Standing beside the bike, he shifted out of his leather jacket and handed it to her. It was large enough to slide on over her own coat. He climbed on and kick-started the bike, knocked out the stand, and balanced on his thick legs. She got on behind and found two footrests.
The sound of the bike and the wind in her face were so loud that she couldn’t have heard if he spoke. At the first sweeping turn, she cringed. Her footrest scraped the ground. She ducked her head behind his back to block the wind and thought, He must be freezing. But on the old swamp road, he dropped his speed, and she let her hair fly flat back from her face. She closed her eyes to feel the coolness.
She leaned in close to his ear and yelled.
“Let me off. Stop here.”
They had just passed the dump, and it occurred to her like a grand reprieve—she could go to Dill’s. She could call from there, say she’d been visiting with him since school let out.
Harold dropped her off where Dill kept a chain stretched across the track to the dump when he wasn’t open for business, which lately had been more and more of the time. When she tried to thank him, he did something strange. He shoved his gloved hand into hers and shook, clasping hard as if she were some kind of comrade. He nodded and drove on. She walked down the dirt track to where Dill kept his trailer. Dill and her dad had grown up together on adjoining sections, but Dill had sold his family place years ago and taken over maintenance of the dump. He’d had an accident; a colt that he was breaking for her dad had reared and fallen backward, the saddle horn striking and bruising his heart. But Dill found he liked the new job. “Lonesome up there on the hill,” he told Earl. “Get a better class of visitor down here.”
Dill’s tiny trailer was thick with his smell, a smell like fresh pencil shavings but stronger, and crowded with stacks of faded magazines and newspapers, blank paperbacks with the covers torn off. Only the cot where Dill slept was free of his accumulation. Cynthia sat there while Dill poured her a cup of coffee and seated himself on a stack of papers. He scratched at his yellowing white beard and blinked at her. She wanted to come right out and tell him why she was there. He was more a dad to her than her own was. But if she told him now it would offend his sense of the proper visiting time, make him think she wanted his help more than his company.
Not fooled, he asked her, “What’s the trouble, sweetheart?”
10
In the next weeks, snow fell, sifting onto the shoulders of the canyons like powdered sugar and collecting in north shadows in the valley. Kenny waited for a letter from his father, or a call. He made a point of stopping at the post office most days, but there was seldom a letter in their box.
In the mornings, he walked to school along a tire track behind the houses and the stores on Main Street. Frozen snow flattened the weeds beside the track, and fields of barley stubble moldered damp and gray in the west. His boots shattered star bursts in the ice underfoot.
The high school was a dingy yellow-brick building, with blue and orange plastic panels decorating the front. Behind the windows, heavy beige drapes had been yanked in some places from their hangers. A long crack in a window had been mended with a dogleg of silver duct tape. Kenny shoved open the front door and walked down the hall. The linoleum seemed to give under his feet and muffle the sound of his shoes.
He leaned against the wall outside his homeroom, tipping back on his heels, until he heard the tardy bell. It buzzed twice as long as normal, like a fire alarm. At the end of the bell, he slipped through the door and into his chair in the back. His homeroom teacher droned through the attendance, and then the day’s announcements came over the speaker, but he barely listened. After the cold walk to school, the warmth in the room made him feel heavy with sleep. The bell rang. Chairs scraped and fell over. Everyone was rushing and talking, but Kenny didn’t move.
The last announcement on the loudspeaker had taken him by surprise. The rodeo team was meeting out front after school. Some kind of field trip. He thought they’d have broken up with winter coming on. Every morning, all through the fall, he’d listened to the announcements, the times and places for 4-H, football practice, and drill team meetings, without paying much attention. But the notices for rodeo made his heartbeat skip.
Since the hunting trip, he’d had strange dreams where he’d joined up with the team but never knew what they were doing. He’d wake up, shamed that he’d ridden against his mother’s wishes. But his father would be riding, too, and neither one could walk away from that high, racing fear and elation. That’s why, he thought, the rodeo announcements shocked him, as if his name might be called any second.
He crossed the hall to the science lab, opened the door, and went in. The room was deadly quiet, the tables and stools all occupied and everybody watching him. Mr. Everts smiled from behind the zinc-topped table at the front and waved at him to hurry up. Kenny blinked and hesitated. The whole class burst out laughing.
