by Homer Hickam
Upstairs, I naturally gravitated to my room. I looked at it from the hall, but I couldn’t go inside. I didn’t feel like I belonged in it anymore. I was no longer that boy of hope and passion and dreams. I wasn’t certain who I was anymore, but I sure wasn’t that boy.
Back in the yard, I saw that Poteet had finished her excursions and Dandy had drifted off to sleep, a golden curl on the green grass. I picked him up and held him while I sat on the back steps. I thought of the day I’d first seen Dandy. He’d come into Coalwood aboard a freight train all the way from a kennel in Pennsylvania. As far as I knew, he was the first purebred dog to ever arrive in town. I had been distressed the instant I saw him because somebody had cut off his tail. Mom said that was what Yankees did to cocker spaniels to make them win dog contests. I couldn’t fathom such a thing. I told her thank goodness human beings weren’t so foolish to do that to themselves. Mom said yes they were. Up north, she claimed, women punched holes in their earlobes to hang their earrings rather than clamp them on like the women in Coalwood did. And over in some countries, she said, people stuck bones and sticks through their noses, their lips, and even their tongues. It made me sick just to think about it, and I was sure glad Americans, even the ones up north, were smarter than that.
On the fifth day of miners’ vacation, I found Poteet sitting regally on the picnic table in the backyard. She looked like she was standing guard. When I approached her, she whined but kept her position. I went down in the basement to check on Dandy, but he wasn’t there. I looked all around the yard and still couldn’t find him. “Where is he, girl?” I asked, and, with a snort, Poteet jumped off the table and led me to a place along the fence behind the garage where there was a hole. She slithered through it.
I climbed over the fence and followed Poteet into the alley behind the house. I called Dandy’s name, then listened, hoping to hear him blundering through the brush up on the mountain. All I heard was the cawing of some crows and the insistent chirp of a cardinal. Poteet stopped and looked over her shoulder. I kept following her until we went between the garages that lined the alley and then down to the narrow little gurgling creek.
It was there I found Dandy, lying on his side, his snout near the water. By the lay of his fur and the way his legs were splayed, I knew he was dead. Poteet sat down beside him and cocked her head. I reached down and closed his great brown liquid eyes, then picked him up.
When I got back to the alley, I saw Jim’s car, a blue-and-white Ford Fairlane, parked behind our house. Jim stood by the gate. He didn’t say anything, just looked at me and Dandy. Poteet trotted up to him and he patted her on her head. When I got closer, Jim put out his arms. “I’ll take him,” he said. “There’s a place up on Water Tank Mountain I have in mind.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked my brother.
“I got up this morning and knew I needed to go home. Now I know why.”
I gave Dandy to my big brother and went into the basement and got a shovel and a cardboard box. “I can’t get over how big you are,” Jim said as he placed Dandy in the box. “And look at your arms. You been lifting weights?”
“I’d say I have,” I answered, thinking of the hundreds of ties and posts I’d hefted over the past month.
Jim carried Dandy and I followed with the shovel. We crossed the road and climbed up Water Tank Mountain. Jim kept going until we reached a stand of pine trees. “You can see the house from here,” Jim said. “Dandy would like that.”
I started digging. I had become an expert at using a shovel. Jim sat down beside Dandy’s box and let me have at it. “I wish I’d paid more attention to Dandy,” he admitted, his hand on the box. “Seems like I was always too busy to give him much more than a pat in passing.”
“Dandy surely loved you,” I said. “He loved all of us. I hope we gave him a good life.”
“Did he suffer, do you think? At the end?”
“I saw him yesterday. He seemed pretty spry.”
Jim smiled a sad smile. “I wonder how I knew to come home. I hadn’t thought a thing about Coalwood all summer. Just trying to get through summer school.”
I climbed out of the hole I’d dug. “Jim, I’ve come to believe there are things in life we’ll never figure out. I mean, just being alive is a miracle when you stop to think about it. Lately, I’ve tried not to think about it. I’m afraid if I figure everything out, it’ll drive me crazy.”
