–
by Meredith Wadley
–
Pepper liked Bermuda shorts better than miniskirts, a dog licking her face better than a washcloth, and scabby knees far better than a head full of curlers. She’d come outside, carrying My Side of the Mountain, wanting to take the book across Buckeye Street to read in the woods behind the Aldrich house. Yesterday, on the last day of vacation, she’d turned ten, and her parents had given her the book. She’d saved it for today, to read in her woodland hideaway. A safe hideaway. At the campground where they’d vacationed, she discovered that not all woods were safe.
But storm clouds covered the safe woods behind the Aldrich house. Thunder rolled. And the air went from the scent of a green twig stripped of bark to that of a penny hot after a freight train had flattened it. Leaves, twigs, cigarette butts, and faded candy wrappers began to skitter and whirl. The trees along the street began to sway. While the sun bit fiercely at her back, rain began to fall. Pepper slipped her book under her T-shirt and sat on the searing hot curb.
Mostly, she slipped into the woods to hide from her bullying brother, Ash. Or her big sister’s indifference to her. Sometimes, she ran from her daddy’s bad moods, which seemed to seep into everything. Since his return from Vietnam, the family was going through what Pepper’s mom called “a rough patch.” Pepper longed for the rough patch to end.
The rain fell as thick and straight as a guillotine. It pounded the asphalt shingles of the houses along the Aldrich side of the street. Their drains gurgled meatily, and scallops of water swept down their driveways. The rain advanced until it reached the middle of the street, dividing Buckeye into wet and dry lanes. Drops the size of quarters hit Pepper’s side of the street, vaporizing immediately.
Metal screeched behind her. The front screen door of her house.
“Hey, stupid! Come inside!”
Ash.
“You’re gonna get wet.”
What did he care? She didn’t move. Without her book, she might’ve considered walking straight into that guillotine of rain.
***
Back in the spring, when the woods appeared as if swarms of green moths had settled on every winter-bare branch, Pepper spied Ash making his way along a footpath. She followed him, and he led her to the edge of the woods, the Ohio River shining below them like a giant slowworm sunning itself. A freight train clackety-clacked, its track following the river’s course.
Penny followed her brother down to those train tracks. He set a nickel on a rail and handed her a penny.
A train approached, and she hesitated.
“Go on, stupid,” he said, sounding almost tender.
***
During their daddy’s year-long absence, Ash grew out his hair. His voice dropped and his legs lengthened. His taste in music changed. Daddy, shocked by his son’s transformation, made blistering comments on the hair and music. In response, Ash stomped through the house, pictures and photos tilting on their nails, smiles dropping from faces, and colors draining to black and white.
One evening, in front of news coverage of the war ongoing in Vietnam, Daddy said. “Boys hardly older than you, son, are being sent home in body bags. Put that in your pretty curls.”
Mommy wasn’t around to say, “It’s just hair, Len.” Or “Go to your room, Ash.”
Pepper’s big brother stood and said, “Come on then, old man.” He raised his fists. “Come on, then.”
Pepper ran for the woods, for the soothing sounds of rustling leaves and creaking branches. The moaning wind.
***
The night before the family left for vacation, Daddy arrived home from work and asked if everyone had already packed. After dinner, instead of turning on the TV, he whistled old cowboy tunes and got out his screen, projector, and Vietnam slide trays.
Pepper’s mom said a part of him missed Vietnam. His buddies.
At the sight of the projector sitting atop a stack of books, Pepper’s mom frowned, and her big sister Connie pressed herself as tight as possible against the den sofa, drawing a pillow over her lap. Ash slipped out of the room, the front door slamming. Pepper longed to follow him.
A hypnotic beam of light humming with dust lit the screen. Click-click, Tan Son Nhut Airport and Daddy—the sleeves of his flight suit rolled to his biceps, his long forearms tanned—standing under his plane’s White Whale emblem. Click-click, he’s offloading a Brahma cow from the back of his C-123. Click-click, he’s shaking hands with General Westmoreland.
