Bells of Heaven Chapter 7
Wind pummelled the windows like a tormented child, and Tim's mama held her hands up to her ears, moaning, "Not today, not today." Everything about her- her hair, her clothes, the way her face twisted away at the corners – everything suggested something at the mercy of the gale. Even Dally saw it, and tried to gently take her hands down.
"Hush now, hush now, darlin'. Ain't nothin' but a rain storm, comin' in hard."
Tim gave a light shiver. There was sorrow in this wind, a threnody of nothing but ghostly wails that pulled at his joints, knocked on his bones, searching for the rhythm of the living. It held all the bitterness of snow in its torment, and he scowled at the clouds scudding in east, at his mother's helplessness, his father's calm. He was unhappy, and impatient, and he wasn't watching.
Because Dally had come home to stay, and somehow, that wasn't what Tim wanted after all.
Dally drove the wagon into an old wrecked Buick abandoned on the side of the road near Jonesboro. He ploughed into it, a grotesque fornication of steel, drunk and lost and ninety dollars down after three weeks' of looking for work. The wagon was a write off, and his shoulder was broken in three places. That accorded him some kind of status amongst the ladies of Clay County; once was a commonplace, twice was remarked upon, but three times was an event worthy of gossip. The story spread in the vacuum of their lives, and Dally Gutterson came home to as many baked dishes as he could eat in a month, along with an unhealthy interest in his newly acquired deformity.
It may not have been as picturesque as they hoped, but it was crippling. Dally was now confined to the house, his income limited to a disability cheque and whatever he earned beneath the counter as a handy man about town.
And so, like a monarch returned bearing battle scars from foreign wars, Dally set about to reclaim the rule of his kingdom.
And Tim, once regent in absentia, burned.
The language and reasoning to parse it all was beyond his fifteen year old self. A younger child would have handed back the crown and the burden with relief: an older man would have recognised the rightness, the necessity. But Tim felt only usurpation; what was once his place and purpose was gone, and now he stood by as his father doled out medication, and fixed leaking roofs, and adjudicated quarrels.
The king was redundant. Long live the king.
Now, as he stared out at the roiling clouds, he projected deliberate malice onto their relentlessness. He needed to get to school, away from his father's ill-conceived and unwanted parenting and towards the one thing that consumed him these past three weeks; and the weather looked to be doing everything in its power to consciously thwart him.
"Come on, Shell, quit stallin'. It's just a storm."
"I don't want to go. I think it's going to snow." Shelley was as morose as Tim, but for different reasons. She had nothing but a pair of old trainers on her feet, useless against any kind of rain, and never liked physical discomfort.
"Well, I'm going. I got science today, workshop, don't wanna miss it."
"Ohhhh." Shelley smirked. "Now I know why you're in such a hellfire hurry to go get wet. Laura Patterson, huh?"
It was horribly, awfully, gloriously true. Tim Gutterson had been walking along by his locker, inconspicuous and unsuspecting, when a bottomless chasm opened beneath his feet, right there in the junior high hallway. The ground gave way as Ellie Hoffman raised her shirt to show the bruise she'd gained in dance class to two girlfriends, and for three sacred seconds Tim caught a glimpse of the swell of her breast and the shine of a satin-red bra.
He'd been in freefall ever since.
It was as though the world was falling away with him. Before that moment, girls held no great mystery or allure; he had two sisters, so girls were alternately aggravating, charming, annoying, fragile, overwhelming with their chatter and busyness and generally kind of fun. He spoke without hesitation or doubt with girls. He appreciated their talents, their perspectives. He was a reasonably fair-minded, well-adjusted teenager who thought the leering of some of his classmates was pathetic.
Then he discovered Sex, and everything he once held true about himself was lost as his body decided to make up for its regrettable stability over the last fifteen years and drop him into the spiralling chaos of blood rush and boners that was puberty. Suddenly, girls were everywhere he looked, a torment on two legs, defining his nights and shower sessions by their scent and sway and leaving his right hand and another part of him sore with over-use. He didn't understand how anybody ever did anything; why weren't adults having sex all day long, once they were old enough to do it? How could they not? He took to wearing his bag slung over his front to hide the fact that he was almost constantly aroused. He wondered if he was some kind of sex fiend – nobody else seemed consumed as he was, nobody else was pin wheeling down a mine shaft of constant, aching lust.
