Tornado Weather

by Deborah E. Kennedy

  It’s not like my dad thinks. I don’t skip. Much. My grades are going to shit on account of Mr. Gonzalez, who is my math teacher and history teacher and walking, talking torment. He hates me. Seriously. He effing hates me and there’s really nothing I can do about it because as far as I can tell I never did anything to bring on the hating in the first place. The fact that he teaches two of my classes is bad enough, but Benny said he heard that Mr. Gonzalez was telling my other teachers that I was a loser from way back, like a born loser, and so now they’re following right in Mr. Gonzalez’s tiny footsteps, giving me grief if I’m a second late and grading my papers and tests extra hard.

  At least I’m doing halfway decent in art class, which is good because I’m pretty sure that’s what I want to do with my life. Be an artist. Starve. What the fuck? Art’s my only A, but even Mr. Sawyer told me I need to be careful not to lose my line. Mr. Sawyer thinks art is all about having a line in your head and following it, putting it on the page in a way only you can, and he’s worried I might have stopped seeing my line. You’re talented, he says, but talent’s not everything.

  It’s because my last name’s Seaver. That’s according to Benny and Benny should know because his sister’s married to my third cousin and my cousin gets pulled over for a DUI every two weeks while Benny’s sister can drink like a fish and hit a few mailboxes and go home completely unmolested.

  Benny likes the word molested, not because he’s a cho-mo or anything, but because he says it makes him sound learned. Benny’s like that, smart and sophisticated, and he promised me five months ago when we were drunk and smoking out at Spencerville Fun Spot that once he got his license and his dad’s cast-off Camry he’d drive us as far away from Colliersville as he could. “Into the ocean if that’s what it takes,” he said, and even though we were hammered and Benny was feeling a little high on account of I’d just blown him and let him cum in my mouth, I’m going to hold him to that promise because it’s really all I’ve got.

  Well, besides Daddy and Uncle Scottie and my bunny, Chiggers, who, according to Uncle Scottie, isn’t really long for this world because of how fat he is and old, too. I guess in a way I have Benny, but he’s a boy and beautiful and his skin is slick like a seal’s and sometimes when we’re together it feels like he could just slide right out of my grasp into the ocean. Not that we’re close to the ocean here in Colliersville, Indiana, or Collarsville as I like to call it, landlocked as we are and choking on dust, but Benny doesn’t belong here and I know I have to do extra-special stuff to keep his interest, hence the blow jobs and the swallowing, but soon that won’t be enough. I have to be smart and get good grades like that Italian slut Marissa Marino, who moved here in December with her hair and her skin and her I’m-going-to-be-valedictorian-as-well-as-head-cheerleader-you-just-watch-me glow (and believe me, Benny does watch her), and that’s why one Sunday while Daddy and Uncle Scottie are in the living room, cleaning their guns and cuing up Road House for the hundred-billionth time, I decide to shed a little light on the “why Renee can’t seem to pass history” dilemma.

  “Daddy,” I say, handing him and Uncle Scottie beers from the cooler Dad keeps next to his recliner, “I got a little bit of a problem with a teacher at school.”

  “Oh really?” Daddy takes a long swig of beer and runs one of my old T-shirts through a puddle of gun oil. “What’s the trouble?”

  Daddy’s distracted, but still, I can tell my timing’s impeccable. Apparently Mr. Yoder—who owned, or used to own anyway, a big-ass dairy out on Route 20 where Colliersville meets Spencerville through a tangled chicken-wire fence—came to the militia meeting tonight because the police raided his business a few weeks ago and he’s out for revenge or something. I guess Mr. Yoder showed up dressed in Revolutionary War garb, white wig and everything, and kept saying, “Give me liberty or give me death,” and it’s weird, but bad news just charges Daddy and Uncle Scottie up, especially when it comes with a new member. Blessing upon blessing, Mr. Yoder’s not only a crossbow enthusiast, but also a mover and shaker in the Colliersville Chamber of Commerce. So, there’s sort of a spark in the air tonight you can almost smell, a “we finally know people who know people” excitement coming off Daddy and Uncle Scottie in waves, stronger even than their usual Old Spice/Axe body spray combo I’m so used to.

