by Mesha Maren
Jodi nodded. “We don’t have electricity up there yet or anything, no phone. But, uh, I wanted to say, it’s important to me to know . . .” She’d had the whole thing rehearsed but now the words would not come out right. “I want to buy the land back from you eventually. My family and I are living on the land now.” Her voice steadied and her confidence grew as she pronounced the word family. “We don’t have a lot of money but it’s important for me to know that I’m working toward owning the land again.”
Lynn cocked her head. The wind blew her dress and she seemed to be moving even when she stood still. “Ownership is . . .” She opened both hands and spread her fingers wide. “I mean, what does ownership really even mean anyway?”
Jodi wanted to reach out and strangle that skinny neck, squeeze it until all Lynn’s words stopped. She waited for her to say something about Native Americans not having any concepts for ownership of land or some bullshit.
“You’ll be stewards.” She stepped toward Jodi and grabbed her hand. Her skin was surprisingly warm. “We’ll make a trust of it.”
Jodi pulled her hand free. If I leave now, she thought, but—what? If I leave now, Effie’s land will most likely be stripped and pumped and left a shriveled carcass. And maybe it didn’t have to matter so much that she wouldn’t personally own it as long as the land was safe. She remembered, as a child, going to visit Effie’s brother, Elbert, who’d been in and out of jail for years but had finally gotten a job managing a cattle operation over in Monroe County. Elbert had lived alone in an Airstream trailer on the edge of the hundred acres, caring for the heifers that were owned by an out-of-state man who rarely visited. The farm hadn’t belonged to Elbert but he’d seemed happy enough there.
“You hate me.”
Jodi looked up. It didn’t seem to be a question really.
“I’m not blaming you,” Lynn said. “I’m just saying you all hate me. I don’t know why I fell in love with a place that nobody seems to want me to be in love with. I stop at the gas station and everybody looks at me like I’ve been out killing babies. And it’s not even about my money, I don’t think. I’m used to being hated for having money; it’s something different here, though.”
Music drifted through the doorway, a range of piano keys like a spattering of raindrops, singular and then flowing.
“But we’re not so different, I don’t think. I mean, I know I’m just a big tree hugger and this is not my ancestry here but I was cut once, my skin laid open to the bone, and in the time it took them to find me, I saw something there.” Lynn closed her eyes and her face shifted, drew in as tight as a fist. “It’s the same stuff they pull from the earth and it’s inside everything and all of us but we cover it up.”
The music had stopped but the last notes hung, nearly visible in the air.
“Do you have anything to drink?” Jodi asked, and on second thought she added, “Ma’am.”
“Don’t call me ‘ma’am,’” Lynn snapped, but her eyes were still smiling.
Jodi followed her through the living room where the walls were hung with enormous paintings of stone-faced women, hair piled high, bodiced dresses laced tight. Lynn poured two glasses of ruby wine from a decanter.
“You like Philip Glass?”
“Who?”
“The music that was playing when you came in.”
Jodi nodded and took one of the wineglasses. She thought of Andy out in the car, smoking cigarettes alone.
“I’m thinking we can have a showing of the new dance I choreographed. There’s this guy, Jay Praxley. He can play the Glass piece.” Lynn swallowed a large mouthful of wine. “Maybe a silent auction, some hors d’oeuvres and wine—that should be enough, don’t you think?”
“Enough?”
“Well, enough to get us started, at least. There are also some private donors who could pitch in if the land is in immediate danger.”
The wine was acrid. Jodi drank it anyway, swallowing small mouthfuls. There was a feeling in the pit of her stomach, the bitter-penny taste of self-pity, just like she’d felt each time she met with the therapist at Jaxton. These women got something out of helping her, a self-satisfaction that Jodi begrudged.
“You know this was all caused by water.” Lynn paced behind the couch. “All of the riches here, the coal, the shale—they must have taught you this in school?”
Jodi remembered reading once about peat bogs and seabeds but she was too exhausted now to follow Lynn’s leaping conversation.
“An ocean from here to California! And the waters filled up with dying plants. The great inland sea.” Lynn flung her arms wide and her bracelets clacked. “So rich in death, hundreds of feet of dying plants, and then the seabed drops and the Appalachians thrust up as tall as the Alps. Imagine it.”
