Authors: Sara Taylor
Beneath a drift of books melting slowly out of their bindings she found a birdcage, of the old dome-shaped pattern, coated in layers of gloppy white enamel so that it looked as though it had been rolled out of fondant. She set it in front of the window to get it out of the way, in the beam of light, then rested for a moment in front of it. In her mind's eye she filled it with goldfinches, flitting and twittering, then tiny monkeys, then little
men like Gulliver in the TV movie she'd snuck out of her bed to see when she was nine. God, she wanted weed. Or opium, though the one time she'd tried it she hadn't felt much. Whippets. Acid. Hell, she'd settle for a pack of menthols and a can of Coke, anything. She watched the cage out of the corner of her eye as she shunted all of the chests into even rows and swept the sanded pine floor bare, and it was the last thing that disappeared as she backed her way down the ladder.
They had all worked through lunch. Her watch was still sitting on her bedside table back home, and Becky was surprised to find that it was three in the afternoon when she came down. The boys were sitting on the front porch drinking iced water out of Mason jars.
“Want to go up the ridge and see the view before dinner?” Dave asked her when she came out to join them.
“Of course she does,” Pierce answered for her. She settled down next to him and leaned into his side. “We go up there every time we come.” This wasn't entirely true; they usually went halfway up, took in the view, smoked a bowl, and decided that they'd finish the climb on the next visit. “Let's christen it with a bottle of something this time though.”
“And a joint,” Dave added. He looked at Becky as he said it, fishing for a response, she thought, but she didn't give him one. She wondered if Pierce had told him about the bust, how they'd been making their moneyâor rather, how she'd been making her money. She'd started dealing out of the girls' locker room her first year of high school, and was such a boring, honest kid in every other way that she had never been caught. She was still dealing in her first year at community college when she met Pierce, who was bouncing from restaurant to restaurant,
washing dishes, and he liked to claim to be the backbone of her business even if he'd never gone with her to pick up or drop off. She didn't do synthetics, so even though he bummed weed from her he kept meeting Donnie every few weeks on the mainland side of the bridge to Accomack Island to pick up Oxy, Ket, Ice, and whatever else he felt like, then sold his extra to the other restaurant workers. She could have told him that this was a risky and expensive way to do business, but he wouldn't have listened to her.
They threw a bottle of wine, a corkscrew, and a pair of binoculars into a backpack, then crossed the side pasture and hiked up into the woods. The game trail they followed led them along the brow of the hill and down through a patch of swampy bottomland before turning up the mountain. Pierce observed that it was a good place to drop a handful of seeds and see what happened, which sparked off a discussion of all the places they had lit up, best and worst. Becky was content listening, and eventually Dave stopped glancing at her as if he expected her to join in.
As the path got steeper the cousins began to discuss the farm itself, how Grandpa Skip owned the entire mountain and had probably never seen more than ten square acres of it, how far it was from nosy neighbors or anyone that would careâthe cattle farmers never went beyond the edges of the cleared landâhow rich the earth was, how large the well was, and how empty their bank accounts were. The trees around them grew stunted and thin, until they crossed the timberline and waded out into the tall grass near the top of the ridge. Becky fell a few steps behind, only half-listening since it was the sort of conversation
she'd had a million times before. Pierce hadn't done much with weed other than smoke it, but she'd saved seeds and played with sprouting them, nothing serious, more a botany experiment than a real attempt at growing.
The tooth winked up at Becky from between strands of dead brown grass like old men's hair, and she broke step to stoop and pick it up. The boys didn't notice, and she had to skip for a moment to catch up with them. It was a molar, complete with roots, thick and square, the crackled off-white of old teacups. Probably from a deer that the coyotes had gotten, not big enough for a cow. Or it had just died of old age, up here under the sky with the wind tearing its soul away and the foothills of the Blue Ridge laid out all around it. Not a bad place to die, considering.
“Whatcha got there, Beck?” Dave turned her hand over and she held it up for him. “That's cool.”
“I can't believe I didn't see it,” said Pierce and held out a hand for it. She pretended she didn't see.
“Dude, you miss half the shit that's going on around you,” said Dave. “Neither of us were really looking.”
They watched her slip it into her pocket.
“Think we'll need an irrigation system?” Pierce asked.
“Nah, we can just haul buckets till it sproutsâit's pretty wet down by the spring. And weed's a hardy plant. When I was like fifteen I used to dump all my seeds behind the toolshed back at Dad's, you know the place. Looked up one day and there was this six-foot-tall pot plant staring me in the face.”
