by Ann Pancake
Once Corey gets the bike as high as he can up the side of the twelve-foot-tall drain, he pauses and gauges where he’s headed on the far wall. He pounces on the bike. Then he’s pedaling as hard as he can down the face of the wall, Corey so close to the bike it’s like he’s melted to it, and he sprays through the slime in the drain bottom, still pedaling, B-bo shrieking when he gets splashed, and Corey sails up the opposite wall, pedaling still, as high as he can until he has to spring off the bike to keep from wrecking.The bike crashes back down to the floor of the drain, but Corey lands like a fly on his hands and feet on the curve of the wall. Clyde jumps up with a piece of coal in his hand and scratches a black scrape to mark how high Corey has gone. Corey slides back down, brushes off his hands and knees, and picks up his bike. With an I-don’t-give-a-shit air, just short of a strut, he saunters to a spectating position.
Seth’s bike matches the motocross outfit, a neonish grasshopper green with jet black piping, and Seth claims the bike has twenty-one gears. He clambers up the culvert wall, trying for the offhandedness Corey carried. He doesn’t start quite as high as Corey did, and although he begins pedaling, by the time he hits the bottom the pedals get ahead of his feet so he has to throw his legs out and away from the bike, the pedals spinning free, and he has barely mounted the opposite wall before the bike, not moving fast enough to keep its balance on the incline, starts to sway. Seth slams a shoe to the ground and catches himself before he tips.
“Coor-EE! Coor-EE! Coor-EE!” hollers Tommy.
“I didn’t get a decent start on that one,” Seth says. It’s a mutter, but the culvert swells it to where they all hear.
“You can’t be worried about hurting your bike,” says David.
B-bo and Tommy scream, “Coor-EE! Coor-EE! Coor-EE! Coor-EE!”
Corey sidles back into view. Dane feels himself shrinking, and then there comes to Dane a picture of Corey as a toddler in Pampers, half Dane’s size, Dane holding Corey’s hand, Lace’s voice: “Now you keep an eye on your charge.” Dane looks at Corey climbing up the Big Drain wall and hunkers tighter in his squat.
Corey leaps on his bike.This time he rises a good five inches higher than the last time because this time he will let himself wreck harder. He splits from the bike at the last second, tumbling into a deliberate roll like a stuntman, his arms wrapped around his head as a helmet, and just before he strikes the water, he springs to his feet. The bike, in the meantime, has slammed to the drain floor with more force than earlier. When Corey pulls it up, they see the fender is so badly bent Corey has to twist it back with both hands to get the tire to turn free. Tommy and B-bo and David and now Clyde drop the name Corey altogether, chanting instead a massive animal grunt—“HOO! HOO! HOO! HOO!”—and the HOOs spiral the drain walls, ricochet and loop, until they overlap with one another. Dane hunches his shoulders up around his ears.
This time it looks for a little while like Seth might actually forget the bike and try. He manages to drag it to a starting point even farther up than Corey has reached either time, and he pounces onto the bike after it’s already in motion, and he keeps up with his pedals. But, then, again, the hesitation. The second thought. And Seth, in the process of trying not to wreck the bike, turns it over anyway, gently, without damage, far, far short of Corey’s marks.
“Corey won!” screams B-bo.
“COOOREEEE!” shrieks Tommy.
“He did not,” says Seth. “We get three turns.”
“That’s two outta three,” says David. “Ain’t no way you can win.”
Then they hear Corey’s voice, cool, from down the tunnel. “Let’s just erase the two earlier and do er sudden death. Don’t matter to me.”
The confidence in Corey’s voice, the offhand charity he grants Seth—all of this moves in Dane. A mixed-up moving. Dane sees Seth nod at Corey’s offer, but there’s not enough light to see how Seth feels about it. Corey snatches his bike back up the concrete wall, the wheel under the just-bashed fender making a peculiar click. He climbs so high he has to tip his head to keep it from grazing the drain ceiling, it seems he’s too high to even mount the bike without overturning the moment he does, and Dane flares up in his chest, a hot-chill panic that has nothing to do with the fish and the logs. But Corey does mount the bike, and he does not turn over, and, again, molded against the frame like a movie Indian on a war pony, he swoops down the wall, hits the water so hard it parts more than splashes, and then catapults up the other side, by some miracle still managing to pedal. Too awed to feel fear anymore, Dane watches with his neck craned back from his squat, his mouth gaping open, as Corey shoots up the other side, passing both his old marks, and then, Dane sees, Corey is flying. He is not pedaling anymore, but the bike’s still going, it’s like the bike is coasting, but up, not down, and all five boys realize that Corey’s going for a 360, a complete circuit of the tunnel, marble in a tube, Corey has busted gravity, and every face is upturned, every mouth sprawled wide, while Corey flies.
