Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories Read online

  Leander Buttons had telephoned three times the day after their solar system interlude and four times the day after that. Jacey had not called him back. Until this very morning, Jacey hadn’t seen much value in being liked by a stray runt like Leander. But now with her intolerable cousin in the house, Jacey had the blues. She thought it might be good to have somebody, anybody, come by and like her for a while, no matter how much food he wore in the crook of his lips.

  “Jacey?” came the high kazoo of Leander’s voice over the phone.

  “Yes, Leander.”

  “Wow. It’s weird you’re calling me,” he honked. “I only left about fifty thousand messages.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You could’ve told me you made it home, at least. Somebody could have murdered you, for all I knew.”

  “Yeah, well, I did get murdered, but just a little. But listen, Leander, what are you doing today?”

  “Not much. Practicing my trombone.” He gave a little blurt as proof. “Then I told my sister I’d help her make a peanut butter log because she’s bummed out and wants to cook. Then maybe duckpin bowling with Josh Gurskis and some dudes.”

  “I’ve got an idea. Don’t do any of that stuff,” Jacey said briskly. “Come over to my house. I want to have a movie day.”

  “At your house?” His tone was cautious. He seemed to smell a trap.

  “Yes, Leander, at my house.”

  “With your parents?”

  “No. No parents. My mom’s away all day. She’s at work.”

  “Um, well, what kind of movies are you talking about?”

  “Let’s see, there’s at least Jaws and Turner & Hooch and I think Excalibur and one that I don’t know what it is. The label’s rubbed off.”

  “Well, what do you think that one is?”

  Jacey sighed. “Shit, Leander, I don’t know! But if it’s been here this long, it’s probably something good. Now, look, do you want to come over here or not?”

  He said he’d be there in about one hour.

  Little Buttons had to ride a Puch-brand moped eight miles to get to Jacey’s house, which lay in a rear-county outbreak of brick ramblers on the verge of some state woods. Jacey ran downstairs when she heard the moped blat into the lane. By the time she was out the front door, Leander already had the kickstand down and was inspecting a ding in the Puch’s blue flank.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “For one thing, I nearly got in a wreck coming over here. Somebody threw a Cheerwine can at me on Piney Mountain Drive.”

  “No way. Are you hurt?”

  “Nah, it was just an empty can, but still, I almost drove into a tree. That fucker. He’s lucky I was trying to get here fast, or I’d have followed him home so I could cut his tires sometime.”

  Honestly, Jacey could see how somebody might want to throw a can at Little Buttons. He was dressed to invite one. His hair was not the usual nest. Rather, he had slicked it back with so much styling crud, it looked like a knob of fresh pavement. His shirt was a nightclub shirt of a shiny fabric, and he wore tight black jeans that tapered to a pair of feathered loafers like something stolen off an Alpine pimp. In one way, she was flattered that he had taken the time for all that primping, yet the outfit bespoke an intensity and strangeness of affection that Jacey did not feel equal to. Also, it made her uncomfortable about what she had on, cutoffs and T-shirt from her bagging job at the Harris Teeter grocery store.

  “What did you get so dressed up for, Leander?”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “No, no, I do like it. It’s just, you sort of got a lot going on.”

  Buttons scanned the ground, unhappily. “My sister Gina did it. I told her I was coming to see you, and she put all this crap on me. I look like a shithead, right?”

  Jacey laughed. “No, Leander, you look fine. You look nice. Really nice.”

  “You look nice,” said Little Buttons, sauntering to her. He squinted into her face and made her feel shy. He smelled clean. “It’s weird to see you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. It’s weird and great,” he said.

  Jacey managed not to flinch when he hugged her and gave her a brisk kiss on the cheek. Unreproved, Buttons prolonged the clinch, sighing and gulping in her ear, running his finger along the proud flesh where Jacey’s bra strap cut into her back.

  “Okay, okay, Leander,” said Jacey.

