December would often end without the arrival of snow. When it finally fell, people would remember why they had been hoping for it all that time: their yellow, broken gardens were buried and the trees were full again, only this time full of jewels. Snow was like a good sermon that made everything simple and clear: there was the snow and the sky, with Eula wedged cozily in-between. It only stayed that way for a day, two days at most. The snow didn’t melt, it just got pushed around, changed colors, and became tiresome.
And some years it didn’t snow at all.
So, in this snow-poor town, they looked for other signs of winter: the lifting of the sugar factory’s odor, a line of colored lights marking a house lost among the dark fields, or the announcement of the first basketball game and wrestling match in crooked capitals on Eula High’s sign.
The gap between the end of football season and the beginning of both basketball and wrestling season—a gap that was due to Eula’s never making the football playoffs—gave Coop a break. For a couple of weeks he didn’t have to take a team to another town, and all his nights were free. He took the glider from the porch to the basement. Then began the season when Coop worked hardest and, with all the overtime, caught up on bills and maybe bought something nice for Maria. In the fall there was only one team each for high school and junior high, football, with one away game per week between them. In winter there was both basketball and wrestling, so nearly every weeknight he was driving some team somewhere. Occasionally a basketball game and a wrestling match were scheduled for the same night, and he had to call in Dwayne Shelby, who had been the bus driver before Coop, and who, now in his seventies, still liked to pick up a few extra bucks from time to time. True, he drove the bus down the middle of the road, but everyone saw him coming. Coop preferred to pass the wrestling team on to Dwayne, as it was the rowdier bunch, and Dwayne, being nearly deaf, was less likely to be distracted by the noise. Coop kept the basketball team for himself. It was made up mostly of tall Mormon boys who sometimes sang hymns on the way to and from games. This too was an annoyance to Coop, one jarringly unnatural to teenage boys compared to the wrestlers’ fighting and hollering, but it made for an easy drive; and Coop liked watching basketball better than wrestling anyway.
One night in December, Coop drove the team out to Homedale, and Maria joined him at the top of the bleachers. She carried with her a bag of books and papers, which she proceeded to spread around her. “Translating,” she answered to Coop’s raised eyebrows. Part of her job as Owyhee County’s one and only social worker was to translate forms into Spanish. Coop’s attention remained primarily on the game, and Maria’s primarily on her work as they traded bits of conversation:
“Might snow this weekend. You gonna come out?”
“Never stopped me before, did it?”
“Maybe come out Friday rather than Saturday, in case we get snowed in.”
“Unlikely.”
“Still.”
“It’s a deal, then.”
Then, a minute later:
“A dog, if it licks your wound, might heal it. Saw it on TV.”
“You don’t say.”
“Something antibiotic in the slobber.”
This was how Coop and Maria talked even at her home, offering subjects like stones picked up from the path. They neither praised the pretty ones nor disdained the duds, as to do either would too much interrupt the walk.
Maria said something in Spanish, which meant she was returning to her work for a minute. She repeated the phrase, sounding it against an imaginary tuning fork to see if it was right. It seemed to be; she hunched over and wrote it down, and the only sound for a while was the shrill music of the game, made of sneakers’ squeaks, referee’s whistle, and shouts from the audience.
Maria was a block of a woman with a face like a dinner plate. Her black eyes, set in deep creases that rode atop her broad cheeks, were chinks in the plate that admitted light. It was these eyes that alerted the Mexicans with whom she worked that she was part Indian and, therefore, probably a drunken thief. It was her short stature that told the Indians from Duck Valley Reservation that she was part Mexican and, therefore, lazy and apt to tell half-truths. And it was her brown skin that made the white welfare recipients she visited far out in the country look over her shoulder back to her car, wondering, where’s the person from the state? To hear Maria tell it, her job was a comedy of errors, like The Jeffersons, where every day she walked into a room and was met with a look of surprise. Coop had met her at a school board meeting where a group of migrant workers petitioned that the bus come out to the camps. The board hadn’t changed the route, but Coop asked the feisty little translator out for coffee afterward.
