Coal Run

by Tawni O'Dell

  “Did Jess do that to your face?” she asks me as she reaches inside a cupboard for a coffee mug.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “He came home with a fat lip last night. He wouldn’t tell me what happened.”

  “Then I guess I won’t either.”

  She brings me a mug of coffee and a sugar bowl. Then she comes back a second time with her own mug and a bottle of whiskey. She holds it over my cup. Her hazel eyes have lost their cat-green intensity. They’re a soft gray in the unlit kitchen, except for a glint of mild malice in them.

  “You want me to Irish that up for you?”

  The words are in the form of a question, but it’s delivered as a challenge.

  “My dad never drank straight coffee,” she explains.

  I watch the bottle wavering over my cup. I see the first brown drops gathering at the mouth. My own mouth grows dry, and my throat tightens. My pulse quickens.

  My hand springs forward without my conscious knowledge or permission and flattens itself over the top of my cup. A splash of whiskey hits the back of my hand. Bobbie pulls back the bottle, apologizing, while I wipe off the booze on my jeans, all the while fighting an intense urge to lick it off instead.

  “No thank you,” I say shakily.

  She knows I wanted to say, “Yes, please.” She puts the lid on the bottle but doesn’t put the bottle away. She leaves it sitting on the table as a sign that we are not completely friendly.

  “So Reese gets released today,” I say to her.

  She takes a seat across from me and sips at her coffee. “He called Jess this morning at the crack of dawn. Woke us up. He told Jess he’ll be getting here later today.”

  “Today?”

  “Yeah, I was surprised, too. I assumed he’d have some urgent things to take care of before he headed down this way, like getting drunk and getting laid. I figured he’d try and get laid somewhere where he’s anonymous. I’d like to think it would be impossible for him to do it around here, but I suppose we have our skanks just like everywhere else.”

  She fixes me briefly with a gaze of sincere remorse.

  “I don’t mean that disrespectfully to Crystal. I admit I never understood what she saw in Reese and what could have possessed her to want to marry him and have his child, but he wasn’t a complete monster back then. He had some good points. He was still salvageable, and maybe that’s what she saw in him. Nobody knew what was coming. Nobody knew he was capable of that. Now we all know, and any woman who’d screw him now, knowing what we know, would have to be as disgusting as he is.”

  “So I take it you’re looking forward to his visit.”

  She smiles at me. “Jess can’t turn him away. Blood is thicker than water, you know.”

  “And stronger than common sense.”

  “That, too. Plus, they’re twins. They’ve got that weird intrauterine bond between them. Who knows what went on in there? Did you know identical twins come from the same egg? Two sperms. One egg. If you stop and think about it, it’s really kind of creepy. They really are one person split in half.”

  “Or maybe not. Two sperm, two people.”

  “No.” She shakes her head. “Two eggs, two people. Two sperm in one egg is like one of those horse costumes with one guy being the head and the other guy being the rear end.”

  “Which one is Jess? The head or the ass?”

  She smiles again. “You sure are asking a lot of questions about Reese. Jess said you asked him a bunch, and his sister Bethany said you asked her, too. Any particular reason?”

  I don’t answer her right away, and then something catches her interest out of the corner of her eye before I come up with an excuse. She gets up from her chair suddenly and darts toward the back door, where she picks up an old football covered in dried mud and scowls at it.

  “What’s this doing inside?” she angrily asks the absent offender.

  She looks over at me, and the earlier spark of ill intent I saw in her eyes becomes a blaze.

  “Think fast,” she calls out and throws a pass at me.

  I catch it but fumble it afterward. It hits the table and jars the cups. Some coffee spills out.

  The soles of my feet burn, and my head instantly fills with the muted roar of the crowd, like the surf outside a seaside cave, as the name of our team is announced while we stand in the alleyway beneath the bleachers outside the locker room door. Deets’s bald head gives off an eerie phosphorescence in the dark, like the poisoned mushrooms that grew in the woods behind my house.

