Coal Run

by Tawni O'Dell

  A sick feeling started in the pit of my stomach as the soft weight of Jolene’s hand snuck into mine.

  There were plenty of men around and lots of equipment and machines meant for digging. Why wasn’t anyone doing anything? Why wasn’t anyone saying anything?

  The gray wooden faces in the orchard began taking on the identities of people I knew. Kids from school. Neighbors. My teacher, Miss Finch, whose boyfriend worked with Dad. Big Dr. Ed, with his dark crew cut and stance like a conquering warlord, who had prescribed the red cough syrup for Jolene yesterday. The lady who drove my school bus. The lady who worked behind the ice cream counter at the Valley Dairy.

  I saw my best buddy, Steve, being dragged through the crowd by his mom. I saw the glint of her wedding band on her dirty hand clutching his dirty forearm. He saw me. His eyes were raw from crying.

  “Is your dad working?” he shouted at me, his voice high-pitched and shaky. “My dad’s working,” he said.

  I saw our next-door neighbor, Maxine. She was standing on her tiptoes, looking all around her. Suddenly she started pushing her way through people, and I watched her find Val.

  Val did everything I aspired to do when I was full-grown. He drove too fast, threw horseshoe ringers, ate Twinkies for breakfast, bagged two bucks every season, wore the same dirty clothes day after day. He could belch the Pledge of Allegiance and throw a football through a tire swing from fifty feet away.

  When he wasn’t working in the mines, he lived in a backyard world of beer, rock-and-roll anthems, and puddles of motor-oil iridescence. He was always working on his truck, or working on the garage he was building to put the truck in, or working on the description of the girl who was going to sit in the truck when it was running smoothly again. I was his helper. My job was to find the tool he requested in the midst of the dozens of tools spread all over the driveway that led to nowhere, since the garage wasn’t finished yet.

  Maxine ran to him and threw her arms around his neck. Her weight dragged his head down, and her own head cracked against his helmet. She touched him all over his filthy work clothes, and cupped his blackened face in her hands, and kissed him again and again. I heard her sobs of joy. They should have made me feel good, but they were ugly-sounding things.

  I headed toward him, pulling Jolene along behind me. Val would have an answer for me. He’d be able to tell me why everyone was here but no one was doing anything. He had an answer for everything. Not the kind of answers my father gave me that were well thought out and took into account all the knowledge he had accumulated over a lifetime. Val’s answers were instantaneous proclamations based on the inconceivability of an alternative.

  “Why’s the sky blue?” I asked him once.

  “ ’Cause it would look pretty stupid if it was purple,” he replied.

  We arrived at his side, and I called up to him. He didn’t notice us at first; then he finally glanced at me and Jolene, and our presence began to register on his face. I saw a terrible sadness there. It took me a moment to recognize the expression. I’d never seen Val look sad. He got pissed a lot. Anger was his emotion of choice when dealing with tragedy or misfortune. Not rage, but a sort of resigned aggravation that once again life had dealt someone an unfair blow and there was nothing anyone could do about it except swear and have a beer and think about something else.

  “Is my dad okay?” I asked him.

  I waited for him to say, “It would be pretty stupid if he wasn’t.”

  He knelt in front of me, something he never did. My dad was always crouching down to my level to explain things to me, almost as if he thought we were equals, but Val liked being taller than me. It might have been because he wasn’t tall compared to a lot of the other miners.

  He clutched me by both arms, and the pain in my shoulder made me jerk away from him, but he held fast. I started to cry. It was the last thing I wanted to do in front of him.

  “You be strong for your mom,” he said.

  “Why?” I screamed the word at him.

  “You just do it. Okay?”

  I dropped my eyes to the ground. A pair of bare feet appeared in my line of vision. They were filthy and spattered with blood. A few of the pretty pink toenails were cracked. One was ripped off. My mom’s feet. She and Dad were going to Miss Finch’s wedding tomorrow. She was going to wear high-heeled shoes with her toes sticking out. The night before she had shown my dad a bottle of pink nail polish and a bottle of red, and he had picked pink.