“Damn. How much did you get off something that big?”
Becky tuned them out again and listened to the wind across her ears. The grass was long and bent and silvery, waving like the surface of the ocean. It flowed away to either side of them,
creating its own horizon. If she were to go off to the left, she knew that she would see down onto the clearing, the crooked farmhouse with its crinkled tin roof and pale purple globes on the lightning rods, the massive cows, Dave's red sedan and Pierce's dented white pickup that burned oil and had the ceiling falling in. If she looked at the right time she might see the farmer from the valley checking over his stock; she knew that someone came in the afternoons, drove up from the foot of the mountain nearly every day to refill the water troughs or chase the herd from one pasture to the other, but they steered wide of the house and she'd never seen them. Down to the right were more mountains, wave upon wave of them, and somewhere beyond, she knew, home. If she wandered closer to the edge she could see the telephone lines cutting starkly down either side of the mountain, then rising up the next one and disappearing over.
Once at the top they sprawled out in the silvery grass, the sun beginning to set behind them, out of breath, gazing down at the valley below. The mountains rolled on past the Peaks of Otter until they misted into purple haze at the horizon. Dave pulled a joint and a lighter out of his shirt pocket, and hacked meditatively at the striker. Becky flopped backward between them and stared at the sky. Every atom of her body tingled when she caught the first whiff of the smoke, and she hesitated for a breath before waving the joint away. She didn't smoke if she wasn't sure about the product or the people she was with. They passed it back and forth over her until it had burned down to a stub, then opened the bottle of grocery-store wine. That was easier to refuse; she'd never been able to stand cheap wine.
“If we can get a crop of half-decent shit, I know a guy back home that'll get us good money for it,” Pierce said.
“Thought you said your buddy just got busted last week.”
“Yeah, 'cause he's a dickhead. Not that one, I mean another guy back on the Shore. People call him Stevo. His brother cooks and he deals. They've got the sheriff and half the county in their pocket, he can move anything. Does cocaine and meth mostly, smokes a lot of it himself but he's a pretty chill businessman. If I get it back there, he can take it off our hands at a fair price.”
Becky closed her ears to the conversation. She found it funny the way that Pierce talked like he'd done it all before: back home only Donnie had ever been his dealer. She figured that he'd been too scared of Stevo to ever buy direct from him, and now he was talking about setting up as a supplier to the guy like they were old buddies, going back to the place he'd run away from to make the kind of life he wanted. As much as he trash-talked where he was from, she didn't think she'd mind living there. Isolation made her feel safe.
There was a breeze up on the ridge, like thin, cold fingers, lifting her sweat-stiff shirt from her skin.
Pierce had taken her up to the farm for the first time a week after they met, a week before he decided that they were together. They'd laid sleeping bags out on the front porch and watched the sunrise, and had wild crazy monkey sex that she'd not really enjoyed, but she figured it was because she was new to it all and it would feel better as she got used to it. It was autumn then, and the mountain had been a blaze of red and yellow, and they'd sat on a fallen tree at one of the overlooks for hours, watching birds diving, and making out in an exploratory fashion. She fingered the tooth in her pocket.
The walk back down to the farmhouse was faster than the ascent, as they went straight down the face of Porter Mountain,
rather than up the zigzag path over the ridge. The conversation had slowed, as had their movements, and Becky found herself casting around in the grass beside the path. Her friend Jamey called her a finder, said she was a living dowsing rod for picking up interesting shit. She found snail shells in the dust, empty shotgun cartridges, deer prints embedded in dried mud. They nearly stepped on a painted box turtle, but she left him behind. As they neared the farm the shadows deepened until they were moving through a vague purple twilight.
Something struck against her shoe as she followed Pierce, and Becky bent to unearth it from the tangle of long grass. It took a moment for her to register the curved shape as the jawbone of a cow, most of its teeth still set in their sockets. Insects and decay had bleached it white and scraped it clean, and she turned it over for a moment before tucking it under her arm and wandering after the guys. They were nearly back, and she could see the cows in huddles around the troughs as they climbed the fences and strolled toward the house.
Down in the meadow in front of the house was an old fire ring, and at some point in the course of the day the boys had filled in the missing stones and gathered up a heap of downed tree limbs. When she caught them up they had begun building a bonfire.
“Hey, Becky, go up and put some hamburgers together, will you?” Pierce called to her when she came in sight. “We're cooking out here tonight.”
