Coal Run

by Tawni O'Dell

  I open it and read it in the light cast by the buzzing Miller Lite sign.

  It’s a birthday-party invitation with all kinds of balls on the front: baseball, soccer, football, basketball, golf, and tennis. Across the top in big block letters is the promise WE’RE GOING TO HAVE A BALL!

  Inside are the details to Eb’s seventh birthday party, including the time we’re all supposed to meet at the Chuck E. Cheese restaurant. The date is six months away.

  He’s written a note to me on the back. I can hear Harrison’s sighs of frustration as Eb asked him to spell every word.

  Dear Uncle Ivan,

  I wanted to tell you about my party early in case you have other plans you need to change.

  From, Everett Craig Your Nephew

  I put the little card back in its envelope and back inside my jacket pocket.

  I don’t get up for a while.

  TUESDAY

  11

  THE FIRST TIME I SAW HER, SHE WAS A SPECK OF A PERSON sitting on a guardrail. She could’ve been a boy or a girl, an adult or a child.

  I realized she was a kid before I figured out her sex. She had short, dark hair and was wearing jeans, tennis shoes, and a blue western-style shirt. As I approached her, I saw that the shirt had colorful stones, cloudy with age, set all over it in a confused zigzag pattern that made me think of Volodymyr’s crown. Some of the stones were missing, and only the empty settings remained.

  I was out doing my Saturday run. I was going to say hi, but I wasn’t going to stop. Then I noticed she was holding one of her shoes in her hand and she had been crying. Both shoes and the cuffs of her jeans were soaked in black, tarry muck.

  I pulled up to a stop.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her, breathing heavily and wiping sweat off my face with the bottom of my sweatshirt.

  She looked at me for a moment, then dropped her eyes and wouldn’t look at me again as she spoke.

  “I stepped in some kind of sticky mud,” she began. “I didn’t see it. These are new shoes. I’m gonna get in trouble.”

  I took the shoe from her and examined it. I smelled it to see if it was oil or asphalt or paint. I wished Val was with me. He knew everything that came out of the ground around here. It didn’t smell like anything except dirt.

  “I think it’s just mud. I wouldn’t worry about it,” I told her, and handed the shoe back to her. “It should clean off. Are you going to be all right?”

  She shrugged her thin shoulders and still wouldn’t make eye contact with me.

  I looked at her. I decided she wasn’t a child after all. She was probably around Jolene’s age but nowhere near Jolene’s developmental plain. She didn’t have much up top, but the bottom half looked good. She wasn’t ugly.

  She wore a tiny tarnished gold cage on a chain around her neck with colored glass chips inside it.

  “That’s a pretty necklace,” I said.

  It was a piece of crap, but when I said it, I meant it.

  “Thanks,” she replied.

  “Well, I’ve got to get going,” I told her, and jogged off.

  I never gave her another thought until the next Saturday when I went running again.

  She was sitting on the same guardrail. It wasn’t an accident. I was certain she had come here at the same time hoping I ran the same route every Saturday morning.

  She was wearing the same tennis shoes and jeans. They were both shadowed in gray where the stain hadn’t completely come out. She had on the cage necklace and a pink shirt that clung to the lumpy bra covering her little breasts. On both wrists she wore charm bracelets dangling with more colorful fake jewels.

  “You waiting for a bus?” I asked her.

  She smiled. If she hadn’t smiled, I might have kept on going.

  I slowed down and smiled back at her.

  “You live around here?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “I don’t recognize you from school. What grade are you in?”

  “Sophomore.”

  “You’re in the same grade as my sister, Jolene. Do you know her?”

  “Everyone knows Jolene,” she said.

  “Yeah, I guess so. Do you know who I am?”

  “Everyone knows who you are, too,” she said.

  I wanted to fuck her. It was an instantaneous impulse. I wasn’t sure where it came from. I wasn’t wildly physically attracted to her. I wasn’t hard up for female companionship. I could run back home, take a shower, make a phone call, and be screwing a girl who was better-looking.

