by Mary Knight
The whole class falls silent. Mr. A leans his yardstick against the edge of his desk and stands in front of us, head hanging down, chin to chest like maybe he’s praying. The image of that magnificent elk that Jules and I saw in the woods last week floats into my mind’s eye, just like it emerged from the trees that day, and I can’t help but raise my hand slowly.
Jules turns to me, one eyebrow raised, like she’s saying, Are you sure you want to do this again?
Mr. A looks up. “Yes, Mr. Hines, what is it?”
“Jules and I … We saw one last week.”
“Saw what?”
“An elk.”
“Ahhh … an elk.”
I hear a few giggles behind me. Carl leans over his lab table and whisper-spits, “Sucker.”
I’m getting a sneaking suspicion I’ve stepped into something excremental (e word, last year—Papaw caught me saying the four-letter version one too many times, so he insisted on giving me another choice). As usual, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be shaking off my boot, so I just keep walking through it.
“Yes, sir. We saw him in our holler, up in Wonder Gap. He didn’t look extinct to me.”
“Is that right? Hmmm …” He scratches his head. “Well, it looks like you found your next research project, Mr. Hines, or rather, it found you.”
“What planet are you from, Hines?” Carl blurts out, his cronies laughing along with him.
Thwack.
“Watch your trap, Mr. Jenkins,” Mr. A says, “or you’re the one who will find yourself without a planet, if you catch my drift.”
Carl leans back in his chair. “Awww, Mr. A, I was just trying to point out—”
“And I was just about to point out that the Carolina parakeet just became your next project.”
Carl drops his chair forward with a bang. The whole class is laughing at him now.
Mr. Amons makes a grand sweep of the classroom with his stick, like it’s some kind of magic wand that will turn us into good students, or maybe he’s wishing we’d all disappear.
“In case the rest of you knuckleheads think you’re immune from this assignment, think again. Each of you is going to team up with one other person, pick an extinct animal, and then develop a presentation that will have the rest of us weeping in the aisles that it’s gone. You’ve got the rest of the marking period to get it together and it counts for a major part of your grade, so it better be good.”
Thwack. Thwack.
Jules and I look over at each other and smile. There are few comforts you can count on in middle school, but knowing that your best friend will always pick you to be her science partner is one of them.
Toward the end of the period, Mr. A gives us some time to meet with our partners to discuss strategy. Jules thinks the elk we saw wasn’t an Eastern elk, but another kind of elk transplanted from somewhere else. Her ma told her they were dropped off to the north of us and are now making their way into our area. This isn’t nearly as cool as finding the last remaining Eastern elk on earth, but it has me curious. How do you transplant an elk, anyway?
Jules and I are the last ones to leave the room. We’re stuffing our books into our backpacks when this new guy comes shuffling up to Mr. A’s desk and hands him a pass.
“Ah, Mr. James David Tiverton III, I presume. I was expecting you a little earlier. Like for class, for instance.”
“Sorry,” the kid mutters, not offering any excuse. “And it’s JD.”
“Ah … of course.”
Mr. A signs the slip as he looks over his gold-rimmed reading glasses and stares straight into the new boy’s eyes, or rather, eye. The kid’s straight, jet-black hair sweeps over his other eye, blotting out half his face, like one of those bad boys I’ve seen in the movies. And by “bad boys,” I mean the ones girls usually fall for, which has me looking at Jules to see what she sees.
She leans in so close that her cheek brushes my hair, and for a minute I forget that anyone else is in the room. “That’s the new coal boss’s son Celia May was telling me about,” she whispers, and I know that my first hunch is correct. News of this guy’s coming has already zapped through the rumor mill.
“I see this is the second time you’ve taken seventh-grade science.” Mr. A hands him back the pass. “Maybe you can teach the rest of us a thing or two, seeing as you’re older and … I’m assuming … wiser … than the first time around.” The kid shrugs and stuffs the slip into his front jeans pocket.
Great. The only thing worse than a bad boy is an older bad boy, and a tall, dark, and broody one at that. I glance at Jules to see if I’m right. Yup. Her eyes are most definitely superglued onto this JD fella, and I’m not liking it one bit. I would like nothing better right now than to eradicate bad boys from the planet.
