The Year of the Storm

by John Mantooth

  Winter was in the air. The town grew restless. My father came home less, choosing to stay over at a friend’s or at the “club,” which was a place that sold moonshine out on County Road Seven behind the woods. When he did come home, he was drunk. Bleary-eyed and stinking, he’d stumble through the door, looking for something to eat, or some time with my mother in the back. She always provided for him, food or sex, it didn’t matter, but she did it without enthusiasm. She had a kind of fuck-you attitude that I always admired. Still, I knew she was going down fast. My father couldn’t catch her, and neither could I.

  It seemed like Dad’s favorite pastime was ignoring me, but that was probably giving him too much credit. The truth of it was that I was a piece of furniture to him. One more thing in the room. He was more likely to sit on me or use me for a place to put his jug than talk to me. I pretended this didn’t bother me, that I didn’t care one way or the other if he didn’t notice me. I patted myself on the back for not being a baby like Seth. All the while I knew that, deep down, Seth wasn’t a baby, and I was just a pretender.

  A week after Tina went missing, I walked over to Seth’s house on a Saturday afternoon. Some of the kids at school had been restricted to their houses when they weren’t at school because their parents worried for their safety. This wasn’t an issue for me. I came and went as I pleased. Mama was in her own world, seated most of the time in her leather chair, the radio tuned to some station or another. Sometimes, I wondered if she was really listening. In ’Nam, when it got bad, I thought about Mama a lot. Still breaks my heart to think about her. There’s more than one way to disappear, you know?

  Seth’s house is gone now. You can walk out to the spot, but all you’ll see are ruins, if even that. It burned down years ago, and what was left disappeared under a maze of kudzu and vines. The kudzu has always run wild here, and even though most of it was dead because it was late fall, the dry vines still held the house as tight as a straitjacket.

  The front door opened and a man who had to be Seth’s father came out. He was scowling and carrying a sack under his arm. His red hair and freckled face reminded me of some distant relative I’d seen in some of Mama’s old photo albums. Where the skin of the boy in the photo was pale white and dotted with freckles, this man’s was a deep brown. He wore overalls and big work boots. Later, I found out he worked across the road in the cotton fields. My own father did the same when he couldn’t find jobs in town doing yards and such. The fields paid better, but my father never tolerated hard labor for any length of time.

  Seth’s father had his head down and didn’t see me until he had almost walked by. “Oh,” he said, his face shifting smoothly to a grin. “You must be here for Seth.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m Walter Pike.”

  He eyed me carefully as if measuring me for a new suit. “Pike?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What’s your daddy’s name?”

  “Preston.”

  He nodded, and appeared to consider saying more.

  “Do you know him?” I asked.

  “Name sounds familiar. That’s all. I’ve got to get to work. Go on in. Good to see he has a visitor.”

  He started off, but then stopped and walked back to me. He placed a hand on my shoulder, leaning in close. His breath smelled bad, like fish. “Between you and me,” he said, “I worry about Seth. His mama run off and left us some time back and he ain’t been the same since.” He patted my shoulder. “Your mama? She a good woman?”

  I thought about this for a second. “Yes, sir. I’d say she is,” I said, trying to sound sure of myself even though I wasn’t.

  “Good. Good. A fine woman is a rare thing in this day and age. These days, the family don’t mean what it used to.” He smiled, showing teeth that were uneven but clean, not stained brown like my father’s. “Strange times we’re living in. Young girls gone astray.”

  I nodded. There had been some silly rumors lately suggesting the girls had been promiscuous and that had led to their downfall.

  “Well, I got to get to work. I’m glad Seth’s found a friend.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  I watched him walk away, toward the road and the cotton fields beyond.

  —

  I knocked. Nobody answered, so I decided to go on in. I found Seth in his room, reading a book. I must have been quiet. Either that, or he was so caught up in the book that he didn’t hear me because he just lay there on his bed, reading. The bed was the only piece of furniture in the room. Beside it, he had stacked dozens of paperbacks, creating two shaky towers of books. One window on the back wall revealed the deep woods behind his house. There were no curtains or blinds and the sun shone in. Below the window were three or four stacks of neatly folded clothes. The only other thing in the room was an old painting of what appeared to be a swamp hanging on the wall across from Seth’s bed. The painting was large, but even that didn’t explain how it seemed to dominate the room. I couldn’t stop looking at it.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Seth dropped his book and jumped to his feet. He acted like I’d just tossed a bomb inside his room instead of simply saying hello. “Why are you here?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be? We’re friends, right?”

  He glared at me. “I didn’t invite you.”

  “Hell, you didn’t ask me to pull your ass out of that quicksand either, but that didn’t stop me.”

  “I would have been fine.”

  “’Cause you ‘went somewhere,’ right?”

  He stepped forward, his fists clenched. “You shouldn’t have come here.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. I’d gone out on a limb to take up for him—losing the only two friends I had in the process—and now he was going to act like this. Bullshit.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I said.

