Coal Run

by Tawni O'Dell

  “Right,” I say.

  “Are you a fucking retard or something?” Lineweaver snarls at me. “It’s my table. Everybody knows it’s my table. He even knows it. I’m taking it back.”

  “Is the table his?” I ask Ronny and his wife.

  “But . . .” Ronny starts to say.

  “Is the table his?” I repeat.

  “He can’t prove it,” the wife jumps in.

  “Everybody knows it’s mine,” Lineweaver snaps.

  “Unless you have some kind of legal documentation proving this table is yours,” I tell him, “I have no choice but to rely on my knowledge of property statutes and the nuances of state and local zoning ordinances to arrive at a fair judgment.”

  They all watch me with last-lottery-ball intensity.

  “What is it?” Lineweaver barks.

  “Finders keepers, losers weepers.”

  Ronny smiles, and his wife hoots. I don’t notice what Lineweaver’s doing, so I don’t see the fist coming.

  It catches me square in the eye. There was a time in my life when my spontaneous reaction would have been to strike back. Now I simply content myself with the knowledge that the blow had to have hurt his hand as much as it hurt my face while I watch a million pinpricks of light explode in front of my eyes before I stumble backward and fall on my ass.

  Ronny’s wife hurries over to me.

  “Aren’t you gonna arrest him?” she asks.

  I think about the paperwork. Assaulting a peace officer on top of everything else. I don’t want to deal with it. At least Jack will be happy to hear they solved their problem like in the good old days, instead of hiring lawyers.

  “I don’t think so,” I reply.

  The truck peels out. The table falls off the bed and crashes to the ground, where it rolls onto its side.

  She helps me up. Ronny has managed to get to a standing position, too. He’s holding his sides, but he’s smiling as I walk over to him.

  “This is Ivan,” he says to his wife. “Ivan Z. You know him.”

  “Well, I never actually met him.” She turns to me. “I went to Punxsy same year as you two, so I got to see both of you whup our butts a bunch of times.”

  “Hell, Punxsy.” Ronny spits some blood in the yard. “We could’ve just sent Ivan and Jess Raynor and nobody else, and they would’ve beat you guys.”

  “Be nice,” she says to her husband. Then to me, “I’m just curious. Why’d you let us keep the table? It’s really his, you know.”

  “I don’t like him.”

  “Do you know Andy?”

  “I just met him.”

  “Do you want to go to the hospital?” I ask Ronny.

  “Nah, I’m okay,” he says.

  He looks at my face.

  “Do you want to go?”

  The area around my eye is throbbing, but for the moment it helps to keep my mind off my hangover headache, which helps to keep my mind off my leg. I lean my head back, close my eyes, and begin to mentally isolate each injury to my body the way I used to after a game, then jump from one to the other like I’m striking keys on a keyboard, trying to create a tolerable harmony from the individual tones of pain. Knee. Head. Eye. Do-re-mi. Eye-knee-knee. Knee-eye-head. Fa-so-la-ti. Head-eye-knee-knee.

  Ronny and I are thinking the same thing: Deets would have told us to get up, shut up, and get back in the game.

  “I’m okay, too,” I tell him.

  “Do you want to come in?” his wife asks me. “Can we get anything for you? Coffee? Breakfast? Ice? Some aspirin?”

  “No, I’m fine. I should get going.”

  I start walking to my truck. I notice another pickup pulled over to one side and idling on the road. It’s not Lineweaver’s. This one is an old Chevy made back when the cab’s roof was a different shade than the body. The roof is white; the rest of the truck is a sky blue with a couple rust patches.

  The guy driving it has one arm hanging out the window. A trail of gray smoke rises from between his fingertips. It’s Val.

  I pick up my pace until I’m almost jogging. My knee is killing me, but I don’t care.

  “This is what you do for a living,” he says when I reach him.

  “On a good day,” I tell him.

