by Adam Rapp
Corinthia watches the back of the man’s neck, where the sinews pulse up and down his shoulders as he pushes the rag through the spray-painted letters.
“Strangest thing about it,” he continues, driving the heel of his hand into the rag, “is that those tornadoes didn’t hardly touch nothin’ else. No cars. No houses. No trees or telephone poles. Only this high school. Like they were aimin’ for it. Like they were seekin’ revenge.”
Last year, when they read George Orwell’s Animal Farm in her sophomore Great Books class, Corinthia learned that the word for attributing human characteristics to animals is anthropomorphizing. Corinthia wonders if this word can be applied to tornadoes, too.
“Doggone gymnasium caught the worst of it,” the man adds, gently laughing.
“You think weather has human powers?” Corinthia asks.
“I’m not sayin’ tornadoes are like people,” he replies. “But don’t you think it’s strange how they didn’t touch nothin’ else? Not the church. Not the libary. Not one thing. It’s like them three tornadoes got their own mind to do stuff. Like they’re straight-up willful.” He stops, takes a step back, and adds, “Listen to me. This turpentine’s makin’ me run my mouth. . . .” He breathes through his nostrils a few times.
For a brief moment, Corinthia considers the impossible: Did she somehow summon the twisters? Was it a vision or an act of will? But why would she want to bring such calamity to Lugo Memorial? Does some part of her hate her school, her community? Sure, she’s had dark thoughts here and there, but the worst of them are akin to forcing Rinna Buss into her locker or mushing a handful of mashed potatoes in Skyler Montreal’s face.
“Fum,” the man continues. “Is that what they call you?”
“Apparently,” she says.
“So what’s Fum?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s from Jack and the Beanstalk,” she explains. “The giant says it: ‘Fee-fi-fo-fum.’”
How she’s managed to avoid this English-fairy-tale reference until now is practically miraculous. Are her fellow students finally turning on her? Were these instances of graffiti executed by an individual, or is it announcing the advent of some kind of revolt against Corinthia Bledsoe? Or does it have an opposite meaning? Were yesterday’s proclamations about the tornadoes now being appreciated? Is Fum an acknowledgment of respect?
“So, some fool’s tryin’ to be slick,” the man says. He soaks his rag with more turpentine and continues working on the door. “Messin’ with a person just ’cause she’s tall.”
Corinthia notices his hands, which seem large for his size, the palms bright and cracked. She has an urge to take one of them in hers — she doesn’t know why — but she lets it pass.
“What’s your name?” she asks, as he uses the rag to wipe away the last few slashes of paint.
“Lavert,” he says. “But you didn’t hear that from me.”
“Who’d I hear it from,” she says playfully, “the turpentine can?”
“I’m not s’posed to be talkin’ to you kids,” he replies.
“How come?”
“I’m just not,” he says quietly. “So please don’t tell nobody.”
“I won’t,” she says.
“Oh, God,” he says. “If they find out I’m talkin’ to one of you, they’ll send my butt back down.”
“Back down where?” she asks.
“Where I don’t want to be,” he answers, glancing over his shoulder.
Corinthia says, “There’s all kinds of places where people don’t want to be.”
After a brief silence, through the side of his mouth, he says, “Du Quoin.”
Corinthia tries to see what he’s looking at down the hall, but there’s only a drift of debris.
“What’s Du Quoin?” she asks.
“Du Quoin’s Du Quoin,” he replies, clearly setting a boundary. He forces his tongue through the space in his teeth, perhaps a nervous habit. Though she is curious, she doesn’t want to push him about whatever Du Quoin is.
“What’s your last name?” Corinthia asks, deftly changing the subject.
“Why?” he asks. “You some kind of detective?”
“Can’t a girl be curious?”
“Birdsong,” he says quietly, as if he’s unscrewed the top of a jam jar, uttered his name into it, and screwed the cap back on.
“Nice to meet you, Lavert Birdsong,” Corinthia says, extending her hand.
“Nice to meet you,” he says, setting down the rag in the bucket, wiping his hand on the thigh of his jumpsuit, then taking hers in his. His hand is warm and strong and dry. “What about you?” he asks.