  He fell back and went into a fit of feeling his hair. Then he did a queer, vaguely palsied move where he dragged his wrist across his zipper and gave his hips a light twist.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “No, it’s cool,” said Jacey. “I just wasn’t ready to get squeezed like that.”

  Leander cracked his knuckles.

  “So anyway, I think Jaws is what we ought to watch, that is if it’s Jaws 1 you’ve got,” Leander said. “I like it when they’re on the boat at night.”

  But Jacey was now unsure if she’d been wise in committing to an afternoon on the sofa with Leander Buttons. An old-time porch swing would have been the thing right then. Before being trapped with him on the couch, she wanted to sit in the open air with Little Buttons, to see in clear light this face that had kissed her in the dark of the orrery.

  Jacey balked and squinted at the green cottage across the street as though it had just been built the night before.

  “Jacey?”

  “What, Leander?”

  “Are we going inside?”

  “In a minute,” said Jacey, with no idea of what she wanted to do.

  At that moment, Maya appeared on the front steps. She’d shed her gypsy scarves for a T-shirt, sneakers, and a pair of blue cotton shorts that were not far from underpants. Looking at her cousin, Jacey was suddenly reminded that a theorem for telling whether two right triangles are congruent is “leg-leg.”

  She was still sore at her cousin over the Charleston phone call, and would be for a long time to come, though she was grateful that Maya didn’t smirk or lift an eyebrow at Leander’s garb. Maya, the lovely hypocrite, was back to all sweetness and sorority. She said that she was going for a walk. Would Jacey like her to bring back some birch beer or snack cakes from the little store up the road?

  Now that Jacey thought of it, a trip to the store seemed like a good idea, the right kind of break-in period she wanted before settling down to Jaws and Buttons in the dim light of the den. Jacey suggested they all walk to the store to buy things for “movie salad”—popcorn tossed with Chex mix, M&M’s, and plenty of melted butter. Buttons said that he could double Jacey on the Puch. Jacey said no. She had firm views on doubling. She had been pretty good friends with Ricky Murphy, who that past spring had slipped off the back of a scooter and caved his skull in on the curb.

  On the walk up Smithfield Road, Maya did not talk of Nureyev, or modeling, or of her own greatness. Instead, she boasted of Jacey’s triumphs, her singing voice, and her speed in the fifty-yard dash (Jacey had the surprising fleet-footedness you sometimes find in the plump); how at the girls’ camp of their childhood, Jacey had outfoxed a group of Methodists who’d beaten the cousins to the signup sheet for canoes by reminding them that at Judgment the last would be first, and that the meek would inherit the earth. The Methodists had stampeded to be the first to surrender their paddles, and all day the cousins had cruised the lake. Jacey could not help but revel in the praise. Amazing how Maya could make herself nearly impossible to despise for very long.

  As it turned out, the store was closed without explanation, and Maya said they should all go to the woods. “Because, check it out,” she said, and she pulled from her tiny pants a wizened marijuana jay. What better way to enjoy this day, she pointed out, than to get high among the trees? Leander said what fun it would be to watch Jaws behind a buzz. Jacey could not disagree.

  The state forest was a realm of oaks and scrub pine blackened from controlled burns, with the new growth already assailed by wisteria and the hairy cursive of poison ivy vines. In sea
rch of a toking place, they left the wide gravel lanes where equestrians clopped and took to the secret tracks through the thickets and thorn sward. Jacey and Maya had wandered here often in summers gone by, and Maya led the way through the old hidden trails. How nice it was, thought Jacey, that while three years had passed since they’d been here together, and the girls were not the friends they’d been, some part of Maya still kept a memory of the place.

  Leander didn’t seem to mind the mud spoiling his Tyrolean loafers, or the rebel strands that had escaped his pomade helmet and swung loose about his face. You could not walk close to him because he was swinging fiercely at the brush with a walking stick he’d found.