  “What’s with you?” Bobbie laughs. “So much for the great Ivan Z.”

  “I never play anymore,” I say, trying to defend myself. “I haven’t touched a football since I broke my leg except to sign them.”

  “Never? Not once? You’ve never even tossed a couple passes to Jolene’s boys?”

  I shake my head.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She walks over and takes the ball from me.

  “I don’t get it. How could you just shut it off like that? Jess plays with all the kids. Our oldest girl’s actually the best in the lot. You should see her catch a football. Her form reminds me a lot of Jess in high school. ‘Sticky Fingers,’ he calls her.”

  She walks to the back door, opens it, and tosses the ball outside, then bends over to rearrange some muddy rain boots lined up on a mat outside the door. I feel the beginnings of a hard-on while I stare at her ass in the tight jeans.

  I briefly entertain the idea of walking over there and making a play for her. I even allow myself to carry it to the point where I imagine her responding the way she did more than twenty years ago in the backseat of her grandmother’s Buick.

  What if she did? I ask myself. Do I really want her because I want her, or is it because I want her to want me, or because I want to try to redeem myself after the “rumors are greatly exaggerated” comment, or because I want what Jess has, or because I can’t have what I really want—which is Chastity—or just because I have a cold, lonely penis attached to my lower body?

  My hard-on dies before it has a chance to live. The heat of desire becomes a chill of doubt that sprays through me, congeals in my crotch, and solidifies there like a protective cup.

  She stands back up again, closes the door, and walks back to the table.

  “All the time and energy you used to put into football,” she says as she sits down again, “where have you been putting it all these years? Into drinking, I guess.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Everyone knows you’re a drunk.”

  Her comment is unexpectedly harsh. At this point my dick has curled up and is set in solidified self-pity like a bug trapped in amber.

  “So’s Jess,” I tell her.

  “He’s not a drunk. He drinks. There’s a difference.”

  “You’re an expert on this?”

  “My dad was one of five Irish brothers. I have three of my own. What do you think?”

  “And they’re all drunks.”

  “I have two uncles who are drunks, and one brother. The rest are hard drinkers. That’s what my dad was, too.”

  “And the difference is . . . ?”

  “A hard drinker is a man who drinks to help him cope. A drunk is a man who drinks because he can’t cope.”

  “What is it I can’t cope with?”

  She gives me the same sly smile she did before, the one where we’re sharing a sinister secret that I don’t want to share.

  “I love Jess,” she tells me. “He’s my one and only. But we’re different. You and me, we’re the same. Our dads were far from the blast. That means they were crushed to death or they suffocated. Do you ever think about that? How they died?”

  I take a quick swallow of coffee.

  “No,” I reply.

  “Do you ever blame your dad for dying?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “Sometimes.”

  She stops smiling, but she continues watching
me intently and suspiciously, like she’s afraid I’m going to blurt out something I’m not supposed to.

  “You know Jess could’ve gone to college and played ball just like you did. He could’ve got a degree and had a career somewhere instead of just a job. But he had his priorities straight. He stayed here where he belonged. He was a real man.”

  “That’s your definition of a real man?” I ask her. “Someone who lives and dies within two miles of the place he was born, even if it means being unemployed and having to suffer and struggle every day of his life just to survive?”

  “Pretty much.”

  She puts her elbows on either side of her cup and makes a bridge with her hands, where she rests her chin while she studies me with pretty eyes full of an ugly intent to harm.

  “You did what you wanted to do, not what you should have done. You know your dad would’ve never let you do something like that. He would’ve been real disappointed in you.”

  A chill much stronger than the one in my crotch spreads throughout my entire body. She can’t know about Crystal.

  “Do something like what?” I whisper.

  She smiles magnificently. She knows she got to me. I don’t know where her hostility toward me is coming from. It may be as simple as seeing me as a threat to her family. I could expose their dirty secret.

  Two can play at this game. I can get to her, too.

