by Haven Kimmel
When I reached the barn Julie and Dana had already scampered up the ladder and were making their way across the rafters like cats. When they were directly above the peak of the corn mountain they held hands and dove in. Julie’s red hair flew up behind her like a cape; Dana’s face was completely transformed by the surprise and joy of her brief free fall. When they hit the corn, surely harder than they had anticipated, they both disappeared for just a moment, then came up spitting, the air around them opaque with dust.
The game continued until everyone had jumped from the rafters; that is, everyone but me, because I was convinced that my father had a special and very limited form of ESP that allowed him to zero in on any situation in which I might be endangering my life. Each time I started to go up the ladder, I had a vision of Dad’s truck flying mercilessly into the barn lot. He would be out of the truck and in the barn before I could even begin sputtering excuses, and it was hard to choose which was more humiliating: not jumping, or not jumping and being escorted home by the seat of my pants by a man wearing a firearm. In the end I simply didn’t jump, choosing one fate over the other. Julie seemed not to notice, but Dana turned to me with the ironic smile that bespoke her earlier life in A City. She noticed.
We went out to visit three of Julie’s horses, Rebel, Diablo, and Mingo. Mingo was Julie’s favorite of all the horses, even though he was criminally insane. No one but Julie, not even Big Dave, could ride him, and once while she was on him he had become frightened by a water moccasin, threw Julie off his back, and stepped on her, breaking three of her ribs. Julie forgave him even as his hooves were striking her chest, and would have forgiven him with her dying breath if he had not ceased his attack, because in Julie’s silent philosophy, being angry with a horse for throwing off a rider, and then killing her, was as arbitrary as resenting a bird its flight.
Julie suggested that we play a form of rodeo, which was, I swear, that we each take a running start and jump on Mingo’s back, from behind. I mean jump on him from his butt side, where he was most likely to deliver a fatal kick.
I collapsed to the ground, moaning. “Julie,” I said, reasonably, “we can’t jump on Mingo’s back. Look at Anita and Annette. Do you want them to die?”
“Get up, you big nut,” Julie said extra quietly, offering me her hand. I took it, and Julie went over and began stroking Mingo’s neck. Dana appeared beside me in a cloud of ill will.
“Coward,” she hissed gleefully between her teeth. She wanted me to know she knew the truth about me without Julie hearing.
“You go do it, then,” I said, waving toward the gray-dappled Mingo, who stood however many hands equals a really tall horse plus three or four more.
Julie started about thirty feet from Mingo, so that by the time she reached him, she was running full out. She put her hands on his haunches and vaulted up onto his back just the way Jesse James would have, in one fluid motion. Mingo never moved, but continued to stare straight ahead, no doubt contemplating the many varieties of horse revenge available to him.
Dana said she would go next. She spit, and then turned and gave me her most smug face.
“I don’t even want to watch this,” I said, my arms crossed.
“You ought to watch it and learn something,” she said, her voice pointedly ironic and manly in the clear autumn air.
“It’s your funeral, Dana.”
“Yeah, you’ll probably be too scared to attend your own funeral, right, Jarvis?” Which brought a little laugh from everyone.
Dana started where Julie had, so that she was running hard when her hands hit Mingo’s back. I wish, even now, that I could report that some dreadfully embarrassing but not life-threatening accident had befallen her, but in fact, she vaulted right up onto Mingo’s back with just slightly less grace than the inimitable Julie herself. Blessedly, no one else at the party was willing to try it, so I was not alone where I stood, sensibly wary, next to the fence.
Later that same day we were chased by a bull, and as we ran hysterically across the pig lot, my shoes and socks were sucked off by the layers and layers of viscous poop and mud, and we couldn’t go back and find them because of the bull. Next: David Lee decided to show us how to do karate, which he had learned from watching late-night television, and naturally requested that I be his assistant. He threw me in an arc by the arm, dislocating it. As I lay on the ground, watching little pinpoints of light explode and fade in my eyes, I heard my father’s truck come flying into the barn lot.