The vigilance that had been his constant duty since he was seven years old was lost. Thinking about anything but sex seemed a waste of time to him now. He left his mother to his father's care, and thought of Laura, and Amber, and Ellie, and how impossible their existence on the same earthly plane as his was.
And he was not missing out on sharing a lab-bench with Laura Patterson for the sake of a little weather.
"I'm going." He grabbed his bag, slung it over his chest, and paused to give Jazz a rough pat. "You want me to walk you, you better get off your ass right now."
Grumbling, Shelley gathered her own things. Pixie was away at a camp for advanced students in Little Rock, so as their mama wavered in her presence, and their father reasserted his with unconscious heaviness, the two of them set out on the three mile walk, coats whipping around their bodies as they walked with the wind at their backs.
Science came after the first break, and Tim found himself suspended in an agony of anticipation as the first period ground on. He always sat well up the back in advanced math class; he could do this stuff, easy, so AP math was a chance to stretch his legs out and daydream, but all his daydreams these days took him into a place that was acutely uncomfortable. Laura took general math, and that seemed to him to be an injustice in the system. Then again, the chance of him ever listening to anything in AP math ever again if she were here was slim. So he stuck a pen in his mouth (even the thought of that turned him on) and listened as the windows shook to the tune of the storm, and classmates muttered about going home.
"They should let us out," Kennedy said. He lived close enough that the fact was a torment of possibility to him each day; he could see his front porch, beckoning, from the science wing. "My brother said it just about tore into Mississippi this mornin'."
"If they were going to do that, we'da heard from Old Creaky." Tim spoke in hope. Old Creaky was the obvious nickname for Cready, the principal.
Kennedy shook his head. "Reckon we're gonna get snowed in."
As if in response to his words, the first wet flakes slapped up, silently, against the window pane. The bell to end the first period sounded and the students gravitated, as if by agreement, to the window.
"Go on! You've got science, I believe," Mrs. Tanner said. "No point gawking. Won't change a thing."
Reluctantly, as if they'd never seen snow before, the students filed away from the classroom towards the science wing. They bottlenecked together at the doorway before putting their heads down and plunging into the storm to cross the quad and reach it. Tim looked up, eyes squinting in the sting of the wind and snow to see Laura running to the science building from the other classroom block, and the weather's cold bite disappeared in the flood of tingling warmth all over his body. She wore red leggings and bright yellow socks, and he'd never seen anything more beautiful.
"Hey," he called as he drew close. She glanced back but quickly hid her face from the blast.
"Oh, hi. You got those notes from last week?"
"Oh, sure. I made you a copy." That wasn't trying too hard. Was it? She wasn't to know how slowly the task went, hours of it, as he curbed his usual hieroglyphics into something at least mostly readable. He found himself pulled towards her, happily helpless in the press of bodies escaping the cold. "Should be good today, huh? Newton's Laws."
"Newton's Laws?" She gave him a vaguely incredulous look, quickly lost as she continued to scan the sky outside the corridor windows. "Who could be interested in that?"
"Yeah. No. I guess."
She looked at him properly, ignoring whatever he was mumbling about. "Do you think we'll get sent home?"
"Maybe." She looked worried, so he added, "I could walk you. Make sure you got there okay."
She blinked at him. He stood at least three inches shorter than her.
"I want my mom to come pick me up."
"Yeah, of course, that would be – um..." he flailed briefly, wondering how it was that a girl he'd chatted to for the last ten years without the slightest hesitation had become an impassable block in his mind.
The students filed into the science lab, tendrils of nervous tension wrapping around each one as the poorly maintained windows rattled violently in their frames and the snow swept past their vision. A good storm like this one brought drama to an otherwise mundane day, and most of them were very willing to wallow in projections of disaster, despite the best efforts of Mrs. Minchin, the science teacher, to drag them clear of it.
Tim took his place at their usual work station, determinedly keeping his eyes above where the short woollen skirt Laura wore rode up on her thighs as she straddled the work-stool. It didn't help. Just the fact of her, the thought of that skirt hem, those red leggings tight against it and the way they parted into darkness in order to balance on the stool – each or any one of them meant he had to pull his stool up hard against the bench in order to hide what was happening below.
"Alright, settle down. Newton's second law of motion; acceleration – force – mass. How can we link these three together in a way that represents Newton's second law?"