He’s maybe ten feet short of where he began the circuit, so upside-down his hair streams straight down off the top of his head, when gravity remembers. Dane’s breath makes a quick moan-suck. Corey is coming down first, because by this point, Corey is underneath the bike, and Dane springs to his feet in time to see Corey slam into the bad water, the bike close after him, landing partly on top of his legs. Corey cringes into a crumple, his knees pulled to his chest, his hands cupping his face, and the other boys rush to huddle around him, Tommy dropping on his knees, David pulling at the bike. But Dane cannot move. Rigid leaning forward, straining after Corey with his chest but not moving, his stomach chock-full with the horror of a dead Corey, his face aflame. When he sees Seth sneaking out.
Not blatantly sneaking, he’s too proud for that, he’s making it look like he’s just quietly waddling home, but Dane knows what he’s doing. And he knows, too, that he has to stop Seth, no one else sees, he can make up for not being able to run to Corey by stopping Seth, and as Seth passes him, Dane tries. He reaches out and takes Seth’s thick soft arm without really clamping down on it, without a real grab, and he is surprised at how taut is the skin stretched over the flesh. Seth snatches the arm away, the fat popping out of Dane’s fingers, and snarls, “Get your goddamned hands offa me.”
Corey is not dead. From his heap in the putrid water, Corey has already sensed what Seth will try. He tosses the bike off his legs, it clattering against the wall, the four-boy huddle scattering in surprise, and Corey vaults up on his one good leg, half of his body soaked in that who-knows-what-all’s-in-it water, and he screams after Seth, “You damn well better get me that four-wheeler ride!”
Seth stops right there in the entrance to the Big Drain and casually turns around. So backlit by daylight he is, Dane can’t see any particulars of him, can’t see the look on his face. He sees only his sloppy silhouette, a box with bulges. Seth, so smug he doesn’t even bother to raise his voice, speaks into the amplifier of the Big Drain: “Soor-ee. My dad says can’t no kids ride that four-wheeler but me.” He pauses. “Liability.”
Dane swings his face back towards Corey in time to see Corey’s mouth drop, the first nondeliberate emotion he has let slip. Then it snaps shut, and his loose hands seize into fists. The mouth bawls back open, and Corey is yelling, “You sonofabitch!You promised, you sonofabitch! You lyin sackashit!”
Seth has stepped clear down out of the drain so Dane sees him only from his thighs up, but he turns, and in the light like Seth is now, Dane can see his face lifted in a sneer, again, casual. “At least I ain’t got a faggot for a brother,” Seth tosses back. He sinks away down the bank, until Dane’s seeing only the back of his pinkish head, and then nothing at all.
Corey has started after him, forgetting his hurt leg, and when he comes down on it with his second step, he screams, “Fuck!” in pain and falls again. At the “faggot,” Dane’s face shoots full of warmth and he shuts his eyes to hide himself. But he’s been called faggot more than once, and coming from the defeated Set
h, it doesn’t mean as much as it might have, means mostly the embarrassment that the others heard, and the faggot humiliation is dampened by Dane’s worry over what he should do now that Corey is hurt. The others have pulled in around Corey again, stunned by his sudden vulnerability, and finally Dane is moving towards Corey, Corey is his little brother and he is hurt. Dane is moving to see how bad it is, then run down and fetch Jimmy Make, this is Dane’s plan, and he creeps into the collar of boys around the fallen Corey and leans down to get a better look. Dane can see the bright water in Corey’s eyes from the anger and the pain, and Dane knows Corey has his mind jammed down on keeping those tears tight in their sockets. Corey stares right back at Dane, hard.
“You,” Corey hisses. “You goddamned homo.”
