Strange as This Weather Has Been: A Novel

by Ann Pancake

  “No, I’m not.”

  “That’s what you’re thinking. I know you, now that Bill Bozer’s up there . . .”

  Now Jimmy Make was right on her, she was messing around acting like she was making a sandwich, and he was right behind her, but not touching, like a shadow he was, and he spoke right in her ear, he did not yell. “No. I am not. I am not gonna work up there.” He stepped back, his whole body stiff, his fists clenched. But Jimmy Make never hit her. “I’m gonna get me a job away from here,” he said.

  The mess on my face came and went. Would clear up for a day, then bubble back like boiled soup, and Sharon gave me some kind of tannish makeup to cover the spots. Sharon was big on such stuff, but then Tommy asked me if I had peanut butter on my face, like he wanted some for himself. After that, I left the tube in my drawer.

  For a while, I knew R.L. was just playing with me, but still, I found myself keeping notes in my head, my brush moving. Even before the orange pop and Anida, I noticed—what he did different, what he did more. Me dipping my brush in the can, wiping the tip on the side, stroking, I tracked the mildest change. The day he started passing by more than once. The day he wore cologne when he did it. The day he held my eyes a few seconds longer. Then he started talking to me—I hope that old bastard’s payin you decent. Hard as you work every day—and after he went back in his room, I couldn’t help but replay his words in my head. Bant’s a name I ain’t never heard before. Pretty though, ain’t it? First I’d hold them still, hold the words up so I could look. Once I finally get a day off, maybe me and you’ll take a ride to Beckley, get us a bite to eat. Then I’d thrust into them, pull them into pieces, roll them around in my hands. My brush moving. Then, once I got home, I’d listen to those words all over again.

  I’d noticed him from the first, he was younger than the others. But gradually he had changed somehow, he came into focus, he snapped big and sharp. It was like he started under murky water, then he rose up, dripped clear and brand-new. And yeah, for a while, I figured he was playing with me (how could he want this ruin of a face?). And a deep part of me knew it was because he had nothing better to do. But yet another part of me wanted to believe. And after not long, the believing part won.

  I felt him stop behind me, could feel his body in what had been empty space. I kept my brush moving. I was on my knees, working on a low spot, my legs tucked under me. I felt a boot toe pry under one bare leg. I kept painting. The toe lifted. Wiggled as best it could in a steel toe, the end wagging. I finally turned. R.L. play-frowned at me, then he kicked my leg, gentle. Then he went on.

  Corey

  SETH AND them are inside people. They stay in their house with their air-conditioning on. Most people along Yellowroot don’t lock up. Seth and them do. But even Seth and them, if they open their shed in the day, don’t lock it again until night. Corey counts on their having got in the shed already once this morning.

  He doesn’t want Tommy going with him, and he waits until Tommy is watching cartoons, but Tommy catches him. Tommy’s like a dog that way. Knows it whenever you come or go, even if he doesn’t see you. He catches Corey before he’s out the yard.

  “I’m going to check on that monkey,” Corey tells him, even though the monkey is beyond Seth’s house and Corey hadn’t planned on going near it.

  Tommy hesitates a few seconds. Then, “I don’t care.” Doankeer, he says it. Mumbling mad with his mouth balled up. Corey gives him the meanest look he can scowl up, but Tommy just keeps right on following.

  They go by the road, not the creek. Chancey pads along with them, dipping his head and hunching his shoulders when they pass yards where dogs come at them. Chickenshit Chancey.

  “Chancey’s chickenshit,” Corey tells Tommy.

  Tommy doesn’t say anything. He pats Chancey on the spine, then hugs his head. Chancey sticks close.

  “Now that Baron,” Corey says. “He’s a feisty sonofabitch.” Corey has three sticks of Juicy Fruit wadded between his cheek and gum, like snuff, and he spits at a squashed toad in the road. “If he just hadn’t had that accident.”

  Tommy stares straight ahead. He’s trying not to ask, but finally he can’t help it. “What accident?” says Tommy.

  “You know,” Corey says.

