Sky of Stone

by Homer Hickam

  Mr. Dooley was all sharp knees and elbows. I grappled with him while he flailed and grunted. And laughed. He was laughing big horse-laughs, gasping for breath in between. “Come on, Mr. Dooley!” I straddled him and pushed his hands to the floor. “You want to take your bath, don’t you?”

  “He should!” Mrs. Dooley crowed merrily. “Been over a month!”

  Mr. Dooley went suddenly limp, although he still giggled as I worked around to get my hands under his arms and drag him to the bathroom. I just about had him through the door when he suddenly scrambled to his feet and twisted away. I dived after him—it was like tackling a skeleton—and we fell into an easy chair, which tipped over. Then he fell limp again. I lifted him by the armpits and started walking backward. His bare bony feet bumped behind.

  When I got him in the bathroom, Mrs. Dooley closed the door behind us. “Let me get off his drawers,” she said.

  She did and I picked him up and sat his rump on the edge of the bathtub. I was breathing hard. She swung his feet around into the water. “Let him down easy. Be careful and don’t bump his head. There you go.”

  Mr. Dooley, sighing, slid like a wet rag into the tub. Mrs. Dooley went down on her knees, picked up a folded washcloth from the side of the tub, dampened it with tub water, and rubbed some white soap on it. She picked up Mr. Dooley’s right arm and began to slide the cloth over it, the soapy water leaving a gleaming trail behind. “Mrs. Dooley,” I asked, still trying to catch my breath, “do you want me to stay?”

  Mr. Dooley’s face seemed to coalesce. It took the sheerest of moments. Where there had been blankness, there was sudden cognizance. “Sonny Hickam,” he said. “I’d know your hide in a tanning factory.”

  Mrs. Dooley sputtered out a short laugh. “Nate, you old fool.”

  “I might be a fool, woman, but I know Sonny Hickam when I see him, although I guess it’s been a while.”

  He fastened his eyes on me. They were suddenly a bright and lively blue. Mr. Dooley held up his left arm, and Mrs. Dooley wiped it down. She did it with lovingly long strokes, a small, gentle smile on her lips. “You over that scarlet fever, Sonny?” he asked.

  I closed my mouth, which had fallen open. “Pretty much, sir,” I gulped.

  “That’s good to hear. It kills a lot of babies.” He gave me a warm look and subsided into the water, blowing bubbles through his pursed lips. When he raised up, he said, “You a monkey.”

  I didn’t think I’d heard him right. “Sir?”

  “You an ol’ monkey,” he said again, and then cackled at what he took to be a joke. I noticed he was missing a front tooth, an incisor. “You an ol’ monkey and got a tail. I’m gonna tell on you to your mother.”

  Mrs. Dooley had lost her smile. She was scrubbing his narrow chest while he squirmed. “Hold still, Nate!” she snapped at him. “Sonny, come here, push down on his shoulders.”

  I came around to the end of the bathtub and did as she said. His shoulders were horizontal bones, the skin wrapped around them soft as velvet. “I said hold him!” she barked.

  I held him. “Please, Mrs. Dooley. What just happened?” I asked.

  She kept scrubbing, going up under his hips to make a thorough job of it. He was twisting, trying to get up, scrabbling his feet against the end of the tub. I knelt down, got a better hold of his shoulders, and felt him subside against me, giving in to my strength.

  “Nate comes back in his mind every so often,” she said. “I never know when. It doesn’t last long, but more than once he’s even gotten himself dressed and gone off to work. The men are always on the scout for him. They call Tag to come bring him home.”

  She reached to pull out the plug in the tub. The water gurgled as it drained away. “Stand him up, Sonny. It’s all right. The fight’s gone out of him.”

  I put my arms under him and lifted. “Your old man’s a bastard,” he hissed.

  “Nate, don’t cuss,” Mrs. Dooley said, and he fell silent. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying,” she apologized.

  After she got him toweled off, she sat him down on the toilet and slid a pair of clean shorts up his legs. She made him stand and she pulled them the rest of the way up. Then she told me to take him across the hall to the bedroom. I held his hand and he shuffled behind me. I pulled the quilted covers back from his bed, and he crawled beneath them. Mrs. Dooley put a finger to her lips and beckoned me back into the hall. “He’ll sleep most all day now. Are you staying at the Club House?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’ll call you when I need you.”