For several seconds, they are all quiet in a new way. A quiet that waits, nose poised, ear raised, for its own end.
Then David steps away from Dane, a delayed flinch. And B-bo states, at a normal volume, like he’s just trying it on for the fit in his mouth: “Homo.” Then, deciding he likes it, a candy fireball on his tongue, he calls, “Homo! Homo!”
“Homo!” Clyde echoes with a crooked snicker. He cackles. “Homo! Homo!”
And then it’s all five of them at the same time, even Tommy, who has only the vaguest notion what the word means. “Homo! Homo! Homo!” Homo-hollering and homo-hooting and homo-squealing, they slosh the tunnel to its brim with the word, they ricochet it side to side. At first they shout at cross-purposes, one voice’s word overlapping the end of another’s, the homos knocking against each other, but soon they hit it in unison, a harmonized cheer, the homo sluicing from concrete wall to concrete wall, the drain doubling the word’s volume and size, tripling it, quadrupling homo, and Dane turns and runs.
He jumps out of the Big Drain and tears off in the opposite direction from where Seth has gone; he doesn’t want to reach the road too soon, cannot bear to be seen. Smashes through third-growth trees and scrub and vines, angling the steep thick-weeded bank, slipping and picking himself up before he full hits ground, his hands and arms beating a way in front of him.Then, before he sees it, he’s crashed into an immense thicket of blackberries. He’s snared deep before he even knows where he is, their canes whipping at him, thorns ripping, they snag in his oversized pants, Dane swims and wheels. Writhing and twisting, little animal noises from his mouth, Dane thrashes through the confusion of bloody bushes, but on the inside of his eyes, he’s fighting the boys. He’s beating them silly. He’s already kicked Tommy, B-bo, David, and Clyde into weepy balls curled at the end of the Drain like wadded hamburger wrappers, he hears the Drain echo-swirling with their groans and sobs, and now he’s turned to take on Corey. Dane turns to Corey and slams the heel of his hand into Corey’s chin, Corey springs back. Dane fights Corey with fingernails and fists, feet and teeth, he punches, pinches, pulls hair, bites. He kicks, slaps, trips, rolls, the blackberry patch continuing far past where he thought it would end, he is in it forever now, canes pricking and tearing, Corey coming at him, Dane hammering back.
Suddenly, he finds himself at the brink of the four-foot drop to the road fifty yards from his house. His momentum carries him right over it, and he hits the road so hard his shins ring, but he does not fall. He hears his tennis shoes smack through the broken asphalt, the chunky gravel, and he is just starting to ease off because he is almost home, when he spots the black Ford Explorer parked at the far side of the house. Jimmy Make has company. Bill Bozer, who comes around only when Lace is gone. So Dane veers through the yard, Chancey surging out from under the porch to follow him, and Dane sprints to where the footbridge used to be and tries to jump the creek, but lands not just inches, but feet, shy of the far side, and, wet to his shins, he scrambles up the eroded bank, Chancey right with him, both of them using all fours, and then Dane is loping up the old road towards the Ricker Place.
His breath’s worn thin, tearing in his throat. The bones in his legs wobbly as grass stalks.When he’s far enough up the draw to lose sight of their house, he drops from a lope to a trot, and, finally, Dane walks.
He stiff-walks. His legs trembling, his hands on his hips now. Him shuddering for breath. Greasy with sweat, it’s running down the middle of his chest, the small of his back, and the strange new smell that sweat carries these days. His face is down-turned, and the old road under his feet has gone to grass, kind of grass calls you lie down on it. Rank and pillowy. He passes the old pigpen, wooden slats atumble, empty now even of pig odor. The old chickenhouse, an exhausted slump. Finally, he does drop down into the fine humped grass, at a spot where he can see the trailer stain, the TV. But it doesn’t even occur to him to enter his boxes. And he sits with his head on his knees, heaving after his breath, but he doesn’t cry. Dane never cries. “Corey does,” Dane whispers. And although his belly grates chock-full of hard stuff, grinding, he almost never throws up. “Almost never,” Dane whispers out loud.