“How’s Uncle Frank?” she asked now.
“They say he has diabetes. I’m supposed to watch what he eats.”
“You can get more aid than you do, you know.”
This was enough to turn Coop’s face from the game. “If that means I can have a busy lady like you come over and try to get him to stand up and walk around, I’ll pass.”
Maria didn’t put down her pen or rise from her work. “Of course, if Frank lived with two people rather than one, he might do a little better.”
Coop smiled. “As I’ve told you before, dear, I don’t think you’d like living with us. He says stuff all day long that’d ruffle your feathers.”
“ ‘Drunken spics need to learn how to drive?’ ” Maria guessed.
“Pretty much.”
Maria nodded.
What Coop didn’t mention was how he laughed along, all day, as Frank said these things. The two men had no way of interacting other than smiling and nodding and commenting to the tune of the television set, and in a way Coop liked it.
“Traveling,” Coop said, in reference to the game. “Ref didn’t ketch it.”
“Still,” said Maria, “with a little help he might get better.”
“Why this sudden interest in Frank?” Coop asked.
Maria didn’t answer.
“He shot his own brother and watched him die. You don’t go on after that.”
“What, then? You die?”
Coop breathed deeply. “You die.”
A few minutes later, Coop said, “You know, we’ve never gone fishing. Why is that?”
“We don’t have time to fish,” Maria said.
Coop squinted at that one, critically. “I’d like to go fishing with you.”
Down on the court, Jay swished a three-pointer. Yes! He gave his hands one sharp clap as he turned to run back down the court. When a cheer rose from the small group of Eula parents, Jay imagined Liz leaping up and calling out his name with a happy laugh. When Liz laughed, her face lost its composed beauty. Her delicate nostrils flared almost inside-out, and her overbite showed. But Liz was neither the type to study herself in photos to find this out nor the type who would hesitate to laugh once she did. And, of course, she wasn’t there. She never came to games in Eula, let alone this distant town, but Jay imagined her cheer whenever he made a basket.
Jay had replayed the moment innumerable times in the weeks since it had passed: Liz had thrown away the Baggie, then read the note in which Jay had given the final, self-revealing clue, YOU’RE THE ONLY ONE I LIKE. She crumpled it. There was no mistaking her disappointment. She had hoped it was someone else.
When they were ten or eleven, Winston, Jay, and the boys had gone to the Rollerdrome Friday nights, more to play foosball and eat nachos than to roller-skate. There was a deejay, a teenage girl, who, every half-hour or so, would break from the disco and play one for the boys—Styx or Rush or Queen. Then they’d all fly out into the rink until the song was over. Liz didn’t usually join them, and Jay didn’t remember why she had on that particular Friday. She hadn’t brought any friends with her; maybe the Padgetts had had a party to go to, so they dumped her off with the boys. In any case, Jay watched her all night from the game room as she struggled along the railing that encircled the rink, stepping heavily in her oversize
d skates like a lamb learning to walk. At one point she tripped, dangled from the railing, and fell. Jay darted from the foosball table, cut straight across the rink, and helped her up. “Ow,” she said, “I twisted my wrist.”
Jay took the wrist in his hand to keep it straight and put his other hand around Liz’s shoulder. He guided her slowly out of the rink to a seat near the snack bar. “Are you all right?” he asked.
She held her wrist between her thumb and forefinger and tentatively flapped her hand. “It hurts,” she said.
“I’ll get you some ice,” Jay said.
“Don’t,” Liz protested, but Jay was already whizzing over to the snack bar. He returned with a bag of ice. He took her wrist again and pressed the ice to it. She might have had a cold, because her voice caught on some phlegm when she whispered, “That helps.” They stayed like that for some minutes, unable to look each other in the face. Then she said it: “You’re the only one I like.”
Jay must have returned to the boys; the rest of the night was lost to memory. But over the years, as he watched Liz develop her hatred of Eula (which she thought she kept so well-hidden), her words, You’re the only one I like, stayed with him. They had given him the courage to drop that first note through the slot in her locker door.
