Strange as This Weather Has Been: A Novel

by Ann Pancake

  But nowadays. Well, anymore . . . the truck concerns Corey. Just a little. It is starting to rust around the wheel wells, just a little, Corey has noticed. Corey thinks to take some black hobby paint to the rust spots, but then he wonders if hobby paint would be an insult. And some motherfucker in a parking lot opened his little prissy white car door on the truck door and left marks. And sometimes when you run it nowadays, something smells funny. Not every time, but sometimes, and Dad can’t for the life of him figure out what’s causing that smell. And other times, instead of the smell, there’s the sound.

  “Hear that?” Dad asks, his head cocked forward and his eyebrows scrunched down. The four of them, Dad, Corey, Bant, and Tommy, are driving into Prater, taking Bant to work. Dane’s already gone to Mrs. Taylor’s.

  “Huh-uh,” Bant says, staring out the window like it’s not important. Bant is a girl. Corey listens keen as he can.

  Dad leans forward to where he’s not watching the road. He dips his ear here and there around the dash, slapping it in different places. Tommy begins, “I’d—”

  “Shut up, Tommy!” snaps Dad. “Shit. Shit. Almost had it.”

  Corey crawls down onto the floor and sticks his head partway up behind the glove compartment. Bant kicks at him a little to get out of her way. He tunes his ears into the truck motor as best he can, but he can’t hear anything out of the ordinary.Then Dad busts out laughing. Corey scrambles back into the seat to see what’s going on, cracking his head on the glove as he does.

  Somebody is driving a riding lawnmower up Route 9. The right pair of lawnmower tires on the shoulder. The left pair in the road. The lawnmower is yellow, probably a Cub Cadet, and its owner has rigged up a little cart to pull. As they get closer, Corey sees the driver is Rabbit. Rabbit rarely wears hats, and you can tell who he is from far away by his hair. Wet-looking copper coils, like short springs. Dad drives right up on the cart, then blows his horn and rips around it. Rabbit doesn’t seem to care. He just raises one hand without bothering to look at them.

  “What’s he driving that on the road for?” Tommy asks.

  “Oh, probably got him another DUI,” says Dad. Corey has turned around on his knees in the seat to watch Rabbit out the rear window. Pretty quick Rabbit disappears from Corey’s sight around a bend, but Corey is wondering where Rabbit found the little wagon—Corey could use something like that. He wonders if the wagon came down the creek in the flood, and he wonders how he missed it and Rabbit did not. Rabbit, Corey is thinking. Now that Rabbit . . .

  Rabbit lives way down at the mouth of the hollow, and he has back behind his house something between a gully and a ditch just full of stuff, but Corey doesn’t know if it’s trash or parts because you can’t tell from the road. All you can see from the road is a bunch of different colors that aren’t the color of the ground, but Rabbit’s always working on something. He is. Corey has never visited Rabbit, never got close to the gully, not because they’ve been told to stay away from Rabbit, but because most people up Yellowroot just do. It’s not only the drinking and the contraptions, but Rabbit is thought a little crazy, and, further, nobody can tell what color he is and he himself won’t let on. If he was definitely white, nobody’d care, and if he was definitely black, most wouldn’t care, but you just couldn’t tell by looking at him, and you couldn’t tell by his last name, either. He hadn’t come from around here. But the color of Rabbit doesn’t worry Corey. The sight of his little cart has got him to thinking.

  “How come they call Rabbit Rabbit?” Tommy is asking.

  “I heard it’s because he used to drive those Volkswagen Rabbits,” says Bant.

  “Oh, it’s just what they call him,” says Dad.

  The parts in the old house are piling up. They sneak them in through a hole in the kitchen that he and Tommy’d had to make a little bigger. At first they’d just put the parts in the kitchen, but now they were filling the living room, too. Corey has the parts. He has the parts. He just doesn’t know how to put them together. Like a little low-to-the-ground speedwagon. That is his plan. It’ll make a noise like a lawnmower starting up, with more of a grumble and grunt to it than a four-wheeler, lower-pitched than your average four-wheeler, but it’ll go over any kind of ground like a four-wheeler can. It makes his heart tick louder to think of it. It makes his body bulk big. Just like a little low-to-the-ground speedwagon, he likes that idea, skimming and bouncing at radical speeds right down low to the ground. Corey has the parts, if he only knew how to put them together. If he had tools. He doesn’t know how, he has no tools, Dad says he’ll help, but it’s always “next week.” But Rabbit, he’s always working on something . . .