  It was her innocence that got to me. Not her virginity. I had been with virgins who were about as pure as acid rain. She was untouched. She wanted, but without knowing she wanted. She had breasts and hips, but she was still a child. She didn’t know anything about dicks and pussies and tongues and cum. She wanted me to hold her hand. To make her feel as pretty and as important as Teen Queen Jolene. Maybe she wanted me to kiss her. It would be the way she had seen it in movies. Something with a soundtrack and a happy ending.

  It didn’t make much sense, but my next thought was of Val and the only time he let me shoot his gun. I remembered the feel of his callused hands on mine and his whispered tobacco breath near my ear instructing me to look my prey in the eyes. I remembered the thrill and fear that came with the power. And I remembered his advice afterward: It would be pretty stupid to try to kill something I didn’t want to kill.

  I brushed the memory away. I didn’t care what Val thought. Val was gone. Val was worse than gone. Val had decided to stay away.

  I looked around me at the calm, green hillsides that I loved, and I hated them for having something hidden inside them that could lead to their destruction. I looked at the girl.

  I let my soul be corrupted that day, although it would be years later before I accepted what I had done. I forgot who I was and what I should do and only thought about what I wanted and what I could do.

  I stepped toward her. It was a bold move, even for me.

  She didn’t move away from me. I bent my head down and kissed her. She kissed me back, then suddenly pulled away and blurted out, “I have to go,” and took off down the road.

  “I’ll be running past here next week,” I called after her. “Maybe I’ll see you again.”

  She was waiting for me the next week. I didn’t waste any time. I got her to take a walk with me. I took off my sweatshirt and laid it down on the ground so she’d have a place to sit while we talked. We didn’t talk.

  She let me take her clothes off, but not the necklace. I told her it might get broken. She asked how, and the look she gave me made me realize she didn’t have any idea what we were about to do, but she didn’t stop me. She trusted me. She thought she loved me. She couldn’t imagine I didn’t have her best interest at heart.

  When I pushed inside her, her eyes grew huge and she asked me to stop. I told her it would be okay. She didn’t ask me again. She didn’t say anything.

  I watched her face the whole time. I tried to imagine the images going through her mind. I was convinced she was picturing the life we were going to lead. The dating. The hand-holding. The love I was going to give her. Maybe love she desperately needed. I didn’t know anything about her. About her home life. She seemed to be poor, but we were all poor. I knew she had a little girl’s love of cheap, sparkly jewels, but I didn’t know a girl around here who didn’t. How far did it go? Did she see our wedding, our happy home, our baby?

  Then it was over in a pleasurable, physical spasm. I had taken what I wanted. I was done. She had been penetrated, destroyed, and now would be left in ruins like any other source of precious ore.

  I left her on the side of the road. I never even bothered asking her name. I wouldn’t learn it until a couple months later when she got up the nerve to talk to me in school, and I went home afterward and looked her up in the yearbook. She was wearing the necklace in her picture.

  Her name was Crystal. I didn’t even offer to walk her home that day. I wasn’t planning on ever seeing he
r again.

  Tapping wakes me up, and I’m grateful that the memory slips away from me.

  The tapping grows louder. I wonder if I could have managed to crawl inside a very big tree last night and now there’s a woodpecker outside looking for his breakfast.

  I open one eye and see daylight outside a windshield badly in need of a washing. I try to move. Every part of my body hurts, some more than others. My face. My head. My arm. My back. My knee.

  I turn my head and smash my nose against a steering wheel.

  The tapping becomes banging.

  “Stop,” I groan.

  “Hey, Uncle Ivan,” I hear.

  The voice is muffled, like the speaker has a jar over his mouth.

  I crane my neck back and see an upside-down Eb waving madly at me from outside the driver’s-side window.

  He cups his hands around his mouth and puts them right up against the glass.

  “Rise and shine!” he calls.

  “Stop,” I say again.

