by Ann Pancake
“Bunker!” she shouted. “Bunker! Here, boy!” She went still and listened again. As she did, she couldn’t help but listen not only for Bunker, but also for the other. But what would the other sound like? Engines idling? A boom underground? A giant hish like a thumb-blocked garden hose? She heard only a pileated woodpecker laugh.
She launched herself over the hollow side, slippery with a decade, with more, of dead brown leaves, the bank so steep that when she was little she would lie against it and still be standing up. She slide-angled down, using again the sides of her feet, the thinking part of her hiding to let her body do its knowing, how quick to move, how far to slant, where to step, her strong hips, her calves, even her stomach muscles helping. “I’m a deer, I’m a deer,” she whispered like she’d done when she was small as though the saying it itself kept her from falling, and she never did fall. Granddad would be behind her, far more cautious, but still nearly magical in his balance, him catching himself from tree to tree, whooping sometimes after a near miss. Now she landed heavy at the bottom in a leaf drift higher than her knees.
“Bunker!” she shouted again. She whistled. The woodpecker ha-ha-ha-ha-ha’d. She started wading leaves towards the place where the hollow forked, passing right away the boundary between their land and the Hackerts’, white paint slashes fading on trees. She dropped into the bed of a wet-weather stream parched waterless after the summer drought and she followed that. The run was choked with flat, dark, slatey rocks, sharp under her feet where they stood on end. Of all the things Uncle Derek had told her, this was the one she could not put away. How the poisons came not only from the stuff they pumped down in. How they came out of the rocks themselves. Things held safe by the earth until the rocks were shattered and the private things unlocked, and then they became poisons, too. “Then they pull back up out of the well that poison water and they have to do something with it. Where do you think they dump it, Jos?”
Suddenly she heard the chussle sound of a big animal moving in leaves, and she knew it was not a deer, because it was not explosive and then away. And right after she spotted Bunker in the hollow fork, panting and loose-limbed with happiness, Jos saw at her foot a buckle-sized rock with a deep imprint.
She knelt. Almost the entire surface of the rock was stamped with shell, a perfect cast. Like a flower floating in a squarish bowl. “Now I don’t got no education,” Granddad would say. “But all of history is in these rocks. Them’s the oldest things that are.” Joslin picked up the fossil and slipped it into her sweatshirt pocket.
SHE HAD TO stop and tie the sweatshirt around her waist on their climb back up. Midday rising summer warm, and she knew it must be close to noon, kickoff, and she climbed faster. Then she and Bunker were moving through the trees on the ridgetop, dropping towards the groundhog shale outcrop, when Joslin grabbed Bunker’s collar and jerked him back.
Uncle Derek’s Honda sat behind the pony shed, where cars never went. Uncle Derek himself was just stepping out of the shed carrying with two hands the biggest plastic bag Wal-Mart gave out, a weight swinging in the bottom of it. Jos tucked herself low. Without taking her eyes off Derek, she reached one hand to Bunker’s stomach and rubbed. He collapsed onto his back and stayed still.
Uncle Derek laid the bag on the ground behind the car and unlocked the hatch. Joslin rose to a crouch to better see. Her uncle wedged the lid off a big white Styrofoam cooler and dropped the lid beside the Wal-Mart bag. Then he knelt, and peeling the bag back more than pulling something out, exposed the blue towel bundle. Jos shot an arm to the ground for balance. Uncle Derek lifted the bundle into the cooler, and she watched him shove and shift to make it fit.
Next he dragged a bag of ice from the front seat and set it on the hood. Seizing it at the top on both sides, he jerked at the staples, but Jos saw they wouldn’t give, and then he was tearing at it, she heard the “Fuck!” Then he spun around, spotted something, and snatched up what she knew was an old piece of barbed wire that had once topped the corral. He punctured and ripped the plastic with that and dumped the contents in the cooler.
After replacing the lid, he pulled across the cooler the sleeping bag he kept in his car, and over and around that he arranged a casual heap—jumper cables, cloth grocery bags, his CD case, the grimy green backpack he called his survival kit. Then Uncle Derek lowered himself into the front seat and gentled the car back to the house, where it was parked in its usual spot when Joslin got there and tied Bunker back up.