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Of course not, because you’re the only kid in the world with problems. Well, I met your dad and he didn’t seem so bad. At least he was sober.”

  “You don’t know anything about my father. He’s evil.”

  This made me laugh. It was hard to imagine the man I’d just met as anything resembling evil. Hell, as wretched as my own father was, evil would not be a word I would use to describe even him.

  “Evil, huh? Just because he couldn’t get along with your mother doesn’t make him evil. So she ran out on you. It happens to a lot of kids. They don’t sit in their rooms and sulk for the rest of their lives. Maybe Jake and Ronnie were right about you.”

  “Say that again.”

  I shook my head. “You don’t want a friend, do you?”

  “Say that part again about Jake and Ronnie being right about me.”

  I was feeling pretty pissed. “I don’t know, Seth. You’re a weird bird. Maybe you are queer. Maybe you do like boys.” As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I wanted to put them right back. Still, I let them linger because part of me couldn’t help but think he had it coming.

  There was a short lull when nothing happened. His face was blank and then he fixed me with a look that could have burned paper. I didn’t even see his fist coming until it hit me under my chin. I fell back, my face already blooming with pain. He lunged at me and stuck his elbow into my neck, driving me against the wall. My head was forced back against the picture frame. The frame came loose from the wall and fell to the floor. I heard something crack but didn’t bother to look. My chin was bleeding. Getting my fists up, I tried to locate Seth. I couldn’t find him anywhere. Delirious, I stumbled over to his bed and sat down. Then I saw him. He was on the floor, hugging the picture frame to his chest.

  —

  The canvas was undamaged. Only the outer frame was cracked. I watched Seth carefully pull the frame away, brushing splinters off the canvas.

  He touched the painting, running his fingers from the tall trees on the right s
ide over to the cabin on the left and then up to the moon whose light spilled out over the painting in uneven streaks.

  He picked it up and put it on the bed beside me.

  “It’s just a damn picture,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Not to me.”

  I scoffed at that. “It’s not even very good.”

  Seth glared at me.

  “What? Somebody you know paint it?”

  “Yeah,” Seth said. “I did.”

  If he thought this would upset me, he had another thing coming. “Whoop-dee-doo,” I said.

  Seth wasn’t worth the anger. He was a nut, and that’s probably why his mother left anyway. I felt an overwhelming urge to destroy the painting.

  “No,” he said. “Leave it alone.” It was like he knew what I was planning, like he could look right into my eyes and see down into the deep, dark, ugly part of me that actually wanted to see him hurt, the part of me that was no damned different than Jake.

  I shoved my way past him and picked it up. I tore the canvas away from the backing frame and held it in the air in front of him, my hands tensing like I was about to rip it in two.

  “Tell me how you knew about Jake’s dad,” I said. This was something that had been bothering me. How would a new kid have known about Jake’s dad being in prison?

  “Don’t, Walter. Please.”

  I started to tear the top part. He lunged at me, but I kept it away from him, stepping up on his bed. “Answer the question.”

  I wanted to curse myself for what I was doing. I’d come because I wanted a friend, but I was making an enemy, and now I was too proud to stop. “Answer me or I rip it to shreds.”

  “My dad and I lived here years ago. He knows Jake’s family and yours. I’m not sure about Ronnie’s.”

  “What he say about my old man?”

  Seth shook his head.

  I began to rip.

  “Stop! He didn’t say nothing. He said he drank a lot. That was all.”

  Suddenly, I felt like laughing. “Well, he got that right.”

  Seth shot me a withering look. “Put it down.”

  “Why’s it so important? What’s so great about a dumb painting? Even if you did paint it.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Of course I wouldn’t. My daddy’s a drunk, and I don’t know how it feels to be you. Jesus, man. I came over here because I wanted to be a friend, but I’m starting to get the feeling you don’t want one.” I dropped the painting on the bed, feeling suddenly deflated, like my life was useless and I should probably just go back to Jake, plead for mercy, and live out my days in these woods, being a damn drunk just like my father.

  I stepped off the bed, taking my time to be sure that I knocked over his stacks of books, scattering them across the floor. “Standing up for you that day was a mistake.”

  I was all the way back out to the den before I heard his voice.

  “Walter. Wait.”

  I stopped. I was still angry, but I learned a valuable lesson that day. Anger can’t hold a candle to loneliness.

  —

  He said he wanted to show me something, and when I saw it, I would understand about the painting.

  I couldn’t imagine what it would be, but I felt bad for threatening to rip the painting, so I agreed.

  He led me outside and back into the deepest part of the woods, where Jake and Ronnie and me brought some girls last summer, telling them scary stories about the woods so that they’d squeal and hug us tight. It was spooky back here, something about the trees. Their shadows seemed to linger and spread out across the ground until you couldn’t really tell what was shadow and what wasn’t.

  We walked slowly as a storm began to build in the sky above us. We said nothing, plowing through the densest parts of the woods. As we walked, it became clear that there was a buried past here, a community worn to rubble by time and fire and weather. A rotting fence tapered away into nothing. A stone wall that might have once been the front of a house. A pile of old junk, rusted and broken beneath smoke-charred branches. There was probably more too, but the kudzu and creepers overran everything, burying the old places as sure as if they’d been sunk into the ground.