  I look around to get my bearings. I’m curled up on my side on the seat of my truck. The sharp bones of Val’s lucky rabbit foot are digging into my hip. At my feet is a big box filled with some of Zo’s belongings I told Jolene I’ll help her dispense. I can’t remember getting here. I don’t remember anything after my encounter with Jess.

  Eb bends down, then pops back up again with a coffee mug in his hands.

  “Open up,” he says.

  I open the door. He hands me the coffee.

  “Mom says to give you this. She says you’re going to need it.”

  He’s ready for school. He’s wearing a yellow rain slicker and his backpack and is exuding more energy and excitement over the act of handing me coffee than I will probably ever feel about anything ever again for the rest of my life. I take the cup from him. Steam rises slowly from it. The heat feels good in my cold hands.

  “You said you were going to play a game with me last night,” he reminds me.

  “Something came up.”

  “Why’d you sleep out here in your truck?”

  “I was tired.”

  “Too tired to come inside and sleep on the couch?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Harrison says you were passed out drunk.”

  I take a sip of the coffee.

  “Harrison’s a bass turd.”

  “Me, too,” he says, smiling. “You know what else I am?”

  “What?”

  “My name is a verb. I learned it in school yesterday. Miss Finch taught us about oceans. Ebb is what the tide does. It means to move away from something.”

  He backs away from the truck, holding his hands out like he’s on a tightrope.

  “See, I’m ebbing.”

  “I see.”

  “Did I get to see the ocean when we came to visit you in Florida when I was little?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did I like it?”

  “You ate a lot of sand.”

  The front door of Jolene’s house opens and bangs shut. Harrison steps outside and starts to stroll down the sidewalk with his trademark slouch.

  “Come on, midget!” Harrison shouts to Eb. “You’re going to miss your bus. Mom wants to talk to you, Uncle Ivan.”

  Upon hearing this information, Eb gives me an even bigger smile before racing away from the truck to catch up with his brother. He gets in front of him and starts walking backward.

  “I’m ebbing to school,” he proclaims.

  “No, you’re not,” Harrison says disgustedly. “You’re going toward school. You’re ebbing from home.”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” Eb corrects himself. “I’m ebbing from home.”

  I wait until they’re gone before I try to get out of my truck. I don’t want them to see how I move.

  I walk around to the back door. Through the window I see Jolene standing at the sink in her Valley Dairy uniform holding a soapy tiara in one hand and scrubbing at it with a toothbrush.

  She doesn’t turn and look at me when I come inside.

  Josh is sitting at the table finishing a bowl of cereal and reading a magazine.

  He has a mop of dark blond hair he keeps shaved around the bottom. A few years ago, he had his initials shaved into it. Jolene sent me a picture of it. Then he had the word “dawg.” Now he’s matured into a very tasteful lightning bolt. I’m going to suggest “bass turd” before he leaves for college this fall.

  “Hey, it’s Hobocop,” he says when he sees me.

  “Funny,” I tell him.

  I can still remember the day he was born like it happened yesterday. I drove over the mountain from State College in the middle of a blizzard to represent the male gender at his birth, since his father had run off to basic training. When I got there, Josh had already been born and was sleeping soundly and pinkly in my mom’s arms, and Jolene was reading out loud to her from a fashion magazine about the dos and don’ts of wearing leg warmers, giggling wildly at the don’ts.

  “It’s a boy,” she announced when she noticed me standing in the doorway. “Like you.”

  I take a seat across from him before he can stand up and carry his bowl to the sink. He’s as tall as me now. Some days I don’t like to be reminded of this.

  I have my back to Volodymyr, and that’s the way I like it. I’m in no mood to meet his all-knowing stare.

  Mom gave the portrait to Jolene when she moved here with Josh. It never felt right having him hang in the house we moved into after our Coal Run home was bulldozed under. His presence in the new house seemed more like a betrayal to Dad’s memory than a tribute.

