Thunderhead

The ground was cold under David’s shoulder blades despite the heat of the day. Cold and with an incipient damp just beneath the grass soaking into his T-shirt because of how long he’d lain here, bucking against Scott to no avail, twisting, writhing, his wrists squeezed in the viselike grip of Scott’s hands and his biceps pinned under the force and weight of Scott’s knees — a force to make his hands numb and his pulse beat into his armpits with a zinging tingling pressure. In his head, he was indestructible. He was a fallen prince from another world like in the books he read. A boy wizard with unknown powers. Partner in a world-renowned comedy duo with Raymie, Scott’s little brother, roaming the fields together and calling the cows in — Come, boss! Come, boss! Soo-eey! — and never failing to find good things to riff on and laugh about and also never failing to locate and round up all fifty-eight cows with their bonging neck bells and their hooves sucking in and out of the muck, their tails twisting up unabashedly and sphincters pulsating wide to emit mounds of greasy manure as they ran from the pasture together, mooing and shitting all the way; later, pausing in the work of shoveling shit and sawdust postmilking (the only tasks he and Raymie were to be entrusted with at their age, aside from roundup) the game continued, the two of them singing into their shovel handles like they were mic stands and swinging and swaggering around each other, laughing, scraping up shit and throwing down new sawdust and hay for the next round of milking as the lake of cow shit at the back end of the barn simmered with flies and humidity in the late August heat. After a certain point in the day’s work, he’d noticed the manure stopped smelling grassy and vaguely good or at least biologically familiar, pungent in a healthful way, and instead took on a more noxious ammonia smell combined with all the piss and sawdust and chemicals involved in turning it to liquid fertilizer. 

And now here he was pinned, not a funny guy, not a fallen prince or a young wizard, no one’s friend or partner and nothing in the way of special powers to help him, just stuck, helpless and disappointed in himself, probably forever. What had even happened? What was the fight between him and Scott about, and how had he done so badly, so fast? He didn’t remember, but the takedown had been swift and abrupt, like it must have been weeks or years in the making, Scott hated him that much — boom — and now he was pinned. Scott’s beaky nose and helmet of yellow hair loomed over him, backlit, the square orange tip of his tongue protruding from behind his crooked teeth as he allowed a rope of saliva yellowed with snot and other effluvia horked up from the back of his throat to dangle closer and closer to David’s face before sucking it back up into his mouth. Laughing. Horking up more snot and then dangling the saliva again, the globule at the end of it eddying closer, closer. And at the last minute, sucking it back. David twisted his head one way and the other to avoid the eventual warm slide of saliva going across his face, maybe into his ear, where it would pool and turn cold and be hard to scrub away. 

“Little shit,” Scott said. “Little faggot.” And then leaning closer, puckering his cheeks to draw more saliva into his mouth, “Oh, oh, watch out, here it comes!” Was he jealous of how much fun David and Raymie were always having together? Jealous that anyone would pay attention to Raymie rather than to him? David could almost imagine how he might escape. If he went totally limp, eventually Scott would grow overconfident enough to let up, release David’s wrist and use a free hand to push David’s head around one way or the other to line it up with the spit. And then, if he timed it just right he’d be able to reach up and grab Scott’s hair, a solid handful of it, and then pull and pull until he could writhe and wriggle his way free. Probably not before the spit had landed on his forehead and run partway down one side of his nose or cheek, familiar as tears but thicker. As long as it didn’t get into his mouth or ear or one of his eyes . . . Meanwhile, he was as stuck as ever, his hands getting number, becoming part of the grass and soil; the pinging through his armpits faded in and out as blood flow through his arms was cut off more and more, and the sky beyond Scott’s head changed color as the thunderclouds towered higher and higher on the horizon — the gold and red light outlining those clouds signifying the end of summer and the beginning of fall, though it was still blazing hot now. Still summer.

