Read Nearer Than the Sky Online
Authors: T. Greenwood
Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Family Life, #Psychological, #General
Nearer Than the Sky (10 page)
I
walked carefully around the back of the house to find Benny. He discovered this hiding space by accident one day, but now he used it every time we played hide-n-seek or whenever he just needed a place to hide. So I knew now without seeking that he was under the porch, lying flat on his belly where I wouldn’t even put my hand for fear of what might live there. What might appear to anyone else as cowardice (this slithering on the ground and under the broken latticework of our house to get away) actually showed incredible bravery.
walked carefully around the back of the house to find Benny. He discovered this hiding space by accident one day, but now he used it every time we played hide-n-seek or whenever he just needed a place to hide. So I knew now without seeking that he was under the porch, lying flat on his belly where I wouldn’t even put my hand for fear of what might live there. What might appear to anyone else as cowardice (this slithering on the ground and under the broken latticework of our house to get away) actually showed incredible bravery.
“Benny,” I said. “Come out. It’s over.”
He didn’t answer.
“Benny, you can come out now. Daddy went to work.”
I could see Benny through the lattice. His face was in his hands.
Ma came around the corner then, still wearing her nightie. She was holding Lily on her hip, even though Lily’s feet nearly touched the ground. She and Daddy had been fighting about the Miss Desert Flower contest again. This time Daddy gave in. He was tired. I could see it in the way he finally just shrugged and threw up his hands. He didn’t even bother slamming the car door this time.
“Where’s your brother?” she asked, looking around the backyard. Then she saw the soles of his dirty sneakers. His feet were as big as Daddy’s now. Bigger even.
“Benny,” she said, leaning down as far as she could with the extra weight of Lily.
I bent down too, sticking my head near the opening where he had crawled, and whispered, “I’ll take you down to the creek if you come out.”
His feet moved and then he was shimmying backward out from under the porch. When he stood up, he was covered with red clay. It would take Ma an hour to get it off of him, and it wouldn’t ever come all the way out of his clothes.
“We’re going swimmin’?” he asked, probably forgetting why he’d gone under there to begin with.
“Sure,” I said. “Go inside and get your swim trunks.”
“We’re going swimmin’,” he was clapping his hands together and hopping up and down on one leg. “I gotta get my new trunks. I gotta find my new swim trunks.”
Benny hopped awkwardly through the back door into the house. He’d grown almost five inches since the summer before. He didn’t know what to do with all that height.
“Indie,” my mother reprimanded.
“What?” I asked, imitating her annoyed tone of voice.
“He needs to learn to mind without bribing him.”
“I was going anyway,” I said. “It’s hot.”
Ma could fight with Daddy, scream and slam doors and throw things until she was almost blue, and then suddenly allow this certain peace to descend upon her.You never knew when the yelling would stop, but when it did, her voice went gentle. From bitter to smooth warm milk within seconds. And today she’d won, and she was happy.
“Okay. Be back in a couple of hours,” she smiled, rocking back and forth with Lily still on her hip.
I grabbed my backpack and Benny found his trunks, which were still soggy from the last time we went to the creek. I made him put them in an old bread bag to keep them from getting my stuff all wet. I had suggested that he put them on and let them dry while we walked, but there was no arguing with Benny. He did things his own way, even if it didn’t make too much sense to the rest of us.
“Did you see that?” he asked just after I accidentally let the screen door slam shut behind me.
“Indie!” my mother screeched. Her transformation from calm to hysterical was just as quick as the reverse.
“Sorry, Ma!” I hollered back and followed Benny’s gesture to the front yard.
“It was a giant mouse!” he said, looking quickly from me to a spot on the grass.
“Are you sure?”
He nodded and pointed again. “It was brown and it ran under the porch. It looked like that mouse we found in the dryer. ’Member? ’Member the one that was dead inside the dryer and got rolled up in Daddy’s T-shirt? ’Member, Indie?”
“That was just a field mouse. It was probably a squirrel.” I shifted the heavy backpack so that the weight of it was even across my shoulders. “Let’s go.” I took his hand and tugged gently. His large hand closed over mine and he resisted my pull.
“It was a giant mouse,” he insisted, staring sadly at the front lawn. “I’m gonna go under that porch again and find him.”
“Okay, Benny,” I nodded. “We’ll look for it when we get back. But let’s go so we can get a good spot by the creek.”
“It was brown and it had squinty eyes.”
“Okay, Benny. We’ll look for it later. Come on.”
His grip loosened on my hand, and he followed behind me, tripping as he turned his head back to look for the mouse.
To get to the creek from our house without crossing the train tracks you had to go all the way out to Depot Street and then go under the overpass to get to Highway 79. It was a lot quicker to go the back way, though, through the field behind our house, through the woods, and then across the tracks to the highway. Of course, we always pretended that we were going the long way, and then when I was pretty sure Ma was preoccupied with something else, we would edge along the side of the garage and make a run for the woods. It was hard with Benny because he made so much noise. But he was learning to be quiet. If I had taught him anything it was how to make Ma think he was doing exactly what she wanted him to do.
Today, Benny was distracted by the so-called giant mouse, so I had to remind him to squat down and walk like a duck under the kitchen window so Ma wouldn’t see our heads bobbing along. He finally stopped looking for the mouse and quietly followed me to the garage, where we crawled through the waist-high grass in the field and then ran to the woods.
“I didn’t make a single sound,” Benny said when we got to the tree I’d designated as the safety zone, where he could talk. “Not even a breathing sound.”
“I know Benny, you did great,” I said. I was out of breath. It was hard to run with my backpack on.
“I almost made a breathing sound when I stubbed my toe on that rock, but I held it inside,” he said, pointing to his chest. “Deep down.”
