Meteors in August (10 page)

I struggled but that only tightened the belt. The leather cut into the underside of my wrists. I clawed and wriggled, scratching myself. The belt stayed taut. My fingers tingled, then throbbed; my hands swelled, fat and bloodless. I thought of trying the ladder but saw myself falling through the rungs, breaking both my legs, shattering my knees, lying in the dark as the gully grew cold and silent. Or I would manage it somehow, make it to the ground without splintering my bones, and I would go home, hands still tied. How could I explain? What stranger could I invent who might do this to me?

I sank to my knees. Finally I worked the tail free from my belt, so I could bring my hands to my mouth. I loosened the belt with my teeth, ripped it free so fast the leather burned my arms.

I scrambled down the ladder, my feet slipping, my hands nearly numb, unable to grasp. They felt twice their usual size, dangling huge and useless as I stalked the girl. I was the angry trapper again, the betrayed man.

Avoiding the path, I headed toward the pond, knowing the girl would move toward water to wash her arms and mouth, the places I'd touched. I stopped half a dozen times, hearing echoes of my own steps. A crow squawked above me, its heavy body teetering on the highest bough of a maple. I passed the egg rock. The ravine was strewn with boulders left by the glacier when it finally melted, but this one was bigger than most, its top smooth as shell, one side split open by a jagged crack. In the legend I'd heard, beasts pecked their way out of this egg when the Indian girl loved the white man. The trapper. Me. Each creature grew more horrible than the last. Cats sprouted wings; dogs had razor jaws and rattlesnake venom.

I had to track the girl and lead her to the Sacred Lake, where our sins could be drowned in the moonlight. I found her in the wet reeds near the pond. I meant to save us, to stand in the icy water until it seemed to fill our veins; I wanted to stop the beasts from crawling out of the stone. But she would not go near the water with me.

“Look what you did,” I said, showing her my bruised wrists, the raw, burned flesh.

She didn't apologize. Still I could have forgiven her until the moment she said, “That's what you get.” She smirked, disgusted with me, just as she was the night I gave her that first wet kiss.

I shoved her backward, pinned her to a scraggly pine. The bark scraped my knuckles but I didn't care. She arched against me, so we stood pressed to the tree, belly to belly, thigh to thigh. I kissed her, hard, smashing our noses together. Poppy petals, butterfly wings, what did I care if I hurt her? My teeth cut the inside of my cheek, and I opened my mouth, trying to force my tongue between her tight lips. She grabbed my face just below the eye, pinched as if she meant to tear the flesh from the bone with her short, jagged fingernails. Still I pushed at her lips, licked her mouth and chin, let my tongue dart up her nostril. She raised her arms and brought both fists down on my kidneys. I reeled, stunned, giving her time to strike the tender place again. My spine buckled; my legs bowed. Gwen tripped me, knocking me to the ground. I lay on the damp grass staring at the sky, all its color drained. I touched the sticky blood where Gwen had scratched my cheek.

The caws of bantering crows stabbed the still dusk, wings flapped as if trapped in a box. The rhythm of their squawking was almost human.

Gwen knelt beside me. “I hate you,” she whispered. I didn't know if she spoke as the Indian girl or as Gwen Holler, but I knew who I was: myself. The trapper was dead, just as Gwen had said that night in the trailer. He was tied to his stove, frozen blue; the wolves sniffed at his corpse and would have eaten him but his blood had turned to ice and his flesh was hard as stone. In the spring he'd thaw and rot. By summer he'd be foul, filling the cabin with his putrid black smell. But by the time they found him, he'd be clean, reborn, a bleached white man of bone. They would stand him up straight and say:
He was a tall man
.

“Liz?” Gwen said. “Are you okay?” Then again, “
Liz?
” Yes, my own name. She lay down beside me with her arm across my ribs, kissed my cheek, licked at the drying blood, nuzzled my ear with her nose. Still I couldn't answer. “Forgive me?” she said, the same words the Indian girl had spoken in the tree house before the trapper was dead.

I moved my mouth in the shape of words. The crows railed in a frenzy, their calls so loud and close I thought they would swoop down on us. Suddenly the woods snapped with the sound of stampeding animals: breaking branches, pounding hooves; they burst into the clearing. Zachary Holler and Coe Carson charged us, waving their arms, grunting like pigs.

