Ohio 1986
It was the third summer since the factory shut down in Marion that my stepfather was out of work. We were busted broke, living off government dole and a backyard garden. My mother worked overtime in the frozen foods section at the Cardinal Market, and cleaned houses to make ends meet. It was the summer I turned thirteen and felt thirty: a skinny tomboy forced into a training bra, with frizzy hair the color of a dulled penny coin. My feet were grass-stained, calloused tough as a pair of brogans. My bedroom window overlooked the porch roof, and there was a three-sided iron truss that held up our TV antennae that I could easily ramble up and down slick as a ladder. I’d take off too the woods whenever things got too hot at the house, and more often than not Old Nick would whine to be let out and join me shortly, bounding through the briars huffing and snorting her annoyance with being left behind.
We lived within shouting distance of our only neighbors, and my Mama’s cousin’s boy was a constantly troublesome presence in our lives and on our porch. By the ripe age of eleven, Dickie was an accomplished compulsive who had nearly burned the barn down twice since Easter. He got arrested in sixth grade for selling dime-bags of oregano, expelled from eighth grade for buying scratch and sniff porno stickers, and at seventeen for armed robbery. This was long before that, though, when he was merely a private nuisance to us and hadn’t yet graduated into a public one.
It had stormed some the night before, and the air was heavy with a humid fog that hung over the pond across the road from our house. When I looked out my window, I noticed that lightening had taken out a big limb from my grandma’s peach tree. It was late May, and the blossoms lay scattered across the ground around it like tiny snowflakes. I watched from my perch as Dickie meandered across the road to the pond, swinging a giant walking stick. A knight-errant lacking nothing but a windmill, he approached a hornet’s nest the size of a pony keg that hung from a live oak. He swung. Hornets roiled out of the tree like a cloud of angry commas and chased him into the pond. I went downstairs and saw the white fluorescent light slanting out from beneath the bathroom door.
“Dickie’s about to drown himself over to the pond.”
Mama sighed as she raised and lowered a brown permanent marker along a strand of gray hair. “Oh sugar. We’ll never be that lucky.”
The marker’s felt tip made a dull squeaking sound against her hair, and smelled like root beer. So did she, with a trace of the acetone that made the marker color permanent, sweet, and toxic. “Murray’s there fishing, with our luck he’ll save him.”
“Did Daddy get the job?” I asked.
“When he got to Croton there was over a hundred men ahead of him in line. So try to walk in eggshells, won’t you? Just be a help today like you always are.”
We heard shouting and mayhem from the road. Mama dropped the marker and hurried to the front door. The porch shuddered as Dickie thundered across it.
“Aunt Sue,” Dickie said. “Aunt Sue…I saw a giant snapping turtle in the pond!”
“Liar.” I said.
“He ain’t kidding,” Murray said, lumbering up the porch steps. “I saw it too.”
