Cobra Strike (2 page)

His eyes crossed.

He slapped both hands across his mouth.

He dashed past me to the locker room.

Even before the doors banged shut, we all heard it.

Loud, anguished retching as he threw up.

He didn't make it back to practice. And I never did my hundred push-ups.

That night, as I usually do on Fridays, I set my alarm to get up early, so I could visit my grandmother Saturday morning.

Unfortunately, I had bad news to deliver.

Any other time, visiting her was something I looked forward to, partly because she lives back in the hills. I love any excuse to drive my Chevy truck along those lonely winding roads shaded by trees. The main reason I enjoy visiting her, though, is there's no
one who means more to me. My parents died in a car crash when I was three, and I grew up in town with my aunt and uncle. Their youngest son is ten years older than me, so it's never seemed as if I have a close family.

Except for Gram. I've spent most of my summers with her, and she's taught me a lot about the land and nature, taking me into the woods and showing me flowers and roots and how they can be used for medicine. Pointing out the different birds and their habits. Showing me how to sneak up on deer. That's where I feel the most comfortable— among the trees and grass. Where a person doesn't have to talk.

When my alarm went off at 7:00 AM, I dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt without showering. In the kitchen, I grabbed an apple to eat during the drive. I wanted to save my appetite for Gram's country breakfast. No one else was awake, and I left quietly after writing a note for my aunt and uncle.

My truck started at the first turn of the key. I let it purr for a few minutes. It's an old
truck, but I work on it plenty and keep it in good running condition.

The sky was a cloudless blue. Water from last night's rain spotted the windshield. I let the wipers run and adjusted the defroster so my breathing wouldn't fog the inside of the windows. I put the truck into gear and pulled away from Uncle Jeb's house, a white two-story building in a row of similar white two-story buildings, on a street lined with old tall trees.

Although I was a high school senior and I had lived in the house since I was three, I never thought of it as home. It was always “Uncle Jeb's house.” Maybe it was because Uncle Jeb and Aunt Marlene treated me so politely, as if they were afraid I would break in two if they hugged me or raised their voices or did any of the rough-and-tumble things parents did when they treated their kids like kids. Or maybe it was just too awkward for them to talk to me. I had so much trouble getting my words out, they always seemed to look away and be embarrassed for me. Either way—with their
kids grown up and gone, and just us three in the house—living with them has been quiet. Most of my childhood memories of the house are about its squeaks and creaks as we moved through it ever so politely.

I turned the corner, and Uncle Jeb's house disappeared from my rearview mirror.

It didn't take long to get out of town. Not because we live close to the edge of town, but because there isn't much town. Johnstown only has one high school and doesn't even have a McDonald's or a Burger King. It's just a small forgotten place stuck back in the hills of southeast Kentucky.

I drove down Main Street, past the old courthouse. On the seat beside me was a mini-recorder, the kind people use to dictate notes. I grabbed it and pressed the record button.

“‘I am dead, Horatio,'” I said into the microphone. “ ‘Wretched queen, good-bye! You that look pale and tremble at this chance, that are but mutes or audience to this act, had I but time, I could tell you. But let it be. Horatio, I am dead.' “

I snapped the record button off, rewound the tape and played it back. My words were getting clearer.

Repeating lines I had memorized from Shakespeare's play
Hamlet
was one way I worked on conquering my stutter. No one had told me it would help, but I figured it couldn't hurt. I liked the sound of the words Shakespeare used. And people have tried worse methods of curing their stuttering.

There was this Greek named Demosthenes who became a famous speaker even though he stuttered. He practiced speaking with pebbles under his tongue, and he stood at the sea and shouted above the roar of the waves. To make his lungs more powerful, he strapped a weight to his chest and recited things as he ran up hills.

Thinking about famous people who stuttered and got over it made me feel better. The guy who wrote
Alice in Wonderland
— Lewis Carroll—stuttered. So did a famous British prime minister, Winston Churchill. And Marilyn Monroe.