Twenty three pairs of eyes immediately dropped to papers, benches, shoes. Four earnest students in the front benches raised their hands, begging to be asked.
"Yeah. Okay. Anyone not from Try Hard Alley?"
Tim watched Laura's hands as they squeezed each other in their gloves, imagined them squeezing something else and slapped a hand against his mouth to cover a groan.
"Oh, Mister Gutterson. You've got something to offer? Amaze me. Blow my tiny mind. Acceleration – force – mass..?"
"Hey." Kennedy spoke up from the back. "There's some naked chick outside."
An immediate flurry of students crammed against the window, ignoring the weary "Kennedy, really, what garbage is this now?" from Mrs. Minchin.
"He's right, look!" Michael Ferguson pointed. Some of the girls gave nervous little laughs. Amber Mosley squealed.
"Ew, gross. You can see everything!"
"Is she someone's mom?"
"Alright, that's enough." Mrs. Minchin inserted herself forcefully between the students and the window. "Come away now." She looked over her shoulder at the woman outside and shook her head. "Diana, can I trust you to get to Creaky's office and let him know?"
Tim hadn't moved. Something told him. Some sense of disaster held him as if pinned to a specimen tray, ready for incision.
"Hey, Gutterball. Isn't that your mom?"
Mrs. Minchin frowned at the speaker, then gave Tim a worried look. "Tim, is that - ?"
He stood, slowly, feeling all eyes on him. Watching, as he'd failed to watch. From his spot against the door he looked through and beyond all his classmates, each of them more or less avid at the spectacle of another student being sliced open, past their greed for scandal and out to the rapidly whitening yard. There, huddled against the wind, buffeted and staggering, was his mother.
She wasn't really naked. But she was only wearing a thin cotton housecoat, with nothing underneath. The material was soaked to transparency. Tim saw her flat breasts, the darkness between her legs, her arms raw with a cold that had to be painful. And most shocking of all, somehow, the bareness of her feet. It was the sight of those thin ankles disappearing into the snow, unprotected, utterly vulnerable, that hurt him the most.
"Wow." Corey Hansen was smirking. "Your mom bringin' your lunch, Gutterball?"
"What the fuck are you looking at?" Tim burst across the room, grabbing Corey's shirt and slamming him back against the wall. He was so fast, and so violent, that Corey gasped and cried out, shocked into genuine fear.
"Tim! Enough. Put him down. No, Mister Hansen, you don't get to complain since you lacked the decency to shut up." Mrs. Minchin kept her voice as even as she could, and Tim spared a second to bless her for it. He knew that pity at this point would rob him of the power to do anything. "Tim, you'd better go and help your mother. Everyone else can sit down and get on with your work."
And that was what he needed. Laura, Corey, Kennedy, even Mrs. Minchin - everyone in the room faded into irrelevance.
Tim left at a run, hearing his boots echoing in the empty corridor, nothing in his mind but his sweet and funny mama, lost in the ice storm. He barrelled into the teeth of it and almost lost his footing – the wind had picked up even in the few minutes since he'd crossed the quad. It was useless to call. He put his head down and fought his way towards her, willing her to stay where she was.
Closer, and he could hear what she was saying.
"They have to come home. They have to come home. They have to come home."
"Mama? Mom?" He reached for her, but she hunched in on herself, unknowing of anything but her own eternal landscape, seen from high above. Hurriedly he pulled off his jacket and wrapped it around her, partly covering her. She resisted clutching it as she needed to, and Tim held it tight against her, his head close to hers as he yelled. "We have to go home."
"Yes!" She grabbed him, her hands blue with cold. "They have to come home."
"They're coming home, Mama. We're coming home. We have to go now."
With despair, he thought of Shelley. But he couldn't let her know. The rumour mill would take care of that, he supposed, and he had a quick moment of sadness at her suffering to come. She'd hear a hundred different versions, all of them awful, and he wouldn't be there for her. He couldn't wait for her, either. Their mama was exposed here, to more than the weather, and he had to get her home, to where they could protect her and keep her safe from the judgment already being brought to bear.
"Come on, Mama, walk with me," he said, holding onto her, urging her steps.
"I have to find them. They have to come home."
"I'm here, Mama, I'm coming home with you."
She looked past him, distraught. "They have to come home. It's getting so dark."
"Please, Mom." He dared to tug at her, and she pulled back, outraged, lost.