In the milking barn earlier, before the fight, he’d registered the difference immediately without knowing anything like the whole story or what was coming. They’d failed their monthly milk inspection. And now the milking machines were silent, the cows released from their stanchions and sent back out to the holding pen at the end of the barn opposite shit lake, where they’d be milling around in the muck, their bags still full and swollen with milk, some of them maybe on the verge of sepsis or blockage from waiting. “Don’t make them ladies wait!” Raymie and Scott’s father always yelled after them afternoons as they went into the fields to round up the cows and drive them in. And now the cows were being made to wait on purpose, because some shit or hay or bacterially infected milk or some other foreign matter had gotten into the holding tank, or a fly, or some of the dead flybodies dangling from the ancient yellow helical strips of flypaper hanging everywhere throughout the barn and covered in bug corpses. Anyway, something had gotten into a milk bucket, or maybe Scott had decided to spit in the milk tank like he was always threatening. Maybe Raymie had suggested to their father that that was what had happened, that Scott had finally done it, spat in the milk, so Scott had chased them all the way back here to the lawn outside David’s grandmother’s house to prepunish them in return for whatever punishment was coming his way later, and had taken David down first because he was easier to catch than Raymie, newer to beat up on, and then pinned him for what felt like hours. What might in actual fact have been hours. Meanwhile, where was Raymie now? Probably having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich back at his house. Long gone. But this was why he liked Raymie so much — because he was halfway impervious and looking for a joke or something to eat regardless of the situation. No sign of their older brother, Peyton, either. Or of David’s grandmother. Which was a good thing. What was she doing inside? Was she inside? He hoped she might never look out here to witness this shaming. 

The coolness of the milking barn earlier, though, as they’d gone in and down the stairs, just below grade on one side and shielded from the sun . . . it had been a relief in a way that coincided weirdly with the realization that there were no cows — no sound of cows anywhere, no hum of the vacuum system propelling their milking machines. Instead, Scott and Raymie’s dad was up on a ladder wearing black rubber gloves and using a pressure hose and some bleachy chemical formulation to power wash the tank and the floor and the whole room, to sanitize everything. “Lost a half tank of milk. At least a hundred gallons. Gone. So you boys get the day off. Like that was worth it. Pretty funny! Now get out of here.” And he’d aimed the hose at them and squeezed once, spraying water to send them back up, and up again, out of the barn and into the sweltering humid heat flashing at them from the sandy dirt in the parking lot, where they could still see the fresh imprint of the milk inspector’s tire treads in the parking space closest to the milking barn’s entryway. David’s grandfather would not be in his “business” office just above and to the right of the entrance to the barn, David knew, because today he was at work in his other office, in the city, at the factory he ran with David’s uncles. This would count as another point against David as Scott and Raymie’s father spent the rest of the day in a chemical haze, trying to erase and undo or at least mitigate damage before David’s grandfather rolled up in his Buick with the top down, demanding an accounting of what exactly had gone wrong. What had caused the contamination. How. And who’s going to fix and pay for it? Not the first time. How much do I pay you to manage this farm? Dirt or disease, they’d need a herd inspection to verify. Have you called the vet yet? his grandfather would want to know. Get him on the line. I don’t care what time it is. Because most likely one of the gals was sick and would need to be taken out of rotation, shot up with antibiotics, and put to pasture awhile or maybe forever, at least until her milk was good again. The vet would go up and down the line shoving his gloved arm all the way to the armpit into one cow’s anus after the next, peeling and tossing aside the glove after each, grabbing up fistfuls of manure for lubrication and making jokes and small talk the whole time. An udder day, an udder dollar, as I always say . . . Why did the cow jump over the moon? She wanted to see the Milky Way! It’s legend-dairy . . .

You mostly forgot about the smell of the milk, being inside it so constantly in the milking barn. The other smells, the ammonia stink of old piss and shit, the sawdust just under that a little sweeter, and the hay sweetest of all, these tended to stick more in his awareness and his memory than the vaguely nauseating smell of milk always climbing the back of his throat and clinging in the humid air like an invisible cheese veil. Like a faint and invisible airborne skein of cheese must. So faint and constant you couldn’t keep it in mind. That is, until he was with his sister and grandparents at mealtimes, at breakfast, like first thing this morning when the milk came his way to pour over his cornflakes as his grandfather talked out his plans for the rest of the day, including something about the upcoming milk inspection, and the smell suddenly hit David in the back of his sinuses, triggering his gag reflex. For a second he couldn’t do it. Couldn’t picture himself pouring out that sanitized white fluid and then eating, knowing as he did where it came from and how it was dragged a bucket at a time through the slop to be dumped in the stainless steel cooling tank with all its gauges and dials, which was like a larger version of the steel buckets they hauled up and down the barn, full of milk or half-full or empty and ready to be rotated back into the vacuum system — the clank of metal on metal as the suction device was attached at one side of the bucket lid and the four tubular metal suckers of the milkers at the other side were quickly tested for suction before being attached to the cow’s teats. The squeaky embarrassing fartlike sound of it sometimes going on. Foop. Her bag hanging there, inches from the ground. Her eating and shitting or suddenly humping up her back a little to spew a stream of urine at the gutter behind her and chewing her cud the whole time, passing the food through her four stomachs as the machine continued to suction milk out of her, and Scott and Raymie’s dad sat by on his milking stool, smoking, a hand or an elbow lifted momentarily to push her back so she didn’t step on his foot. Easy, boss, easy. To square all of that with a glass of fresh, cold, mostly scentless milk from the store-bought carton in the fridge, and then to drink that milk or dump it over your cereal — at times it seemed like more than any reasonable person could expect of him. He didn’t like milk anyway. But at his grandparents’ he always drank it and put it on his cereal because . . . he didn’t know why. Because they all did. And so he got over himself and after the first few bites forgot what he knew about milk and stopped tasting what he was eating at all. 

