by Dao Strom
Cody was swinging a stick at the grass and grinning. “I knew that was you,” he said.
“Well, I knew it was you,” I answered, happy to see him.
He sat down on one of the rocks and poked his stick into the ground. He started gouging up clumps of the yellow grass. When he bent his head down, I could see the back of his neck was red. He rubbed it with one hand.
“Why is your neck red?”
“I got sunburned. I guess you don’t ever burn. You’re lucky.”
I walked a few steps away into the grass. I broke off a branch of a manzanita tree that was hanging over my head. The bark was smooth and deep crimson red. You could peel it off like the skin of a fruit, and the wood underneath was white and soft and delicate and pretty. Suddenly I felt like fighting. I stuck the branch in my mouth.
Cody was watching. “You’re acting weird, April,” he said, “you’re chewing on a stick.”
I shrugged. We didn’t talk for a few moments. Cody kept digging at the ground with his stick and I stood with my ankles crossed and watched him. The dirt turned up in wet, dark redbrown clumps with pale yellow slivers of grassroots poking through.
“My mom turns red as a turkey every time she goes out in the sun,” said Cody. He laughed slightly. “This one time my dad and her were lying by the lake and my dad fell asleep with his hand on her back and when she got up later and went inside, she had, like, a white handprint mark in the middle of her back and the rest of her back was all red. My dad called it the hand of God!” He laughed more, but I didn’t feel like laughing with him. “It was so funny, though,” he said.
“Did it go away?”
“’Course it went away.”
I sat down on the other side of the rock next to Cody, imagining a big white hand mark on a person’s bare back. “Who do you like better,” I asked, “me or my sister?” My sister, Beth, was seven, three years younger than we were.
Cody shrugged. “Neither, I guess.”
“But you have to like someone better,” I said. That year I had begun to be scared about possibilities and had to seek security sometimes. By myself, it seemed any disaster, any atrocity was possible. Often in the afternoons I would be overwhelmed by dread. I don’t know why or where it came from. I’d be inside, thinking a crazy person might have broken into the house while we were away and that he was hiding there watching me, so I would go outside. But there might be a storm blowing and then I’d envision the whole side of the cliff next to the house collapsing suddenly and burying me. You just couldn’t know. So often it felt as if there was nowhere safe to go.
“I like you both the same,” said Cody. He glanced up abruptly. “Whoa, lookit. Wish I could do that”
Two red-tailed hawks circled in the sky far overhead. Their cries came across the valley toward us, faint and lonely sounding.
Cody made a squawking noise in his throat.
We came back up along the blue gravel road and sat down at the top of my driveway. The dogs waddled up the driveway and walked around us, wagging their tails and trying to lick our faces. We kept pushing them off and finally they lay down, panting. Their big thick coats smelled like the mucky parts of the lake, but they felt good to lean against or lay your head on.
We were there on the driveway with our heads on the dogs, looking up at the gray sky, when Cody’s Uncle Michael walked by on the road. Uncle Michael was about fifty years old and brain-damaged from all the drinking he’d done. At least that’s what I remember being told. He lived in a trailer next to the trailer the Walkers lived in, because Cody’s mom was Uncle Michael’s niece and had to take care of him. The Walkers were also building a house on their property, nicer than ours, though, a log cabin. The logs the Walkers were using for their home were honey brown, like the color of pancakes.
Uncle Michael was known for taking frequent walks down the road. He dragged his feet when he went by and he slouched. He never talked to anyone, and if you said “hi” to him he would just lift his hand at you and not blink. He wasn’t supposed to drink or smoke anymore, but when he took his long walks down the road you could spy him sneaking cigarettes. (That is how the older girls in the neighborhood picked up the technique, actually, of holding their lit cigarettes carefully, backward, in the cups of their hands as they walked; they told Cody so.) And Uncle Michael wasn’t really brain-damaged, we knew, he just didn’t want to talk. He sat in his chair in front of his trailer and played cards by himself all the time, too, and didn’t that take thinking? I’d decided something must’ve happened to Uncle Michael, something terrible when he was young. My parents on the other hand explained to me that Uncle Michael was a vegetable, a human vegetable. Maybe before he had been an avid card player, an expert, reasoned my father, and that was why this skill was now automatic to him. His having been a card player would explain his drinking, too, said my father.
I didn’t always believe them, though, my parents.
Cody and I waved at Uncle Michael and he waved back and went on walking. A few seconds later, Rebel Johnson and her little brother, Davy, who was four, came walking up from the opposite direction. They lived down the road, and their father, Travis Johnson, was a contractor who’d been helping my father build our house for a couple of years; he still occasionally helped. Rebel was one year older than me and Cody but in the same grade as I was. She was the first friend I’d made when we moved up here.
“Your uncle just flipped me off,” she told Cody.
“No, he didn’t.” Cody rolled his eyes.
“I swear to God he did.” Rebel had straight, shoulder-length blond hair and freckles. She wasn’t popular in school, because (the other kids liked to say) she had a big butt. She was also a troublemaker and a kleptomaniac. Otherwise, maybe people would’ve thought she was pretty. I’d been told by some girls in school that more guys might like me if I didn’t hang out with Rebel so much. Those same girls wouldn’t have believed I actually hung out more with Cody Walker when we weren’t in school.
