Coal Run

by Tawni O'Dell

  “He scored three touchdowns that night. The first two I missed, but the third one I was watching when it happened, and I’ll never forget it as long as I live. The ball was snapped, and he came running up behind the quarterback, and every single player on the field came together in one huge lump of bodies. There were arms and legs everywhere, and all this grunting and shouting. Then all of a sudden he came bursting out from the middle of it like a rocket exploding off its launch pad. No one could believe it. Everyone in the stands jumped up and started screaming. My cousin grabbed me and held me up over everybody’s heads so I could see. The other players on the field didn’t even realize what had happened. They were all still in a lump. He never looked back to see if anyone was coming. He never looked over at any of the fans cheering for him. He just ran. Looking straight ahead like he saw something special in the distance, and it made everybody else look down there, too. He ran all by himself the whole way down the field, across the big red Centresburg flame at the fifty-yard line, and when he got to the end zone, everybody was going crazy in the stands. People were just going out of their minds. And the players had figured out what happened by then, and his teammates were jumping up and down, and the other team was standing there shaking their heads. He didn’t spike the ball or do a fancy dance or jump around. He didn’t even look up in the stands. He just slowed to a jog and stopped for a moment, and then he turned and started jogging toward the sidelines like nothing had happened.”

  “He did his job,” Dr. Ed says.

  I start to nod off to sleep.

  The last thing I remember hearing is Chad saying, “Yeah.”

  WEDNESDAY

  18

  I WAKE UP IN ONE OF THE HOLDING CELLS WITH PIERCED CHAD standing over me.

  One of Dr. Ed’s prescription slips is pinned to my shirt. It reads “I slipped you a mickey.”

  The man himself is nowhere to be seen.

  Chad doesn’t comment on the situation at all, except to ask me what I think of the cots. Are they comfortable? He says he was thinking of bringing his girlfriend here once. He was never able to get up the nerve to ask her, but someday he’s planning on asking her or some other girl. He’s pretty sure somewhere out there is a girl who’d be turned on by the idea of sex in a jail cell.

  I get to my desk before Jack or anyone else arrives. I spend my whole day there, not quite knowing how to deal with the fact that I feel physically well. I had planned on being violently hungover all day long.

  I don’t even leave the station to get lunch.

  Stiffy reminds me at the end of the day as he’s on his way out and heading for home that I have a dinner date at Eat’nPark. Otherwise I would have forgotten about it. Pregnant Chad gives me a wink and wishes me good luck. It’s never too late to meet the right woman and start a family, he tells me.

  An elderly hostess in a yellow cardboard HAPPY BIRTHDAY crown holding a water pitcher aloft in one hand and clutching a stack of large plastic menus to one side stands serenely in the doorway separating the milling would-be Eat’nPark customers from the vista of happy seated customers like a Statue of Dining Liberty beckoning to our teeming, hungry masses.

  I wait my turn standing in front of the glass display case full of brightly painted, plate-size cookies and rows of pies topped with glistening meringues and shiny glazes and sparkling sugar crystals. I glance around secretively, looking for my very attractive owner; that was the way Chastity described her.

  Considering that she thinks of me as nothing more than a has-been dumb jock, she probably thinks the only kind of woman I can find attractive is a dim-witted, twenty-something blonde with large breasts and a boundless capacity for enduring endless, exaggerated tales of my past exploits and physical prowess. I can only hope.

  I finally arrive in front of the hostess. I begin to explain who I am, but she interrupts me with a shake of her head. In a creaky voice both ominous and pleased as punch, she tells me she knows why I’m here.

  I follow her through the dining room, fighting back the temptation to ask her if my date’s pretty or does she at least look easy or desperate. Little old ladies are usually a good judge of these particular personality traits.

  The last time I had sex was right before I left Florida, with a woman who had just moved into the apartment two doors down from mine. The night was memorable to me only because I’ve hit the outskirts of middle age and the fear of fading appeal, where I believe that every time I have sex may be the last. It doesn’t make the sex act itself any better than previous times. It only makes me more determined to enjoy it more than previous times, which usually has the opposite effect.

  It’s no different than all the times I’ve tried to quit drinking and I’ve sat with my final whiskey forcing myself to savor it when all I want to do is gulp the whole thing down at once in order to get any kind of a buzz, no matter how small or fleeting or ultimately unsatisfying.

  If I gulp, I feel like I missed out on something; if I savor, I feel frustrated; but either way I always remember that last drink, until I have the next one a couple days later.

  I scan the booths and tables for an unattached female. I don’t see any.

  We make our way toward a small, round blond head barely visible above the back of a booth. The hostess stops next to his table and automatically fills the water glass sitting across from the boy. He hops out of the booth and extends his hand to me.

  “You must be the great Ivan Z,” he says, grinning so broadly I think the smile might sever the top of his head from the bottom, like an ax stroke to a tree. “I’m Everett Craig. It’s great to finally meet you.”

  I take his hand. He’s wearing a pair of tan corduroy pants without grass stains on the knees that are a little small on him, a blue shirt, a navy blue blazer that’s a little big on him, and a yellow adult-length necktie patterned with tiny blue airplanes that hangs below his belt.