  I nodded. “Ma’am, when he gets . . . right again, will you tell him something for me?”

  “I guess.”

  “Tell him I said thanks for making that navy doctor give me penicillin.”

  “I’ll tell him.” Her voice was flinty, as if she blamed me for something. Maybe, for all I knew, she blamed me for everything.

  I let myself out the door and walked back down Main Street. I heard a car coming behind me, but I didn’t turn around. I didn’t want to be picked up. I just wanted to keep walking and thinking about what I’d just seen and heard. The car eased on by and I saw it was the Buick, roadworthy once more. Dad braked. Reluctantly, I climbed inside.

  “Sonny,” he said.

  “Dad,” I replied.

  We didn’t speak all the way to Coalwood Main. He parked in front of Mr. Bundini’s office, across from the Club House. “How’s your room?” he asked.

  “I like it,” I said.

  “Enjoying the food?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Floretta’s a great cook.”

  “She sure is.”

  He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Got a meeting to go to,” he said.

  We both got out of the Buick. He put on his hat. “See you,” I said, and started to walk across the street.

  “Hey!” he called, and I stopped. “Johnny Basso tells me you’re a pretty good miner.”

  I turned about. Had he actually sounded proud? “I’m pretty sore,” I confessed.

  “It’ll pass.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He nodded, then went inside the office, and I climbed the steps to the Club House porch. Someone was sitting on the swing. It was a squat little toad of a man with a crew cut. I knew him all too well: Mr. Amos Fuller. “What time is it?” he demanded. He held his watch up to his ear. “Damn thing’s busted!”

  I wasn’t wearing a watch, so I shrugged. He glared, but didn’t seem to recognize me. He grumbled something I couldn’t hear, then got up and went inside, the screen door slapping behind him.

  Then I heard a familiar voice in the direction of the Big Store. A tall, rangy young man dressed in starched khakis was talking to some miners sitting on the Big Store steps. After he finished his conversation, he walked across the street toward the Club House. I recognized him immediately. When he’d been a junior engineer, Jake Mosby had taken up for the rocket boys, more than once. He’d even set up a telescope observatory for us on the Club House roof. After I’d graduated from high school, Jake had gone back to Ohio to work as a manager for the steel company. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed him until I saw him again. I cried out like a happy little kid as he came up the porch steps. “Jake!”

  “Sonny boy!” he yodeled. He clutched my shoulders, pushed me and pulled me, turned me around, and gave me a complete once-over. “Damn you’ve grown!” he said, squeezing my shoulders. “Feel those muscles, too! I heard you’d taken up coal mining. You’ll make lots of money. Then back to school, eh?”

  “We can only hope,” I responded. “What are you doing here?”

  Jake’s grin faded. “Tuck Dillon,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Sonny, I’m on the investigating team.”

  My grin disappeared, too. I asked, “Does Dad know this?”

  He shook his head. “We’re going to be fair, Sonny. It’s an honest investigation to find out the facts of the case.”

  He had called it a “case.
” That made Dad sound like a suspected criminal. “Jake,” I said, my stomach tightening, “don’t be a part of this.”

  “It’s my job, Sonny,” he said stiffly. “I didn’t ask for it but I got it because I know Coalwood.”

  Mr. Fuller came back out on the porch. “Let’s go, Jake,” he said.

  Jake shrugged. “Sonny, I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Sure,” I said. I watched him join Mr. Fuller on the porch steps, then walk down the sidewalk and across the road. Then I remembered something. “Hey, Jake,” I called. “Where’s your Corvette?” Jake had always driven a cherry-red Corvette. To me, it symbolized who he was, a man who knew how to squeeze fun out of life.

  Jake turned and walked backward a step. “Sold it,” he called back. “Got me a good, hardworking Nash.” Then he turned around and went up the steps with Mr. Fuller and into Mr. Bundini’s office, leaving me openmouthed in astonishment.

