Miller's Valley (11 page)

“I don't go over there no more, Mimi. I don't go anywhere near that place.”

“Who is your primary source?” Mr. Bally said in the water offices.

“I'm still doing my preliminary work,” I said.

“I'd be happy to sit down and talk to you. That would look good to the judges.”

“Do you know much about coal, sir?” said Richard.

“No, son. But I know everything about water and Miller's Valley.” He picked up one of the microfilm boxes. “You talked to your father about your project?” he asked.

“Preliminary project,” I said. “It's just preliminary.”

I
believe in love at first sight. I remember the day it happened. Any time I want I can make myself feel that feeling again, although I don't anymore, haven't for years. But I could if I wanted to. There were times when all someone had to do was light a match for a birthday candle, start the fireplace in the living room, burn some trash at the dump down the end of the road. All I had to do was smell smoke, and I was there, I was there. The smell of smoke could get me going good.

Clifton was kissing the cows. I don't know why, but that summer his favorite thing was to slip his head between the rails of the fence and kiss each one on its damp square nose. Cows can be skittish, but they hardly ever were with him.

“I like this one the best,” he said.

He was almost four, a good-looking little boy who was smart and watchful. Minding him now didn't consist of much. He knew the rules, and he was good at keeping them. He was more like me, more like his aunt Mimi than his father. Of course his aunt Mimi had been around from the beginning, and his father—well, he just wasn't.

I could see a thin ceiling of whisper-gray smoke over the entire valley. There'd been hardly any snow that winter, and little spring rain, which everyone had said was a good deal until the brush on the mountain got dry as typing paper and some passerby dropped a lit match or maybe a cigarette and set it alight. My father was back at my aunt Ruth's, spraying her roof with the garden hose so that stray embers wouldn't nestle between the asphalt shingles. The volunteer companies from six or seven towns were on top of the mountain, coming in on one of the old logging trails, sending a state helicopter over to the deep cold waters behind the dam to lower buckets and bring them back and upend them over the blazing brush.

“Don't let anything happen to my house, Buddy,” Ruth had yelled out her window.

“It's not your house,” my mother had yelled back, but Aunt Ruth couldn't really hear her at that distance. I tried to remember the last time my mother and her sister had had a real conversation, a knees-touching-under-the-kitchen-table, eye-to-eye, pass-the-sugar conversation, but I couldn't.

“This one is his wife,” Clifton said as he stood at the fence looking at a cow with a black eye and swollen udders. When he tried to kiss her she backed up and rumbled a low warning.

“No, no, I like you, cow,” he said. He had a big orange sucker Ruth had given him, but she still wouldn't let him take any of her dolls down to see up close. “Those are just dolls to look at,” she said. “We don't play with those dolls.”

I was sitting on a stump reading a book,
The Construction of Water Containment Units in the Continental United States.
I'd done so much research on my science project that I could have written a book myself, but maybe not the one I'd originally intended. “You don't like that guy much,” Richard had said after Winston Bally had stopped by the conference room for the third time, and I didn't like him any more for being right about most of the things he said about the valley. If you didn't take the people who lived there into account, he had the right idea.

The helicopter came overhead, its bucket dripping water that I figured had a little bit of Andover in it. Clifton looked up. “Daddy was in a chopper,” he said.

“Really?” I said. Every once in a while Tommy would get drunk and say something like “The bugs, man, you can't even believe the size of the bugs. They'll eat you for breakfast.” But you couldn't ask him a direct question about Vietnam. On the news they showed some boys who had burnt their draft cards, and Tom said, “I wasn't even drafted, I signed up of my own free will.” Then he laughed and laughed, and then he started to cry and he fell asleep on the couch before dinner and had disappeared by morning. Sometimes at the diner one of the old guys would say, “They make it look pretty bad out there, son.” And Tom would say one of two things, either “You have no idea” or “You don't want to know.” Then someone would say that we had to beat the Communists or they would take over everything, and Tommy would stand up and leave. He always got comped because Mr. Venti had told the waitresses we had to honor his service to our country, even though I wasn't sure Tom felt that way himself.

Most of the time when he came to visit he would fall asleep in the living room, and my mother would cover him with an old quilt and leave him there. Tommy took a lot of pills, some to help him sleep, some to help him get up in the morning, some to help with the pain in his leg. He took something that was supposed to make him puke if he drank, and he took it and drank anyway and got so sick it seemed he would turn his insides inside out. “I always start the day with good intentions,” he said to me once. Sometimes he even fulfilled them. He would help my father deliver a heavy engine in the truck to someone, or he would pick up groceries for Ruth. He would sit with her and watch television and he would make the two of them baloney sandwiches with mustard and potato chips. And then he would disappear and we wouldn't see him for days, maybe longer, and Callie would say she hadn't seen him, either. Usually when he turned up again he looked exhausted, and sometimes he was bruised, or cut up.