  The next morning, Corey waits until Tommy goes in the bathroom. Tommy usually takes so short in the bathroom he doesn’t even close the door, so Corey slips out the front screen, careful the catch doesn’t click, grabs his bike, and pumps down the road as fast as the bike will go. He hunches his shoulders, bullets his head for the aerodynamics, and he’s going so fast he keeps his eyes closed, in part so he won’t have to look at that sorry-ass hollow, in part to keep out the bugs, in part because he doesn’t have to look. Corey has that hollow memorized.

  Rabbit’s lawnmower is parked in his driveway behind the fake-wood-paneled station wagon, and Corey finds Rabbit where he thought he would. In his backyard fooling in a freezer. One of those enormous old-timey freezers that swing open from the top like a coffin, and Rabbit has crawled into its motor through a panel he’s removed from one end while at the other end, he’s hooked up a washing machine with cords and hoses. Rabbit lives on the side of the road opposite the creek, and his backyard is bigger than most because it’s near the mouth of the hollow where the land opens and spreads a little. At the foot of the yard before the hill starts, there’s the big ditch full of stuff. Corey hesitates to walk past Rabbit and right up to the gully, but from where he stands in the yard, he can already tell it’s garbage and parts both. Corey knows Rabbit knows he’s there, but Rabbit doesn’t say anything. That’s another reason people don’t visit. Rabbit is buried in the freezer past his waist, only his calves and his rotten tennis shoes sticking out in the air, and around the yellowed tennis shoes, tools are fanned out, some Corey can name, most he can’t. Next week, now stop buggin me about it. Corey can smell the tennis shoes from where he stands. Finally Corey asks, gesturing with his thumb towards the lawnmower in the driveway, “Do you have to be sixteen to drive that thing into town?”

  Inside the freezer, Rabbit’s tool sounds still. Then Rabbit backs out. He stands up and squints towards where Corey’s thumb points. When he squints, his lips pull open, and Corey sees the car wreck of teeth on his bottom gum. Rabbit wears a grease-smeared T-shirt with something about Jesus on the front and something about a well-drilling operation on the back. “Nah, I don’t think so,” Rabbit says. Then he crawls back into the freezer.

  Corey waits a minute or two.Then he takes a few steps towards the driveway, the mower and the cart, the twenty-five-year-old station wagon. He looks over his shoulder at Rabbit, still safely stuck in the freezer, then Corey saunters over to the station wagon and peers inside.

  A year or so ago, the authorities attached to Rabbit’s steering column a contraption he had to breathe into before the car would start. At first, nobody believed this, but now that’s the truth. Lace heard it was the truth at the Dairy Queen, then somebody saw Rabbit in the Big Bear parking lot in Charleston pushing carts around and around to where he would sober up enough to start his car.Then somebody else said her husband’s cousin in Welch had to do the same thing. So Dad finally went down to Rabbit’s to see, and, sure enough, here was this anti-drunk-driving device the state police or Pinky McCutcheon or somebody had installed in Rabbit’s car. But Dad had not taken Corey that day, and Corey couldn’t for the life of him figure out how such a thing might work.Today he sees nothing unusual in the car. They must have taken it back.

  Corey returns to the freezer. Rabbit’s shirt is hiked up so Corey can see his bare b
ack, and like the rest of Rabbit, the back is not reddish or yellow or tan like other part-black people Corey has seen. It’s gray. And even this close, Corey can’t tell if the gray is a skin color, or if it’s a layer of strange tiny hairs, or if it’s just dirt. Corey wonders what Rabbit’s making from the freezer, but he knows better than to ask. Instead, he says, “You reckon that Cub Cadet could drive up them cement ditches on the side of the mountain?”

  Rabbit doesn’t bother to pull out to answer that one. “Honey, that there couldn’t pull a ramp into a truck.”

