Gemini (4 page)

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raney

From underneath the barn floor,
Raney listened to Bo hollering for the dogs, listened to his low grunt as he heaved the stick for them again, the pause of its silent sail through the air, and then the thud of wood against packed earth. She held the trapdoor of the bunker cracked only a few inches open; dust and bits of hay picked up slits of daylight coming through the old walls and chinks in the roof. She heard Bo’s footsteps change pace, circle back around, closer, and she let the hatch down with a soft thump. A few minutes later she heard his voice calling for her, echoing through the metal air shaft hidden behind a mock orange planted just for that purpose. Then he was inside the barn, though judging by the rising pitch of his voice and the pace of his Converse sneakers crisscrossing the floor, Bo didn’t start to panic until he’d checked every corner and the hayloft to boot. Even then she waited until his steps came to a halt nearly over her head. When it got so still she wondered if he might be crying, Raney threw the hidden hatch open and popped out of the ground like a ghost springing from the grave. Bo dropped to his knees with his arms across his stomach. Raney would have climbed out to comfort him if she hadn’t been laughing so hard.

“You going to puke?” she asked.

“No,” he said, wiping his eyes and mouth. “But if I were I’d make sure to hit you in the face.”

“Come inside. Watch the ladder—there’s a weak step on the third rung.” She sat on one of the two cots, watched Bo’s feet feel for the steps until he was on the ground letting his eyes adjust to the low light.

“What is this? Your playhouse?” His voice was still shaky, but he had his thumbs crooked in his pockets like he was totally cool.

Raney let out a laugh, not that it was a ridiculous question. It was a house, of sorts. “It’s a bunker. My grandpa built it.” She turned on a lantern and settled back on the cot.

Bo walked deeper into the room and let himself down on the other cot, their knees close enough to tangle. “What’s he use it for?”

“Survival. It’s like a bomb shelter. Where you go if there’s a war or something.”

Small as it was, Grandpa kept this room meticulously organized. All four walls were lined with plank shelves that held stacks of alphabetically arranged cans: artichoke hearts and asparagus and beets and Boston baked beans and carrots. Hundreds of them. Raney had argued that it made no sense to stick to the alphabet, as when you are hungry you think with your stomach: meat first, then vegetables, and eventually Hostess Ding Dongs for dessert. But Grandpa took so much pride in his system she let it be.

Under each cot were tanks of water and oil and gasoline and kerosene, and under the shelves were packages of batteries and a gas stove, a sun shower and more water; plastic bins with blankets and tarps, a big metal can filled with packs of Burpee seeds and a sealed metal box of medicines—aspirin and Tylenol and Imodium and Pepto-Bismol, iodine tablets and alcohol and bandages and even some skin suture and needles he’d pinched from the Jefferson General emergency room once. He had hooks screwed into the wall holding ropes and hoses and an axe and maul and a shovel and trowel, various-sized lanterns and a fire extinguisher and a hunting rifle with shells in a waterproof case and several skinning knives. There was one shelf of books: a
History of War
,
Wilderness First Aid
, three Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and a complete volume of Shakespeare’s plays. One copy each of the Bible and the Qur’an, and
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
,
The Communist Manifesto
, and a partial set of
The World Book Encyclopedia
he’d picked up at a garage sale. Also
Gone with the Wind
(which Raney had requested) and a spiral-bound
Boy Scout Campfire Cookery
. There was an unframed photograph of Raney’s grandmother, Joy, tacked to the wall and beginning to curl at the edges. For the first time Raney was struck by her grandmother’s awkwardly wide mouth and thick eyebrows and saw more of her own face there than her mother’s. And just today, waiting for Bo to panic, she had discovered two new additions to the bunker: a Costco-sized carton of Kotex and a shallow Rubbermaid container Grandpa had filled with tubes of paint and various brushes and a few prestretched canvases. Genuine oil paints, with names like magenta and titanium, intended for canvas instead of a sheet of drywall. Raney had stroked the smooth paint tubes like they were bolts of fine silk. She wondered if he was hiding them here for her birthday or if he was thinking the end was coming sooner than expected.

Bo looked like he’d fallen down the rabbit hole. “Jeez, you could live in here.”

“That’s the point.”

