Flowers

by Scott Nicholson

  "We won, Coach," he whispered, and that word "we" was like a stake in my own heart. Then Jerry was dust, forever part of the infield.

  Dana took the pitcher's mound, weeping without shame. She stared into the crowd, at the umpires, into Turnbull's dugout, and I knew she was meeting the eye of every single person at Sawyer Field that day.

  "Look at yourselves," she said, her voice strong despite the knots I knew were tied in her chest. "Just take a good long look."

  Everybody did. I could hear a hot dog wrapper blowing against the backstop.

  "All he wanted was to play," she said. "All he wanted was to be just like you."

  Sure, her words were for everybody. But she had twenty-two years of experience as Mrs. Ruttlemyer. We both knew whom she was really talking to.

  "Just like you," she whispered, her words barely squeezing out yet somehow filling the outfield, the sky, the little place in your heart where you like to hide bad things. She walked off the mound with her head down, like a pitcher that had just given up the game-winning hit.

  So many tears were shed that the field would have been unplayable. People had tasted the wormwood of their prejudice. They had seen how vicious the human animal could be. Even vampires didn't kill their young, even when the young were decades old.

  There was no memorial service. I wrote the eulogy, but nobody ever got to read it, not even Dana. There was talk of filing criminal charges against the Turnbulls, but nobody had the stomach to carry it through. What happened that day was something that people spent a lot of time trying to forget.

  But that victory rang out across the ensuing years, a Liberty Bell for the living dead in Sawyer Creek. Vampires were embraced by the community, welcomed into the Chamber of Commerce, one was even elected mayor. Roscoe Turnbull has three vampires on his team this season.

  That Sawyer Cup still sits on my mantel, even though I never set foot on a diamond after that day. Sometimes when I look at the trophy, I imagine it is full of blood. They say that winning takes sacrifice. But that's just a myth.

  Still, all myths contain a kernel of truth, and even a myth can make you shiver.

  ###

  THIRST

  Sally hadn't rained in days.

  She hid under the porch when Mom opened the screen door. The wood of the porch bent and groaned above her head. Mom's shadow fell across the sunlit cracks between the boards, and Sally knew it was time. She hated being one of the stupid old rain people.

  She wanted to be like Melanie, with a blue dress and fine yellow hair and no freckles and skin that didn't turn pink on the first spring day. But Mom said Sally was a rain girl, and that was that. Rain girls weren't supposed to be pretty, even with rainbows in their hair.

  And raining was so much trouble. How could you have fun when you had to fight the sun and mash the clouds together and wring the drops out of the sky? She had to worry about the trees, the flowers and shrubs and vines and thorns and all of them screaming and whining for water. And the people, too. Mom had told her a million times that she had to care about people she didn't even know. Stupid people with their stupid thirsts.

  It was so grown-up, all this worry. She wanted to spend her summer catching the frogs that hid in the grass beside the ditch, racing boys down the street on her bicycle, running through butterfly fields with her arms spread wide as the colors dodged and blurred at the edge of her vision. She longed to sit under the stars at the foot of an old oak and just breathe the big air and not think about whether the soil was moist enough. She wanted summer nights, holding hands with Jason if she could gather the nerve.

  "Come help me, Sally Ann," Mom called. "Got chores to do."

  Mom was on the porch steps now, and Sally could see the veins in her ankles. Mom was dehydrating. Her eyes were faded and rinsed, her face creased with arid distress, her hands cracked like an ancient washwoman's. Mom had started driving the rain at an early age, younger even than Sally. And now she was worn, shriveled, like a sponge that had soaked up too many spills.

  The shady space under the porch was a tiny separate world. Outside it, the maddening sun baked the earth and asphalt ran like a river between the neighborhood houses. Sally wished she could lie there forever on her belly in the cool dirt. But it was early afternoon in July, and that meant only one thing.

  Time for thunderstorms.

  "Sally?" Mom called again.

  "Coming, Mom." She skinnied out from under the porch, catching a cobweb with one of her pigtails. Her mother smiled down, her lips a pinch of gray.

  She's so tired, Sally thought. Why doesn't she just QUIT?