Once Dane sits down, Chancey turns back, tempted by him lowered like that. He pads over and noses Dane’s ear, then he notices the blood on his arms and starts licking it. Dane lets him. “Dogs got stuff in their mouths can heal cuts,” Jimmy Make will say. Chancey licks the blood down, the smears and the runs. Licks the blood back to where Dane can see the exact holes the thorns have made, each hole with a little blood bead hard on it. Lined pricks of blood beads Chancey leaves all over his arms. Then he realizes the front of his T-shirt, too, has been ripped, and he lifts it to get a look at the cut on his stomach.
The homo ringing in his ears, once he’s lifted the shirt, he has to see more, so he pulls it over his head. He stands up to where he can see himself better. Homo. The blocky ill-fitting yard-sale pants—Dane has outgrown his pants, but not his shirts—soggy with sweat over his thick lower parts. Hips and thighs, womanish, mismatched. The stomach and the chest still a little boy’s, a softness to both. The slack fatness in the belly drooping down, the slight droop around his nipples, them peaking out, just barely, and Dane wonders if this is how a homo looks, and he feels pretty sure, yes, he thinks.
Quick, he slips the shirt back over his head and looks up the road to the old house. He never enters the old house, rarely even approaches it. He sticks to the trailer stain. In the house there’s too much chance of running into the ghosts of Grandma and Pap. The trailer box isn’t capable of ghosts, but the house feels fertile with them, even though Lace has told him, “You know your grandma wouldn’t come back and scare you like that.” But now, Dane, still pumped full of the Corey-hate, the homo-shame, something draws Dane to the house. No room left in him for fear, and he’s drawn to it. Dane finds himself walking right up and stepping into the ruin of the porch. Dane stands on the slant of boards in the stale odor of abandoned house, kudzu snarling up the Insulite walls on either side of him, and he stares at the front door knob. He knows it is not locked.
Chancey snuffles the porch rubble. Thunder rumbles, distant, but thunder, even though it hasn’t looked like rain all day. The fish wake up in Dane. Flash and flicker, hateful busy fish with steak-knife fins, I try to stay off the nerve medicine. Mrs.Taylor’s mouth a dark hole in her batter-colored face. But this has turned into one nervous place, moany. Moany in their mouths. Dane takes a step backwards, off the boards, but then he hears Corey’s voice, twisted steel: Goddamned homo. Dane reaches out, touches the knob, turns it. He pushes open the door.
At first his eyes won’t focus, and it has nothing to do with dark. It’s how what he expected to find just isn’t, and there’s too much of what is and in the wrong places. All that’s left from his grandma’s day is the stern coal stove, the Naugahyde couch foaming with burst stuffing, the wallpaper dangling in tongues, but Dane just barely sees that. He mostly sees nothing but metal. Rusted metal, mud-crusted metal, broken metal, Dane cannot right away even separate it into things, and less than the metal, but still everywhere, plastic and wiring and cable and rope lengths and tires. Dane steps up onto the floor, his anger gone for the moment. It’s pushed out by surpri
se. But then he understands, and the anger rushes hot right back. This is Corey’s doing. It’s where he’s been storing his parts. The trash they’ve been pulling out of the creek and along the road for their plan, Dane has many times come up on them when they’re talking of it, they bait him to eavesdrop, then shut up fast in an obvious way when he gets close and stare knowingly at each other, it’s sheer meanness is all it is. And here now they’ve turned his grandma’s house into a genuine dump with their mean secret mess, and the anger doubles in him, thickens, heats. But at the same time, mixed up and way down under, he feels for a moment a little bit of scared.
His arms and hands tingling, he weaves through the junk to the kitchen, and there he sees that they’ve been hauling in the parts not through the living room door, but through a hole in the kitchen wall. They may or may not have made the hole, but for sure, they’ve torn it up bigger, and Dane’s fists clench.The kitchen is completely crammed with metal parts, it even smells of old metal, a rust smell like you taste when you bite blood in your mouth. A rusted sorrel-colored barrel, looking crunchy to the touch, wire screens off kerosene heaters and the heaters themselves, aluminum poles, a car battery, a car hood.There is junk piled on the floor and stacked on the old knock-kneed table, junk even wedged on top of the refrigerator, screws and bolts lined up in the windowsills.The only untrashed part of the kitchen a crooked path they’ve made for dragging the most recent stuff to the living room.