I've always told myself that if they could get past their stutter, so could I.

“ ‘Now cracks a noble heart,' “ I said into the tape recorder. This was Horatio, talking to Hamlet after Hamlet had been stabbed with a poison-tipped sword. Shakespeare wrote some good action stories. “‘Good night, sweet Prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!'”

I practiced as I drove down Main Street. When I reached the railroad tracks, I turned and followed them along the river. I reached for the apple, crunching on it to knock the edge off my hunger.

I passed the Johns Corporation warehouses. I passed the Johns Corporation trucking center. I passed the Johns Corporation headquarters. I passed almost a mile's worth of Johns Corporation civic pride. All of the buildings were set behind beautifully landscaped lawns with ponds and flower beds. The Johns Corporation had begun as a coal mine at the turn of the century and had expanded ever since. Most people in town worked for the Johns Corporation in one way
or another. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why this little town in the valley was called Johnstown.

And that made the news I had for Gram even worse. I was worried my bad news was somehow connected to all those nice buildings with the perfectly landscaped lawns. Just like I was concerned about why the Johns Corporation had made it necessary for me to have empty jars rolling around on the floor of my truck.

Twenty minutes later, as I parked near Gram's cabin, I had finished rehearsing what I needed to explain to her.

From where I parked the truck beneath an elm tree, I could see Gram. She sat in her rocker on the front porch, reading from her Bible.

In some ways, Gram was what you'd expect a granny to look like. She favored dark dresses. Her white hair was piled in a bun. She had tiny glasses perched on her nose. Her cheeks looked like wrinkly dried apples.

But in other ways, she wasn't what you'd expect at all. Although in her eighties, she
could still dance and giggle like a teenager. Her eyes were a deep clear blue that movie stars would envy. Her voice, thick with a backwoods drawl, was soft and quiet and, especially when she was angry, hinted of great power.

I walked across grass wet with dew and up the slight hill to her cabin. It wasn't much more than a bedroom and kitchen, with a small living room warmed by a stone fireplace. The outside walls of the cabin had weathered to a soft gray over the years; the roof was dull tin. But not one piece of lumber sagged. Old as the cabin was, it had been solidly built.

Gram looked up and smiled at my approach. The morning's first sun warmed the front porch of the cabin, and the shadow from Gram's head fell across the Bible on her lap.

“He was good, that Jesus,” she said as a hello to me.

“Yes, ma'am,” I said. I didn't stutter as much around Gram. While there is plenty doctors don't know about stutters, they do
know it seems to happen when the vocal cords tighten and lock up. Part of why they tighten, though, is because stutterers are afraid of stuttering. And the more fearful they are, the more they stutter. So the problem just keeps getting worse. Around Gram, though, I'm less afraid of stuttering because I know she doesn't care if I do, and because I'm less afraid, I stutter less.

Gram took off her reading glasses, folded them, and set them on her lap beside the Bible. “Even folks who don't believe in his miracles will agree he was a great teacher, that thousands followed him and hung on his every word. But did he charge admission? Did he ask for a collection plate? No, sir.”

She sighed and shook her head. “Just heard on the radio about another television preacher caught doing wrong. Them's the ones so caught up in wordly riches they forget the teachings—how a soul is worth so much more than anything the world can give them.”

She sighed again. “So when I get discouraged hearing about those who use Jesus and his teachings badly, I just go right back to the
source.” She patted her Bible. “Helps me remember all over again how good God is. And my faith don't get tarnished none.”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said. Sometimes I disagree with her, just for the fun of getting her all worked up and excited. This morning, however, I didn't have the heart for it. I had too much on my mind.

She patted the Bible again. “This does give me comfort as I gets closer and closer to the pearly gates.”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said.

Gram leaned forward and peered at me. “Don't ‘yes ma'am' me like I'm some child you want to keep happy. You should be telling me them pearly gates is still a long ways off. And furthermore, you and me have had enough talks. You should be chastising me for calling them the pearly gates. As if heaven's such a small place that gates can contain it.”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said, finally grinning.