  Mom gone, Dad in trouble, me working in the coal mine, and Jake without his Corvette. If the world got any more peculiar, I didn’t think I would recognize it at all.

  19

  WATER TANK MOUNTAIN

  FLORETTA PACKED a lunch for my Sunday picnic with Rita. “Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches might be fine for you but ain’t right for Miss Rita,” she said.

  She handed over a wicker basket. When I hefted it, I figured she had enough food in there to feed a half-dozen junior engineers, or a regiment, which was about the same. “We’re going hiking, Floretta,” I said. “I can’t carry all this heavy stuff up a mountain.”

  Her voice was dangerous. “You be careful with Miss Rita up there, boy. She may think she’s a coal miner but she’s still a girl underneath all that. I want her back here in the same condition she left.” She eyed me. “What’s that on your belt? A nasty old army canteen! Has it ever been washed?”

  Now that she’d mentioned it, I didn’t guess it had, not since my uncle Robert had brought it back from the Italian campaign, anyway. I had used it all through childhood to carry water up in the mountains during my adventures there. Floretta held out her large, flat hand. “Give that thing to me. I’ll run some hot water and soap through it and try to get some of the scunge out.”

  I dutifully unclipped the canteen and handed it over. I heard the sink run fast and furious for a minute, then Floretta came through the swinging kitchen door and handed it back. “The water in it was as brown as dirt,” she said, sounding triumphant.

  At the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs, Floretta vanished into the kitchen. It was Rita and she was wearing her khakis and tall lace-up boots. She gave me one of her delicious smiles. “This is going to be so much fun,” she said. She let her eyes rest on the basket. “Is that as heavy as it looks?”

  “It’s just what we need,” I replied, nodding at the kitchen door behind which I knew Floretta was listening. Lugging the basket with both hands, I walked Rita toward the double screen doors that led to the porch. “Don’t worry,” I whispered. “I have a plan.”

  “Where are we going?” she whispered back.

  I lost my whisper. “Water Tank Mountain. There’s a nice view from up there. I want to swing by my house first. I’ve got a backpack in the garage and I can unload this stuff into it. And, if you don’t mind, I’d like to take Dandy and Poteet along. I think they’d like the exercise.”

  “Dandy and Poteet?”

  “My dogs. They won’t be much trouble.”

  Before we got off the porch, a familiar voice asked, “Where you folks headed?”

  Jake was sitting in the porch swing. He was wearing Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt, his feet clad in sandals. “Hello, Rita,” he said, not bothering to get up.

  “Jake,” she said.

  Jake smiled, then gave me a wink. “Rita and I have something in common, Sonny. Our fathers both own a percentage of the steel company.”

  “I’m sure Sonny is fascinated,” she replied. “And how is your father, the real Mr. Jake Mosby?”

  I was surprised to learn that Jake was a junior, like me. All the years I’d known him, that had never come out. “As fine as a watch, Rita,” he said. “I presume your father is the same?”

  The screen door smacked open and Mr. Fuller came out on the porch, crossed over to the other side, and sank into one of the metal chairs. Rita’s eyes cut toward him. “Let’s go,” she said.

  I did so, gladly, muttering something in the way of a good-bye to Jake. When we got out of earshot, Rita said, “Where do you know Jake from?”

  “He used to be my friend, even helped me with my rockets. He’s here with that other fellow on the porch—Fuller’s his name—to do the Tuck Dillon investigation.”

  “I know Amos Fuller. My father’s had a run-in with him more than once. He knows what I think of him. Are you worried about the investigation?”

  “Dad could lose his job,” I said, shrugging.

  She looked back at the porch. “Your dad’s smarter than both of those two put together.”

  “How do you know Jake?” I asked.

  She tossed her head, her long black hair falling down her back. “We grew up together, practically. When my father would go to Ohio for the board meetings, we’d usually stay at Jake’s parents’ house. I spent one summer on their farm in Kentucky. They had horses. Jake and I used to go riding all the time. But we never really got along. He was too childish even though he was older than me.”

