Coal Run

by Tawni O'Dell

  “Here,” I say, and hand him a picture of Crystal I cut out of our high-school yearbook. “You should have this. She was sixteen in that picture.”

  He takes it from me.

  “Are you sure you don’t mind if I keep it?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  He stares at it for a moment. He can’t help glancing up at what she is now. He quickly returns his eyes to the picture, then darts them to the glass horse.

  “She was pretty,” he says.

  “Yes, she was.”

  “I don’t look like her, though. Do I?”

  “No.”

  “I guess I look like my dad, then.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  He walks back to the shelves and carefully returns the horse.

  “I better get going.”

  “Do you mind if I ask where you’re going to?”

  “Back to school, I guess. I go to Ohio State.”

  “How’s your football team this year?”

  “Not bad,” he says with something close to a smile.

  “You play?”

  “No.” He shakes his head. “I did in high school, but I wasn’t good enough for college ball. I run track, though. Middle distance.”

  I’m back to being unable to talk or move. He seems to be having the same problem. We stand awkwardly until he speaks again.

  “I feel like I need to get out of here. I’m going to come back and visit her again, but right now . . . do you know what I mean?”

  “I understand completely. So you’re not even staying overnight?”

  The protectiveness rushes through me again. I know Reese could be back in town today.

  He shakes his head.

  “I always thought I knew who I was, and now I don’t know anymore. Like, I always thought I was born in Cleveland. Now I find out I’m really from . . . what’s the name of that town again?”

  “Coal Run.”

  “I might even have other family around here. Aunts and uncles. Cousins. Grandparents. Do you know if I do?”

  “You have some.”

  “None of them cared what happened to me? They just let me disappear out of their lives?”

  “It was beyond their control.”

  He looks back at Crystal. The struggle going on inside him shows clearly on his face. I think of the stag again, stepping into the field, this time realizing the hunter has him in his sights. He must decide to run or stand his ground, knowing either way he can’t escape his fate.

  He walks over to her, bends, and quickly kisses her on the cheek.

  We don’t say anything more to each other. He walks out the door and down the hall, and I walk along with him, each of us accepting the other’s presence in silence, without explanation, as if it were the most natural thing for me to accompany him and him to want my company.

  Outside, the sun has won its battle and the storm clouds have departed, leaving behind ragged wisps of black and gray hanging in the blue sky like chimney smoke.

  Danny Raynor is squatting next to the border of shrubs lining the walk leading to Safe Haven’s front door, intently picking through the whitewashed gravel and pieces of rose-colored quartz spread at their bases. I glance around for Jess and find him behind me, standing off to one side, his hands in his pockets, rocking slowly back and forth on the heavy soles of his work boots. He doesn’t look my way.

  John stops, and we finally shake hands. It’s a hand like any other. It doesn’t burn or crush or turn me into stone. There’s nothing painful about its touch, except that I’m feeling it for the very first time.

  I watch him walk across the parking lot to his car. It’s a blue Nissan. A couple years old. A nice car, but not too nice. I’m glad to see he’s not spoiled, and he’s also not suffering.

  I don’t know I’m crying until I feel a tear crawling down my neck.

  Jess comes up beside me.

  “That was your son,” he says.

  I nod.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see a brown stream of tobacco hit the cement walk.

  “You better fix that,” he says.

  16

  I TOLD HER TO HAVE AN ABORTION. AFTER I GOT PAST THE annoyance of being approached by her in the hall in front of my friends, and past the initial panic at realizing she was serious, and past the anger that my own life could be compromised in any way, my mind searched and found the answer. Abortion. What a beautifully clear-cut, foolproof word. To terminate before completion.

  She gave me a look of absolute disbelief. She wasn’t upset that I said it. She wasn’t about to cry or hit me. I don’t even think it was the word itself that startled her. It was that I could say it to her so quickly and so carelessly.

