Meteors in August

by Melanie Rae Thon

  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.

  Later, I smelled something baking, something sweet and delicious. Mom had hot cornbread waiting for me when I got down to the kitchen. “Thought I’d warm up the house,” she said. We each took a steaming golden square big enough for four people. I slathered mine with butter and honey, but we hadn’t chewed the first bite before someone rapped on the back door and pressed a pale face against the glass. Mom jumped up to slide the bolt free and let Aunt Arlen inside.

  “Are you crazy, woman, coming out in this storm?” Mother said. Aunt Arlen’s head was wrapped tight in an old flannel shirt, and she wore a raccoon coat that held the ripe smell of the dead animals. She went straight to the stove to rub her bare hands together over the heat.

  Mom offered cornbread and Arlen shook her head. Skinny as she was, I’d never known Arlen to refuse food. She still hadn’t said hello. Finally she took the rag off her head and turned to face us. “I’m not going back,” she said, “not even if hell does freeze over. I mean it this time. I’ve had it. Right up to here.” She slashed the air in front of her throat. “He can just see how he likes it, cooking and cleaning up after those boys. They’re half his—or more—I can hardly see my part in them now that they’re grown. Maybe Justin and Marshall will think to look for their own place if they don’t have a live-in maid. Lester can iron his own shirts and mend the crotch of his own damn jeans instead of throwing them in my lap and asking me what the hell I do all day that I can’t get around to the ‘few, simple things a man has a right to expect from his wife.’ Now that the Fat Lady’s shaking for God and speaking in tongues, there’s one more ‘simple thing’ Lester Munter wants from the old wife. All of a sudden this bag of bones don’t look too bad. Well, he can hold his breath till he turns blue and falls on his face. He’s not laying a finger on this woman. ‘Come on, baby, let’s get warm,’ he says, right in front of the boys—and them sneering, knowing their father’s gone to Lyla Leona for years, and they’ve seen her too, wallowed in her flesh. Pigs, every one of them. I had to get myself out of there before I stabbed my fork right up his nose.” She paused long enough to take her first breath.

  “Can I stay here, Evelyn? Just until this blizzard’s over? I’ll look for a place as soon as the weather breaks. Something for me and Lucy—oh, my poor baby; I can’t leave her with her brothers for long. They’ll turn her into a little slave. Maybe I can get us a room at the boardinghouse, right up there with Minnie Hathaway and Lyla Leona; maybe I can be saved too.”

  “Don’t even think about living in a dump like that,” Mom said. “You can stay here long as you want.”

  I don’t believe Arlen ever had any intention of looking for another place. She settled into the den off the living room and slept on the lumpy sofa that was three inches shorter than she was.

  For two days she watched her own house like a thief. “Look at Lester,” she said on the third morning, “fat and happy and late for work.” She snorted. “Looks like Justin gave up on that foolish beard. My boy never thought he had enough chin. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t go out with girls. Maybe that’s why Lester did him the favor of taking him to see the Fat Lady when he was sixteen. What a father. Isn’t there some law against a man and his son sleeping with the same woman? Well, there should be. Rubs mighty close to incest if you ask me.” Arlen didn’t mind that I was the only one listening to her.

  “Poor Lucy,” she said. “Look at her. No hat, no gloves, you’d think one of those boys would see to it she doesn’t freeze on her way to school.”

  Later that morning Arlen sneaked into her empty house and packed enough clothes to stay with us all winter. The whole thing made my father nervous. He asked Mom how long Arlen was staying. “Just a week or so, honey, until this tiff blows over,” she said. She never called him “honey,” so he must have known we were in deep.

  On Sunday, Arlen went to church; she wanted to hear if folks were speculating on her reasons for leaving Lester. She wanted to know if the reverend judged her with mercy or cruelty. Daddy stayed home for the first time in months. He said he wanted to have a word with Mother, but he looked too red to talk. As soon as Arlen was out of the house, he pounded his fist on the kitchen table and said, “She’s not staying here another day.”

  “She’s staying as long as she wants,” Mother said.

  “It’s not right, a woman leaving her husband and kids. I won’t be any part of it.”

  “She’s your sister, Dean.”

  “She’s Lester Munter’s wife, that’s what she is, and she belongs in his house, not mine.”

  “Blood and water.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “That your sister should mean more to you than Lester Munter.”

  “What do you think we’re running here, a home for wayward women?”

  “She’s hardly a wayward woman.”

  “No? Well I think that’s a mighty polite name for a woman who deserts her husband. When I think of her harping away about Elliot Foot, I don’t know whether to laugh or be sick.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “No, of course not. Elliot Foot is a man.”

  “Elliot Foot ran off to be with another woman. Arlen left to be by herself. Your sister walked across the alley and Elliot took a Winnebago to Arizona.”

  “I could make her go.”

  “I’d go with her,” Mother said.

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “I’m stating a fact.”

  They glared at each other. They were both bluffing, but neither one was willing to force the hand. Finally Daddy said, “I wish she’d just find her own place
and keep us out of it.”

  “You know she hasn’t got a dime of her own.”

  “Whose fault is that?”

  “Hers,” said Mom. “She should have lifted ten bucks from Lester’s wallet every week and stashed it away for herself.”

  Dad sighed. He didn’t have a chance with this kind of reasoning. “If Les ever comes over here and wants to drag her home, I won’t stand in his way.”

  Arlen stayed, one week and then another. The third week began. She didn’t have much to talk about now that Lester and the boys weren’t around to keep her riled, but that didn’t stop her. There was a noisiness to her presence, a clamor of confusion. By the time I came home from school, Mother was worn down by Arlen’s jabbering. She soon agreed with my father: it was time to send Arlen back to those children who needed her.

  Our house seemed smaller in winter. The tiny windows of my attic room leaked light, but by four o’clock the whole house was dark. In the dim hours, my wallpaper turned chaotic. Nina had chosen it, this tangle of green vines and burgundy roses. I dreaded going home but couldn’t stand the cold outside. Often, Arlen followed me from room to room, relating every detail of her day. She stayed on my heels as I climbed the stairs. One afternoon she said, “I couldn’t decide whether to wear my blue dress or my green one this morning. So I chose the brown slacks instead.” This amused her. She muttered a few words under her breath and giggled. I tried to slip into the bathroom and close the door, but she was too quick for me. “I had toast for breakfast—with strawberry jam. Your mother had apple butter.” I sat down on the toilet. “No, wait,” she said.