  “Mr. Craig,” I respond. “It’s a pleasure.”

  “Have a seat,” he says, and hops back onto his.

  The hostess hands me my menu and totters away.

  “You bought me?” I ask.

  He nods.

  “Don’t tell me you actually used your own money for this. Your allowance money or your birthday money?”

  He has a mug of hot chocolate sitting in front of him. He leans into the little white tufts of whipped cream on top and slurps loudly. When he pulls back, he’s wearing half the drink on his nose and chin.

  “Dr. Ed was there, and he gave me a loan. He said I could pay it back by not being sick for a year.”

  “Was it his idea for you to bid on me?”

  “No, it was mine. I thought this would be a good way for us to get to know each other.”

  The guilt I’ve been trying to keep at bay for the past two minutes triumphs momentarily. My shoulders sag under its weight. I’ve been living, or at least half living, in the same house with him for the past eight months, but he has to buy an hour of my time in order to get to know me. I’m ready to start being seriously depressed when I stop and take another good look at Eb.

  He’s thrilled about this meeting. He’s thrilled that he came up with the idea, and he’s thrilled to be spending time with me. I should be equally thrilled.

  He’s not holding a grudge over times I’ve let him down in the past. He’s not feeling bad, and he’s the one who has reason to, not me.

  I’ve always believed that feeling guilty showed a person was basically decent: Even though he did something wrong, he at least realized he did something wrong and felt bad about it. But right now it seems painfully obvious to me that guilt is nothing more than a device to make yourself feel better over something you did that hurt someone else while cutting the person you hurt out of the equation.

  “I agree,” I tell him. “I only wish I’d thought of it myself. For us to go out together just the two of us and do something.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” He takes another slurp of hot chocolate. “Now you can do it with Harri
son or Josh and be the first to think of it.”

  “So did your mom drop you off?”

  “She went out. Dr. Morrison did.”

  “Dr. Morrison?”

  The birthday-party table erupts into applause when the hostess, followed by a knot of waitresses, comes into view carrying some kind of pink-cream-topped pie ablaze with candles. I assumed that the party was for a child, but it turns out to be for a large, flannel-shirted man with touches of gray in his hair, wearing a crown similar to the one the hostess wears but with BIRTHDAY BOY written across it.

  They begin to sing “Happy Birthday,” and soon the entire restaurant joins in.

  I hunch down and lean across the table so Eb can hear me through the din.

  “Did she say anything about me?” I ask him.

  He hunches down, too.

  “You mean, did she say if she likes you?”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  He shakes his head.

  “The only thing she said about you was she asked if you could fix a toilet.”

  “What’d you tell her?”

  “I told her I didn’t think you could. I told her I’d never really seen you fix anything, except the one time you stepped on the remote when it was lying on the floor and you cracked the back off it and you kind of put it back together and put a rubber band around it to hold the batteries in.”

  The singing ends. The restaurant grows silent as the man blows out his candles. Cheering ensues.

  “But I told her I know how to fix a toilet,” he adds.

  “How do you know how to fix a toilet?”

  “Mom taught me.”

  “Your mom knows how to fix a toilet?”

  “Sure. Grandma taught her. Some guy named Val taught Grandma. Mom said Grandpa never bothered teaching Grandma because he thought he was always going to be around to do it for her. That’s why Mom says you always have to learn to do everything for yourself. You can never count on anyone always being around.”

  We both sit up again now that we can hear each other without shouting.

  “Don’t be sad, though,” he tells me with a furrowing of his smooth forehead and a concerned pout that’s hard to take seriously with a ring of chocolate and whipped cream around it. “She said to give you a message. She said after you take me home after dinner, if you want you can pick her up at the hospital and you could go have a drink or something. If you want.”

  “She really said that?”

  “Yeah. Do you like her?”

  “She’s all right, I guess,” I reply with admirable detachment. “What about you and this Hannah girl you went to the auction with? I’ve heard you mention her from time to time.”

  “We’re just friends.”

  I nod my understanding of their situation.

  “Can I ask you a personal question, Mr. Craig?”

  “Sure, Mr. Z.”

  “I have to confess I’ve seen you around town, and I’ve always been impressed by the amount of neckties you have. Is there any particular reason you collect them?”

  “Nope. Not really.”

  He takes another drink from his hot chocolate. This time I can’t help reaching across the table and swiping the whipped cream off the tip of his nose with my finger.

  He takes the hint and wipes off his mouth with his napkin.

  “My dad wears a tie now,” he tells me, staring at the chocolate staining the paper. “That’s why he moved away. ’Cause he got a good job with a tie.”

  He looks up at me, and I have a powerful moment of déjà vu from when his mother, my baby sister, used to look at me with those exact same eyes filled with the exact same bewildered hurt. I think it was only this morning.

  “It makes you feel different when you wear one. Did you ever wear one?” he asks.

  “I have on occasion.”

  “Didn’t you feel more important?”

  “To be honest, I feel more important right now than I ever felt when I was wearing a tie.”

  “You look pretty bad,” he says, his grin returning. “Maybe you should borrow my tie before you go see Dr. Morrison.”

