Meteors in August Read online

Zack wiped his nose with the back of his hand and punched Coe’s arm. “Fucker,” Zack said. “You gave me a bloody nose.”

  “Come on,” said Gwen, “before they get dressed.”

  Zachary Holler would pummel us both if he caught us spying on him. Or worse, he’d wait for some unexpected chance and pay us back in a way I couldn’t imagine—some heartless way, like the way he paid Myron Evans.

  I took one last look. I never understood why Nina took to boys the way she did. Something bad lurked in Zachary Holler, something threatening in his sunburned neck and hard thighs. As he grew older and his chest thickened I could see meanness blooming up in him, a living thing. And Coe, mild Coe, must have had an empty place inside his ribs, a place that could only be filled by Zachary’s cruelty. Nina would have found Zack handsome: she liked dark-eyed boys with strong arms, and she would have brought out a kindness in him, false and fleeting. I saw Zack’s turned-up nose. I saw his horrible hands, hands that could break the neck of a cat. To me he was half imp, half monster; but to Nina, he would have been just another pretty boy. I knew exactly what she’d think of Coe Carson too, because I knew how she treated his brother, Rafe, after that day Mother caught him with his hand stuck down Nina’s bra. He became one of the boys who squatted behind bushes or climbed high in trees to call her name. She called him by his real name—Raphael—made him speechless so she was free to tease and tempt him.

  Still, Rafe Carson found a way to redeem himself. He achieved a mythic status in 1964, when he managed to get himself locked up for trying to rob a gas station down in Rovato Falls. He was the only boy we knew who’d been sent to the detention school in Miles City, though many fathers had threatened their sons with such a fate. Nina and her girlfriends talked of it in whispers and hushed if they caught me listening. His name was their chant: Raphael, Raphael, my prisoner, my love. I imagined my sister and her two friends, their hands clasped, dancing. Trapped in their circle, I saw Rafe Carson, his wrists tied with the pink and yellow ribbons from their hair. Prisoner, they whispered, love. Years later I heard Rafe Carson got himself in real trouble over in Washington, but no one knew for sure and Coe wasn’t talking.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” Gwen said as we climbed up the hill. “Didn’t I tell you there was something to see?”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t think it was so great.”

  “That’s because you’re sweet on Myron Evans. He’s the only one you want to see with his pants down.”

  I refused to answer. Catching Myron didn’t interest me in the least, not since I’d seen him press his face in the fur of his dead cat.

  At the crest of the gully, Gwen grabbed my arm. “Have you ever kissed a boy, Liz?” I shook my head. She knew damn well I hadn’t, unless you wanted to count the time Jesse cornered me on the playground in second grade and licked me from my chin to my nose. I could still feel his rough tongue, the slobber I couldn’t wipe away fast enough. I was almost in tears, too surprised to slap him. He flipped my dress to expose my underwear to a gang of boys. Jesse ran and the boys scattered. Later I learned it was a dare. My cousin earned half a dozen nickels by making a fool of me.

  “What do you think it’s like?” Gwen said.

  “Nothing special.” I realized that most boys didn’t kiss like Jesse. I had seen women swoon in movies; I had seen them surface from a deep kiss, gasping for air but not displeased.

  “Do you think that if I kissed you and pretended you were a boy that it would be the same as really kissing a boy?”

  “I s’pose.” I figured it would be a lot like kissing Aunt Arlen on the cheek, only wetter and probably worse. It still hadn’t occurred to me that Gwen actually intended to try it out.

  “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Let’s see.”

  Kissing was kissing. I had no idea why Gwen had to go to the trouble of pretending I was a boy, not that it took much imagination: I was already five foot six, bony as Aunt Arlen, flat-chested as Coe Carson.

  “Be Gil Harding.”

  “I won’t,” I said. “Anyone but him.” In my opinion, Gil Harding was a greaser; his hair was hard and shiny, combed into a tail in back, and all his pants fit too tight. Gwen liked him because he was two years older, because he wouldn’t even look at her. “Just for a minute,” Gwen said, “just for me.”

  “He’s got rotten teeth,” I said.

  “You’ve never been close enough to Gil Harding to see his teeth.”