“Good morning, Ken.” Mr. Everts laughed himself, but kindly.
“Sorry,” Kenny mumbled.
“Take a seat,” Mr. Everts said. He marked something in his roll book.
Kenny climbed up on the stool beside his lab partner and opened his notebook.
Without speaking, Mr. Everts turned and disappeared through the frosted glass door into his office and prep room. The class stared at the open door in silence. They knew better than to talk.
When Mr. Everts returned, he was holding upright a green canvas cot. He unfolded the two halves, pried out the legs, and stood the cot on end like a begging dog. It seemed to have no weight at all when he set it down on the linoleum and shoved it aside with his foot. He addressed the class.
“First aid,” he said, “can make the difference between life and death.” He paused and looked round the room. “What,” he went on, “is the most important word in first aid?”
“First,” the class murmured.
Mr. Everts nodded, turned his back, and began to write on the blackboard with a stubby piece of chalk. He wrote fast in a thick white scrawl, the marks all up and down like letters in a foreign code. The class waited for him to turn around and translate what he had written.
“Take out your notebooks,” he said and waited while a whoosh of fluttering pages swept through the room. A pen dropped and rolled along the floor. Kenny tried to write and keep up with Mr. Everts’s voice. He scribbled, “Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Head back. Airway clear. Nose pinched. Vomit.” Then the point of his pencil broke off clean, just below the sharpened wood. He picked up the tiny point of lead and wrote with that until it was too small to grip. He glanced over at his lab partner. The boy was scribbling fast, and before Kenny could borrow another pencil, Mr. Everts stopped.
“All right.” Mr. Everts came around and leaned back on the table. “Here’s the situation. You’re swimming in the quarry. Your friend dives in. He doesn’t come up. What do you do?” He paused before he answered his own question. “One,” he said, “you send for help. Two, you dive until you find him. Three . . .” Mr. Everts stopped and looked out into the class, waiting for someone to answer the question. Kenny lowered his eyes and stared at his notebook.
Finally a hand went up and one of the girls repeated what Mr. Everts had said. Kenny relaxed and stopped listening. He pictured the rodeo team meeting after school. He knew from his last school that nothing much went on. Guys stood around and practiced roping wooden steer heads, or a burro. Or they talked about rides they’d made or seen. He wondered what a field trip meant.
When he looked up again, something had changed in the room. Mr. Everts had set up a second cot. The two cots stood, centered in the open space in front of his lab table, like a scene on a stage before the play begins.
Mr. Everts called back into the prep room and started to talk again. He didn’t pause or look over when the two seniors came through the door. One was the class president, a tall basketball player with short, dark hair. The other one was Cynthia Dustin.
Kenny stared at her. A white la
b coat hung down to her knees, blue jeans showing underneath. She stood beside the lab table, with no expression on her face. Mr. Everts turned finally and nodded. The two seniors walked to the cots. Cynthia sat down carefully on the edge, testing her weight before she swung her legs around and lay down.
The class was silent. Kenny felt his heart knock in his chest like blocks of wood clapped together. Mr. Everts knelt behind Cynthia’s cot and slid a hand under her neck. He lifted, tilting her head until her shoulders arched and her chin pointed at the ceiling. She looked broken, like the breech of a rifle. Her hair fell back on the cot in a pale, silky wedge. With two fingers, Mr. Everts pressed her nostrils together, and with his other hand, pulled down on her chin. He mimed the motion of putting a finger in her mouth. Slowly, he began to lower his dark face toward hers. Kenny stopped breathing. Just before his lips touched Cynthia’s, Mr. Everts stopped. He breathed out loudly then tilted his head sideways like a swimmer. He gasped a lungful of air, dropped his face back over Cynthia’s, and breathed out again. Kenny was almost limp with relief. Mr. Everts was only imitating the movements.
He grasped the edge of the lab table and pulled himself up, resting for a minute before he gazed out over the class, his eyes moving from face to face.
“Volunteers?” he said.
The class sat rigid and silent. Kenny could feel the tension travel from the front of the room to the back. He stared down at his notebook, as if he could will Mr. Everts not to call on him.