He laughed. “You don’t have far to go, boy. You never have.”
“You’re still an idiot,” I said, happy to trade insults with my older brother.
“You’re still a little sister,” he said. “But, dammit, you’re a big little sister these days. I’d hate to arm-wrestle you.”
“‘One fist of iron, the other one of steel,’ ” I said, quoting Tennessee Ernie Ford, “‘if the left one don’t get you, then the right one will.’ ”
He laughed. We sat together, not too close. “Why did we always fight so much growing up?” I asked.
He tossed a rock, watched it roll downhill. “You did things to aggravate me.”
“Oh, I see. It was my fault. Like what kind of things?”
“You’d take my coloring books and color them all the wrong colors before I got to them,” he said. “And you’d take my puzzles and solve them before I’d halfway figured out what they were even about. I never could spell a hoot and you could spell everything even before you started to school. That really bugged me. Mom would go around spelling things like ‘Let’s give Jimmie his m-e-d-i-c-i-n,’ and I wouldn’t have a clue what they were talking about, but you’d go, ‘His medicine! Ewwww!’ I mean you weren’t even in the first grade and you could already spell big words!”
I could have pointed out that he still couldn’t spell medicine, at least not out loud, but I held my tongue. Instead, I considered his accusations, and then gave him one of my own. “I hated that you gave me every disease in the world. You’d catch the measles and Mom would make me go in and hang around your bed until I got it, too. Same thing for the mumps and nearly everything else.”
“That wasn’t my fault,” he said. “That was Mom’s. It made it easier on her if we both got sick at the same time. That way she’d only have to deal one time with that particular disease.”
“I didn’t like wearing your hand-me-down clothes, either. They were always too big.”
“Still not my fault,” he said. “Boy, you were just resentful, that’s all. I ought to knock you upside the head right now for it, straighten you out.”
I laughed. Then I looked at the forlorn cardboard box. “Guess we need to see to our little boy here,” I said.
Jim nodded, and together we lowered Dandy into the place I’d made for him. The dirt smelled fresh and clean like the good turned West Virginia loam that it was. I shoveled until the box was covered, and then Jim and I hunted around the mountain for loose rocks to make a border. Jim fashioned a cross from two limbs using birch bark to tie them together, then stuck it at the head of the grave. We stood over it. “Do you remember how we got Dandy?”
“Mom bought him, didn’t she?”
Jim shook his head. “It was you and me. I came up with the idea to have a cocker spaniel and Mom showed me where we could buy a puppy through some magazine. I got you excited about it and we saved up, you and me together. We begged and borrowed pennies from everybody we knew. We made ourselves true nuisances all up and down the row. Every time we got a hundred pennies, we traded them in for a silver dollar at the Little Store. When we had enough dollars, Mom mailed our order in and when the railroad man called, said we had a C.O.D. that was barking, we walked down to the station at Coalwood Main and handed over our bag of coins. Dandy was about dead in that old wooden crate he came in, not even any water to drink, and he was covered with fleas. But I knew I loved him with all my heart the first time I saw him.”
I remembered now. It was the only thing that my brother and I had ever done together, but it was a good thing. Dandy had become the o
ne link between us during all those years whether I realized it or not. Tears started to leak down my face, and when I looked over, I saw Jim was brushing something from his eyes, too. “Got to get back to school,” he said.
“Stay, Jim,” I told him.
He shook his head. “Can’t,” he said, and then gave Dandy’s grave a final pat and led the way back down to the house. He climbed into his Fairlane. “This place seems so strange now,” he said of Coalwood. “I remember everything about it, but it’s like I wasn’t ever really here. It’s hard to put into words.”
I knew what he felt. I felt the same way. We’d always been aimed out of Coalwood. High school was supposed to be the end of it. When we came back, we didn’t fit, somehow.