THE MOUNTAINEERS WERE down by ten two minutes before the half. They’d all four ended up watching the whole thing so far, the old people decked out in their WVU sweatshirts and hats, and even Uncle Derek seemed taken in, hollering at the screen right along with Granddad. He’d brought back from town as a treat everybody’s favorite pop to go along with the pepperoni rolls, and Jos, tucked up in the chair farthest from the TV, rationed her Orange Crush until the bottom went warm. She watched Uncle Derek as much as the game. Had he dug Goldy up or just found her where the coyotes left her? Just finding her was what she wanted to believe, but the older part of her knew how unlikely that was, especially with Goldy still in her towel. But why would Uncle Derek not have filled back in the hole, make it look like nothing happened at all? Because any messing in dirt Granddad would catch, especially since Derek had no idea how they’d placed the pretty stones. And what secret something could he possibly want that little body for? Every time she got to that, her face flashed hot before the anger collapsed, too quick, into a pity close to tears. Goldy dead dragged around in a Wal-Mart bag. The choke of not just groundhog shale but also ice in Goldy’s mouth, and the taste on the terrible stuck-out tongue.
“Well,” Derek announced when they cut to the commentators at the half. “I’m heading out to Morgantown right after the game. Talked to Casey this morning. I’ll be going against traffic.”
“Defense don’t wake up, I guess you won’t be burning any couches,” Granddad said. Uncle Derek left regularly, to Morgantown, to Pittsburgh, to Elkins. When he was gone, the taut rushed out the house a little like from an overinflated ball. Joslin was not sad he’d be going now.
She sprang up the steps two at a time to her room. The Hackerts would be by within twenty minutes. To put on the uniform earlier than right before the game felt to her a disrespect even though she knew some kids, like Madison, wore theirs around the house for fun. Into her shorts, she ran her hands a few times over their blue and black silkiness, and then she bent and fastened the Velcro straps on the shin guards, which she loved most of all because they made her legs look the way they always felt. She tugged her jersey over her head, “Blue Jays” in cursive over the back, and the uniform complete, a lightness rushed from her chest, carrying her along after it, her moving without thinking across that green field. She hugged her right wrist with her left hand, a good-luck embrace of the good-luck bands, and picked up her cleats by their tied-together laces. Then she remembered the fossil.
She pulled it from the pocket of the sweatshirt she’d hung in her closet and eased it into the toe of one cleat. Granddad would be out in the yard “getting some air,” shuffling off his ire at the unraveling game. She’d give the fossil to him now, before she left. A little salve for both Goldy and the football loss.
But when she reached the porch, she stopped short. Granddad was hobbling towards the ripped-up grave and she didn’t want to interrupt. Then her heart ducked. He was pausing at Derek’s car.
For several seconds he stood as though paralyzed, his head thrust forward on his neck like a turtle’s, his fingers spread open where they hung. And Jos, blood beating in her throat, heat rushing in her face—Jos understood it was a snifter.
He cupped his hands around his face against the filthy rear window as though that’d cut the dirt like a reflection. Then he charged up the driver’s side, clawing the roof for support, opened the door, dipped, and jerked the hatch lever, Jos heard it unclock. He jag-legged back to the rear, threw up the hatch, stared for a second, and then he pitche
d onto the ground behind him, using both hands, the cloth bags, the jumper cables, the survival kit, the CD case cracking open and the disks spooling out.
“Derek!” Granddad shrieked. “You get out here! Right now!”
Jos held her breath. Behind her, the door whined open. She could hear a crunching in Uncle Derek’s mouth.
“Right now, boy!”
Jos dared not turn around. She heard a swallow. And she heard, too, heard this with her body, a rumbling right under the air, the rumble rising to mute roar, until Uncle Derek exploded, “I’m taking her in for tests!”
He screamed it with the passion of someone announcing the end of the world, but also with the humiliated fury of a little kid caught, and under all that, she heard, too, heard this with as much surprise as she’d felt when the blue towel came out of the Wal-Mart bag, the quiver that comes right before tears.
“Get out here lift this lid off!” Granddad bellowed.
“I’m taking her in for tests! Taking that goddamned creek water, too!”