  "That's my good girl," Mom said.

  "It must be time, huh?" Sally sniffed the air for rain, but it was too early. Mom's eyes were dry.

  Mom turned and walked into the house without answering. Sally followed, letting a couple of flies into the house before slamming the screen door closed. She'd heard that flies bit more before a storm, but she didn't believe the saying was true.

  Dad was sprawled on the couch, fanning himself with a newspaper. The paper was opened to the sports section. For a spiteful moment, she felt like raining out a few baseball games.

  Dad was a demolition man. He ran a wrecking ball and worked as a dynamiter when he had the chance. But there weren't a lot of buildings to tear down in this dying town. Nobody wanted to build here. Too hot. The concrete clung to steel bones and waited, waited, waited, while the windows and doors held their breath.

  Mom sat at the table and folded her hands. Sally wished Mom wouldn't wear those ugly scarves on her head. They made her look like a gypsy. People talked enough the way it was, without giving them more whisper ammunition.

  Dad rolled to his feet and flapped the papers, then threw them to the floor. He growled and kicked the edge of the couch. Mom closed her eyes and turned down the corners of her mouth and her eyelashes flickered like electric moths. Outside, the sky grew darker.

  Across town or country, one of the wind people was at work, sending chapped leaves and candy wrappers skittering across parking lots and sidewalks. Sally sat at the table across from her mother as the breeze rattled the screen door.

  Dad pounded the walls with the bottom of his fists.

  The sky grew charcoal gray.

  Mom whimpered.

  A raindrop fell, ticking off the shingles like a small stone.

  "Come on, Sally. Come on and cry," Mom said.

  But Sally wasn't the least bit sad.

  "I need help, honey. I can't do it alone." Mom's voice nearly broke. She clenched her parched hands.

  Sally didn't want to mourn. Why should she weep just so the dumb grass could grow and puddles could fill and cows could drink and the world could be blue and cool?

  Dad knocked over the lamp. Thunder whimpered in the distance.

  "Sally, please," Mom whimpered. She was too eager to serve. Just a dishrag too soon threadbare, a gray mop-head limp from swabbing, a puckered lemon squeezed dry of juice. Sally grew more angry than sad when thinking of Mom's years of sacrifice.

  Dad put a boot through the sheet rock wall and lightning flashed and thunder split the sky. Sally wanted to be like him and bring the thunder. That was braver and crueler. None of these foolish tears.

  Mom was behind schedule, not matching Dad's ruckus. Her weakness threw her timing off. Soon it would all be up to Sally. And that made Sally damp with rage.

  She closed her eyes and thought of Mom, who was barely able to summon a good dew. Mom was failing and fading. Just as Sally would be in twenty-five years. And with that realization, the tears came, slowly at first, then faster.

  Drops rattled off the roof and Sally looked out the window. Through her tears she saw streaks of silver-gray, the small diamond drops bouncing and breaking on the earth, the ground drinking the gift she had made. Mom had stopped trying to cry, only sat and watched with a pleased smile, proud to have a daughter who was her spitting image.

  Sally cried rhythmically and easily now that the clouds had burs
t. Dad stormed up a storm and rumbled his rage and the sky echoed his anguish. Sally cried until she was weary from weeping. Rain fell and the plains refreshed themselves, pricked up its corn, stiffened its marigolds and shivered its thick trees.

  Then the wind person must have grown tired of puffing and blowing, because the clouds broke apart and spread out like wool jam on gray bread. Dad fell on the couch, exhausted, the summer heat of effort making his forehead bead with sweat.

  Sally sniffed and blinked. She dried her eyes with the corner of the tablecloth. At least Mom hadn't sliced onions, as she had done last week when Sally's tears refused to fall.

  Outside, the sun came, and the last drips fell from the rusty gutter onto the porch. The air was scrubbed clean, its molecules full of fresh green, smelling of renewed life. Dad returned to the couch.

  "Good job, honey," Mom said, patting Sally's hand. "I'm afraid I'm just not much help these days."

  "Why do you keep on, then? Why can't—"

  "—someone else do it? There is no one else, at least in this part of the country. Only me. And now you, dear."

