Meteors in August Read online

  At precisely three minutes after twelve, according to Freda Graves—“Oh Lord, let us remember this hour”—we heard the dull click of the lock being released, like a trigger hitting an empty chamber. Gwen gripped my hand, squashing all my fingers together. The door creaked open slowly. Inside, the bar was dark as a cave, and I realized how quiet the street was all of a sudden.

  Elliot’s two younger brothers, Vern and Ralph, appeared. They hadn’t changed since the last time I’d seen them; their beards were still long and matted, their mouths still hidden by hair. They lumbered through the doorway, carrying a long blue sign with bright red letters. The crowd took a single breath as if they’d seen a beautiful thing.

  Freda Graves shook with the force of her own words. Her huge bony hands drew pictures in the air, scooped out lakes of fire, scattered the valleys with our bleached and numberless bones. “This is the eve of destruction,” she shouted, “opening a house of sin to face the House of the Lord.” From the bottom of the steps, Myron Evans shouted, “Amen, sister.”

  Ralph and Vern each slipped a heavy loop of rope around the sign, preparing to hoist it, then ducked inside the dark bar again. “Mark my words well,” said Mrs. Graves, “this is the day of our downfall.” She sucked hard at the air, filled her lungs, and seemed to grow before our eyes, her shoulders square and broad as a man’s, her legs thick as old pines. “We are leading our brothers and sisters into temptation. We walk in the valley of the shadow of death, and I fear evil.”

  “Amen!” Myron yelled again. His support wasn’t helping Freda’s cause. He blinked too much when he talked. It made me nervous just to watch him, as if I had to run to the bathroom. Pale, game-legged Myron Evans, a grown man who still lived with his mother and never learned to drive a car, was not generally admired by the people of Willis.

  The brothers emerged with a pair of silver ladders. They propped the ladders against the building, giving them a jerk and a shove to be sure they were steady. Elliot waited inside the bar. Mrs. Graves’s audience waned now that the action had started; a few of the good Lutherans had strayed to our side of the street. Still she was undaunted. She called out to her meager band of followers. “Come stand beside me, Minnie Hathaway,” she shouted. This renewed our curiosity for a moment. We all knew Minnie. We could smell her in the heat. She doused herself with perfume, a daily reminder of her dear father’s funeral, of his coffin drowned in gardenias. She wore white gloves, every day of her life, through all the blistering days of summer and all the brutal days of winter.

  Minnie minced up the steps toward Mrs. Graves. She was a bird woman with no wings, brittle-boned and light enough to fly if she’d had some way to get off the ground. “Minnie Hathaway is our beloved sister,” Freda said, gripping Minnie to her breast. “And we all know of her struggles.” We certainly did. Early in the day Minnie Hathaway was a perfect gentlewoman, so proper and elegant you almost forgot she lived at the rooming house and shared a bathroom with three men and the Fat Lady. But when Minnie got a few drinks in her, she flew into fits that twisted her cracked face and made her cuss in ways that were embarrassing even to men. “Bad as an Indian with liquor,” folks said. I was warned not to listen to nasty talk. “Don’t judge what you can’t understand,” Mother often told me. I tried not to judge. What did I know? I was only nine years old. But nothing Mother told me could have stopped me from listening to what people said. If nasty talk was bad for me, I was already poisoned.

  At last Elliot appeared in the bright street. The crowd cheered and clapped when they saw him, hero of the day. He was the runt of the family: a small, jittery man with a full beard and a serious lack of hair. He nodded to his brothers. Ralph and Vern each grabbed a line of rope and started up the twin ladders.

  They braced themselves on the ledge and slowly pulled the sign toward them. “Is it fair?” Mrs. Graves bellowed. “Is it fair to tempt our own sister this way? Is it just to remind her of her sorrow each time she leaves this holy place?”

  “Tell her to leave by the back door,” Vern yelled. The crowd hooted.

  “Forgive them,” Freda Graves moaned, raising her hands to Heaven, “for they know not what they do.”