He had stupidly thought she would come to the Rollerdrome right away after finding the key, but two days passed and the icepack melted in the locker. Even if the bag of water confused her, though, there was no mistaking the words in the note. She knew it was Jay. And she had never meant that he was the only one in her stupid life in this stupid town that she loved; she had meant, simply, that on that night six years ago he was the only one of Winston’s friends she could stand.
Jay had learned early that the people south of town would tolerate a Mexican among them, especially if he was tall and athletic, but only to a point, and that point usually had to do with sex. He could live at the Van Bekes’ as a son until their daughters came home on vacation from college, then he was sent to Lina’s for a few days. He’d had sex with plenty of girls—all of them white—and those from the neighborhood had sworn him to secrecy while the poor girls at school had bragged to their friends and begged to be his girlfriend. The Padgetts could accept him as Winston’s best friend, but never as Liz’s boyfriend. The line lay between the two. Jay had imagined that Liz, in mapping out her rebellious new mindset, had erased the line. Clearly she hadn’t: since the Rollerdrome, she hadn’t even met his eye in the hall.
When the game was over, Maria gathered her things, and she and Coop walked slowly down the bleachers and out under the star-encrusted sky. There was a thick halo around the moon, as if it were being viewed through a frosty window. “Till Friday?” Coop said, placing his hands on Maria’s shoulders. Maria shuddered with cold, leaned in, and rested her cheek against his sternum. They were both shaped like barrels, but Maria was a couple of heads shorter than Coop. It was luck, he had told her once, that he had never gotten her pregnant, because any baby they made would roll around like a bowling ball. Maria had laughed at that, but then sadness had come over her, causing Coop to wonder which she regretted: being short and round, or having reached forty without a child. He hadn’t asked. But he made sure to never again say anything to Maria that approached an insult, even in good humor. She was too precious to him.
“Maria,” he said, “you and I have never had an argument. Do you know that?”
Maria said, “We don’t have time to argue.” She gave him a peck and left, just as the steaming crowd charged from around the end of the bus with their gym bags and basketballs, laughing and congratulating each other on good plays. They had won.
“Looks like Chicken Coop’s got himself a hen,” Jay said under his breath as he mounted the steps into the bus. He couldn’t help but sneer at anyone happy in love.
Coop chuckled in response. Jay was one of Coop’s favorites. He often made those three-point shots and wasn’t a goody-goody. “Looks like he does,” Coop said, mostly to himself, since Jay was out of earshot.
ONE DAY IN science class, Mr. Peterson said, “Enrique, could you give us some of the differences between deciduous and coniferous trees from last night’s reading?”
“Sorry, Mr. Peterson,” Enrique said, “I skipped it.”
This was a lie. Enrique always did the reading, and, even if he hadn’t, he could have answered the question. He had known the difference between deciduous and coniferous trees since he was six years old. But his little test worked: the look on Mr. Peterson’s face was less one of anger or disappointment than of wonder. What had happened to his star student to make him so different? Enrique wanted to seem like someone who had been jarred loose from his moorings by a few hard waves—because he had been—and although it would have ruined the experiment to peek down the row at Miriam, he could imagine she wore the same expression of wonderment.
Enrique had never been more alone, estranged as he was from those closest to him. Yet he was no longer sad. His newly imagined role in junior high was the lone wolf, cruising the halls quietly, broodingly. Pete Randolph had steered clear of him since the day over a month ago when Jay punched him. Enrique naturally gave Pete a wide berth as well, but even from a distance perceived, or imagined to perceive, Pete’s diminished standing in his circle of friends. The circle itself seemed to be loosening, and its members no longer made fun of Enrique. This could have been out of fear of Jay. It could also have been because Enrique no longer raised his hand gloatingly in class, or stole the big-handled plastic combs from girls’ back pockets, then ran down the hall laughing loudly and holding them high out of reach, or toured the lunchroom with Miriam taking silly surveys (“Do you believe in Bigfoot?”), or wore cat-eyed glasses cut from construction paper, then made a pair for anyone who wanted one, setting off a daylong craze. He no longer gave his taunters any material.