  “Nuh-uh,” says Tommy.

  “Oh,” Corey says. “Thought you did.” Corey squats and busies himself retying his shoe. Build the suspense. “Baron used to be a Rottweiler. But somebody stuck him in a air compressor and shrunk him to what he is now. Dad found him and rescued him.”

  Tommy is quiet for a while. “No, he wasn’t.”

  “Look at how he’s colored, his markings. At how he acts.”

  Tommy is silent. His hand rests on Chancey’s back as they walk down the road.

  Corey shrugs. “I don’t care if you believe me or not. I’m just telling you what happened.”

  “A air compressor couldn’t shrink a dog,” Tommy says.

  “They put chemicals in there with him,” Corey says.

  “Oh,” says Tommy.

  They’re passing Mrs. Taylor’s neat blue house. Corey sees Dane carrying the slop bucket through the backyard to the outhouse, Dane struggling with it, leaning to one side. Dane feels Corey looking at him, and he looks back at Corey, and then they just look at each other. Chickenshit, too. Dane and Chancey. Corey rubs the Juicy Fruit between his teeth and cheek.

  “Where’d Dad find him at?” Tommy asks.

  “Oh, it was somebody he worked with in North Carolina. Kept Baron in his glove compartment all day. Wife couldn’t handle him by herself at home. Dad saw him when they come off work and the man opened the glove to show Dad a gun.”

  “Oh,” says Tommy.

  Now they’re passing Seth’s. Like most of the other houses up Yellowroot, Seth and them’s house has a fence around the front yard. But while most of the other houses have waist-high chain-link fences, Seth’s fence is made of tall redwood-painted boards laid hip-to-hip so you can’t see through them. Still, Seth’s house is two stories tall, plus a little tower at one end which Corey thinks is probably fake, and tall as the house is, you can tell what it looks like from the road. While most houses in the hollow are trailers or modular homes or former company houses, sold long ago to locals who’ve changed them from look-alike to different—added plumbing, porches, carports, awnings, siding—Seth and them’s house is none of the above. It is younger than Corey and built of a scab-colored brick, and the house perches on a little dozed-up mound, “like they knew when they built it we were gonna get washed out,” Mom says. “That was eight, nine years ago,” says Dad. “How in the world would they know?” Despite the size of the house, the yard is no bigger than anybody else’s, so the house is all cramped up inside the fence, looking ready to flop out. Seth’s dad cuts the yard with a ride mower. And when the front gate is open, you can see they have in their front yard not regular lawn ornaments, not geese or kissing Dutch children or wooden bears or ceramic deer, but two white statues of robed women carrying jugs on their shoulders. Dad calls them the waitresses.

  Just the three of them—Seth, his mom, his dad—live in that big house. Not even any dogs. If I had me one . . . Corey wonders if this is the kind of place where Paul Franz lives. He would know if he’d been invited to the birthday party last year, but he wasn’t. Didn’t know him that well then. Corey spits his gum on the ground near Seth’s gate.

  Things with Rabbit aren’t moving too quick. Rabbit doesn’t tell Corey to leave or anything, but he doesn’t pay any attention to him, either. It’s only a matter of time until Mom or somebody figures out what Corey’s got in the old house, and Mom isn’t going to like it. The way him and Tommy whacked that hole. But Dad won’t show him how, makes sure Corey gets nowhere near his tools, either, patience, Corey tells himself about Rabbit. Be patient. Like the time they found the baby possum, and it didn’t want much to do with them at first, either. Then finally it let them pet it. Then, true. It died. Well, just be patient.

  Chester
’s fence is made of a rusted loopy wire that looks like things have been butting their heads against it to get out for many decades. Chester has a single lawn ornament, a ceramic buck about four feet high with antlers that Chester keeps covered with a Wal-Mart bag so nobody will take a shot at it from the road. Tommy and Corey know where there’s a fair-sized gap in the fence, and they hold the wire apart for each other to crawl through. Finally understanding where they’re going, Chancey snaps into an ears-up head-high I’m-headed-for-something-dead-and-juicy prance.

