Strange as This Weather Has Been: A Novel

by Ann Pancake

  I started trotting. I was to myself enough by then that I was careful where I laid my feet, but I trotted. He kept right with me, then he started talking something else, I should’ve known he wasn’t really worried about me getting arrested or killed. “And what if they catch you? And they find out I brung you up here?” He was huffing a little, trying to keep up. “I’ll lose my job, quicker’n that. They’ll fire me.” Now I heard a wobble in his voice, and it made me hate him harder. “I have to have this job. You know that. Where else am I gonna find work pays anywhere near this?”

  “I won’t tell them.” I turned and faced him, still moving.

  “Even if you don’t, they’ll figure it out. Guys at the motel know I’m fooling with you.” He was just this side of crying now, babified, and I hardened so deep I wasn’t even mad, I kept moving, and he whined, “I done what I said I would, I got you up here, it just ain’t here. I love you, baby.” He snuffled, little gulping noises coming out of him. “C’mon, let’s just get offa here. I can’t lose my job. Look at what I already risked for you. I done did. Look.” He reached out for me. “I love you.”

  All I know about what happened next was I fell. Don’t know if he tripped me or knocked me down, don’t know if I stumbled myself trotting backwards over ragged ground, I only know I was moving in a blackness that was inside me more than outside me, and then I know I fell. And the land. Under me, dead, gone, buried, me thinking, crucified, dead, and buried, the end of something, it just always was, and on the third day; no ma’am. And my grandma said, You Bant, you’re different.

  And I said, Grandma, I can’t feel any longer for it.

  And she said, Now Bant.You know bettern that.

  And I said, You have to let go of it to keep going ahead.

  And she said, You know what’s right.

  And I said, I’m too young to have nothing but past to believe in.

  Then I found myself back in the truck. I didn’t know how I’d got there, but I knew I’d done it myself. The boy was nowhere to be seen. Me bleeding from the heel of my hand, right there above the pulse, and what if that kind of dirt got in? I ground it against my jeans despite the hurt. Then R.L. opened his door, swung in, and slammed it harder than he needed to. I didn’t look at him after that.

  Lace

  I WAKE with the taste of Jimmy Make’s shoulder in my mouth. Not the real taste of it, because Jimmy left early this morning after I fought him. And not the recent taste of it, because it is only the memory taste that can bring water under my tongue. I wake tasting the memory of Jimmy Make’s shoulder with sun in it, freckles on top the brown and sun in the skin. But I never taste the sun in Jimmy Make anymore.

  We fought me into tears, fought me into a knot on my knees, but we fought him until he wasn’t angry anymore. Fought him past mad. Started fighting the minute I got home, house hollow-blacked and the light of the TV, and finally, no light at all. We fought to cigarette breaks, to whiskey shots, to try to sleeps, then we’d remember something and fight again. We fought til the little cool came, crack of the night, fought til the gray pushed the black out the land. We fought til he picked up his keys.

  He’d shower at the mine, but the places he’d miss, shadows lurking on skin. Shadow Jimmy. Never got to make a man. Him boy, then middle-aged, no in-between, the boy in the middle-aged body, and how much did I take from him? That slow low ruin. Down in a hole. Sunless skin, coal taste in it, swallow memory back. Linoleum floor and coal stove, smoke in my little girl throat. The soft clot it makes there.

  I tell you, each of my kids I love in a different way. Tommy, my baby. Hold him against my body here. Feeling I get with Tommy, with him it’s all feel, yearn to nustle, boy-squirm under my breasts, then the slow settle. Finally the tuck. Sweet nut.Tommy growing up poorer than the others had to, Tommy growing up poorest of us all, and him not even knowing any different.When I’d always thought by the baby we’d be doing better, for your children, how things are supposed to be. Tommy I love from my belly. From the center of me.

  Corey.They call him little Jimmy Make. But he’s half little me.The hard want in Corey, thrusting, the anger and envy, open mouth, reach down your hands and him crash right through, Corey. A go, go, go, while everything around here hollers at you stop, and I know there is no way we can fill that crave, no way we ever will, and I want to catch Corey, shake him, show him, look at me. Look at me. And if all you’re going to do is want, at least want life. Starving even when you’re full. Because also in Corey is the Jimmy Make part, the hot wet, Corey a flame, a push, a glow, and although of course I love Corey different than I loved Jimmy Make, the same force in Corey draws me still.