… …

It was the end of summer, and Rose was at the kitchen window, tapping ash from her cigarette down the drain. A little game she played with herself: if she smoked here in the window, blew smoke out the screen and washed all the evidence down the disposal, did it count? Had she smoked, really? The half pack in the front pocket of her apron — Kents — crinkled as she leaned at the edge of the sink, that sound making her already anticipate and trust longingly in the pleasure of her first real smoke of the day (if the weather held), first smoke in view of her grandkids, anyway; how she’d remove and slide the pack from the apron pocket to her pile of reading, the newspaper folded neatly open to the crossword, reading glasses, pen, lighter, and that novel — what was it called? — all to be brought pondside later, where she could sit and relax a few minutes before seeing about starting dinner; let the smoke waft around her and fill her temples with a rushy buzz of good feeling as she filled in the puzzle blanks at a tempo exactly matched with the ember’s creep through the paper. Rapture, really. The missing words and missing letters — six letters, first letter E, last letter D, downward spun — the pieces of the story she was reading that hadn’t cohered yet, if she got to it, the maple leaves rattling in the wind: this would be all she needed to think about. Maybe then a second cigarette. There was no reflection of herself ghosted in the window as there would be in winter months, when she played the same game, standing here and looking out, but with the window cracked rather than cranked wide, and the fan over the range on full blast. Now there was only the warped black matte of the screen with its familiar divots and tears, and through that the sounds of birdsong. Smells of late berries and drying grass reminding her of all the gardening also immediately ahead. Deadhead the zinnias and pull some of the midsummer bulbs, scratch in more lime and fertilizer before the weather changed, and then make a little effort at pruning back and supporting her babies, the yellow roses, for fall. 

The boys were out there somewhere too now, hidden behind the hydrangea and yelling at each other like there was no one else in the world, Come on, come on, man, and Don’t, and I said knock it off already . . . Laughter. Their voices blew her way and faded again. Fucking faggot. Don’t! Maybe a little more than the usual level of alarm or complaint underlying it, she thought, signifying . . . what? Almost enough alarm to make her put the smoke out and go see. Exert whatever little grandmotherly authority she had with them. Authority based more on cajoling and friendly disapproval combined with offerings of snacks and treats as bribery or just distraction, not punishment. Knock it off! I said don’t, motherfucker. That was her boy. David. Wherever did he learn to talk like that? Well, of course. Where they all did. From each other, from his big sister, from television. And as long as he was cursing his fool head off, it was probably safe to assume that whatever trouble they were into would be harmless pose and bluster. Pretend-manliness and manly rage more than anything worse, though where that could lead . . . Barnyard language stays in the barn and comes off with your muddy shoes at the door, thank you very much, she’d have to remind him later. Did you have fun with Raymie? Anyway, they’d all survive one another and live another day.

Meanwhile there was that seasonal, annual shift going on up there in the heavens, somewhere beyond and behind the clouds — another summer about to be gone, poof — and all the colors reflecting a new angle of sun more autumnal than summery. No doubt the storm and days of rain ahead would bring a clarifying wash of cooler air to make everyone look back on this day and the ones immediately preceding as if they’d never happened, or had happened on some other planet. The blistering heat and sun and humidity would then seem almost unimaginable — and not just because of the changes in season, of course. The children, David and Linda, would have to be sent back to Connecticut soon, very soon, or else be enrolled in school here rather than in Connecticut; if Mary was serious about what she’d been saying lately, that is — about coming home awhile and all the other changes in her life she’d been hinting at for months. Don’t say divorce if you don’t want or need to, honey. Call it whatever you like. But can you agree that something has to be done? 

