Coal Run

by Tawni O'Dell

  She pulls away, fixing him with a radiant smile that reduces the man to a boy. Its sincerity is overwhelming. She rarely smiles, and only when something truly enchants her or strikes her as funny. Her surface always reflects her depths.

  “Hey, Mrs. Zoschenko,” he mumbles.

  “It’s so good to see you again,” she tells him.

  “You look the same,” he tells her.

  “I do not.”

  “You do to me.”

  Tears start to roll down my mother’s cheeks. I don’t know what to do. Jolene stands by watching happily, as if she fully expected this reaction.

  For the first time in my life, it occurs to me that maybe Val had a crush on my mom.

  He extends the six-pack to her.

  She wipes the tears away, smiles again, and takes it from him.

  Jolene introduces her boys. Their desire to eat is stronger than their curiosity about this old neighbor of ours with the limp and the funny shoe who made Grandma cry.

  It’s not until we’ve spent a full ten minutes with everyone stuffing their faces in silence that Eb breaks the ice with a heaping spoonful of mashed potatoes and gravy halfway to his mouth.

  “Isn’t Val a girl’s name?”

  The eating frenzy is temporarily suspended. Josh swallows a laugh. Harrison turns very serious, glancing back and forth between Eb and Val. Jolene and Mom each sit back in their chairs and take a sip of their beers, poured in Jolene’s good glasses.

  “What kind of name is Eb?” Val asks in his rasp of a voice.

  “It’s a verb,” he replies eagerly.

  He jumps up from his chair and starts walking backward away from the table.

  “I’m ebbing from dinner.”

  Harrison rolls his eyes. “It’s a nickname for Everett,” he explains to Val.

  “Val’s a nickname for Valentine.”

  Eb returns to his chair.

  “You’re named after a card?” he asks.

  “I’m named after a saint.”

  “You mean like Volodymyr?”

  We all automatically look over at the portrait hanging behind my mom.

  “He’s not a saint,” Harrison corrects his brother. “He’s a czar.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “A czar is a king. A saint is a religious guy.”

  “He was religious, too. He’s got a cross on his stick.”

  “It’s a staff.”

  “He was a religious king,” Josh speaks up.

  I look over at him. He pulls one of Jolene’s rolls apart and pops half into his mouth and washes it down with a gulp of milk.

  When Val was his age, he was already working in the mines.

  I remember when he made the decision not to go back to school his senior year. He told my dad one summer night when the two of them sat drinking at our kitchen table: Val with a beer he was too young to drink legally in this country, which my father considered ridiculous, and my dad with his warm tumbler of one of his vodkas that came in bottles with pictures of czars or snowy landscapes on the labels.

  I had been sent outside to catch fireflies, but I lingered near the screen door instead, holding my jar and straining to hear their conversation over the whir of the fan Mom kept running in the open kitchen window. I heard Val’s gruff confession and my dad’s soft, precise broken English advising him to finish high school first.

  The next day Val let me tag along with him to the junkyard to dump some old tires for a neighbor.

  I went off to play in the junk. When I returned, he was sitting on the arm of an old couch with the back torn out and stuffing spread everywhere like snow.

  He was staring at an old claw-foot bathtub with a big crack down the middle.

  I asked him if he was going to finish high school like my dad said he should. He never answered me.

  He just stared at the tub for a while, smoking a cigarette, occasionally picking up an old beer bottle and whipping it out into the junk abyss, where it would either clunk or break with a loud, clean crack or shatter like wind-chime music, depending on what it hit.

  Eventually he got up, walked over to the tub, and gave it a kick. He cocked his head to one side and listened intently to the sound with a small, grave smile on his lips, as if it could tell him something mystical about life from the echo inside it. Then he glanced at me and said, “I got a job for this.”

  He lugged it home for a different neighbor and turned it into the shelter for her St. Joseph lawn ornament.

  I keep watching Josh. Val was a year or two older when he wrote those letters Zo saved for me all these years. The idea of Josh’s being in the mines or fighting in a war is inconceivable to me.

  I look at him, and I think he’s a child. When Val left for war, I thought he was a man. When I was eighteen, I was certain I was a man, but I behaved like a child. Am I right now? Or was I right then?

  I’m absorbed in my own thoughts. I don’t even realize the conversation has moved on until I hear Eb ask, “What happened to your leg?”

  I’m impressed by his nerve. At his age I would have never been able to ask Val that kind of question. I wouldn’t even be able to ask it now, but Eb doesn’t seem put off by the disturbing green eyes with their troubled brown calm or by Val’s intimidating silence.

  Val puts his fork down and leans forward over his plate.

  Jolene and Mom look a little apprehensive, concerned as much with Val’s being offended as with Eb’s being verbally attacked.

  “What happened to your tooth?” Val asks him.

  “It got loose, and I wiggled it with my tongue a lot until it came out one day.”

  Val seems satisfied with the answer and sits back in his chair. “I was fighting in a war,” he explains, “and my leg got shot a bunch of times. I couldn’t get to a doctor for a long time. By the time I did, my leg was dead and they had to cut it off.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you get a medal?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was it the same war Grandpa was in when he had to go to the place with the lids?”

