Too Shattered for Mending

I know the smell of pine loam moldering in the fall.

Watch a coyote hunt a house cat in the Chinese cemetery.

Native rainbow trout shake their heads at a ⅛ Rooster Tail spinner at midday, swallow it come evening.

I know that Rowan loves JT, even after he beat her.

Rowan smells like water. I told her that once. I said, You smell like an eddy. I was thinking of the North Fork of the Clearwater. The backcountry runs, rocks and pools, clean enough to see the trout cut to shadow.

Rowan was drinking a Monster in front of the Mini-Mart. She said, A what?

She’d sliced the knees out of her jeans, scissored them way back to the side, and I kept looking at all that exposed skin.

I said, Like an eddy on the river, when you wade in. You know?

When I wade in?

To fish, I said.

She tilted her head, and the hair she’d pulled up bobbed to the left. So I smell like a fish?

No, I said, not like a fish. You smell like an eddy.

She smiled, already shaking her head, laughing at me.

I said, Messing with me, huh?

It was last school year. I was a freshman then, a year younger than her. I’d gotten more work in the cemetery and I imagined that I’d take her out, do something nice for her. Rowan was with JT but I tried to ignore that.

Rowan finished her Monster and threw the empty down on the cement. I’ll see you around? she said, and made a fish motion with her hand.

Sheriff’s deputy pulls off the asphalt of the Idaho 11. Drops his Clearwater County cruiser into the flats next to the trampoline. Willa stops jumping and watches. Exposes her teeth, sticking her tongue through her front gap.

The deputy gets out. Walks over to me where I’m searching for chicken eggs in the overgrowth. He says, Are you the kid they call Little?

I stand up straight. Say, Yep. Let him see my full height: six foot five and still growing.

All right. He nods. Looks up at me. Taps his badge. I’m Deputy White. Sheriff’s Department.

I know who he is. Know where he lives, up Walker Road toward the National Guard school. Know his mustache and his cruiser.

Deputy says, Have you seen your grandfather lately?

I shake my head.

Not at all? he asks.

Not at all.

Deputy White stares off to the northeast, the cemetery rows, the plots and headstones like teeth bucking up out of the ground. He says, For how long?

I have the chicken eggs in my left hand. Pick the stuck grass between them with my right, look in the same direction as the deputy, across the graveyard. Say, Weeks maybe? I don’t know.

Deputy White hooks his thumbs in his utility belt. You think he’s gone down the Grade? He means to Orofino, along the Clearwater River. A meth run.

I shake my head again.

The deputy says, You don’t know or you won’t say?

Can’t, I say, ’cause I haven’t seen him. I shift the eggs in my hand like a pitcher choosing a baseball.

The deputy has his hands on his hips. He’s looking past the cemetery now, staring into the hills, the lodgepole pines beyond the Baptist church, the first trees after a slash fire, all the same shade of high green, low gray.

He says, So that’s how it’s gonna be, then?

I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say to that.

Deputy White points at the big house. Derlene’s out on that porch now. Uncle Lucky too. Okay, the deputy says. If y’all do see him, you tell him I’m looking for him and we need to talk. He’s slipped up, and I’m following. You got that?

Okay, I say.

Derlene and Uncle Lucky don’t say anything at all. Their faces are sacks of Quikrete. Cigarettes smoking between their fingers.

Now y’all don’t forget it. I want him talking to me real soon, you hear? The deputy nods at us like he’s being friendly but he unsnaps his holster with his thumb while he smiles, and when he walks to his driver’s-side door, he circles around the back of his cruiser so he can keep us in front of him. This is the angle the law takes here. Keep your back to the wall. A man could catch a potshot easy.

Big, I thought I saw you walk up from the shallows to the ballfield, Highway 11 around the turn to Main Street, your head down the way you always walked as if there was something important on the ground in front of you that needed focus. But you didn’t have your bucket with you, and I knew it was only my head bothering me. There was no one in the grass along the road. I blinked, and there was no one next to the ballfield either. The night became the morning, all in one moment, and the dew on the early-fall grass was like metal shavings sprinkled by God.

Light east-west wind, the clouds running laterals in the opposite direction. I looked over at the house, stick frame propped on cinder blocks after being moved from Weippe. A four-foot ground gap. If I crouched down, I could look under the house and see the cemetery at an angle. The cemetery out back. A garden of the dead. All those planted and none to spring up. I’d come outside to pee in my favorite spot, out by the stop sign, but seeing you made me forget.

