Weatherball Blue by Russell Brakefield
Spring that year the local news affiliate had erected a hundred-foot tower outside the station, atop of which they stacked a stainless-steel ball fitted with 300-some neon lights. A beacon. A mascot.
Russ is one of my favorite poets (TWO wonderful books of poetry that I couldn’t recommend more highly in the last year, Irregular Heartbeats at the Park West and My Modest Blindness) and in the last couple of years has been quickly turning into one of my favorite short story writers as well. I immediately fell in love with this one on first read, and only love it more and more each time I revisit. The poet’s eye is evident in all the specificity, the detail and language, the way of looking at the world, but the storytelling is so fun and engaging and true; it’s what really grabbed me here, sweeping me up into this world and characters. I’m so excited to get to feature this story today, and I hope you all love it as much as I do.
—Aaron Burch
We first met Darrell sophomore year, the same year Channel 12 put up the Weatherball. My best friend Steve and I had noticed him lurking in the halls that spring, had seen him smoking cigarettes near the dugouts after school and trudging back and forth down the rural highway in his baggy black jeans and Static-X t-shirt.
It was Friday of finals week when we finally spoke to him, in the dusty Dairy Mart parking lot just down from the school. Steve was inside, and I was putting gas in my tank—five bucks in nickels I’d plopped down on the gas station counter without an ounce of shame. Darrell was hanging around by the payphone alone. I watched him, as I pumped, walking in circles, checking and rechecking the change slot, picking up the phone and putting it to his ear without ever making a call.
“What’s the weirdo doing now?” said Steve, coming back to the car with a Coke slushy in one hand and a bag of Red Vines in the other.
“Stop,” I said, but then added “I don’t know—he is being pretty weird actually.”
“You still want to be his best friend?” Steve climbed into the passenger seat through the open window. The door had been stuck since the end of sophomore year.
“I never said that. I just said he seems alright. He says smart shit in class sometimes.”
“Yeah well.”
Steve had always been a little wearier of interlopers, more cautious about who we let into our crew. But then Steve had been a big kid when we were younger and had taken more direct punishment from the neighborhood boys about his weight and his pizza face, about all the trash his parents kept stacked in their front yard.
Steve adjusted his straw, and it made that squealing plastic-on-plastic noise. “My mom said she heard from Mrs. Schmitt that he used to be in some fancy boarding school up north, but that they kicked him out or he ran away or something.”
I hung up the gas pump and got behind the wheel. “He doesn’t exactly look like boarding school material.”
“No. Not so much.” Steve was squinting, making a face that meant he’d drank too much too fast. “Well whip on over there then,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“What?”
“Just pull the car over there dweebus.” He took another drink and set the slushie in the grimy cup holder between us.
I pulled the car around to the payphone and parked, idling a few feet from where Darrell was doing his pay-phone derby routine.
Steve leaned out the window. “Hey man. You need some change or something? Need to use my cell?”
Darrell jumped at the sound of Steve’s voice. He stepped back a few feet and stared into the car like we’d just asked for his wallet.
“You know my friend Chris, right? He said you two have History together.”
Darrell peered into the car and nodded.
“You alright?” Steve leaned a little further through the window.
“No. Yeah. I’m alright,” Darrell said, staring at his feet. “I’m just waiting for a ride is all.”
“Seems like you’ve been waiting awhile.” Steve said this with a kindness in his voice that I didn’t usually hear. It surprised me, this voice, and I think it surprised Darrell too.
“Thanks.” said Darrell. “I’m good.”
“Red Vine?” Steve thrust the bag out the window in Darrell’s direction.
Darrell approached the car timidly, like a deer walking up to a salt lick for the first time. “Thanks,” he said again, and slid a red straw from the bag.
“The weather’s about to turn,” said Steve, and pointed to the sky. “Rain or snow in sight.”
I looked up to see a row of dark clouds mounting on the horizon, the grey-green glow of spring thunderstorms. Somewhere in the distance, the Weatherball would be blinking its steady pattern.
“Get in,” Steve said and clicked the lock button. “We’ll drop you off home. Or we can go down to Leo’s for a slice.”
It was some sort of promotional stunt, the Weatherball. In the spring that year the local news affiliate had erected a hundred-foot tower outside the station, atop of which they stacked a stainless-steel ball fitted with 300-some neon lights. A beacon. A mascot. A bit of free advertising. A waste of money, depending on who you asked.