  Seth moved with an assurance that made me jealous. How was it possible that I had lived in these woods my entire life and felt confused and disoriented, while he knew exactly where he was going?

  I glanced up at the darkening sky. “You sure this is a good idea? It’s looking pretty ugly.”

  “It’s right here,” he said. “And the storm is a good thing. Makes it easier.”

  “Easier? What are you talking about?”

  He ignored me. “If you ever try to find it without me and you see the little cabin, you know you’ve gone too far.”

  Cabin? I saw nothing but trees and shadows. At the time, I had no idea the “little cabin” he mentioned would be the place where my life would change forever.

  “What exactly are we looking for?” I asked.

  He bent down, clearing away some of the foliage. I saw a solid square block of concrete. There was an opening, a round hatch, no more than three feet in diameter, built into the top. He lifted it, revealing the arms of a ladder leading down into the darkness.

  “Storm shelter. My grandmother used to live back here. I know because I found her journal in an old trunk and she wrote about this place a lot. About how the storm shelter saved her life once. About how she climbed out of it after a big storm and saw that the world had changed.”

  He pointed at the crumbled remains of something half hidden by the trees. An old plow lay next to it. “There’s pieces of buildings everywhere. I call them ruins. They’re all that’s left now. It was a whole town. Called Broken Branch. Another storm, a few months after the one my grandmother survived in the shelter, destroyed everything. Including her. This time, she couldn’t make it to the shelter and she died in the cellar at her own house. My dad was with her. He talks about it sometimes when he goes off into one of his moods. The cabin I mentioned? The one that you’ll see over there if you go too far? That was where she died. My father rebuilt it years ago. The rest of Broken Branch is gone. His sister and him were two of the six that survived. The others moved away to start over somewhere else, I guess.”

  I waited for more, but Seth got quiet and just looked out at the trees.

  “And?”

  “That’s it. It’s all history now, except one thing.”

  “What?”

  “This storm shelter.”

  “And this is what you wanted to show me?”

  “This is the doorway to what I wanted to show you. The real thing is the swamp.”

  “In the painting?”

  “Yeah. The same one. That’s where we’re going.”

  I tried to imagine what I’d seen in the painting being out here in the woods. The cabin, maybe, but the swamp? No way. Not here. I shook my head. “This doesn’t make sense.”

  “Forget sense, Walter. Just follow me.”

  He went down the ladder into darkness. I hesitated to follow, purely out of pride. I still hadn’t forgotten our fight, what he’d said about my father. His foolish attachment to the painting. All of that vexed me to no end, but damned if I didn’t feel a new, more powerful emotion as I took hold of the ladder: curiosity.

  —

  Later, I’d hear my dad talking about how the storm had been “a big ’un” and how the roof came right off Bill Morgan’s house, but inside the storm shelter, I could barely hear anything at all. It was out there, sure, but it didn’t seem real. Nothing seemed real inside that shelter.

  We sat down on the dirt floor. Seth was across from me. It didn’t matter where. He was close.

  Neither of us spoke. I felt sleepy. We sat there, just soaking in the silence for a long time. Eventually, we heard the thunder a
s it rocked the world above us, but it was a small, faraway thing that didn’t matter at all.

  “The painting in my room,” he said at last. “I painted it when we moved away. I couldn’t go there anymore, so I painted that picture and hung it up in my room. When things got really bad, I would stare at it and dream of coming back. Then after my mom disappeared, my father decided it was time to move back.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That painting was of a swamp. There’s no swamp in these woods. I’ve walked them from top to bottom hundreds of times.”

  “You’re wrong about that.”

  I could do nothing but grin. He was insane.

  “I want to take you there.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t understand. We’re inside a storm shelter.”

  “You have to trust me, Walter. Can you do that?”

  “Sure,” I said. But it was a lie. I felt uncomfortable suddenly, and I couldn’t say why.

  “I’ve never shown anybody before.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The swamp. It’s where I go. I can show you.” I felt his hand on me. First my shoulder, then down to my hand. I pulled away.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Do you want to see it or not?”

  I’m sure part of me was thinking this whole thing sounded like the biggest load of bullshit I’d ever heard, but there must have been another part of me that wanted to believe in disappearing to your own place, somewhere safe and secret. More than anything, though, I was curious. I wanted to see for myself.

  I let him hold on to my hand.

  “Close your eyes,” he said.

  I did, though the darkness inside the shelter was so total it was hard to tell.

  We sat like that for a long time. His hand was over mine, the silence of the shelter broken only by the thunder booming above us.

  My hand felt sweaty in Seth’s, and worse, I felt weird holding hands with another boy, especially one who was so widely suspected to be queer. Just forget it, Walter, I told myself. He’s not like that. Still, the longer we sat there, my hand in his, the more I wanted to pull it away. I was just about to when it happened.