"Don't you! Fucker! I'm here for my children."
"Shit." He looked about him, desperate, then made a decision and swung his shoulder down and into her. Before she could protest he lifted her onto his shoulder and turned into the wind.
She screamed. It hurt him as if her screams were part of the ice now burning his face.
He didn't say anything to her. There was nothing he could say. She didn't fight him, physically, lying limp and exhausted across his back. But she screamed, a mad, horrible sound, and the screaming was relentless.
Head down, he trudged through the rapidly gathering snow. His boots were soaked in seconds, along with his shirt. He forgot them both when he saw her feet, blue-white and cut, too cold to bleed, bumping against his chest.
It usually took twenty five minutes to walk from school to home. In the storm, accompanied by his mother's shrieks and staggering under her weight, it took an hour. Even though her voice was almost gone by the time his front door came into view, he heard her keep straining to scream her anguish for her lost little ones, somewhere in the wildness. His ragbag heart was bleeding as he pushed open the unlocked front door and stumbled on down the corridor to his parents' room.
And over and over, the question that thrummed with each pulse, remained: where the fuck was his father?
He lowered her to the bed and took off the jacket then groped for the blankets, wrapping her, still wet and shivering, under their warmth. She seemed to stop then. Exhaustion, or acceptance, or perhaps her mind had gone far beyond the travails of weather and family. Whatever the cause, Tim was grateful, because he had more to do now and didn't know what strength he had left for the task.
Everything in him ached, but the thought of hot showers had to be put ruthlessly aside. He couldn't take off his boots, because he had no others, and he couldn't get his wet jeans off over his boots, but he could change his shirt and reclaim his soaked jacket. His hands were claws, unable to be straightened.
"Dad?" His voice was a croak, and he tried again, louder. But he knew the house was empty, except for Jazz, pushing his nose against Tim's thigh, reading his distress.
"Hey, Jazz. Hey, buddy." For one quick, awful second he wanted to bury his face in his dog's fur and howl; but he fought the urge, biting his lip instead and turning back for the door.
"Gotta go get Shell, Jazz. You stay with Mama, okay?"
No, that was not okay; Jazz whined and stayed close as Tim stepped past the rain and snow that had been blown inside the house through the open door. His dog was not abandoning him, and that was a comfort he could cling to.
A moment's hesitation, right at the top of the porch steps – and then he committed himself, letting the wind blow him along, with Jazz tucked in close to his legs, his blackness muted to gray in seconds.
It was another half hour of struggle in the cold. The lights of the school were bright against the darkness of the mid-morning storm when he finally rounded the bottom of the hill, so chilled now he could barely breathe. He stumbled forwards, peering past the cars collecting out the front, the anxious parents and excited students, who were all variously delighted with the disruption of their day. In the snow and dim light individual faces were blurred to sameness. Jazz pushed on, assured, and Tim followed.
They found Shelley waiting by the front office. She was talking with Laura Patterson, both girls flushed with the general excitement. His sister glanced at him as he came near.
"Oh my god. Don't you got any sense? What've you been doing – playin' in the snow?"
Laura looked uncomfortable, and Tim realised, with a new tightness in his belly, that Shelley didn't know. He was amazed that no-one had taken the opportunity to relish her dismay as they piled up the salacious details.
"Come on, Shell. We gotta get home."
She tossed her head. "Laura's mom's giving me a ride."
Tim looked past her to see Mrs. Patterson gathered with several of the other mothers, all heads together, talking urgently. Maybe it was the storm that was exercising their minds. Maybe it was the state of the roads, and the damage to their gardens. But he'd bet everything he owned that it was the scandalous doings of Clara Gutterson, and the good mothers of Greentop High were feasting on that like carrion on a particularly noisome carcase.
He gritted his teeth.
"Sure."
"You can come with us, you like." Laura made the offer with studied casualness, and he saw how she widened her eyes slightly in the direction of her friends, standing several feet away, watching but not watching in the way girls did the world over. Laura, Tim understood with sickening clarity, was looking for Details. Extra tidbits to bring to the talk table after the Guttersons were dropped at home.
"Yeah. Okay." And the thought that would have had him almost catatonic with excitement less than two hours ago was simply painful to him now. Mrs. Patterson left her group of friends and came to join them, conspicuously smiling, jaws tight with intrigue.
