by Una Mannion
“We’re not. It’s just a town on our way. Anyway, he’s not there. He’s in prison.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. He was arrested in the hospital, and the cops took my statement there, and they had yours. They had a search warrant for his house and found stuff. He was arraigned last week. No bail. We don’t have to worry about him.” Wilson put his hand to his jaw.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“My lawyer.”
“Are you in trouble because of all this?” Had my mom gone to a lawyer those few days she was here? Did she need one?
“No. Well, maybe for beating him up in the first instance, but I had a lawyer long before that because of other stuff.”
“Yeah,” I said, as if I really knew what he was talking about. Maybe it was for robbery, or for that night they said he punched out all the windows, or possibly for dealing drugs, which he still did.
I got back on the bike, and we continued west.
After Reading, we passed Minersville. I knew already we were in mining country. Everything looked like it had slumped slightly; even the sky sagged, as we passed coal trucks and anthracite signs and lots of American flags. A few miles beyond Buck Run, Wilson turned off the main road. We went down two small roads and onto a dirt path that sent up white dust all around us, like ash. The path ended at a chain-link gate and a sign that read No Trespassing and another that read Blasting Area. Other vehicles had driven right over the fence; just to the left of the gate, a whole section lay flattened on the ground. Wilson drove over it. We had come through a tunnel of trees, but in front and all around us now was nothing—no vegetation, no trees, no color. Wilson kept on driving forward, but the landscape was completely bare.
We climbed a hill, but the farther up we went, the more the traction under the wheels seemed to give, and it started to feel as if we were sinking. Wilson stopped, and we both stepped off the bike. The earth beneath my feet moved, as if there was nothing substantial below us, and I sank several inches in my Wellies.
“What’s wrong with the ground? What is this?” I thought maybe it was a quarry.
“It’s a strip mine.”
“What is that?”
“They blast away the earth to get to the coal instead of digging for it. It’s like tearing off the skin, the fat, and the muscle of the earth to get to the bone. Sometimes they take off whole mountaintops, explode them off, so they can get directly to the coal seam. Six hundred feet of mountain or more, and then they dump it all.”
There must have been thousands of acres here, all stripped bare, like a scar. Nothing would ever grow here again. It would be dead forever. Far away, I could see forests, a blue-green mirage moving like a sea of water, but here the earth was all the same pale brown. There was no sound. No birds. No movement of water. Nothing.
We walked up to the highest point on the empty hill and sat on the strange surface. I felt as if it might swallow me into its nothingness. This is what earth without trees would feel like: no texture, no substructure, no roots or connections to give it composition, no history, just a sense of collapsing. I had never been to a place so bleak.
“How is this allowed?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “All those beautiful trees. It makes me sick.”
I looked over at him, sitting in this vast empty world. “Did you kill our cat?”
“What?”
“Did you kill our cat, Mr. Franklin?”
“That’s a bit of a non sequitur.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“It means it had nothing to do with what came before it. I didn’t kill your cat or anybody’s, ever. I’ve never hurt animals.”
“What have you done, that everybody is scared of you, the police know you, you have a record, and you’re only nineteen and have your own lawyer?”
“That’s what you’re thinking about?”
I waited, lifting the strange earth and letting it fall through my fingers.
“It wasn’t just one thing. It’s a long list of things. Do you want, like, a rap sheet?”
“Tell me the worst thing.”
“I can’t even say. Most people would say armed robbery or maybe one of the drug charges. I’ve done plenty of stupid things. But it’s some of the things I did when I was mad, so mad I couldn’t even think, wrecking things and people, that I feel worst about.”
“Why were you so mad?”
“I don’t know. My dad, maybe? Myself. I just wanted to destroy things and, I don’t know, get put away.”
I wished I hadn’t asked. I remembered Marie saying about his dad beating him senseless, and I didn’t want to know the side of him that raged.
“It’s messed up,” I said.
“Yeah. I’ve been to plenty of shrinks. They think so, too.”
