by test
"Open the door," Billy said.
I climbed through the front seat and jumped out. My legs disappeared into the drift of snow. I waded over to the garage and opened the door for Billy. He drove up past the drift, stopped, and dropped his plow. Then he backed up, dragging the white drift with him, all the way to the street, where he turned around, backed into the drive, and started plowing, the snow rolling like a heavy surf in front of his plow, new flakes of snow falling behind him, landing in his tracks, until, finally, the driveway was clear.
He pulled his Blazer into the garage. I shut the big door and closed us in, then I headed for the small side door
Billy got out. "Come here," he said, "help me with this."
I kept walking. Icy snow crunched under my feet, dry, like the taste of chalk, and it gave me a chill. I wanted to reach the house before Billy and tell Mom what happened, explain how it was all Billy's fault.
"Jeff!" he said.
I turned.
Billy cocked his head and made a fist. "Turn that light on and get over here."
I didn't want Billy to hit me again. He was too far away to hit me. "I'm cold," I said.
He took a warning step.
I turned the overhead on. Billy grabbed the trouble light and held it out for me. He unwound its extension cord and plugged it in. I took my mittens off to warm my hands around the bulb.
"Knock it off," he said.
So I held the light like he wanted, pointing it at his hands while he cut a sheet of cellophane from Dad's paint supplies. He brought the sheet over and folded it to the size of his broken window, then he ran duct tape along the outside molding. The tape didn't stick so well in the cold, and he kept having to redo it. By now, my hands were so numb that I wanted them to hurt just so I'd know they still worked. After Billy taped the sheet from the outside, he taped it from the inside.
Billy put the duct tape away, unplugged the work light, took it from me, and put it away. He said, "Now clean off that seat."
I brushed off the snow in two swipes. "There," I said.
He looked at me.
I gave the seat two more swipes.
"All right," he said and nodded toward the house, like he was doing me a favor, like everything was suddenly good between us.
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I hated Billy.
We walked through the little door, back into the cold. I ran ahead and squeezed the handle to the front door between two pain-straight hands. More opened the door from the other side, and the warm air hit me, peeling away the cold. My shoulders sagged with relief.
Billy was behind me. I wanted to shut the door on him, let him freeze.
He stepped inside.
Mom plucked my cap off and started unwinding my scarf, as if nothing was wrong. Then she saw the blood on my lip and stopped. I said, "Billy left Dad, More. He left him in th"
She shushed me and looked up at Billy.
Billy took off his coat. "He's hunting."
She flaked blood from my nose, "How'd this happen?"
Billy hung up his coat and walked toward his room.
I whispered, "More, Billy"
"Shush." Mom got me out of ray coat and said, "Go wash your face."
I lingered, then followed her down the hall. I walked past Billy's door and peeked in: he lay on his bed, listening to music, and Mom walked toward the stereo. I stood just inside the bathroom door and listened.
She shut the stereo off. "Where's your father?"
"Hunting."
I stepped into the bathroom and turned on water.
Mom said, "I've had a long enough day already."
"We saw a deer," Billy said. "He went after it. Simple as that."
"So you just left him? In the woods. In this storm."
"But he broke into my truck, Mom, and stole my rifle."
I pulled a washcloth from the towel rack. My hair was flat to my head from static.
"Your father wouldn't just do that. What happened?"
Billy didn't answer right away. I let the water warm, then filled the basin. When I stuck my hands in, the pain shocked my arms stiff. I took my hands out. Billy said, "Jeff had to get back for his scouts meeting." I knew he'd blame me. I hated him forever.
Mom said something I couldn't hear.
"Well he wouldn't shut up."
Everything was silent for a moment, then Mom walked back to the front door. She put on her coat. She came back down the hall. "So," she said. "Are you going or am I?"
I couldn't help but think how awful Billy must have felt. I imagined him turning to face the wall, lips in a tight frown, pissed at the world.
Mom said, "Well?"
Billy got up and left. He stomped out the door, out to the garage, where he
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spent half a minute just roaring his engine. Then he left, spinning his tires in the snow.
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When I got home from my meeting, the snow had stopped and Billy's Blazer was parked in the drive. The light was on in the garage and I looked in through the side door. Billy stood with Dad. The buck was tied by its front hooves to the rafters, a stick wedged in its empty chest. Dad had his coat unzipped, his cut hand was taped, and the other held a bottle of tequila. He handed the bottle to Billy, who drank. I could hear Dad through the window: "I tracked him down to the lake and around. All the way around. He'd come back for those carrots, and I thought I had him then. God damn, I had him all lined up," he held an imaginary gun and said, "He'd come back for those carrots." Billy handed the bottle back to Dad, who stopped talking to drink. Billy folded his arms, tucked his hands in his pits, and stared at the ground. "So," Dad said. ''He'd come back for the carrots. . . ."
