Sourland

saw one of these but knew of them. Copperheads are smaller snakes but poisonous, too. Even garter snakes and grass snakes in just our backyard, in our woodpile in the garage, I’d be terrified of. There was this story of what happened to a ten-year-old boy a cousin of Dan Burney he was tramping in the woods with his dog and the dog waded into a pond and started swimming and something in the water attacked it, the dog was howling and yipping and the boy waded in to rescue it and turned out to be water moccasins, they came swarming out of the cattails and rushes and attacked the boy, sank their fangs in his legs, pulled him down and sank their fangs in his belly, his chest, his face thrashing and swarming at their prey and he screamed for help but nobody could hear him, his heart stopped there in the swamp.

Pressed my hands over my ears. I was feeling sick just to hear this. Begging the guys to stop it, I didn’t want to hear it, I didn’t believe them but the guys just laughed at me.

The boy we hurt, his name was Arvin and he was Michie’s age or older but in special ed. not in eighth grade. In special ed. that was taught by a man teacher, in a corner of the school building by the shop/vocational arts, students who couldn’t read like the rest of us or couldn’t talk right or had things wrong with them you could see, like in their eyes, in their faces, or maybe they’d be very fat or very thin and had trouble walking, or had ways of acting that were signs of their strangeness like laughing too much or twitching their shoulders or shrinking away when you saw them. On the school bus, they sat together at the front, near the driver. That way, they’d be protected.

Arvin Huehner, 14. The name in the newspaper.

We were surprised, the way the name was spelled. You just called them Hugh- ners, the family.

Arvin was taller than Michie and his friends but bony-thin, with rounded shoulders and something wrong with his chest: “pigeon-breasted” it was called, he’d been excused from gym classes and swimming. His shoulder blades curved forward as if he’d been stooped over too long and couldn’t straighten his back. His neck was at an angle like he was leaning away from himself. His face was pasty-pale and hairless like something skinned. His lips were rubbery and loose. His teeth were crooked and stained and his eyes were weak behind thick lenses and he had a high-pitched whiny voice you’d hear sometimes when he was scolding his younger brother and sisters who rode the bus with us, in mimicry of an adult Arvin would cry, “Bad! Bad!”

When I saw Arvin Huehner my eyes seemed to sting. Quickly I looked away. The thought came to me There is someone like myself.

(Why this was, I don’t know! There was nothing of DeeDee Kinzie in Arvin Huehner, or in any of the special ed. kids.)

Michie said, There’s the freak.

In a freak, there is something that draws the eye. You resent it, having to look.

My cousin Michie was thirteen, when I was eleven. Michie wasn’t tall but solid-built for a boy his age. He had a wedge-shaped face, a heavy jaw. You could see how he would grow into a heavy man like the older Dungarves. But his cheeks were soft and smooth-looking and had a natural flush like sunburn. His eyes were bright and shrewd. Already in junior high, Michie Dungarve was “sexy” in the eyes of older girls. He hated school and cut classes when he could. He had a posse he called it, guys who hung out with him. When he was younger Michie used to paint stripes on his face like an Indian, red clay to give him a wild scary look. On a leather thong around his neck he wore an animal jawbone and a black turkey vulture feather. In the family Michie was known for his mule-stubbornness. Aged two, his mother said, he’d dig in his heels in the ground, even an adult man could hardly budge him.

I was DeeDee, short for Diane. I was the only girl.

Why it happened I was with them, it had to do with where we lived. Red Rock Road, that ran along Red Rock Creek from Rapids to Route 14 which was a state highway. Red Rock Road was just two miles, not a through road so you’d wind up at the old logging site where the woods look ravaged even now. It’s mostly wild woods and fields and a big swampy marsh where only rushes and cattails grow and there’s a terrible smelly black muck through late summer. There were six houses on this road and naturally you got to know the kids if they were your age and took the bus to school. The Dungarves lived next-door to us, my mother was all the time over visiting her sister Elsie, or Elsie was at our house, and when he’d been younger, Michie sometimes came with her. There was a path through the field to the Dungarves’ house. My cousin Michie was only two years older than me but when you’re a child two years is a long span of time and always I wanted Michie to like me.

Showing off for Michie, to get Michie’s attention. My aunt Elsie would tease me.

At school, Michie would protect me. Not because he liked me but because I was his cousin. Fuck with DeeDee Kinzie, you’d be fucking with Michie Dungarve.

I hated girls! Mostly, girls hated me.

I wore clothes like the guys. Jeans, zip-up parkas, shirts pulled over shirts. My chest was flat as a guy’s chest. My hips were lean as a guy’s. Where my legs came together there was a frizz of pale brown hair, it wouldn’t be for another two years or so that hairs began to grow in my armpits and on my muscled legs sharp as tiny thorns. My face was small and oliveish-pale and my eyes deep-set like shiny black glass.

I had a mouth on me, my mother said. She stopped slapping that mouth by the time I was eleven. She’d learned.

Water moccasins. Slow-moving and mud-colored in the stagnant swamp water. I’d be wading in the swamp and see the snake-shapes start toward me beneath the surface of the black water, a faint ripple all you’d see, oh God I could not move my legs I could not scream for help the snakes swimming toward me surrounding me in a circle rushing at me to sink their fangs into me…

How many times I dreamt this, it makes me sick to think. At school I asked a teacher why’d God make poison snakes and she answered some bullshit answer like they do and I had to pretend to believe it, like I always did.

Tell Nose Pick c’mere, Michie said to me.

Nose Pick was one of the names they called Arvin. On account of him always picking at his nose, his mouth, his ears like he had terrible itches all over. Arvin had a way of watching the rest of us, kind of smiling at us, laughing if we did something meant to be funny, wanting to be with us except most of the time, at school, if we were outside on the school grounds, he couldn’t: there was a yellow line painted on the pavement dividing one part of the paved ground from the rest and the special ed. students were not allowed to cross this yellow line or vice versa. This was a school rule. You could figure that it protected some of the special ed. kids from being teased or tormented but also it was meant to protect other kids from being teased or tormented by the special ed. kids who were bigger and older and kind of unpredictable in their behavior. Arvin Huehner was between these, you could say. He’d be picked on by the guys but, tall and kind of bossy like he was, Arvin sometimes picked on younger kids himself. That high-pitched nasal voice scolding Bad!

The Hugh-ners as they were called lived on Red Rock Road in a house that was just a basement, you could see the basement windows and part of the first floor that resembled a skeleton, just boards and planks where rooms would be, except work stopped on the house years ago and never started again. There was no outside to the Hugh-ners’ house only just raw planks and strips of something like canvas that became ripped and flapped in the wind. This house, that people called an eyesore, and were contemptuous of, was about a mile from where we lived, and the Dungarves lived, toward the dead end of the Red Rock Road. The older Hugh-ners were said to be “normal” but the children were all special ed. Arvin had only younger sisters and a brother, no older relative to protect him.

Hey Arvin, I said, Michie wants you to come with us.

Arvin narrowed his eyes at me not trusting me exactly. This was in April, a day that smelled of wet earth. Warm when the sun came out and chilly when the sun went in. Arvin was wearing a parka that was an ugly mustard color and corduroy trousers that fitted his legs narrow as pencils. That Arvin would believe my cousin Michie and his friends would want him to join them, that Arvin was so stupid hardened my heart against him. Why’d you think you could be their friend I wanted to laugh in his face.

Arvin adjusted his glasses on his nose, blinking at me. He was licking his loose rubbery lips excited and scared.

O.K. c’mon, I told Arvin.