  “This Helman Yoder development is gonna take us to the next level,” Uncle Scottie says.

  Dad agrees. “No doubt about it. Helman will see to it that we step up our game.”

  I don’t know Mr. Yoder from a wheel of cheese, but his son, Wally, is in my class and we used to be sort of friends way back when in fourth or fifth grade, but he thinks he’s a chick now or something—wears skirts and tights to school and uses the girls’ restroom even. I heard he works at the Hair Barn, giving mani-pedis and eyebrow waxes to old ladies. Wild. He doesn’t say much when I run into him in the bathroom, preening in front of the mirror and slathering on the same shade of lipstick as Marissa the Italian Slut, just averts his eyes and plays with his hair. But that’s fine with me. Now that Wally’s a girl, it’s like we have nothing to talk about.

  “Daddy,” I say again. “I need your help.”

  Daddy looks up from his rifle, a shiny blue-gray, walnut-butted Winchester he likes to call Cher in honor of that singer from the seventies who used to be beautiful but is suffering from melty face like the rest of them. “Spill it, sugar,” he says. “Tell me all about the asshole.”

  Uncle Scottie laughs and shakes his head. That’s his response to a lot of what Daddy does and says and even though they’re not really brothers and he’s not technically my uncle, just an old friend of the family, they get along like they’re related, doing pretty much anything for the other and having the occasional fistfight to clear the air.

  I take a seat in Daddy’s recliner and pop it up so I’m relaxed and dig in. “It’s this Mexican guy, Mr. Gonzalez—”

  “Spic teacher?” Daddy says.

  “Well, yeah,” I say. “Mr. Gonzalez hates me, Daddy, he really does, and you think I’m skipping, but what’s really going on is he’s flunking me on purpose and telling all my other teachers that I suck or something.”

  “What right does he have…” Daddy says, going red about the temples. “What right…”

  It’s feeling too easy, but I go with it. “I know, Daddy. That’s what I thought. What right?”

  Gonzo’s as legal as they come—born in Chicago, according to Benny, and a Bottoms dweller like us—but there’s lots of illegals living right next door now, thanks to Mr. Yoder, who brought them here to milk his cows. Well, not technically next door, but down the street in the Ranasack Apartments, which, like the rest of the Bottoms, used to be nice. Daddy says he can remember a time when people took some pride in their places, mowed their lawns, planted flowers by their front stoops, kept their boat docks waterproofed and up straight. It’s as if everything’s sort of gone downhill. Literally. The three shoulderless streets and two gravel alleys tip toward the Ranasack like cigarette ash left too long, and Daddy blames the illegals for the difference. Whenever we run into a group of them, playing basketball in the apartment parking lot or hanging out around Tony’s Pizza or the bank or the PO, he makes sure to get between me and the men especially, who, Daddy says, have one thing on their mind, that being the rape of young, helpless white girls like myself. Benny thinks it’s all bullshit, says my daddy and his precious militia make the KKK look like a bridge club, but I’m not sure. Daddy says there’s a right way and a wrong way to do things.

  The wrong way is my dick of a cousin Josh’s approach. A few nights ago I caught him writing, “Spics go home!” on someone’s truck with a Sharpie. He was drunk off his ass and in the company of his stripper bit on the side. She was plowed, too, and wrapped up tight like a Christmas present in a bright blue Band-Aid dress. She kept stumbling on her six-inch heels and telling me I was pretty for a Seaver. “That’s because all the Seavers you know are men,” I said, and pushed Josh toward h
ome. “Go back to your girlfriend.”

  “Excuse me?” said the drunk girl.

  “Your real girlfriend,” I said.

  Josh wants in Daddy’s militia so bad everyone can taste it, but Daddy and Uncle Scottie won’t budge. They have their standards, regardless of what Benny might say about it.

  “Your teacher says you suck?” Uncle Scottie asks, eyeing me suspiciously from under the brim of his hat.

  I just ignore him and forge on. “I study, Daddy, I really do. And I work hard. You’ve seen me. I get home and go right to my room and do my homework until it’s all finished, but Mr. Gonzalez is poisoning that place for me. Just poisoning it.”