You don't want to know. As far as I was concerned he was right about that part. Sometimes I thought what I imagined was worse than the reality, most of the time not. I would sit in the living room chair and watch him sleep on the couch, not looking at his face but at the rise and fall of his chest under a grimy T-shirt. I wondered what his plan was now. Getting through the day, I figured.

“Daddy!” Clifton would holler when he would finally turn up, and there Tommy would be.

“Daddy,” Clifton hollered, turning away from the cows at the fence, and there he was moving through the smoke, my big brother, swinging his bad leg out the way he did so he wouldn't have to bend it much. He slung it along with him like a long narrow sack of cement. The funny thing was, a lot of people had come to believe it was a war wound. I guess it was. I guess Tommy's whole life now was a war wound.

“Who are you?” Tommy said as he bent down slowly, like an old man.

“I'm Clifton.”

“Clifton who?”

“Clifton Miller. Clifton Miller!”

“Clifton Miller? That's funny—my name's Tom Miller. Maybe you and me are related.”

“We
are
related,” Clifton always said, and he always garbled the last word a little bit, like he couldn't quite get his mouth, with its tiny pearl teeth and pursed pink lips, around all of it. “I'm your boy!”

“You are?” Tom would say. “Hell, yeah, you are! You are my boy!” And then he would pick Clifton up, trying to keep the pain that cost him out of his face, and look him square in the eye, foreheads almost touching. It never got old for Clifton. I wondered when it would. Or if it would. My mother's lips clenched when Tommy got to the “hell yeah” part. Her crazy love for him was always at war with her disapproval of what he'd become. Whenever anyone would say how hard it was to watch him limp, she would say, “He's lucky to have that leg at all.”

“Hey,” I said to him.

Tommy put Clifton down slowly, picked up my book and looked at the title. “It's summer, it's your day off, what the hell is wrong with you?” he said, rolling his eyes, which were bloodshot, but maybe just from all the smoke. “You want to come up the mountain with us? The fire guys want to cut down a line of brush and shrub to make it harder for the fire to jump any further. I told a couple of them I'd give them a hand with the chain saw and the brush hog.” I looked down. His hands weren't shaking so much today.

“I've got Clifton,” I said, but just then my dad came down to the road and said, “Clifton can help me with the hose.”

“I can help Gramps with the hose!” Clifton said. He made everything sound like an adventure. I guess we were all like that, once.

“I'm coming back to take you to the diner for dinner,” Tommy told him. “You want to drive the tractor?”

“Yes sir!” said Clifton.

“Not you, bud. Your aunt Mimi. You help Gramps with the hose.”

Quick as you could say Tom Miller just showed up, we had things happening all around us. My father came out with a box of sandwiches wrapped in wax paper that my mother had made before she left for the hospital, and he hitched the brush hog to the back of the tractor. “Take your finger out of your mouth,” he said to Clifton, who put his hand behind his back, embarrassed. My father noticed Tom had a case of beer on the passenger seat of the truck, and he shook his head and said, “Don't you be driving my tractor all lickered up,” and Tom said, “I'm never driving that tractor again,” and there was a noise from the back of the truck and it was only then that I saw there was a guy asleep back there, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt with a baseball cap covering his face.

“Who's that?” I said, climbing up on the tractor and handing Clifton my book, which he held carefully in his small square fingers. Callie was doing a good job with him. Even my mother said so, and my aunt Ruth. It was the one thing they agreed on.

“Oh, hell, I almost forgot. We'll wake him up when we get there. That's Stevie. You'll like him. Everybody likes Stevie.”

Tom was right; everybody did like Stevie, although Tommy was the only one who called him that. I wound up calling him Steven. “The woman makes me sound respectable,” he would say, his arm hooked around my neck. “The woman makes me sound dignified.”

The smoke woke him up that afternoon, smoke lying so low that it swamped the flat bed of the truck and killed my view of the valley, which from the tractor usually looked miniature, like the village Donald's grandfather had for his HO train set. The truth was, the fires were never really that big a deal, but everyone acted as though they were, maybe because the fires they could fight and the flooding they couldn't. You could put out flames but you couldn't stop the water from running into Miller's Valley when it wanted to. Twice the copter dragging its water bucket went over again, and both times, as soon as the sound started, Tom stood still and let his head drop down low, like he was waiting for it to be done. I didn't say anything about that. I didn't want to ruin this time we were having, which felt more or less like normal.

