Coal Run

by Tawni O'Dell

  There’s a used-book sale going on in the hospital lobby. About a dozen folding tables have been set up, all of them crammed full of rows of books arranged in no particular order. A teenage girl plugged in to a portable CD player and engrossed in a magazine sits at a card table with a red cash box and a hand-painted sign telling everyone that all proceeds will go toward the building of the new children’s ward.

  The sale is proving to be popular, if only because it offers an alternative to sitting in waiting rooms or lying in hospital beds. People walk from table to table—some in patients’ gowns, others in regular clothing—picking up books, opening them to the first page, and putting them back again.

  I leave word at the front desk to have Chastity paged, and then I do some browsing for my mom. She has a couple favorite authors who have published enough paperbacks between them to assure there’s always a few copies floating around any book sale.

  I move on to a different table. Sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of it with a big book open in his lap is a boy who looks familiar. It takes me a second to place him as the same one I passed this morning riding his bicycle.

  He’s engrossed in the book. I stand next to him, and he never looks up. I try to get a look at what he’s reading.

  The page he’s on has pictures of big jungle cats: a leopard sleeping in a tree, a pouncing black panther, a roaring lion, a crouching tiger. They catch my eye because they’re not photographs or the traditional style of illustration for a book like this. Each picture is a miniature work of art, a painting, not an ink drawing, almost impressionistic in the way the colors are softly blended and light and shadow play against each other.

  A thrill of recognition races through me, and I have to stop myself from reaching out and yanking the book away from him.

  He looks up at me.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Hi,” he replies suspiciously.

  “Did you get to school okay?”

  His expression relaxes as he remembers me.

  “Yeah. My grandma took me.”

  “Could I see that book for a second?”

  He pulls it closer to himself.

  “I didn’t do nothing wrong.”

  “I know you didn’t. I want to show you something.”

  He looks from me to the book, then back again. He decides he can trust me and reluctantly holds the book up to me.

  I take it and hold it in my hands like it might break into a million pieces at the slightest pressure. I close it and run my hand over the old hard cover bordered in orange with a collage of plants and animals pictured on it and the title in capital letters: THE WONDERS OF NATURE.

  Inside the cover my name is written in faded lead by a sprawling five-year-old hand. Two other names come after it. This isn’t the first time it’s been passed along. My mother must have given it away for the first time years ago.

  I skim through it, recalling every section as clearly as if I had read it yesterday. The African rain forest. The Australian outback. The American woodlands. The desert. The ocean. The Arctic. The prairie.

  I find the page I’m looking for and hand the book back to the boy. He stands up to take it.

  “That’s a prairie-dog town,” I tell him. “Have you ever seen one of those?”

  He shakes his head no as he studies the picture.

  I wait for him to finish. I hope he puts it back on the table. I want the book. If he doesn’t give it up willingly, I’ll be forced to try to convince him I should have it. I can show him my name on the first page. What if he argues: finders keepers, losers weepers? The same rationale I used to solve Ronny Hewitt’s picnic-table crisis?

  Maybe I could beg and make him feel sorry for me. Maybe I could offer him cash. Of course, there’s always the fact that I’m bigger than he is.

  He looks up from the page.

  “Cool,” he says simply.

  He gives me a quick version of the same grin he wore coasting down the hill this morning on his bike.

  “Thanks”—he looks me up and down and decides to call me—“Officer.”

  He tucks the book under one arm and walks over to the girl with the cash box, his other arm swinging at his side.

  I feel Chastity come up next to me. I don’t have to turn to know she’s there. Her presence charges the air like the arrival of a game day.

  I turn and look at her. She’s changed out of her work clothes. No sexy pantsuit or a short skirt with her long legs showing. Instead her long legs are inside a pair of slim jeans tucked into stack-heeled, brown suede cowboy boots. Her hair is down and loose, except for a thin brown leather headband. She’s got on a pale pink T-shirt with a well-worn denim shirt over it tied in a knot. I can tell by the shape of her breasts beneath the fabric that she’s not wearing a bra.

  “Ready?” she asks me.

  19

  CHASTITY NEVER HAD TIME TO GRAB DINNER, SO I TAKE HER to the Valley Dairy. She said she had a craving for a chocolate milkshake and fries.

  It’s not very crowded. It does most of its business during breakfast and lunch. Jolene likes to say this is because she doesn’t work nights. She could be right. The pep level for the three waitresses working tonight is running low.

  The customers are subdued, too. People eat in silence for the most part, occasionally speaking to each other in low tones. It’s the exact opposite of the Eat’nPark chaos.

  We’ve already done our word jumbles and crossword puzzles on our menus, and Chastity even drew a picture of a barn with cows and chickens around it, using the broken crayons sitting on the table in a juice glass.

  During the drive over, she said she felt bad about our phone conversation and wanted to make it up to me. She said she didn’t want us to get off on the wrong foot.

