Sourland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  When I was DeeDee Kinzie. That long ago.

  This thing that happened when we were kids living out north of Herkimer. The Rapids it was called, where we lived that wasn’t a town but had a post office and a volunteer fire company that shared the building. We went to school at Rapids Elementary then at Rapids Junior-Senior High. My cousin Michie Dungarve who was two years older than me but just one year ahead of me in school. These guys he hung out with in eighth grade, Steve Hauser and Dan Burney. And me. This thing that happened.

  Like a sudden storm, like lightning striking. You can be standing on a porch watching the rain out of a boiling-dark sky like my mother’s older sister Elsie smoking a cigarette and there’s a flash of something like fire and a booming noise so loud it near-about knocked her over, lightning had struck the porch post and splinters shot into the side of her face like buckshot. Happened that fast, my aunt would tell that story the rest of her life thanking God, He had spared her blindness, or worse.

  This thing that happened. Except I guess it had to be something we made happen. Not like a lightning storm that’s an act of God out of the empty sky.

  This single time I was granted an appointment with Reverend Loomis asking why you would call some terrible thing an act of God, for isn’t everything that happens an act of God. And Reverend Loomis gives me this frowning smile saying an “act of God” means a great cataclysm beyond any mortal to control. And I say yes, Reverend. But why.

  There is something dogged about me, I know. Seeing how our pastor smiled harder at me, that I was a challenge to his kindly nature. I was trying not to stammer saying what I meant is, if God did not wish a terrible thing to happen, why’d He let it happen?

  Reverend Loomis spoke calmly and carefully as you would speak to a child. Saying we can’t demand such questions of God, he grants us freedom of will to sin or not to sin. Freedom of will to take sin into our hearts or cast it from us. You don’t need theology to know this, Mrs. Schmidt!

  I felt the man’s warmth touch my heart that has such a chill upon it like an old spell.

  But needing to say, I wasn’t speaking of myself but of this boy that something happened to. When we were children out in the Rapids.

  My voice cracked then. For why’d I say that: children. We were not young children, none of us. And why say the Rapids. Reverend Loomis has family in Watertown, he would scarcely know rural Herkimer County.

  Somehow I was talking fast. I was nervous, and I was anxious, and I was missing my painkillers, that keep my heart from racing and sweat from prickling in my armpits. Saying I don’t understand, Reverend. See, I don’t understand!

  Reverend said let us pray together, Diane. Then you will understand.

  Reverend smiled and touched my arm. His smile is a flash of white flame, each night following I will sink into sleep into that white flame.

  My cousin Michie said it’s good to have a little evil in you, people know not to fuck with you. Like a vaccination where they put germs in you, to make your blood stronger.

  This swampy woods off the logging road. A thing that scares me is snakes. When we were kids, tramping through the woods back of our houses and after a heavy rainfall or the thaw in spring there’d be sheets of water in the woods, the creeks overflowing, the ditches, even the ravine and afterward a deposit of mud, silt, storm debris. Snakes in the swampy woods and some of them water moccasins. Four feet long and thick as a man’s leg. I never saw one of these but knew of them. Copperheads are smaller snakes but poisonous, too. Even garter snakes and grass snakes in just our backyard, in our woodpile in the garage, I’d be terrified of. There was this story of what happened to a ten-year-old boy a cousin of Dan Burney he was tramping in the woods with his dog and the dog waded into a pond and started swimming and something in the water attacked it, the dog was howling and yipping and the boy waded in to rescue it and turned out to be water moccasins, they came swarming out of the cattails and rushes and attacked the boy, sank their fangs in his legs, pulled him down and sank their fangs in his belly, his chest, his face thrashing and swarming at their prey and he screamed for help but nobody could hear him, his heart stopped there in the swamp.

  Pressed my hands over my ears. I was feeling sick just to hear this. Begging the guys to stop it, I didn’t want to hear it, I didn’t believe them but the guys just laughed at me.