He leaned close to inspect the photo of Raney’s grandmother. He stood up and touched the hunting rifle and knives, picked up a shortwave radio from the shelf. “So how does your granddad say the world is going to end?”

“Depends on his mood. There’s that AIDS disease. He says that could be like the bubonic plague. The USSR might blow us up—they have missiles pointed right at the navy base over in Bremerton, you know.”

“My dad says the Soviet Union is broke. He says it’s going to fall apart ’cause of Afghanistan.”

“What does your dad do that makes him so smart?”

“He buys and sells corn and stuff. Commodities.”

“Corn. Your dad sells corn. In Seattle.”

“Well, at least I’ve got a dad. He’s rich too.” Raney’s face went stony, not believing he would put that shit on her. Bo turned all shades of pink. He took his hand out of his pocket like he might touch her, but she pulled back. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”

She shrugged, but wished now that she’d left him out in the yard still searching for her. She stood on the cot and pulled an oblong box off the shelf. It was filled with cartons of Marlboros. She took out a pack and tamped it firm against the heel of her hand like she did it all the time, unzipped the gold plastic string from the clear wrapper, and shook one cigarette out. “Go on. Take it.” He looked at it like she was passing him a rattlesnake. “Can’t bite you.”

“Your granddad would kill me.”

“He won’t know. I’ll just rearrange the packs so you can’t tell one’s gone.” Bo slowly pulled the cigarette out of the red-and-white box and held it between his thumb and first finger, turning it this way and that. Raney took a lighter off the shelf and clicked it into a blue flame; the sharp scent of butane made her feel grown-up and brave. “Go on. I do it all the time.” Bo put the filter in his mouth, and she touched the flame to the tobacco. Nothing happened. “You pull the smoke
into
your mouth, stupid. Breathe
in
, not out.”

“I know. Just give me a minute.” She clicked the lighter again, and Bo siphoned enough air through the cigarette for the paper to catch. Not two seconds later the hatch right over their heads opened up and Grandpa jumped down the ladder in three steps.

Raney had never seen him so mad. The truth, really, was that she hadn’t much seen him mad at all. As gruff as he was with everyone else, he had never been harsh to her. Later she decided it must have been some protective instinct coming out in him, no different from Gif’s growling at Bo. Bo ducked like he thought Grandpa might hit him, but Grandpa just stood there, a look of fuming fury on his face. The small room was getting hazy from smoke; Bo was holding the cigarette in front of him like a holy candle. For a minute Raney wondered if he was going to offer it to her grandfather. Finally she hissed, “Put it out, Bo.”

Grandpa boomed, “You’ll not waste a perfectly good cigarette on my property. Smoke it. Right here.” Bo looked at Raney, like she would overrule her own grandfather. Grandpa took the cigarette out of Bo’s hands and put it to his mouth. “I told you to smoke it.”

So Bo took a puff, inhaling this time. He started to cough immediately, but Grandpa didn’t budge. Nobody was leaving that room until the cigarette was gone. Tears were running down Bo’s face and he coughed so hard he doubled over. After five puffs he bolted past Grandpa up the ladder and out the barn door and Raney heard him retching in the grass.

“I started it, Grandpa,” she said.

“And he obviously didn’t turn you down.” He followed Bo up the steps and waited for him to stop vomiting. Bo wiped his mouth and backed away. “Oh, come on,” Grandpa jeered, rolling his sleeves up his arms. “You’re enough of a man to smoke. Break into my things. What else are you good at? Think you’re strong?”

Bo looked half-scared, half-bewildered and fully hoping a second hole in the ground might open up for his escape. “I don’t want to fight you, Mr. Remington.”

“Hell, I’m not gonna fight you.” He looked Bo up and down and then pointed down the hill toward the highway. “It’s a half mile to that road. Half mile down and half mile back up. Tie your shoes first, pup.”

Bo shot Raney a desperate look. She raised her eyebrows and mouthed, Just do it!

“That’s right, kid,” Grandpa said. “You’re strong enough to beat the old man. You get a ten-count head start.”