It was three days after, and I could still feel my hands shaking. I looked down and my fingers wouldn’t straighten.

I drive south through town over the rise, past the Timber Inn, the Outback, and Sammy’s, head south to the 250 split, the Judge Town road. It’s not far out but I pass the main houses and the one good place with the fish pond, up the road toward the old Cardiff Mill, past Brown’s Creek.

There’s a few places I could ask, but some I wouldn’t want to, and I roll up on gravel to a place I’ve been to with Big twice before. It’s a yellow house with a five-foot TV satellite dish in the middle of the driveway on 8 x 4 wood blocks, and I stop the truck in front of the dish.

A man walks out, duck-footed, feet pointed in two different directions and his head craning all ways to see if I’ve got anyone with me in the cab or laying flat in the back.

My window’s already rolled down. I don’t get out. I say, Have you seen Big McCardell?

Who’s asking?

Little McCardell.

The man’s finished looking in the cab and the bed of the truck, and he knows I’m alone now. He rubs his eyes with the palms of his hand. Not for a bit, he says. He keeps rubbing at his eyes.

You know what he was last doing here? What he was running? This is what I really came to ask.

The man stops rubbing his eyes. Looks at me close. Hey now. Those ain’t the kinda questions people ask around here. He shifts one hand behind his back and holds on to something I can’t see. Says, You know who’s in that cabin behind me?

I shake my head.

Right, he says, you don’t. And you don’t wanna know. ’Cause people that know, well, they sometimes disappear.

But I gotta ask. I gotta know about my own granddad’s business.

Kid, I don’t think you understand what all I’m sayin’.

I look at the house. See movement at a window. A blind pulled down quick.

The man says, I seen real young before, and I get that. That’s how we all growed up. Just don’t mix young with stupid. Right? He still has one hand behind his back.

I pop the truck in reverse. I’ll go ask around elsewhere. I start to back up, and the gravel under the tires crunches.

The man calls out, It don’t matter for me ’cause I ain’t affected, but I wouldn’t ask too many elsewheres if I were you. You understand?

—

The next three places I stop are abandoned, no cars and no answers at the door, and Judge Town isn’t a place where you check a door and walk in if it’s unlocked. You never know what you might find inside a house, and you wouldn’t want to get caught by whoever’s staked a claim. So I drive back home to my trailer to eat, to get some sleep, to head to school in the morning.

Dyslexia in school is like trying to ride a four-wheeler with the back axle broken. If I can get it to drive at all, it’s just a matter of time until a bump takes the wheels off.

Grade school, I remember seeing other kids excited and raising their hands, asking what we were doing next, and I was just hoping to God there wouldn’t be anything next because I didn’t have a chance of finishing what was in front of me.

But the worst was always math. Math is a trick they play on you when you’re a kid. You’ll never win. Grade school, I’d be in class wondering why the teacher made up problems for us.

High school’s supposed to be different, but it isn’t. Without Mr. Polchowski—my Room 2 teacher during study hall—I wouldn’t have passed a single math class in all of high school. To be honest, I wouldn’t have passed science either. Science has math in it, among other things. Last week, in science class, I asked a kid what a word was in our textbook, and he said, That’s Latin, man.

Latin, I thought. I don’t think there’s even a country where they still speak Latin, so what’s it doing in my textbook?

—

Today in study hall, Mr. Polchowski says, "Listen to me. You’ve got to make time for your homework at home, you know?"

I don’t tell him how hard I tried to do my math homework last night because it doesn’t look like I tried at all. I sat down and wrote out all 13 problems but only answered one of them, number 6. The others didn’t make any sense to me.

Okay, I say.

Okay? Mr. Polchowski adjusts his ponytail. You always say ‘Okay,’ but then you don’t do it. Look, he says, "I understand that math isn’t your favorite subject. But that’s why you have to do your homework. It only gets harder if you don’t do it. If you put something off, it makes a thing worse."

Okay, I say again. I know I should’ve come after school yesterday to get more help, but I always want to go right home, just get away, and so most of the time I do.

Mr. Polchowski taps the desktop. Let’s get your homework out and see how much we can get done during this study hall period. All right?

All right.

I have a see-through red plastic sheet that I cover my page with, and it helps the problems come into focus underneath, so I use that. Together, Mr. Polchowski and I work on math for the next 45 minutes. We don’t get to all the problems, but we get most of them done, and I feel a little bit better about things when the bell goes off.