I dragged out a long line of brush with the tractor and Tom cut up some dead branches with the chain saw. Then we finished off the sandwiches, except for plain cheese, which no one really liked much, and balled up the wax paper into the empty slots in the beer carton. We were sitting on an old stone wall when there was a groan from the truck, and then the slow grinding metal sounds of someone standing in the truck bed and using it as a springboard to the ground.

“This's my kid sister,” said Tom, mustard in his mustache.

“Good to meet you, kid sister,” Steven said, putting out his hand and looking straight into my eyes like he was trying to see what was inside my head. It was a good thing I was sitting down because if I'd been standing I would have staggered, maybe even fallen.

“That's not love,” my aunt Ruth had said one day when we'd been watching
The Guiding Light,
nodding at the screen, where the blond nurse was kissing the blond doctor next to a sign that said
SURGERY
. You could see how red their lips were, like they were painted on.

Maybe she was right, although there was a part of me that wondered why she would think she knew anything about it. But whatever it was, I was in it, surrounded by smoke, just like that.

F
or the rest of my life he would always be the guy:

Who first French-kissed me.

Who first felt me up.

Who first put his hand down my jeans.

Who first took my virginity.

Nah, that's not true. He didn't take it. I gave it to him. I shoved it at him with both hands. There was a routine the girls went through in high school, and I'd heard about it enough to know how it went. I'd heard it once spelled out like a science experiment to a whole bench full of girls in their underwear after gym by a senior named Nancy Fuller. “You don't let him put his tongue in your mouth for at least four dates,” she said, adjusting her breasts inside her bra to make sure they were even. “You wait at least three months before you let him get under the shirt. If he's really your boyfriend you can let him go below the waist. But that's it. And don't ever take your clothes off because he won't be able to stop.”

When the time came I felt like Nancy had missed an important part of the whole deal. I couldn't wait to get my clothes off. I would have died if he'd stopped. I don't know why I wasn't embarrassed or ashamed or sorry, but I wasn't. Sometimes I thought there was something wrong with me, that I was just bad and I'd better stay with one guy because if they let me loose there's no telling what I'd do. Mostly I thought it was because Steven was so damn charming. He wore charm like a three-piece suit. He knew his way around a girl.

The first time he came to the house to take me out he brought a box of peanut brittle. My aunt Ruth was still a sucker for a chocolate-covered cherry, but my mother loved peanut brittle more than anything on earth. I guess Steven had gotten that out of Tom, because he sure hadn't heard it from me. A whole pound of peanut brittle, hand-packed in a white box with a gold elastic around it and fancy gold-and-white patterned wax paper inside that looked like the wallpaper in the Ventis' dining room. He would have been three steps ahead of any guy in Miller's Valley if he'd just handed my mother that box, but not Steven. He had to put whipped cream on the sundae. “Maybe you haven't had dinner yet but I sure would like it if you would try a piece and give me your opinion,” he said to my mother. “Someone told me it's the best peanut brittle in the state, but I'd like to know what you think.”

“That boy went out of his way,” my father said next morning at breakfast.

“He is in no way a boy,” my mother said.

He was twenty-four, almost seven years older than I was. He worked construction all over the county and the map of his arms was as sharp as the contours of Miller's Valley: bicep, tricep, shoulder muscles, all as hard as the tire on a semi. He told me he was taking me to a steak house, and I thought we were going to LaRhonda's father's place, but he drove for almost an hour to a place off the highway with a big aquarium in the center of the room. He told me they aged their own beef. He ordered surf and turf for the both of us. It was the first time I had lobster, and he cracked the claws for me. “So fill me in on this project you're working on,” he said. I hadn't told him about that, either. It was like he made a study of people. We were sitting side by side on a red-leather bench against the wall, and he put his arm along the top of the bench but he never let it touch me, which made me even more conscious of the fact that it was there.

“It's pretty boring,” I said.

“Try me.”

He was the first person I told about what I had learned, that all the history and all the science and all the simple common sense made it pretty clear that someday the government was going to buy up all the houses in the valley, or take them if they weren't freely sold, to extend the water storage area behind the dam and increase the size of the reservoir. He listened like he was really interested, which may or may not have been true at the time. That was the thing about Steven: you couldn't always tell what was him and what was his idea of how he ought to be. He was a high school graduate framing in walls and laying shingles, but he had plans, big plans, not school plans or job plans but money plans, success plans.