But Enrique didn’t miss being that happy, frivolous boy. In fact, he looked back on things he had done six months before with a clarity that felt new and masculine. Cat’s cradle? He had sat on a bench in the middle of the mall last summer with a loop of string and done cat’s cradle with Miriam. (Pinch the Xs and lift them through: tram lines! Hook the pinkies to make diamonds, dip and lift: the manager!) How many people had walked by and seen him? He hadn’t deserved the boys’ abuse, but he had been asking for it.
After the science fair, it seemed that Enrique’s mother had slipped into a depression that mirrored his own changed mood. Enrique imagined that somehow she sensed that he had found her out and was ashamed, but whatever the reason, she rarely visited him at bedtime anymore. In her absence, his sexual fantasies became more powerful and elaborate and lasted deeper into the night. The pro-wrestling matches he could hear Jay watching in the living room became, in his mind, gut-slugging, ear-biting orgies, and Enrique masturbated wildly into a gym sock. He was tired of feeling guilty. Of course, in some future chapter of his life he would come back around to God and family and his story would have a wise and cozy Cosby Show ending, but in the meantime he gave himself over to fantasies of bullies ripping the gym shorts off sissies and burly teachers keeping bad boys in detention so long that they wet their pants: grounds for further punishment.
Enrique ate lunch alone or at a table with his more distant friends, saying little. These tended to be Miriam’s friends too, and if she joined them, she would sit at the opposite end of the table. Gene’s claim that he didn’t care about the science fair now seemed true—he had never asked how it went. In fact, the boys hadn’t exchanged one word since their fight on the porch. Enrique felt a jab of guilt when he saw Gene eating alone, but, by the looks of it, Gene hardly noticed. The same war was going on among the features of his face; the conversation with himself continued whether or not Enrique was sitting across the table. It was nice, for a while, to be disassociated from the weirdest kid in junior high, and Enrique knew that, when he needed to, he could pick up where they had left off and Gene would neither offer nor seek apologies. He didn’t underst
and their point.
Not long after Thanksgiving break, Enrique invited Abby over to see the model. He was proud of it and wanted to show it off, and, more than that, the event would be a kind of three-pronged experiment: How would Abby react to being in a trailer park? What would Jay say when he saw a peer hanging out with his little brother? And what look would cross Lina’s face when she found her lover’s daughter in the living room?
But when Abby arrived, her hooded eyes showed neither disgust nor pity. Enrique recited his presentation, interrupting himself to give parenthetical visual descriptions: “The steam from the dry ice flowed down like this, all through the houses. It stayed really low, just like it was supposed to.”
Kneeling next to him on the floor, Abby said, “Enrique, that’s so cool. No wonder you won.”
Now his affection for Abby and for his project overcame his desire to be a detached observer. “Here’s the posters,” he said, taking them from behind the couch to the kitchen, where he laid them out on the table. “They turned out pretty good. I’m going to color them all in before State.” Abby studied the posters and nodded. “I have to change this one,” Enrique said. “It turns out Lake Overlook isn’t that deep.”
“Was Gene excited to win?” Abby asked.
Enrique put the posters back in a pile. “He dropped out before the science fair.”
“He dropped out?”
At the sound of a basketball being dribbled up the walk, Enrique positioned himself so he could see the front door. “Yeah,” he said absently, “Gene was being kind of a pain. He kept wanting to change directions, like, change the project to be about how lake overturn could happen at all the different lakes all over the world. And when I didn’t let him, he dropped out.”
Jay threw open the door, then stood there with the ball propped between his hip and arm. He wore his letterman’s jacket over his basketball uniform, and his hair was still wet. At the sight of the visitor, his eyebrows leaped and his face opened. “Hey, Abby,” he said. “Hey, little brother.”
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