As we drove away I could see Debbie in the front yard with her fist raised at David Lee, who had scampered all the way to the top of the big pine tree. He clung to it like a monkey as it swayed. Lying in the emergency room I realized that I never even got to eat any of the homemade french fries or fried mushrooms that Debbie had made. She had cooked so much that she was forced to break out the Fry Granddaddy. Plus I knew for a fact that there were about twenty-five freezing-cold Cokes in the refrigerator, the refrigerator that Julie and I had surprised Debbie by painting with exterior house paint, the same refrigerator on top of which there was a clock that always said 8:30. A party was going on in that kitchen, without me.
DANA INVITED ME DOWN to see their new Ping-Pong table, which her father had set up in the pristine barn.
“Wow,” I said, running my hand over its greenness. “Where’d you get it?”
“We were in Muncie last night,” Dana said casually, even though it was fairly unusual to find oneself in Muncie, which was big and far away, “and Dad asked if there was a Zayre’s around somewhere, and I said, ‘A Zayre’s. Yeah. Isn’t there one on West Jackson Street?’ And we drove over there and sure enough, it was right where I thought it was.”
I stood with my mouth open, imagining the weird and superhuman power which would allow a fifth-grader to know the name of a street in a city thirty miles from her home. Mooreland had three north/south streets, and I only knew the name of one of them, Broad Street, and I only knew that because I could see the street sign from my own front porch. As for all the little east/west streets, I couldn’t imagine they even had names. Saying, “We live in the house next to Minnie Hodson’s old house,” was surely more efficient than assigning a number to our front door. And since Mooreland had only one of most things (the exception being churches, of which there were three, one for every hundred people), it was also quite simple to say, “We live at the four-way stop sign,” or “I’ll meet you in front of the hardware store.”
I snapped my mouth shut and nodded, as if I knew exactly the Zayre’s she was talking about. We played Ping-Pong for a little while, but it didn’t go well. I was completely unskilled and Dana played so hard her shots often went right off the table, and so I spent a fair amount of time searching the corners of the barn. (I later discovered that in order to be a good athlete one must care intensely what is happening with a ball, even if one doesn’t have possession of it. This was ultimately my failure: my inability to work up a passion for the location of balls.)
We walked out into Dana’s side yard, at loose ends.
“What do you want to do now?” Dana asked.
“I don’t care. What do you want to do now?”
“I don’t care.”
We scuffed our feet and looked at the general flatness and order of Dana’s yard.
“We could fight,” Dana said, with a dangerous tone in her voice.
“Pshhh,” I said, with a sigh. “You know I don’t fight, Dana, I’m a Quaker.”
She circled me. “So?”
“So. I can’t. Just drop it.” I looked at the ground.
“Well, I can fight,” she said, pushing me hard in the chest.
I took a few steps backward, unbalanced, then righted myself. Briefly, my eyes met hers, and I saw that her face was suffused with a dark light, and she was smiling. Before I could say anything, she pushed me again, and I stumbled. We continued in this fashion all the way back to her hedgerow, and when she pushed me into a blackberry bush, I snapped, and came out swinging,
blindly.
I guess I must have hit her at least once, although I have no memory of anything but the hectic movement of the sky and the trees, my own heart pounding, and the ground suddenly spinning and rising. Dana had hooked her foot behind my leg and knocked me down. All too briefly we rolled, an equal contest, and then she had me pinned.
I hated to look at her, but I had no choice. Her bottom lip was bleeding, and her hair was tangled up with grass, and we were both breathing heavily.
“Get off me, Dana,” I said, furious.
She just continued to stare at me in a fixed and unnerving way.
“Get off me, Dana.”
“I don’t want to,” she said, calmly.
For a few heated moments I had no idea how to respond. All I could do was stare at her and imagine how ridiculous we looked from the street (which was Broad Street, I happened to know), and then I became scared and pushed her off me roughly.
She sat up in the grass as if nothing had happened, until it became clear that I was leaving.