  “Don’t have to see ’em to know.”

  She kicked at the dirt. “Are you ready?” she said.

  “I’m ready.” I puckered my lips and closed my eyes.

  “No, stupid. You’re the boy. You have to come after me.” I bent toward her; her breath in my face was grassy and sweet. She opened one eye. “Don’t you know anything? You’re supposed to put your arms around me.”

  I thought of my cousin Marshall, his hand gripping the bare breast of the girl who peed on Arlen’s lawn. I saw the bruises from his rough fingers, the girl’s smeared mouth, lipstick rubbed all the way up to her nostrils and halfway down her chin. This was as much as I knew about kissing.

  Olivia Jeanne Woodruff, that strong young woman, lured Elliot Foot off in her Winnebago. Was she wearing him down like Arlen said? Was she kissing him to death?

  Nina flung herself into the arms of Billy Elk. Nina threw herself on Jesse and tried to save him with her own breath. This was all I knew of love and mercy. The line blurred. Passion and salvation seemed like the same thing, like something I’d wanted my whole life.

  I lurched forward and clutched Gwen’s waist, gave her a fast moist smooch on the mouth—almost on the mouth. My aim took me high and I ended up getting more of her nose than her lips. She wiped her face with the back of her hand and spit on the ground. I was as sloppy as Jesse. She turned and ran. I stood, stupidly staring at the red scar of the setting sun. My eyes burned. I was nothing but a stand-in, a ridiculous failure. Let me try again, I thought. But I was sure she never would.

  I watched Gwen’s hair swing from side to side as she sprinted down the road, so you couldn’t help thinking of a horse’s tail, an animal’s rump. Yes, she could have Gil Harding if she wanted. She could have any boy when she was ready. Soon she wouldn’t have to bother with me and my false, clumsy kisses.

  I ran after her. It was almost dusk, but she wanted to walk downtown. Boys in trucks and souped-up Mustangs dragged Main. They hung their heads out their windows, whistled at every girl they saw. They didn’t care if she was fat or old, pimple-faced or bowlegged. Anything female was worth a blast of the horn. Gwen didn’t seem to notice their lack of discrimination. She grinned every time they hooted, certain that each call was for her alone.

  Later, we lay on our sleeping bags in the trailer. I said, “This is our cabin. We live alone in the woods.”

  “I’d be glad to live alone and be rid of my parents,” said Gwen. “Ruby doesn’t do shit now that she’s working four to midnight. She’s a slug all day and gives me hell if I don’t do the laundry and clean up after Zack and Dad. She says it’s high time I learned to do a woman’s job. A woman’s job? Christ. I’m no genius, she tells me, I’ve gotta be able to do something.” Gwen kicked off her shoes and stripped down to her underwear. “Fourteen years old and my mother wants to get me trained so I can marry some fat slob like my dad and wipe up his muddy footprints off the floor when he comes home from hunting and throws a bundle of dead ducks in my sink.” We unzipped our sleeping bags so we could have one underneath us and one on top. “Not this girl,” Gwen said, draping her warm leg over mine, “no sirree. This girl’s going to have a good time before she thinks of promising to love, cherish and obey. Obey? Who thinks up this shit anyway?” She rubbed her leg up and down against mine, and I felt the rough stubble of her shaved calf. I tried to forget our miserable kiss, tried to pretend nothing had happened and nothing had changed.

  I stared out the window, watching the sky. “My parents sure as hell don’t obey
one another,” Gwen said. “Dad’s been on her back ever since she got the night shift. She says it’s twice the money, and he says, ‘What’re my wages—chopped liver?’ Same conversation, five times a week. She wants her own money, never tells him what she makes. She’s stashing it and I know where. Makes her feel free to have it. I think she’s getting me trained so she can split. Like hell. If she screws, I’ll be right behind her.”

  I gazed past Gwen. She nudged me. “What’re you looking at?” she said.

  “The sky.”

  “What for?”

  “I’m waiting for the first star.”

  “Tell me the rest of the story,” she said, “about our cabin in the woods.”

  “A crazy trapper built a shack in these parts too.”

  “Why’s he crazy?”