  I’m trying to figure out why she’d want to get off on any foot with me and exactly what we’d do once we started off on the foot. I know she’s engaged. She seems to like me but not be interested in me, yet I sometimes see flashes of something sensual in her eyes. Maybe she’s a flirt. Maybe this is some warped kind of vengeance for all the times we beat Clearfield. Maybe she’s preparing to hit me in the head with the ultimate egg: leading me on to think I might get to sleep with her, then blowing me off? Or maybe she will sleep with me once and then dump me? I can only hope.

  “So tell me about Florida,” she says, dunking a fry into the ketchup on her plate. “I’ve only been there once, and the whole time I was there all I could think was, why would anybody want to live here? No hills. No trees. Too hot outside, too cold inside. Everybody and everything feels so temporary. I don’t know how anybody could ever do anything serious there.”

  “I don’t think anybody ever does. I think that’s the whole point.”

  I watch her raise the fry to her lips and take a bite. I must be doing it with a longing look on my face, because she pushes the plate across the table to me and nods that I should take one. It’s not the fry I want, but I take one.

  “It is a strange place if you actually try to live there, and you’re not retired,” I tell her, “because no one is from there. Everyone has come from some other place because they failed at something or they couldn’t cope with something. Everybody you talk to has a similar story, and almost all of them start with, ‘Yeah, I just couldn’t deal with . . .’ and then you fill in the blank: couldn’t deal with an ex-wife, couldn’t deal with so-and-so looking for me because I owe him money, couldn’t deal with snow, couldn’t deal with a certain job, couldn’t deal with having any job.”

  “Then why were you living there?”

  “If America were a yard sale, Florida would be the table in back with all the discarded crap and all the broken, unidentifiable pieces that went to other things. I fit right in.”

  “Well, I know your mother and your sister, and I know this town, so I know you weren’t discarded,” she says, reaching for her shake. “And you’re easily identifiable. So you must have thought you fit in because you were broken. Are you referring to you
r knee?”

  “I guess.”

  “You ran away because you broke your leg.”

  “I did not run away,” I practically shout at her.

  “What do you call it? A smart career move? You always secretly harbored a burning desire to kill bugs for a living? I admit Florida’s the place to be if that’s your calling in life.”

  “I didn’t care where I went. I just knew I couldn’t stay here.”

  “Why not?’

  “I couldn’t play ball anymore. That’s all I was to people around here. A great ballplayer. I didn’t want to have to be reminded every single minute of every single day what I’d done.”

  “What do you mean, what you did?”

  “What?”

  “You said you didn’t want to be reminded about what you had done.”

  “I did?”

  She slips her straw between her lips and takes a sip.

  I look at my own drink: a Coke. I’m surprised not to have an urge to put rum in it, but I’d love to have a beer. I asked one of the waitresses if they make beer shakes yet. She just smiled and said I’d be amazed how many times she gets asked that question.

  “I must have meant what had been done to me,” I explain. “You know, what happened.”

  “I still don’t see why having to stop being a great ballplayer should make you feel like you had to leave.”

  “I let everyone down.”

  The words are out before I can stop them. I realize it’s the first time I’ve ever said them out loud to anyone.

  She seems to grasp the seriousness of what I’ve just said, even though the words themselves are simple, almost juvenile.

  She knits her brow.

  “How?” she asks.

  “I told you. I’m not a great ballplayer anymore.”

  “I highly doubt that anyone expected you to be one forever.”

  I shrug a reply.

  “I can tell you one thing,” she says, still looking concerned. “There wasn’t a single person at that auction looking at your balls that had even the slightest bad feeling about you.”

  I look over at her. She’s waiting for me to smile at her comment. The best I can do is roll my eyes at her.

  “You were a source of happiness and pride for them. Someone would start talking to someone else about you. They’d say you should’ve seen Ivan against Notre Dame. You should’ve seen him against Ohio. That time on the fifty, he took the snap and disappeared into this wall of lineman and everybody thought he was buried; then he popped out on the other side and ran for a touchdown. Or that time everybody thought he was out of bounds, but somehow he managed to run seventeen yards down the sidelines for a touchdown like he was walking on a tightrope.”

  I reach for another fry off her plate while she keeps talking.

  “The next thing you’d know, there’d be a bunch of people all huddled around, smiling and nodding and talking about you, and then that led to talking about other things. You make them feel good about their town because you’re from it, and then they feel good about themselves.”

  “That’s sort of what I mean,” I tell her. “Everybody talking about me. I can never escape it. Even now.”

  “Why do you want to escape it?”

  She takes another slurp of her shake.

  “I just do.”

  “If it’s so bad, then why did you come back?”

  “I came back to do a favor for a friend.”

  “But you have a job here.”

  “It’s temporary.”

  She looks up at me with the straw still between her lips.

  “You’re not staying?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you like the job?”

  “I’m not sure about that either. Some days I do. Some days I don’t.”

  “I think that’s true for any job.”

  She goes back to eating fries. She holds each one between her thumb and forefinger and picks it up delicately like she’s playing a game of pick-up sticks. After she eats a few, she licks the salt off her fingers before she puts them around her milkshake glass again.