“Where are you going?!”
“I’m going home.” I started walking across her yard.
“Oh, really? Well, the next time you’re such a psycho I may just have to kill you!” She was yelling loudly enough for the neighbors to hear.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, waving her off. “Why don’t you go bite yourself, you little shit.”
It was my first big swear, and as I stomped up the hill and over the railroad tracks, the whole situation made me feel like my stomach was harboring a fugitive. By the time I got home my eyes were burning with tears, and I desperately wanted to go up and just lie down on my bed, but first I had to walk on down to the corner to see if the street my sister lived on had a name, and sure enough, it did: Jefferson.
Dana never apologized, and neither did I, but she was a big enough person to come to my house later that afternoon. I was lying on my bed with my face toward the wall, and I refused to turn over, even after she had said hello.
“Okay, then. I’m just going to sit here on the floor . . . no, no, I’m not going to sit on the floor, because I can’t see it. I’m going to sit on this pile of clothes and books and stare at you until you turn around. I’m going to sit here and stare at you through your fan, even though there’s a dead mouse in the bottom of it that has been there as long as I’ve known you, and now it’s just a dried-up little skeleton.”
I tried not to laugh, and was doing fine until she started to hum. In order to save us both the extreme embarrassment of Dana’s broken voice, I turned over, only to find her sitting in a clothes basket, on top of my dirty laundry, wearing a ratty old Beatles wig she had found in the back of her mother’s closet. As soon as she met my eyes she broke full-throated into “Band on the Run,” her favorite song in the world. To be fair, she probably was no worse a singer than Linda McCartney, though I would never have said that to her face. The day ended with me laughing so hard I thought my appendix would burst. I begged her to stop.
AND THEN ONE DAY, toward the end of the year, Dana didn’t come to school, and when I stopped at her house on the way home there was no answer when I knocked. My mom was waiting for me at our house, and told me that the rumor in town was that Dana’s parents had had a terrible fight that had escalated into violence, and that Jo had taken Dana and fled town.
“I don’t think they’re coming back, honey,” Mom said, studying my face.
“They have to. This is where Dana lives; it’s where all her friends are. Jo can’t just take her away like this.” I tried to sound reasonable, but my voice was strained.
“I think, actually, that Jo had been planning it for a while. I think that’s what the fight was about.” She paused a moment. “It wasn’t a good home for Dana, sweetheart, and maybe wherever they end up will be better.”
“Wherever they end up? You mean nobody knows?”
Mom shook her head. I stared at her a few more seconds, trying to read her face for clues, but it appeared that she really didn’t know where they’d gone.
I went out and sat on the porch swing. The street that ran in front of my house was called Charles. If anyone were to ask, I could say that I lived on the corner of Charles and Broad, or else I could say that I lived behind Newman’s Marathon, whichever made more sense. At least I had some choices.
Dana’s father and brothers stayed in the house for the rest of the year. No one ever really saw them. One Saturday, a few months after she left, I walked down to Dana’s house and knocked on the door. I couldn’t bear not knowing anything about her. Lou answered the door after what seemed a long time, bleary-eyed and thick with smoke. He just looked at me, unable to imagine what I was doing on his porch. I finally scrumbled up the courage to ask if I could look in Dana’s room, to see if I had left an overdue library book there. He stepped back and let me pass by him without a word.
The house was painfully still. Nothing waited on the stairs. When I turned the corner into Dana’s room, my throat was so tight I reached up and touched it. The afternoon sun slanted through the big west window, lighting up the dust motes that filled the air.
Her bed was neatly made. In the corner lay the old Beatles wig, and a pair of shoes she had outgrown. A single picture of Shawn Cassidy, cut from a magazine, was still pinned to the wall, but otherwise the room was empty, and rather gray, and looked very like it had when she lived in it. I lay down on the bed a moment, feeling stupid, then got up and went home.