Click-click. Daddy grins alongside a tiny lady. She cooked, kept the officers’ quarters clean, and taught the men useful words and phrases. Click-click, click-click, click-click,. Night-market vendors; old men sitting on bamboo stools; and women in ao dais floating along sidewalks. Click-click, click-click, click-click,. Daddy posing by an orchid stand, his hands on his hips; storefronts chockablock full of wares; and a street clogged with motor scooters, three-wheel vans, and army jeeps.
A fresh tray slid into place, click-click, click-click. Another replacing it.
Click–click, jungle-green hills framed by a cockpit window. Click–click, click-click, click-click. Bangkok jewelry-store clerks, a cobra handler, a lavishly golden temple, and long wooden boats, loaded with fruit and flowers, clogging a canal.
Now came the inevitable sticky tray. Shoved, slides clatter. Shoved harder, clatter, clatter. Harder, dammit, and harder still. The books beneath the projector slipping and the projector crashing, the light slicing a new path and slides scattering across the floor.
Mommy ran out of the room and up the stairs. Connie pressed her pillow tighter.
Daddy’s keys jangled. “How ’bout a treat, girls?” he said. “Pizza?”
The projector’s beam cast the room in a ghostly light.
Through the door to the garage came the sound of his Willys driving off. Pepper missed the before-Vietnam daddy.
Connie righted the projector and turned off its lamp before following Mommy upstairs. Pepper returned the slides to their trays. She knew their order.
Upstairs, in the big bed in the big room, Mommy lay with an arm covering her eyes, Connie curled against her. Pepper waited to be invited in, to be included, but her wait went unrewarded.
The Willys returned, Pepper’s mom whispering, “Go eat your dinner, girls. Call in your brother.”
***
Without My Side of the Mountain, Pepper might have walked straight into the rain: washed clean and returned to the safety of the woods. Last night’s bath had cleaned her of vacation grime and smoke but not of what had stained her. She needed to be cradled by the woods.
She pressed the book to her chest. My Side of the Mountain was her book, not borrowed from Lisa, her best friend, or from a library. Not fingered by thumb lickers, sleepy-seed diggers, or nose pickers. She’d saved reading it for the woods because she had no corner of her own. Pepper and her sister shared a bedroom with Wendy the hamster. Pepper loved Wendy’s waddling ways, the smell of her fresh bedding, how she licked water drops from her bottle, and even her squeaky wheel.
Pepper loved her shelves of books and Matchbox cars, cars that Ash had abandoned or hadn’t noticed missing, a red Beetle, a powder-blue Cutlass, and a green Galaxie. Yesterday, Connie had given Pepper a black Bel Air with opening doors and hood.
The room wasn’t all nice, though, considering the closet, which became a cave at night, its darkness deep as fear. No way she could sleep with its door left open. Sometimes, Wendy’s wheel stopped squeaking in the night, waking Pepper. Seeing the hamster raised up on her back feet and sniffing the air, Pepper would imagine something under the bed, her heart pounding. She’d struggle to fall asleep again.
Spooky closets and sliding movements under the bed were better than the dolls who sat atop the bureau. In their frilly dresses and stiff ringlets of hair, they glared at Pepper’s sunburned shoulders and chewed fingernails. They murmured about her grubby feet and scabby knees.
After her bath last night, Pepper had pulled those dolls from their shelf, lifted their skirts. Under their lacy panties, their goings-on-down-there were curiously not going on. Pepper had never noticed their smoothness before. Now she knew they were nothing like her in any way. She’d taken a match to them, singing those smooth, featureless parts.
When Connie came upstairs to bed last night, she said, “What stinks in here? Did you burn something? I’m telling Mom.”
***
A week ago, four Buckeye families loaded four station wagons and headed north. Together, they’d rented a scout camp for ten days. Pepper rode shotgun in her dad’s Willys. He sang “Happy Days Are Here Again” and told jokes. Pepper ventured to repeat one Ash had told her. “What’s better than roses on your piano?”
“Dunno.”
“Tulips on your organ.”
Her dad’s hand tightened on the steering wheel. “Where’d you hear that?”
He knocked the smile from Pepper’s face.
“Don’t you ever repeat it.”
“Sir.”