  “I don’t want to have an abortion,” she said, dropping her gaze to the same mud-stained tennis shoes she was wearing the day I met her.

  “Are you out of your mind? You’re sixteen,” I whispered harshly. “Why would you want to do something stupid like that? Do you think having a baby is a joke?”

  “No.”

  She didn’t matter enough for me to hate her. She was too innocent and easily manipulated for me to fear her. All I felt looking at her standing in front of me with her downcast eyes and cheap chips of color inside the tarnished gold cage she wore around her neck was the same petty irritation I might feel for a knot in the laces of my cleats.

  I wanted rid of her.

  “If you think having this baby is going to get me to marry you or even pay any attention to you, you’re wrong. I’ll deny it’s mine. To tell the truth, how can I be sure it’s mine? Maybe you screw guys on the side of the road all the time.”

  I thought I saw her flinch. I was afraid she was going to start crying and make a scene. I wasn’t home free yet. I still had to be careful how I played her. If I did it correctly, she’d have an abortion or she’d have a baby she’d be too intimidated to claim was mine.

  “I don’t like you,” she said softly to the floor.

  I was shocked by her nerve in standing up to me. Didn’t she know who I was? Didn’t she know her place?

  “You think I care?”

  “I won’t tell anybody it’s your baby,” she added quickly, almost in a mumble. “I don’t want anybody to know.”

  She turned and walked off down the hall. I felt great. I had won, and I had also dodged a bullet. It was amazing I hadn’t got a girl pregnant already. I didn’t always use protection. Luck had cut me a break by making my one and only victim too selfless and naive to pursue me. She was going to take care of it alone.

  I saw her and John only one more time before that night in a State College bar when I watched her bloody body being wheeled out of her home on a stretcher and him being carried out with his gutted stare and one small hand like a starfish clinging to the back of a deputy’s neck on the eleven o’clock news. She was walking down the main street in Centresburg with him. He was about two years old. I looked right at him, but he didn’t exist for me. All I saw was Crystal. I didn’t want any trouble. I wasn’t even willing to put up with a couple minutes of awkwardness.

  I hid from them.

  I was not myself, I’ve tried arguing with myself. That mean, cowardly, self-absorbed boy wasn’t me. He was someone I sent out to do my dirty work, because sometimes we have to make tough decisions and do unpleasant things to people who don’t deserve them.

  I had my own stresses. On the surface it may have seemed I had a charmed life, but I was about to leave for Penn State, where I was expected to be the Golden Boy again, where I was expected to perform at a level I had never approached before, where I was going to be under the tutelage of a coach who instructed and guided instead of terrorized and manipulated. Common sense may have said that I should prefer his methods, but I had never encountered them before. I was comfortable with fear and the blind pursuit of duty. It was something I knew just as my father knew mining.

  I’m driving too fast. I’m not even sure where I am. I’m still in Centresburg. I’m in a neighborho
od I’ve probably known since I was a child, but I can’t recognize anything. The street is noiseless. Kids are in school. Adults are at work or quietly going about the activities they pursue alone in their homes every day. The houses look blurred and browned around the edges, like they’re made of singed paper, until they disintegrate altogether into puddles of dirty gray.

  I pull my truck off to the side of the street and dig through the junk on my seat and floor hoping there might miraculously be a single unopened beer I forgot to drink or a bottle with an inch or two of whiskey left, but I haven’t had a beer in the truck since Jolene cleaned it out on Sunday, and I threw away the empty bottle of whiskey I drank that night.

  I lean my forehead against the steering wheel and watch tears drip off my face and leave dark wet spots on my faded jeans.

  It is something I know: Those were my dad’s words to my mother explaining why he chose to work in a mine when he was free after years of being forced to labor in one as a prisoner.

  I think of him meeting her for the first time, sitting at that long-ago dinner table with my grandfather and uncle, living ghosts of able men who would meet their ends too soon for no reason other than that they were doing their jobs.