When I get home, I find a yellow chicken carcass under the front of the trailer, one of the Buff Orpington egg-layers. This hen’s missing her undercarriage, like a small-block Chevy without a bottom end. I look around. Search for clues. Think, maybe raccoon? Maybe a weasel? I pace off five steps and walk the circle, each part of the clock as if I’m doing a search and rescue for a lost hunter.

I find bobcat prints in the mud patch near the gate, all four feet gathered together where he set to leap at the base of the corner post. I put my index finger in the mud print, imagine his jumping with a full belly, making a pistol out of my other hand and pulling the trigger.

I go back to the chicken carcass, grab it feet-first, and sling it into the yard can. I look around and count ten chickens now, plus one rooster. Hope no more egg-layers get took.

Willa and I are sitting on the trampoline, doing homework. I look at that fading bruise on her face. It doesn’t seem to bother her. She’s doing her subtractions page and getting through it pretty quick. I’m trying to do an algebra problem, but the equation makes no sense to me, the numbers and Xs shifting all over the place. I pull out my red cover sheet but it doesn’t help much.

Little, Willa says, look.

Hold on a second. I’m trying to do this math problem.

No, trust me, look. It’s Mrs. Trepp.

I look up, and Mrs. Trepp is coming along the 11 from the west in the right-side driving lane. She’s in her wheelchair. She has her lawn mower out in front of her, in gear, and she’s gripping its handle and gas bar. She’s still an eighth of a mile down the road, but we can already hear the mower’s engine rumbling.

Willa says, How fast do you think that thing runs?

I don’t know. Maybe three miles an hour?

Willa giggles. And it just pulls her along, huh?

It’s a self-propelled mower, so she doesn’t have to push it.

Willa says, I heard she’s run that to Weippe before.

I don’t know about that. It’d take at least a couple hours.

Willa raises her eyebrows and stares at me, meaning she believes what she heard.

Mrs. Trepp rumbles by, passing the front of our house. She never looks at anyone. She wears those big sunglasses that old people wear over their glasses, sort of like safety glasses a person might wear on a construction site, but tinted dark, not clear or yellow. I used to wave at Mrs. Trepp when I was younger, but she never waved back or turned her sunglasses toward me, so I stopped.

As she passes, I look at her arms, the muscles and tendons flexing. I say, See that? Her arms are strong.

Willa makes little clicking sounds between her teeth. Says, "I know it’s wrong to say, but she better have strong arms…because she doesn’t have any legs."

Mrs. Trepp drags up the hill past the Mini-Mart, the Timber Inn, the Blue Moose, and the Vug. Then she disappears over the hill.

Willa says, Where do you think she’s going?

Sammy’s Grocery, probably.

Oh, Willa says. I guess everyone needs groceries, huh?

Willa and I go back to doing our math homework. My algebra problem still isn’t working out. I want to rip the textbook in half and throw it into the road. Maybe burn it after it’s been run over a few times.

Willa says, Wanna hear a joke?

I’m not really in the mood for a joke, but I say, Okay, because Willa loves to tell jokes so much.

All right, Willa says. What do you call a cow who works for a landscaping company?

I don’t know, I say. What?

A lawn moo-er. Willa starts giggling, and she falls back on the trampoline. Then she does a lawn mower sound in her throat and makes a real serious face. Stares forward with her arms out straight. Who am I, Little?

Mrs. Trepp?

Exactly, Willa says, and starts to giggle again.

I’ve never met a girl as serious or as silly as my cousin Willa. She can go from a frown to a smile and back to a frown again quicker than anyone on earth.

The first time I saw Rowan was last year. She was a sophomore at Timberline and I was a freshman. I was in her math class at the start of the year because the school people had gotten something mixed up, and somehow they’d placed me in Advanced Algebra instead of Remedial Algebra Skills. I didn’t understand any of the concepts the teacher talked about, and they transferred me down two levels after that, but that was three weeks later. Until I was moved down, I sat next to Rowan.

Timberline High School sits between our two towns, Pierce and Weippe, and since Rowan was from Weippe and I was from Pierce, I’d never seen her before. She was thin in a sort of underfed way, and her clothes were loose, cheap hand-me-downs from someone three or four sizes bigger than her, but she had a real pretty face, and the way she moved was sort of like a long-limbed cat. It’s hard to describe, but people noticed her. She wore thick black mascara and black eyeliner too, and it made me think of Queen Cleopatra in the book Mrs. Q read to us in fourth grade when we were learning about the Egyptians. Rowan painted eyeliner in sharp little lines to the outsides of her eyes, and all that black eyeliner made the green in her eyes brighter than it already was. I thought she looked perfect like that, and I had a hard time taking my eyes off her.

