Coal Run

by Tawni O'Dell

  One of the machines had started working in Left 12 three weeks before the explosion.

  As a kid I didn’t fully understand my feelings. I only knew that Gertie made me feel the same way I felt when I learned about slavery in school, or what happened to the Indians. I had nothing to do with any of it as an individual, yet I was part of a bigger, ongoing whole that had done terrible things to large amounts of people in the name of progress and greed.

  Gertie made me feel ashamed because I was a part of us, and we had allowed something terrible to happen to us.

  The night of my accident, I had been wallowing in shame for two solid weeks. I had been drunk the entire time, ever since I saw the news story about Crystal and went to see her in the hospital.

  She had been flown to Conemaugh. Her injuries were raw and new. The places on her body where she had been beaten by Reese with a baseball bat were a gleaming shade of black-purple. She looked like she had been burned in a fire.

  I close my eyes against the memory and make my way back to the bar, where Art, the owner and bartender, has another Jack Daniel’s waiting for me.

  The front door creaks open as I take a seat. I know it’s Jolene by the way a dozen pairs of eyes slowly blink at her from the smoky gloom. Women rarely come into this bar, and never on a Sunday. If they’re looking for a husband, they send a kid in to get him.

  She walks, unconcerned, across the sticky, beer-stained floor, the click of her heels echoing off the wood-paneled walls. A few of the men drop their stares back into their beers, but most of them keep their sloppy gazes helplessly pinned to her.

  She slides onto the stool next to me and doesn’t say anything.

  Art reaches out to refill my draft. Jolene asks for Tequila Rose. He squints at her, making his dark eyes disappear into the folds of his fat face.

  “It’s that pink shit,” I explain to him.

  “Oh, yeah.” He nods. “We don’t have drinks that come in colors.”

  “How about a Tequila Sunrise?” she says.

  “How about tequila?” he suggests.

  “Give her a beer,” I tell him.

  “Is it time for the funeral?” I ask her.

  “You missed the funeral.”

  “I mean the burial.”

  “You missed that, too. I hitched a ride with someone else.”

  “With Randy?”

  “Randy?” she scoffs.

  She thanks Art for the beer and takes a drink. It leaves a little line of foam across her upper lip.

  “He hasn’t seen Ebbie in two years, and there he was only a couple miles away from him and he told me he didn’t even have time to stop by and say hi. No, it wasn’t Randy.”

  “So how is Randy?” I ask her.

  “His hair is thinning, and he’s put on some weight, but on the positive side, he’s developed good posture.”

  “Here’s to good posture,” I say, holding out my glass.

  She clinks hers against mine.

  “He said to tell you he felt bad you had to be the one who found Zo, and he wanted to thank you for driving her around and running errands for her and all the other help you gave her after her first heart attack.

  “He also said he appreciates me taking care of all Zo’s stuff. He said Marcy really appreciates it, too. I told him I’m not doing it for him or the wifey. I’m doing it for Zo, who specifically asked me to do it.”

  She takes another gulp of beer.

  “Why do you think she asked me? I could kill her for asking me. It’s going to be so much work. There’s no reason why Randy and Marcy can’t do it. Marcy doesn’t even have a job.”

  “She asked me to go through all her paperwork,” I remind her. “Randy should definitely be the one doing that. Not me.”

  “We’re suckers,” she sighs.

  “Here’s to suckers.”

  We clink glasses again.

  “So who was the guy you were talking to?”

  “What guy?”

  “The one at the funeral. The one you were grinning at like he was some leggy brunette in a harem-girl costume.”

  “Val. Our old next-door neighbor.”

  Her eyes grow big over the rim of her beer mug.

  “I knew it. I knew it. Does Mom know he’s back in town? She had a real soft spot for him. She still does, as far as I know.”

  “We didn’t get around to talking about Mom.”

  “What did he say about me?”

  “How do you know he said anything about you?”

  She gives me a glance that says we both know it was a stupid question.

  “He said he knew you were looking at him in your mirror and that I could tell you he was flattered, but I have to tell you I sensed a lot of sarcasm when he said it.”

  “Oh, no. He was serious,” she tells me, nodding her head. “He knew about the mirror, huh? I wonder if that’s because he was a soldier?”

  “Oh, yeah. That must be it. I’m sure the Vietcong did a lot of spying on American troops with compacts.”

  “He’s not bad-looking in a grungy, broke, and pissed-off sort of way.”

  “Are you kidding me? Do you know how old he is?”

  “I don’t care. I dated Jack.”

  She takes another gulp of beer, and this time I have to reach out and wipe the foam off her upper lip with my thumb.

  “I don’t see you dating him anymore.”

  “I didn’t stop because he was old.”

  “Yes, you did. You stopped because he kept falling asleep because he was old.”

  “I stopped because he kept falling asleep while I was talking to him.”

  The phone behind the bar rings. Art answers. He hands the receiver to me.

  “What are you up to?” Dr. Ed asks.

  “You’re calling me at a bar. What do you think I’m up to?”

  “I need a favor. I’m going out to Jess Raynor’s place. I just got a panicked call from Bobbie. She was close to hysterical. Their youngest hurt himself, and she wants me to come take a look at him.”