He closed the car door, rolled down his window. “You want me to call the folks, tell them about Dandy?”
“Yes.”
He nodded. “What’s going to happen to Dad?”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t seem to care if they fire him or not. He just keeps going like there’s no problem, one way or the other. It’s really strange.”
“I think Mom’s up to something,” he said.
“What makes you think that?”
“Because she’s always up to something.” He stuck out his hand. I took it and we both squeezed hard before letting go. He looked up on Water Tank Mountain. “Dandy was sure a good old dog.”
“He sure was.”
Jim drove his Fairlane out of the back alley, then turned left onto Highway 16, heading back to the outside world. I stood quietly for a while, listening to the trees on the mountains whispering to themselves, then went through the gate to feed Poteet. She greeted me, her tennis ball in her mouth.
34
THE CABIN
A FEW days passed. I walked a lot, there being hardly anyone to pick me up and give me a ride. I even walked all the way down to Cape Coalwood. The ancient slack dump stretched out before me, waves of heat coming off it. There wasn’t a single board left of the Big Creek Missile Agency’s old blockhouse. Some concrete chunks were all that remained of our launchpad. I searched around and found some metal fragments, the remnants of abor-
tive launches. I could still smell the burnt propellant on the slivers of steel and aluminum. I put them back where I’d found them. They seemed almost like holy icons from another page. I felt like an intruder.
I walked back up the road until I got to Frog Level. A truck rumbled up next to me. It was Red Carroll. “Where you going, Sonny?”
“Nowhere,” I said.
“How about a ride there?”
“Why not?”
We rode along, neither of us saying anything until we got to Coalwood Main. He stopped at the Club House. “You want off here?”
I shrugged. “I guess so. Any word from O’Dell?”
“Off to Germany soon. I’m so proud of him I could bust.”
I nodded and started to get out, but Red stopped me. “Why don’t you volunteer for fire watch up at the Cabin?”
“Fire watch?”
“Tag’s been asking around for somebody to go spend miners’ vacation at the Cabin and watch the mountains in case there’s a wildfire. You got a lot of time on your hands. Why not?”
The Cabin Red was talking about was officially titled the Coalwood Conservation Club. It was a rustic lodge on top of Coalwood Mountain that was mostly used for poker parties by the company managers. Schools used it every so often for day outings, too. “Can’t do it, Red,” I said. “I have to feed Poteet every day.”
“I’ll take care of her,” he said. “You want me to tell Tag you’re interested?”
I sure did. It sounded like an adventure, and I was ready for one.
That night I heard a yell from the foyer. “Hey, Sonny boy!” It was Tag.
I came downstairs. The constable gave me a big grin. “I got your sleeping bag, your food, everything you need in the trunk of my car except a change of clothes. Go get packed and come on.”
“Am I really needed up there?” I asked. I had been having second thoughts. After all, who would walk aimlessly around town if I wasn’t around to do it?
“We need every set of eyes we can get,” Tag said.
“Then I’m your man.” I ran inside to pack my few pitiful clothes and a couple of books. I was working on a new book I’d bought at the company store titled To Kill a Mockingbird. I was enjoying it quite a lot. It was narrated by a little girl, and I especially enjoyed reading about her father. Atticus Finch wasn’t much like my dad, at least not outwardly, but I thought they shared at their core a certain decency, and honesty, too.
On the way up Coalwood Mountain, I asked, “Did you talk to Mrs. Dooley?”
“Must have slipped my mind,” he remarked. “What was that about again?”
“Never mind.”
At the crest of the mountain, Tag turned left and we started climbing a steep dirt road. The dust boiled out behind Tag’s patrol car. “Driest I’ve ever seen it,” he worried. “Usually, there’s some dew in the morning to keep things wetted down a bit, but even the air’s dried out.”
“How am I supposed to let anybody know if I see a fire?”
He reached in his shirt pocket and produced a key. “This is to the Cabin. There’s a black phone in there.”
“What do I look for?”