  “I haven’t seen you in action,” she says, “and I don’t know you very well, but I’ve been around people talking about you, and it seems to me that you’re one of those people that other people automatically look to for guidance.”

  “That’s scary.”

  “I think given the opportunity to talk to a lawyer about a legal problem or an accountant about a tax problem or a teacher about a math problem, they’d rather talk to you. And not because you were famous once. They just seem to trust your judgment.”

  “Well, that’s kind of weird, considering how badly I’ve screwed up my own life.”

  “Maybe that’s because you’ve never really listened to yourself.”

  She stares into her glass and stirs what’s left of her shake with her straw.

  “You might laugh at this,” she says, then looks up at me almost shyly, “but I think you’d make a good sheriff.”

  I do laugh at it.

  “No chance of that for a while. Jack’s going to be sheriff until the day he dies. He’ll be rolling around in a tricked-out wheelchair with a siren and a regulation shotgun strapped to the back of it. He’ll have keystone-shaped bifocals.”

  We both laugh at the image. Then I suddenly don’t find it funny. I find it all too real.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks.

  “Jack’s getting up there. Dr. Ed, too. I was thinking about Zo. You ever been out to her place?”

  She shakes her head.

  “The house is great, but it’s the property that really sets it apart. Two hundred acres of untouched hills and forest.”

  She makes a big slurping noise as she drains the rest of her shake.

  “Sounds great,” she says.

  “You want to go?” I blurt out before I realize how stupid the suggestion is.

  “Go where? To Zo’s house?”

  “Yeah . . . well, I have a key. Jolene and I are sort of in charge of packing up her personal belongings.”

  “So you’re asking me if I want to go to a dead old lady’s house in the middle of the night and go through her dead old lady things?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Are you springing for the beer?”

  ———

  We end up at Zo’s house with a couple six-packs. The house is cold. The heat’s not working. I start a fire in the living-room fireplace, but it only makes the living room warm. We start packing boxes in the other rooms but are gradually drawn there by the heat.

  The work, the nearness of Chastity, the comfort of being in a place that has always been safe helps distract me from my troubled thoughts of John, and Jess and Bobbie, and my dark wish for Reese.

  Surprisingly, after the day I’ve had, I don’t feel the need to get shitfaced, but I do need some alcohol in my system like a diabetic needs his insulin. A few beers provide enough. I concentrate all the rest of my desire on Chastity. Having her in the same room with me and being able to watch her simple loveliness as she engages in common household tasks like packing a box and dusting a shelf is just as arousing to me as seeing her in her high heels and miniskirts.

  She picks up a vase off an end table, checks the bottom for masking tape, cleans it off with a rag, and puts it in one of the dozen boxes of objects to be dispensed by Jolene. Unmarked objects go in a different box. So far it contains an air-freshener night-light and a broken windup alarm clock.

  I pop open a new can of beer for her. She takes it from me while she picks up a framed photo off the same end table with her other. She shows it to me: two small children, sitting Buddha style on their big padded diaper bottoms, graze on a plate of Ritz crackers and cheese cubes in the middle of a room enclosed by a perimeter of sturdy plastic fencing.

  “Those are Randy’s legitimate kids a couple years back,” I explain.

  “They’re cute,” she says.

  “Like pandas,” I add, “only le
ss endangered.”

  She laughs and takes a gulp of beer.

  She has a small birthmark where her jaw meets her throat. The first time I noticed it, I thought it was a tattoo of a lavender rose. I watch it pulse as she swallows.

  She flips the picture over. Finding no masking tape on it, she puts it in the We-Assume-This-Goes-to-Randy box.

  I ease myself back down on the couch. It’s made from a nappy, crumbly-looking upholstery, the same light brown color as the spice cake Zo used to serve here to her guests, with an ivory afghan over the back and two matching doilies on the armrests the same color as her sour cream frosting.

  I reach for the drawer I removed from Zo’s filing cabinet and brought with me into the warm living room and start browsing through its contents.

  A lot of it is junk: old insurance statements, instruction manuals and warranties for everything from toasters to septic tanks, a bunch of old patterns in their original Butterick and McCall’s envelopes, with ink sketches of willow-thin girls wearing short zippered jumpers and hot pants with matching vests.

  Some of it’s not junk, though. At least it wasn’t to Zo. A brochure from the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas. Homemade birthday cards from her grandchildren. A newspaper clipping of a widow with a J&P executive in a suit handing her a gigantic fake cardboard check while her four kids stood around her in their best clothes and scrubbed faces. The caption reads “J&P reaches out helping hand.” It didn’t mention that the hand only contained three hundred dollars for each family.

  I find an old math test of Randy’s. He only missed three. The teacher wrote WOW! in red ink at the top. It’s the only one of his school papers I find. There’s also a safety-patrol patch from grade school, and a small clipping from the local paper listing the graduates of his high-school class. His name is underlined.

  I guess that was one of the advantages of having a boy like Randy. You didn’t have to devote too much storage space to his achievements.