  As they get closer to the creek, Corey’s legs get weighty. He glances up the creek, back towards Seth’s. The problem is, at the same time that you don’t really want to see the monkey, the monkey sucks you to it. You don’t want to see it, you don’t want to see it in a bad way, but, then, you do want to see it. In a bad way. Chancey has already scrambled up into his monkey-barking spot, the gray metal box, he has his head lowered and the chops pouring out his mouth like he’s puking copper bells. Dad says he must have a thimble of coondog in his blood, but you can’t tell it any place but his voice. Now they’re near enough the creek to smell the water, and Corey wants just to turn upstream towards Seth’s. Skip the monkey today. But, if he does, Tommy will think he’s chickenshit, and goddamn that Tommy, why can’t I go anyplace by myself? Corey plunges into the water running and splashing as fast as he can go, his brain turned off, to where they look at the monkey.Tommy squeals and rushes to catch up, not wanting to see the monkey alone, and when he reaches Corey, he snatches Corey’s bare arm with a pinch that has nail in it.

  “Quit that!” Corey snarls, and he snaps Tommy’s hand off him.

  Under the mild current the crinkly fur ripples. The monkey hangs close enough to the surface that you can see it easy through the murky water. Parts you can’t tell what they are lift a little, sink, lift a little, sink. You would think something would have eaten by now on that big open eye, but something has not. And what does that tell you. What.

  Corey rips his head away. He turns and runs up the creek, hooting and splashing like he’s having fun. Smashing his legs into the water, windmilling his arms. Fun.Tommy tears howling after him, until they get close to Seth’s backyard. Where Corey halts, puts his hand on Tommy’s mouth, and whispers, “Shut up now.”

  Seth’s fence along the creek has been washed away, so Corey and Tommy stand in the water, looking up into the yard. They keep the ride mower in the two-car garage. The four-wheeler stays by itself in the shed. A corrugated metal shed, beige, with double doors that swing open in the front and a regular door on the side that doesn’t face the house. Corey shoots Tommy a glare that means do whatever I do. Tommy understands. They sprint at top speed through the yard with their heads ducked, dart to the hidden side of the shed, and flop down, gulping air, looking at each other without smiling.

  But then Corey feels something else coming up in him. He doesn’t want it to come up in him, but it does. He’s going to have to see what Seth’s doing. He’s about half scared Tommy will try to get on the trampoline when he leaves, so he pushes Tommy against the side of the shed with his palm on Tommy’s chest until Tommy slumps down. “You wait here,” Corey tells him. “Hold Chancey. Don’t move. If they catch us, they’ll arrest us.” Corey stares Tommy in the eyes. “You know that, don’t you?”

  Tommy nods, his lips sucked into his mouth like that might hide the rest of him.

  Corey ducks from his waist, keeping his legs straight, and darts towards Seth’s window like a DEA agent. Once he’s squashed under the sill, his back to the brick wall, he catches his breath. Then, cautious, he turns around and rises to his toes.

  He crawls to underneath the next window, then stands, leery, half expecting to pop up and be staring Seth’s mom in the face. But he’s gotten it right this time. He’s looking over Seth’s shoulder at Seth’s computer screen.

  Seth is shooting people-looking shapes that rush around his screen. The carpet is littered with toys and videogames, more videos and videogames jammed in bookshelves. A Washington Redskins trashcan stands in the corner filled with every kind of ball, and the TV plays a video, looks like Aladdin, maybe, Corey thinks. Seth has just got his hair cut again, gets it cut every other week, seems like. An arrested three-quarter inch of brick-colored bristle across the crown of his head. Corey watches the fat wrinkle at the base of Seth’s haircut while Seth continues to blow people away on the screen. He drops back to the grass, this time in a football HUT! position.Then he duckwalks to the far side of the shed, where Tommy crouches, clinging to Chancey’s collar, his lips still sucked in his mouth. Corey reaches for the side door. Before he touches it, he crosses eight of his fingers.