“I didn’t hear you at all,” I said and pulled the backpack off. My shoulders ached.
“Did you bring my new swim trunks?” Benny asked, tugging at his earlobe.
“Benny, you saw me put the bag inside the backpack.”
“Can I see them?”
“No,” I said, pulling the backpack back on.
“You brought them inside that bread bag because they were wet. Right, Indie?”
“Shhh,” I said. “Let’s go.”
I loved the walk through the woods to the tracks. The Ponderosa pines smelled so sweet in the summertime, like butterscotch, some people said. The ground was completely covered with their spiny needles. I could have lived my whole life here, surrounded by the giant trees. It was cool and dark and quiet.
Daddy was the kind of person who didn’t like the woods. He wasn’t happy unless he was somewhere with a lot of noise and people. When he bought the bar from a friend and moved all of us to Mountainview from California, he’d never been anywhere in Arizona except for Phoenix. He didn’t know that up here there was almost nothing but woods. Of course, like Daddy always said, wherever there are people, there will be bars. And if a bar was open, there would always be someone who needed a drink. There was always somebody to talk to at Rusty’s, always some story to hear. Daddy didn’t even mind if he’d heard a story a thousand times. He’d rest his elbows on the smooth, polished wood of the bar and listen to Simon telling tired old Vietnam stories, or Nancy talking about the way her boyfriend used to make her the prettiest Indian jewelry before he got his fingers cut off in the factory. And how now all he did was smoke weed and watch basketball on TV. Daddy wouldn’t trade the sound of Johnny Cash on the jukebox and the music of the cue ball clacking against the other balls on the smooth green felt of the pool table for anything. I loved it too, but sometimes all that noise got my tongue confused. The sounds of the bar tasted like cigarette smoke and sour lemons. I could only take the bitter olive of Nancy’s sadness and the sickly sweet maraschino cherry of Sheila’s flirting before I longed for the forest.
Benny liked the woods too, but only during the day. He wouldn’t even go near the edge of the forest at night. But now he was skipping and tripping over his big feet through the maze of trunks and branches. He was happy here. He almost never cried in the woods.
After not too long, the woods opened up again to Highway 79, which ran all the way down into the canyon. But to get to the road, you had to cross the tracks. It wasn’t as safe here as it was in town, where there were flashing lights and wooden arms that descended to protect you every time a train went by. Out here, you needed to put your ear to the ground and listen because it was easy to confuse the sound of the train with the sound of your own breaths or the wind whistling through the tops of the trees.
“Benny, come here,” I said and motioned for him to join me as I knelt down to the ground.
We had done this before. He lay down on the ground, pressing his ear against the cool gravel near the tracks, and squeezed his eyes shut.
“I don’t hear nothin’,” he said, opening his eyes. “It’s safe.”
I raised my eyebrows at him. “Are you sure?” I could feel the train through the thin soles of my flip-flops.
“You check, Indie,” he said. “I don’t know, maybe I heard somethin’.”
“No,” I said. “I trust you.” I started to stand.
“Stop,” he said. “Just a minute. Let me try again.”
I smiled.
“I hear it, I hear it!” he squealed. “It’s coming!”
“Good, Benny,” I said. “Looks like you just saved my life.”
“I just about saved your life,” he said. “Phew.”
“Let’s move back,” I said, pulling him back away from the tracks.
Within seconds the train approached us; the bright yellow light on the front could have been the sun. Benny yelled into the scream of the train, trying to match its noise with his own. When the caboose rolled past he waved frantically to the conductor, who looked startled to see such a tall boy grinning and jumping and screaming. He returned the gesture and Benny kept waving until the train was gone and the ground was still and soundless again. Only then did he tentatively step across the trembling tracks to the other side.
I don’t like to swim. That’s not why I liked to go to the creek. Benny was the swimmer in our family. Swimming was the one thing he was truly good at. In the water he could have been any other fourteen-year-old boy. In the water everything else just floated away.
We went to our usual spot, hoping that tourists hadn’t already discovered it. Weekends were always a little risky, and there was nothing worse than tourists spreading out their godawful beach towels on the smooth gray rocks that were rightfully ours. Nothing worse than some old lady with frosted hair spilling her suntan oil in the clean water. Sometimes the rainbows of oil would last for days after the tourists had already gone home.
We crawled down through the woods and across the wobbly bridge to Benny’s favorite place. There were no people here. It was only the end of May. Too early in the year for tourists, I guess.
Benny pulled off his cutoffs, grabbed the orange bread bag with his mildewy suit inside, and went behind a tree to change. When he came back out the other side, he disappeared into the creek. I sat down on my favorite rock. It was only inches from the water; when the creek was high, the running water would sometimes splash over the rock, touching me with its wet fingers. If I lay on my back it felt almost as if I were swimming. This was the closest I ever came to going in.
But there was no time to dream-swim today. Inside the backpack I had the books I’d been carrying around for a month. One was a high school geometry textbook I bought at the school library book sale. The other was Ma’s Sears catalog. I would have torn out the page instead of lugging that thing around, but I was afraid she would have noticed. Ma knew the catalog like the lines in the palms of her hands. The pages were dog-eared and worn. Pink ruffly party dresses. Shiny white buckled shoes. I knew that she wanted these things for Lily, but that we didn’t have the money. These dresses were the blueprints for the patterns she pieced together to the make the homemade versions we
could
afford. And to me, the dress that hung from a curtain rod in my parents’ bedroom looked just as good as any in this catalog, but I’d watched her hold the catalog up to the dress she made and shake her head.
could
afford. And to me, the dress that hung from a curtain rod in my parents’ bedroom looked just as good as any in this catalog, but I’d watched her hold the catalog up to the dress she made and shake her head.
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