  I have this way of dealing with Daddy. Some, and by some I mean Uncle Scottie, would say that I’m spoiled, that Daddy’s wrapped around my pinky finger, but it’s a lot more complicated than that and no one, not even Uncle Scottie, not even Benny when he’s quiet and listening and so beautiful and empathetic I want to eat his face, can really understand what Daddy and I have. It’s just us. It’s been just us for three years now since my mom up and left with that horrid Irish guy who came through town selling fake limbs, only the problem was the fake limbs were even a little fake. They didn’t work, didn’t stay on, didn’t move right—ask poor Carl Nickels, who’s in the militia but mostly moves targets around since he lost his leg below the knee to sugar diabetes. Carl was the first guy in town to buy one of the blarney dickwad’s fake legs and was so jazzed thinking he’d finally be able to drive again that he strapped it on and took off full tilt, only to have the thing come unhinged at 60 mph and his El Camino split in two by a telephone pole. By the time people realized it was all a scam, though, my brilliant mother was elbows deep in love with the dude and skipped town with him and his truck full of plastic arms waving good-bye.

  I have one of the arms. It got left behind by accident, flew out of the truck bed and landed, fingers up, in our lilac bush. It’s sitting on my bookshelf in a vase. I painted a tattoo on it, a whole sleeve of tangled things—roses, words (“Mother,” “Benny”), bullets, bunnies. It’s a souvenir. I have a dress of hers, too, an ugly one with the armpit ripped out, and a seashell earring box with four pop-beads inside.

  I can tell by the diamond commercials on TV that Mother’s Day’s approaching. None of us gives a shit. None of us has any mothers. Dad’s died of a heart attack before I was born and Scottie’s drank herself blue and right into the ground a few years ago. Mother’s Day, shmother’s day.

  Anyway, Daddy and I bonded after Mom left, got really tight because we had to. Watched a lot of movies, mostly Disney princess crap because that’s what I was into then, fell asleep on the floor together sometimes, ate popcorn and Little Debbies and Corn Nuts just to survive. Things were tough for a while, things were downright scary because Daddy lost his job and then almost lost his mind, but now here we both are, on the other side of all that, stronger, better and better for it, and Daddy’s got a j-o-b he kinda loves at the junkyard off Route 20. It’s a pretty easy gig. He feeds the dogs, watches a little TV, packs a little heat. I take Benny there a lot, that is when we’re not hanging out at the Fun Spot, which is a badass location because it’s like history just froze everything in place, and trees grow up right through the rides and wooden clown faces rot in the rain. Benny’s into that sort of thing, old stuff with long stories. That’s why he likes the junkyard, which he says is like a cemetery for cars. When we go there we get lost in the jungle of truck cabs and tires, throw flowers. It’s spooky and wonderful at night, strange shadows and varmints scurrying in the high grass and wheel wells.

  “Mr. Gonzalez, you say?” Daddy holds Cher up to the light and tilts her back to really let her shine.

  I nod, doing my best to sound choked up. “I just don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “Maybe you should go in, have a meeting with him, Hank,” Uncle Scottie says. His gun’s clean and packed away. I can tell by how fast he’s finished and the fact that he’s sitting on the edge of his chair that he’s itching to get home to his pretty girlfriend—Patty? Penny? It doesn’t matter, won’t last more than a few weekends. He’ll take her out to Sharkey’s, turn her around the dance floor a few times, and she’ll get drunk and accuse him of looking up some other broad’s skirt. Before you know it, Uncle Scottie’ll be alone again and begging to sleep on our couch out of sheer loneliness, moaning about crazy women, can’t live with ’em, can’t kill ’em. Except you could, Daddy’ll say, like he always does. If you had the balls. We’re very big on balls around here.

  “Think that’ll help, honeypie?” Daddy asks me now. He lays Cher lovingly in her case and snaps it shut. “Giving Mr. Poncho Gonzalez a good talking-to?”

  “Not sure he’s the type that’ll listen to reason, Daddy.”

  Uncle Scottie whistles and shakes his head.

  Meanwhile, on the TV, Patrick Swayze’s telling a whole bar full of mulleted, wannabe bouncers, “I want you to be nice, until it’s time to not be nice.”

  “Well, all righty then,” Daddy says, drinking his beer down. His gaunt, handsome face narrows to a point.