Rebel walked up and stood over us, Davy behind her with his fingers in his mouth and his face all dirty. He was barefoot. Davy was always barefoot. Once in the middle of winter even, he walked down to the creek by himself and went in naked. He was only two years old then. He got poison oak all over his body and had to be put in a cold bath.
“April, I have something to tell you,” said Rebel, her hands on her hips.
I squinted up at her. “So, tell me.”
“You have to c’mere. It’s a secret.”
“So,” I said, fixing my gaze on her.
Rebel’s eyes got a little wide. “It’s important, April. Like, majorly.”
I got up, and she took my arm and pulled me aside. The dogs also got up, so Cody stood, too. I noticed his blond hair was messy in the back from lying down and for a single moment I felt protective of him. Rebel put her arm around my shoulders and her bangs touched mine. “Amy Abraham died,” she whispered. Amy Abraham was a girl in our neighborhood and a classmate of Rebel’s and mine.
I knew enough to be cautious about believing anything Rebel said. I narrowed my eyes at her—a thing I’d recently picked up from watching one of the older girls, Leann DeOlivera, do it while she was talking back to her parents.
“A tree fell on her. I swear to God, April. My mom just got a phone call from Dana Morrison’s mom, and Dana Morrison’s mom said Dana’d just been on a Girl Scouts camping trip, and the park ranger said they camped under a dead tree. Dana Morrison was there like right next to Amy, and she saw Amy’s legs sticking out from under the tree. She said her legs were totally blue.”
I didn’t speak. I was thinking about Rebel’s reputation for making up stories and stealing things from people at school. Many times the teacher kept the whole class after to search through all the desks. Once, I was remembering, Rebel stole a holographic dinosaur ruler from Amy Abraham, and later I gave it back to Amy in secret. But I told Amy I’d just found it on the ground somewhere. Usually people suspected the truth about Rebel
anyway.
“Cross my heart, swear to Jesus, April,” said Rebel. “It’s true, true, true.” She got in my face and nodded three times. “Amy’s gone. Aren’t you sad? You should be sad, April. We’re never going to see her again and we didn’t even get to say good-bye. Isn’t that awful?”
I thought then that I should feel like crying, but for some reason nothing moved inside me. The sound of my father’s pickup truck growling up the road broke the air then. He came home from work each day at five o’clock. The truck looked very white on that gray day. Cody and Davy moved off the driveway, and the dogs ran up against the driver’s side window, wagging their tails and barking and panting.
My father leaned out the window. “What are you skunks up to?” He was in a good mood. He pointed to Davy, who still had his fingers in his mouth. “Hey, he has no shoes on. Rebel, your brother could get ringworm running around barefoot like that, you know.” The truck rolled slowly forward.
“Dad,” I had to say it before Rebel could, “Amy Abraham died.”
“A tree fell on her when they were out camping with the Girl Scouts last night,” said Rebel in one breath. “It was a dead tree, a Ponderosa pine. And it wasn’t even windy. The tree just fell because it was dead.”
My father sat with the truck idling. He shook his head. “Oh, Jesus,” he said, his mouth turning down as if he were about to get angry.
Cody walked over to where Rebel and I were standing and looked at us with a blank face. He was still holding his stick, and he drew some lines in the road with it in front of his feet. I felt my eyes start to water a little but, I have to say, that was the only time. Not just with Amy’s death. With the next one, too.
At the bus stop a lot of kids used to tease Amy Abraham because she was sort of a goody-goody. Some mornings I sat next to her on the bus and tried to make her feel better by attempting to be her friend. But most days, to be honest, I walked straight to the back of the bus, where I sat and tried to be more like all the others. The back of the bus was where it was at. Laughing and sticking my foot out in the aisle to trip boys like Todd Parham and Bryan Nichol as they boarded. Nothing that happened on those bus rides counted for very much once you arrived at school, though.
And at school Amy Abraham had nothing to worry about; she hung out with other girls more like her, who wore prettier dresses and colored hairbands, who’d come in on the Highway 49 bus that went almost into town, other girls who were not too popular but not unpopular, and who were affiliated with things like the Girl Scouts because their parents knew about these things. Girls who had events like first communions in their lives, and annual bake sales.
Amy Abraham lived down Winding Mile Way (which went on much longer than a mile), clear on the other side of the lake we all lived near, Lake Miwok. Her mother participated in the carpools to and from the bus stop with the other mothers, and her father was a professional baseball player but also a contractor. Amy had two little brothers and a white pony named Snowcone, and one year Snowcone got sick and had to be put to sleep, and the following day in school Amy was crying a lot in the middle of class. I remember standing around with the other girls who gathered to comfort her, but I didn’t have the nerve to put my hand on her shoulder. We were all sometimes friends and sometimes not, in those days.
After dinner on the evening Rebel had told me the news, my sister, Beth, and I sat at the edge of the dirt bank behind our house, eating cantaloupe halves. From there we could watch the faraway strip of sky (across the valley where it was not as overcast as here) fading to orange, then purple, then blue, over the hills. My hands and legs were sticky with cantaloupe juice.