Jos saw Granddad’s lip lift, his top teeth bare, saw the red lace on the side of his nose, one cheek. He whipped around, jerked the lid off the cooler, and snapped it in two across his knee. He plunged both arms in, muddy ice erupting up and over the sides, and then Granddad was raising the blue towel bundle, matted with ice melt and grave dirt, and cradling it to his chest.
When she heard the thump she finally broke, turned to see that Uncle Derek had hurtled off the side of the porch and, although the drop was not waist-high, had fallen on his knees. He pushed himself up and crashed away, zigzagging like a rabbit, and she tore her eyes from him and back to Granddad, hovered over Cuddle Dog, an orange-brown mud stain spreading across his blue and gold front. Jos felt her legs step towards Granddad, then stammer, the trespass of breaking in on him and his dog, the pity she felt for Uncle Derek too, beaten near tears. And then she was moving to where Derek had gone, at first her knees locking and jolting her shins, her glancing over her shoulder at Granddad, but soon trotting, and at last breaking into a full-on run.
She found him in the dusky pony shed between a broken-down rototiller and the stack of old pallets. His back against the wall, his arms sprawled limp across his raised knees, his face flung down and his hair screening it. She stood before him on the pulverized manure and decades-old dirt, her understanding only, and that not even in a thought, that at least something could be right if he would just speak. She waited. He did not push his hair up and pin it clear of his forehead. He did not lift his face. She heard no sound at all, not even his breath, certainly not tears, and she wondered if he knew she was there. She took a step closer.
Back at the house, the Hackerts’ big Suburban crunched into the drive. A half-minute later, its door slammed.
“Go on, Jos. Your ride’s here.”
His voice came empty as a broken bucket, barren even of anger. Jos bit her bottom lip, her expectation dissolving into panic. Her eyes darted, the top of a stall where the long-gone pony had left chew marks, the dry soil crusted in the rototiller blades. The place on the crown of Derek’s head where the scalp showed white.
“Josss-linnn!” It came from behind the house, a piping. They’d sent Madison to fetch her.
“Go on, Joslin. You want to miss your game?”
The gap between her and Uncle Derek widened despite the step she’d taken closer, and every muscle in Jos’s legs was rising to run, but her still rooted to the floor, her heart a barbed anchor reaching all the way to the ground. Madison called again. And suddenly, it came to Jos. If she left him something, she could go.
On reflex, she tipped the shoe, her palm out to catch the fossil, but before it shook loose, she stopped. Despite everything, she knew Granddad loved rocks more than Uncle Derek did. She dropped the cleat toe-down and pushed the tied-together shoestrings back into her elbow crook. Her mind flashed to the next most valuable thing she had. The blue jay band. She rolled it off her wrist. Kneeling, she rested it in the fine dirt right at the toe of his boots where he could not miss it when he finally looked up.
Outside, she had to pause a second for her eyes to take the light. Against the faded copper of the shale hollow side, the blond broom sedge, Madison in her green and black uniform shimmered like a toy hummingbird. “Jos!” she squealed. But behind Madison, a form shot out of the yard and towards the outcrop, an animal too low and dark to be a deer. In her own hand, Joslin could feel the pressed clasp under Granddad’s thumb. She could feel Bunker’s chest bloom as he vaulted free.
SAB
SULL, I FEEL the hurt of you. I feel you run. Air catch in your throat, not enough lung, all that land breathing on you. Breathing. Cucumber smell, skunk smell, rich rotty punk, I see you moving over ground, sinking into hollows, deer flushing all around. The bugs choiring like rattles, swell rattle, ebb rattle, Sull, they feel you, too. And you stop on a ridgespine, you brace your hands on your thighs until your breathing calms down. Then you listen. You listen hard. Hear only acorns dropping. A buck grunt-squeal, whinny wilder than a horse.
What can I tell you? Sometimes it comes easier if your body’s on the run, your mind closing so your insides catch it, hills’ channels, your channels, currenting as one. What I can tell you is it’s not going to reach you through how you usually hear. It speaks in your throat like fingers spelling in a deaf-blind hand, you listen by a feel where you swallow. It feels like swallowing ground.