When they reached the camp gates, Pepper’s dad broke into song again, this time, Pepper’s favorite, “You Are My Sunshine.” She doubted he meant her, though; the skies were periwinkle blue and cloudless.
Chestnut trees sheltered a row of tents with canvas sides and wooden floors. The parents positioned themselves between the girls and the boys.
Pepper shared a tent with Lisa, her neighbor, best friend, and opposite. Lisa with the perfect grades at school, the blonde hair and blue eyes, and the maturing figure, her breasts emerging. Pepper would have liked making straight As, but she was happy with brown hair and eyes, and she did not want breasts. She didn’t want boys saying to her what they said to Connie and would say to Lisa. Pepper did not want attention from boys—sort of.
The girls changed into swimsuits. Pepper wore a two-piece, but it was not a bikini like Lisa wore, and she felt like an unsharpened pencil next to her sharp friend. The two crossed the wooden footbridge spanning a stream deep enough to canoe on. The bridge connected the sleeping area to a mown field, an open kitchen, and a stream-side beach. After a quick swim, the girls lay out their towels to sun themselves. Ash and his best friend, Chris, pestered them, throwing pebbles and twigs their way and even flinging a skink onto Pepper’s belly. Lisa screamed and scrambled to her feet, the boys howling like apes. Pepper saw the critter safely back to cover. No, she did not want attention from boys.
The moms sipped cocktails and prepared a buffet of salads and side dishes, and the dads drank beers and built a fire in an open pit. Burgers and sausages went onto the grill. Soon the four families occupied the fireside logs, balancing paper plates on their knees. They toasted marshmallows for smores. Bedtime came with the stars. To a backdrop of guitars and the adults singing campfire songs, Pepper listened to Lisa’s secrets of boobs and blood. No, she did not want either.
“We can hear your every word,” Connie shouted from the neighboring tent. She and her tentmates broke into laughter.
Pepper later woke to tiny feet scurrying across the canvas over her head. On another night, something hit the canvas above her head, waking her. It tumbled and plopped onto the ground. Nearly every night, Lisa would whisper her need to use the latrine. She couldn’t make the trip on her own.
If the boys left them alone, the girls would nap on the sandbar, making up for poor sleep. They’d cool off with dips in the creek. Pepper became a turtle, a fish, an otter.
Her dad took her canoeing. He’d lean into his paddle and push, and they’d glide over green plant stuff waving underwater like ribbon candy. Heaven, until the other dads plopped an ice chest onto the sandbar and whistled. Her dad drove the canoe ashore. Its metal bottom screeching caught Ash and Chris’s attention. They pelted Pepper with water. She screamed. Why couldn’t they just leave her alone?
For all his blond hair, height, and the soda frizz of his upper lip, my brother’s best friend was just a Goofus. Fourteen like Ash, but a head taller, Chris stooped to seem smaller and stole cigarettes from his mom. If you called him “Chris Kraft,” his eyes became a hard blue like shadows on snow: Mr. Kraft was his stepdad. Pepper feared older boys. She found herself longing for their approval and a rough-and-tumble girl. More and more often, she found herself ashamedly mimicking the curvy ways of Lisa and the older girls, the flouncy walks, hair flipping, and hip-cocked stances. If Chris noticed Pepper’s girly moves, it was only to laugh. When Ash noticed them, he’d chase her into the water.
Her birthday fell on their last day of vacation. The moms griddled pancakes and scrambled eggs with Jimmy Dean sausage. Pepper didn’t have to help set the table or wash dishes. Lisa gave her Island of the Blue Dolphins. My Side of the Mountain came from her parents, Connie gave her the matchbox car, and Ash’s birthday card had a crisp five-dollar note in it. There were presents from the other families, too, coloring books, a kite, and a cross with a diamond chip.
She opened Island of the Blue Dolphins on the sandbar at camp, but Ash and Chris came up behind her, casting their shadows over the book’s first page. Asking them to go away was pointless. And curiously, they weren’t there to torture her. They told her to follow them. She closed her book and pulled her shorts and T-shirt over her swimsuit.
Across the footbridge, through the chestnut grove, and past the latrines, they led her. Chickadees called, “Hey, sweetie.” And Jays jeered like schoolboys.