  I peek into his truck. He’s got a six-pack of Red Dog, a carton of cigarettes, a blue plastic Wal-Mart bag filled with Chef Boyardee products, and a bunch of loose red lollipops sitting on the seat next to him.

  “This isn’t what I was planning on doing,” I say all of a sudden. “Being a deputy, I mean. I was a football player. Well, you know that. I was more than just a player. I was good. Great, actually. I was an All-American. Leading rusher at Penn State three years in a row. We won a national title my freshman year. Won the Sugar Bowl my sophomore year. I was drafted by the Bears. The Chicago Bears. Back when Ditka coached. Jim McMahon, Walter Payton, Mike Singletary. All those guys. I never got to play with any of them because I got injured. I never even got to meet any of them except Ditka. He sent me a letter when I was in the hospital. Joe Paterno came and visited me a couple times. Brought me some ice cream. Peachy Paterno. That’s his flavor at the Creamery. It’s great stuff. I used to have a flavor. Ivan Z’s Tacklebreaker Brickle. They don’t make it anymore. . . .” My voice trails off.

  He finishes his cigarette and flicks the butt onto the ground.

  “You’re gonna have to shorten that if you want it on your tombstone,” he advises me.

  He pulls out, and once again I let him get away before I ask him where he’s staying. I just stand there like an idiot and watch his brass Gertie tag swing from his rearview mirror as he drives away. He got to keep his tag, too, that day, even though he wasn’t killed.

  ———

  I decide to pursue him this time. I drive the main road back to Centresburg for a while, and when I don’t find him, I head for our old neighborhood. If this really is his first time back here in thirty-three years, I’m sure he felt the need to check out the place. Hopefully, he knew ahead of time about the mine fires and wasn’t expecting to find a town anymore.

  The houses are all gone now. Cracked foundations and piles of chimney rubble are left in their places. The sidewalks that used to lead to front doors are broken and buckled. Rusted mailboxes ragged with bullet holes hang from splintered wooden posts. Grass doesn’t grow, and the weeds that do are an inexplicable shade of snot.

  A lot of women used to plant flower gardens in dump-truck tires laid flat and painted white. A few of the tires remain, along with other little pieces of each family’s identity: swing-set skeletons, rolls of chicken wire, doghouses, flat-tired bikes, a rotting picnic bench.

  Keeping watch over all of it is a small, randomly stationed army of forsaken lawn ornaments, their colors chipped and faded. From a distance their cracked faces look real to me. Frozen deer and rabbits. Dogs and Madonnas and elves. Their bodies bleed mud and grass like victims of some perverse crime of nature.

  My favorite is a St. Joseph lawn ornament housed in an upturned, sawed-off half of an old claw-foot bathtub. It’s survived better than any of the others. The tub has been an effective shield against rain and wind and pickup-truck snipers. White porcelain shrapnel litters the yard, but the saint has never been hit. The white dove that used to sit perched on his finger wasn’t so lucky. It’s gone, but his finger is still raised as if he’s saying, “Hey, wait for me.”

  I slow my truck to a stop in front of what used to be our house and where Val’s garage was never built for the truck he never completely fixed. The silent, empty black mouths of the coke ovens are strung across the distant hillside like a sutured wound.

  Our backyard was the first place where the problem was detected. It was late May at the end of my senior year in high school. I was grabbing some breakfast. Mom was upstairs getting dressed for work, and Jolene had run outside to feed her pet white rabbit.

  When she came back inside, she had a strange look on her face. It wasn’t pure worry or fear, but a little of both mi
xed with confusion. The pen was gone, she told me. The ground was torn up in a straight line like someone had taken a backhoe and overturned the earth, leaving broken roots and rocks the size of her head in its wake. But strangest of all was the intense heat around the spot and how it seemed to be coming from the ground.

  I reluctantly followed her outside. Jolene wasn’t a liar, but she had a knack for missing the obvious. If she said the pen wasn’t there, I believed her, but I also knew there had to be a reasonable explanation. Probably one of the more ambitious members of her legion of simpleminded, greasy-overalled admirers had dragged the thing off with his dad’s tractor, planning to replace it with a new one, painted pink, that he’d spent an entire school year building in shop class.