  The sign caught the lip of the ledge; the crowd gasped and stepped back, a single being with a single mind. Elliot was the only one who didn’t budge. He stood his ground, ready to accept his fate if the sign crashed on his head. Vern and Ralph each gave their end a jiggle and counted: “One, two, three … heave!” The sign was up and the mob whooped. In a matter of minutes the wires were attached and the red letters blinked on and off: LAST CHANCE, LAST CHANCE.

  Mrs. Graves made a futile attempt to sway the throng as the Foot brothers riveted the sign in place. “Repent, O ye sinners. Turn and be forgiven, Elliot Foot.” But Elliot didn’t turn; he held the door open while his first customers streamed inside the cool bar. “I see you on a darkening path,” Freda warned. “O Lord, the way is dim. A tear disappears in a well. A soul shrivels in Hell.”

  Gwen and I sneaked up to the door with everyone else. Inside the bar the light was murky, the air already clouded with smoke. We had just poked our heads over the threshold when I felt a swat on my behind. I whirled to face my attacker. It was Nina, my sixteen-year-old sister. “Lizzie Macon, you better get your little ass home if you want to have any butt left to sit on,” she said. “Daddy would skin you like a rabbit if he saw you here.” She glared at Gwen. “You too, Gwen Holler. Children got no business hanging around a bar.”

  Gwen said, “You’re not my sister. I don’t have to listen to you.” Then she stuck out the tip of her pointed tongue and darted inside.

  I don’t know who made me madder: my sister for spoiling our fun, or Gwen for going inside without me. But Gwen was already out of sight and Nina was right in front of me. When she took hold of my arm, I shook her loose and said, “I wish you’d leave me alone. I wish I didn’t have a sister.”

  The next summer, my cruel wish became a curse. Nina disappeared. When you live in Willis, Montana, you know there aren’t too many places to run where they won’t find you within the hour and drag you back to your own front door. But my sister found a place, and it was a long time before any of us saw her again.

  Before Nina vanished, she dug through the shoe box Mom kept stashed in the hall closet and carefully cut her own head out of each photograph. She didn’t want to see posters of herself stuck on every telephone pole for a hundred miles. She left the rest of us intact, so we’re still there, grinning stupidly at the camera. I see Nina’s legs and Nina’s pink dress, the one I yearned for but never wore. I see Nina’s hands clasped in front of her, and I recognize her wrists as easily as I would recognize her face. My sister.

  In the photographs I am a skinny child with big knees. I keep my hands in my pockets or behind my back. I always thought my arms were too long. Whatever the year, my hair is chopped off short. Mother had a fear of ticks and lice and believed in prevention. She said I didn’t take care of myself. I look like a freckled boy forced to wear a dress. My eyes are pale and surprised, as if the flash frightens me every time.

  One of my parents is always missing from the picture, but I feel them behind the camera, creating us again and again. Mother has a tiny waist and thin hands. Though I am still a child, I can see the startling ways I will outgrow her. My hidden hands are monstrous. She wears faded dresses, but the cloth is good. Her shoes have chunky heels and tight laces. She is a sensible woman.

  The pictures have no colors, only shades of gray, but I remember. Mother’s hair had a red glow when she stood in sunlight. Every morning she drew it back into a perfect knot, held fast with half a dozen invisible hairpins.

  There are deep lines at the corners of Father’s eyes. No matter what the season or time of day, he seems to be squinting into the sun. I see him squeeze Nina’s headless shoulders. He is blond, like her, the handsome father of a beautiful girl. His nose is too big, his brows too dark for his fair hair. By afternoon his stubble makes his face look d
irty. These imperfections save him. He cannot stop grinning. He pats my head, but he is thinking only of my sister. I scowl. He stoops to kiss her cheek, and she’s not there.

  3

  THE FIRST year Nina was gone I kept telling myself she’d be back any day. The second year my mother cleaned out Nina’s drawers and closet. She took the clothes to the Salvation Army in Rovato Falls and stopped at the dump on the way home to heave a garbage bag into the pit. The bag split before it touched the ground. Makeup and perfume, tarnished jewelry and barrettes, tattered romance novels and ticket stubs with boys’ names on the back spun and fluttered toward the rotting heaps of strangers’ refuse, toward the junked cars and the decaying corpses of the rats that young boys had shot with their fathers’ rifles.

