Melanie Thon - Meteors in August

Red Elk stayed at the mill for a few months and had no trouble with my father. Daddy knew the big Indian had brought his Nina home, and he knew that a different kind of man might have killed him the night of the fire. After Caleb Wolfe left town, some folks urged Red Elk to run for sheriff, but he refused: he wanted no part of our law.

I thought about the big Indian a lot. He had saved our family three times. He saved my father by keeping Lanfear Deets alive, and he spared me from damnation when he rescued Zachary Holler. He gave us all a second chance the day he found Nina. This man whom Father once chased from our town did not weigh good and evil. He did not live by the laws of our God: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. He did what he thought was right, and never stopped to ask himself if we deserved his mercy.

I wanted to live by his code, but I had enough trouble just trying to be good, keeping myself from saying nasty things to Marlene Grosswilder, or leaving surprises in her locker. I made an effort not to speculate on exactly what Eula and Luella Lockwood did in their tub for four hours every day, but it was difficult to keep my mind from wandering and stop my tongue from flapping. I kept seeing Myron gripping the pencil, writing: I try to be good, but sometimes I can’t help myself .

Of course I knew that my bargain with the devil was nonbinding. He was never going to knock on my door, looking to collect his due. The devil didn’t want me, and God hadn’t even noticed my father’s passing illness. He hadn’t heard the frenzy of my pleas and confessions. If it was true that the devil who loved attention went after only the best souls, he probably recognized me as one very much like himself. My soul was not prime territory. I was no saint, no martyr. I never had the gift of speaking in a tongue only God could understand. I babbled worthless gibberish. I wasn’t one of the chosen any more than Myron Evans or Minnie Hathaway was. We were hungry. That was what we shared. It was only the depth of that hunger that set us apart for a time. We weren’t marked for goodness, but we weren’t lucky enough to be extraordinarily bad, either.

I was alone, all of us were. God had created the world and let it spin. The Father of the rain took no notice of our daily struggles. I finally accepted my mother’s god, the god with no mouth to whisper answers in the night, the god with no ears to hear the cries of the living or the drowned, the god with no hands to raise me up or beat me down.

If I managed to do something right in my life, it would be small and have entirely earthly dimensions. I was bound to make a lot of mistakes and cause grief to others, probably those I loved best. And when I did, no great hand would strike my head in retribution, not my father’s, not the Lord’s.

One more person left Willis that summer: Ruby Holler disappeared before Zachary’s hands healed. As Nina said, it wasn’t surprising when women ran away, it was only surprising that so many stayed.

At school I looked for Gwen. I thought I might say something kind to her and she might say something back. But she didn’t come to school that fall, and I thought maybe she’d gone after her mother. If she screws, I’ll be right behind her , she said that summer night so long ago when we’d slept in her trailer. I got up the nerve to ask Zack, but I couldn’t find him at school either. So it was Coe Carson I cornered in the schoolyard one blustery afternoon in mid-December. He didn’t have a hat and his ears burned a brilliant red. I said, “Hey, Coe,” and he looked at me as he always did, blank as ice, not knowing me from one month to the next. “Lizzie Macon,” I said, “Gwen’s friend.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, kicking the snow, “I remember.”

“I’m looking for Zack.”

“You won’t find him.”

“Actually I’m looking for Gwen.”

“Won’t find her either.” He thrust his bare hands in his pockets and hunched against the wind. It was only four o’clock but almost dark.

“They leave town?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well what — exactly?”

“I can’t tell you,” he said, backing away. I grabbed his coat sleeve and he jerked free, spinning and sprinting across the crusty snow. I broke out after him; he was long-legged but I was strong. If I caught him, I meant to tackle him and hold him down till he talked.

But Coe couldn’t keep running in the cold. He stopped and turned, panting, his breath a white cloud in front of his face. “They don’t want to see you,” he said. “They don’t want to see anyone. They won’t answer the door. They won’t even answer the phone.”

He’d told me all I needed to know. Gwen was still in town. I jogged toward the Hollers’ house. At the very least, I was determined to look at her, to see if there was still anything between us. I knew her house as well as my own; all I had to do was get inside. The back door was locked, and I wasn’t bold enough to try the front — I thought I’d have to take her by surprise. I walked around the house a dozen times, looking up at every window, hoping to find one cracked open, but there were no open windows in Willis in the middle of December.

Finally I did see a woman’s shape behind the blinds of the upstairs bathroom, but it couldn’t have been Gwen. I figured Gwen’s father already had some big lady living with him, some ugly woman grateful enough to mend his jeans and wash his pants, some poor widow with a nasty disposition who made Gwen ashamed to come to school and answer people’s questions about her mother leaving town.

The wind died down and left the clear sky whirling with stars. My stomach growled. I decided to come back and try the next day and the day after that and the day after, until one day a careless hand left the back door unlocked. Then I remembered the door inside the garage that led to a back hallway. I had one last chance.

I stumbled in the dark, through the clutter of bikes and boxes until I held the cold knob in my hand. It gave and I ducked inside, safe and terrified. I flattened myself against the wall and listened. There was no pounding on the stairs, no shouts or slamming doors.

I darted through the living room, where the air hung thick with dusk. Any minute I imagined all the lights would blaze and I would stand like a fool, blinking and blind, staring down the barrel of some tough boy’s rifle with no way to explain myself. But I made it to the other side of the house and up the stairs without Zack or Gwen or the swaybacked lady in the bathroom hearing me. Now I stood at Gwen’s door, my hands flat on the smooth wood, knowing I had no right to enter or even knock, knowing she might spit in my face; I was nothing more than an intruder, a burglar with only a girl’s privacy to steal.

I tapped, lightly, thinking she might not hear me and I’d be free to go. Maybe that lady would come galloping after me, her flesh quivering, and run me out of the house. If she stopped to ask Gwen who I was, Gwen would deny she knew me and the woman would boot me down the stairs.

But Gwen did hear my knuckles on her door, and she didn’t ask, “Who is it?” Instead, softly, she said, “Come in,” expecting no strangers, no former friends.

She looked up as I opened the door, and I was the one too stunned to speak. I squeezed my eyes shut; but when I opened them, the girl on the bed still looked the same. The fat lady in the bathroom was Gwen, and here she sat, her belly bulging, her face swollen, her stringy hair unwashed and uncombed.

“Close your mouth before you catch flies,” she said. “It’s me.” I stared at her bare feet; even they were fat. “None of my shoes fit,” she said. “Dr. Ben says that some of the things that make the baby grow make parts of me grow too. Look at my hands.” She spread her fingers under the little lamp near her bed. The lampshade had dancing teddy bears and red rocking horses. I inched closer to study her hands. She said, “Don’t be afraid. You can’t catch it, not from me.”