by Tony Earley
Instead he said, “Here we go.”
At the highway, he waited to let a single car pass, although he could have beaten it easily. Sitting at the stop sign in the Major greatly increased his chances of being spotted — and perhaps waved down — by Mama, but Jim wanted the trip to last as long as possible. He nervously watched the front door of Uncle Zeno’s house and drummed his fingers on the wheel. The approaching car, an ancient Marathon, eventually clattered by. Jim pulled onto the highway behind it and shifted languidly up through the gears to a speed even Mama would have approved of.
At the railroad crossing he slowed the Major to a near crawl and bumped gingerly across the tracks. Chrissie still leaned against the window and he didn’t want her to bang her head against the glass. But once he reached the turnoff to the Lynn’s Mountain road, he couldn’t resist downshifting and throwing the Major into a single lazy fishtail. (He suspected that Norma had secretly liked fishtailing, although she had always demanded that he stop.) Chrissie whirled on him angrily.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked. “Do you think that’s funny? Are you trying to make me throw up?”
Jim slowed the car so quickly that it almost stalled and he had to downshift into first.
“No,” he said. “No. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
While Jim looked at Chrissie, her skin changed in an instant from a not-so-healthy-looking pale into a desperately unhealthy-looking gray. Sweat bloomed on her cheek and above her upper lip.
“Oh, no,” she said, leaning forward and placing her head on the Major’s dashboard.
“What?”
“Ohh,” she moaned.
“Are you going to be sick?”
Chrissie sat up straight, looked around wildly, then lay back against the seat and tightly shut her eyes. “No,” she said. “I’m fine. Keep driving.”
She moaned again.
“Hold on,” Jim said. He steered the car across the bridge over Painter Creek.
“Stop the car,” she said.
“Right now?”
“Stop the car.”
Jim jerked the wheel to the right, and before the Major even stopped rolling, Chrissie leapt out and disappeared into the thick rhododendron that lined the stream’s steep banks. Jim didn’t see how any creature could have vanished into a tangle of rhododendron so easily, especially a full-grown girl wearing a skirt. When he turned off the engine, he heard her crashing through the thicket toward the creek bed. He imagined that must be what a deer sounded like. Jim knew what rabbits and squirrels sounded like, but all the deer in his part of the world had been shot years before.
He sat behind the wheel until he heard Chrissie stop running, then he opened the door and climbed onto the running board. He cocked an ear toward the rhododendron and listened. The woods were quiet; at first he couldn’t hear anything, save the indifferent murmur of the creek. Then, somewhere near the water, he heard Chrissie gag. He felt a tearing sensation, a great helplessness, rip through his chest. He ran around the car and squinted into the rhododendron, but he couldn’t see her. More than anything, he wanted to help, but he had no idea what to do.
“Chrissie,” he called. “Chrissie! Are you all right?”
She gagged again. When she finally answered him she sounded desperate. “Don’t you dare come down here!” she said. “You stay right where you are!”
“Where are you?” Jim asked.
“I mean it!” Chrissie yelled. “I said no!” She started to say something else, but coughed and was ill again.
Jim moved to the edge of the roadside and looked for a way into the rhododendron. “I’m coming in,” he said.
“No!” Chrissie screamed.
Jim fidgeted toward the thicket, but didn’t move forward. “Okay,” he called. “Ready or not, here I come!” (And would wonder for the rest of his life why he had said that.)
A rock sailed up out of the rhododendron and plunked into the road. “Damn you! I’ll kill you if you take another step!”
Jim clapped his hands against the side of his head. He turned around in a circle. “But you’re sick,” he said. “You shouldn’t have to be sick by yourself. Nobody should. Let me come down there.”
Another rock flew up out of the trees. This one landed with a clank on the roof of the Major and bounced onto the road.
“Hey!” Jim yelled. “Take it easy on the car!”
“I’ll kill you deader than hell, Jim Glass! So help me God. I’m warning you for the last time!”