  “What’s going on, Val?” I heard my mom say.

  They began talking in quiet voices, with my mom staring intensely at Val and Val staring intensely at her ruined feet about what was being done and what wasn’t being done and why. Val told her we were waiting for a drill bit to be driven down from Somerset and a rig to be driven up from West Virginia. We didn’t have anything here that could drill deep enough. Mom wanted to know why they were drilling instead of trying to go through the mouth. I lost track of the details then except for the numbers. The men were working Left 12. Two miles from the portal. Five hundred feet under the ground. Val said trying to estimate their whereabouts underground and drilling from the top was the only way.

  “I don’t understand,” my mom finally said.

  She lifted her hands up and covered her face. When she pulled them away again, tears had cut streaks of white through the dirt on her cheeks, but her voice stayed steady and calm.

  “What are you saying?”

  “It’s gone, Mrs. Zoschenko.” Val paused and made a strange noise like he was gulping for air. “The shaft. It’s gone. It’s collapsed. The whole thing.”

  I heard my dad’s voice in my head: one way in, one way out.

  I waited to see what my mom would do next. It seemed to me that everyone was watching her. She was the sister, the daughter, and the wife of a miner, and, because of me, it was assumed she would be the mother of one, too. Her brother and her father were also working the morning shift in Left 12 along with her husband.

  She sat down in the middle of the dirt the same way I’d seen Jolene plop down in the yard about a hundred times while she was learning to walk. When Mom hit the ground, Jolene crawled into her lap. There was nothing on Mom’s face. Nothing in her eyes.

  She held out one hand like she was waiting for someone to help her up. I walked over to her and took her hand and held it in my own the way I’d seen knights in storybooks kneel and hold a queen’s hand.

  “Did you wave good-bye to your dad this morning?” she asked me.

  I nodded.

  “Good,” she said.

  She pulled me down into her lap along with Jolene.

  “We’re going to pray,” she said.

  “Pray for what?” Jolene whispered to me.

  “The men,” I whispered back.

  I clasped my hands together and closed my eyes. I prayed with all my might that my dad was still alive. A couple days later, I would hear my mom praying behind a closed bathroom door that he had died instantly.

  SUNDAY

  1

  I FINISH MY BEER, CRUSH THE CAN OUT OF HABIT, AND TOSS IT onto the floor of my truck, where it hits the other cans with a small clang. From where I’m parked, a sparkling stream of piss seems to be coming directly from the filthy blue roof of a yellow, pink-shuttered plastic playhouse, as if the structure itself is filled with liquid and has suddenly sprung a precise and artful leak.

  I keep a watch on it as I take another bite of my ham-salad sandwich from the Valley Dairy and reach over to the glove compartment where I keep Vicodin and my revolver. I take out the pills and a folded piece of paper. An old high-school football team photo that Art, the owner of Brownie’s bar, took down from his wall of fame next to the men’s room and gave to me and a road map fall out, along with a can of shaving cream and a folder filled with car accident reports.

  The piece of paper is a fax from the state parole board. I open it and flatten it out on the seat beside me.

  Reese Raynor’s grainy, black-and-white fa
ce stares up at me with the stale eyes of someone who thinks he’s always being told something he already knows. His teeth are clamped shut, his top lip drawn back in a smirking snarl that I would probably find cartoonish in its attempt to intimidate if I didn’t know him personally.

  He has changed amazingly little during eighteen years in prison. Except for a paunchiness around his jowls and the loss of some of his hair, he could be the same kid I went to school with.

  Beneath his mug shot is the standard information on the parolee, his crime, his sentence. The only item I care about is the release date and time: Tuesday, March 12, 8:00 A.M. Today is Sunday. It’s 1:16 P.M., and I’m late picking up Jolene to go to Zo Craig’s funeral.