No! I said . . . Stop, you’re so fucking gross. Oh my gawd! Stop it. STOP. 

Was David crying? The complaint was increasing in volume anyway. She should go offer that pitcher of lemonade and some of his favorite Mallomars. Or Oreos. They all loved the Oreos. Soon anyway. Why wait?

Another golden drag and another. Another.

Now the wind rattled the leaves of the holly closest to the window and swelled through the maples down by the water with a noise like a hose coming on, carrying the boys’ voices away from her. HEY! Hey . . . hey. And she was caught in a temporal eddy, suddenly remembering another summer’s end, many years ago. Before kids and grandkids. A teenager herself then, only a year or two older than Linda. Seventeen? Maurice Berman. She hasn’t thought of him in years. Or no . . . she has. She’s thought of him almost every day, but not directly. Not a full-on sensory recollection of the way his mouth had felt on hers, warm, pliant, absolutely electrifying, absorbing, and how the feelings that came with kissing him had suddenly made sense of the entire adult world for her, answering all of her questions about the pulse underlying life, the mysteries of fads and longings and the excitement of being alive that had seemed to her to drive everyone else in unfathomable ways toward each other and toward all the trends of the day, when in her experience, until Maurice Berman that is, it was a stupid, joyless, and disgusting thing to be tolerated (barely) — romance. Sex. Desire. Being slobbered on and pawed at by boys on the dance floor. So this was what it had been about all along — these electrified feelings of never having quite enough, of wanting your mouth open wider and wider to the sweet effulgence of attachment and wanting any impediment to his physical nearness annihilated. And the feeling too, the morning after their final night together kissing, kissing, as he stepped onto his bus back to the city — back to New York and away from their little enclave of Jewish summer bliss there in the Adirondacks surrounded by mountains and water — her absolute foolheaded conviction that she’d see him again. She’d have time. So much time to lie with him again and talk and be loving. His little half wink of secret acknowledgment (because they were back to their public personas and aware of her parents watching and rules to be followed) and the newspaper tucked up neatly under his arm, the quiver in his sleeve as he raised a hand to blow her back a kiss so she understood he must be feeling it as strongly as she was — feeling something anyway about the specialness of their attachment, and about the longing and the separation. And then he was gone. His neat horn-rimmed glasses and pleated trousers and the sweep of his black hair and that mouth, those eyes . . . In its wake the bus trailed a cloud of gray-brown dust and diesel exhaust that hung and eddied in the air, sparkling, dissipating, and before it had even halfway settled, she knew: she’d never see him again. He would be swept away on other buses and subway trains into a city of swishing cars and commerce and sidewalks full of young women, prettier young women who were not her and who were not as afraid of taking chances or as inexperienced, a city where in fact she’d never have a place beside him. Maurice. So what had become of him? She would never know. She had no way of knowing. For all she could say, he was dead. Another casualty of the war. But as alive as ever in her memory.

So, she thought, pulling herself back into the moment. So, she’d call Mary and say what was necessary: that Mary needed to decide, had to decide finally . . . that she needed . . . If she could just get the question for Mary absolutely straight in her mind, the words for it, she’d better or more effectively be able to push for an answer. For the right answer. And now, suddenly, as if on cue, here was the phone ringing. She’d already turned toward it as if in anticipation. Water spun down the drain with a smear of ash and her wet cigarette butt and kept running as she switched on and off the disposal to erase all evidence and then rinsed and dried her hands. Gone. 

“Yes, Mary dear,” she said, lifting the receiver. “Well of course I knew it was you.” She laughed. “Who else would it have been? Anyway, I was about to call . . .” 