  “He married an Indian girl. They lived near the timberline, but her three brothers found them. They tied the trapper to his own stove and kidnapped their sister.”

  “Where’d you hear this story?”

  “Everybody’s heard this story. The trapper struggled for a week. The fire burned out. The wind roared through the cracks of the log cabin and the trapper dreamed he was falling down a crevasse in a glacier.”

  I kept looking out the window as I talked. Already the sky had gone from blue to black, filling with stars that disappeared behind the ragged ridge of the Rockies. “The ropes cut his wrists and thighs, but he was too numb to feel his own blood,” I said.

  “I heard this story before. You’re not telling it right.”

  “I’m telling the truth. If you don’t want to hear it, I’ll think the rest to myself.”

  “No, go on.”

  “He fell asleep. He would have frozen to death, but he cried out from a dream, and a pair of wolves heard him, and knew his voice. Years before, he’d spared the life of the male. The trapper’s rifle was aimed at the animal’s head, but he heard the she-wolf howling in the hills as if she knew her mate was in danger. He emptied six rounds into the dirt and the wolf ran free.”

  “Now I remember,” Gwen said. “They found that trapper, and he was still tied to the stove, and he was dead. That’s what you get for marrying an Indian. My father says Indians should be able to join the union at the mill, just like anyone else. Ruby says that if we let them do that, the next thing you know they’ll be wanting to marry our daughters, and the town will be full of women like Mary Louise Furey. Who cares that the trapper died anyway? No one knew him.”

  “The animals thought they owed the trapper something. They gnawed through the ropes; they slept beside him to keep him warm. And when he woke, he was changed. He couldn’t talk like a man; he could only bark and howl. He’s still looking for the Indian girl.”

  Gwen said, “I heard the girl killed herself when she found out the man had frozen to death. Her brothers locked her up in a little hut and she drowned herself in the pail of water they’d left for her. They buried her in the old way, sitting up instead of lying down, like she was expecting company, wearing all her beads and a doeskin dress.”

  “It’s not true,” I told her. “They aren’t dead; they just can’t find each other.”

  “I don’t want to be buried. I want to be burned. I want my ashes scattered so no one can dig me up later and look at my bones.”

  “I want to disappear,” I said. “I don’t want anyone to do anything with my body.”

  “No one just disappears.”

  I didn’t answer. I knew how wrong she was. I thought of my mother’s shoe box hidden in the closet, all the pictures Nina destroyed. I imagined her coming home, carrying an envelope with all the missing pieces. We’d sit on the living-room floor and tape the pictures together. She’d stay long enough for the seams to mend and fade like old scars.

  “Do you think the trapper will look for her forever?” Gwen said.

  “For the rest of his life. Maybe longer.”

  “I want someone to love me that much.”

  “I don’t. You have to be dead for someone to love you that much, dead or gone for a long, long time.”

  Gwen laughed. “It’s only a story.”

  In the square of sky there were too many stars to count. I thought each star was a person who was lost. Their eyes watched the world night after night. They were safe and knew exactly where to find us.

  I don’t remember falling asleep, I only remember waking. The trailer pitched as if the ground had split open beneath it. For years we’d been warned that Willis sat on a fault line. I prayed I would end up in the same hole as my parents. Gwen clawed at my back. “Jesus, somebody’s trying to knock the trailer over,” she said. Only then did I realize it was the trailer shaking, not the earth. “Damn you and your crazy trapper,” she sputtered. She thought that talking about a man could bring him to life. The rocking stopped and the trailer shuddered as it settled back into its ruts.

  Gwen said, “Lock the door.”

  “Why me?”

  “You’re closest.” She gave me a little kick.

  I wasn’t scared, but I believed the best thing to do at times like these was to screw your eyes shut and pull the covers over your head until the bad thing went away. I slid the bolt in place. “Anyone who can rock this trailer can rip the door right off the hinges,” I said.

  Gwen jumped out of bed to rummage through the closet. She came up with a broken broom handle and a flashlight. When she flicked it on, I knocked it from her hand and the light blew out. “He’ll see us,” I said. The trailer swayed again. I tugged the broken broom handle away from Gwen. Its jagged edge gave me a vague idea of how I might use it.