“Relax,” Mr. Everts said. “Everybody, I mean everybody, is coming up here. It’s not if—it’s when. We have all week.” He stared around the lab again. “Sorry, Cynthia,” he said. “They’re going to let you drown.”
The class laughed, and Kenny watched the shoulders of the kid in front of him relax. He forced his own shoulders down. A girl in the front row raised her hand. The class watched Mr. Everts guide her through the procedure. Cynthia never moved. Kenny looked up at the black-and-white clock in the front of the room. In ten minutes, the class would be over. Kenny prayed for someone else to volunteer, for the bell to ring.
Another girl volunteered to practice on Cynthia, and Mr. Everts pointed at a boy. The boy stepped up and knelt beside the other cot, like a football player crouching down to pray before a game, and looked up at Mr. Everts.
“Neck,” the teacher prompted.
But Kenny watched Cynthia. The volunteer slid her hand under Cynthia’s neck, but she couldn’t seem to fit it under her hair.
“Ouch,” Cynthia said, and the whole class gave a tiny jump. Then everybody laughed. It was like a scene in a movie where the body in the coffin sneezes. The boy cocked his elbows up toward the ceiling and breathed loudly into the face on the cot.
“Shit,” Kenny’s lab partner whispered across the table. “Hope he hadn’t got bad breath.” Kenny had to strain to hear the whisper. When he did, he smiled, his lips pressed in a straight, embarrassed line. He didn’t hear Mr. Everts call his name.
His lab partner was nodding and bobbing at him. “You,” he said. “He’s calling you.” He tried to stifle a giggle.
Kenny climbed off his stool and moved slowly toward the front of the room. Where the lab tables gave way to an open space of alternating liver-colored and dirty white squares of linoleum, he glanced at the door. For a second he almost turned toward it. He actually felt himself swing out into the hallway. But Mr. Everts was waiting.
Kenny took a step toward the class president, but the other boy was still practicing. Mr. Everts pointed at Cynthia.
Kenny heard his knees make cracking sounds when he knelt by the cot. The face below was perfectly still. Cynthia’s eyes were closed. Kenny thought she might be sleeping. He wished he could see the clock behind him. It had to be time for the bell.
“Let’s go.” Mr. Everts nodded, impatient.
Kenny breathed in and slid a palm under Cynthia’s hair. It parted, the way falling water parts when you slide your hand in. It lay on his skin, strangely cool and weighted, but the nape of her neck was warm. He lifted, watching the smooth hair swing back, holding her head in his hand, and reached around to press two fingers against her nose.
“No, not like that.” Mr. Everts placed his own large hands on either side of Cynthia’s face, tilted her head, and let it rest on the cot. “There,” he said. “Now both hands are free.”
Kenny had pulled his hand from under Cynthia’s hair. But he couldn’t bring himself to touch her face. His hands were doughy and chilled.
“Let’s go.” Mr. Everts’s voice was low and even, as if he might stand there forever.
Kenny leaned down toward the pale face on the cot and raised both his arms. His elbows stuck out like wings, as if he could touch her without touching her. As fast as he could, he pulled down on her chin with two fingers and pressed closed her nose. He breathed down, then up, like he was swimming the last lap of a race.
“Again,” Mr. Everts said.
Kenny tilted his face again toward the face on the cot. He exhaled loudly, and felt the buzzing of the bell ring through the room. Cynthia’s eyes opened, her face only inches from his. He was staring into blue eyes the color of a gas flame turned down low. He jumped back, as if a dead animal he’d been poking with a stick had jerked to life.
He straightened to his feet. The girl on the cot smiled slowly, as if she didn’t see him. She reached for Mr. Everts’s extended hand, and swiveled around to sit up.
“Quiz on this tomorrow,” Mr. Everts shouted at the class.
“But I never went up,” somebody whined. The class was shuffling books together, scraping stools along the floor, everyone moving at once toward the hall.
“Have a nice nap?” Mr. Everts was talking to the two seniors. The boy shook his head in an “I don’t believe we’re doing this” gesture. Kenny glanced at Cynthia. She was smiling in a way that seemed to Kenny very private and unconcerned.