“Good news, you two.” Mr. A is speaking to me and Jules now, and I can’t imagine what “good” he could possibly mean. “Since everyone else in the class has already teamed up, there’s only one option I can see for our new friend here.” With that, he slaps this Tiverton guy on the back like he’s some kind of prize or something.
“Meet your new partner.”
Eradicate—verb
1 : to pluck up by the roots; to root up
2 : to root out; to destroy utterly; to extirpate
“But, Papaw, she’s so doggone blind to who this JD character really is.” I pull the mask covering my nose and mouth down to my chin so he can hear me.
I’ve been helping him rip wood for a new cabinet he’s making, catching planks of cherry as he runs them through the table saw. It really kicks up the dust. Our conversation about Jules and the new boy at school has had its fits and starts, like almost every conversation I’ve ever had with Papaw here in his woodshop. It used to irritate me, but now I’m glad for it. It gives me time to think about my comebacks, which, when you’re trying to make a point with Papaw, is a downright necessity.
Papaw takes the plank from me and brushes off the shavings, looking it up and down, like how I caught Jules looking at JD when he was reaching for a book on a library shelf. His T-shirt crept up as he reached, showing his bare back along with the ribbed waistband of his paisley boxer shorts. I stared at Jules staring at him and it just about drove me crazy.
“Well now, Curley, I expect Jules knows what she’s doing. Besides, what terrible thing could happen between the two of them working on a science project, especially with you watching their every move?” Even through Papaw’s scratched-up safety glasses, I can see the twinkle in his eyes, which really ticks me off.
“It’s what could happen between the two of them when I’m not there that worries me, Papaw. You should see how she looks at him—all googly-eyed and all.” Honestly, do I have to spell it out for him?
“Oh, I see.” He taps the narrow edge of the plank three times on the cement floor, knocking the sawdust off, and leans on it. “This is more serious than I thought.”
“Thank you,” I say facetiously, which you might think is the word for the week, but it’s not. I learned it from Mr. A, who says it a lot when he fools us into thinking he’s dead serious.
Now that I seem to have Papaw’s full attention, I hardly know what to do with it. I turn on the Shop-Vac and start sucking up sawdust, one of my jobs. Papaw stands there patiently, waiting for me to finish. The silence that remains after the vacuum shuts down feels heavy with anticipation, like how the mountains feel in early spring.
“So what’s really going on, Curley?” Papaw finally says, staring at me with his eagle eyes. “I mean, with you?”
His cool gaze burns right through my chest, like he has this superpower that can see straight through to my heart. I know I can’t hide from that look, nor do I really want to. His seeing me like that makes me want to find the truth and tell it. If only I knew what it was.
“Try starting with what’s on top,” he says, placing the cherry plank on his workbench to sand. I hop onto a stool and lean back against the pegboard wall. All I can think about is Jules staring at J
D’s boxer shorts.
“For starters, Papaw, she knows what kind of underwear he wears,” I say. “No girl should know that.”
“Hmmm … that does sound kind of personal.”
“Well, yeah. She doesn’t even know I wear Jockeys.”
“Now, that’s a relief.”
“No kidding, Papaw. What if she starts knowing more about him than she knows about me?” That day at the library working on our report, Jules jabbered at JD like she used to jabber at me. I felt like one of those cast-off pieces of wood Papaw throws on his scrap pile and later burns for kindling.
“Three can be hard,” he says as he flips off his safety glasses and tosses them on the bench. “Real hard. I’ve been the odd man out a time or two myself.”
Papaw shakes the sawdust out of his hair, like he’s shaking off a memory. “Seems like it would take years for Jules to know JD like she knows you, though. What’s personal goes a lot deeper than knowing the brand of someone’s underwear.” He picks up the hand sander and runs the block along the wood in long strokes. Whoooosh, whoooosh.
Usually, Papaw’s words comfort me, but all the wisdom in the world can’t make this uneasy feeling go away. With every pass Papaw makes across the wood, I feel my stomach tighten.