THERE ARE TWO PHOTOGRAPHS, taken at a slumber party at Julie’s house, just before Dana disappeared forever. In the first we are trying to form a human pyramid, like cheerleaders. Dana, Anita, Annette, and I are on the bottom, being always the tallest. On top are Rose and Julie and Kirsten. We are laughing wildly into the camera. In the second the pyramid has toppled and we are lying in a heap on the floor, and the expression on our faces is quite different. We are all, in various ways, trying to keep our tender and budding chests from touching the person in front of us, for fear of the sharp knock of pain that accompanied every touch. The days of hard wrestling were already over, although we were just beginning to realize it. From then on, we would spend our lives as girls trying to maintain that flat, sad distance. Some people moved so far away that we never, ever saw them again.
* * *
DINER
There are a finite number of times one can safely climb the same tree in a single day; after that point the whole venture becomes meaningless, and potentially dangerous. I had climbed my favorite tree, an oak that had a perfect bottom-shaped well where the big limbs began, about five times. I was getting casual with gravity, and had begun dismounting higher and higher, when I realized that I was aware of my stomach.
I was hungry. I walked into the house, which was so surprisingly empty. My sister had married only a few months before and was now living down the street; my brother was not a person I would consider in such a situation; my father had gone to one of the many mysterious places he had to be; and my mother, who we all trusted for so many years to remain faithfully in her place on the couch, was working.
She had taken a job waitressing at the little restaurant on Broad Street that sat diagonally from the drugstore. From the outside it just looked like a shotgun house. There were even checkered curtains in the window and a front stoop for sitting. Mom had only been working there a few days, and only the lunch shift, but her absence was alarming.
Our kitchen was really a part of our den—separated only by a “breakfast bar” at which no breakfast was ever taken—and I stood in the strange nether world between the den and the kitchen, staring. I never entered the kitchen if I could avoid it, and even as I stood there, deeply worried, I could hear mice skittering around in the oven.
I ran back outside and stood on the front porch, bark dangling from my sweatshirt and my hair. Oh, I was so hungry. I was hungry, hungry, and at what appeared to be a desperate time: the Newmans were not at the gas station, Rose and her family were out of town, and
my sister had gone to New Castle. I had no money. I couldn’t think of how to steal any. My mom was completely gone.
I sat on the porch steps and contemplated, my stomach growling and grumbling. If I went back in the house I would have to face the kitchen, and if I stayed outside I would surely expire.
I went inside, and slowly, fearfully, walked across the sticky kitchen floor to the refrigerator. The inside of the refrigerator was no better than any other part of the kitchen, but I was able to locate a bag of carrots, which I grabbed, slamming the door behind me. I took them outside and whittled off the grubby outsides with my pocket knife and set to eating them. They were pretty good, for vegetables. I ate one, and then another, and probably a third and fourth, distractedly, until I noticed the whole bag was empty and I wasn’t hungry anymore. In fact, my stomach felt like a little carrot rock.
I tried lying down in the yard and moaning out loud, which seemed to comfort the people who died on soap operas. The leaves and twigs snapped and poked in an unfriendly way. When I stood up to head for the house, I found that I felt even worse. I realized I needed my mother.
The walk to the diner was a long and treacherous one. I periodically had to stop and sit down in the grass to gather enough strength to go on. The sun pounded down on me, so that by the time I reached the front door I was stooped over like the emphysemic old man my grandma was married to, Pappy Catt, and I was clutching my stomach. It took all my willpower to straighten up enough to open the restaurant’s front door.
Mom was walking out of the back where the desserts were kept, carrying a piece of pie to a man who was sitting at the counter drinking coffee and looking at a map. One look at him told me he was from nowhere near Mooreland. He was wearing a suit, which was, as far as I knew, a habit practiced only by men who sold insurance, like Rose’s dad. Mom gestured for me to sit down at the counter, and then she ducked into the kitchen.
Obviously she had not noticed how terribly aggrieved I was. I stooped over to the counter and slid onto the stool right next to the businessman, even though the whole rest of the diner was empty. He looked down at me without speaking or smiling, then turned back to his map.