  The boy we hurt, his name was Arvin and he was Michie’s age or older but in special ed. not in eighth grade. In special ed. that was taught by a man teacher, in a corner of the school building by the shop/vocational arts, students who couldn’t read like the rest of us or couldn’t talk right or had things wrong with them you could see, like in their eyes, in their faces, or maybe they’d be very fat or very thin and had trouble walking, or had ways of acting that were signs of their strangeness like laughing too much or twitching their shoulders or shrinking away when you saw them. On the school bus, they sat together at the front, near the driver. That way, they’d be protected.

  Arvin Huehner, 14. The name in the newspaper.

  We were surprised, the way the name was spelled. You just called them Hugh-ners, the family.

  Arvin was taller than Michie and his friends but bony-thin, with rounded shoulders and something wrong with his chest: “pigeon-breasted” it was called, he’d been excused from gym classes and swimming. His shoulder blades curved forward as if he’d been stooped over too long and couldn’t straighten his back. His neck was at an angle like he was leaning away from himself. His face was pasty-pale and hairless like something skinned. His lips were rubbery and loose. His teeth were crooked and stained and his eyes were weak behind thick lenses and he had a high-pitched whiny voice you’d hear sometimes when he was scolding his younger brother and sisters who rode the bus with us, in mimicry of an adult Arvin would cry, “Bad! Bad!”

  When I saw Arvin Huehner my eyes seemed to sting. Quickly I looked away. The thought came to me There is someone like myself.

  (Why this was, I don’t know! There was nothing of DeeDee Kinzie in Arvin Huehner, or in any of the special ed. kids.)

  Michie said, There’s the freak.

  In a freak, there is something that draws the eye. You resent it, having to look.

  My cousin Michie was thirteen, when I was eleven. Michie wasn’t tall but solid-built for a boy his age. He had a wedge-shaped face, a heavy jaw. You could see how he would grow into a heavy man like the older Dungarves. But his cheeks were soft and smooth-looking and had a natural flush like sunburn. His eyes were bright and shrewd. Already in junior high, Michie Dungarve was “sexy” in the eyes of older girls. He hated school and cut classes when he could. He had a posse he called it, guys who hung out with him. When he was younger Michie used to paint stripes on his face like an Indian, red clay to give him a wild scary look. On a leather thong around his neck he wore an animal jawbone and a black turkey vulture feather. In the family Michie was known for his mule-stubbornness. Aged two, his mother said, he’d dig in his heels in the ground, even an adult man could hardly budge him.

  I was DeeDee, short for Diane. I was the only girl.

  Why it happened I was with them, it had to do with where we lived. Red Rock Road, that ran along Red Rock Creek from Rapids to Route 14 which was a state highway. Red Rock Road was just two miles, not a through road so you’d wind up at the old logging site where the woods look ravaged even now. It’s mostly wild woods and fields and a big swampy marsh where only rushes and cattails grow and there’s a terrible smelly black muck through late summer. There were six houses on this road and naturally you got to know the kids if they were your age and took the bus to school. The Dungarves lived next-door to us, my mother was all the time over visiting her sister Elsie, or Elsie was at our house, and when he’d been younger, Michie sometimes came with her. There was a path through the field to the Dungarves’ house. My cousin Michie was only two years older than me but when you’re a child two years is a long span of time and always I wanted Michie to like me.

  Showing
off for Michie, to get Michie’s attention. My aunt Elsie would tease me.

  At school, Michie would protect me. Not because he liked me but because I was his cousin. Fuck with DeeDee Kinzie, you’d be fucking with Michie Dungarve.

  I hated girls! Mostly, girls hated me.

  I wore clothes like the guys. Jeans, zip-up parkas, shirts pulled over shirts. My chest was flat as a guy’s chest. My hips were lean as a guy’s. Where my legs came together there was a frizz of pale brown hair, it wouldn’t be for another two years or so that hairs began to grow in my armpits and on my muscled legs sharp as tiny thorns. My face was small and oliveish-pale and my eyes deep-set like shiny black glass.

  I had a mouth on me, my mother said. She stopped slapping that mouth by the time I was eleven. She’d learned.