The news station came up with a series of jingles to help us lowly townsfolk read the ball, each of us suddenly anointed as casual fortune tellers. The mustachioed weatherman—his name was something punny that I can’t remember now, something like Storm or Sunny or Ray—would chant the Weatherball slogans at the top of every forecast, pointing to the animated graphic at the bottom of the screen:
Weatherball red, warmer weather ahead.
Weatherball blue, cooler weather in view.
Weatherball green, no change foreseen.
Colors blinking bright, rain or snow in sight.
It was Darrell, I think, that made the joke first, adding a fifth category to the forecasting system: Weatherball black, terrorist attack. It was the summer of 2002, and we thought we were funny, much funnier than anyone else our age. We thought we were wittier and edgier and more interesting. Maybe we were. Most likely it was just important for us to think so at the time.
*
That summer Steve and Darrell and I would drive around town in my beat-up Honda civic, mermaid teal with one mismatched red mirror. Usually we’d drive out through the cornfields and orchards west of town, then loop back to cruise along the river, letting our hands drift out the open windows to catch the cooler air.
Most nights, at the end of the night, we’d end up in the little sitting area beneath the Weatherball, a miniature park with benches and a landscaped foot path lined in brick-red mulch. We’d sit there beneath the man-made planet and smoke cigs and throw rocks into the duck pond across the street. We’d talk about our summer jobs, talk about girls we liked but had no chance with, talk about nothing at all. We’d quote the same movies over and over—Tommy Boy and Road Trip, older shit like The Jerk and Blazing Saddles— until we were sick laughing, the globe above glowing like our own personal spotlight.
Steve and I had known each other since we were kids. We grew up on the same street, four houses apart. I knew how his mother fed him (mostly casseroles). I knew about his nightmares (endlessly falling through the dock at the creek off 10 Mile Road). I knew the brand of cigarettes his dad smoked (Basics) and the first girl who’d broken his heart (Sarah Downing). I knew about his troubles at home and about the most embarrassing moments of his young life. I knew a few things about him probably no one else in the world knew. He knew those things about me too.
On the other end, we knew jack shit about Darrell, and Darrell, it seemed, was happy enough to keep it that way. On our nighttime drives and in the hours we spent kicking around beneath the Weatherball, Darrell didn’t talk about his life, didn’t give up one stitch of intel on where he was from, his family situation or his past, his hopes for the future. And the thing was, amid Chris Farley impressions and smashing mailboxes and late night 7-11 runs, none of that mattered to us anyways. All we needed to know was already right there in front of us.
One thing we did know, without him having to tell us, was that Darrell was different. Even setting aside the rumors about his past—about his mom being a jailbird, all that boarding school business—it was clear he was different. Everyone in town was some version of poor, but Steve and I had pretty good lives, “remarkably stable households” as one teacher once put it, praising us for a group project on the Bosnian War we’d worked on together. Darrell, on the other hand, lived with his mom in a trailer at the south edge of town—literally just on the other side of the train tracks—and wore the same two ripped metal t-shirts to school every day. He took the free lunch trays in the cafeteria and ate them alone by the dumpsters in the parking lot. He didn’t go on field trips or meet with the guidance counselors. He didn’t do sports or clubs, not even the Magic the Gathering Club or the open Rock Rehearsal space in the music room on Tuesdays. If he wasn’t with us, it seemed, he was almost always alone.
We didn’t care about any of this, but we could tell Darrell did. The first time we picked him up was also the last time he let us inside his mom’s trailer. He was outside waiting when we got there, but then had to go back in to get some money for whatever stupid shit we were going to spend it on that night. “You guys can come in,” he said, “but let’s be quick.”
Inside the trailer all the shades were drawn, and a sheet of cigarette smoke hung in the air. Sound from a TV rippled from the back bedroom, a low silver glow coming from the crack in the door that reminded me of Weatherball blue, cooler temps in view. Darrell put his finger to his lips as we passed. “Mom’s trying to chill,” he said in a whisper.
And then there were the dogs. Dogs everywhere. Five or six of them at least, about five or six too many for the size of the trailer. They were all fat and drooly small breeds that nipped at us and humped our ankles as we made our way back to Darrell’s room.
