Strange as This Weather Has Been Read Online Free Page B

closest thing I’d ever seen to it was the Summersville Dam, but this was bigger, darker, and looser. I hauled back my head and looked up its whole height, and it seemed to me it must be as tall as the highest buildings in Charleston, but who knew for sure. There was just no way to gauge how tall the thing was because there was nothing natural about it, nothing you could compare it to, and then it dawned on me exactly what I was standing under—Yellowroot Mountain, dead. I knew from Lace and Uncle Mogey that after they blasted the top off the mountain to get the coal, they had no place to put the mountain’s body except dump it in the head of the hollow. So there it loomed. Pure mountain guts. Hundreds of feet high, hundreds of feet wide. Yellowroot Mountain blasted into bits, turned inside out, then dumped into Yellowroot Creek.
    We were standing at the edge of a big field of rocks that jumbled the space between the last pond and the bottom of the fill. Strange rocks that pushed me away when I looked, the rawness of them, no weather to them yet, despite all the rain. Jimmy had spread his legs and jammed his hands on his hips, and when he reared back to look up, the shirt jerked loose of his jeans. I watched him watching. He was all the time bragging about how he’d worked in the industry for years. He was supposed to be able to tell something about this. “Fuck,” he said. The sky was making to rain again, pushing breeze ahead of it. Jimmy Make tightened one bootlace and started across.

    I swallowed. He was picking his way, his arms winged out for balance, his chin tipped down. The breeze pimpled me along my arms and in the small of my back, even though there wasn’t enough chill in the breeze to do that. Then I shut down my mind and plunged after him, taking the rocks like a bear would, bent all the way over so I was walking on my feet and my hands. I didn’t want to touch those rocks with my hands, but I figured it would be worse to walk upright, then slip and skin an ankle, let it get in your blood. No. In the cracks between the rocks, gooey liquid stuff. Dark greens and blacks that turned blue when light hit them.
    I reached the base of the fill on all fours before Jimmy did on his feet. I pushed my neck back to see to the top again, and now I noticed how it looked like it maybe had two tops, one in front, one behind. But I couldn’t be sure. It was like I’d see two, but then my eyes would bend, and it would look like just one top again. And this close up to the fill, it was even harder to take it all as real. It was like my mind didn’t want to make a place for this here.
    By now, the sun had started dropping behind the blasted-off ridge, but we could still see easy the leaks in the bottom of the fill, water drooling out here and there even though it hadn’t rained in a couple days. I watched Jimmy Make. He just stood there. All I could read on his face was mad.
    “Maybe Lace is right,” I said.
    Jimmy spat into one of the leaks. Lifted his eyes off that and upswept them the height of the valley fill. I asked him again, “Do you think she’s right? There’s water standing up behind it?”
    Jimmy Make still didn’t look at me. But he usually didn’t. “That ain’t no dam,” he finally said.
    “I know it’s not no dam. Do you think there’s an impoundment behind it?”
    “Well,” said Jimmy, “I doubt that.”

    I looked at him. His belly paunching out under the untucked shirt. His brown eyes narrowed under the camouflage cap. Then I understood that he wasn’t exactly bullshitting me because he was bullshitting himself first. And right there I knew for sure what I’d suspected all along—Jimmy Make couldn’t tell any more about what was going on than I could.
    It was me was going to have to climb up that fill and see what was behind it.

Corey
    IF I HAD me a four-wheeler. If I did, now. Seth has a four-wheeler, and Seth’s only nine. And Seth hardly ever rides his four-wheeler, just goes