  We climbed into her car, a white Ford Thunderbird with little round portholes in back. I stowed the basket in its minuscule trunk. There was barely room, but the little car was flashy and suited her. The interior smelled of leather and her perfume, a scent I would have been happy to inhale for the rest of my life. She went smoothly through its gears but left a little rubber on the road in front of the Club House. I saw Jake had stirred himself out of his chair and was leaning on one of the porch pillars. He had an odd half smile on his face. He raised his hand, but I didn’t give him one back.

  On the way up Main Street, heads turned in our direction at nearly every porch and yard. We were leaving behind a lot of wagging tongues, that much was for certain. At the corner of Tipple and Substation Rows, I directed Rita into the alley behind our house. Dad’s truck was gone. He was up at the mine, I figured, even if it was a Sunday afternoon. She parked the T-bird, and I went inside our garage and returned with a canvas backpack. Like the canteen, it was an artifact of my uncle Robert’s World War II Italian campaign with the United States Army Signal Corps. I opened it up and packed Floretta’s sandwiches, some little tubs of coleslaw, a few boiled eggs, and a tablecloth. I left behind everything else—the thermos and the cloth napkins and silverware and the vase with the rose wrapped in wax paper.

  I rattled the back gate, and, as expected, Poteet came bounding out of the basement with Dandy waddling close behind. I let them out and introduced them to Rita. “Won’t they get lost?” she wondered.

  I laughed. “All I have to do is tell Poteet to go home and she’s better than any compass.”

  “I’ve never owned a dog,” she said, taking a step back when Poteet sniffed her knee.

  “Then you’ve missed one of the pleasures of life.”

  We crossed the road to Water Tank Mountain and climbed up to the dirt road that led to the Coalwood School. When Dandy reached the road, he was panting and his head was down. I went over to him. “You all right, boy?”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Rita asked.

  “He’s fifteen years old.”

  “Is that old for a dog?”

  I worked to keep the surprise at such a question out of my voice. “Yes, very old. Mom always said it’s about seven dog years to every human one. That makes him a hundred and five.”

  Rita absorbed the information. “Father would never let me have a pet of any kind. He said he was allergic to fur.”

  I had never heard of such a thing and immediately suspected her father was lying for his own convenience. I didn’t voice my suspicions, though, it be
ing impolite. I pointed, instead, to a break in the foliage. “There’s our path.”

  “I didn’t even see it,” she marveled.

  “It’s easier to find in the winter. It’s steep at first, then there’s a fire road that’ll take us out to where it’s clear-cut. Then we’ll angle up the mountain to the water tanks.”

  “Lead on, Hawkeye,” she said.

  I hitched the backpack on my shoulders and scrambled up the steep hillside. I grabbed trees where I could to help me climb. Rita slipped a couple of times but then caught on to the natural rhythm of going up a West Virginia mountain: dig in your toes, grab a tree and pull, and then keep climbing.

  We reached the fire road, and Poteet took off, her nose to the ground. She soon discovered a patch of milkweed that made her sneeze. A puff of white, drifting seeds rose around her. Dandy panted up beside her, his nose in the air. When he sneezed, Poteet nuzzled him. Then he sat down on his haunches, looking puzzled. I squatted beside him and moved my hand back and forth in front of his eyes. Rita came up alongside us. “He’s blind or nearly so,” I said. I hugged him, and he shivered even in the heat of the day. Rita knelt and let her fingers graze Dandy’s head. She jerked back when he moved. “He won’t bite you,” I said.

  “Dogs scare me.”

  “Most dogs just want to be loved,” I said. “It’s only the ones who don’t get any attention who get mean. Dandy and Poteet, they’re loved and they know it, pretty much.”

  She touched him again, and Dandy arched his head. “He likes it,” she said.

  “He sure does. You have a way with him, Rita. Dogs know things about people. He knows you’re nice.”

  When I looked up, I found Rita watching me. “You’re an interesting fellow, Sonny Hickam,” she said.

  “How so?”

  She stood up. “You wear your heart on your sleeve, for one thing,” she said.

  “Some people think that’s a failing,” I replied, wincing. It was true. When I’d been so much in desperate love with Dorothy Plunk in high school, Roy Lee had told me the only way to win a girl was to pretend you didn’t like her, at least at first. Because I just couldn’t fathom why such a thing would be true, I could never manage it.