Math was never good for me, but in the advanced class everyone was speaking a language I didn’t know a single word of. I was just over six foot four last year, in a room full of freshmen and sophomores, and I felt like a grizzly shifting his weight through a crowded lunchroom, knocking cafeteria trays and spilling milk. My chair made a loud screeching sound every time I moved in my seat, and the whole class would look at me whenever I did anything.

JT was the best football player in the school that fall, a preseason All-State selection at strong safety, and that only made me more of a curiosity. The little brother of a hero. I was on varsity too that year, partly because of JT and partly because of my abnormal size. I didn’t mind hitting people, and JT made me do some tough workouts in the summer to get ready for the season, but the playbook wasn’t something I understood. The plays looked like a bunch of letters and lines scribbled all over the place, crossing each other everywhere, and in a bunch of different colors, and I couldn’t memorize any of the offensive or defensive packages. I told the coach that the playbook made no sense to me, but he said, You just need to buckle down and learn up then, son. Spend more time with it, so I took it home and studied it, even put my red plastic sheet over the pages, but nothing helped. There wasn’t anything in the world that would make the playbook read like a story to me.

One night at practice, my positions coach said, Jesus dammit, Little, if you go the wrong way one more time, then the whole fuckin’ team’s gonna run wind sprints after practice. I went the wrong way again two plays later because I was trying to do what was in the playbook and not really trusting what I felt might be right, and everyone glared pretty hard at me as we started our line runs after the last drill.

But JT said real loud, I don’t give a shit about this extra running. These sprints are only making us faster as a team, right, so I’m fine with this, and he winked at me after he said it. So then the team was okay with the sprints, and no one gave me too hard of a time after practice. But football stayed rough after that, and the coaches kept yelling at me.

—

Rowan sat next to me those whole three weeks I was in the advanced math class. I thought she was beautiful with those cat’s eyes, and I didn’t care too much that I couldn’t understand the math that was being taught in the class as long as I could keep sitting next to Rowan. She was good at math, always getting the right answer on the board when she was called up by the teacher, but the way she slumped her shoulders and rolled her eyes as she walked back to her seat, the whole class could tell that she hated it, or hated the teacher, and that only made people like her more. I hoped she’d be called up every day so I could watch her walk, watch her shift her hips in her big, loose clothes. She’d write her equations in a loopy handwriting, then walk back down my aisle like she was coming to get me.

I know it sounds dumb but I liked to imagine that she’d walk back to our seats and take my hand. Lean down and whisper, Let’s get out of here, right now, you and me, okay?

And I’d say, Yeah, okay, and we’d walk out of class, and the teacher would yell for us to come back, but we’d just laugh and run outside, keep running across the road, up Grasshopper Creek. Then my ideas would kind of get the better of me and I’d imagine Rowan asking me if I wanted to skinny-dip and I’d say okay. She’d take off her clothes in front of me and she’d be thin and tan, like she spent all her time naked in the sun, and she’d take off her bra last, and she’d cover her chest with her hands before she’d laugh and run into the water, throwing her bra over her shoulder, and I’d struggle with my clothes and want to catch up to her, hoping to get a glimpse of her nakedness underwater.

But then we’d be back in math class and the teacher would be calling my name for the third or fourth time and some of my classmates would have started to giggle and I’d say, Oh, sorry. Wait, what? and I’d look at Rowan and she’d be smiling too.

Driving early to school toward Weippe. I’m looking for the turnoff to the house Big took me to once when I was seven or eight. He had a cut hand that night, an ACE bandage sopped with blood on the palm side, and I could hear the wet each time he unstuck it from the steering wheel. I was thinking about his hand, wondering how he cut it—not asking questions because he wasn’t in a talking mood—and I didn’t notice where we turned. Suddenly we were off the 11, and we made two more turns before we got to a yellow house with three men sitting on the porch drinking clear liquor out of jars.

The turn’s what I’m looking for now, something familiar, something to remind me, and maybe that yellow house might tell me what Big was into lately. I’m driving the truck slow, looking left and right on the highway, and that’s when I see the worker, a man in his late 30s or early 40s, unloading corrugated roofing from the back of an ’85 F-250.

There’s something about the man—his height maybe, the way he looks a little like JT—that makes me let off the gas all the way.