  I knelt in the dog-smelling carpet, head smashed in my arms, he hadn’t hit me, I wasn’t trying to beg. My body quivering under me, me swabbing the soak of my face—then I heard the ring of his keys. My shaking stopped. I lifted my face. It was undark enough to see. His bare pale feet. The stains on his jeans. The glut of stomach, flesh under his chin. The limp when he turned to leave.

  See him heave, the bow of his back, arch over me. Big cat. Wet horse. A swimming through air, catch me there, I needed that then. Hard rolling beauty and the tight of his skin, and I thought I’d lost all memory of how love felt, lost it so far back unnoticed I didn’t even have enough to copy by, had no pattern, that’s what I’d thought. Hard rolling beauty in that boy, rolling, burst drain. Shadow Jimmy. Out of a thousand fights, he’d never driven away, and this one him not even angry, there was light enough to see. And how much did I take? My mouth on his skin. Taste it there.

  Sad dark Dane. All that he carries quiet in him and how he feels too much, how he pulls into him everything, then closes like a mussel. Mussel soft inside.Way he’d just sit on my lap as a little one and watch, how he wouldn’t cry for food. Then he wouldn’t cry for pain. Dane will never have an easy time of it, I’ve known that since he was tiny, and I used to believe I could do some of his hurting for him, soak it away. But now I know different. I want to take Dane’s shoulders between my hands, press my eyes to the crown of his head. I want to cover him.

  Bant I love most different from the rest. Little sister, little friend. Bant’s dear face, and the skin will scar, but it is a luxury to heal a face. A luxury to heal. What the two of us went through together beginning that dark January, her growing her life while I was growing up, us moving over ground. Ground moving up into us. The years it was just the two of us, before Jimmy and the boys, Bant my side, my echo, Bant my death and then my borning, and if Tommy’s my stomach, Corey through my hands, Dane in my tears, then Bant is fused to my ribs. Feel her there.

  I raised up when I heard him take the keys, there was light enough that I could see. I raised, and I called his name. Jimmy turned around. There was light, I could see his face. It wasn’t mad. Jimmy Make had started feeling sorry for me.

  We flashed, glistened, we glowed. Him heaving through water, and the sun on his skin, water drops glisten flash, brown flecks spun gold. Spun gold. Creek trees and rocks and weeds, me riding his shoulders, my feet tucked behind his hips, a new animal made. Him never wanting past now, never thinking past real, the way he filled me and made me forget me, animal wetness, hotbody catheat. Needed, I loved, I took from him then.

  I wake this morning at ten o’clock, my skin already sticky where it touches skin. Too much raw sun in the room, the ripped sheer curtains, the bent rod, and I wake with in my mouth the taste of Jimmy Make’s shoulder. And I wake knowing that although today he will be home, Jimmy is not waiting on me any longer. This time, Jimmy will choose. And I know, at thirty-one years old, Jimmy Make has finally grown up.

  Dane

  IT’S TEN fifteen on a Sunday morning, and although the house is never empty at that time on a Sunday morning, it is almost empty now. Dane stands in the living room door looking at where Jimmy Make’s truck is not, while the logs grind tight in his gut. So little room to move. Corey and Tommy left half an hour ago, taking care not to wake Dane, which means they are up to
something because otherwise they would have deliberately bothered him. Bant was out until after two in the morning, Dane heard her sneak back in, and with her sneaking came a bad feeling in Dane, a feeling with colors, an animal smell, but a feeling he cannot name.

  But what worries Dane most is when he passed Jimmy and Lace’s room a few minutes ago and he saw Lace alone in their bed. He paused there in the hall, looking harder to make sure Jimmy Make wasn’t hidden somewhere in the covers, but it was only Lace, awake, her eyes open, but not seeing Dane. Now Dane realizes Jimmy’s truck is gone and he never heard it leave, which makes him think it’s been gone a good while, and for Jimmy to leave in the middle of the night like that . . . Then there’s what Dane saw at the end of the hall last night.