“Forgive me,” Zack squeaked.

Gwen tried to crawl between their legs, but Zack thumped her chest and shoved her toward me.

“Forgive me, forgive me,” he whined. “You two like to kiss? Kiss for us. Come on, show us what you like. Hey, le's be friends, okay?” He gave Gwen another swat and she fell on me. Winding a thick clump of her hair around his fist, Zachary forced her face down to mine. “You like girls, little sister? Give Lizzie a big smooch. Come on, I like to watch. Don't you, Coe? Don't you like it?” Gwen's nose rubbed mine, and Zack kept pushing, pressing our dry lips together. He yanked her hair, jerking her head back. “You like that? Wanna do it again?”

Coe said, “Come on, Zack. You've had your fun.”

“I'll say when I've had my fun. If you don't like it, get the fuck out of here. I don't need help from any wussies.” He cuffed the side of Gwen's head. “Shit,” he said, “I'm tired of this anyway. You little queers make me sick. If I ever catch you at it again I swear I'll kill you.”

Coe Carson took a step closer, reaching out his hand as if he meant to help us. “What the hell are you doing?” Zack yelled. “Don't touch them. It's like a disease. You want to end up queer?” Coe hopped back and the two of them fled. The woods swallowed their bodies, but their words hung over us, unmovable spirits hovering in the gray light.

I lay on my back with Gwen half on top of me, staring at the sky, afraid to move. Gwen stood, flicking at the mud on her pants. I studied the spots, a dozen places where dirt was ground into blue cloth. “Look what you did,” she said, pointing to the splatters of mud. “You and your stupid game. Don't try to follow me. Don't you dare try.” I didn't answer. “Do you hear me?” she said. I closed my eyes and nodded. I listened to her splashing water on herself at the pond. She didn't run. Gwen Holler walked away from me.

I don't know how long I lay in the reeds—a minute, a half an hour, a night and another day. My back was wet and cold. The headless trees shook their dark arms at me. It was dinnertime or long past. Mother might be standing on the porch, looking down the empty street, a fear like hunger in her,
not again, not again
. My father might make her sit down and eat without me, pretending the thought didn't rise in him. Imagining my parents' pinched faces, all their fear turned to rage when they saw my filthy clothes, made me want to lie in the cool mud till the snows came. For the first time I believed I understood why my sister never came home.

The gully grew dark. Lying there alone, I thought of the grizzlies that tore young girls from their sleeping bags and dragged them deep into the forest. I saw the sky dark with eagles, saw them dive toward the water to pluck the dying salmon from the river. Bobcats sharpened their claws on our woodpile, left two-inch gashes in the wood, as if a stump of pine was soft as flesh. I had always known these woods were alive with danger.

10

GWEN HOLLER
punished me with a passion more ardent than any affection she'd ever shown. Hardly a week passed before she latched onto Jill Silverlake. Jill was short and too blond; her face and hair blurred to a single shade, like a doll left unpainted. Her popularity depended on the fact that her father owned the Strand, the only movie theater within twenty miles of Willis.

I wasn't easy to ignore. The junior high and high school kids shared one building. Still we numbered less than two hundred in all. I made sure Gwen Holler couldn't avoid walking in front of me a dozen times a day. I spoke to her every chance I got. “I saw a badger in the gully,” I said one day. I was sure this would interest her. But she had a way of lifting her chin that made me invisible. Later I tried to pass her a note in class, and she let it drop to the floor. Jill snatched it up, giggling as she read the message:
Meet me at the tree house tonight and I'll show you where he was
.

School was more tedious than usual without Gwen to break the boredom, imitating Mr. Lippman's twitchy excitement as he explained the digestive system of a cow or the reproductive habits of silver salmon. “The cow has four stomachs and often regurgitates its food to chew it a second time.” Mr. Lippman offered up his knowledge as if each fact were a small treasure. “Female salmon die soon after they spawn. Their nervous systems accelerate, and they literally swim themselves to death.”