Jim heard Chrissie scrambling around for another rock. He heard a hysterical-sounding giggle bubble up out of his mouth and wondered why Chrissie Steppe throwing rocks at his car made him feel like laughing.
“All right,” he said. “Don’t shoot. I give up.”
While Chrissie climbed up out of the rhododendron, Jim surreptitiously examined the round dent on the roof of the Major and, to his surprise, found that it didn’t bother him very much. In fact, he didn’t care about it at all. When she appeared at the edge of the thicket, he took her hand and helped her into the roadway. Her hand felt cold and clammy, not at all the way Jim had imagined it would feel, but he was glad to be holding it, anyway. Chrissie still looked desperately pale, but much better than she had when she had run into the rhododendron. He opened the door for her. Before he closed it he removed his handkerchief from his back pocket and offered it to her. He had been carrying one only since he became a senior, but until that moment he’d found no use for it.
“You can wipe your mouth off with this,” he said. “I haven’t used it. I mean, it’s clean.”
Chrissie accepted the handkerchief and stared at it. “Thank you,” she said.
Between the bridge and the valley at the foot of the mountain, the road halfheartedly trailed the creek through a range of short, rolling hills. Sometimes it dipped down through the laurel and rhododendron and ran just above the level of the water, but other times it climbed away, so that not even the ravine that carried the creek was visible. When it curved through the woods, the straight black trunks of the trees loomed somberly in the mist. A few yellow poplar leaves lay pasted to the roadway and softly hissed beneath the Major’s tires; their sweet, melancholy smell affirmed the coming of the hard frosts and cold winds that would strip the trees bare. Jim opened his window a crack. He was afraid that the curves and the rise and fall of the road would make Chrissie sick again, so he drove very slowly.
“It’s okay,” Chrissie said. “It’s over now. You can speed up.”
Jim glanced over at her. Her color had almost fully returned, and in general she seemed to be a different person, perhaps someone it might be safe to talk to.
“What do you think was the matter?” he asked.
Chrissie shook her head. “I’m fine now.”
“Do you think it’s the flu?” Both of Jim’s maternal grandparents had died of the flu in 1918, and Mama had reared Jim to expect the worst regarding sudden illnesses.
“No, it’s not the flu,” she said.
“Maybe you just ate something that didn’t agree with you.”
Chrissie slapped her palms twice against her legs. “Jim . . . ,” she said.
“What?”
“Listen to me. It’s not the flu and I didn’t eat anything that disagreed with me. Okay? Now do you understand?”
“I don’t think so,” he said.
Chrissie covered her eyes with her fists. She sighed deeply. “I’m only going to say this one time, all right?”
Jim nodded.
“It’s my P-E-R-I-O-D.”
Jim mouthed the letters. When the letters bunched themselves into a word, he swallowed hard and stared straight ahead at the road. “Ah,” he said. “Okay. All right. I see.”
Chrissie looked away and stared out the window. They were passing a poor upland farm stacked precariously on the side of a red, barren-looking ridge. The pasture was so steep it looked painted onto the hillside.
“Well,” she said. “I don’t s
ee how they ever got grass to grow on the side of a bank like that.”
They stared at the farm like pilgrims on reaching a site they had traveled thousands of miles to see.
“They used to have a white cow,” Jim said.
“A what?”
“A white cow.”
Chrissie started to laugh.
“Well,” said Jim. “They did.”
They settled into an embarrassing but not unwelcome silence. Jim was at least glad the subject had changed. He tried to think of something else to talk about, but before he came up with anything, he felt Chrissie looking at him. When he sneaked a look at her, her brow was dipped into a furious V.
“Promise me you won’t ever tell a soul we talked about my you-know-what,” she said.
“Trust me,” Jim said. “You don’t ever have to worry about that.”
The Abandoned House
THE NEXT farmstead they passed lay deserted. Stickweed and broom sedge and ragweed and small, scraggly pine trees loitered about the yard and pasture; the roof of the barn had fallen in, and a nest of poison oak vines, their leaves turning a bloody red, seemed intent on pulling the rest of the structure down. The front door of the house was open and the broken windows on either side of the door gaped at the road.