They liked imagining she was clairvoyant — her sisters, brothers, children — always knowing, before she picked up, who was calling and what they wanted before they could as much as say hello. But it was not clairvoyance, not really. It was their own mostly predictable natures and need for her and the timing of their need. Not all that difficult knowing in advance. No more difficult to read than the light behind the clouds spelling out the weather ahead and the imminent shift in seasons, or the pattern of dust left hanging in the air from a recently departed bus carrying your lover away from you forever. “They’re doing fine, I think. Far as I can tell. Linda is . . . well, somewhere. Everywhere. Reading D. H. Lawrence in her room, last I saw? And David’s with the farm manager’s boys — you know, Scott, Raymie. I don’t know why they’re not over there slopping the barn as usual, but I suppose there’s a story behind it. And how are you, dear? Have you . . .” But she didn’t have it yet, the question . . . didn’t have it sharply enough in mind, so she didn’t ask. Didn’t press. She waited, leaning at the counter with all her weight on one leg, listening. 

… …

In the folk songs their mother listened to at home and sang along with in her signature desperate, croony-voiced way ever since Linda was much younger, there was almost always a Willy. Sometimes a Katy. And Katy and Willy were always down by the river or headed down to the river after chasing each other the livelong day, sometimes after having run away together or after having knifed her parents to death in their sleep when . . . well, all the rest of it. The part she knew about without needing to hear it in a song. The kissing and smooching and the clothes peeled away, the garter undone and him sticking his fingers in her like the babysitter used to do, but better, nicer, to make her feel good and because she also wanted it. Or wanted to want it, which was probably saying the same thing. 

And now here they were, down by the actual river in her grandfather’s cow pasture, and her Willy was not a Willy but Peyton. Peyton, the big brother of Scott, Raymie, and the baby, striding around in his tall brown farmer boots that made him look like some kind of agrarian aristocrat (so she thought), an agrarian romancer like Lady Chatterley’s Oliver Mellors, like he ought to be smoking a pipe instead of sucking on a stem of timothy and then whisking aside the forelock of hair that was always falling over his eyes. Hair the same straw color as the tuft of seeds at the end of his timothy stalk. Then, hair pushed aside, he’d blink and half smile endearingly, as if the world had suddenly come back into focus after dreamy moments of being transported by thoughts of her. And now she was right against him, on the riverbank, like in the songs — so close and alone he couldn’t pretend for a second to be thinking of anything but her. So close she could pluck the stem of timothy and drop it over his shoulder, push him on his back and lean over him with her mouth mashed right on his and her fingers threaded through his. As always, there was the taste of grass on his lips, and under that the quivering pulse of blood, which she also almost tasted, or tasted in some syncretized way that blended all perceptions, like the rush of adrenaline right before you had to stand up in class and give a recitation, or the explosion of relief and good feeling immediately after you sat down to pee. The fizz and zing in the air right before a thunderstorm. The feeling of his tongue on hers made her almost want to die or to bite him, it was that good. 

“How long do you figure we have?” she asked. She poked him in the shoulder. Let his mouth enfold hers again awhile. “Peyton?” 

He shrugged under her. Surged against her. Pulled her down harder. “An hour at least? Maybe half a day. Can we just . . .” 

He’d told her this already. But she wanted to hear it again. They’d never had this much time alone and might never again, and she wanted it to last, wanted it to matter more — no, she wanted him to stop rubbing and humping himself on her bare leg like it was all he cared about, like their stupid dog, Baggins, always humping anything in sight. Chairs, peoples’ legs, other dogs. Anything. Blinded by his dick. Like she wasn’t even here with him anymore. She wanted him to say again how he’d dumped fertilizer in the milk tank before his dad or any of the other help showed up for morning milking so there would be this “crisis” and the kids would all be sent away and they’d have the day — maybe their last day, or one of the very few last summer days remaining, anyway, before her mother came around to get her and David, drag them back to suburban hell and its boredom and all her mother’s hippie friends and her pot plants under grow lights in the basement. She wanted to hear how Peyton had timed it so no one would notice, so they’d more likely blame Scott, and then the two of them could meet at the gate by the dam and slip under the fence and just walk and be alone together all afternoon without her brother or his brothers or his father always breathing down their necks. Hang out by the river. Go skinnydipping. Do whatever. A field trip. Ha ha. A day alone together. Because I want you so bad, Linnie . . . can’t stand another minute apart. 

“Like at least another hour more, though, right?” she asked. As if he hadn’t just answered. Before they had ducked down the embankment and closer to the water, the sky had looked distantly ominous to her — all gray and gold, piles of backlit thunderheads going as high as any she’d ever seen. Like something in a painting, but distant. Now here, down in the gulley by the river, it was summer still. Brilliant hot sunshine and skater bugs on the water, and only a slice of clear blue sky overhead . . . like time had stopped, despite the occasional far-off rumble of thunder. 