“Corinthia,” she says.
“No last name?”
“Bledsoe.”
He looks up at her, but not in some astonished way. To Corinthia’s surprise, for once, it doesn’t feel like someone is beholding a freak, a beast, or something apocryphal, which is a word she had to spell during an early round at last year’s school-wide spelling bee. Sometimes strangers regard Corinthia with such disbelief that she gets the sense they think there are two smaller people stacked one on top of the other, operating her like some colossal school mascot.
“Corinthia Bledsoe,” he says.
Her name sounds like music coming out of his mouth. Like soulful, time-soaked, bluesy music. After a breath, he adds, “You might be the tallest person I’ve ever seen in my life, Corinthia Bledsoe.”
He stares up at her, almost smiling.
“What?” she says, sensing the faintest bit of mischief in his eyes, which slide a bit as he leans back and peers down the hall yet again. When he sees that they’re still alone, he adds, “Let’s just say you definitely ain’t no storybook monster.”
There is something about this man, Corinthia thinks, something about his quiet, deep voice; his slow, warm hands; and the intensity of his gaze.
The three letters are gone now.
“Thanks for cleaning my door,” she says.
“My pleasure,” Lavert replies.
She opens the door with her key, ducks her head under the upper casing, and enters her bathroom.
It’s a two-mile walk home, and instead of taking the shortcut through the modest neighborhoods of Lugo, Corinthia decides to tack along Lugo’s frontage road, “No-Name Road,” as it’s come to be known over the years.
No-Name Road is marked with shaggy, grassy ditches, gravel shoulders, and a few miles of forest where, last spring, a small pack of gray wolves was discovered, along with untold mutilated carcasses of deer. The wolves were written about in the local paper just this morning. “More Wolves Spotted in Lugo,” read the headline. The story was also reported on the news.
“Where there are deer, there may also be wolves,” the anchorwoman in pancake makeup said, looking directly into the camera.
The citizens of Lugo were advised to stay out of the forest and to “let nature take its course.” But yesterday in Mr. Sluba’s class, before the marine-world subjects of phytoplankton and krill were introduced, he brought up the wolves. On Thursday, as a way to kick things off, he spent the first few minutes of class posing questions relating to local life-science issues.
“After their food supply runs out, where do you think these wolves will turn?” Mr. Sluba asked.
No one raised their hand — it was early in the quarter, after all, and that slippery business of sycophants and class participation hadn’t yet been established.
“Will they become vegetarian?” Mr. Sluba continued rhetorically. “Will they turn on themselves and practice cannibalism? Will they leave the forest and start hunting the yards and porches of our neighborhoods?”
This final question settled in the room like an early winter chill. Corinthia imagined all the slain cats and dogs in her neighborhood, the wolves being confused by ceramic deer, stone rabbits, and the many statues of garden gnomes in red wizard caps.
The Bledsoes have a ceramic Dalmatian in their yard, which guards the mailbox. It arrived in a FirmaMall shipping c
ontainer over a year ago, and more than once Corinthia has seen her mother speaking to it and patting it on the head as if it were real. Marlene named it Chet and will sometimes tease Abel, the Latino mailman, saying things like, “Careful, Abel, Chet hasn’t been walked yet,” and “I’m teaching Chet Spanish. Soon he’ll be able to say hello.”
What would those gray wolves make of Chet?
Corinthia suddenly recalls Channing’s strange visit before she went to sleep last night.
“If you sit still enough in the presence of a wolf . . .”
Is Channing in the forest? she wonders.
Corinthia stops walking, crosses the gravel shoulder, hops over the grassy ditch, and takes a few steps toward the tree line. But something makes her stop. A strange feeling passes over her. Her arms are suddenly plagued with gooseflesh. She has the strong sense that something very bad will happen if she continues.
“CHAN!” she calls out to the trees. “CHANNING BLEDSOE!”
She waits a moment, but there is no response, so she moves away from the tree line, jumps back over the ditch, and continues walking on the gravel.