  “Why didn’t she take him to the hospital?”

  “I asked her the same thing. She said she didn’t want to, and that was that.”

  “Why wouldn’t she want to?”

  “The only reason I can come up with is, he didn’t fall and she doesn’t want anyone at a hospital to figure that out, because they’re obligated to report anything suspicious.”

  “Suspicious how? You think Jess Raynor is beating his kids? I can’t believe that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I know Jess. He wouldn’t do that.”

  “How well do you know him? When’s the last time you talked to him?”

  “About twenty years ago.”

  There’s silence on the other end.

  Finally he says, “Okay, well, I hope you’ll understand if I decide not to take your opinion on this too seriously. I’d like someone to come along with me, just in case Jess is on another one of his benders.”

  “What kind of benders?”

  “Drunken ones where he goes off into the woods behind his house with his rifle and takes potshots at anything that moves in his yard.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “No, I’m not kidding you. He lost his job about a year ago. Things are pretty bad out there.”

  “I’m off duty.”

  “I don’t want you there in an official capacity. I want you there as someone who could deal with Jess while I’m dealing with Danny.”

  “But you’re saying I could get shot at?”

  I hear a heavy sigh.

  “Meet me there,” he commands, and hangs up.

  I give the phone back to Art and drop a few crumpled bills on the bar.

  “I’m meeting Dr. Ed at Jess and Bobbie Raynor’s place,” I tell Jolene.

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  She downs the rest of her beer and slides off her stool. She starts walking toward the d
oor.

  “Bobbie’s one of my friends. And Gary is one of Harrison’s friends.”

  “Has Bobbie ever told you that Jess beats any of their kids?”

  “No. Jess would never do that.”

  “Has she ever told you that Jess shoots around their house?”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Has she ever told you that she had a major crush on me in high school?”

  She utters a laugh as she stops at the door. She opens it and stands in silhouette against the rectangle of gray daylight.

  “She told me she had sex with you once in the backseat of her grandmother’s car. She said it was a great way to spend three minutes in a Buick. You mean that crush?”

  4

  JESS AND BOBBIE RAYNOR LIVE ON A STRETCH OF UNPAVED ROAD that looks like the claw end of a gigantic hammer has been dragged back and forth across it. Their house is the only one for two miles in either direction. It’s small, sided in faded yellow and trimmed in peeling brown, with a rusted railing running up the front steps.

  The garage door is closed, and the lower half has been pulverized. Jagged boards hang loosely. Splintered wood is scattered everywhere. A Dodge Ram pickup truck is parked nearby, half off the driveway, with pieces of wood sticking out of the grille like whiskers.

  A pair of beagles start howling from the tops of their doghouses as soon as we come within view. Tire tracks lead from the driveway right up to the front door. They cut across the grass in a series of indefinable patterns. I park on the road behind Dr. Ed’s old orange Impala.

  His squat, heavyset bulk is standing in the middle of the yard with the permanence and proprietary air of a rhino. He’s holding his tackle box that he uses to carry medical supplies instead of fishhooks, and he’s wearing a pair of baggy brown slacks and a wrinkled brown shirt that adds to the rhino effect.

  Jolene gets out of the truck and starts walking across the ripped-up yard, stepping over pieces of garage door. Thanks to her many pageant years spent picking her way across muddy fairgrounds, torn-up football fields, and rutted speedways, she can walk gracefully in high heels through just about anything. Unfortunately, this is not a marketable skill.

  I look around the place, and I’m depressed as hell. Back in school Jess and I were friendly with each other but never what I’d call friends. We couldn’t be. Deets fostered a competitive hostility between us. Even though we were part of a team striving toward a common goal of victory, we craved and coveted his praise and attention, and he encouraged it.

  Yet at the same time, I admired Jess. It was a stronger feeling for me than any affection I felt toward guys I considered my friends. There was nothing fuzzy or sentimental about it. It was a hard, uncompromising feeling that had little to do with who he was or what he was but was based purely on what he could do.

  I knew Jess didn’t have any big plans after graduation. He had worked Marvella with his dad as a summer job and talked about putting in for a full-time shift. In our yearbooks under future plans he wrote, “Travel to Alaska to hunt grizzlies. Come back home and go to work.”

  I tried convincing him once he was making a mistake tying his future to the mines. Even then the few remaining mines in the area were on the verge of closing or being updated with longwall machines that did the work of a hundred miners with a crew of five. The coal that was accessible had been depleted, and the technology to go deeper hadn’t been invented.

  Colleges were going to recruit him, I explained to him in the locker room one night when we both had to stay late after practice—Jess so he could ram the concrete wall, me so I could run bleachers, because I missed a hole on third and four during Saturday’s game that would’ve got us a first down inside the twenty.

  I remember staring at the fresh violet bruises on his upper arm and shoulder. They covered his skin completely and with a disturbing, fitting beauty, almost as if the bruised flesh were his true color and he was beginning to emerge from his pale-skinned cocoon, shoulder first.

  “College can be your escape,” I told him.

  He reached for his locker door with his good arm and gingerly hung his practice jersey on a hook.