  After that day Nina began to fade. I couldn’t open the closet and catch a whiff of her, lingering on all her clothes; I couldn’t see her leaning close to the mirror, worrying over one tiny pimple on the side of her nose.

  Nina had always protected me. She saved me from a thrashing that day at the Last Chance Bar, which made my outburst all the more unbearable. She knew Father was apt to strike first and ask questions later. Better to punish unjustly than to let a child escape without rebuke. If I wasn’t guilty of that crime, surely I had done something else, something unknown. I deserved every blow. But Father never touched Nina, not until the night she left. She could tease him out of anger, cajole him with laughter, leave him helpless with her smiles.

  As I grew older I learned to fool Daddy but not to charm him. Four years after Nina disappeared I still longed for her to leap to my defense, to shelter me and speak for me. I remembered the last winter she was with us. Late one afternoon in early December my cousin Jesse and I pegged snowballs at the Lutheran church. Jesse had shaggy light hair and his teeth were too big for his mouth. He was always in trouble, but the snowballs were my idea. How were we to guess that Reverend Piggott would be at church on Wednesday? How were we to know that the thud of snow would jar him from his prayers and turn the frail minister into a raving prophet, a man with a vision of our imminent doom?

  Reverend Piggott believed in the evil of children; he depended on it. Twisting our ears, he dragged us inside and made us stare at the crucifix above the altar, the image of our Lord. I wasn’t afraid of God. I couldn’t imagine He’d plunge me and Jesse into the fires of hell for throwing a few snowballs, and I thought Reverend Piggott was a bit of a fool to suggest God might be so petty. But I didn’t argue. The reverend kept a ruler beside his Bible at the pulpit; I had seen him use it in the heat of a sermon, slapping wood on wood, creating his own thunder. As we stood before the pained Jesus, Reverend Piggott took the stick to our palms, those wicked hands that had packed the snow hard and hurled it at God’s holy house. Jesus hung. His palms bled. My eyes burned. Jesse kicked Reverend Piggott in the shin and ran, and I took a second licking for his sake.

  “Ask Jesus to forgive you,” Reverend Piggott hissed. And I did, but the wooden Jesus did not speak or raise his head.

  At home, Nina helped me hide my wounds. Father would have given me a set of marks on my butt to match my palms if he knew what I’d done. Mother would have marched down to the Lutheran church and told Reverend Piggott she’d have him arrested if he ever laid a hand on one of her children again. I didn’t want another whipping, but I feared I didn’t deserve Mother’s fierce defense. Only Nina could save me, my sister who hid me and kissed my palms. There, baby, she whispered, all better.

  The fourth year Nina was gone I discovered I still wished for her protection, and the need rose in me like a living thing. It had to do with Gwen Holler.

  Gwen and I ran wild in the summer of 1969. We were full of the sudden knowledge that bloomed from the changes in our bodies, or, at least, the changes in her body. Gwen had taken on the shape of a tiny woman. She was already fourteen, a few months older than I was, as she often reminded me. In her basement, she unbuttoned her blouse to show me the swell of her breasts, the dark circles around her nipples. I thought of Nina in the woodshed with Rafe Carson; I heard Mother’s hard slaps. I longed to touch her again, to soothe her, just as I longed to touch Gwen Holler. I wanted to have something to show Gwen, some womanly change that would surprise her, but my arms were still too long, my knees too big. I had nothing to reveal, yet I felt sure that what was happening to her must be happening to me too.

  For two weeks, we prowled the gully, a deep gorge at the east side of town. We stalked Gwen’s brother, Zachary, and his friend Coe Carson, Rafe’s younger brother. They weren’t difficult to track: in their wake they left a trail of dead birds and wounded rusty tin cans. Zack and Coe raised their BB guns for any flicker in the woods. If they couldn’t find a squirrel or crow, the sun glinting off a shiny thing was enough to spark a volley.