  Corey thinks. “You could fix it so it could.”

  “I ain’t fooling no more with that thing.” Rabbit’s voice rings tinny from inside the motor.

  “What are you working on?” Corey asks. Rabbit does not answer.

  Corey sidles away, nonchalantly in case Rabbit might look, towards the gully. Closer he gets, more jealous he is. Where’d he find all this stuff? worrying how many parts from the flood Rabbit had found before Corey. If Corey had only been quicker, if only school’d been out, and probably, Rabbit, with the cart, he could carry . . . Corey with nothing but Tommy. It is not fair. He stands on the edge of the not-quite-gully, not-quite-ditch, grass above his knees. Up on the mountain, way out of sight, he can hear the big machines working. Some of the stuff is just garbage in olive-drab bags, and some of it’s just garbage in the raw—you can smell it ripening as the day heats up—but Rabbit also has appliances—a dishwasher, another washing machine, a small refrigerator, a couple push mowers, naked car engines, and—what’s that? Some big kind of motor Corey can’t recognize at first. Until into his mind comes a picture from the time they went fishing at Summersville Lake. The men pulling the big motorboats out of the water up ramps on special trailers made just for boats, the water shedding glorious as the boat surfaced back to earth, and last and magnificent, the tail end. That big raw motor pulled loose of the water, shaking and free, dripping water like a mighty dog, and the way the motor was bared out there.You couldn’t exactly see all of it, couldn’t see the little parts inside, but you could see enough of it to get your blood up and Corey has almost driven a boat.

  It was like driving a boat, it was, there towards the end . . . The day of the May flood, Dad had gone to Madison, and before he left, he took the lawnmower and weedeater out of the truck and set them in the yard. As soon as he left, Corey pulled the lawnmower and the weedeater into the place behind the house you couldn’t see from any windows because he wasn’t supposed to fool with them—it was not just a lawnmower and weedeater now, it was Dad’s job—but Dad was also not supposed to go to Madison without Corey, because he’d said earlier in the week Corey could maybe go. So Corey snuck the lawnmower and weedeater behind the house, and him and Tommy started working on them. Or he started working on them, and Tommy fetched Corey’s tools—the steak knife, coat hanger wires, tomato stakes, bottle opener. Dad wasn’t dumb enough to leave his tools behind, too.

  It had rained for a couple days, so the creek was already up some and the ground still soppy, but that morning it looked like it was going to clear off. But not long after Dad left, while Corey was working on the mower, the clouds started to make, quick. The mugginess and the haze, unusual thick for May, the clouds boiled and built, and Corey nodded, yes, you go right ahead, the clouds like how Corey felt inside, it was not fair, him not able to get the cap off the oil pan, and, you know, pretending just wasn’t enough anymore. He sat back on his heels, looked up over the ridge, good, all that empty violence, thunder and lightning, motor noise in the sky.

  By the time the lightning started, they were inside watching TV and Mom made them shut it off so it wouldn’t get hit and blow up. Which Corey wouldn’t mind seeing.Very soon after the lightning, the clouds busted so wide open it was like somebody’d reached up with a knife and slashed them end to end. Mom and Tommy didn’t want to watch the rain, but Corey did, so he climbed into the deep sill of the big threeway sticking-out window in the dining room at the front end of the house, the end that faced up the hollow. He knelt in the sill and watched the force of the rain.

  Until he started to notice the creek.The rain actually slacked some so he could see the creek better, and he realized the creek was coming up so quick you could watch it rise. It wasn’t like you could only tell if you looked away a while, then looked back. No, you could see it rise. It thrashed right up and over its banks, and there it slowed some, the extra room to spread, and at that point, it was still carrying in it just the regular flood stuff, sticks and pop cans and leaf wads and such. Then the downpour eased off even more so Corey could see up the creek farther, and he looked up to the big drainage pipe above the house, and, all of a sudden, the creek took a leap. Either the pipe was jammed or there was simply too much creek for it, and the creek jumped off its belly and stood on its knees on top the drainage pipe, then took a tremendous dive right over it. Corey hollered, “Mom! There’s a flood coming!”