“Mom likes to help out with the fosters,” Darrell said, rummaging through a heap of laundry on his bed, pawing through the pockets of dirty jeans. “Some breeder out west sends them over here.”
I was a little queasy by the time Darrell found his stash of crumpled ones and we headed back out, the smell and the dark and the dogs whining and barking all around us setting me on edge. When we emerged from the trailer, I had to blink to adjust my eyes. Steve and I stood there in the parking lot for a minute rubbing our sockets and gulping in good air.
“Let’s go!” yelled Darrell, already in the back seat of the Civic waiting.
Later on in life, when I lost track of both of them and went through my own divorce, I’d think back to Darrell often, back to that dark trailer, to his mom smoking in bed and all the dogs and pizza boxes and mail piled up on the counters. It makes me cringe, thinking about how Steve and I talked about it later when it was just the two of us, how we made jokes about his mom and about the dogs eating her after she died of a Diet Dr. Pepper overdose. I wonder about my own kids sometimes too. I wonder about my kids’ friends and what they think about me now that I live on my own, what they say about my shitty apartment and my empty fridge, my own piles of mess and too dark rooms. My elderly cat Linda clawing at all the couch cushions.
It was the summer of 2002, and we thought we were funny, much funnier than anyone else our age. We thought we were wittier and edgier and more interesting. Maybe we were. Most likely it was just important for us to think so at the time.
Darrell would occasionally disappear for long stretches of time that summer. When we called his mom’s place, she would say he was gone and give no more explanation. Or sometimes she’d say he was playing video games or watching TV or that he just didn’t want to talk to us. Sometimes she just hung up if she heard one of our voices on the line, as if she was hoping for someone else instead.
In July, we didn’t see Darrell for three weeks straight. When he came back, the first week of August, he called us up as if nothing had happened, and we drove out on a Friday night and swooped him and headed for our normal spot. I thought maybe Darrell would tell us something more about his life then, since he’d been gone for so long, but he just wanted to talk about the new Austin Powers movie, which he’d apparently seen without us. He kept doing Fat Bastard lines over and over, standing on the little benches beneath the Weatherball and shouting in that terrible accent. And when that got old, he got quiet and said he should go home and could he get a ride even though it was still early, and so we piled in the car and headed back that way.
“I was up at my Dad’s house,” Darrell said from the backseat right before we dropped him off at home. “I might be up there a couple more times this summer.”
“Cool,” we said, and then Darrell said “Yeah Baby” and hopped out of the car.
*
We did do other things that summer, apart from just sitting around outside the news station. We swam in the river, launched off cliffs and perfected backflips from the rope swing by the boat docks. We mowed lawns and mended fences for money. Steve worked as a mascot at the zoo and at the kid’s camp up on the lake. I washed dishes at Sharkie’s Fish and Stuff downtown. Lots of days we just hung around my parents’ house, watching TV in front of the window AC unit or jumping on the trampoline until someone got hurt.
And it was in these spaces, the normal domestic spaces where Steve and I had spent our entire lives getting to know each other, that Darrell had the most trouble. It was almost as if the Weatherball’s glowing lights cast some magic spell over the three of us, allowed us all to be together with no complications, no questions, no concerns.
Darrell had a short fuse everywhere else. He would go apeshit about the smallest things. He’d lose at NFL Blitz, say, or Steve would make a joke about Darrell’s scraggly beard, and it would send him off. Sometimes he’d just get up and walk out on us, and we’d find him in the driveway a little later, shooting endless lay-ups on my nine-foot hoop, unwilling to come back inside or even really talk to us. In the end, we’d have to just leave him there until he cooled off. And he would, and then we’d carry on like none of it happened in the first place.
I thought maybe Darrell would tell us something more about his life then, since he’d been gone for so long, but he just wanted to talk about the new Austin Powers movie.
One night, Darrell and Steve picked me up after work with two bottles of cherry vodka they’d found in the back of Darrell’s mom’s trailer. Steve had been working at a kid’s camp on weekends for some community service thing and had swiped some expensive gear from the ropes course—harnesses and ropes and massive metal lobster clips. I’d lent Steve my car, and the gear sat there in a tangled nest in my backseat when he pulled up.