  He pours Foodland Frosted Flakes into a cereal bowl, stops a minute, decides to trade up for a mixing bowl. He stays so hungry lately, despite his stomach being always more than full. It is not a good hunger, not appetite, it is just an order to keep applying pressure. What’s goin on, you got worms? Jimmy Make talking. Dane turns towards the porch, Baron at his feet, back-pedaling, bug-eyed alert for something to drop, and when Dane opens the front door, he tips the bowl, loses his spoon, and slops milk on Baron’s head. Baron’s tongue happy. Dane picks up the spoon and carries his cereal to the edge of the porch, where he sits with his legs dangling and the railing right over his head. Feels the sting of air on the piece of his little toenail he ripped off last night. Sunday morning. Almost nobody home. Would things be different if they still went to church? No. Dane knows they would not. Things are gettin awful. Just awful, things are gettin. What’s coming. What’s coming next. Open your Bibles, please. Read.

  He spoons the cereal into his mouth like a duty. Mrs. Taylor is at church. Mrs. Taylor has finally decided. Before very long, her house will be empty, too, she is just too worn out to stay. If we all last til then. He likes Mrs. Taylor, but if she leaves, she’ll take the stories with her, but then how much does it matter anyway, with the stories in him already? Turrible. It’s just turrible. He’d be going to school anyway, he’d be working way less hours even if she stayed. Him going to the new middle school. New kids to discover new meannesses for Dane.

  They fought hard last night, fought nasty. Lace was very late getting home from the Dairy Queen, but Jimmy Make was mad enough to sit up for her, Bant slipping in the back door while they were at it in the living room. The fight had been a bad one, but Dane hadn’t thought it that much different from most of them. Until later when he had to pee.

  He had woken up, and often when this happens, he tries to hold the pee, wills himself back to sleep, but there is always also the very real risk he will pee the bed. He hasn’t for over a year now, Dane believes he’s outgrown it. But last night, the fear of backsliding and bed-pissing outweighed his fear of the dark. He could feel the almost morning in the dark, it was graying a little, but it was still dark enough to threat. So Dane ventured out on his nighttime bathroom ritual, screwing his eyes tight shut in the dark down the hall—he runs his hand along the wall, he knows exactly where to stop—until he hits the bathroom doorjamb, reaches inside, and flicks the light. Only then does he open his eyes. He’d done all this last night, and after he peed, he turned the light back off like Lace made them do, clamped his eyes closed, and began groping his way back to the bedroom. Then something happened.

  He felt a pull on him from behind. Something down the hall magneted his back, it commanded look and see, the command deeper than voice or tap or clutch, even more insistent than the pamphlet pull, and Dane clenched his jaw against it; he stiffened his back. But it would not ease up. It yanked. It ordered. It forced. Until finally it was worse not to look than it was to look, finally this Dane knew, so without turning his whole body, without exposing his front to it, at least he could hold onto that, he craned his neck around over his shoulder. And saw.

  At the end of the hall, at the entrance to the living room, lay the monkey. Even though it was too dark to see that far, even though there was no way his eyes could have adjusted that fast, Dane could see. The monkey wasn’t sitting up looking at him, no. It wasn’t alive. The pull had come off it dead. It lay crumpled in its usual death pose, Dane recognized the way it lay even though he has never actually seen the monkey, still Dane recognized that pose. He knew. Limp on the carpet, twisted funny unlike any live thing would lie, and its dirty fur swished a little, Dane saw it move, the way it swishes when water passes over it. That was the only thing about it that moved. At Dane it cocked its empty dead eye.

  Then, abruptly, it let Dane go. He was suddenly turned loose and tearing back to his bed, slamming his arm in the bedroom doorframe and stubbing brutally his little toe on the leg of Corey’s couch. Corey didn’t twitch. Dane shot under his covers, snatching them all the way over his head, and he lay trying to hold the outside of his body rigid as ice while inside his whole self was abeat. He grasped after prayer. Felt it air in his heart.Then he heard the whispers. End-of-the-world mutter, voices soft-chutter, moany. Moooany in their mouths. He heard.

  This morning, he’d had no fear about walking back into the hall. He knew, even though it hadn’t been a dream, that the monkey would be gone. Knew that with the same recognition he’d had of how the monkey always lay.