  “We all know Danny didn’t smash into a wall,” I tell her. “Jess told me what happened. At the bar last night. He was drunk. Drunks tell things they’re not supposed to. That’s why we got in the fight.”

  Panic and suspicion flash across her face.

  “What did he tell you?”

  “The truth.”

  She thinks about it, and her calm returns. She shakes her head confidently.

  “He didn’t tell you anything.”

  “Why are you protecting him?”

  “Protecting him?” she asks. “What do you mean? What did he tell you?”

  “He told me he hit Danny.”

  It takes a moment for my words to sink in. Her face becomes an absolute blank. She grows pale before my eyes.

  She stares straight ahead so intensely I think she might be in a trance. Then, all at once, she falls apart. Tears begin rolling down her cheeks, and her shoulders shake with sobs. She covers her face with her hands.

  “That’s the kind of guy he is,” she says from behind her closed fingers.

  At first I think I didn’t hear her right.

  “What kind of guy?” I ask her. “The kind who beats his kids?”

  She drops her hands and shakes her head.

  “No. You don’t understand. He’s so good to me, and I’ve been awful to him.”

  “You’re right. I don’t understand. I don’t understand anything you’re saying.”

  “Some days I feel like I can’t take it anymore. I just can’t take it. And now Reese is coming.”

  She stops talking suddenly. I can tell by the look on her face that she thinks she’s said too much.

  “Of course you can’t take it,” I try to console her. “You’ve got four kids, and your husband’s out of work. Things are really hard, but that doesn’t give Jess an excuse to do this. Nobody wants to get him into trouble. He isn’t a bad guy.”

  “You don’t know anything about Jess!” she screams at me, the same rage returning that she showed on Sunday when Dr. Ed accused Jess. “Don’t you talk about Jess!”

  “Did he hit Danny?”

  She thinks about it. I can see the terrible struggle going on in her thoughts and her heart. It shows on her face. Anger, fear, sorrow—even love fights for a place.

  She stands up and takes her coffee cup to the sink.

  “If he says he hit Danny”—she chokes on a sob, with her back toward me—“then I guess that’s what happened.”

  When she turns around again, she’s regained her composure admirably.

  “It’s still none of your business,” she tells me. “I hope you understand that. I really mean it. Now I want you to go, and I don’t want you to come back.”

  She walks out of the room. I leave by the back door. A calm, delicate rain has begun to fall. It feels like stepping into a cool, wet breath. From here I can see points of bright green on the bare branches that looked dead and black from the road.

  Next to the row of dirty boots are two dirty Ball jars with jagged holes poked in the lids with a screwdriver.

  I pick them up to see if their prisoners are still in residence. They’re empty. I put them back where I found them.

  Steve and I used to spend hours of our summer vacation standing in the cold, murky water in the creek behind my house, overturning rocks, searching for crayfish and filling jars with them. They were especially exciting and meaningful prey, because they had claws and could hurt you if you weren’t smart and careful.

  Some days we let them go. Other days we forgot and left them in the sun and accidentally boiled them. Still other days we set them loose on the packed dirt around the doghouse in Steve’s backyard and watched his Lab mutt strain at the end of his chain while the crayfish skittered witlessly from snapping jaws to our prodding sticks until they succumbed to dust and exhaustion.

  We were always really impressed with the size of the mud-brown piles of claws and antennae we were able to capture. We used to love to give the jars a couple violent shakes and watch, grinning, as the crayfish responded to our cruelty by trying to rip each other apart.

  14

  NINETY-SEVEN MEN DIED IN GERTIE. THE REMAINS OF SIXTY-FOUR were recovered and laid out in rows on the floor of the Coal Run Elementary School multipurpose room on plain white bed sheets donated by the housewares department of Woolworth’s. The others are still buried deep inside the collapsed tunnels along with my dad.