  I could see right away that the pen was gone and the ground was ripped up. I was confident of my tractor theory until the heat hit me like an oven door had been thrown open in my face.

  I should have hesitated, or I should have gone to get help, but I was entranced by the horrible possibility of what I suspected must be true.

  By then, almost fifteen years after Gertie blew, everyone in town knew we were sitting on top of a mine fire. It was a predictable final outcome after an explosion of that magnitude. Isolated sections of the coal bed had kept burning long after the initial fireball raged through the tunnels, and eventually the heat and gases reached the topsoil.

  Scattered patches of plants and trees had begun to wither and die. There was always a strange burned smell in the air no one could identify. People were constantly ill with headaches and nausea, but no one suspected that these symptoms could be related to anything other than a recurring flu bug.

  Even with all these developments, people weren’t too concerned. Mine fires were common in coal country, and everyone knew they were next to impossible to put out.

  A great, soft, simmering cloud of steam was spread across the ground where the rabbit pen had been. I noticed something strange jutting out of the torn clods of grass and dropped to my knees to check it out. I began moving the dirt away and realized it was the corner of the pen.

  I called out to Jolene and started digging more vigorously when suddenly the ground split apart and I found myself tumbling headlong into a chasm where gusts of heat billowed up at me and a hot wind howled around my ears. I grabbed onto the yard above me, but I could feel the dirt crumbling in my hands. Beneath me flames flickered in a black so infinite I couldn’t tell if they were near or far, small or raging. I started slipping.

  When I opened my mouth to yell for help, a scorching rush of air tore through my throat and lungs and burned the breath out of me. Jolene grabbed my hands and was able to help pull me out.

  Only a split second had passed, but my eyebrows had been singed off and the bottoms of my gym shoes had melted onto the soles of my feet. The physical pain was nothing compared to the fear I felt. I was sure I had seen all the way to the center of the earth. Maybe all the way to hell.

  By the end of that day, a motorcycle, a prized rhododendron bush, a clothesline post, and a birdbath had all disappeared in other yards. No one was sure what to do. People were still more confused than scared, but that changed in the middle of the night when everyone on our road was awakened by a loud boom. We all came outside in our pajamas and watched in dumb amazement as a neighbor’s Harley was consumed in flags of brilliant orange flames while it was slowly sucked into the earth. The gas tank had exploded. No one could say why.

  The wife went back inside and called Sheriff Jack.

  For the next few days, the town crawled with scientists and engineers sent by the Department of Environmental Resources, Penn State’s mining-engineering department, UMW, and the state Bureau of Deep Mine Safety. Some reporters and a few spokespeople from various concerned interests showed up, too. The guy from the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration had the shiniest black shoes I’d ever seen. No one from J&P put in an appearance.

  The hole in our yard turned out to be four hundred feet deep and 370 degrees hot. Toxic levels of carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide were found in the air and drinking water.

  The final verdict was announced at a public meeting in the elementary school’s multipurpose room by a guy from the state secretary of Environmental Protection’s office: All the ground beneath Coal Run was on fire.

  Barbed wire and a warning sign went up at the junkyard. The government paid people for their homes and gave them six months to relocate before the town was bulldozed under. Most people were satisfied with the money.

  Mom found a house in Centresburg. Jolene and I tried to convince her that it was probably for the best. Now she’d be a lot closer to where she worked, and she’d have all the amenities that come along with living in a big town.

  She did her best to act like she didn’t care too much. At times I almost believed her.

  Val’s obviously not here. I try the junkyard next.

  I’m hopeful at first when I notice a pickup truck parked there, but it doesn’t turn out to be the truck Val was driving. It’s a Dodge Ram, the same year and color as Jess and Bobbie’s. I pull in front of it and see the smashed-in headlight and the scratched grille.