I wanted to go into the garage and touch the deer's fur, feel the short, coarse hairs. But I was worn out from Mrs. Henslow's snowflake cutouts and knew, if I went in, Dad would make me listen to his story about a dozen times. Billy looked up and saw me and rolled his eyes. I could have gone in there, and maybe we could have made faces behind Dad's back. That's the only way to put up with Dad when he's drunk. But I went to the house instead.
Mom was watching TV. She asked how scouts was. "All right," I said. She asked if I'd seen the deer, that Billy was out there, why didn't I go have a look? I didn't say anything. She asked if I was mad, and I still didn't say anything. She said I shouldn't be.
"I know."
I wasn't tired, but I went to bed early. I twisted back and forth for hours, the furnace going off and on, off and on, stretching out time. I kept expecting Dad or Billy to come in and apologize. Say something hokey about how we're a family and should try to get along better. Dad sometimes does that. Billy, too, lately. But I never understood how sorry changed things. I mean, once a thing is said, how can they take it back? Once a thing is done, how can they pretend it never happened? You can't forget how miserable they made you feel. They only make themselves feel better
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Walking on Water
by Kim Trevathan
Backing out of the truck trailer onto the metal ramp that led to the store's backroom, Eddie Clyde Johnson jerked the handle of the pallet jack and shook loose a case of Log House Maple Syrup from behind where I was pushing. It grazed my shoulder and landed on the ramp with the dull thud of thick broken glass.
"I told you to steady it!" Eddie Clyde shouted. He jerked the jack again, this time so hard that the whole eight foot high load of stacked boxes lurched at me so that I had to slam my body against it to keep from being crushed to death.
Before Eddie Clyde could tell me to, I picked up the dripping case of syrup and walked backwards with it to the produce sink, holding it away from my body and leaving a stringy trail on the floor. Rinsing each of the ten unbroken bottles under the hot water faucet, I stripped them clean of syrup and labels so they'd be ready for Wayne Stone to mark down to half price and put in the discount buggy out on aisle one. With what was lefta box of broken glass and syrupI headed back to the loading dock and
the incinerator. When I opened its metal doors I had to lean away from the heat and hiss of a caseful of loose macaroni and cheese that had been mashed beyond salvage. I reared back to throw in the syrup box, and from behind Eddie Clyde snatched it out of my hand and pitched it off the edge of the loading dock into the pit, the bottom of the downhill concrete ramp that the warehouse truck had just pulled up out of. The box landed in a pool of black water and splattered the gray canvas sneakers of Crawford Keys, the bum, who made his appearance every Tuesday after the truck left. Open pages from a newspaper swirled and crackled between his legs, and the black puddle rippled around the sinking syrup box. Crawford looked up at useight stockers standing five feet above him on the lip of the loading dockand told us the story of how he could walk on the water.
"You boys are young," said Crawford, which we knew, all of us high schoolers except Wayne Stone, who'd worked at the store twenty years. "Even so," said Crawford, "I bet you've heard of the 1915 flood."
Though he'd told us this one before, we all shook our heads no. "Tell us about it, Crawford," said Eddie Clyde, who had a mustache and a red Firebird with a glasspack muffler that grumbled so loud the checkout girls paused at their registers and smirked when he arrived for work each afternoon. He stood
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closer to the edge of the dock than the rest of us, and in the middle so that Crawford had to look at him while he told his story.
"That river can fool you," said Crawford, glancing over the side wall of the ramp in the direction of Clark's River, a half mile away at the city limits. "It may look harmlessslow and graceful on its way to Paducah and the Ohiobut if it takes a notion it can destroy a town, it can kill you. I know. Back in the summer of 1915 there was no stopping it. It spilled over its banks, over the railroad tracks that run alongside it, halfway up the big tobacco warehouses on First Street, and on up the hill to Third where it covered the courthouse steps and rose above the pedestal of General Robert E. Lee's statue, all the way up past his boottops, six feet off the ground. Gray skies, gray rain, brown water everywhere. I lived upriver from towny'all know, where I still doup on a hill above the landfill, up high where I watched the river rise and cover the dump, all your grandparents' garbage and trash and rusty cars and washing machines. The water would never touch me, but over the hill that stood between me and town, I knew it had to be bad."