She considered telling him to do it himself, but thought better of it and went back up to the house, leaving the jawbone on the porch.
There was a smattering of stars high in the sky when she
came back with a plate of raw hamburgers, and the edge above the western mountains was fading to pale turquoise. The boys had dug up an old grill grate and balanced it across the rocks in a corner of the uneven ring, and she carefully dropped the discs of meat onto it, where they steamed and seared to the metal. She sat down next to Pierce and snuggled into him. His shorts had ridden up, and she traced over the upside-down tattoo on his thigh. A friend had done it for him, one time when they'd gotten really fucked up together.
“You've been pretty quiet all day,” he said to her. “What's with this cuddly shit all of a sudden?”
“I need to talk to you about something,” she whispered back to him.
“Like what?” he asked.
“It's kinda private.”
“Anything you want to talk to me about, you can say in front of Dave,” he said. “Go on. Am I not screwing you enough or something? Because we talked about that before.”
She wanted to just lay it on him, to get back at him for getting her into this. She wanted to see him lose his shit right there, right then. She almost told him.
“Nah, it can wait,” she said instead, and ran a hand over her firm belly. The smell of burning meat made her nauseous. “It's not like it's going anywhere.”
1981
S
KIRT
S
he shouldn't have been wearing a skirt, Bo said to us after. It was her own damn fault. But what did he want Ellie to do, go to her aunt's funeral in dungarees and work boots? My guess is he didn't want her working with us at all, wanted her to keep her smart ass in the house where it belonged. Didn't matter to him that the fifties were over and done with; he probably figured she'd stolen the job from some well-deserving man with a family to raise.
It was a Thursday. We were fixing up a Victorian on the edge of Belle Haven. The original builders had crammed all the plumbing into the one wall between the kitchen and the bathroom, to save on cost and make things easier. We'd ripped out the wall between the two first thing, so the studs and pipes stuck up out of the floor like tulip stems after the flowers had died. Tiny had been set to take out the old handicapped toilet with me helping, and Chick and Bo were stood in the kitchen checking the joints in the copper piping.
Ellie didn't plumb. She was in the far corner of the kitchen levering up the heart-of-pine floor a board at a time, knocking out the nails, and stacking them on the porch next to the shoe
molding she'd already ripped up. She pulled up the age-dark boards slow and gentle, easing apart the tongue-and-groove like she was bathing a baby. Bo would've ragged on her about that, but when she got done you couldn't tell the floorboards were secondhand except for the nail holes, and that made them worth more. Once the expensive flooring was out we wouldn't have to bother as much with carefulness, nothing underneath but joists and subfloor.
When we fixed up a house we pulled out the pretty bits first: the enameled cast-iron bathtubs with the claw-and-ball feet, the watery window glass, the hand-milled egg-and-dart molding. Our boss, Paul Lovett, sold all the little pieces off right away to retired city types that thought restoring a vintage house on their own would be a fun way to hurry up an early death, and couldn't bring themselves to finish it off with modern, mass-produced trim and fixtures. Then we'd fix the leaks in the roof and the shorts in the wiring, fit out the place with new Sheetrock, Kohler sinks, and double-glazed windows. When it was done, or sometimes just before, Lovett would sell it, usually to some young couple that wanted a historic home without all the drafts and falling plaster. More recently, the “just before” buyers had become scarce, and the finished houses usually sat for a few weeks, like dollhouses in the toy store in January.
We had a paint-splattered black plastic radio blaring old Country, so we didn't hear tires on the gravel driveway. Me and Tiny wrenched up the toilet and went to carry it through the kitchen and out onto the back porch when I saw the girl hanging against the doorway, hesitating to come in. She was tall and narrow, with too much pink brushed on her face trying to hide
all the freckles. I'd seen her and Ellie together before. Since I was the only one that had noticed her I kicked the side of Ellie's boot as I passed to make her turn around. She popped up with her flatbar in hand to take a shot at me, then saw the girl in the door and changed her mind. They went out onto the rotting porch and Tiny and me followed them slowly, to get the toilet out of the way. They'd gone off under the oak tree by the driveway, next to the girl's dented brown Chevelle, and some of their conversation drifted over. The tone didn't sound so good. We left the toilet by the back steps. I fiddled the knob on the radio down when I went past, hoping there was going to be some explaining when they got through.
