Strange as This Weather Has Been Read Online Free Page A

her, tires, Styrofoam pieces, a pallet, I saw her twisting and swerving like in a dodgeball game. But she was hardly gaining ground, so she gave up on that, too, turned downstream now, looking over her shoulder always for what was coming behind, the flood force pushing her ahead of herself until she fell down, caught herself, stumbled back up, a clot of plastic jugs glancing off her back, then she dropped into water on purpose this time, I could tell she meant it, and started half-swimming, half-crawling, towards the stand of sumac and other little trees that marked the end of our yard. She fell forward into the thicket, pulled herself upright with each hand around a small trunk, and the trees stood close enough together to make like a cage around her, and although the water could breach the cage, the big pieces of debris and logs could not.
    The water dropped quick after that. The roar sunk to where she could hear me hollering. She struggled out of the sumac, limping a little, her uniform muddy and torn. She waved at me.Then she pushed down on the air with that hand, like telling a kid to quiet, and I could read her lips: “It’s okay. It’s okay.” But I knew better than that.
     
    Another dike was looming ahead, and this time Jimmy went around it, jerked the truck onto the grassy outside bank of the pond, and
made a road that way. Then we were riding smoother, but it felt like we were going to tip, and I locked the door with my elbow. I thought again of the guards, how they must leave a few nosing around even when the mine wasn’t working, and surely they would hear the truck. The ponds stairstepped all the way up the hollow, and as the hollow rose, narrowed, those top ponds no longer even pretended at grass, nothing but flood trash and rock. And then it got to where not even Jimmy Make could drive a truck any farther.
    He idled it there a second, no doubt considering just crashing on through, but then he switched off the ignition, stomped the brake, and swung out. I followed him. Hit ground, my bones still humming off the jar of the ride, and soon as I left the inside of the truck—sudden silence, clawed-up earth, sky shifting towards rain—even though I was fifteen years old, how small I felt. Like anything could get me. I craned my neck a little around the bend, and I saw for the first time the mine rim, just a piece of it was all I could see from that angle. A prickle moved under my hair. I recognized it from the others I’d seen from highways, sudden dead spots in what should be green, but then, in the car, you’d swing on by and not see it anymore. Jimmy Make didn’t even notice. He was just swaggering on up towards the turn, and I knew why. Still preening in what he’d just done, the fuck-the-company pride of it. But when we got around that bend, even Jimmy Make’s cockiness drained away.
    The edge of the mine top towered several hundred feet right over our heads, a straight gray line that started at the east flank of Cherryboy, then ran as far to the right as my head could swivel. Lace had said they hadn’t got Cherryboy yet, and she was right, but not even all those late-night listenings had got me ready for how the top of Yellowroot was just plain gone.Where ridgetop used to be, nothing but sky. Under that sky, what looked from this distance like raw colorless gravel but must have been piled-up rock. And beyond that, nothing at all.

    Jimmy’d stopped too when we first caught sight of that full edge, but we had to walk a little farther around the turn to check what Lace had sent us for.When Jimmy started off again, I followed right behind, my head down, me closer to him than I’d been in some time. He wore a black T-shirt faded to a plum color, and I watched his back, not ready to see the fill, and telling myself, it couldn’t be as high, as bad, as it already looked like it was going to be. But then Jimmy stopped, and I stopped, too, and there the fill was. And I couldn’t pretend anymore.
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