There was a breeze blowing when we got to the Weatherball, and I was shaking right away as we strapped on the gear and started climbing the big utility ladder that led up to the top. If you clipped into the next rung each time before you moved, there was really no way to fall, but we’d all been drinking—them more than me—and everything felt wobbly and electric, like one wrong move and you’d be fucked, flat as a pancake on the Channel 12 roof.
At the top we heaved ourselves over the little railing and clipped into the center column. The wind was cold, slicing at our bare arms like knives. The whole tower swayed a bit beneath us. The ball was huge up there, much bigger than I thought it would be, and blinking an intense bright red. Nearly blinding. The light colored our faces bright orange like in that episode of Seinfeld with the Kenny Rogers Roasters. We sat on the shaky platform beneath the ball, back to back to back, mostly without speaking, all of us breathing heavily and staring out into the darkness.
I got chicken first, as usual, and said we should climb down, but Steve was talking about how this was the just the start, listing off first other things in town we could climb, then other things he wanted to do once he’d “gotten out of this shithole.” He was drunker than I’d thought, talking a mile a minute. “This is just the start,” he said. “We are going to look back on this as just the start of everything. The start of our lives.”
“Alright that’s enough,” said Darrell, suddenly climbing to his feet. “Enough future talk.” He unclipped and walked to the very edge of the platform, spreading his arms out like wings. He was painted in neon blinking red; one minute we could see him, the next we couldn’t. Later, I would remember this scene like some demonic flip book, Darrell moving in clipped, spastic frames.
“Be careful man,” I said, but my words fell away from me into the darkness as soon as I said them.
Darrell leaned over the railing and started shouting at the top of his lungs, words to metal songs and then other random shit, movie lines and inside jokes and then just his name, his full name, over and over into the wind.
Steve and I were both saying his name too—Darrell! Darrell! Darrell!—but in one of those desperate scream-whispers you use when you don’t want to spook someone, real gentle so that he wouldn’t get even more freaked and pitch himself over the side.
Finally, he sat back down and clipped in again. “This is living,” he said, hoarse and out of breath. “Right now. Here. This is it.”
On the way down I was sure my foot would slip on every rung. I must have held my breath the whole way, waiting to plummet to my death or waiting for Darrell to slip past me and pull all three of us down with him. Back on the ground, everything looked different. The little benches looked bleached and terrible, the mulch like rotten teeth tossed along a cracked footpath. My car, the thing I loved most in the world, looked like a rusted undersea vessel. I was shaking so hard my teeth were chattering.
I think about this night a lot, when I’ve had a few too many beers or when Steve pops up on my Facebook feed or when I’m doing anything that involves heights. I think about the feeling of that giant metal structure bending and swaying beneath us. I can picture Darrell at the edge, his body poised to leap like some majestic bird. I only live about two hours from where I grew up now, but I haven’t seen the Weatherball in years. Google tells me it’s still there, and I think Steve’s still there too, with a family and a job at the high school, but we haven’t talked in years, and we never spoke again after that night about our short time on top of the world.
Later that summer, Darrell told us that his younger sister was dying of cancer. “Leukemia,” he said, and when he said it, he looked up at the Weatherball as if for answers, as if it might open and deliver him some serum and antidote or some simple solution for all that had gone wrong in his life. “I think she’s going to die.”
Darrell had never told us anything about his sister, except that she was younger and that she lived with his dad. We assumed that some of those times he’d been missing had been spent with her, up there at his dad’s place, though he never said as much and we never felt we had the right to ask. But when he told us this, that his sister was sick, he offered it up plainly, with no hesitation. He looked like he might puke. Steve and I were leaning on the back of my car, the trunk popped, and Darrell was sitting on the sleeping policeman beneath us. The Weatherball was blue that night—cooler weather in view— if I remember right, painting his face with an extra layer of anguish.
“I’m going up north to spend some time with her,” Darrell said. He fiddled with the gravel at his feet, lining up little pebbles on the pavement. “It’s like, terminal.”
I remember being unable to speak in that moment, not having a single thing to say to my friend. I remember being ashamed about this then, and I’m still ashamed about it now.
“I’m sorry man,” said Steve eventually. He went and joined Darrell on the curb, not putting his arm around him but sitting close enough that he could if he needed to. “That fucking sucks. I’m really sorry.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry.” I echoed.