I kept hoping Gwen would wait for me someday, that she'd hide at the corner of the building and jump me as I passed. I'd yelp and she'd squeal, delighted that she'd scared me. “They
literally
swim themselves to
death
,” she'd say, her voice high and shaky. We'd laugh till our stomachs hurt and walk home arm in arm. But nothing like this ever happened.

On an evening in early December the snow began to fall in soft clusters. I thought of the glaciers, how they'd carved the mountains from each side, leaving a narrow, deadly ridge of stone. At the summit the temperature dropped to 70 below. On the snow fields, the pack was twenty feet deep or more. I prayed for a chill north wind to whip down the canyon of the Rockies so that I could miss one day of school.

Sometime in the middle of the night, without anyone awake to witness, the snow began to swirl, rising off the ground in narrow funnels. By dawn slivers of ice flew sideways and drifted into sharp peaks across the lawns. Trees bent, shrouded in snow, like the stooped ghosts of great men. I thought that God might be listening to me again after all.

I knew my desire was selfish. Blizzards killed stranded travelers and lost cows. I'd heard of an elderly couple whose fire burned out one night. Three days later a neighbor found them frozen in each other's arms. The truth didn't matter: it could have happened; it might still happen. But I was not sorry I'd prayed for the storm.

When I woke at eight, I knew school was canceled. I didn't bother to get dressed. I imagined Daddy getting up for work two hours earlier. I could almost hear him say:
It's not too bad
. If he couldn't back the truck over the drifts in our driveway, he would have walked to the mill.

I scurried down the hallway to crawl in bed with my mother. I'd tell her I was cold and she'd lift up the blankets for me, too sleepy to protest. But she wasn't in the wide bed. I found her in the other room, my grandmother's room. Mother slept there more and more—whenever Daddy kicked or snored, whenever his breath held the faintest whiff of whiskey.

I opened the door slowly. I could never sleep in a dead woman's bed alone, but Mother was unafraid, curled beneath so many blankets I could hardly be sure she was there at all.

This was a woman's room, not like my parents' jumbled bedroom, where the dresser top was always cluttered and half a dozen pairs of shoes lined the wall, where the bed went unmade day after day, and the smell was always Father's smell. Grandmother's room had white curtains with pale pink roses. The bedspread was white too, and on the dresser the silver-handled mirror and brush lay on the blue runner, ready to be used.

From the wall, the grandmother I had never known gazed at me, amused, as if she guessed I would one day stand here and wonder. The artist who tinted the photograph had made her eyes a brilliant blue and her hair a deep chestnut, but I knew these were small lies: her eyes were as pale and colorless as mine, like clouds, Mother said. Her hair should have been lighter too, my color, unruly, fine, an unremarkable brown. The artist thought that darker hair would make her brows look less severe, but Grandmother's confidence defied his efforts.

So she peered out at me through the years, with all the brashness of her youth. She was sixteen and fearless. Her marriage was two years away, so she didn't know that her preacher husband would take her from Chicago to a godforsaken town in Montana. She didn't know that he'd leave her and the church and their baby daughter, my mother, to answer another call, that he'd move to California to care for an invalid sister, and die there without ever seeing his wife or child again.

This was what was left of him: in her jewelry box a small packet of letters on blue paper, signed:
Your loving husband;
on her finger a wedding ring she could not remove, first because of hope, and later because her knuckles twisted with arthritis; in her heart a bouquet of baby's breath, so dry and fragile it would crumble at the slightest touch.

Often Mother sat alone in this room, taking the letters out of the envelopes, reading them again and again, as if she were looking for some truth, some explanation she'd missed. But she never found an answer she liked. Once I caught her by surprise. “I don't know why my mother kept these letters,” she said. And I wondered: Why do
you
keep them? She showed me the ring and told me about Grandmother's twisted hands, though I had heard the story many times. “She made me promise to take the ring off her finger after she died,” Mother said, “no matter what it took. I had a devil of a time, but I kept my word.” She rubbed her own knuckles. “Poor woman,” she whispered.

I closed the door and left my mother drowned in dreams.

Shivering, I ran back to my own bed and hid beneath the covers. I fell into a fitful sleep. I imagined Grandmother's swollen knuckles. I saw her tug at the ring. But the woman in the dream looked like my mother.