Crawford rubbed his hand along his silver stubbled jaw. He looked sideways at the sky. Then he snapped his head back around at us and raised his voice. "Did I sit in my shack on the hill while that river swallowed the town and the people I knew?"
"No!" we said, all of us except Wayne.
"That's right," said Crawford. He turned his body sideways and squinted his peacock blue eyes, which he knew made us listen harder. "That's right," he said again. "I walked on the water to help them, all those people sitting on their roofs waiting for the rain to stop. Anybody would help if they could, sure, but not just anybody could make up inventions." He looked down the line at each of us and bowed. "Floating shoes," he said. ''Inflatable like those things pretty girls lay on in the water. Except smaller and shaped like slippers so I could wear them on my feet and slide right over the water like I was on ice."
"How'd you think that up?" asked Eddie Clyde.
Crawford smiled and wiped his lips on the sleeve of his flannel shirt. "Didn't have to think them up, Johnson. I already had them. For fishing."
"Didn't really answer my question," said Eddie Clyde to us out the side of his mouth.
"Flood came so sudden," said Crawford, "that everybody's boats washed away down the river to Paducah and into the Ohio. Not one boat left in town, just strong men trying to swim places and drowning. I saw them floating down the river on my way to town. Head down, face up, all of them on their way to Paducah for the last time. No telling where they ended up in that current, maybe on down to New Orleans, where I went one time in my inflatable shoes and played harmonica with Louis Armstrong. Another story."
"Let's hear it, let's hear it," we said, though the only one of us who knew
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a thing about Louis Armstrong was Wayne, and he was behind us now push brooming the stock room.
"The flood story," said Crawford. "I have to finish it."
"Hell, we've only heard it about fifty times," said Eddie Clyde. "We know you saved the day and screwed all the old ladies." We laughed as we always did when Eddie joked. He dated the prettiest majorette at our high school, and she smiled straight at him where he sat in the stands as she waited for her baton to descend from the moth-littered black sky. Eddie always told us he wasn't stupid enough to play football, though he was strong enough, we knew. Every day he would hit us hard on the shoulders to say hello and if you tried to punch him back, he would dodge and thump you on the side of the head with his finger.
Crawford waited for us to stop laughing and got right up next to the edge of the dock, close enough to reach out and touch the toes of our sneakers, us standing there with our hands in our pockets looking down at him. Eddie Clyde jingled coins in one pocket, a wad of keys in the other. He could lock and unlock every door in the place. They trusted him.
"It kept a-raining," said Crawford, whispering, "like you boys have never seen. No thunder, no lightning, just a hard, cold rain in the summertime, everything as gray as that concrete there. I put on an orange cap so the people on their roofs could see me coming through the rain, and I took along fishing gear and old bread for bait so the folks could feed themselves."
Eddie Clyde made a big show of scratching his head. "How'd they cook them fish," he asked, "in the rain and all?"
Crawford smiled at Eddie and showed his teeth, which made us all stare. His eyes did not smile because he was thinking with them, remembering. A few feet behind us Wayne's broom scratched against the smooth concrete floor.
"Raw fish will not kill you, Johnson," said Crawford. "They ate that fish raw because they were so hungry, because they needed strength against the chill. Ate all kinds of fish, didn't throw nothing back. Not carp, not drum, not even old gar. Ate whatever the Lord sent their way, rich and poor alike. And they were glad to have it, up on their roofs, under their wet blankets and whatnot. And they thanked me for that fishing tackle, they thanked me until the rain stopped and the sun beat down so hard that steam rose from the wet cold roofs and it looked like the whole town was smoldering. And the water went away and people gathered all the ruined stuff to take out to the dump. A procession of them passed below my home to discard their mud-soaked rugs, their broken furniture, their clothes that smelled of death and decay. Then they drove to town and didn't look back. Do you think they remembered old Crawford Keys once the sun come out?"
"No!" we said. And we were right.
"Excuse me," said Wayne, behind us. In front of his broom was a line of trash and dust and broken glass. Crawford stepped back as Wayne pushed the
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line over the edge into the black puddle. Fine white dust floated in the air between us and Crawford. Wayne went away to put up the broom and came back with a half rotten red cabbage and an overripe cantaloupe, which he handed down to Crawford, who was telling us how he strode down the mighty Mississippi to New Orleans in his inflatable shoes and met Louis Armstrong.
"Who was he?" asked Eddie Clyde. "A boxer or a wrestler or something, and you went down there and kicked his ass?"
"Louis Armstrong," said Crawford, "played a trumpet so loud and clear that the earth trembled and the Mississippi River ran backwards and women shivered and moaned and fainted, and the hardest rich white men smiled and loved Louis."