Excerpt: Beautiful Noise

Beautiful Noise
By Shaun Perkins

Prologue

Geri’s Diary

This creek is too cold to even put your toes in. I bent down and just put the tips of my fingers in and shivered. It’s shallow but it crosses the road and makes it impassible after a heavy rain. It disappears around a bend, and someday I will follow it.
On one side the creek is sunny and made for kids. The other side is all shadow. The snakes live here. Boys jump from the bank full of gnarled tree trunks. The water swirls with sticks and brownish spirals of leaf crumbs and trash.
If you go past the shadow side, the creek winds around the Walkers’ cow pasture. You can’t see it when you’re driving down the road, but the line of trees and the emptiness beyond them let you know that the creek is there. You can only see it again when the road curves back to the north and once again crosses over the water.
I want to follow the creek to its end. The water will be cold. Cedar trees line the banks for miles. It must be miles. I don’t know how long that creek goes on—through this county and the next, into Cherokee, and then leaving Oklahoma altogether, winding its way into Arkansas.
I know how much of a shock the water is.
Past the shadow side and around the bend is place, only waist-deep, but it’s too thick with shade. You can’t see what you’re doing there. Everyone stays away, even couples making out. Besides, something happens to the wind where the creek curves to the east. It comes out of the trees differently. Or it doesn’t come out at all. It vanishes, like the light.
The water is a shock. Yet you don’t want to turn away after you go in. I’m not afraid of snakes, but I don’t want to touch them. Still, there’s something attractive about how deadly they can be. The water is shallow. And I know how to swim. But when it’s so cold. When it’s winter, and you go on, your knees could stop working.
You could go slowly and something might still hold you back. Hands pressed against my stomach to stop me. Not pushing, just stopping me. A wall. A barrier. A warning.
What do I do when someone holds me back? Resist. Resist.

Chapter One

“If it ain’t too dark out there for ya, yank that laundry off the line and bring it in!”
Geri wiped the sweat from her forehead. It was stinging her eyes. She squinted into the darkness and could see Ganny’s outline in open back door. In that fading light, she looked like the little old woman who made the gingerbread man. It was the only book Geri had from her childhood, the only reminder of her mother, whose name was on the inside cover. It had been hers as a child.
“Sure thing, old woman!” Geri yelled.
Ganny snickered and the screen door banged shut as she went back inside the kitchen.
Geri bounced the basketball against the smooth dirt court she had made in the back yard. The ball slipped from her wet hands, and when she picked it up, stringy lines of dirt, mixed with her sweat, slipped off the ball like worms.
She rubbed the ball against her t-shirt to dry it and then dribbled it behind her back—back and forth, not looking at it, not needing to. It was too dark to see it now anyway.
“Most girls as tall as you can’t handle the ball that well,” Matt had said to her earlier.
He had been sitting on the propane tank with a giant glass of lemonade, watching her shoot baskets. Dirt flew up all around her, and it stuck to her skin.
“You look like a leopard with those dirt spots,” he added when she didn’t reply to the first comment.
She knew he didn’t really care about her dirt spots. He liked to smother her in kisses even when she was salty from sweat right after a game. She was tall like him, with curly hair that was gold sometimes and red sometimes and always out of control. Her body was muscular, but she had curves and breasts so large that she sometimes wore two sports bras to keep them in check.
Sometimes Matt just liked to talk, not needing a response. Sometimes she was the same way. So was Ganny. Ganny had handed Matt the lemonade when he drove up. Geri never stopped playing.
“Would you stop long enough for me to get a kiss?” Matt asked with a fake pitiful voice. “Can you stop?”
She had eventually stopped but only gave him a peck.
Ganny she loved. Matt she loved. But nothing held her focus like playing basketball. The sound of the ball hitting the dirt, thunk, thunk, thunk, got inside of her, as much a part of her as the beating of her heart. Coach Thorpe noticed it the first time he saw her.
Ganny had her garden and her sewing. She had Geri, this great-grandchild no one wanted to raise. She could come close to crippling herself as she bent from the waist and swung like a pendulum pulling out weeds and popping off deadheads as she walked the rows of marigolds, runner beans, and radishes. An unneeded quilt took her months to piece, but she wouldn’t let it go until it was finished and folded carefully, wrapped in newspaper and stacked in the hall closet with the others.
She also has a kitchen rhythm. She made sandwiches with thick homemade bread and freshly-sliced ham with red onions and thin slices of tomato. She would put a sandwich on a plate and give it to Geri and insist that she eat it because Geri forgot to eat sometimes. Her best friend Bird was mystified by her ability to forget food. She told Geri she wished she could do the same.
Some nights, like tonight, Ganny stood at the back door and watched Geri bounce the ball, shooting into the darkness. The only clue the she had made a shot was the clank of the metal chain net against the pole. Ganny rarely said anything, but Geri could feel her there and know that Ganny wondered about her and if she would run or if the basketball would keep her at home. Ganny took her in when she’d run from everyone else.
I’m not going anywhere, Geri told her without words and hoped she heard. I’m not going anywhere.
The light from the back porch cast the shadow of the oak tree onto the side of the barn. Geri could no longer see the goal. There was no moon. The last of the spring’s barn swallows flew swiftly into the half-open barn door.

Granny’s Gardening Journal

March 23: There’s a fine patch of pigweed’s cropped up the east side of the barn, and there probably ain’t nothing to be done about it. Noticed where Geri’s trampled it down a few times retrieving her basketball. But pigweed’s tougher than old leather, and the only way to get rid of it is to get the shovel and dig up the roots and make sure you get every last one. I dug one up once that had a root an inch and half thick and was almost six foot long. I sometimes wonder if I should have had Warren put that goal on the side of the barn after all. Sometimes she’s out there playing long after dark, and she don’t seem to notice how the earth there is beyond bare it’s sinking in, she’s making a hole in the way she keeps going over and over the place in front of the goal.

March 25: I got my seeds at the feed store today—cucumbers, beans, and tomatoes. Course, it’s too damn early to plant a thing. The flags and tulips are all up and ready for spring. The lilies are already coming out of the ground. Oh but it’s too soon. If they’ll wait a few weeks, they’ll look better with the warmer days and more sun and no threat of one of them all-of-a-sudden-take-your-heart-through-your-ribcage tornadoes or even just a gusty wind coming along to lope off their heads.

March 30: For some reason I keep thinking about Sister when I’m out in the garden. Today, Geri was practicing her basketball out at the barn like usual, and I was putting down some powder on the hollyhocks, which those damn beetles love so much that they don’t barely get to sprout a few leaves before they’re pocked with holes. And all of a sudden I thought of Sister because it struck me that I was up to my elbows in the cool dirt of the garden and behind me was the sound of the basketball thumping against the ground, and the feel of it was so familiar. And I must be starting to go mental because I stopped and looked over there at Geri and it was her I saw—with the length to her and that chest girls envied and boys goggled at and those long, long legs and the perfectly shaped nose. And the skill. The skill that caused her to leave us. The obsession. I dug up some hostas and spaced them out more evenly in the space along the front porch.

April 4: It wasn’t a tornado last night, but the wind was bad enough to knock over that old scarecrow been out in the south end of the vegetable garden for probably ten years now. She had a panty-hose filled with cotton balls for a head, and the cotton balls, all brown and stiff and peeling, are busted up and spread across the grass and stuck in the barbwire fence like moths in a spider web.