My brother, Thien, came and stood to our side, throwing rocks down into the ravine. “You know what this guy Victor called me at the pool today? This guy from school who I hate? He called me a Indian.”
Our mom, who was sitting behind Beth and me on a turnedover bucket, said in a surprised tone, “You’re not a Indian.”
“No, duh,” said Thien, and threw another rock. The dogs kept pricking up their ears at the sounds the rocks made landing in the brush and grass. They thought it was deer or porcupine or some other creature down there.
Mom laughed. “Well, whatever they say, you just tell them ‘thank you!’ and ‘good-bye!’ and pretend you don’t care, because they don’t know what they talking about.”
“I’m not going to thank people for that,” said Thien, with disgust. “God, Mom.”
“They don’t know what they’re talking about,” I agreed, thinking about a mistake my teacher had made. She’d written “America” on the board and told us to come up with words we could spell out of those letters. She hadn’t believed me when I raised my hand and said “camera.” She just skipped over me with a look that said she thought I didn’t understand the exercise.
My brother said, “Well, I told him at least I’m not a stupid ugly albino.” Beth and I laughed, even though neither of us knew what an albino was.
Thien glared at us. “It’s not funny.”
“I know you are but what am I,” I said as quickly as I could. I didn’t know why I said it.
Thien’s face wrinkled at me. “Shut up, loser,” he said, then walked off up the driveway.
Later, I walked down the road a way to find him. I was feeling full of love and worry because, honestly, I hated seeing my brother get mad. When he got mad he always looked more like he was getting sad. I didn’t like his silence at those times; it terrified me. When he got in fights with our father, it was this way, too. He would just get very, very quiet while our father yelled. Sometimes he wouldn’t answer a question, and our father would repeat it again and again, and I would stand nearby praying Thien would say just one word at least. The trees were blue now in the late evening light. I saw the shape of a person coming, but it was too tall to be Thien. I ducked down on the side of the road and the grass poked at my legs. It was just Uncle Michael walking by, smoking his cigarette. He lifted his hand in his stiff wave and hardly looked at me, as if he’d known all along I was there.
I finally found my brother in his trailer. The rest of us had moved into the house only a month or so ago, but he’d stayed in the trailer. Inside was my brother’s own world. He had hooked up his speakers so that the whole inside of the trailer filled with sound whenever you turned on any music. We listened to The Beatles a lot, since they were Thien’s favorite band. I liked to lie on my stomach on his floor and draw while he did his homework or whatever. Sometimes if I needed to draw something difficult, like a hand or a foot (the hardest things to draw realistically, said our mother, who had read this in a book about art), I would ask Thien to draw it for me. He was good at everything. He was always copying pictures out of comic books and science fiction novels whose plots he would tell me. There were many stories about men who could travel through time or to different planets but were lonely in their regular lives.
“Thien, I’m sorry.” I stood on the dirt outside and called through the door.
“Stupid,” said Thien, opening the door. “I’m not mad at you anymore.” He was smiling.
Inside, the music was warm and loud. I stood on one of the seats and pressed my body to the wall and felt the wall trembling, as if the music was inside trying to get out. I felt so cozy for a moment, it felt like Christmas.
“You know that girl, the one who died?” asked Thien. “You should never sleep under any trees, okay? And if you’re walking and you ever hear branches creaking over your head, from now on run. Fast, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, feeling serious and a little proud about the possible danger.
“It was careless of the Girl Scout camp leaders not to have realized those girls were sleeping under a dead tree.” Our dad had already said this.
I closed my eyes for a second to feel the music more strongly.
“You wanna know a secret? You can’t tell Mom or Dad, though.”
I opened my eyes. “Swear to God, hope to die.” I swore it, but then I crossed my fin
gers behind my back, just in case.
“I hate living in the trailer. I hate building the house. I hate Dad.”
“I hate it, too,” I said. But I wasn’t sure which part I meant.
Amy’s funeral was on a Saturday. Mom said we should go, since everyone in the neighborhood was going, and Dad said he’d rather not, because he didn’t like big occasions, which he said people were always putting on to make themselves feel better about things that had nothing to do with them in the first place. Plus, he had work to do.
That morning he was laying tile in the kitchen, and Thien was helping. The floors of the house were still concrete. There was no gypsum board on any of the upstairs walls, so you could walk between the beams and if you weren’t careful, you could fall. The tiles our father was laying were like big, square, textured stickers —the cheapest kind. When our father built things, he either made them makeshift or like the humongous cat carrier we couldn’t even carry, as the pine wood he’d built it with was so heavy. Beth and I used the box as a house for our dolls instead.
I stood on the bottom stair and ate my toast, watching Dad and Thien peel the paper backing off each square and stick the tiles straight onto the concrete. Tile by tile the kitchen was starting to look like a kitchen was supposed to look, but it still seemed unfinished to me. It was like watching chickens grow up. I was so used to seeing them as baby chicks, I couldn’t tell at which point they became adult chickens.