“Do they think you can get better?”
“Maybe. They say I would do better away from here, away from my dad—and I did when I was at military school. I don’t know . . . I can’t leave my mom.”
I wanted to ask if it was because he was protecting her from his dad, but another part of me didn’t want to know more.
I made a pillow of my jacket and lay back on the hillside of dirt. Wilson did the same, having to lie back first on his elbows, and then ease himself down. We lay there like washed-up living creatures on a strange planet.
“Wilson?”
“What?”
“Have you seen Sage?”
“Yeah. A few days ago she and Tony De Martino came to my house.”
“Oh.” Sage was still hanging around with Tony. I wanted to ask how she was but didn’t.
The sun was warm, and I could tell by Wilson’s breathing that he had fallen asleep. I lay on my side, facing him. It was true, what Sage had said; he was handsome. Strong-featured, tanned, and when he laughed, a series of lines appeared either side of his mouth. His dark hair was tipped with blond from the sun. His face was slack with sleep, but you could see the fullness of his lips and, even though it was swollen, the line of his jaw. A man, not a boy, as Sage would say. He was good-looking, but because he was crazy, girls steered away from him. I wondered if he’d ever had a girlfriend. I was still cautious about him. I knew something wasn’t right, but at the same time I trusted him with my life. I wondered who he’d be if he’d had a different father.
I dozed, too, and woke to a rumbling that I could feel all around me. I sat up. Wilson was down by the bike, and I felt and heard it a second time. Almost like thunder, and waves of vibrations beneath me, except the sun was shining. Was it an earthquake? I grabbed my jacket and ran down the hill to Wilson. It was like running down a snowbank.
“What is that?”
“Explosives.”
“Are they near? The sign said we shouldn’t be here.”
“No. It’s like a mile away. But we should head out anyway.”
We stopped at a gas station in Reading, and I got a hot dog with mustard and a bag of potato chips. Wilson drank chocolate milk through a straw. By the time we hit 23, it was almost dark. We pulled into the driveway. There was a Datsun parked in it.
“Jack Griffith’s here. Will you come in with me? And let me carry the helmet? Just for effect. And try to act normal.”
“Yeah, with your rubber boots from Ireland, your corduroy, and all the dust, you look really biker chic.”
We went in through the rec room door, and Thomas and Jack were sitting there. Even though they’d never talked about what had happened, Thomas and Wilson had some understanding since that night, and I could see Thomas’s face brighten when he saw him. Jack mumbled a hello to both of us, and we said hey back.
“Wilson!” Thomas said. “You feeling any better? Is the chest tube out?” He looked at me then. “Where’ve you guys been? What’s with the Wellies in July?”
Wilson acted right at home. He sat down on the couch opposite Jack’s chair, and I plopped down next to him and heard him suck in his breath. I kept forgetting the broken ribs. We we
re both holding our helmets.
“We went up toward Bucks Run and Centralia,” Wilson said, “out beyond Reading, looking at some of the strip mines—you know, for Libby’s tree research.” He made it sound like I was a graduate student. I told them about the strip mining, the strange earth like a moonscape, how despairing it felt there.
“What happened to your hair?” Jack asked me. We all looked at him.
“That’s a bit of a non sequitur,” I said.
I could feel Wilson smile.
I looked directly at Jack, and it wasn’t hard, and I didn’t feel embarrassed about anything that had happened. Thomas interrupted and asked more questions about the strip mine, the kinds of explosives, the risk of floods and landslides if there were miles of no vegetation. He asked Wilson if he would take him up.
“Yeah, I will. Maybe next week,” said Wilson. His voice was getting even harder to understand through his closed lips, and I looked at him and could see how exhausted he was.
“You should go home to bed and stop talking,” I said.
“I will.” He stood up, and I said I would walk out with him. On the driveway, I strapped the helmet to the seat back.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Glad to be of service. Again.”