“I’m telling you,” Chris said without telling anyone anything.
A hawthorn snagged Pepper’s shorts, and she tugged herself free. Beads of blood appeared on the back of her hand. She licked them, tasted metal, and thought of the smeared penny in her pocket. Where were the boys leading her? What did they want to show her?
***
The rain stopped, and vapors rose from the wet side of Buckeye Street. Pepper’s reading spot under the old oak would be dry; getting to it would soak her. She didn’t mind getting soaked, but she had her book to think of. She withdrew it to peer at its cover, Sam Gribley releasing his falcon, Frightful.
Across the street, a pair of robins landed on the Aldrich lawn and hopped about.
Pepper imagined living on her own in her woods. Not all woods were the same: Her woods were safe. Her woods were decent. She imagined her big oak having a hollow wide enough for her to sleep in. The first time she read My Side of the Mountain, she’d envied San Gribley’s solitary life. And she’d envied Kanara’s solitary life on Island of the Blue Dolphins. Pepper never wished to be an only child. She wished to be an orphan. She already felt orphaned.
***
Chris and Ash lead Pepper into a clearing. Grasshoppers and crickets leaped from their path, and the sun shone hot and predatory. The chirrs of insects traveled down Pepper’s spine like shivers. A distant train horn moaned like a warning, and somewhere above them, a falcon whistled. Pepper thought of bolting; why didn’t she bolt?
Stopping at a picnic table in full sun, the boys stopped. “Come here,” Ash said. “Take off your clothes.”
“What?”
“Take off your clothes.”
“Leave me alone.”
“Do it, stupid, or I’ll tell Dad.”
Chris stood behind Ash. She couldn’t run; they’d tackle her.
“Swimsuit,” Ash after she removed her T-shirt and shorts.
She nodded at Chris. “He has to turn his back.”
Ash scoffed, and Chris did not move.
The swimsuit fabric stuck to her skin, the bottoms rolling as she removed them. When she crossed her arms to pull her top over her head, Ash said, “That’s enough. Get on the table.”
“Nothing there to see,” Chris said, and the boys laughed.
Ash pushed Pepper back onto the table’s surface hot, rough surface. “Knees up,” he said.
“Why? No!”
He touched her thighs, her muscles tensed, and he threatened again to tell their dad.
Her legs trembled as her brother pried them apart. Her lungs felt as if they’d filled with hot sand. And her every exhalation sounded like, “Why? Why? Why?”
Chris and Ash leaned close. Where their eyes traveled over her, they left traces of hot slime.
In the clear, clean sky, a falcon glided.
“Well, look at that,” Chris said, not meaning the bird.
“Yep,” Ash said. He threw Pepper’s T-shirt and shorts across her face and said, “Get dressed.”
“If you try to say anything to anyone,” Chris said, “you’re just a girl.”
“A girl,” Ash echoed.
Now, Chris stooped. “Hey, look what I found.” He held up Pepper’s flat penny and pocketed it. “My lucky day.”
Ash threw his arm around his friend’s shoulder. Off they trooped, like brothers.
***
Vapors still rose from the rained-on side of Buckeye Street. A car approached, Mrs. Kraft’s red Beetle, vapors in its path, swirling. The car’s body, dappled in raindrops, sparkled as if studded with rhinestones, mesmerizing Pepper—until the windshield wipers rose. The rubber blades sniggered over the dry glass, breaking the momentary spell.
That’s when she saw the passenger in the car. Chris. Pepper’s fingers flayed across her book. She pressed it against her chest.
His eyes held hers, his head turning as the car continued, sweeping by until the moment broke. A bird across the street, above the Aldrich house, cried. And the summer storm above Pepper’s woods began falling to bits, small clouds breaking away forever.
–
–
–
Meredith Wadley is an award-winning and anthologized American-Swiss writer and military brat who lives in a medieval micro town on the Rhine River. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Find her long-form fiction in various publications, including Collateral and Line of Advance. Read more of her work at www.meredithwadley.com. She tweets @meredithwadley and haunts Instagram: #meredithkaisi.
–
–
–
–