"Well, there you are." Somehow , the statement of fact was rendered an accusation in her mouth, as if they'd been deliberately hiding from her. "You ready to go, Laura, honey?"
"Can Tim come too, Mom?"
"Why, of course, dear." The picture of maternal solicitude, Mrs. Patterson nodded and smiled before saying, "How's your poor mother, Tim? She get home okay?"
"She's fine."
"What do you mean?" Shelley frowned, suddenly aware of the claws beneath the care. "What's with Mama?"
Laura opened her mouth to answer, but Tim said, "I'll tell you at home, Shell."
And Shelley didn't pursue it; the Gutterson children knew the boundaries of discussion about their mother, and they did not incorporate the corridors of Greentop High.
Tim could tell that Mrs. Patterson was disappointed. She gave a slight sniff, and they left the warmth of the office area for the bleakness outside. It was only then that she noticed Jazz.
"That's not your dog, Tim."
"Yeah, he is."
"Well, I'm sorry, but I can't have a dog in my car."
Tim stared at her.
"Well, I just can't." Mrs. Patterson bristled, as if he'd challenged with her. She opened the doors to her gleaming station wagon, her smile bright and hard, daring him to argue. "You'll have to leave him here. He'll be fine."
Until that moment, Tim would have sworn that formidable women like Mrs. Patterson would always have his measure. But with his dog tight against his legs, wet, weary, but not dreaming of abandoning him, he found a different truth.
"He's comin' with us." Quickly, he slid into the car, then patted his lap for Jazz to jump up on him. Laura gasped.
"Tim!"
He glared at her. "You gettin' in? It's cold to be standin' around."
Shelley promptly joined him in the backseat, while Laura and Mrs. Patterson stood open-mouthed, until Mrs. Patterson found her voice.
"Tim Gutterson! You will get that wet beast out of my car this instant!"
"Nope." Tim gave her one of her own smiles back. "You can try shiftin' him, but I don't reckon you'd get more than a handful of wet fur. Now, you can stand there arguin', or you can get in. Reckon I know which I'd rather, 'f I were you."
Mother and daughter hovered there, for a second, in immaculate outrage. Then, with an acquiescence born of the weather, they both dropped into their front seats. Mrs. Patterson's fury resonated through the car, but Tim ignored it. He held tight to Jazz as the station wagon started up and eased away, through the slow traffic, the snow-flurries and indistinct pedestrians. And he learned something else about himself; that all the hormones in the world were not proof, for him, against a dislike of character. Laura Patterson was just another girl, now, and never would hold any kind of power over him, ever again.
The drive was silent; the Guttersons got out with muted thank yous, unacknowledged, before the car disappeared almost at once in the storm. Jazz bounded up the steps ahead of him to the door, as Tim told Shelley what had happened. How their world had crumbled once more, and how it was time for the blue and red lights to wash over them again, taking their mother away to somewhere safe and healing and utterly dreadful.
Shelley didn't cry as Tim rang for the ambulance, but when she came out of her mother's bedroom, her eyes were red. Tim knew it would be several hours before the ambulance arrived, so he left her and went to the bathroom, claiming some hot water and some space before he suddenly sat in the bathtub with the shower head dribbling onto him and began shaking as if it was the cold in his bones, as if it had anything to do with the storm.
Two hours later, Dally appeared. Tim heard his voice, heard Shelley explaining, heard bedroom doors opening and closing and the rattle of Jazz's paws on the floor as he ran sentry detail up and down the house. He had a lot to say to his father – a lot of questions, a lot of accusations. But all the words lay about his feet, limp, useless, and he lacked the energy to bend down to lift them up and fling them in his father's face. He stayed in the backroom instead, and his father didn't come near him.
Only one more thing stirred him that day, after he came out to watch them load his mother on a gurney and take her away. It was his last lesson.
Dally stood silently in the kitchen, working his jaw, unable, it seemed, to take any kind of action that would claim his authority. Shelley sat slumped at the table, head down on her bent arms. And Rhonda Galby bustled about the room, pretty and practical and glowing with helpfulness.
"Oh, there you are, sweetheart. Come on in and set a spell. I've got your supper on the stove, one of your favourites, Dally tells me." She stepped to him and patted his cheek before giving him a quick hug. "Now, you don't worry none. I'm going to look after y'all now."
And Tim learned that even when every part of him wanted to do it, he could not punch a woman.