Kenny walked back to his lab table and picked up his notebook. If he held out his hand, he knew it would tremble. When he tried to pick up his pencil, it rolled off the table and hit the floor with a loud, hollow sound. He left it there and followed the rest of the class out the door.
It wasn’t until late afternoon, in his last class, that he had time to look in his notebook. The words he’d written in science took up less than half a page. He would flunk the quiz. All afternoon he’d been waiting for the blood to stop rushing in his ears and his head to clear. He couldn’t recall the order of the procedure, what he should do first, but he felt he could run all the way home without stopping. He didn’t care if he passed the test or not.
After his last class, he wandered to his locker. For days he’d been expecting something, not a letter from his dad, but something. All the rush of his blood seemed to drop away. He wanted to see Cynthia. To touch her. Nothing, he knew, would ever feel that way again.
He stood at his locker a long time, trying to think what books he needed to take home. He couldn’t remember his assignments. Finally, he let the locker door clang shut, all his books inside. When he looked around, the hall was empty. At the far end, by the gym doors, the janitor was pushing a wide broom. Kenny turned in the other direction, shoved open the heavy door, and stood on the stairs leading down to the parking lot.
A cold wind blew across the valley, white clouds moving fast overhead. The foothills were in shadow, but a beam of white light struck the clouds. In the parking lot, ovals of snow glistened against the wet asphalt. A few kids stood by their cars, the motors warming up and sending clouds of steam into the air. A bright pool of light swept over the parking lot and shifted back to shadow, as if a window curtain had billowed open and closed. The sunlight seemed mechanically connected to the wind.
He took the stairs two at a time and turned in the direction of town. At the edge of the parking lot, a short yellow bus had pulled to the curb. As Kenny came near, he recognized a boy in a shiny red jacket embroidered with a bucking horse. Without thinking, Kenny followed him up the metal stairs of
the bus. Everyone looked up, curious. Mr. Gallagher, the advisor, shifted around in the driver’s seat and frowned.
“Could I just come along and watch?” Kenny asked him.
Mr. Gallagher hesitated and looked down at a clipboard on his knees.
“Yeah,” he said. “But only watch. I got no permission slip on you.”
Kenny took a seat in the last row of the bus and shifted over to the window. For the first time that day, the muscles in his neck and arms seemed to warm up and relax. He had no idea where the bus was going.
11
The next cow—not much bigger than a heifer—balked in the chute and refused to stretch her neck out through the head catcher.
“Get to goin’,” Earl yelled. “Get!” The vet twisted her tail up and shoved. Dill beat on her hip with a short, flat board. The cow ignored them all. Then, as if listening to some inner voice, she stepped up to the trap. Roddy stood back and looked up at the low, darkening sky. It began to snow again.
“Here we go,” Dill said. He stood at Roddy’s shoulder. “Now we’re gonna get some weather. Let’s get a move on.” He jerked his chin at Roddy and stepped up to the chute. “Give me a hand here.”
Roddy moved in close, where Earl had the cow held fast by a nose ring. The chrome horseshoe-shaped clamp stretched her nostrils sideways and looked like it might slip loose, but Earl had the rope snubbed down taut around the corner of the chute. The young cow had two thick, misshapen horns turned in and growing toward her skull. Moving fast, Dill unwrapped his dehorning saw from a length of rust-stained toweling.
He laid the short saw flat against the cow’s skull, and with a few short strokes, cut the horn away. He worked so fast Roddy could smell the burning hair and horn. The cow bellowed and tried to jerk free. Then blood began to spurt from severed veins near the hide. Three tiny red fountains arced into the air, spattering the ground, Roddy’s boots, Dill’s green rubber chaps. Roddy tugged his glove off with his teeth, stepped in close, and pressed a finger against one of the bleeders, just above the cut. He held it there until the pressure of his finger stopped the bleeding. He touched a second vein, and then a third. The warmth of the blood under his fingertip surprised him. It pumped against his skin and felt like his own pulse. Some ranchers pulled out the severed veins with tweezers. But Roddy had always preferred to do it this way. In all the nasty business of working cattle, this one thing made him feel good. He knew the cow didn’t appreciate his efforts. But it always struck him as a tender thing to do.
Love and Country Page 8