  Baron scratches the screen door, wanting out. Dane ignores him, reaches his hands up to stretch his arms on the rail. He hears a motor start down the hollow; a motorcycle or ride mower or four-wheeler. Then he realizes it’s coming all the way up into their part of the hollow, where nobody has much reason to come, especially with the gate locked back up. Dane looks towards the bend in the road to see who it is.

  The first thing he can tell is that it’s two kids on a four-wheeler, and the next thing he can tell is that it’s Tommy and Corey—the chamois rag fluttering—but then he reminds himself that’s not possible. But then it’s clear that it is. They aren’t going very fast, just kind of sputtering along, and Dane knows they’re trying not to draw attention to themselves. That’s the only reason Corey wouldn’t be gunning it. Chancey trots along at a safe distance behind.

  Dane has risen up on his haunches by now, clutching the rail over his head with both hands, tensed, and now they’re putting right past the house. Dane sees they’re none too glad to spy him spying on them, which he can tell by the way Corey ignores him so hard it turns inside out and becomes the opposite and the way Tommy’s mouth ohs in frightened and disappointed surprise before he buries his whole face in Corey’s back. Now Dane is standing, paralyzed by three cross-pulling feels: the temptation to get revenge on Corey’s meanness by running inside and telling Lace; a jaw-drop awe that Corey has managed not only to steal Seth’s four-wheeler but knows how to drive it; and, louder than anything else, curiosity over what Corey will do next.

  They jiggle past and on up the hollow, the camouflage fenders rocking with the bumps in the road, their legs spraddled over the big engine, the chamois rag flagging. Dane hits the ground in his bare feet and sprints to the road to see whether they’re heading for the valley fill or the snake ditches, then Corey takes the hairpin turn that doubles back up to the above-the-hollow road. The moment the four-wheeler’s out of his sight, Dane hears it explode into speed. The snake ditches.

  He springs back up on the porch and snatches his tennis shoes from just inside the front door.Then he’s across the yard and road and clawing straight up the hill to the above-the-hollow road where Corey and Tommy will have to pass on their way back down the hollow to the snake ditches. But the bank is steep and viney, and Dane slips two times, three times, four, he tangles himself, cussing without words his awkwardness, his broadish woman hips, these he blames, and while he’s thrashing around to regain lost ground, he hears the four-wheeler barrel by above him. Then he busts free and finds himself staggering out into the higher road before he expected to, and over the noise of his own breath, he can hear that they are idling now, no doubt looking for the turnoff to the snake ditches.

  The snake di
tches are not a place Dane would ever choose to go, and would never go alone, even though snakes, like dreams, are the least of his problems now (him little, and Jimmy Make bringing them up on the dirt bike, and Dane scared skeered of snakes while Bant was not, Jimmy was quick to point out, although later Bant told him not to feel bad, she had been scared, too, but still later, Dane wondered if she just said that to make him feel better). The snake ditches are a bad place, but, like the Big Drain, Dane’s need to watch mutes the dangers of the snake ditches. As does, although he would never think it to himself, his want to be a part of the others.

  He runs down the road after them, but not in the middle. He sticks to the sides in case they should look back and see him. The reaching sides, overgrown and heavy green, the road in August a tunnel of plant. Balancing on the top of a rut, he tries to keep clear of puddle, water, mud, but he slides into it a time or two anyway, and over top his own gasping, over top the swish his side makes against branches and weed, he hears the four-wheeler engine holler and strain off-road. He hears Corey yell something at Tommy.

  Then he’s left the road and is creeping through the underbrush on the side of the track they have begun to tear to the snake ditches, Dane terrified that if they see him, they’ll abandon the ditches altogether and speed off somewhere he can’t follow. Sweat slicks up and down his back, spills between his two little breasts, he feels it tickle, he smacks at it to go away. Suddenly Corey comes into full view, and Dane ducks behind an umbrella magnolia to watch from behind. Chancey has already spotted him, but Chancey doesn’t care. Still mounted on the four-wheeler, Corey forces it forward, then gentles and coaxes it, forces, then coaxes, alternating like that, while Tommy sweeps back and forth in front dragging away bigger obstacles.