The sun is bright and warm, and the air feels somehow thinned. It’s as if the tornadoes stole the late-August humidity and plan to unleash it on some heartland town farther east. Corinthia walks along the shoulder, her long, heavy feet trudging through the gravel. She can feel fatigue radiating outward from her lower back. It’s starting to seep into her hips, but she knows if she stops to rest, she will fall asleep in the tall grass and turn into potential wolf meat. The following morning, they’ll find her picked clean in the ditch, all those humongous bones looking more like some weird shipwreck of ancient timbers and scrimshaw than a human skeleton.
The clean, ripe smell of dirt, pollen, and the dolomite from the sunbaked gravel floods her nostrils. In the distant farmlands, she can see a pair of grain elevators, an ancient, scarred barn listing to the left, a half-empty corncrib with a tin conical hat. Part of her wants to venture beyond Eagle Ridge Road, where she normally turns left and heads for home on the final stretch. Corinthia sees herself walking west for hundreds of miles, crossing the Mississippi River into the wheat-colored expanse of Missouri on foot, and into Kansas, where she will find some other small town and start her life over. She could get a job at a local bookstore, arranging new titles — she’s certainly tall enough to reach the higher shelves without a ladder — or find work on a farm, baling hay or feeding baby goats.
A few cars pass along the two-lane road. When the aspirin-shaped Lugo water tower comes into view, she can see that, on its face, beneath the town’s namesake, the same word has been written that appeared on her locker and on the door to her bathroom. In black capital letters, there it is again:
FUM
Who is this graffiti artist?, she thinks. Is it a boy? A girl? A faceless, genderless ninja enshrouded in black? She feels her stomach give way to cold emptiness. It’s as if she’s swallowed a chilled metal plate. This is what shock feels like, she thinks: like swallowing cold dinnerware.
She mentally scrolls through everyone she knows at Lugo Memorial and can’t think of a single person who might actually hate her.
Corinthia finally comes upon Eagle Ridge Road. She stops for a moment and again considers the world to the west. She looks in that direction, but all she can see is the timberline of that long forest. It almost seems like the trees are growing themselves, extending their reign over the land, in cahoots with the gray wolves. She imagines the wolves strategizing, communicating telepathically, outsmarting the world.
At home, Corinthia is greeted by her mother and a pudgy blond man in a light-blue cotton suit, gray tie, and black orthopedic shoes.
“This is Detective Moon,” Marlene Bledsoe says. “He works for the Bureau of Missing Persons.”
“Dick Moon,” he says, offering his thick, stubby hand. “Hello, Corinthia.”
At a glance, Corinthia thinks he looks like a fat, sick baby. She sets her book bag on the floor, shakes his hand, and just stands there. It’s clear that Detective Moon has been briefed about Marlene Bledsoe’s daughter’s extraordinary size, as he appears to make nothing of it. He holds a small moleskin notebook and a ballpoint pen.
“Take a seat, honey,” Marlene says to her daughter.
Corinthia does so — on her repurposed piano bench — but Detective Dick Moon remains standing. Marlene, who is wearing lemon-colored yoga slacks and a T-shirt that features artwork from the first Indiana Jones movie, stands as well. Her small, tense hands are wedged into her armpits.
“Corinthia,” Detective Moon says, “you may already be aware of this, but since the tornadoes touched down, your brother is the only member of this community who hasn’t been accounted for.”
She nods.
How is it possible that Channing is the only one of Lugo’s four thousand some-odd citizens to have gone missing?
“When was the last time you saw him?” Dick Moon asks.
“Last night at dinner,” she says.
“You didn’t see him after that?”
“I went to bed early.”
“As I told you,” Marlene interjects, “Corinthia had sort of a rough day.”
Detective Moon jiggles some coins in his pants pocket.
“Well, it’s been a rough morning, too, I’m sure. For all of us.”
Corinthia decides that he is an oversize thumb with a face and arms.
Her mother has been doing dishes. Corinthia wonders if she sometimes washes them, dries them, and then washes them again, just to give herself something to do.