  "But it's not fair. Making the rain is hard work. Melanie Higgins doesn't have to do it. Vince and Selena don't have to worry about crying when the sky needs them. And Jason—"

  "But you're not like them."

  "Why not?"

  Mom shrugged. "The world needs rain. We bring it. Who are we to know the reason for such things?"

  "Could be worse." Dad had opened the paper again and spoke from behind the rumpled pages. "Them in the Sahara, the Mojave, the Painted Desert, the Gobi , places where the rain people died out, them folks are suffering. We ain't so bad off here. We got shade trees and a roof over our heads."

  "But—"

  "No more buts, ifs, or druthers, young lady," Dad said, dipping the newspaper to send his stormy glare at Sally. "You'll do as your mother says."

  "But I want to be like everybody else." Sally stood and stamped her foot. "I won't be a rain girl for the rest of my life. I won't, I won't, I WON'T."

  Sally ran to her room and threw herself on the bed. She put her head under the pillow and sobbed. The rain started again, mad on the windowsill. It poured until Mom came in an hour later to soothe her.

  "What do you want to do?"

  "I don't know. What do you want to do?"

  What Sally really wanted to do was exactly what they were doing now. Nothing.

  Jason skipped a rock across the creek, a four-hopper. He looked coolly at the sky, at the fat orange gob of sun sinking toward September. Sally watched him. She liked to watch him.

  He had blue eyes and a flame of hair, and his shoulders were starting to broaden. His voice was deeper than those of the other boys on the block. He was different, better than the others.

  They sat on the smooth black rocks and watched a crawdad make a milky mud-trail on the bottom of the creek. The shade was pleasant. The high trees fanned them. Or maybe one of the wind people was breathing hard.

  "School starts in a few weeks."

  "Yeah," Sally said. "Where has summer gone?"

  "Where did it even come from?"

  Sally looked at him closely. Did he know? Or was he just guessing? She decided he was just making strange talk. He couldn't know about the season people, about the tug-of-war between the spring folks and the summer hotheads, the nerveless winterers and the brown brittle autumn makers. Ordinary people didn't know the true workings of nature.

  Sally hugged her knees to her chest. Jason, eyes of ice, she thought. You should be a winter boy. Because your eyes are cold and blue and you see the end of things.

  But she said nothing, only listened to the music that some creek minder was playing, a tinkle here, a glug and gurgle there, a soft swallowing splash and a fishy laugh.

  Jason was tossing a mudball in the air, spinning it in his quick hands.

  "Seventh grade next year. That means we'll have Miss Fenwick. It's going to be a long year." Jason's head bobbed as he followed the path of the mudball.

  "She's not so bad," Sally said. They sat in the long shadow of evening for a while without speaking.

  Then, "Jason?"

  "Hmm?"

  "Is Melanie going to be your girl next year?"

  The mudball stopped, held in one hand. "Melanie?"

  "I saw you kissing her on the playground last spring."

  The mudball started again, more slowly. "That was just kissing. I don't want Melanie to be my girl."

  "But Melanie says—"

  "Melanie says a lot of things."

  Another silence, shorter this time, and the gap was filled with the first night noises as the man who tucked in the sun started his daily labors. The insect conductor lifted her arms somewhere, counting out the beats with a dandelion wand. Crickets and late birds played their notes, and a beagle across the meadow flubbed its lines.

  Sally's heart was beating fast, like Dad's during a thunderstorm. "Are you going to you...you know-- have a girl?"

  "Been thinking about it."

  The mudball landed in the black water of the creek. Jason moved from his rock to sit beside Sally. The stone cooled beneath them.

  "Been thinking, maybe you. If you want to, that is." Jason's breath was close, an odd whispering wind, warm but fresh on her cheek, followed by lips on hers, all as mysterious as night.

  Sally skipped into the living room, whistling.

  "You've been chipper lately," Mom said.

  "It's autumn. I don't have to do those stupid afternoon rains anymore."

  Mom put her hands on her hips. "Now, I can tell it's more than that. I was a girl once, too."

