. The stains on his jeans. The glut of stomach, flesh under his chin. The limp when he turned to leave.

See him heave, the bow of his back, arch over me. Big cat. Wet horse. A swimming through air, catch me there, I needed that then. Hard rolling beauty and the tight of his skin, and I thought I’d lost all memory of how love felt, lost it so far back unnoticed I didn’t even
have enough to copy by, had no pattern, that’s what I’d thought. Hard rolling beauty in that boy, rolling, burst drain. Shadow Jimmy. Out of a thousand fights, he’d never driven away, and this one him not even angry, there was light enough to see. And how much did I take? My mouth on his skin. Taste it there.

Sad dark Dane. All that he carries quiet in him and how he feels too much, how he pulls into him everything, then closes like a mussel. Mussel soft inside.Way he’d just sit on my lap as a little one and watch, how he wouldn’t cry for food. Then he wouldn’t cry for pain. Dane will never have an easy time of it, I’ve known that since he was tiny, and I used to believe I could do some of his hurting for him, soak it away. But now I know different. I want to take Dane’s shoulders between my hands, press my eyes to the crown of his head. I want to cover him.

Bant I love most different from the rest. Little sister, little friend. Bant’s dear face, and the skin will scar, but it is a luxury to heal a face. A luxury to heal. What the two of us went through together beginning that dark January, her growing her life while I was growing up, us moving over ground. Ground moving up into us. The years it was just the two of us, before Jimmy and the boys, Bant my side, my echo, Bant my death and then my borning, and if Tommy’s my stomach, Corey through my hands, Dane in my tears, then Bant is fused to my ribs. Feel her there.

I raised up when I heard him take the keys, there was light enough that I could see. I raised, and I called his name. Jimmy turned around. There was light, I could see his face. It wasn’t mad. Jimmy Make had started feeling sorry for me.

We flashed, glistened, we glowed. Him heaving through water, and the sun on his skin, water drops glisten flash, brown flecks spun gold. Spun gold. Creek trees and rocks and weeds, me riding his shoulders, my feet tucked behind his hips, a new animal made. Him
never wanting past now, never thinking past real, the way he filled me and made me forget me, animal wetness, hotbody catheat. Needed, I loved, I took from him then.

I wake this morning at ten o’clock, my skin already sticky where it touches skin. Too much raw sun in the room, the ripped sheer curtains, the bent rod, and I wake with in my mouth the taste of Jimmy Make’s shoulder. And I wake knowing that although today he will be home, Jimmy is not waiting on me any longer. This time, Jimmy will choose. And I know, at thirty-one years old, Jimmy Make has finally grown up.

IT’S TEN fifteen on a Sunday morning, and although the house is never empty at that time on a Sunday morning, it is almost empty now. Dane stands in the living room door looking at where Jimmy Make’s truck is not, while the logs grind tight in his gut. So little room to move. Corey and Tommy left half an hour ago, taking care not to wake Dane, which means they are up to something because otherwise they would have deliberately bothered him. Bant was out until after two in the morning, Dane heard her sneak back in, and with her sneaking came a bad feeling in Dane, a feeling with colors, an animal smell, but a feeling he cannot name.

But what worries Dane most is when he passed Jimmy and Lace’s room a few minutes ago and he saw Lace alone in their bed. He paused there in the hall, looking harder to make sure Jimmy Make wasn’t hidden somewhere in the covers, but it was only Lace, awake, her eyes open, but not seeing Dane. Now Dane realizes Jimmy’s truck is gone and he never heard it leave, which makes him think it’s been gone a good while, and for Jimmy to leave in the middle of the night like that . . . Then there’s what Dane saw at the end of the hall last night.

He pours Foodland Frosted Flakes into a cereal bowl, stops a minute, decides to trade up for a mixing bowl. He stays so hungry lately, despite his stomach being always more than full. It is not a good hunger, not appetite, it is just an order to keep applying pressure.
What’s goin on, you got worms?
Jimmy Make talking. Dane turns towards the porch, Baron at his feet, back-pedaling, bug-eyed alert for something to drop, and when Dane opens the front door, he tips the bowl, loses his spoon, and slops milk on Baron’s head. Baron’s tongue happy. Dane picks up the spoon and carries his cereal to the edge of the porch, where he sits with his legs dangling and the railing right over his head. Feels the sting of air on the piece of his little toenail he ripped off last night. Sunday morning. Almost nobody home. Would things be different if they still went to church? No. Dane knows they would not.
Things are gettin awful. Just awful, things are gettin.
What’s coming. What’s coming next. Open your Bibles, please. Read.