I laughed. He was pale and tired, and I knew he was in pain. I held his shoulders for a quick moment. “No, really—thanks. Like, for everything.”
I went back through the rec room and said, “Good night, you losers,” to Thomas and Jack, like it was old times when they were building nerd labyrinths for their marbles, before death, and adultery, and secrets and betrayal and heroism and strip mines had come into our lives, and I climbed up the stairs, not giving a shit about my Wellies or my hair or my dirt.
28
That summer when I so desperately tried to reel us all in, I didn’t understand the forces spinning us apart. I didn’t know it was my last summer on the mountain, that I wouldn’t live with my mother or my siblings again, that Thomas and I would board with other families for the remainder of high school and that Ellen and Beatrice would start the next school year in a different state. I didn’t know that my mother would move with them, that we would all leave the mountain, and maybe for her it was to be closer to Bill, and maybe it wasn’t. We still didn’t know.
Even without knowing all that was to come, I already wanted to go back to before, to hold us all together in the car driving through Pennsylvania Dutch, so squished and inseparable I couldn’t tell where my skin ended and my sister’s began; I wanted to be in the back of Dad’s pickup truck, us and the machines, after a day cutting lawns, driving home and the air cooling us as we drove, grass blades and leaves in a swirl around us, or lying on the living room floor in our separate spaces, listening to old reel-to-reel tapes of a time when we were looking forward to who we would be in the future. I wanted to hold us there. Together. Summer evenings in the driveway playing kick-the-can against the dark, calling from azaleas and dogwoods, running the trails. I wanted to be on the moss hill in the Kingdom smoking Charlotte’s Kents with Sage or looking up through the canopy of a maple in October, wearing a sweater against the cold, wading through leaf fall. I wanted Beatrice in my bed curling my hair, needing something from me, Ellen coiled beside us, wound against the world; I wanted Marie back, across the room from me, making sense of it all, and Thomas in his room looking up at the spinning universe. Even now sometimes I want to be driving west down 252 and Ellen’s tired head falls on my shoulder, and I don’t shrug it off, and she stays there with us in the car; to drive, again, all of us together, through the covered bridge, to feel the wooden planks beneath our wheels, to climb the mountain, knowing the turns by heart by the feel of them, to be going home.
Beatrice came back from camp with braids all over her head and wristbands made for her by new friends. She had a bag of embroidery thread and was busy designing us all anklets and bracelets. She’d canoed, been white-water rafting, had campouts with ghost stories, hiked a mountain, seen rattlesnakes and water moccasins, and started to say “y’all.” She was taller and tanned. She said it was the best time she’d ever had.
“I was practically the only Yankee there,” she said.
“Did they actually call you that?” asked Thomas. “Yankee?”
“Yeah. There was just me and a girl from New York City.”
“I hope you did us proud,” said Thomas.
“They got me to say the word water over and over. And they’d all repeat it, ‘Wudder, wudder.’”
“Yep, you definitely showed them what we’re made of,” said Thomas.
“That’s totally a Philadelphia thing, the way we say it,” I said. Sage had told me a thousand times it was a word we’d destroyed.
Ellen came back from the Gambinos’ and art camp saying that if she never saw ravioli, cannoli, panna cotta, or prosciutto again, it would be too soon.
“Stop bragging,” said Thomas. We salivated at her descriptions of what they ate. Gabriel had taught her how to make tiramisu, soaking the ladyfingers in coffee and amaretto, making the mascarpone mixture, finishing it with chocolate shavings using a potato peeler. She and Gabriel had made us potpourri. We each got a sachet. Ellen said he used rose petals, lavender, orange peel, mint, sweet woodruff, and rose oil.
Ellen had gotten attention at art camp. One of the teachers there taught in a private school in Maryland that had one of the best art departments on the East Coast. The teacher had spoken to the school, and a week or two after Ellen came home, they called my mother, offering Ellen a full scholarship. It never occurred to me that she would actually go.