I don't know how I managed to keep up with my schoolwork. Maybe it was because Steven acted as though it was a part of me he thought was important. We would be at the dumpy apartment where one of his friends lived, up a rickety set of wooden stairs to the second floor of what you could tell was meant to be a one-family house instead of a collection of weird apartments with half kitchens and sketchy bathrooms, drinking beer, or gin and orange juice for the girls, someone in the bedroom passing around a joint, and Steven would announce, “This woman? Top of her class. You wouldn't know it to look at her, but she's more than a pretty face. She's a brain. Calculus, man.”

“Precalculus,” I might say under my breath, but no one listened to me much, in those apartments or in the bars. Steve Sawicki's girlfriend. Tommy Miller's sister. That was all I was, no matter how often Steven told people otherwise. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he'd say, putting out his hand, “Mimi Miller.” It was embarrassing, but there was a part of me that liked it, too. He made it feel like life was a party, and he was hosting it. Sometimes when I wasn't with him and I thought about him he seemed unreal to me. But then he'd be sitting next to me and I'd look down at those little dark hairs on his arms and they were the realest things in the world. I know some people wondered why I was with him, and part of it was because he made it seem like he was training for the Olympics and I was the gold medal. No one had ever acted like I was the gold medal before, or not so I'd noticed.

But I know now that some of it was simpler than that. It was the sex, although I spent a lot of time pretending we weren't having it. I wouldn't go into one of the bedrooms at those crappy apartments the way those other girls did, so you could hear them through the thin hollow-core doors. Some of them sounded like they were pretending to me. I wasn't pretending, not one bit.

None of the people Steven hung out with were the kind of people who cared if you took calculus, or precalculus. Some of the girls seemed just shy of low-dull normal, although maybe that was what they thought their boyfriends liked. One or two were nice to me. Brenda, who was a beautician, was always telling me how good my hair would look if I let her put streaks in it. She said she could do it right in the kitchen, but I thought my mother would go nuts. She was already suspicious of Steven. Maybe she could smell the sex on me. Maybe that's why I was keeping up with my schoolwork, too, because my mother kept watch, was always going in my bag and looking at the grades on my quizzes. They didn't give her any ammunition: A A A A. Even the English essays.

Once Steven insisted on driving me to the state capital when I was planning to do research. I tried to get out of that by saying that I had to take Richard, too, but he insisted on giving Richard a lift. The three of us were sandwiched in the cab of his truck, Richard and me with our notebooks on our laps, Steven with his hand on my knee.

“He seems like an okay guy,” Richard said when we got inside. “He has a lot of plans,” I'd replied, but that sounded lame even to me. Although it was true. Steven could talk about his plans for hours at a time, until Tommy, who liked him less now that I was with him, would tell him to shut up. His plan—his business plan, he always called it—was to buy a run-down house cheap, fix it up, then resell it at a profit and buy another one. He would take long drives to look for the right areas, “up-and-comers,” he'd call them. I'd go with him, if I wasn't working at the diner or doing extra credit after school, and study in the truck while Steven walked around the main street, checked out the parks and playgrounds, picked up the local paper to read the real estate ads. Sometimes he'd see a house in an ad that looked promising and he'd drive over and sit at the curb, saying things like “I just want you to picture that painted white, with green shutters. That real dark green, kind of a classy color. Like, country club, you know what I'm talking about?”

“Hunter green?” And he'd look at me like I'd invented fire, and kiss me, first a smacking kind of kiss, then a long kiss that made me go all soft. “That's why I need you to help me with this,” he'd say. “You understand this. You're on the same wavelength.” At the end of the day, if it wasn't cold or raining, or even sometimes when it was, we would drive to some gravel road off the main drag, where the trees closed in, and he would put a sleeping bag on the bed of the truck. We would take off our clothes as fast as we could and jump on each other like crazy people. It's been a long time, and I know more now than I did then, a lot more, but I'm not sugarcoating anything when I say that the charm didn't fail him there, or in the twin bed in the room he rented from an elderly man the other side of town from the valley. Maybe that's why I kept up with my schoolwork. A long line of correct equations, a physics test with the number 100 at the top in red ink: they made me feel more like my old self. My old self believed all the stories about how boys had to talk you into it, about how you had to just smack them down or put up with it. I'd never heard anyone talk about putting up with dinner and a movie just so you could get to the part where the warped wooden door was closed and locked and your boyfriend had to put his hand over your mouth so you would stop making so much noise.