  Chiggers bangs against his cage in the kitchen and I text Benny right then: Gonzo’s reign of terror ends now.

  * * *

  Colliersville High School is the kind of building you look at and just know there’s lead paint in there somewhere. It’s ancient, so old my dad went there, and sticking out between the windows are these hideous yellow panels, for decoration, I guess, but I can’t help thinking that they look like dead teeth in a rotting face. Inside it’s almost worse. The first thing that hits you is the smell: old sweet potatoes, body odor, and hunger. People think that hunger doesn’t have a smell but they’re wrong. Half the hunger’s the real and sad kind—Colliersville’s got its share of poor kids—and that smells like shit breath and sugar, but the other half is pure desperation to get the hell out of Dodge. That’s the kind of stink I have and mostly I don’t mind it. I’ll wash it off someday, soon maybe, when Benny takes me to the ocean.

  Next up on your tour of Collarsville High, after the wall of smell, is the big, bright hallway where the rumbly-stomached, genuinely poor kids stand so they can make fun of your outfit. Not that I blame them. They have to have something, so what they have is judgment. I’m a Seaver and I used to be a poor kid, kind of still am if you compare me to Marissa the Italian Slut and her Wyndham-on-the-River friends, but Collarsville is weird that way. I’m cute, or at least I was in elementary school, and ever since I punched Lauren Tewksbury in the throat for calling my mom a hussy, I’ve had a reputation for being mean, so the poor kids leave me alone. After all, I was one of them back when Daddy lost his job and we had to shop at the Apple Mart, the little grocery store tacked on to the foodbank to make the impoverished feel like they have agency. Those are words Mr. Gonzalez loves to say. “Impoverished.” “Agency.” “Marginalized.” Ba-lo-ney, if you ask me, which of course he never does.

  Me and the other Apple Mart kids—Uncle Scottie’s real niece Balinda with the big swimmer shoulders and George, Carl Nickels’s two-legged son, most of the McElroys, and this Taiwanese kid whose name no one can pronounce but you know not to mess with on account of his killer eyes and weird upper-lip tic—we’re the ones who remember what this town was like when it was all woods and farmland. Back then places like Wyndham-on-the-River were just stink bogs filled with birds, and we all bonded in the foodbank aisles over the generic cereals and wilted produce and our unspoken knowledge that the only thing standing between us and outright homelessness was our parents’ spotty ability to get up and go to work in the morning. It brings you together, that knowledge. It’s an invisible thread yanked tight and double knotted.

  Benny wouldn’t know anything about it. His family has money. They own a couple gas stations in town and one down in Fort Wayne, not to mention a huge Wyndham-on-the-River McMansion with an in-ground pool out back and a genuine fountain out front. When he meets me in what he calls the Gauntlet Hall the morni
ng after my talk with Daddy and Uncle Scottie, he’s wearing a pressed wine-red shirt and expertly faded jeans. His hair, dark like chocolate and shiny as the barrel of Daddy’s gun, is elegantly mussed. It’s going in so many directions I get a little lost staring up into it, but that’s usually how I feel whenever I’m around Benny, like I’m on a hilltop somewhere spinning in circles like that girl who played the nun in the spring musical last year—“the hills are alive, with the sound of mucus”—and then someone says, “Now walk a straight line.” Yeah right.

  “Morning, pork chop,” Benny says. He throws an arm over my shoulder and guides me through the smell and scoffs and flying spitballs to his locker, which is decorated on the inside with poetry torn from magazines and posters of Barack Obama and the women of the Supreme Court. Benny’s a bit of a leftist, which makes him a weird match for me, I know, but I guess it’s true what Uncle Scottie says after every one of his breakups: Opposites attract.

  Benny grabs his trig book. “I hate this town so much I want to shoot myself in the face.”

  I glance over his shoulder down the row of lockers to Wally Yoder, who is awkwardly adjusting his bra. What does he have in there? Socks? Kleenex? Regardless, the result is lumpy and the left side is visibly bigger than the right. For a second, I can’t help feeling sorry. Benny and a lot of the other boys aren’t always so nice to him. Machismo crap. Then there’s the scandal surrounding his dad’s dairy and the whole transitioning into womanhood thing. I want to help him but not enough.