  Then Mom was beside him, said, “Oh, God,” and then she was gone. By that time, the wall of creek had rushed the yard, had smacked up against the house and split around it with a hammering and a roar, this second part of the flood carrying big stuff—car parts, a mattress, but mostly what Corey could see were logs, and plenty of them, and the logs were spearing at the house, the house itself cracking and ripping, and the thuds. For the first time, Corey felt scared, but not a soft scared, it was a bright hard scared, riding the salt n pepper shaker or watching Friday the 13th scared, not scared like Tommy sitting on the kitchen floor, sobbing, “Where’s Chancey at? Where’s Chancey at?” He could hear something on the outside walls flap and zing—a piece of siding split loose—while Baron, the inside dog, perched like a rooster on the back of the couch where he could look out at it and yip. Corey stood in the sill on his knees and watched the wild water split around the house, and that was when he saw how it was like driving a boat. Like piloting a big old boat, not some little open boat, no, but like a captain in a pilothouse with a wheel. Corey put his hands on his wheel and steered.

  He looks at the big motor in Rabbit’s ditch. He feels the go of it buzzing in his arms. It was like driving a boat, it was, there towards the end, Corey told Tommy later. Bant overheard. She smacked Corey right over his ear with the hard bone in the heel of her hand.

  Dane

  “CLEVELAND,” Mrs. Taylor is saying. “Now flat places like that, they make me feel lonely.”

  Dane kneels in the commode room with a bucket of Pine-Sol water and a can of Lysol, scrubbing the stains and knocking out the odor. Mrs. Taylor sags over him in her walker, directing. He sprays Lysol in circles around the bottom of the seat like she’s told him to, holding his breath as long as he can, and Mrs. Taylor is saying, “Yeah, they wanna drive every last soul out of southern West Virginia, then the governor and them can just sit in Charleston and count their money.” Dane stares into the empty pot.

  Somebody knocks on the back door. Mrs.Taylor inhales and throttles herself into motion, heaving the walker towards the kitchen, and Dane knows it’s Lucy Hill from down the road, whose well has been ruined by the blasting. Mrs. Taylor’s well has held up so far, so she gives the Hills water, and they cut her grass. Dane wonders why she thinks he can’t cut grass. He can hear the rumble of empty milk jug bundles as Lucy and her daughters maneuver them through the door. They will have their wagon in the backyard, and as they fill jugs at the sink, they’ll bucket brigade them out the door, Lucy herself at the sink, handing off jugs to the oldest, special ed Casey Ann, then Courtney, the youngest, on the porch, passing them to Paula, the middle girl, Dane’s age, who arranges them in the wagon. Dane usually helps the Hills. But he knows Mrs.Taylor won’t want him moving directly from the commode room to the drinking water.

  He scrubs at the floor around the metal chair, the stains from the gap between seat and pot. She’s trained him. Before she cut herself down to three conversation topics, Mrs. Taylor told him how she has fought coal dust and road dust off coal trucks, has kept a clean hou
se without garbage collection, without sewer system or city water, sometimes without septic, has suffered the stench of straight-pipe plumbing. Mopped up the black slime of Buffalo Creek. And here in my final years, when it’s my time to rest, blasting dust and flood trash and my house falling down all around me in little pieces. She has trained him. Dane rinses and wrings out his rag, and now Mrs. Taylor is thumping back towards him. Even though water still runs in the kitchen, she feels more urgency to supervise the cleaning than the bucket brigade. Again, she hovers over him, her large failing body lodged in the walker, even the body, despite its emphysema and fatness and diabetes, antiseptically clean, smelling always of perfumed powder, the powder in smudges on her exposed skin, speckled on her blue slippers. Mrs. Taylor continues the subject of Cleveland. “And people don’t speak. You may have noticed that when you-all were down there in Durham.”

  Dane nods, although he doesn’t remember, and although they’d lived in Raleigh.

  “Change rags, honey, and wipe the windowsill, and I believe we’re done.”

  The Hills have left, and he’s making them tuna salad for lunch, which he likes to do because she calls his tuna sandwiches the best. Mrs. Taylor is chattering on about Avery, she drops the Cleveland and is just looking forward to the day he will come, when a blast goes off.