  Water moccasins. Slow-moving and mud-colored in the stagnant swamp water. I’d be wading in the swamp and see the snake-shapes start toward me beneath the surface of the black water, a faint ripple all you’d see, oh God I could not move my legs I could not scream for help the snakes swimming toward me surrounding me in a circle rushing at me to sink their fangs into me…

  How many times I dreamt this, it makes me sick to think. At school I asked a teacher why’d God make poison snakes and she answered some bullshit answer like they do and I had to pretend to believe it, like I always did.

  Tell Nose Pick c’mere, Michie said to me.

  Nose Pick was one of the names they called Arvin. On account of him always picking at his nose, his mouth, his ears like he had terrible itches all over. Arvin had a way of watching the rest of us, kind of smiling at us, laughing if we did something meant to be funny, wanting to be with us except most of the time, at school, if we were outside on the school grounds, he couldn’t: there was a yellow line painted on the pavement dividing one part of the paved ground from the rest and the special ed. students were not allowed to cross this yellow line or vice versa. This was a school rule. You could figure that it protected some of the special ed. kids from being teased or tormented but also it was meant to protect other kids from being teased or tormented by the special ed. kids who were bigger and older and kind of unpredictable in their behavior. Arvin Huehner was between these, you could say. He’d be picked on by the guys but, tall and kind of bossy like he was, Arvin sometimes picked on younger kids himself. That high-pitched nasal voice scolding Bad!

  The Hugh-ners as they were called lived on Red Rock Road in a house that was just a basement, you could see the basement windows and part of the first floor that resembled a skeleton, just boards and planks where rooms would be, except work stopped on the house years ago and never started again. There was no outside to the Hugh-ners’ house only just raw planks and strips of something like canvas that became ripped and flapped in the wind. This house, that people called an eyesore, and were contemptuous of, was about a mile from where we lived, and the Dungarves lived, toward the dead end of the Red Rock Road. The older Hugh-ners were said to be “normal” but the children were all special ed. Arvin had only younger sisters and a brother, no older relative to protect him.

  Hey Arvin, I said, Michie wants you to come with us.

  Arvin narrowed his eyes at me not trusting me exactly. This was in April, a day that smelled of wet earth. Warm when the sun came out and chilly when the sun went in. Arvin was wearing a parka that was an ugly mustard color and corduroy trousers that fitted his legs narrow as pencils. That Arvin would believe my cousin Michie and his friends would want him to join them, that Arvin was so stupid hardened my heart against him. Why’d you think you could be their friend I wanted to laugh in his face.

  Arvin adjusted his glasses on his nose, blinking at me. He was licking his loose rubbery lips excited and scared.

  O.K. c’mon, I told Arvin.

  We weren’t taking the school bus after school. There was a way we hiked home along the railroad embankment then along the creek for maybe a mile.

  So Arvin trotted with us like a scrawny dog. Along the railroad embankment and into a thicket of trees and there was the edge of the swamp and the ravine you had to cross over some fallen logs. Below was a marshy ditch thick with rushes and cattails and water that smelled like sewage, that was high after some days of rain. Below were bullfrogs croaking so loud and hoarse, you can’t believe the noise is coming from something so small. The guys threw rocks at the frogs but the frogs were too quick for them. Turtles sunning on logs, they’d slip off and disappear at the sound of a voice.

  A surprise how a turtle can see you and hear you and maybe feel your footsteps at a distance. How a creature with such a thick clumsy shell can move so fast, to save its life.