  Next I glance at our old team photo in a needless exercise of confirmation: 1980 Centresburg Flames. AA District Champions. One game shy of a state title. Myself in the front row: I. Zoschenko, cocaptain. Reese in the back row, on the far end, with his stare like two grimy nickels. Beside him his twin brother, Jess, the other cocaptain, his eyes glazed with the determined numbness of someone forced to share a bus seat with a ticking bomb.

  A few weeks after the photo was taken, Reese was kicked off the team. Most of the guys couldn’t believe he lasted as long as he did. He rarely attended practice. He never opened a playbook. He stalked off in disgust each time Coach Deets wheeled the blackboard into the locker room. For Reese every defensive play began and ended with the simple wisdom “A crippled man cannot score.”

  But Deets let all that slide. He would’ve let Genghis Khan play for us if he could block, and Reese could block. He had no finesse or speed, and a very limited understanding of the rules and objectives of the game, but no one could get past him.

  What finally made Deets give him the boot was his performance off the field. The day after a game—even the games we won—members of the opposing team would find the headlights on their trucks bashed in, or all the windows on their houses blackened with dog shit, or a younger sister deposited on the front yard, drunk and deflowered.

  Deets would have tolerated that, too, but the other teams had a problem with it.

  I put the photo back in the glove compartment and unfold my deputy’s map: a highly detailed blowup of the county. I’ve traced what I think will be Reese’s path, highlighting all the bars along the way and making a looping detour near Altoona to accommodate a trip to The Tail Pipe, a favored strip joint in the area.

  I’m assuming he’ll head to Jess’s house. He doesn’t get along with his parents, and the rest of his family in the area is made up of sisters who are married to men who won’t let him come near their homes. He and Jess were the oldest and the only boys in Chimp Raynor’s tribe of pale, lip-licking girls with dark stares like cloaks who never spoke unless spoken to and never walked down the middle of a hallway. The two brothers were the meat of the family; the girls were the drippings.

  My job has brought me to the home of one of the sisters. She’s married with kids now. Her mother is on the premises as well, the ominous incubator of Jess and Reese. She’s hiding in the gunshot-riddled Buick in the driveway.

  I get out of my truck and close the door softly, trying to be quiet, and take a few careful steps up the driveway, but my boots crunch over the windshield glass sprayed everywhere. As the pisser comes into view, he turns to look at me but keeps himself aimed in the same direction, continuing to make an impressive arc over his wife’s peacock green gazing ball and her lawn goose prematurely dressed for Easter in a bunny costume they’re already selling out at the mall.

  I see his gun leaning against the playhouse where he put it while his hands are otherwise occupied. A Winchester twelve-gauge. Chuck, our dispatcher, didn’t say anything about its being a shotgun, but his wife probably didn’t think to specify when she called. I reach into my pocket for a roll of Certs and pop one in my mouth to mask the scent of beer.

  The man’s face doesn’t register any definable emotion or even recognition upon seeing me, but he raises a hand in greeting.

  The gesture causes him to lurch slightly to one side as he’s drying up to a trickle, and the goose and ball get spattered. I glance toward the front window of the house and see Bethany Raynor, now Bethany Blystone, and her two little girls peering through the curtains. She turns livid when she sees her goose get hit.

  I take a few more steps toward him, passing by the car. Inside, his mother-in-law is hunkered down as far as she can go on the floor. There are fragments of glass in her teased, gray hair that look almost decorative when she cranes her neck up toward me out of the shadows and a plank of daylight falls across her face. The seat above her has been ripped open by the shotgun blasts.

  “Are you all right?” I ask her.

  She’s trembling, but she’s remarkably calm considering the circumstances. Forty-five years of marriage to Chimp have probably taught her to dole out hysteria sparingly. She manages to nod, then whispers to me, “Why are you all dressed up?”

  She works at the Kwik-Fill on the north side of Centresburg where I buy my gas, and she always sees me in a deputy’s shirt.

  “Funeral,” I whisper back.

  “Zo Craig’s?” she asks.

  I nod.

  “I saw her obituary in the paper,” she goes on. “It was almost as big as Elizabeth Taylor’s.”