  But the trek went on longer than it needed to. Maya seemed to have forgotten about the joint and had gone into a pageant of mountain knowledge, showing Jacey and Little Buttons how to identify wild ginger, elderberry, oyster mushrooms, and sassafras. She came across a deer jaw, and wrenched loose the molars and passed them out as brown mementos of the day. Jacey lagged at the rear, now and again losing sight of Leander and Maya in the brush. It annoyed her to hear Buttons plying Maya with his own tidbits on the outdoors—the mythic depth of loblolly taproots, pyrite and arrowhead information, and how you could train a crow to be your pet with patience and crumbs.

  Jacey was almost furious when they reached their resting spot—a low bluff with a view of both the main path and the gravy-colored creek at the bottom of the ravine. The waxy leaves of rhododendrons formed a thick barrier from the path. The joggers and equestrians passed by and did not notice them. Nobody saw the teenagers until a youngish man with unruly hair and an old warm-up jacket happened down the trail. He stopped, peering through the bushes. He doffed an imaginary hat and strolled down to the creek. They watched him shed his jacket, shirt, and his boots, and take a seat, Indian-style, on the big island of dun stone in the middle of the stream.

  Once the man was past, Maya pulled the joint from her shorts.

  “You’ll like this stuff,” Maya explained to Leander, licking and pinching the paper before she lit it. “Just a nice mild mind high. Not so much a body high.”

  “Are we gonna smoke it or just fuckin’ talk about it?” barked Jacey, who’d had marijuana twice and never felt a thing.

  “What’s up your butt, Jacey?” Maya asked.

  “Nothing. I’m hot. My legs itch.” Jacey scratched her calves furiously, and Maya watched.

  “Mine get like that, too,” Maya said. “Mostly when I haven’t gotten exercise in a while.”

  “I exercise,” Jacey snapped. “I swim laps four times a week.”

  “That’s terrific,” said Maya. She handed the joint to Leander, along with a thin box of matches.

  “A swimming person sweats a gallon of sweat an hour,” Leander said. “My brother works at the Community Center pool. They have to mess with the chemicals constantly to keep up with it. Here, Jacey.”

  She took the joint and drew a cautious amount of smoke into her cheeks and passed the joint to Maya, who took a long drag and lay back in the shadow of the rhododendrons. Languidly, she put her palms to the sky and went into a spell of practiced breathing. “You know what I love?” she said. “I like the smell, that groovy rotten smell. All these plants that took in the sun and the rainwater out here years ago or whatever; now the leaves and fallen trees are rotting back into the earth, and they’re breathing all that energy back out into the air. Literally, that’s summer you’re smelling, from five, ten, a hundred years ago, all that energy coming back now. I can’t explain it. It’s sad, but it’s beautiful, too.”

  “I hear you,” said Leander.

  “You know what else I love?” Maya asked.

  “Cheetos?” Jacey offered, trying to rupture the spell of woodland sensuality Maya had begun to weave.

  “A Pringle,” said Leander Buttons. “A Pringle is a convex paraboloid.”

  Whatever else it was that Maya loved, she forgot about it when the shirtless fellow down on the creek cranked up a little radio, and suave casino jazz blared dimly through the trees. The music brought Maya to her feet. She felt the air with her palms and swooped her hips around. “Get up, Jacey. Come dance with me.”

  “I will not.”

  “Fine, stinker. Leander. Get up. Come here. You don’t have a choice.”

  Leander, nervous and gleeful, allowed Maya to pull him up. She glided around before him, and Leander staggered after her, kind of shadowboxing, his head lolling and looking everywhere, because he couldn’t settle on which was the best part of Maya to watch. The next tune started, a waltz. Maya drew Leander to her, squiring him around the bluff. He was grinning like a fool. He got his hands down on the bare gap between Maya’s shirt and shorts and left them there.

  Jacey could feel the anger coming off her like heat lines on a road. She managed to restrain herself the first time Maya lowered Leander in a competition-grade dip, but the second time, the rage spilled out of her. “All right,” she yelled. “You know how to fuckin’ dance. We get the goddamned point, Maya. You can sit down now.”

  Leander and Maya stopped, but they didn’t turn each other loose. Maya showed her smooth teeth in a quizzical half smile. “Jesus, what the hell is wrong with you?” she asked. “I asked you to dance and you said no. What do you care?”