“But why does she even like the guy?” I yell over Papaw’s sanding. He freezes midswipe and stands, listening. “I mean, he seems kind of creepy. It’s not as if he’s even nice to her. Like when she dropped her books on the way out of the library, he didn’t even stop to help her pick them up. And then when I did, she didn’t even thank me. She was too busy rushing off to catch up with Mr. JD Tiverton the Third. Honestly, Papaw, what good does it do being a good guy when the bad guys always get the girls?”
Papaw starts shaking all over, hunched over his sander, like he’s having some kind of attack. He’s shaking so hard that sawdust drops in clouds from his leather apron. I’m about to reach for the phone hanging by the door to call 911 when he busts out laughing in these huge, gulping guffaws.
“I swear, Curley, my dear boy. I don’t think I’m ready for this.”
“Not ready for what, Papaw?”
He chugs about half a liter of water from a Ball jar he keeps on a ledge. When he’s drained it of every last drop, he slams it down on the workbench. “Not ready for you to grow up, that’s what. Not ready for you to be navigating this crazy, mixed-up maze we call adulthood, that’s what.” He spits his t’s out like paper wads.
Under his breath, so softly I almost can’t hear him, he says, “I don’t know what I was thinking when we lost your ma and little Zeb to that river of sludge, but for some reason I thought—I thought—I could handle this.” He starts rubbing his upper arm like it’s got a terrible ache. “Not that I had any choice.”
Whoa. All of a sudden my chest feels all tight and airless like the inside of that Shop-Vac packed with wood shavings. I never thought about Papaw not being here with me. I mean, I never thought he might have something else he’d rather be doing.
Papaw ambles over and puts his arm around my shoulders. “Never you mind, son. Never you mind the crazy ramblings of a tired old man, you hear? Besides, it’s about time you found out how fallible I really am.”
Fallible. Yup, that’s our word for the week, and I’m really starting to hate it. If someone like Papaw can be less than what I thought they were or weak or bad or downright wrong, then who can I count on? My stomach churns like when I stood there looking down into my mama’s grave. Dark. Hollow. Empty.
Papaw grabs a piece of carved wood from a shoe box on the windowsill and hands it to me. It’s a spurtle, a funny name for a Scottish stirring stick that he sells at art fairs in the summer along with his furniture and wooden bowls. We call it our “thinking wood.” I hold the flat stick in the palm of my hand and rub my thumb up and down its silky-smooth surface. Immediately, I feel the muscles around my stomach ease.
Papaw’s two strong hands grip each of my shoulders as he peers at me from under his bushy white brows. “Look here, Curley. I can tell you’re in a tough place about Jules and this JD guy, and I’m not sayin’ it’s going to be easy. I wish I could tell you that the good guy always gets the girl, but I can’t.”
“Wait a minute, Papaw. Are you saying Jules could actually wind up going for this guy?” I feel like cracking that spurtle right over my knee. “Do you mean she’s just as fallible as you are?”
“Heaven forbid.” He laughs softly. “In this case, I’d say Jules is being gullible—your word for next week, incidentally. The difference between the two words isn’t always obvious.”
“Right, Papaw.” Just what I need, another word to help me express what a miserable life I’m having.
“These are hard words to learn,” Papaw says, as if reading my mind. “Even harder to see in ourselves, if you catch my drift.”
Actually, I don’t, but my head’s hurting and I tell Papaw I’ve got homework to do. Before I get out the door of the shop, however, he asks me to run to the house and get his bottle of heart pills. He’s rubbing his left arm again.
“Sure, Papaw. Be right back.”
I rummage through a pile of receipts on Papaw’s dresser, searching for the small plastic bottle of pills I often see on the table by his reading chair. There are days he pops those pills like Jules pops Tic Tacs on the way to school when she’s forgotten to brush her teeth.
I find the bottle under a receipt from Home Depot and am about to take off back to the woodshop when, next to an old framed photo of my grandparents on their wedding day, I see a small, padded white envelope. Figuring it’s the one Antsy handed Papaw, my curiosity gets the best of me. I pick it up and the flap falls open, revealing a wad of hundred-dollar bills.