Bo pinched his mouth shut and then he took off. Raney couldn’t tell if he was running to race or running to get away. Grandpa counted to ten with his hands proud on his hips, and then he shot off too. He caught up with Bo halfway down the hill and from up at the barn Raney heard him whoop. They kicked a cloud of dust between them that almost blocked her view. When they reached the mailbox at the highway she could tell Bo had taken up the challenge and was digging in; he slapped the square wooden post and skidded on the gravel in a tight circle. Grandpa was so close they looked like a single four-legged creature before Bo pulled away. He started back up the hill just as fast as he’d gone down. They were both calling out now, Bo with a victorious yelp and, Raney swore, she heard her grandfather let out a laugh. She started running down the hill toward them, saw Bo grow larger and closer and Grandpa slip farther back and then they both disappeared just below the short, steep rise at the last bend. When she saw them again, Bo was in full stride, pumping fast and smiling wide. But Grandpa was doubled over at a standstill.

Bo saw Raney’s face change as she passed him. He spun around and sprinted back to reach Grandpa first. As bad as Bo had looked after choking on that cigarette, Raney’s grandfather looked worse. He bent over his knees with a low moan, his eyes squeezed shut in a grimace and his breath coming coarse and quick. Raney knelt in the gravel beside him. “Grandpa,” she said, then repeated with a cry of panic, “Grandpa!”

He shook his head once and then again. He put a hand on Raney’s shoulder and slowly straightened his knees and then his back until he was upright. His face was the color of ash, stubble bristled over his chin. Had it always been so gray? He was sixty-one, but he looked old to her that day. Old for the first time. It took a while for color to return to his face.

Bo was as quiet as death through all of it. Finally he asked, “Are you all right, sir?”

Grandpa took a deep, clearing breath and pulled up so his greater height cast a shadow over Bo. He waved him away. “Go on. Both of you, go on. You’re too scrawny to take advantage of her anyway.”

—

Raney’s grandfather started preparing for the end of the world the spring her mother, Celine, disappeared. Raney remembered climbing onto the kitchen counter so she could see the barn doorway through the window, watching him drive a shovel into the still winter-hardened ground, stamping his boot down onto the flange like he was crushing evil itself. For days he clove and heaved pile after pile of soil out of the earth. She remembered her grandmother washing dishes at the sink with her mouth pressed into a hard white line, offering Raney no explanation. And as young as Raney was, she understood that he didn’t need a reason to dig. He just needed a place to spew his fury and a hole in the ground was as good as anything else. After all, there’s no bottom to it until you decide you are done. She didn’t feel rage herself. Later, much later, she knew that degree of anger was too big for a four-year-old child. All she felt was a brand-new emptiness, deep as that hole under the barn.

He pretty much quit going to work in the machine shop, maybe so that if Celine came back he would be there to catch and hold her. And she did come back once, a few months after Raney’s grandmother passed. She came and went again so quick and quiet he would never have known she’d been there but for the fact that this time she took Raney with her. The summer after Raney’s sixth birthday she woke up in the middle of the night and there stood Celine, all the blowsy blond flesh of her Raney knew from the photo she kept tucked inside a
National Geographic
magazine. She had wrapped the picture in a foldout map of Africa, possibly by chance or possibly because her mother was as exotic and foreign to Raney as that wild continent with its bare-breasted, dancing natives.

Celine had already put Raney’s clothes into a grocery bag. She scooped her baby into her arms like they’d kissed good night just a few hours ago, Raney still in half a dream. The dream and the real never did fully sort out—what memories of that summer were true and what were the longing of her motherless childhood. Even years later she would recall the noise and color and smell of events that couldn’t have happened: a parking-lot carnival with every ride lit up and spinning, arcade games whirring and gonging, but Celine and Raney are the only two people there; Raney rides the Octopus standing on the seat with her arms extended wide to the wheeling sky while Celine laughs and waves to her from the deserted gate in a deserted asphalt lot. A day later, or maybe a month, Raney sits between her mother’s bare, tanned knees and pushes down the accelerator of a convertible sports car, trying to catch shimmering black pools on a hot desert road before they evaporate. That night, or a month before, or a week later, in a windowless room where it is always night, a man places a wrapped package in her lap and inside is a blue dress with a stiff petticoat—she will get a pink dress tomorrow if she stays quiet and lets her mother sleep.