Darrell nodded. Behind him, the Weatherball blinked black. It did this sometimes, some mechanism resetting or some generator timing out. Sudden darkness all around us. Then just as quickly it blinked back on, throwing a blanket of blue light over us again.
“Terrorist attack,” I said, the joke we always made, by rule, when this happened.
But when I looked back at Darrell, he had his face in his hands. He was crying, his bony shoulders shaking beneath his t-shirt.
“Dude, not the time,” said Steve.
Later, when Steve and I dropped Darrell off and started the drive up the hill to our neighborhood, we rode in silence. The radio sang mostly static as I drove past the abandoned gas station, past the one flickering streetlamp at the entrance to the high school, past the Episcopal church and the VFW. I turned on my brights as we headed further up the hill, hugging the tight curves of the rural highway.
“You want to stay at my place?” I asked, as a I made the last turn past the bait shop, up towards our street. In the country darkness, the stars above us were bright enough to cast shadows.
“I think I better go home,” said Steve. “I haven’t really spent any time there lately.”
I remember being unable to speak in that moment, not having a single thing to say to my friend. I remember being ashamed about this then, and I’m still ashamed about it now.
Darrell’s sister died at the end of August, just before school started up again. The Weatherball had glowed mostly green for the rest of the summer. No change foreseen. The air stayed wet and humid, as if the river was lifting in some slow-motion rapture. But at the same time, everything in our lives felt charged with movement, with change. Every moment felt like we were back on top of that tower, standing on the edge, about to leap or about to fall.
A few of us drove up north for the funeral. Darrell shaved his head before the service but kept his long, scraggly beard. Sitting in the church pew among the suit-and-tie mourners, he looked like a pirate or a train robber, head dotted with black stubble, grey circles around the eyes. People whispered from the back of the church, worried about Darrell and what would happen to him. Darrell’s mother didn’t attend the funeral. His father, who we’d never seen before, sat solemnly beside him like an older, sadder version of our friend.
The service was short and sparsely attended, presumably filled with the family members and friends in Darrell’s life that he’d decided not to tell us about, and that, I know now, he never would. Darrell would move north to be with his dad before school started that fall, and I’d have very little contact with him in the years after. I’m not sure where he is now. I heard from an acquaintance a while back that he was doing time at the supermax in Marquette, but then I heard from someone else he was a pipe fitter in Benton Harbor, perfectly happy/unhappy just like the rest of us. Sometimes I still see him in my dreams, out in my mom’s driveway shooting layups. In the dream he’s suspended in the same endless loop, like Sisyphus but with a tiny, orange rock in his hands, leaping over and over up towards the sky.
I don’t remember much else about the funeral, not which song the old soloist sang or what verses the preacher read aloud as eulogy. I do remember Darrell giving a short speech, most of which he mumbled inaudibly into a creaky microphone, trying, it seemed, not to weep. At one point he said he’d never be as good as his sister was, and though I never met her, the way he said it made it feel as true as anything else I’d heard Darrell say.
“I wouldn’t have even recognized him,” said Steve’s mom, leaning from the row behind us after the service ended. “Is there some significance in that beard? In the shaved head?” She kept dabbing her eyes with a Kleenex like she was a widow in some Hallmark movie, like it was her daughter lost. “Like, does that have some special meaning or something?”
She was looking for answers, as was everyone else in that room that day, looking for something to help them understand. A dead girl. A lost young man. The rest of us with our lives still set out before us. But Steve and I knew what was what. We kept our eyes fixed on the back of our friend’s bowed head, his stubbled skull bobbing in the front of the church. We knew. This was not a sign or signal, not some beacon for the rest of us to hold onto, not some statement we could learn from. This was just what death looked like when it came too quick and without forecast.
STORY:
Russell Brakefield is the author of Field Recordings (Wayne State University Press), My Modest Blindness (Autofocus Books) and Irregular Heartbeats at the Park West (Wayne State University Press). He received his MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. He has received fellowships from the University of Michigan Musical Society, the Vermont Studio Center, and the National Parks Department. He is Assistant Professor in the University Writing Program at the University of Denver.
*
ART:
Aaron Burch is an artist, writer, teacher, and editor, including of this site .
Next Tuesday, we’ll feature a bonus interview with Russ about this story!