The word payoff zaps through my mind again, only this time it’s blinking neon. But payoff for what? What kind of shady deal has Papaw made with the coal company? It’s got to be shady, right? Why else would it be cash? In hundred-dollar bills? And as far as I can tell, a lot of them. I count them. Twenty-three. And there were probably more.
I’m feeling hollow again, like I don’t even know what kind of pit I’m looking into.
Fallible—adjective
: liable to fail, mistake, or err; liable to deceive or to be deceived
It’s two weeks into our science project on Eastern elk, and Jules and JD have decided we’re meeting at JD’s house to do more research. JD says his Internet connection is probably better than ours because he lives at the top of a mountain and not in a holler like the rest of us. I guess JD’s pa bought the former coal boss’s house and spent some big money on it.
My house is out, of course, since we don’t even have Internet, much less a computer, but I wasn’t going to say that. Jules didn’t mention it, either, although I’m pretty sure Internet service was the last thing on her mind. She plumb lit up after science class on Friday when JD offered his house for our next meeting.
“Oh, JD,” she cooed, “you’re the bomb.”
The bomb?
“Since when did you start talking like a city kid?” I ask her on the bus that afternoon on the forty-five-minute ride home from school. She’s been staring out the window at the blur of hills and hollers rushing by and chewing on the end of a strand of hair. I used to think it was cute, but now for some reason it’s annoying me.
“What do you mean?” she snaps.
“I mean, calling JD ‘the bomb’ and all. It’s not like he’s going to blow up in your face.” Honestly, I’m trying to lighten things up, but she’s staring holes in me.
“Just because I use a word that’s not in your dictionary suddenly means I’m a fake?”
“Well, no … not exactly. I just wondered … I mean … I never heard you talk like that before, that’s all.” Not the most brilliant comeback, but then, Jules and I rarely fight. “Besides, you gave me that dictionary, remember?”
Jules rolls her eyes, pulls a book out of her backpack, and slaps it open on her lap. “Well, JD talks like that,
and I happen to think it’s cool.”
These last words of hers sting like a passel of yellow jackets knocked from their nest, but it’s her silence for the rest of the way home that hurts even worse.
Today on the way to JD’s house, Jules is all palsy-walsy with me again, as if our argument never happened. When Mrs. Cavanaugh, Jules’s ma, pulls up to our front stoop in her old, rusted-out Jeep, Jules hops in back with me as soon as I get in.
The first thing that hits me is that Jules doesn’t smell like Jules. It’s like a whole truckload of lilacs or gardenias gets dumped into the Jeep with her, and I resist the urge to hold my nose. You might think I’m exaggerating, but if a smell can have a kick to it, this one would send you clear over the mountains. I decide to keep that to myself.
“Gee, Jules, you sure do smell nice.”
Rather than hitting me on the arm like she usually does when I give her a compliment, she tilts her head to one side and blushes. Blushes! I’ve never been able to get Jules to blush at anything, and Lord knows I’ve tried.
I catch Mrs. C looking at us in the rearview mirror. Her eyes are smiling, but for the life of me, I don’t know why. This isn’t the Jules I know. I’m not even sure I like her. Besides, she keeps talking about JD this and JD that, like he’s her favorite subject. We’ll probably meet his dad, she says, but his mom is still up in Indiana waiting for their house to sell.
“JD thinks they may be getting a divorce, but don’t say anything,” she tells me. “He’s kind of touchy about it.” As if I have any interest in the Tivertons’ personal lives whatsoever.
The slow, winding climb up JD’s paved driveway, up his very own mountain to his very own family mansion, reminds me of how a movie sometimes starts out with a panoramic view before it zooms in on the movie star. And there he is, in all of his bad-boy finest, standing on the fieldstone steps of his stone-walled castle—black jeans, black T-shirt, black stringy hair, hands in his tight front pockets, all casual and nonchalant like the mansion behind him is some shack in the woods somewhere with some skimpy view of a landfill and not this amazing scene of rolling blue hills as far as the eye can see.