  “No, it was a different one.”

  Eb falls silent for a moment, and then a grin splits his face.

  “Hold on a minute,” he says eagerly. “I was saving this, but I’m gonna do it now.”

  He leaves the room and returns holding a bunch of lids, their edges ragged from being removed with a can opener.

  “I had to have cans for an art project at school. We were allowed to bring in extra cans, for the kids who didn’t have cans and I brought in a lot. Anyway, we just needed cans, not lids. Mom was going to throw them away, but then I remembered Grandpa’s picture, so I saved them.”

  He dispenses lids and their explanations as he walks around the table.

  “The biggest one is for Grandma. The shiniest one is for Mom. The dented one is for Uncle Ivan.”

  He stops next to Val.

  “I didn’t know you were going to be here. Is it okay if you get a regular one like me and my brothers?”

  Val nods.

  We all sit there looking at our lids. Eb watches us expectantly, beaming.

  “They’re for our graves in case we don’t have anything else.”

  We continue nodding.

  “I didn’t want to waste them,” he says. “They’re good lids.”

  I make it through dinner and dessert before I get too antsy thinking about what lies ahead of me tonight. I wait until the boys leave the table in a thundering herd and Mom takes a cup of coffee into the living room, casting backward glances at Val, who’s offering to help Jolene load the dishwasher.

  I felt a little awkward around Val all night after reading his letters. I feel like a Peeping Tom forced to come face-to-face with the person he’s been spying on, only what I’ve done seems even more intrusive. Watching someone through a window without his knowing is an invasion of his privacy; reading someone’s innermost thoughts without his knowing is an invasion of his s
elf.

  But those letters belonged to Zo. She believed I needed to know his thoughts, no matter how many years had passed between us, and she was right. I needed to be shown that it’s never too late to be told you weren’t forgotten.

  I make my apologies to them and duck out the back door with Jolene’s protests ringing in my ears.

  I know I’m leaving too early. I’ll have to sit uptown half the night, but it’s better than being around other people. I don’t want anything to distract me or change my mind.

  On the way to my truck, I grab Harrison’s baseball bat off the back porch.

  ———

  I drive out to the State Store and get a bottle of Jack Daniel’s to keep me company, but I drink surprisingly little. Since seeing my son in the flesh, I haven’t felt the need to drink as much. I’m not comforted by this. I don’t believe for a single second that our meeting cured, reformed, or shocked me into being a nondrinker. I’m afraid of the opposite. I think I’m experiencing a dry lull before a very wet storm.

  I got a look at Reese’s car in the Kwik-Fill parking lot. Tracking him down is easy. He’s parked uptown not far from the Golden Pheasant. I park my truck far enough away that he won’t be able to notice it’s a sheriff ’s vehicle.

  I’m across the street from Woolworth’s. I take slow sips off my bottle and think about the women who worked there, kindly old lifers who spent decades changing hamster litter and pulling out the tray of birthstone rings for little girls who would never be allowed to buy one because they didn’t need one. I wonder what happened to them when their jobs disappeared.

  I try to keep my mind focused, but it’s not easy. I don’t let myself think about John and what I have lost, or Chastity and what I may have gained. I don’t think about Jess and Bobbie and what may or may not be going on in their house tonight. I don’t think about Zo dying peacefully on her couch or Val’s friend Lucius getting shot in the throat or Crystal the vegetable who will probably outlive us all. I don’t think about my dad walking off for that final shift, waving up at me standing in my bedroom window as he crossed our moonlit front yard.

  I don’t even let myself think about Reese, because the rage that boils up in me is reckless, and I have to stay levelheaded to make this work.

  It’s a weeknight and near closing, so not much is going on. The couples have long since cleared out: those who came together and those who found each other. The women have left, too: the unsuccessful loners and the groups of giggling stumblers. The men who are left at this hour leave individually and sporadically. Each one bursts from the door and stops suddenly, squinting first at the streetlamp, then at the sidewalk in front of him, like it’s covered in dog shit or daisies or something else he doesn’t want to step in.

  Reese is one of the last guys out. The relatively harmless-looking, greasy-haired deadbeat standing in the middle of a brightly lit convenience store trying to balance barrels of potato chips under the critical watch of his mother is gone. This Reese reminds me of the one I knew in high school. He has the same skulk. The same flat gaze. The same instinctive angry tensing of his arms and shoulders when he walks out into the open.

  He waits outside the door and lights a cigarette before crossing the street to his car.

  I try not to think of him as human. I think of him as I would any unpleasant but unavoidable chore.

  I don’t tail him out of town. There’s no traffic at this hour, and I don’t want him to realize a deputy is following him. I take an alternate route and pick him up about ten miles from Jess’s house.

  I could stop him at any time, but I don’t want to take a chance of being interrupted, no matter how slim the chance might be on an isolated rural road in the middle of the night. I wait until we’re about a mile from a coal road that used to cross a creek and lead to a loading tipple next to the railroad tracks. It’s the same creek that eventually twists its way to Coal Run, where Steve and I used to catch our crayfish. The bridge disintegrated and washed away years ago. The road is overgrown with weeds and leads to nowhere now. I’ve never seen anyone use it except during deer season when hunters park their trucks there.