“I hate to see that,” Chrissie said.
“What?”
“An empty house. Every day when the bus comes by here I want to get off and shut the door. I wonder why they left the door open?”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“What do you guess it would rent for?” she asked.
“I don’t know. It would depend on how much land came with it.”
“Do you think the house is still good?”
Jim looked in the rearview mirror, but the house was already out of sight around the curve behind them.
“I think it had a tin roof,” he said. “The house should be okay if the roof’s all right. Are you looking for a place to live?”
“We’re staying with my grandparents until Daddy gets back from Oklahoma,” she said. “Then we’re going to need a bigger place.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Jim asked.
“Me and Mama.”
“What’s your daddy doing in Oklahoma?”
Chrissie kept looking out the window. “Working,” she said.
They crossed Painter Creek a second time and drove into the long valley that lay between the creek and Lynn’s Mountain. The valley was one of Jim’s favorite places. The road wandered through prosperous-looking farms with painted houses and clean fencerows and thick green pastures. The soil in the creek bottoms was rich and brown. In the distance the mountain seemed to angle downward and disappear, along with the road, at some magic, unreachable point.
To the right of the road, a thick bank of white clouds had lowered itself onto the top two-thirds of the mountain. The bottom line of the clouds was so straight it could have been drawn with a ruler, and nothing about them suggested movement. They seemed to have come to stay.
When Jim leaned over to look through the passenger window, he smelled the vanilla extract Chrissie wore as perfume. He found himself in no hurry to sit up straight. She still held his handkerchief in her lap and hadn’t unfolded it. He had never wanted to kiss anybody so badly in his whole life.
“Look at that,” he said. “Most of the mountain’s gone.”
“I like it when it gets like that sometimes,” Chrissie said. “Everything looks different and spooky, and it’s like living somewhere else. Sometimes you just want to live somewhere else. But it gets old after a while. Have you ever lived on a mountain?”
“Nope. I’ve always been a town boy.”
“I like living up high as long as I can see the sun,” she said. “We used to live on a mountain up above Tuckaseegee, but we were on the wrong side.”
“What do you mean, ‘the wrong side’?”
“The side facing north. You don’t ever want to live on the north side of a mountain. You don’t get hardly any sun that way. The south side’s always better.”
“How long did you live there?”
“Four years. Then we moved to Oklahoma.”
“How’d you like it?”
“Oklahoma or the mountain?”
“The mountain,” Jim said.
“It was all right,” Chrissie said. “It was pretty and green during the summer, but it felt like it started getting dark in the middle of the day and it seemed to rain constantly.”
“The wrong side of the mountain,” Jim said.
Chrissie nodded. “And you really had to look out for copperheads. They were everywhere. One day Mama found one in the potato hole.”
“What else?”
“Well, during the summer it seemed like mold would grow on your shoes overnight. And in the winter it was just awful. It never got light and the wind blew all the time and it stayed so cold you never could get your feet warm.”
“Sounds like you didn’t like it at all.”
“That’s not true,” Chrissie said. “We just didn’t have a good house. I intend to have a nice house someday.” She looked at Jim seriously. “Y’all have nice houses, don’t you?”
The question seemed to hold neither envy nor resentment, so Jim nodded.
“They look nice from the school.”
“What about Oklahoma?” Jim asked.
“I didn’t care for it. It didn’t have any mountains that I saw, so it never looked right to me. You just get used to looking at mountains. Then, in the spring you had to worry about tornadoes, and it was way too hot in the summer.” She shuddered a little. “And they have scorpions out there. You have to shake your shoes out before you put them on. I hate a scorpion worse than a snake.”
“You never struck me as the kind of girl who would be afraid of anything.”
“I never said I was afraid. I said I didn’t like scorpions and snakes.”