“Smoke. Make sure it’s not coming from a coal tipple or something. I’ve included some topo maps in your stuff so you can tell where you’re looking.”
At the Cabin, Tag helped me unload the gear, which included a little gas stove. He had my food in a cardboard box. Nearly every can was beef stew, which was good. I knew how to heat up a can of stew.
Tag walked me around the Cabin grounds. The view was wonderful. As far as I could see, mountains were stacked behind each other like the pages of a book. A fire tower sat on one side of a grassy meadow. “That’s the best place to keep your eyes on things,” he said. “But just about anywhere up here will do.”
We climbed the tower and I stashed the topographical maps in a metal box on the top platform. Inside it, I found a compass. I practiced with it, finding north right off. Then I spotted a plume of smoke and determined that it was coming from the east. “I see it,” Tag said. “It’s a long way off, though. No threat to Coalwood. But I’ll call it in, just to be on the safe side.”
When it looked like he was about to leave, I decided to get something off my chest. “Tag, why did you lie to me?”
He gave me a surprised look. “What do you mean?”
“You didn’t have to ask Mrs. Dooley about what happened to Nate, did you? You already know what happened to him. Isn’t that right?”
Tag pushed his hat to the back of his head. “You know, Sonny, I’m not a real policeman. I’m just a company stiff dressed up to look like one. I do what the company tells me to do, which isn’t very much. They just keep me around so folks will have somebody to call if they’ve got a problem like somebody stealing somebody else’s tomatoes. If a real law gets broken, I call in the county.”
“Okay,” I said, and waited.
“There’s not been any real laws broken here,” he said after a bit. “It’s just Coalwood business.”
“You mean nobody hurt Nate Dooley?”
“Not on purpose.”
“What does that mean?”
Tag looked off to the east. “I better go call in that smoke.”
“Tag . . .”
He spat over the railing. “For God’s sake, Sonny, let it go! Your dad doesn’t want any of this to come out. That’s all you need to know.”
“What does Dad have to do with Nate Dooley?”
Tag shook his head and headed down the steps of the fire tower. I followed him all the way to his car. “Forget I said anything,” he said.
I couldn’t oblige him. “Tag, what does Dad have to do with Nate Dooley getting hurt?”
“I didn’t say he did.”
“But you said—”
“You got my n
umber?”
“Yes, sir, but—”
“Call me if you need anything. And thanks, Sonny. You’re doing a real service here.”
“Do me one favor,” I said. “Swing by the Dooleys and tell Mrs. Dooley where I am.”
“Sure. It’s nice of you to try to help her out.”
“She picked me, not the other way around.”
“Some folks say you owe her,” he said. “I don’t happen to believe that. You were just a baby when all that happened. Don’t worry. She can always call me if she needs anything.”
“Why didn’t she call you when Mr. Dooley broke his wrist?”
Tag stared at me, then shook his head. He climbed into his patrol car and sped down the dirt road. I watched the cloud of dust rising from his tracks for a little while and then trudged back up the hill to do my duty.
I SPENT the next five days alone at the Cabin. I called in three plumes of smoke, both far away. I also got a pile of thinking done. I didn’t figure everything out, but by the time my work at the Cabin was done, I was somewhere close, of that I was certain.
Nate Dooley.
Tuck Dillon.
Dad.
Where there was Dad, wasn’t there always Mom? Just a little more information, I believed, and all would be clear, the mysteries solved.
But then, as usual, Coalwood threw me a curve.
Red Carroll came to get me in his garbage truck. “Did you have fun?” Red asked as he drove down Coalwood Mountain.
“I sure did.”
“Good, good,” he said, a bit distracted. He drove us through Six, then along the straight stretch that went past the mine. “Look at all those fancy cars, Sonny,” he said.
I looked. There were a bunch of them—Cadillacs, Chryslers, some big trucks, too. Then I saw a lot of men dressed in suits walking over the grounds. “What’s happening?”