  Josh gives Jolene a peck on the cheek on his way out, the same thing I used to do every morning with my mom. A sudden pang of guilt stabs at me as I think of all those lost years I avoided her, and not because of anything she had done. I’m still avoiding her. I’m back home, but I still don’t see her enough. She’s never complained.

  I look around me and bury my face in my hands. Jolene’s kitchen is one of the worst places for a hangover. The walls are papered in hundreds of little bright red apples with a border of little red and blue houses and the greeting WELCOME FRIENDS WELCOME FRIENDS WELCOME FRIENDS covering the entire perimeter of the room.

  I’ve had a couple late nights sitting in this kitchen with a bottle wondering if there’s a border out there somewhere that says: GET THE FUCK OUT GET THE FUCK OUT GET THE FUCK OUT.

  “So you’re pissed at me,” I break the ice.

  “No, why would I be pissed at you?”

  “Because I didn’t come home last night like I promised Eb,” I sigh.

  She tosses the toothbrush inside her sink, where it clangs loudly, and turns on the water with more force than she needs. The stream bounces off the small crown in a spray of dish soap bubbles that spatters the front of her uniform. She finishes rinsing it and gives it a few shakes before setting it to dry in a rack with some breakfast dishes and rinsed-out cans with the lids taken off.

  “No, why would I care how many promises you break to Eb? Or why would I care what kind of example you set for him? Why would I care if my six-year-old son finds you passed-out drunk in your truck?”

  “He wouldn’t have known I was drunk if Harrison hadn’t told him.”

  She grabs a dish towel from a hook near the stove and begins to dry her hands furiously.

  “Is that supposed to be funny?” she asks.

  “Why do I have to set any kind of example for anybody? I’m not their father.”

  “You are the most selfish person I’ve ever known.”

  “What are you talking about? He’s only six. I’m not having a bad influence on him. I’m not having any influence on him.”

  “You were the same age Eb is now when Val was drafted. Are you going to tell me you were too young for him to have had an impact on you? Were you too young to remember Dad?”

  I don’t say anything.

  “I was, you know,” she says quietly. “Too young to remember Dad.”

  She hangs the tow
el back on its hook, pausing to adjust it so the colorful scene of smiling fruits and vegetables is properly displayed. The crown, leaning against a cereal bowl, sparkles noticeably in the midst of the dishes and cans. She gives it a deep, thoughtful glance, as if she might consider wearing it today.

  Her crown collection resides in a small white curio cabinet in the upstairs hallway. She cleans them one at a time in no apparent order, usually with a soft blue cloth made from a square patch of Josh’s first security blanket. She likes to do it at night after the boys are in bed when she’s watching TV, in much the same way Zo used to take out her knitting or my mother used to take out her pair of scissors and newspaper flyers filled with coupons. Most of the crowns are from pageants; a few are gifts from childhood; some she bought for herself.

  When Jolene first started competing in beauty pageants, I couldn’t figure out why. She’s one of the least competitive people I’ve ever known. She’s always been aware that she’s pretty; she’s never needed a panel of judges to tell her so. She didn’t need the titles as a professional springboard. She never had any interest in the kinds of careers beauty pageants usually lead to. She didn’t want to be an actress, a TV newscaster, or a gyrating girl in a rock video.

  My mom was puzzled, too, but she was never the kind of mother to pry too deeply or lecture. As long as we promised to never do drugs, drive with someone who’d been drinking, drop out of school, spend money foolishly, or vote Republican, we were fairly free to pursue whatever interests we wanted, even those she didn’t completely understand or wholeheartedly approve of.

  I never heard her voice an opinion, good or bad, about beauty pageants or give Jolene any kind of advice. The only time I ever heard her say anything to Jolene before a pageant was before her very first one, standing in the hallway outside the junior-high auditorium.

  Mom took her by the hands and said, “You know what really impresses me? A good lemon meringue pie. Where the filling is just right—not too tart, not too sweet. And the meringue is perfect—not too stiff, the peaks not too browned.”

  Jolene said, “Me, too, Mom.”

  And Mom looked immensely relieved.