“Dear Mimi,” said the postcard I'd just gotten from Donald. “I'm here. Hope I will do okay. Donald.” On the front was a picture of what looked like an apartment building with palm trees and the ocean behind it. It was in Santa Barbara, but it looked like the Garden of Eden only with tennis courts. “California,” Steven said when he took it out of my purse. “That's an idea.” The next time he saw LaRhonda he said, “Who's Donald?” LaRhonda rolled her eyes. “Loser,” she said. “That's mean,” I said. “But true,” LaRhonda said, and I'm ashamed to say I didn't say anything after that. I told myself that he was just a boy I'd known when we were kids, who I hadn't seen in years.

It was funny—LaRhonda's interest in me had revived. It didn't hurt that her boyfriend knew Steven from construction. His name was Fred, and he had red hair and freckles and bright green eyes, so depending on your taste he was either good-looking or just plain weird. He and Steven liked each other, maybe because, unlike the other guys on the jobs they worked together, Steven didn't mock the little inspirational palm cards Fred liked to hand out. Sometimes I would find a card in Steven's pocket with a picture of a bird or a flower or something, and then some verse: “Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field” or “All we like sheep have gone astray,” something like that.

LaRhonda was still part of the God Squad, and so was Fred, but the numbers had gotten smaller and smaller since LaRhonda had first taken Jesus as her personal savior, or what her father sometimes called “lost her tiny mind.” One of the girls had gone the other way and become part of the new hippie group, kids who had moved from skirts and sweaters to bell-bottom jeans and Indian print blouses. “All of them smoking that pot in Lizanne's basement!” LaRhonda said, and Fred frowned and tapped her on the knee, as though I was the only one in Miller's Valley who hadn't heard that my brother was the man to see for marijuana.

LaRhonda's mother loved Fred, and I could tell why. He was so agreeable that it sometimes seemed like he didn't have an opinion about anything. He'd order whatever LaRhonda did at the Dairy Queen, go along with anything Steven said. “Definitely!” was his favorite word, and about as close to a sentence as he usually got, unless you counted “Praise God.” But even praising God he was the guy who would buy beer for the fifteen-year-olds who hung around the package store after every other guy had passed them by and said “Get lost.” Sometimes we would go to LaRhonda's house and swim in her pool, lie on the chaises, and ask Fred to bring out iced tea or sandwiches, see if there were more towels in the laundry room. “Definitely,” he always said.

We usually left if the Ventis showed up. Even with the four of us there, a situation where most parents went out of their way to pretend to like one another, they were uncomfortable to be around. Their conversation went like this:

“You need more ice cream like you need a hole in the head.”

“What difference does it make what I look like? Unless I was twenty and wearing a waitress uniform, you wouldn't even notice.”

“You're crazy.”

“You're disgusting.”

LaRhonda was working as a hostess at the steak house during the shifts when her mother was off, and she said she didn't know what her mother was talking about, but at the diner we all did. After Callie shut Mr. Venti down and told him that if he fired her she would tell Tommy why, he'd turned to a girl whose mother was also a waitress at the diner. It caused all kinds of problems because both daughter and mother let Dee know that while she made the station and schedule assignments they would change them if they didn't like them. Plus when Mr. Venti would stop by there were always angry customers wondering where their club sandwiches were when they were sitting right up on the to-go shelf waiting for a waitress who was in the back office doing who-knew-what, usually on her knees.

“The man is almost sixty!” Dee would mutter to herself sometimes, but the rest of us kept our mouths shut. I had to admit, Mr. Venti was right about one thing: Mrs. Venti was getting really fat, and to make it worse she was wearing the clothes she'd worn when she was thinner. “She's a total mess,” LaRhonda said. “She imagines all kinds of disgusting stuff about my father.” Once Mrs. Venti came in and spilled hot coffee down the front of the uniform of the girl at the diner, but that only made things worse because then everyone was talking about what had happened. Mrs. Venti laughed so hard, in a kind of odd and uncomfortable way, that everyone knew the coffee was no accident. That was the last time we saw her at the diner. When I came over she would try to ask me questions about what was going on there, but I stayed vague. The glass of orange juice she always had in her hand smelled like it had gone bad, and Steven said that was because it was half gin. “I thought things would be different,” she said to me one day looking out the kitchen window to the big back lawn, and after that I tried not to be alone with her.