  When the knob turns in his hand, he clenches both fists in silent victory. Had me a feeling on this one. I did.

  He steps in, quick, Tommy attached to his waistband, Chancey’s collar hooked in Tommy’s other hand. Corey shuts the door behind them. The shed is dark and unventilated, ten degrees hotter than outside, and livid with the odor of gasoline. Corey pushes his eyes to adjust, tugs at the little daylight cracking through the unstoppered eaves, but he can feel the machine, feel its every detail, before he actually sees a thing.

  Three times he has looked at it up close. A thousand more he has dreamed it. A 2000 Suzuki Quadrunner 250 4 × 4, four-stroke engine, advanced drivetrain design. Front differential lock, massive suspension, three-speed subtransmission with thirty-five forward gear combinations, and finally, here it comes, out of the dark, and oh, it is beefy, and rugged, and tough tough tough. Green with camouflage fender covers, cargo racks front and rear, those blocky bad-ass tires, and now Corey is circling it. He circles, studying it from every angle, and when his sight’s full up, he starts to touch. The speedometer, the key in its ignition, the choke, and then he strokes the fenders and the vent, he grasps the handlebars, he thumbs the throttle. Finally he kneels, all the time inhaling the shimmer of gasoline, and he lies on his back on the dirt floor to look up under it in awe. There is not much to see down there in the dark, it is really simply that he needs to be under it, needs to have it over top his body. But then. Something occurs to Corey. The dirt floor. Most of these prebuilt sheds come with floors. This shed just sits on the yard.

  Corey lies there a minute longer before he rolls out and gets to his feet. Then, slowly, savoring, Corey climbs on. He straddles the seat and stretches his legs to reach the pedals. He spreads his arms to grip the handles. And now Corey extends in four directions. Corey’s a big man now. Corey is not just as big as Corey spread out, no, Corey can feel how Corey keeps on, how Corey courses right into the four-wheeler parts. The handlebars a lengthening of Corey’s arms, the clutch and gears and brake an amplification of his legs, the engine under him a swelling of Corey’s guts and crotch. Corey. Corey. Corey Turrell and his kick-ass four-wheeler.

  Bant

  “IF PEOPLE would just stand up . . .” Lace was talking towards me, but I knew it was Jimmy Make she wanted to hear. She’d been going on with the usual for some time, us eating supper, fried baloney sandwiches and fried potatoes, it was a supper we were eating quite a bit, and when Jimmy Make had come to the table, he’d snarled his lip and said, “See we’re eating steak again.” Us eating, and nobody but Lace talking, and nobody at all listening, until she said something a little off the routine. “I heard that over in Malwell, too, people are starting to organize against it.”

  “Huh?” It caught Jimmy’s attention. “What are you talking about? The union?” I knew why he was confused. The union hated Lyon. But it supported mountaintop removal because some outfits had a few union jobs.

  “No. Not the union.” Lace took another bite of her sandwich.

  “Another environmental group.” It came out in a muffle, but Jimmy heard fine.

  “Environmentalists!” He threw his fork down on his plate. “I’m telling you again, Lace.” He was glaring at her. “I’ve told you a hunderd times.You stay clear of the shit-stirrers.You get too close to the shit-stirrers and we real
ly will get killed.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Lace said. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “Like hell I don’t.” He had each hand on a table corner now, and the muscles leapt up in his arms. “You know, there is a reason people don’t speak out. A damned good reason they don’t stand up. I’ve worked for these outfits. I know what they’re capable of.”

  “Do you think you can tell me anything I don’t already know?”

  “What do you think they did to them environmentalists over in Hernshaw last summer? That slip your mind? They hit an eighty-year-old man in the head. An eighty-year-old man who is also a politician, if they beat up old-man politicians, what do you think they’ll do to people like you?” He was raised halfway up from his chair now. “I hear stuff, too, you know. That woman had her house burned down. Environmentalist. And that crazy Caspar Seeber, he got joined up with them, put bumper stickers all over his truck, and next thing he knew, he was run off the road and totaled the thing—”