  “Maybe I should.”

  “Hi, how are you fellas doing tonight?” our waitress asks us.

  “Great,” Eb pipes up.

  “Do you know what you want, or do you need some more time?”

  He doesn’t pause for a breath.

  “I’m going to have chili, and a grilled cheese sandwich, and spaghetti, and cottage cheese, and chocolate pudding with sprinkles, and can you keep them from touching each other?”

  “I sure can, honey.”

  She turns her smile in my direction. I slide my unopened menu across the table to her.

  “I’ll have the same.”

  I’ve been inside the Centresburg Hospital about a dozen times since I’ve been back. Each trip here has been work-related, escorting someone after a car accident or a bar fight or a home-repair mishap.

  Prior to this rash of visits, I hadn’t been back here since I broke my leg. I was only here a few hours that night, long enough to get me stabilized after the blood loss and shock, before moving me to a hospital in Pittsburgh and a team of specialists Joe Paterno already had waiting for me.

  My mom was with me the entire time. I sensed her more than saw her. I drifted in and out of consciousness, rarely remembering anything that passed before my eyes, but I felt her sitting next to me, and I heard her voice inside my head.

  During my years of drinking, I’ve given a lot of thought to what she must have been thinking that night, even though we’ve never discussed it. She had lost her husband, father, and brother to Gertie, and now, in some cruel twist of fate, she was going to lose her son to it, too, years after that threat had supposedly passed.

  One thing my mother had been spared along with the other young widows of Gertie was that they weren’t going to run the risk of losing their sons to the mines. It was a state of affairs they actively worked toward, even before the mines closed on their own for economic reasons and the mine fire gutted our town.

  After Gertie blew and these women no longer depended on J&P to put food in their children’s bellies and roofs over their heads, they adopted a different attitude toward the mines. Many of the opinions they began to voice to each other were opinions they had always held but kept from exploring even within their own minds, the way a child will consciously deny that an abusive parent is doing anything wrong by striking him, telling himself instead that he deserves it.

  After the explosion it was more important than ever that the profession of coal mining be respected. None of us left behind could allow ourselves to believe that any of those taken had died pointless deaths.

  We could never hate the industry for the same reason the families in our midst whose sons were going to die in Vietnam would never allow themselves to hate the country they had fought for, but it was perfectly acceptable to hate the men who owned the companies or the men who wanted the war.

  It was no different than my dad’s being able to continue being a miner in America after he had been a miner in a Magadan gulag. The fact that he had been taken away from his family at gunpoint, starved, beaten, and forced to live and work under deplorable conditions against his will never seemed to affect his respect for the actual job. He could hate the man tattooed on his arm who made him be there against his will, but he couldn’t hate the work, because to hate the work was to hate himself.

  Once the enemy had been identified and given human qualities like ourselves, even if their faces had never been seen, a fair fight could ensue. The gloves could come off. Excuses no longer had to be made. Patriotism no longer had to be confused with the pursuit of power. Morality no longer needed to be attached to something based on greed, and gratitude was no longer given to something based on exploitation.

  For my mother and the other miners’s wives, it was a battle fought in the quiet, subtle form of guidance. They were going to make sure when the time came that their sons would have o
pportunities outside the mines and the armed forces. They urged them on to college or vo-tech school, pushed them to learn job skills, or just simply tried to instill in them the desire to look beyond the end of their own road as the only possible place for work.

  The mines ended up closing on their own for reasons other than lack of a workforce, and Stan Jack pocketed his fortune and moved on to do whatever it is men like him do next.

  It had to come as a relief to our mothers, because they knew deep down that as long as the jobs existed, some of us would fill them.

  No one had said the forbidden names at the time, but they had sat on the tongues of every man and woman present when Gertie blew: Monongah, Centralia, West Frankfort, Darr Coal. A hundred men dead. Two hundred men dead. Burned, dismembered, crushed corpses spread out on high-school-gymnasium floors waiting to be identified. Others buried too deep to be recovered. Local lumberyards unable to provide enough pine for the coffins. A hundred men dead. Three hundred men dead. Three hundred new men ready to fill their jobs the next day.

  The causes behind these explosions were never known for sure. Reasons were given, but there was no way to effectively conduct an investigation at a scene buried under tons of earth and rock.

  The companies blamed it on miner incompetence; the miners blamed it on the company’s disregard for miner safety, but this particular battle had become one of unspoken demands and silent arguments kept inside their hard hats by the time of my dad’s generation of miners. All the legislative battles that were going to be fought had been fought; all the improvements that were going to be made had been made.

  The miners themselves knew that working in a mine could never be safe, just as a seasoned soldier never believed in a commander in chief’s promise of a quick and easy war.

  These promises were made for the well-intentioned but ignorant public by the well-informed but equally ignorant powers that be about subjects neither understood or wanted to think about.

  Those who did understand, like my father and my mother, shook their heads and wondered at the games these luxuriously removed people played to ease their uninvolved consciences. Then they went ahead and did their jobs and lived their lives, knowing full well there is no such thing as a safe mine or an easy war.