  “I bet it’s Myron Evans,” she said, “that dirty little creep.”

  In my mind I saw Myron dragging his bad foot. “It can’t be Myron,” I said. “He’s not strong enough.”

  “It is Myron. Who else but a pervert would try to scare us this way? I’ll beat his head with the flashlight if he comes in here. I’ll crack his skull, I swear.”

  Suddenly everything was still. I pulled myself up to the window just in time to see two boys leap the fence and duck down the alley, Gwen’s rotten brother and his slow shadow.

  “Can you see anything?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Do you think he’s gone?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “I bet Myron knows Zack told us what he tried to do. He wants to scare us so we won’t talk. They can lock a man up for good for the kind of stuff Myron Evans likes.”

  Poor Myron. He even got blamed for things he didn’t do. I remembered a time when a gang of us followed Myron home. We hid behind trees and shrubs and called to him: Myron, oh Myron. We sang it. Sweetheart, Dear One. He twirled in the street, looking for us, nearly stumbling over his lame leg. Myron, my darling. And he hobbled away, trying to run. But he was brave, much braver than I was. When he was just a child and those boys pinned him to the ground, he was strong enough to beat his own head bloody.

  Gwen said, “Maybe it was the trapper. I bet he saw my hair and thought I was the Indian girl.” She was no longer afraid. The trapper was no different from the boys cruising Main, and Gwen was smiling, her teeth wet and shiny in the dark. She whispered, “Do you think he’ll keep after me?”

  7

  WE CALLED ourselves Lutherans, as good as any in the county, but we only made it to church when the mood struck my father. In late September the feeling hit him hard. That’s when I heard the story of Freda Graves, how she’d fallen away, possessed by some private passion.

  It all began on a Friday night. I’d been in school for only three weeks, and I was already fantasizing about diseases and accidents that might keep me out of class for months at a stretch. Not long after my father got home from work, someone banged at the front door. I thought one of my teachers had discovered I’d stuck Marlene Grosswilder’s locker shut with twenty pieces of chewed Super Bubble. I still owed that girl for things that had happened in third grade; I might never be done paying her back.

  I ope
ned my door a crack. If Mr. Lippman, the science teacher, was the bearer of bad news, he would take great pleasure in the details, throwing in a few of my other bad habits as long as he was at it.

  I sneaked down the stairs and realized I wasn’t the one in trouble today. A small woman was slapping at Daddy’s chest. He was too surprised to defend himself. She cried, “Look at you, a big brute like you. You nearly broke my Lanfear’s arm. You can have your damn twelve dollars.” She threw a wad of crumpled bills at his feet. “What do you care if my kids don’t eat dinner? It’s better to have them go hungry for a week than to have you beat on my husband so he can’t work.” She was young, her hands tiny as a child’s. I’d seen her at church and knew her name—Miriam Deets. She was not a pretty woman, but her skin was smooth and rosy. You knew just by looking at her she’d be sweet to touch. Miriam had married a man twice her age. Lanfear Deets worked under my father, and I’d heard Daddy say he was lazier than an Indian.

  Father dropped down to his hands and knees in front of Miriam and plucked the money off the floor. She looked as if she wanted to kick him in the ribs. But she didn’t: she just stared at him, seeing some kind of hideous animal too vile to strike, a two-headed calf, an earless dog.

  When Daddy got back on his feet, he stuffed the bills in Miriam’s fist and told her to get on home. Her mouth was a tight circle of struggle. She was too proud to take it and too poor to hand it back. “Tell your husband the debt’s canceled. Tell him not to bet money he don’t have to spend. And tell him the one thing that makes me sick to my stomach is a man who sends his woman out to do his talking for him.”

  The guys at the mill always owed my father. He had to write all his poker winnings down in a little black book just to keep track. I’d never known him to forget a debt or let a single dollar slide, and I wanted to tell Miriam Deets to shoo before he came to his senses.

  All evening Father fretted and paced, popping out of his chair every five minutes. Mother must’ve said, “What is it, Dean?” six or seven times. Even a night’s sleep didn’t snap him out of it. At breakfast he put four teaspoons of sugar in his coffee and was ready to dump the fifth when Mom said, “What’s eating you?”