  From where I stop, I can see down over the hill. Jess is standing with Danny next to the rusted remains of a Kenmore dishwasher. He’s surrounded by rotting recliners and couches, washing machines, piles of tires and hubcaps, heaps of scrap metal, hundreds of beer bottles, and rusted refrigerator doors. All of the junk is riddled with bullet holes, including the menacing red-and-yellow DANGER KEEP OUT sign. The local boys shoot at anything, and if it doesn’t run away, they often hit it.

  I get out of my truck this time. The smell of sulfur hits me, a smell like a hundred struck matches mixed with a dozen rotten eggs. I blink and cover my nose with my hand and slam my door. The sound carries far in the absolute silence, but neither of them looks my way. I can hear Jess’s voice floating over the hiss of the simmering earth, but I can’t make out any of his words.

  He’s doing all the talking, waving one hand in the air while the other one grips a big stick that he has planted in the ground and holds at arm’s length like he’s just laid claim to a foreign land.

  What’s he doing here alone with Danny? is the first thing I wonder. What kind of mother leaves her kid alone with a man who hit him yesterday, even if that man is his father? For the moment I’m angrier at her than I am at Jess.

  “Hey, Jess. What are you doing out there?” I call to him.

  He turns and squints at me from beneath the bill of his J&P cap, then turns his back to me. He’s also wearing his old company windbreaker with RAYNOR stenciled across the back in big yellow letters, a pair of jeans, and a pair of black Wolverine work boots with bright yellow laces.

  Wisps of white haze crawl in and out of the tops of his boots and snake up his legs. On wet days like this one, the cool water makes the hot ground steam.

  He points out something to his son on the dishwasher and proudly pats its side with the unintended affection blue-collar men feel for major household appliances that outlive their warranties.

  “You shouldn’t be out there,” I try again. “It’s dangerous.”

  “It’s only dangerous over there,” he points farther down the hill.

  I start taking slow, tentative steps across the mud-slick hillside, maneuvering between tires, beer bottles, and gutted bags of garbage. I slide the final few feet, keeping my balance with my arms pinwheeling at my sides.

  “You see that?” he asks when I join him.

  He points off in the distance. I look down the length of his arm, but I don’t see anything except the dead forest surrounding the junk. The trees lost their rough outer covering of bark long ago, and their interiors have been weathered and smoothed by years of exposure to the elements until they’ve taken on a muted silver glow. Some of them have broken free of the weakened soil and toppled over; their charred root systems look like snarls of barbed wire.

  “What am I looking at?”

>   “There was a yellow Maytag dryer sitting there yesterday. Today it’s gone. Sunk into the ground. It might be hundreds of feet below us by now.”

  “And you really think it’s safe for Danny to be out there?”

  “Shit,” he breathes out. “Wasn’t he just standing next to me two seconds ago? I swear he’s part mountain goat.”

  “Come on away from there, Danny!” he yells.

  The little boy is crawling on top of an overturned refrigerator. The bottom half is sunk partially into the ground. It’s hard to believe he’s the same kid I saw passed out and bleeding in his mother’s kitchen yesterday.

  Jess leans the stick against the dishwasher and reaches in his jacket pocket for a packet of Skoal. He offers me some. I pass. He puts a plug in his lower lip.

  “You can find the damnedest shit here. People throw away entire doors and windows. Parts of roofs. Siding. Insulation. I’ve found some really good lumber before. That’s why I’m here,” he volunteers.

  “Bobbie had a little accident at the house the other day, and the garage door got busted up. You saw it.”

  “Bobbie did that?”

  His gaze and his voice falter.

  “Yeah, well. It was my fault. The brakes on the truck are really bad. I’ve been meaning to fix them. Now she wants me to fix the garage door. Reese is coming to see us when he gets out, and even though Bobbie hates his guts, she wants the house to look nice. Does that make any sense to you?”

  Danny arrives breathless in front of us. He’s carrying a beat-up orange plastic jack-o-lantern bucket kids use for trick-or-treating.