  “I don’t care,” Jacey said, getting up. “Dance all you want. Or actually, why don’t you just go off somewhere and fuck? I mean, there’s all kinds of bushes and stuff around here for you all to fuck in.”

  Maya drew in a sharp, shocked breath and dropped her arms from Leander’s shoulders. Leander tittered. Jacey went on. “Yeah, you want to, Leander? She’ll totally do it. She’s a pretty big slut. See, there’s a guy in Charleston she’s trying to quit fucking, because of this other guy she’s getting ready to fuck, her teacher or somebody, but she can’t fuck him yet because he’s so goddamned old it’s against the law, even though she wants him to.”

  A collapsed, stunned look came over Maya, as though a piece of crucial rigging had been snipped behind her face. Her mouth hung open wide enough to take a tangerine.

  Whatever sound Maya was about to make, Jacey didn’t want to hear it. She ran off through the understory, and it was not until she reached the creek that she began to cry. Hot tears rushed out of her. But fearing that Maya and Buttons could see her from their roost, she quickly choked her weeping off and rinsed her sticky face in the creek.

  What she wanted most was to go back to the afternoon dark of her mother’s house and watch TV and eat Triscuit crackers topped with cheddar cheese and a pickle coin. But to leave the woods, she would have to pass the spot where Maya and Leander were hiding out. She felt she couldn’t let them see her heading home and hold on to any dignity, so she wandered the creek, hoping to look distracted and at ease. She walked downstream and upstream again. She pitched rocks into the water. She stroked lichen and squatted for crayfish, which calmed her not at all.

  Not far from the bluff, she paused to look at the shirtless man lying out on the stone island. He had his radio going and his eyes closed, as glad in the sun as a cat. She watched him put a green beer bottle to his lips, drain it, and set it in the creek. The bottle bobbed through the eddy and lodged downstream in a wad of beige foam. Then he felt for another in a crowd of bottles clanking in a pool near his hand, opened it, and tipped some of it back, all without opening his eyes. You had to appreciate somebody who all he needed was a hot stone, beer, and a cheap radio to have a good time. Jacey thought she might like to talk to him, just say hello, at least, but he just kept on sunning himself. Minutes went by, and Jacey could feel Maya and Leander’s eyes on her, watching her loiter on the bank like a fool.

  “Hey!” she called to him.

  The man lifted his head to look at her, raising cobbles of muscle on his stomach. “All right, now,” he said with a yawn. He tasted his mouth, blinked, and stacked his fists behind his skull so he wouldn’t strain his gut looking at her. “What’s happening?”

  �
��You don’t have any more of that beer, do you?” Jacey asked.

  The man gazed down the path. Then he glanced at the bottles chilling in the creek and scratched at his hair.

  “Come on, please,” Jacey said. “I’m so thirsty I’m about to die. Give me one. I can pay you for it.”

  He sat up, looking put-upon, but then he shook his head and chuckled. “I guess,” he said. “Come on.”

  Jacey stepped with care across the algae-sueded rocks that led out to the little island. When she got there, the man had already pulled a beer from the water for her and levered off the cap.

  “It’s not cold, but it won’t burn your mouth,” he said. His voice was mild. Jacey took two lusty, gasping pulls on it, and then stared at the bottle with great interest. Shyness warmed her, a heat deeper than the sun’s.

  “Heineken,” she said. “Best beer on the market, if you ask me.”

  The man didn’t say anything but let a mirthful little blast escape from his nose.

  “Anyway, I didn’t mean to come out here and bug you,” Jacey said. She hooked a finger in her pocket and drew out a pair of crumpled bills. “Here. I got two dollars. That enough?”

  “Don’t sweat it,” said the man. “Have a seat, if you like.”

  Jacey sat, her sturdy pink legs stretched out in front of her, crossed at the ankles, which was how they looked best. She took another deep draw on her beer, and before she could stop it, a terrible wet belch came out of her.