In the mornings the rest of that summer after Mom had gone to the hospital, Thomas and I listened to the radio in the kitchen before Beatrice or Ellen woke up. The royal wedding was at the end of July, and it seemed every station had nothing else to talk about. In the days after the wedding, three hunger strikers died in Northern Ireland. I listened to the radio and thought how much it would have upset Dad that there was more talk about Princess Diana’s wedding dress than there was about the three young men who died.
I walked the mountain that August. I looped Forge Mountain Drive, paced the trails, and sat in the Kingdom. I went down the northwest trail to the bottling factory and over the ridge behind it. I discovered an old quarry in the middle of nowhere. At night I pulled ticks from my scalp over the sink and then crushed them against the beige porcelain with my thumbnail. I walked south and came through the woods to Valley Creek, near the covered bridge. I walked and walked the mountain, memorizing its surfaces, as if my feet knew before I did that I wouldn’t ever be going back. I broke into the bunker on the Nike site, through a rotted window frame. I didn’t find nuclear secrets, just cobwebs, spiders, a broken office chair, and a dead mouse that had turned almost to dust in a trap on the linoleum floor, only the long tail intact. Sometimes I sat up there looking at the bindweed choking the fence, the dead dandelion and chicory. I counted how long it had been since I had pulled weeds with my dad—one year and eleven months. I rewrote days working with him where I could name nutsedge and pokeweed and could haul the tarpaulin of leaves myself, and could tell him then, in the past, all the tree facts I know now.
Charlotte Adams was the first to leave the mountain. It was Wilson who heard. She had rented a house in a new development near Gateway Shopping Center.
“But why didn’t Grady leave?” I asked him. “Why Charlotte?”
“I don’t know,” said Wilson. “He has his doctor’s practice up here. Maybe that’s too hard to move. Maybe Charlotte just wants to get away from all this.”
“How about Sage and the boys? Who will they live with?”
“Don’t know. Maybe both.”
We had driven through the development when it first opened, one night on the way home from school. All the houses looked the same. I had resented it before it ever existed because it had once been beautiful meadow, and then it was steadily destroyed by cement trucks and bulldozers.
&nbs
p; Every time I thought of Charlotte Adams, it was as if my insides were being scooped out. That night, after the Acme, I’d told Marie how it scared me to see Charlotte like that, so uncomposed, so unlike herself. She had always had this elegant detachment that I thought was her, being southern and refined and all that. But Marie said she liked Charlotte Adams even more after the Acme.
“It would be far scarier to have met her and instead of seeing her messy and upset, she looked blank and perfect. Like a Stepford wife. She’s been fucking betrayed, she’s upset, and she showed it. She’s real.”
One afternoon I got a ride with Thomas and Jack as far as Paoli. I went into a Hallmark store and bought a card for Charlotte Adams. I’d looked at the whole selection. “Good Luck in Your New Home” seemed tactless, “Thank You” kind of strange. I bought a blank message card, one with Monet-like flowers. I didn’t know what I would write to her.
I walked the five miles back to the mountain, up North Valley Road to Diamond Rock, and started to climb, past the octagonal schoolhouse and up Horseshoe Trail Road. Locals along here had tried to make the road private-access, and sometimes they harassed the drivers who dared to come through. I wondered if anyone would give me trouble. I walked and walked. The road was gravel and full of potholes. I looked down at my Converse, now gray with wear and washing.
I’d nearly reached the point where the trail met the top of the mountain, below the Nike site, when I heard the crunch of gravel under wheels. There was a car behind me, going very slow. I stepped onto the grass verge so it could pass but didn’t look back, in case it was one of the crazy locals trying to keep it private. But the car didn’t pass. I stopped walking, and the car stopped. The ignition cut out; I could hear the fan still whirring. A door opened.
“Libby?”
I turned. Mrs. Boucher was standing at the open door of her Volvo.
“I thought it was you. I wasn’t sure because of your hair.”
I had developed an involuntary response when people mentioned my lost hair: I touched my neck.