Jim grinned. “So, how was your house in Oklahoma?”
“We couldn’t keep the dust out of it.”
“I’ve never been out west,” Jim said, “but I want to go someday.”
Chrissie shrugged. “I don’t think you’re missing much. Some people like it, though.”
They crested a short rise and the school bus Chrissie had missed materialized up ahead as if it had been conjured. It moved broadside to them at the spot where the road and creek turned in unison and raced toward the wooded side of the mountain.
“Do you want me to run the bus down for you?” Jim asked.
“No. Slow down. I can’t let anybody see me in your car.”
“Oh.”
“That sounded awful, I know,” Chrissie said. “But that’s not how I meant it. Things are just kind of complicated right now.”
“With Bucky Bucklaw?”
Chrissie tossed him a sharp look but didn’t say anything.
“So, what do you want me to do?” Jim asked. “We’re going to catch it pretty quick once it starts up the mountain.”
“I don’t know exactly. I guess we need to stop somewhere and wait,” Chrissie said. “If that’s all right with you.”
Jim slowed the Major. “Do you want to turn around and go look at that old house?”
“That sounds good,” Chrissie said.
Jim stopped the car in the yard and cut the engine. The house seemed to be trying to disappear into the landscape. It had once been painted white, but it had long since faded to a gray slightly darker than the color of the day; the roof had rusted to the red color of the muddy driveway. The open door and broken windows looked ominous.
“Who used to live here?” Chrissie asked.
“I don’t remember their names,” Jim said. “Some old couple. I saw them a few times from the road, but we never stopped. I guess they must have died.”
“Oh,” Chrissie said. “That’s sad. And I guess they must not have had any kids to take over the place.”
“I guess not.”
“Do you think we ought to go in?�
�
“Why not?” Jim asked. “Are you scared?”
Chrissie stuck her tongue out at him. “No,” she said. “I just didn’t want to be disrespectful.”
Beside the house stood a black walnut tree already devoid of leaves, save for a few yellow stragglers clinging to the topmost branches. The upstairs window of the house was open to the weather, and one of the tree’s limbs reached through it as if feeling around for the lock. Jim imagined that the house, or someone or something inside it, was listening to them as they approached, and he caught himself stepping through the weeds as quietly as possible, almost tiptoeing. He stopped on the top step and checked the soundness of the porch before venturing onto it. When Chrissie stepped onto the porch behind him, the boards creaked deliciously, and he felt gooseflesh scamper up his arms.
When he turned and looked at Chrissie, her eyes had warmed with excitement into some miraculous, glowing shade of brown, a color Jim had never seen before. For a moment he couldn’t remember how to move his legs. He felt himself smile so broadly, so ridiculously, that he would not have been surprised had sunshine poured out of his mouth.
“What?” Chrissie asked.
“You look scared,” Jim said.
“No, I don’t.”
Jim smiled again. “You’re right. You don’t.”
The delicate segments of her irises seemed to have been cut from some impossibly fine glass, except that, as Chrissie’s pupils widened in the shaded light of the porch, they changed shape while he studied them.
“Why are you staring at me?” Chrissie asked. “You look like a possum. All that grinning.”
Jim pretended to take offense. “A possum,” he said. “I don’t look like a possum.”
Chrissie giggled. “You’re right,” she said. “You don’t.”
At the threshold Jim pushed against the door, but it had swollen into place against the floorboards. He stepped sideways through the opening into a dim, unpainted hallway that bisected the length of the house and stopped at what Jim guessed was the back door. On the right side of the hallway a stairway disappeared up into the shadows, and beyond the stairway stood a single doorway; on the left side two doors faced the hall. The shadows between Jim and the exit at the back of the house seemed to possess mass and bones; had Jim been a few years younger, he would have turned around and run as fast as he could. Chrissie stepped into the house behind him. She grasped the doorknob and pulled but could only move it two or three inches. The doorsill scraping against the floor of the silent house struck Jim as one of the loudest noises he had ever heard.