  They went every day. They did what they were supposed to do. And I thought I was doing what I was supposed to do. Be a ballplayer. I was good. I brought my town glory. I made people proud, not just of me but of us. That’s what I was supposed to do. Not have a wife and baby dangling around my neck when I was only eighteen.

  Roby sho kajut. Do what they say. That’s what my father’s mother screamed at him when a pair of starving, half-crazed Russian soldiers with patches of black frostbite on their hands and holes worn through their boots told him he was going to go labor in a death camp to help make bombs to win the war, after they gunned down his father for saying no.

  Roby sho kajut. Do what they say. Work this job. Fight this war. Take this ball and run down that field. Roby sho kajut. Do what they say, and you may have a chance at life later.

  I shouldn’t be crying. I always told myself if I ever got to meet him, I wouldn’t cry.

  I was certain that since I had lived for so long with the knowledge of his existence and with the ugliness of what I had done, eventually coming face-to-face with him wouldn’t have any impact on me. I thought I was prepared for it.

  But no amount of drunken obsessing could prepare me for his flesh-and-blood hand in mine. For his living, breathing presence in a room with me. For the flash of my father I saw in his features when he smiled.

  I took my son from his mother; I took my son’s mother from her son. Jess was wrong in his assumption. Some things can’t be fixed. How can I fix that? By telling him the truth now: that his real father was a spineless, self-absorbed, son of a bitch who callously abandoned a pregnant sixteen-year-old girl who then felt her only alternative was to find someone else to screw as quickly as possible and hope that this time when she told him she was pregnant he’d have the decency to marry her? And that person turned out to be Reese Raynor, a man who would beat her routinely until one day he put her into a coma? Does he really need to know this truth after just finding out the truth about the existence of Crystal?

  We’ll sit and have a beer, maybe? Pick up where we left off? Hope to have some kind of future grow out of the death of our father-son relationship? Could we build a new relationship over the murdered fact of the one we should have had?

  His past is dead to me, and his knowing me as his father is dead to him. No amount of bargaining, negotiating, apologizing, promising, pleading, or a bribe of cold, hard cash will get back his life for me. What I threw away can’t ever be retrieved, replaced, or imitated.

  I try to picture him at every age: crawling over junk and collecting rocks like Danny Raynor, full of gap-toothed enthusiasm and unconditional love like Eb, going through the trying transition of boy to man that Harrison is experiencing, where he begins to look at a hole in the ground as a place to bury his mistakes and his treasures, not just a place to explore.

  I gave up my son’s life. I’m incredulous at the thought of these words and the fact that for the last twenty-one years I didn’t understand their meaning.

  I make it back to the station, although I have no conscious memory of doing so. I have no problem staying at my desk for the rest of the day. I take calls and catch up on paperwork and help several people who show up at the station with various complaints. I’m an automaton, and I think that maybe this is what I should be: a man behind a desk who never leaves the desk, who has nothing outside the desk. No woman, no family, no community, no life. Just a desk. A square, solid, piece of furniture that I can’t hurt or help.

  ———

  After work I stop at the Kwik-Fill with the sole intent of getting gas. It never crosses my mind that the mother of Reese and Jess Raynor works here, or even that a human being works here.

  The fluorescent glare, the customers standing mutely between regimented shelves staring hypnotically at the brightly colored, plastic-wrapped items, the polished silver and glass of the refrigerated section, the complete absence of smells, the constant unidentifiable insect whine makes me think of an alien spaceship and a race of zombie space clones.

  Edna Raynor could easily be part of the intergalactic flight crew in her Kwik-Fill uniform and name tag, with her teased hair like a helmet and her complexion an unnatural shade of fleshy orange in the blue-white glare from an overhead set of lightly buzzing tubes.