“Where’s Dad?” Corinthia asks her mother.
“At work,” she answers. “He couldn’t get anyone to cover his shift.”
“Corinthia,” Detective Moon says, “did Channing give you any indication that he was planning on taking a trip?”
“Detective Moon thinks he might have used the tornadoes as a distraction to run away,” Marlene says.
“At this point it’s just a theory,” he says. “But we have to consider all possibilities.”
“He barely speaks to me anymore,” Corinthia says.
“He’s been under a lot of pressure with football,” Marlene tells Detective Moon. “Football and SAT prep. When the season gets under way, he tends to keep to himself.”
Detective Moon asks Corinthia if she’s noticed anything different about her brother lately.
Again, she recalls Channing’s strange late-night visit to her room, their conversation about stillness.
“All he does is work out and study,” Corinthia offers.
“The night before football games, he hardly even speaks to his girlfriend,” Marlene adds.
Detective Moon says, “Winter, right?”
“Winter Hornacek, yes,” Marlene confirms for him.
“And we know for a fact that Ms. Hornacek is at home with her family?”
“I spoke with her a few minutes before you arrived,” Marlene replies.
“You might want to talk to Drake Sirocco, too,” Corinthia offers.
“Drake is the quarterback on the football team,” Marlene explains. “They spend a lot of time together, too.”
“Drake . . . Sirocco . . .” he echoes, writing in his little notebook.
“The Siroccos live over on Log Drive,” Marlene adds.
“Thanks,” Detective Moon says, returning the notebook and pen to the interior of his suit jacket. He then thrusts his hands into his pockets and starts jiggling that change again.
“Well,” he says to Corinthia, “if anything occurs to you that might help us get a lead on the whereabouts of your brother, please call me. I gave my card to your mother.”
Corinthia nods.
“I better go check if there’s any new information over at the office,” he adds, then nods to Marlene.
While exiting, he tells both women how lovely it was to meet them and he pledges to do everything in his power to find Channing.
Corinthia and her mother remai
n in the kitchen, Marlene’s face inflamed. Per usual, Corinthia gets the sense that her mother is having a hard time looking at her.
Marlene turns away from her daughter and peers dramatically out the window, as if she might start singing a melancholic ballad.
“Your vice principal called,” she starts in, a bitter weariness clotting her voice. “Mr. Mejerus. I understand you’ll be staying home from school for an undetermined period of time. That he’ll be sending along your homework assignments via e-mail.”
Corinthia has an urge to walk over to the clean dishes, grab a coffee mug, and hurl it to the floor.
But instead she tells her mother not to worry.
“You’ll hardly know I’m here,” she says. “Don’t worry.”
And then she excuses herself from the table.
In the basement, Corinthia is washing her hands in the extra-large sink of her customized bathroom when she is seized by the image of geese — thousands of geese peppering the sky, their black, wavering mass like some terrible thought sprung from the mind of an all-powerful deity beset by madness. Though the word that came out of her mouth during the school-wide assembly was birds, it was only a word, and now she’s seen that they’re geese. She is certain of this because of their long, dark necks, gray wings, and the white stripes marking their faces. They fly through the milky-gray, cloudless sky of her mind. And now she can hear the cacophony of their collective honking. It’s an inconsistent, mind-boggling sound. Corinthia brings her hands to her ears.
And then, just like that, the geese are gone and Corinthia comes back to herself.
She finds that she is down on a knee. She is breathing hard, suddenly starved for oxygen, genuflecting in her bathroom. She grabs the edge of the sink and pulls herself up. In the mirror she can see that her face is flushed. The whites of her eyes have gone pink. Her nostrils are flaring. She can feel a knot forming where her left knee met the floor, and she kneads at it.
First tornadoes and now geese? she thinks.
Why geese?
What could they possibly mean?
In her bedroom, she uses her landline to call the Lugo district library. She asks for Cloris Honniotis, but the head librarian, Norma Klondike, tells Corinthia that Cloris is currently unavailable. Corinthia asks her to please, please, please ask Cloris to call her and leaves her name and number.
