Chapter 2
WHAT HORSES SMELL LIKE AFTER RAIN
Buzzy Fink’s toenail collection, by the time I arrived in town, filled half an old Band-Aid tin. His showpiece was a full big toenail, cracked and yellowed, with tailings of cuticle still attached. Found it on a rock in the middle of Chainey Creek after a summer squall—brown water racing and the big old nail just staring at him like Sunday.
The original owner of the nail was a topic of much debate in the Fink clan. Esmer Fink, Buzzy’s grandfather, was sure it came from one of the Deal sisters. Identical twins, the Deal sisters: never married, bitter, lonely. He’d noticed Ethna Deal limping past the closeout bin at Pic-n-Pay the week before the discovery, and he’d seen the sisters down at Chainey Creek with their socks off. It was Ethna’s; he was sure of it.
Isak Fink, Buzzy’s father, knew Ethna had nothing to do with the toenail. Besides, the Deal sisters always limped. He reasoned, with some support in the family, that the original owner was an old miner named Mose Bleeker who disappeared during the storm and supposedly drowned drunk in Chainey Creek. Buzzy subscribed to this theory because it greatly raised the currency of his find: possessing the only remaining piece of a dead man was something to boast about.
Buzzy’s brother, Cleo, boycotted the entire discussion, believing that he was the rightful custodian of the nail. He was with Buzzy at the time of the discovery and thought that as the older brother he should take ownership. He was jealous of the attention Buzzy received and was half-lovesick over Jemma Blatt. Jemma’s interest in the toenail only made matters worse.
The only member of the family without an opinion on the nail’s origin or its rightful conservator was Buzzy’s mother, who believed the big toenail, and indeed his entire collection, would be the undoing of her youngest son. “A boy what keeps parts a people gonna come to a bad end,” she predicted into her black soup. “It jus ain’t natural.”
The debate eventually waned, unresolved, and the toenail remained at the top of Buzzy’s collection, brought out like his aunt Pip for special occasions. My first meeting with him was just such an occasion.
“Tie a slug to that spider bite; it’ll stop the swell. Gotta be a gray one, though. Brown ones make it worse.”
I was lying on the ground in the hills outside town, prostrate in pain after a red spider had got under my shirt and bit me on the stomach. My feet were against a giant oak tree and I was debating how best to apply my life’s remaining hours. I thought of running back to Chisold Street and crawling up to the porch and in my final breath telling Mom not to grieve too deeply; then I would die in her arms. But I was at least two miles from Pops’ house and the run back would only rush the venom to my brain. I finally decided to burn an abandoned coal tipple I had seen over the last hill when the voice filtered down from somewhere in the giant tree.
“I’m outta slugs right now, but down the creek there’s plenty. An don’t try cheatin it with a worm. Gotta be a slug… a gray one.”
I gazed up at the gigantic trunk, thirty feet around, branches fostering a great green canopy in every direction. Three limbs up, through the bark and leaves, a boy about my age was smoking a cigarette and reading a dirty magazine. The rippled black soles of his army surplus boots dangled over the tree limb. He threw the naked lady down by my head and quickly worked the forty-foot drop, landing on the ground a few seconds after the magazine. He squatted, knees to ears like a bushman breaking cane, slowly weaving back and forth across the ground in a rhythmic search for something.
“Here she is,” he said, pulling the curled carcass of the spider from the leaves. He held it between his thumb and forefinger. “It weren’t deadly poisonous, but you’ll feel it for a few days less we get you that slug… Name’s Buzzy Fink.”
“Kevin Gillooly.”
Buzzy Fink was a head taller than me and half again as broad, with sandy blond hair cut in a flattop on an already thickening neck. Eyes so blue they made the rest of his face seem freshly washed. A spread of freckles across both cheeks met at his nose; his big white teeth, gapped in the middle, flashed pink tongue when he smiled.
“You’re the Peebles kid,” he said as a point of fact.
“My grandfather’s Arthur Peebles.”
Silence.
“Let’s you an me get you that slug.”
I followed Buzzy close, feeling the expanding numbness around the bite. He strode to the edge of the wooded plateau and plunged straight down the steep, rocky bank to the creek some hundred feet below. I was lagging off, employing saplings as ropes, sliding down the bank on my butt, thankful for finally finding a kid to do stuff with. When I reached the bottom, Buzzy was already under his fourth rock—a few red salamanders, armies of pill bugs, but no gray slugs.
“Here you go,” he said after rock five, extracting a gleaming slug twice as big as my thumb. “This’ll do you.” He stepped over the rocks and slapped the slug into my hand. “I got some duct tape up the tree. We’ll make a poultice an tape it up. You’ll be jus fine.”
He was off again, long, sturdy legs making easy work of the slippery bank. I made after him, trying desperately not to smash such a serviceable specimen. At the tree he took the slug and climbed up one-handed, feet on knobs, hands on bark. Three branches later he was lighting a cigarette in a red pine rocker on the front porch of an impressive tree house. The house nested in the middle branches of the colossal oak at a point where the main trunk divided, providing a perfect platform for the structure. Shingle roof, pane window, plywood walls, and a front porch. A blue door.
I started up the trunk, echoing the nubs and bobs that Buzzy used to earn the first branch, my foot slipping, stomach scraping bloody against the bark.
“What’s the matter, Kevin Gillooly, don’t you have trees in In-de-anna?” Smoke punctuated each of his laughs.
I finally made it to the first branch and onto the front porch of the tree house, where I could see the whole town, the hollows and the remnants of the old mines on the Hogsback. As I scanned the horizon, something seemed out of place. The silhouette of the mountains over by the Hogsback was strangely malformed, as if some giant had cut off the peaks, leaving a flat gray table. Buzzy was still sitting, enjoying his cigarette. The sound of a massive explosion reached us, muted like distant thunder, but shorter, sharper, and inconsistent with the perfect sky above.
“What was that?
“Big-ass explosion,” he said between puffs.
“From what? Do you think anybody’s hurt?”
“It’s how they mine now. Blow the tops off an dig at it from above.” He stood, put out the cigarette carefully on the underarm of the rocker, and flicked it into a dirt-filled coffee can, then went inside, rummaging for duct tape. He reappeared a minute later, tape and slug in hand. He gave me the slug, added a sprinkle of porch dirt, and spat into my hand. He screeched out two feet of duct tape. “Slap the slug on the bite and hold it there.” He readied the duct tape for application. “Now take your hand away.” I did and Buzzy quickly covered the slug with tape. “Leave it there for a day an you’ll be okay.”
I could feel the cool slug squirming against my skin and watched its outline in the tape, moving like a puppy under a rug. Buzzy offered me a cigarette.
I sat on the porch deck next to him, trying to look practiced as I lit the end and pulled the first raging drag, holding in a cough with my life.
After a while Buzzy said, “I seen you come into town last week.”
“We’re living with my grandfather, me and my mom are. My father went back to Indiana because of work. He’s a lawyer.”
“Heard your momma’s gone crazy cause your little brother died,” he said, looking hard at me.
“She’s taking it kind of bad.” I avoided his gaze.
“Is that why you been lightin them fires?”
I froze. “What do you mean?”
“I mean is that why you been lightin them fires?”
“Uhhhhh…” I looked down into the tree-house porch floor at an empty acorn top.
“You don’t need to be doin that no more,” he said before I could muster even a lame reply.