  “I’m pretty sure Elizabeth Taylor is still alive.”

  “Oh, you know who I mean. The other one.”

  I look in Rick’s direction again. He has a slight sway to him now.

  “Right,” I say. “I loved that movie she did. You know the one.”

  She nods again.

  “Jess did Zo’s mowing. Did you know that? She has a real nice John Deere tractor. He loves that tractor.”

  “I better go talk to Rick,” I tell her. “You stay put.”

  I take a deep breath and start walking toward him. There’s a strong smell of wet dirt beneath the acrid carbide smell still lingering around his gun and the stench of alcohol wafting off him. I’m not close enough to smell yet, but I swear I can see it hanging around him the way heat in the summertime makes the air ripple.

  The dirt smell makes me think about Zo’s impending funeral and the freshly dug plot that’s waiting for her in the J&P cemetery next to her long-dead husband, one of the ninety-seven men who died in Gertie.

  “How ya doing, Rick?” I call out amiably.

  He fixes a glassy stare on me.

  I move closer but still keep a fair distance away from him so I don’t panic him. I have two objectives at this point: get hold of the shotgun and save the lawn ornaments from any future urination.

  I motion at him to move toward me.

  “Why don’t you bring it over here, Rick? Your kids play around there, don’t they?”

  He’s staring at me trying to place me, not in the present but in the past where most of us like to keep each other now that we’ve seen the future.

  He finally drops his gaze and looks forlornly at the puddle he created next to an overturned doll stroller with a stuffed animal strapped inside it.

  With his back toward me, I move quickly to the playhouse and pick up the shotgun.

  He doesn’t turn around. He raises his head and stares at the land behind his house beyond his yard.

  The morning rain has stopped, and the sun is trying to make its presence known by shining dimly behind the wall of gray clouds that meets the rim of lavender-smudged hills with the finality of a lid. The weather’s been pretty good lately. It’s a shame it couldn’t have been a little drier today. I know that wherever Zo’s practical soul is right now, it will be upset over the thought of all the good shoes that are going to get caked with mud and the time spent cleaning them afterward.

  “Ivan? Ivan Z?” Rick asks unsteadily, turning around to face me.

  “Yeah, Rick. It’s me.”

  A smile ticks briefly at the corners of his mouth like a small spasm.

  “I heard you was back, but I didn’t really believe it. Working for Ja
ck, huh? How’s it going?”

  “Okay. How’s it going with you?”

  We both glance at his house, where the two little girls are still pressed against the window, but Bethany has disappeared. Their stares dart back and forth between their dad and me and the car with the shattered windshield where their grandmother is hiding. It occurs to me that they might not know if she’s living or dead.

  “They’re closing Lorelei,” Rick announces.

  He stands in the middle of the yard and somehow manages to look uncomfortably stiff even though everything about him, from his dick hanging out of his jeans to his arms hanging at his sides to the drunken slackness of his unshaven cheeks, is limp.

  “So I heard.”

  “I only got called back nine months ago. I was out of work for almost a year before that.”

  I hear the front door open and see Bethany, out of the corner of my eye, head for the car. She opens the door, and a sob catches in her throat. Her mother stumbles out, and they wrap their arms around each other. Rick watches them.

  “There’s only Marvella left now,” he says, “and it’s all longwall.”

  He shakes his head.

  “I don’t want to do it again. I can’t do it again. Being unemployed.”

  The two women are crying. He notices and points accusingly at them.

  “My mother-in-law has a steady job. She’s been working at that goddamned Kwik-Fill since the beginning of time. She used to sell Slim Jims to Ben Fucking Franklin.”

  We watch the women help each other into the house. Bethany shoots him another scathing look, this time directed at his exposed manhood.

  “And then there’s Chimp. Worst miner ever lived. And he ends up working longer than anybody. Gets full retirement. Now he’s even collecting black-lung benefits when nobody else can get them, and he doesn’t even have it. You know he doesn’t have it. He’s got that shit you get from smoking all the time. What’s it called? Empha-seeming?”