  The rescue crews worked for two weeks before giving up. It was a painstaking, time-consuming process. The miners had been swallowed by the mountain when it collapsed in on itself, and the only way to free them was to manually mine them out with picks and shovels the same way their forefathers used to mine the coal.

  The workers weren’t looking for survivors by the end of their search. They were looking for something to be dug from the earth to be given to a loved one to put in a box and bury again: a hand with an engraved wedding ring, a foot still in its steel-toed safety shoe, a piece of torn shirt with a piece of torn skin permanently fused to it by a glue of baked black blood, an unharmed hard hat with its lamp still glowing and tufts of hair in grayish pink spatters of flesh stuck to the inside of it.

  I never saw any of these things. I only heard about them, but I knew that the stories were true. It was why there were so many small coffins at the funeral, a size usually reserved for babies, Val reluctantly explained to me when I asked.

  Val helped dig for the entire two weeks. He was one of the first men in and one of the last to give up. He probably would’ve continued to dig in that same spot forever like a determined dog with a misplaced bone if J&P hadn’t called off the search. He also needed to get back to work. He had already lost two weeks’ pay.

  I was never allowed back to the site after the day of the explosion. I only saw Val one more time that day, hours after we’d first seen him. I found him sitting on the ground gulping oxygen from a mask attached to one of the tanks donated by the Centresburg hospital and staring at a dozen dogs that had strangely gathered in a group far away from the people and silently lay in the dirt, watching, with their muzzles on their paws.

  I ran over to him and told him about how my mom had dislocated my shoulder but we found Dr. Ed and he fixed it and gave me a shot of something that made it kind of numb and a bunch of lollipops. I offered him one. He took the red one and put it in his pocket.

  Then I asked him if he knew anything I didn’t, and he asked me what I knew. I told him I knew an explosion had caused the mine to cave in. I knew a lot of the dads were dead. I knew my dad was one of the men on the list posted on the office door who was wor
king Left 12, but until my mom said so, he wasn’t dead. I knew his number was 342. I knew that the official name of Gertie was J&P Coal Company Mine No. 9. I knew Stan Jack named all his mines after women. I knew that Gertrude was his mother.

  He said I was a smart kid. He said he didn’t know more than that.

  After that first day, he was gone every morning by the time I woke up. He came home every night at dusk, the black mine dirt covering him like shoe polish, too tired and filthy to do anything but fall into a heap in the middle of his backyard, where he’d lie so still I was always certain he was dead.

  I’d walk over to him and call his name. I’d nudge his leg with my toe. I’d offer to get him a beer.

  Maxine would come out and beg him to get up, beg him to take a shower, beg him to eat dinner, beg him to go to bed. She’d promise him things she couldn’t deliver. She’d make threats that didn’t scare him. She’d start to cry. Then she’d finish by shaking him awake and screaming at him that he was going to catch his death of a cold if he kept lying on the ground.

  Then he would push her away, growling something about dying from a cold’s being a fine fucking way to die, and fall back asleep.

  The only person who could rouse him was my mom.

  Once Maxine had gone back in her house sniffling about the futility of a mother’s love, my mom would cross our backyards pulling her old nubby biscuit-colored sweater closed around her and hugging herself against the cold night air.

  She’d kneel down next to him and lightly touch his arm, and his eyelids would fly open.

  “Why don’t you go inside, Val?” she’d ask in her quietly assertive voice. “Get cleaned up. Have a hot meal. Get some sleep.”

  He’d elbow his way up to a sitting position. The eyes behind the grimy black mask would look at her like she was a creature he’d never seen before—something mythical like a unicorn or a wood nymph—and he wasn’t sure if he should be terrified or enchanted.

  She’d watch him with her new haunted, blasted stare that was impossible to turn away from but equally impossible to hold.

  When I found myself trapped by her new gaze, I felt a strange, sweet pain, like when I finally scratched a maddening bug bite until it bled, reveling in the relief it gave me but knowing I was going to be tormented by a burn afterward. I needed her more than ever now, but it killed me to look at her.