Ellie came back in, and we heard the girl's car pull out. Tiny had started in on the sink, and I was waiting to be useful, so we were all in a bunch around the old copper piping when she tapped Chick on the shoulder. No one else looked up, but I reckon Tiny and Bo were about as curious as me.
“My dad's sister died. Funeral's in Salisbury tomorrow.”
Chick made an “I'm sorry” noise. The rest of us pretended not to hear. “How'd it happen?” he asked.
“Drunk driver. Ain't much left to bury.”
“Wanna go home and we'll see you Monday?”
“Nah, I'll be good for the rest of today. Do need to go to the funeral, though, if you can spare me.”
Chick nodded an affirmative. She went to the next room, the dining room before we'd emptied it down to plaster, and picked out the ten-pound sledge from the tools leaning against the wall.
“Hey, El, who was the hot skirt?” Bo shouted after her. “I'd sure like a piece of that!”
The sledge hit the wall; bits of plaster pattered to the ground. “My baby sister, you asshole.” She pulled the fractured plaster free from the slender lathes, and whacked it again.
“No way in hell she's your sister, with that rack.”
Whack, patter.
“Give lipstick a shot one day, maybe then someone other than your dog'll want to put his mouth near you.”
“Go to hell, Bo.” She stripped the wall to lathes and studs, shoveled up the fragments, then went back to pulling up boards.
Bo gave her hell pretty much all the time, but she stuck it out. Sometimes Tiny joined in, but Chick never said anything. Chick was foreman: he made sure the job got done, but he wasn't there to babysit. He probably would have shut them up if it had slowed down the work or if they'd started taking swings at each other. I was mostly glad they weren't going after me: I was barely nineteen and not more than a carpenter's helper. Bo really got into it sometimes, but Tiny usually just listened, a funny smile on his face. He was tall and skinny, worked fast and didn't talk much, but the way he watched people sometimes made me go cold all over. I'd run into Ellie once, having a beer at Charlie's one night, and asked her if Bo's bullyragging didn't get to her.
“I'd rather have Bo talking shit than Tiny looking at me the way he does,” she said, and I decided I would've felt the same way if I were a girl. It wasn't like she had much choice; there weren't any jobs on the entire Shore unless she could stand line work at the Perdue plant making half the money even on swing shift. A lot of people were glad when all the chicken factories showed up on Accomack Island, but you can smell the
stink from miles away, and take-home pay's so small it makes you want to cry. Bo or Tiny might've liked it, killing chickens eight hours a day, but I couldn't think of many other people who would.
Nothing went right that Friday. We got there in the morning to find that some jackoff had lifted the handicapped toilet from the back porch. That's three hundred bucks just walked off, probably coming out of Chick's pay, so he stood there cussing for a fair minute.
A skunk had come in after the half a peanut butter sandwich Tiny had left sitting by the radio, and sprayed Bo when we tried to kick it out. He changed clothes and doused himself with pickling vinegar from the little general store a ways down the road, but that didn't do much for the kitchen. We decided to ignore it and get on with the work.
Tiny and me had begun ripping out the baseboards in the bathroom, carefully; we'd found mice at other jobs, rotting lumps of fur and bone. The baseboards here were just flat pine, a broad one and a skinny one knocked together to make an “L” shape, so the wires could be tacked to the wall underneath it. They hadn't bothered to go under the walls when they wired the house for electricity, just run it along under the baseboards or poked it into the gap beneath the plaster. Since new plaster takes months to cure it makes sense to do it that way, but when you go to fix the wires you see that it's a snarled mess just waiting to start a fire, and if you're honest you rip it all out and start from the beginning. There were a few plastic-covered lengths
here and there, but all the old wire was insulated with raw cotton and cloth strips. Some of it, around the light fixture, was burned and crisped from when lightning had struck the house.
Wiring was Ellie's job; she told Chick when she first started working with us that she learned it all from following her daddy around. She'd gone to the funeral though, so Bo took a crack at it so we could Durock the bathroom over and call it done. He shocked himself right off, and anyone could see that he didn't have the first idea what he was doing, so Chick told him to leave it and to take up where Ellie had left off prying up the kitchen floor, which he didn't like. A few hours later Tiny went out on the back porch for a smoke, stepped through a rotted patch, and fell through up to his waist into the spidery cavity beneath. When we pulled him out we found something else to worry about: an entire tribe of feral cats had set up camp under the porch. We turfed them out ourselves instead of wasting breath on animal control, and the beasts were docile enough until Bo started up the compressor while I had one draped over each arm. A compressor sounds like a jackhammer's little brother, and makes me start even when I'm expecting it; those cats climbed straight up me and tore for the woods out back.