  I know Reese won’t stop immediately. His gut reaction will be to run. Then he’ll remember he’s on parole, and a drunk-driving charge isn’t as bad as DUI plus reckless driving plus unlawful flight. He’ll still consider running, but then he’ll think about what that would mean. Staying with Jess and Bobbie and going out drinking every night is probably preferable to being on the lam or going back to prison. Then he’ll think about running again, because he has just enough ego combined with stupidity to think he could actually get away with it. In the end, if he doesn’t pull over for me, he’ll pull over because he needs to take a leak. Arriving at either of these conclusions will take him about a mile of drive time.

  I put my lights on and don’t bother with my siren. My prediction proves accurate. He speeds up initially. Slows down. Speeds up again. Then he slows down, pulls over, and comes to a stop about twenty feet from the coal road. I roll down my window, stick my arm out, and motion at him to pull in. He does.

  I get out, close my door behind me, and listen to it echo in the quiet night. I listen to my boots crunch across the bony and notice how some of the pieces glimmer in the moonlight like chips of ebony. I remember Jolene running around collecting jars of the stuff after I showed her the page in my Wonders of Nature book that showed coal being turned into diamonds.

  He automatically holds a hand up to shield his eyes from the flashlight he’s expecting me to shine in his face. I wait for him to figure out I’m not going to do it.

  “Step out of the car,” I tell him.

  “For Christ’s sake.”

  “Step out of the car.”

  “What the hell?”

  He gets out and leans against the rusted-out fender. He seemed steadier in front of the bar. I realize now how drunk he is, and I wonder if I should wait and do this sometime when he’s more sober so he can truly appreciate what’s being done to him.

  “If it ain’t the great Ivan Z,” he slurs at me.

  “That particular greeting is beginning to get on my nerves, Reese. You think you could come up with something else?”

  “I’ve never seen a deputy driving around these roads out here in the middle of the night,” he slurs at me. “What were you doing? Waiting for me to leave the bar? Don’t tell me you guys are gonna make my life a living hell now that I’m out. Is that it? You’re just gonna harass me and fuck with me all the time? Why don’t you just fucking plant some weed on me and send me back to jail already, huh? Why don’t you just get it over with?”

  “I considered that option.”

  My reply confuses him. He stops talking and peers into my face. He notices the baseball bat I’m carrying.

  “What’s that for?”

  “You used to be pretty good with one of these,” I say, gripping the bat near its end and slapping it loudly against my palm. “Football was always my game. I’m just a novice with one of these. I probably couldn’t even crack your spine in two, let alone crush your skull.”

  A sluggish understanding begins to show in his eyes.

  “What the hell is this all about? What do you want?”

  “I want to know why you married her.”

  “Huh?”

  I take a step toward him, and he flattens himself against the car.

  “The child wasn’t yours. She was pregnant when you married her. You married her and agreed to raise someone else’s kid. Why?”

  “I loved her.”

  “You loved her?”

  “Yeah, I fucking loved her!” he shouts at me. “You got a fucking problem with that?”

  I swing the bat without thinking and catch him across the kneecaps. He crashes to the ground on his side, screaming, and grips his shattered knees to his chest. I hit him in the kidneys, and he screams again.

  I expect to feel good, but I feel sick. I realize too late I don’t want to do this, but I have to d
o it.

  My calm returns, even though my hands have begun to shake.

  I take a deep breath.

  “You loved her, and you beat her. You tried to beat her to death, and you’re going to tell me you loved her?”

  “I’m not saying I did a good job of it.”

  I lift the bat over him. He raises his hands over his head and cringes beneath them.

  “Okay. Maybe I didn’t love her. I thought I did. I guess I felt sorry for her. The guy who got her pregnant walked out on her. He dumped her. He told her she could never prove it was his. He told her to kill it. I felt bad for her, okay?”

  I think of Val’s letters. I think of him writing to Zo that the only bad things in Vietnam were the American soldiers and the North Vietnamese soldiers. The two enemies become one enemy to the people they were trying to save.

  For one terrible instant, I feel we’ve been manipulated and pitted against each other, against our wills, for reasons we don’t understand, by forces beyond our control. I see how we could have been and should have been on the same side. Reese and I come from the same dark place; we’ve just spent different amounts of time in the light.

  The feeling isn’t strong enough to make me forgive him or make me forgive myself.

  I leave him moaning on the ground and walk back to my truck to get Jess’s revolver. I return and show it to him. He cranes his head up, and his eyes flicker with terror.

  “This is your brother’s gun that you took out of his house today and put in your car. When I pulled you over for drunk driving, you shot at me.”

  I turn and shoot at a tree about fifteen feet away from us. Reese yells, “Holy shit!” when the gun explodes and pulls himself into a tighter ball on the ground.

  “Fortunately you missed,” I go on with my scenario, “and the bullet lodged in a tree. I was able to respond by shooting at you, and I didn’t miss.”

  “That means . . .”

  His face goes slack and pale.

  “You’re fucking nuts,” he says shakily. “That’s the most premeditated shit I’ve ever heard.”