  Sally found that hard to imagine, looking at Mom now. A thousand years of sorrow were etched on her forehead. "Well, anyway, thunderstorm season is over."

  "It's been weeks since a rain, though. I think we'll need one later this evening. Getting a little dusty outside."

  That evening, Dad pitched his usual fit. Sally tried to squeeze some tears out of the corners of her eye, but it was no use. Her heart was too light, a helium balloon, a seagull, pink cotton candy.

  Mom sliced two onions. No good. Thunder shook the windowpanes, but the sky kept its bottom and hoarded its liquid jewels.

  Weeks passed. School had started, the fields withered, dwarf corn shriveled, peas rattled in their pods, oldtimers leaned on fences and recollected the great droughts of their youth.

  Sally tried every night, tried to be sad, tried to weep. She sniffed onions and thought of sick puppies and broken toys and funerals and other sorrowful things. Once she even poked herself in the eye. Still the fields lay dry and aching.

  She saw Jason every day at school, and they walked holding hands every afternoon, kissing by the creek when the other children weren't around. The creek was thinner now, weak between the smooth stones, quieter and less merry. The sky was cloudless.

  The autumn makers rolled out golden rugs, applied their red and orange brushstrokes, underpinned the landscape with brown. The trees thirsted and gave up their leaves too soon. The ground cracked and sighed. Still no rain.

  October came, on dried batwings.

  The Halloween dance was coming up at school. Sally sat at her desk, excited by the chaff in the air and that sweet melancholy aroma the grass gave off just before the winter women put it to sleep. Sally cut her paper pumpkins and bundled her corn by its bleached husks. She wanted a drink of water, but the school principal had shut off the fountain because of the water shortage.

  Sally didn't feel guilty. So what if the pumpkins were shrunken and scarecrows withered at their posts? She had tried to rain. It wasn't her fault that all those stupid people shook their fists at the sky and sent up airplanes with silver iodide and cast their hopeful doomed eyes at each occasional cloud. She hadn't asked to be a rain girl, anyway.

  Classes were dismissed early for the holiday, but Sally stayed to finish the decorations that would hang in the gym on twisted orange and black streamers. She stood to stretch her legs. Her
fingers were sore from scissoring. But she didn't mind. Tonight she would be dancing with Jason.

  She walked down the hall on the pillows of daydreams. She had a new dress to wear, one her mother had made as Sally sat at the table each evening and tried to drum some rain. Mom had worked the needle and kept looking up at Sally, her eyes red and dry and hollow. Dad had cursed, but only managed to summon some heat lightning.

  Sally opened the school door. Even the sunshine didn't bother her. She thought of the dress that was waiting at home. It was blue, the color of a mean sky, and she couldn't wait to wear it. Even Melanie never had a dress like it.

  Four steps across crisp grass.

  Shapes over by the swing set.

  Somewhere, the wind people gasped.

  Jason was kissing Melanie.

  Sally stared, disbelieving.

  The shapes blurred, shimmered in her damp eyes.

  "Sally, wait," Jason called. Melanie laughed.

  Sally ran toward home without looking back.

  The sky opened its throat, empty of clouds but spewing a silent silver grief. Her heart was as leaden as the air. Her drenched clothes clung to her like a second skin.

  She found home and bed and Mom, but still the ache tore at her heart.

  "What's wrong, honey?" Mom said, sitting on the bed. Beneath the concern in Mom's voice, Sally heard elation and relief. Rain pounded on the shingles, steady and untiring and passionate. Puddles stretched themselves outward and rivers swelled with Sally's hurt. Shriveled apples were knocked from their branches and umbrellas collapsed like tissues.

  Ordinary people watched from their windows as the sudden rain fell. Minutes before, not a cloud had dotted the sky. But in the people's happiness they forgot all about the oddness of it, too joyful that the dry spell was broken. They stuck out their tongues and quenched themselves.

  The rain kept on into the night and throughout the next day, soaking all the kids who went to the Halloween dance. Then two more days without pause, the ground saturated and the ditches swollen, brown water churning over sewer grates, all pulled by the gravity girl toward the far gulf. The creeks bloated, and the creek minders wrung their hands, flustered by the loss of control.