  I can tell by the carefully arranged stiffness and the highlighted silver-gray glint of her hair that her hairdresser squeezed her in after all. I can picture her on the phone Sunday, later in the day, after getting over the shock of being shot at, pouring out her domestic woes to the woman on the other end in exchange for an appointment. Rick’s worst nightmare—the reason he tried to disable her vehicle in the first place—was her getting to a phone, and she probably ended up using his as he was passed out in the mud next to his wife’s lawn goose and his own puddle of piss.

  She gives me a nod of acknowledgment when I walk in, and then her eyes dart to a display of Middleswarth potato chips where a man is standing with his back to us, one hairy, muscular, pale arm hooked around one of the cardboard barrels. The lid is lying on the floor. He digs his hand into the container and pulls out a couple yellow chips that he shoves into his mouth. He wipes his greasy fingers on the leg of his jeans.

  I get the feeling that I know him. I glance back at Edna, who’s glancing back and forth between him and me. She’s trying to communicate something without speaking. It’s not fear, exactly, even though there’s wariness in her eyes.

  I think back to the times Val let me tag along with him when he went hunting. He’d shoot me a similar look when he sensed that a deer was nearby. Don’t scare him away, he’d say with his eyes. That’s what she’s saying, too.

  I take a step toward him. He’s going bald. His scalp shows between the oily stripes of his hair. He turns around with another handful of chips poised in front of his open mouth.

  Our eyes meet for a moment. Our stares lock. On first sight he only sees a deputy and I only see an asshole. Then recognition begins to dawn for both of us. He gives me a dog’s smile that’s nothing more than the physical act of drawing his lips back from his teeth.

  He pops the chips into his mouth and crunches them loudly.

  “Well, well, well,” he says. “If it ain’t the great Ivan Z.”

  I feel the skin on the back of my neck tighten. I’m not bothered by his presence as much as I’m bothered by his use of the exact same words of greeting that his twin used a couple days ago. I don’t like to be reminded that they’re two parts of the same whole.

  He extends his hand. I think of him holding the baseball bat in it.

  When I don’t take it, he draws it back and wipes the grease on his jeans again and holds it out for another attempt.

  I don’t want to take it, but I can’t afford to arouse any suspicions in him or in anyo
ne watching us.

  He has a bully’s grip. He wants praise and a show of fear and thinks they’re the same thing. He expects me to try to wrest my hand out of his, then give it a disbelieving flex and compliment him on the pain he inflicted.

  I don’t. I beat him by distraction. I ask him a question.

  “How long has it been, Reese?”

  My ploy works. The exertion of concentration forces him to abandon the handshake. He sincerely tries to do the math and come up with a sum of years—and fails.

  “Since high school, I guess,” he says, and shoves some more chips in his mouth. “Shit, I missed these chips in Rockview. Most of the guys did. Some liked Wise, and there were a few shitheads who said Snyder’s is the best, but they usually only said it once. If you know what I mean.”

  “You should contact the Middleswarth people,” I tell him. “I think you may have just stumbled on a great new ad campaign for them.”

  He gives me another dog grin.

  “I remember when you broke your leg. It was before my trial. I heard about it in jail. Man, it was all anybody talked about for days. Guys were really torn up. It was like they took it personally. You know what I’m saying? ’Cause you weren’t just some great ballplayer nobody could imagine knowing. You were one of us.”

  “Except for the part where I didn’t kill or maim anyone.”

  He tilts his head a little, like he’s trying to hear better. His chewing slows. His stare hardens, and I’m reminded of the fact that he beat a man to death, a man the same age and size as himself with a similar history of violence who had spent years behind bars, which is an entirely different crime with an entirely different reason behind it than attacking a defenseless woman. Beating Crystal into a coma was an act of cowardice; beating that inmate to death was an act of insane rage.

  I had a moment in the Safe Haven parking lot this morning where I almost went after John and asked him to stay. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to tell him the truth or just try to convince him that Centresburg was a happening place where a guy like him could have a good time hanging out with a guy like me between visits to see his mother, the vegetable, and nightmares about the monster who put her in that condition, whose blood he believes runs through his own veins.