  Michie told Arvin go climb down into the ravine where there was something glinting in the mud, looked like a car hood ornament. Arvin began to whimper saying he didn’t want to, his mother would be angry if he came back muddy. And maybe then Michie or one of the other guys pushed him. Or maybe Arvin decided to climb down. We told Arvin we’d be friends with him, he could come home with us. So he climbed into the ravine which was maybe thirty feet deep, slipping and sliding in the mud. I said to Michie what if there are water moccasins in that water and Michie just laughed. Arvin managed to get hold of the hood ornament but his feet were sinking in mud. He began to cry, he was stuck in the mud. The guys were laughing and yelling down at Arvin it was quicksand he’d gotten into. He was red-faced and snivelling and his glasses were crooked on his nose. I saw a swirl of something in the water just a few yards from where Arvin was struggling. I saw the ripples, I saw the rubbery-thick black snakes just below the surface of the water. We were waiting for Arvin to be sucked into the quicksand. Like in a TV movie where a man was trapped in quicksand in a jungle, you watched as the quicksand sucked him down, the lower part of his face disappeared into the mud, his mouth, then his terrified eyes, then he was gone, the quicksand shut above his head only just frothy bubbles.

  In the movie, monkeys were flying through the trees overhead and chattering and shrieking. At the top of the ravine, the guys were laughing at Arvin. I said, Hey we better pull him up. Laughing like the guys but getting scared. I didn’t say anything about the snakes because the guys would only laugh at me. I wasn’t sure I had seen snakes, maybe it was just wind blowing the rushes.

  Arvin was trying to grab hold of some vines, to pull himself up. His legs were sunk in mud to his knees. He was crying, bawling like a calf. A calf bawls for its mother, just a few hours old and already its lungs are strong enough it can bellow. But a human scream is thin and weak and can crack if you’re afraid. Arvin was bawling like a calf, bawling with no words, like he’d forgotten what words were. Michie and Steve were tossing stones and mud-chunks at him. Dan Burney dragged a heavy rock to the edge of the ravine, let it drop and roll down the slope at Arvin but missing him. There was a broken tree limb shaped like a spear, I threw. The spear fell short of Arvin where he’d fallen in the mud and was bleeding from a cut on his forehead, he was bawling but not so loud as before. The guys got into seeing who could hit Arvin with the most stones. The biggest rocks. The sky was darkening like something begun to boil. It happens that fast, east of Lake Ontario. There came a harder wind, and rain like warm spit. We backed off and left Arvin in the ravine.

  Hiked through the woods to Red Rock Road, and to our houses. Michie, Steve, Dan. And DeeDee who was me.

  Two years later in ninth grade my name would be Diane. I had a close girlfriend through high school who called me Di. And Frank calls me Di sometimes. Nobody calls me DeeDee now, if I heard this name I would freeze.

  It was years later my cousin Michie was arrested for what he did to a girl named Sheryl Ricks over at Alcott. Michie denied it at first saying it must’ve been some other guy, Sheryl was seeing other guys not only him. The rumor was, Sheryl was pregnant with Michie Dungarve’s baby but that turned out to be false, the Niagara County coroner reported.

  When you die every fact of your body can be exposed. Not just are you pregnant but have you ever been pregna
nt. Have you ever had a baby. Are there “bruises and lacerations” in the vaginal area, meaning have you been raped. Or maybe not raped but you’ve had sex. Once you are dead they can know everything about you.

  By the time of Sheryl we were out of school. Michie was twenty-two. What he’d done was beat his girlfriend then twist her head with both his hands so that the vertebrae in her neck broke. In his bare hands. Michie was that angry and that strong. He’d been in the navy for two years and the family was proud of him then he tested positive for amphetamines and was discharged “less than honorable” and came back to Herkimer where his family was living then. Then there was a few months he worked for a bail bondsman up at Watertown and was apprenticed to a licensed bounty hunter which was work he liked, he said. His name wasn’t Michie now but Mitch.

  Mitchell Dungarve is my cousin’s actual name. In the papers and on TV it would be Mitchell Dungarve, 22.

  Mitch would tell anyone who asked him, Sheryl Ricks had it coming. She’d known it, too, which was why she’d tried to run from him in the parking lot. Mitch told the Herkimer Journal reporter he’d kind of wanted to see what it was like killing somebody, anyway. Since he’d been a kid, he was curious. And in the navy, he’d never seen “combat.” The reporter said, well—what was it like? and Mitch said it happened so damn fast like a fire flaring up almost he hadn’t felt anything at all.