Chick wandered off at that point, told us to take early lunch and a smoke break and headed down the road toward the village. He came back half an hour later with a handle of bottom-shelf whiskey from the ABC in Belle Haven, twice as much as he usually got, swabbed it on mine and Tiny's scratches, then passed it around so we could each take a swig before hiding it away for card night. The skunk had gnawed through the power cord of our radio, and when we realized that we almost packed it in right there. Working without music, even crap music, makes
time drag on forever. The day was capped off with Tiny dropping one of the kitchen windows and shattering five of the six watery panes.
We all had headaches from the skunk spray, and should have taken that as a sign and given up for the day, but we stuck it out another hour until Paul Lovett showed up with the payroll. He and Chick walked off a way like they always did to talk over how we were getting on, and we could tell Chick wasn't happy by the way he ran his hand over and over through his crinkled black hair. Lovett didn't look too thrilled either by the time the wad of green was handed over. He hopped in his truck and crunched off back toward Parksley, and we all gathered up on the porch to collect.
“It's a low week,” Chick told us as he counted out bills. “Some effer bounced a check on a load of windowpanes, so we're all taking a cut in exchange for a bonus when this place is finished.”
“You could've run that by us before you said yes,” Tiny cut in.
“It's a hundred now for a couple hundred later. Our other option was a permanent cut. The market's as stable as a drunk's aimâI'm getting us as good a deal as possible out of this.” He handed over my pay.
“That ain't legal, is it?” I suggested.
“When you start paying income tax you can start talking âlegal,' kid. Don't tell me you do, 'cause I know none of us do.” He looked at me in that sharp way he did, out of one eye, that reminded me of my grandpa when he was only partly joking. “Anyway. I buy the booze for card night, cut or no. Go home after instead of hitting the bars, you're even again.”
“If you get through a Friday night on a hundred, you drink like a pussy,” Tiny guffawed, then took a tenner from each of us and walked off toward town to make change for betting.
The rest of us went up to one of the bedrooms. First thing we'd done when we started on this house was strip off the decades of wallpaper laid thick one on top of the next, took every room down to the scratchcoat and swept the floor clean so we could suss the job and plan it out. Otherwise, we'd left the upstairs alone. It was a pretty room; the ceiling high and the windows large and trimmed in hand-milled molding, the heart-of-pine floorboards twelve inches wide and blood red from age, a fireplace with a mantelpiece all plaster curls and wreaths. The wiring on that circuit was bad, so we had a big battery-operated camping lantern that we kept with the tools; the early-summer sun had already dipped below the trees. Bo brushed bird shit and crumbled ceiling off the packing crate in the middle of the room before setting the lantern down. I'd brought up the milk crates we'd “borrowed” from Food Lion, and Chick wiped out the Mason jars that lived in a crooked line on the mantelpiece when we weren't drinking from them. We settled down on the milk crates and played a few rounds of Smack, waiting for Tiny to get back.
While we sat there we heard an engine down on the driveway, and a car door slamming. There was a cuss from the back porch, presumably at the lingering eau de skunk, then the sound of flip-flops thwacking up the stairs. Ellie showed up in the doorway, dressed in borrowed black and white: the top tight and stretched across her chest, the skirt safety-pinned on one side. She looked like a waitress.
“Damn, what the hell happened to the porch?” she asked.
“Good funeral?” Chick asked back, and cleared the table.
“Sucked ass, but I didn't expect any different.” She threw herself down and stared accusingly into the bottom of an empty Mason jar.
“What the fuck are you dressed as?” This from Bo.
“A lady.”
“Do you have peaches or baseballs stuffed in there?” he asked.
“Nah, they're mine. Where's the bourbon?” She rolled her jar around on the crate.
“We're waiting on Tiny to get back.”
“Just a shot to start me off?”
“The bottle doesn't get opened until we're all here.” Chick put his cards down and reached around to his pocket. “Figured you'd want in, so I gave him a ten for you.” He handed over her pay, and explained why it was less than usual. She stared at him without responding; you got the idea that she didn't really care. Probably wore out from the funeral.
“We cleared a heap of cats out from under the porch today,” I told her. “Clawed the shit out of us.”
She didn't look up, just sat there with her arms on her thighs fiddling with the bent corner of one of the jokers.