He blinked, and as she watched his pupils pulse open wider and constrict again like some kind of underwater plant, she wondered if he wasn’t just terribly nearsighted. If maybe that dreamy faraway look of his that she loved wasn’t simply the fact that he didn’t see very well. He wasn’t preoccupied with transcendent ideas like the men in the books she was always reading. Maybe at this distance he couldn’t quite see her at all except as kind of a blur. Or maybe he saw her better than ever? And then she was lost again in the colors of his irises, the pretty grays and greens and flecks of blues ringed around the pulsating black, and his tongue was going in circles around hers and his hands had slid under her shirt to press where she ached most longingly, most stingingly for him, all the while still humping away against her hip. Chafing the skin of her hip and thigh in a way now that didn’t feel good at all.

“Can you,” she said. “Can you just . . .” She wanted him to touch her like he meant it, like he had before sometimes, but already she could tell it was too late. He’d passed some internal threshold and was not with her anymore; his body had gone rigid with feeling, and his eyelids were fluttering stupidly, uncontrollably, spasming as his lower back locked him harder against her and a sound like a tire deflating hitched its way from the back of his throat and through her teeth, halfway down her own throat. 

“Jesus,” he said. Jerked her harder against him as whatever he was feeling squeezed through him another, final time. “Jesus, god.”

And then he sat up. 

Swiped aside his forelock of timothy-colored hair and laughed, and plucked with two fingers at his crotch. 

“Fuck,” he said. “I’m going to have to fall in the river now for a minute.” Again he swiped aside his forelock, and again he laughed. Then he stood halfway and scrambled down to the water’s edge. Quickly, he removed his clothes.

His ass, like his back and his arms from the biceps up, was pure white, making the color in the skin of his arms and face and neck look fake, more like dirt than pigment. Farmer’s tan, she thought. Of course. From this angle it looked like he was wearing some kind of very, very pale flesh-toned onesie. And then he was laughing as he tottered along the rocks at the edge of the river, going deeper, deeper, up to his knees, until finally he turned to face her so she saw the deflated tube of his dick in full daylight for the first time, like nothing so much as one of those metal suctioning milker things they stuck onto the cow’s udders at milking time but smaller, narrower, not as perfectly tubular, its form undifferentiated from end to end — not blue-purple mushroom-capped like her brother David’s at bath time or their father’s in dim memories from years ago. Uncircumcised. She stared, not seeing his face anymore and again thinking of their dog, Baggins — the glistening red carrot of his penis unsheathed whenever he got on one of his humping sprees — until Peyton fell backward into the water to float a second before twisting away from her, laughing. “So cold! Oh my god,” he said — and went fully under. Now there was only a smooth spot in the water that eddied differently where he’d been, the Peyton-shaped plume beneath that going underwater to mark his absence until he popped up again whipping his hair around. “Come on! Get in here!” he said. “What, are you afraid?” 

Not afraid, she thought, watching him dog-paddle. You don’t even know how to swim, idiot. I do. I can swim a mile. Afraid?

She blinked in a way she hoped might be read as vaguely abashed or bashfully feminine and helpless. Stood and sauntered closer, pretending to play with the hem of her T-shirt as if she was going to pull it off over her head in one slick move, so she’d have his whole attention — Wanna see my tits? — if he could see her at all, that is. She wasn’t sure. And when she was close enough, she bent, scooped up his jeans and T-shirt and boots and casually walked with them back up the bank. Higher, higher. She left his underwear — tighty-whiteys, naturally — in the dirt where he’d dropped them, the wad of his effluvia soaked through the cotton and stuck wet-side-down in the dirt. And when she was at the top of the bank and at a distance where she was pretty sure he would no longer be able to see her, she ran. 

“Linnie? Linda?” he yelled after her. His voice sounded funny, coming from down there in the water. “Hey. What are you . . . Linnie! Get back here! Hey!” 