  “Escape from what?” he asked me.

  We were Deets’s chosen ones, the sole inhabitants of his torture-filled, glory-filled kingdom. We shared the same fears and objectives, and, like men under fire or orphaned siblings, we depended on each other even though we knew we were completely alone.

  I wanted better for him, not better than what I had but definitely better than this.

  I join Jolene and Dr. Ed. He turns and looks at me with twinkling blue eyes cushioned in crinkled crow’s-feet. His forehead is furrowed with grandfatherly concern beneath a snow-white crew cut that makes his skull appear soft and furry. He looks deceptively cuddly and harmless, the way a sleeping tiger does.

  “I hope your theories are wrong about Jess. I’ve already had to deal with one drunk shooter today, and I’m not even working,” I tell him.

  “Who was the shooter?”

  “Rick Blystone.”

  “What was he shooting?”

  “He lost his job.”

  “Right.” He nods. “Lorelei’s closing. She was a deaf-mute, you know?”

  “Who?”

  “Lorelei Jack. Stan’s aunt.”

  He studies the steep, heavily wooded land behind the house where Jess may be hiding, then tilts his head back like he’s about to sniff the air.

  “That’s two Raynor families in one day,” he comments. “You think that’s a coincidence, or do you think there’s some family tension going on that’s pushing everybody over the edge?”

  “Are you talking about Reese?”

  He darts a quick glance in my direction.

  “I don’t know, am I?”

  “How do you know he’s getting out?”

  “Do you know how many Raynor children I treat in my practice? Twenty-three,” he replies to his own question, and starts off toward the house with the tackle box swinging at his side. “I know more about their family than they do.”

  Bobbie’s waiting at the door for us. She’s clutching a wad of blood-soaked paper towels in her hands. Her face is lined with worry, and her eyes are raw and red from crying.

  “Dr. Ed,” she chokes.

  “Calm down,” he says to her.

  “I can’t stop the bleeding. It just won’t stop. His nose is swollen up like an egg. And he keeps passing out.” She gasps at this, and fresh tears start streaming down her cheeks.

  “Calm down,” Dr. Ed says again.

  He guides her back into the house. Jolene bravely tries to follow, but her own eyes have already welled up with tears, and she looks pale.

  “Go wait in the truck,” I tell her.

  “I want to help.”

  “Go wait in the truck,” I tell her more forcefully.

  “Okay,” she says. “But you come get me if you need me.”

  “I will.”

  The family room is admirably neat for a woman with four kids. It’s decorated in the fake country style dictated by women’s magazines whose urban editors can afford Shaker furniture and hand-painted farm-animal plates to be used for display instead of dinner. Bobbie can’t, but she’s done her best to uphold the image on Jess’s income.

  There are doilies and dried-flower wreaths and ceramic chickens. She has ruffled eyelet curtains, pillows upholstered in gingham, and a video cabinet shaped like a barn. The wallpaper is pale blue with tiny green apples.

  On one of the walls is a smiling Sears family portrait of Bobbie, Jess, and their four children, all of them color-coordinated and temporarily united by their individual desires to be perceived as united. Next to it is a photo of a man in camouflage hunting gear smiling for the camera. He has his rifle in one hand, and the other is holding a cap against his chest like he’s about to start singing the national anthem.

  Hanging on a chain from a corner of the frame is one of Gertie’s identification tags. Now they have plastic punc
h-out tokens, but back then they were brass. Each man had a number for the day. The tags were left at the cage entrance as a record of who was inside. They were recycled from shift to shift, but the company made an exception after the explosion and let the families of the dead miners keep the tags, the way a football team retires a jersey. For a lot of us, it was what we had instead of a body.

  The man in the photo was Bobbie’s dad. Chimp didn’t show up for work that day. He was home with a hangover.

  I follow Bobbie and Dr. Ed into the kitchen. Danny is on the floor, slumped against a wall, covered up in a Winnie-the-Pooh blanket with blue satin trim. His nose is badly swollen. The skin is stretched taut and has already turned a greasy shade of purplish gray. His eyes are open and glazed.

  Bobbie claps her hands to her mouth as she enters the room, and tears spill over them like she’s finding him in this condition for the very first time.

  I feel sick to my stomach. During my time as a football player, I’ve seen my share of nasty injuries, and during the four months I’ve been working as a deputy, I’ve seen some pretty ugly stuff, too, but this is the first time I’m seeing a little kid who looks like someone punched him in the face. I can’t believe Jess could do this.

  Dr. Ed washes his hands at the sink. He kneels down and murmurs something to Danny as he gently tilts back his head and pushes at his eyelids with his thumbs. Danny suddenly comes to life, whipping his head back and forth, sending a spray of blood in all directions out of his nose.

  Bobbie falls to the floor and tries to calm him, but he pushes her hands away, crying.

  “What happened?” Dr. Ed asks her.

  “He ran into a wall,” she bites her lip.

  “Don’t lie to me, Bobbie,” Dr. Ed warns.

  “He did. He was running real fast with the girls. They were chasing each other, and he wasn’t watching where he was going, and he smashed right into the wall.”