“That's better,” she said. “You looked like you'd just left a funeral.”

She pointed at the rocking chair beside her. “Set yourself down,” she said, “and tell
me what's eating you. And I know it ain't football.”

I set myself down. “Ma'am?”

“There's no way you didn't make the team,” she said. “Not my Roy Linden, the boy who's fast enough to slap a deer's rump.”

“Gram, it was j-just once, and I wish you w-w-wouldn't keep on with that story.”

“You can't deny it. And folks around here have seen you run. They know it's the truth.”

Gram had been with me that afternoon, back when I was fourteen. I had been standing at the edge of a clearing, downwind from the yearling doe so it couldn't catch my smell. There was enough of a wind that it couldn't hear me move softly through the deep grass. I'd gotten close enough to see its eyelashes. I'd burst up from the grass, not even sure why I was doing it. But I'd gotten enough of a jump to swat the doe's hind end as it started to run from me.

“‘Course,” Gram said, “legs like yours don't do a team no good without someone who's got an arm to take advantage of it. Anyone
else show up for quarterback besides that pitiful boy of the Schenleys'?”

“No, ma'am.” Usually this was how we spent our time. She talked a lot to spare me the effort.

Gram shook her head in disgust. “That boy's arm don't have the power to throw a football through a wet paper towel. It's a shame. A real shame. You're probably the best-kept secret playing football in Kentucky ‘cause there's no one to get you the ball.”

“Gram, you're s-saying that because you're s-supposed to.”

“No,” she said, “I'm saying it because I could go to my grave a happy woman knowing that those fleet legs of yours got you a scholarship to college. Be the best chance you have of making something of yourself and leaving this coal town. And it ain't going to happen with a quarterback like that Schenley boy. Your team's got to win some games before any scouts will make the visit to Johnstown.”

We sat quietly for a few minutes, each of us rocking as we enjoyed the sunshine and
the trees and the view of the valley beyond the trees. In a few weeks, when the autumn frost struck, the vivid colors in the trees as their leaves turned would make the woods look like a storybook picture.

Finally, Gram sighed to break our silence. “Is it about the water? Is that why you come up here so glum?”

Gram always could read my mind. She knew what was weighing me down.

“Yes, ma'am. It is.”

And I began to tell her my bad news.

Although I stutter less around Gram than around others, talking still doesn't come easily. And every once in a while I get mad at myself because the words I hear in my head don't come out as fast as I think them.

So it took me a while to tell her what I had discovered in the science lab just before football practice.

In the last couple of months, Gram had found several dead birds near her cabin. Not
dead like killed-by-foxes dead, with piles of feathers scattered around a bush. These birds looked more like they had flown into a window. Tiny perfect bundles of color that would never sing again. Gram found them in her garden, under her apple trees, and even in the creek, trapped against roots and fallen branches by the force of the current.

Gram doesn't believe in using pesticides on her apple trees or in her garden. She had started to wonder if something in the water was killing those birds. There is a spring-fed creek—Gram calls it a crick—that runs past her cabin, which is perched halfway up a hill and overlooks the hollow—she calls it a holler. Near the cabin, the creek widens into a small pond, and then it narrows again and flows into the bottom of the hollow to join a small river.

Gram started to worry when she hadn't seen a frog or a turtle in the pond in a while.

She had been right to worry about the water.

In the science lab, I'd looked at two water samples through a microscope. The first
sample came from a creek in a valley on the other side of the hill. The second sample came from the pond near Gram's cabin.

In the first sample I saw what I had expected to from all the things I had learned in biology. There were dozens of little wriggly things, so small they were invisible without the microscope. As my biology teacher had explained, they were the beginning of the food chain. Roughly speaking, they were food for tiny bugs, which became food for bigger bugs, and the bigger bugs became food for birds and so on up the line.