Over the lumpy hummocked field of cow patties and rocks and briars and milkweed and ragweed and thistles, the ground tilting first downward through the ceaseless buzzy noise of flies and crickets, and then up again toward the road she ran. Through trees grown together, where the cows liked to hang out in bad weather, and ducking one fence line and another. Clambering over an ancient stone wall. Just like in the songs. He rode and she ran, the long summer’s day . . . Only in reverse. Without her mother’s quavering alto to accompany anything, and not toward the water. Away. Not to fuck anymore, but to unfuck. Because she was in a wicked mood. A mood for fun. And because she just wanted everyone to know, really, what an ass he was. What a dumb fuck. How white and stringy and stupid his ass really was — helpless as a chicken right before you grabbed it and wrung its neck. Putting fertilizer in the milk tank! 

When one of his boots felt like it was slipping out of her grip and too heavy and cumbersome to carry any farther, she paused. She flung it as far as she could in one direction and then, spinning, flung the other in the opposite direction. But she kept his sad farmer jeans and T-shirt and socks all balled together at her midsection and ran and ran. 

… …

When the change in weather finally came, David knew in a way that correlated with the smells of rain and ozone and the sudden shift in temperature, the light disappearing and the wind lifting the undersides of the leaves in the maple tree in a mad rush of sound like freedom, that whatever it was Scott had wanted from him and whatever had provoked him to sit on David’s chest for so long would now become irrelevant. Moot. They’d have to decouple then, stand up, and run in opposite directions as if nothing had ever happened — or nothing that could easily be assimilated with the rest of experience and given words to understand, anyway. But for a while it didn’t work that way. Even as rain ran off the end of Scott’s nose and chin, and the menacing hatefulness in his eyes attempted to reassert itself through his obvious discomfort at being colder and more drenched by the second, there was no change. The matching bracelets of pain around David’s wrists and the ache through his arm muscles, where it felt almost as if he’d been nailed to the ground, did not relent. Only when the sound of his grandmother’s yelling from the kitchen doorway reached them — “David! Linda! Linda! Hey! Where are you kids!” — the door banging open and shut again with it as if she was now or very soon heading out to find them  did it stop. No more weight on his chest. Arms free to move. He scrambled upright. Scott hunched crablike, fists raised like some old-time boxer ready to go another round, swung wildly once — but really, finally, the thing between them, whatever it was, no longer mattered. It had expired, and the sky was cracking open with thunder, and the light was all but gone. 

He turned and went toward his grandmother’s house at a walk, letting the rain mix with his tears and rubbing his hands together to get the feeling back in his fingertips and then squeezing his arms to bring the sensation back there as well.

“Here you are,” she said as he came into the kitchen. “Out of those wet clothes, and I’ll get you a towel. Run a bath. Would you like a bath?” 

He shrugged.

“Were you having so much fun you didn’t even notice? There’s a severe storm warning from now until six p.m.! And where is your sister? Do you know?”

“Probably off with Peyton. If I had to guess. I didn’t see her. Or him.”

“Well, then.” His grandmother seemed only a little more undone than usual by this news. Annoyed or unable to find a quick funny retort, anyway. “I expect we’ll see her when we see her, then.”

And no sooner had she left the room and he’d bent and begun untying his drenched sneaker laces and pulling down his mud-soaked, grass-stained jeans than Linda showed up at the door, strobe lit in a flash of lightning and smiling fiendishly. Before the sudden pop of the electricity — at first it sounded to him like another aspect of the thunder — and before all the house lights suddenly snapped off with it, he knew he’d been right. From the rubbed-raw redness of her mouth and chin and the way her lips looked almost smudged into the rest of her face, and from the expression in her eyes — a devilish glare or squint of self-confidence and invulnerability to indicate that she now considered herself to be in possession of special powers that would allow her to lord it over him and the rest of the world more fervently than ever with secret knowledge: she’d been with Peyton. They’d been off somewhere trying to act like movie stars in a sex scene, or actually being movie stars in a sex scene. Finally fucking. Probably. 

“What are you staring at?” she said, and then came the snap, the thunder, the lights going off like something had exploded through the circuits, and both of them screamed at the same time, and then seeing each other half-illuminated in what remained of the daylight they screamed again and laughed because her hair had fallen over her face and was also spun out and frizzing around her head in a way that reminded him of being underwater, like she was some kind of banshee or sea monster, and his pants were still stuck halfway off, around his ankles, holding him in place. Outside, the wind sounded as if it meant to rip the world up by the roots. They’d been expelled from summer before of course — at the end of every summer prior — but not like this. Not so violently and without any relief. Not like summer had taken childhood with it and meant never to return.