  Zack Holler was tough. He had solid thighs, a bit of hair on his chest. He had never learned to compromise because his fists were fast and his head was hard. Red-haired Coe Carson, gangly and too loose in the joints to be quick, straggled after Zachary. The boys didn’t know that Gwen and I were creeping through the ravine, just beyond their range, shaking bushes and imitating birdcalls to draw their fire. Often we took refuge in a rickety tree house, where we could watch them cutting through the underbrush.

  In the middle of June, Zack and Coe took summer jobs at the mill and gave up their exploits in the gully. Boredom led Gwen and me to become hunters ourselves; our goal was to catch Myron Evans in the act. We pricked our fingers, rubbed them together and swore a pact in blood.

  Myron Evans lived three blocks from me in a house bordered by two vacant lots. The old gray body of the building blistered in the sun, and the untended garden grew into a tangle of roses and milkweed. The frail pillars of the porch sagged, allowing the overhang to lurch at a dangerous angle. The endless footfalls of Myron and his mother had beaten the front steps bare. They lived alone in the three-story house. People said that when one room got dirty, when the stacks of newspapers piled too high, and they couldn’t find the cats’ litter box to change it, Myron and his mother locked the door and moved to another room. Of course, no one knew this for a fact; they hadn’t invited any of their neighbors inside for a cup of afternoon tea since 1937.

  My aunt Arlen said Mrs. Evans was pretty once, before she had a crippled son, before her husband disappeared into the green edge of twilight. This former beauty was difficult to imagine. Now her left eyelid drooped over her eye and made her half blind. She always turned her head to look at you, to stare you down with her one good eye, bloodshot from overuse, yellow as an old egg where it should have been white.

  Mom said Mr. Evans died of pneumonia in the spring of ’38, but Aunt Arlen told me Mr. Evans went out to get a beer one warm evening in June and never came home. “What a pity,” Arlen said, “and Myron just a boy. No wonder that poor child turned out the way he did, no wonder at all.”

  Arlen sipped at her coffee, contemplating misfortune and misery. “And then there was that nasty business with Myron’s teacher.”

  “Nothing but a rumor,” my mother said.

  “Eugene Thornton had to leave town. Myron quit school—never went back after fifth grade. Proof enough for me.”

  “He quit school because people in this town talk too much, and even little children turn mean.”

  I knew the children Mother meant. They were men now; they were married with sons of their own. Boys loathe the weakest among them, just as a pack loathes a sick animal. Wolves will hound a crippled cub to death. On the playground, more than twenty years before, three boys had pinned Myron to the dirt. They ran their fingers through his hair, called him Darling and Dear One, My Sweetheart, the names the teacher had given him, alone, after school.

  He didn’t cry or buck. He pulled his head up and then bashed it on the gravel: once, twice, a third time, until his eyes seemed to float in his skull. He moaned and smiled, knowing he made his own pain, knowing no one could take that away from him.

  The boys scattered, leavi
ng Myron sprawled on the ground, blood in his hair.

  “Poor Myron,” Arlen said again, just to herself.

  Yes, poor Myron, everyone in town said so. But people’s sympathy didn’t keep them from warning their kids not to go near the Evans place after dusk. Rumor had it that Myron was apt to pop out of the bushes and reveal more than a child should see. That’s what Gwen and I meant to find out for ourselves.

  Some folks said he was retarded and some said he was crazy or just plain evil, but most everyone agreed he should be put away to keep him from annoying decent citizens.

  On a warm night in July, Gwen and I camped outside in my backyard. She’d shaved her legs. “Feel my stubble,” she said, and I ran my fingertips over the short, stiff hairs along her shin. Then I felt my own legs. They were neither prickly nor smooth. My legs were covered with fine down, a fuzz I wished to ignore as long as I could.

  I knew this was the night we’d catch Myron. My skin was already hot. I wondered what he’d do if he caught us spying. I imagined his pretty white fingers clutched around my throat, his hair flopping forward and back as he lifted me off the ground. And what would we say if we caught him in the bushes doing what people said he did? He was no kid. We weren’t going to swat his behind, tell him to zip up his pants and get on home. A boy who could bash his own head on gravel, not once but three times, a child who could beat himself bloody, was frightening in ways I couldn’t explain. Now Myron Evans was a grown man; I was scared of what I might have to do if he got hold of my wrist.