What I can tell you is your instincts are right. These hills, if you can open, will carry past your pain. But I know, too, they never talk in words or lines or tones. The thing you have to learn is to hear unsingable song.
WE WERE COUSINS just a year apart. Grew up in here together, then Sull left out. Gone thirty years, though at first she’d now and then come back. A family reunion, Christmas, when an old person passed. Eventually she stopped that, too, and the less we saw her, the more stories got told. Her obscenely rich husbands, outlandish mansions in outlandish places, uncountable affairs. Or they’d turn it and tell that Sull earned the money herself, in some just-this-side-of-legal way, and she not only seduced and discarded men, but had a taste for women as well. Then, in the last decade, the telling overturned. Became parable of the woman who got too big for her britches and lost everything she had. Drugs, bankruptcy, embezzlement, some said she’d even spent time in jail.
For years, I didn’t just listen to those stories. I retold them myself, even though I knew they were at best half-truths, and so did everyone else. We craved the balm the stories gave, the way they spun our envy into smugness. Handed us our moral superiority and let us gloat. Then came my forties, and that all changed, along with everything else. You go through what I did, most of your judgment of others gets scoured right out.
When Sull called, I hadn’t heard her voice in fifteen years. I was so surprised at first I couldn’t talk back. She said she had to come home and didn’t think a week would be enough. Said with her parents moved to South Carolina, she had no place to stay. Said she really just needed to get out in the woods, she’d be gone all day.
She drove up in a car that had never seen a road like mine and sat for five minutes behind closed doors. I saw how her profile’d gone from robin to hawk. By the time she got out, she wore a company face, cheerful, blithe, but right away I found it hard to look at her because no Sull I knew was there. We talked for an hour in the living room, sticking to the distant past. I asked after nothing recent. She offered even less.
My kids were long gone to places like where Sull went and worse. My son’s room had the better view, but I put her in my daughter’s, the farthest one from mine. My house backed right up against the woods, so my yard wasn’t even really grass. Virginia pine, reindeer moss, old barbed-wire fence line. The next morning, Sull ducked her rubbed-down body through the wire. Stood still some seconds on the edge of it all. Then disappeared over the hill.
SUMMER FORTY YEARS ago. Grandmother’s house. Sull’s mom and dad, mine, most all the family back then live
d no more than eight miles apart. We’d come together for Saturday suppers, and when the sweet corn was on, me and Sull’d carry to the pasture afterwards heaps of husks and cobs. Passing the old people on the porch, we’d always hear one call, “You all going down there? Daub some sab on that horse.”
How wide apart a year seems when you’re that young, and Sull always seemed way older than she was. Headstrong defiant from the beginning, and my mother’d shake a warning into me before she’d let us play. And Sull, being outside of an evening, did it settle you down like it did me? Deer shaping themselves in the wild end of the pasture. The way the cool coaxed the smell out the sycamore tree. Did we hear it then and just not know it, because at that age we’d never stopped hearing it yet? How else could you be gone so long and live the way you did, yet somehow get called back?
Brownboy’d nicker when he saw us, swim through chest-high Johnson grass. By evening he’d be free of flies except for the mob around each eye. While he crunched shucks, we ran hands across his hide, raised places, pus-running sores, pink and gray scabs. From a tree crook down there, we’d pull the dry cob and the pine tar salve we called sab. We’d daub it on fly bites gone bitter, gone bad.
MOST DAYS THAT first week Sull came back, we sat on my concrete stoop at night. Warm, dry, early September, sill between summer and fall. The lightning bugs were finished, but the haze was, too, the stars at their nearest, cream of Milky Way. We’d only been kids together, so we’d only ever played together. It’s not like we had a history of sitting down to talk. And now, when we did, it was like that evening Sull arrived. Only light things, slight things, things anybody could have said.
I’m not sure what I expected, but I guess, given your ruin, some chink into your heart. The vacancy of your voice seemed a fog you threw around yourself. The vagueness a softness to cloud how hard you’d got. By the end of that week, I still had no idea why you’d come. Probably just wishful thinking that you’d returned to reach for what, after my own wreckage, I found. More likely it was “peace and quiet” as it was for most who came here from outside. The “beauty of the landscape.” The myth that we had no crime.