She walked to the window as if she might be able to see the mountains shift again out there and Jodi thought of the moment four weeks before when she herself had stepped out of Jaxton and seen the mountains, so strong and green, and all the hope they had filled her with. She could not think about them now without thinking also of everything else she had not known—Ricky’s past, the loss of the land, everything she could not see from inside those concrete walls.
“With limestone too, it’s the water. It’s so strong, you know, the water and the gravity, it will dig through anything to get down and move on. If we cut open the mountains, we’d see rivers like veins carving out those magnificent uterine caverns.” Lynn turned back toward Jodi. “They’re so womb-like, don’t you think? So feminine.”
Andy’s car was dark when Jodi got in.
“Well,” he said, cranking the ignition. “I nearly run out of smokes.”
The dashboard lights blinked on and the motor purred.
“That lawyer gonna help you keep the land?”
Jodi looked back at the buttery glow of lit windows. “I don’t think it’s that simple,” she said.
When they arrived home there was a pickup truck parked beside Miranda’s car. Not old man Farren’s pickup either, this one was bright red and looking shiny new. Andy turned his headlights on it then pulled up beside.
“That’s A.J.’s new truck,” he said. “You expecting him?”
Jodi shook her head.
As she walked up the front steps she could hear the pitch of men’s voices and Miranda’s tipsy giggle. She pushed the door open, blinking into the bright room.
“How many hippies did you hit?”
It was Dennis. She recognized his voice even before her eyes adjusted. He was sitting in one of the kitchen chairs, tipped back against the far wall, a can of PBR balanced on his knee. A.J. sat beside him and Miranda perched on the edge of the table, swinging her legs.
“Dad give you a ride over to Lewisville?” Dennis said.
Jodi nodded.
“It’s always been weird up there,” Dennis went on, “but it’s fucking thick with them now, huh?”
“Them hippie chicks are okay with me,” A.J. said, grinning. “Hell, they don’t care if you can see their titties.” He laughed.
“Yeah, that’s cool,” Dennis said. “If you like your girls hairy.” He pulled a can from the plastic loops and held it out to Jodi. “Me and A.J. here was wondering what you two ladies are up to tonight.”
Jodi took the beer and went to lean against the chimney. From the back bedroom she could hear Rosalba and the boys’ voices. “Nothing much,” she said.
“Come out and have a beer with us.”
“We’ve got beer here.” Jodi pointed at the remainder of the six-pack.
“Shit, that’s gone in two seconds,” A.J. said. “Come on, y’all ain’t come down and hung out in town since the first night you got here.”
Between the wine at Lynn’s and now the beer, Jodi was starting to get a buzz that she didn’t exactly want to let go of and refusing A.J. seemed to take more energy than she had.
In the bedroom, she found Ricky, Rosalba, and the boys spread out on Ricky’s mattress reading his Bible.
&n
bsp; “The beast has horns like a lamb but he speaks like a dragon,” Kaleb explained.
“Lamb-dragon!” Donnie chanted, crawling across the mattress.
Rosalba reached out and ran her fingers through his hair. “You are a lamb-dragon,” she said.
Donnie reared up, giggling and pawing the air.
Jodi pressed herself closer in against the doorframe, tensing her fingers against the wood as a sadness spread through her. She did not show her love enough, she thought. She held back, every time, and then it was too late; someone else had moved in and taken her place.
“Hey, Rosalba,” she said, hating the emotion so audible in her words. “We’re going into town to hang out for a little bit. You want us to drop off the boys at my parents’?”
“Oh, no, I will watch them,” Rosalba said, looking around, as if for confirmation from the boys and Ricky. “You go, have fun, we will be here.”
Steering his truck with one hand, A.J. wormed the other into his pocket and came out with a palmful of little white pills. “Take a couple,” he said, offering them to Miranda, Dennis, and Jodi. “Wake you right up.”
Jodi took two and stared down at them there in her sweaty palm.
“I can sell you some clean piss if Ballard ever acts like he’s wanting to test you,” A.J. said.
“Well, I hope not.” Jodi glanced from A.J. to Miranda. She knew she ought give the pills back and tell Miranda not to take hers either but the truth was she wanted them bad, wanted anything to wash away the taint of self-pity from her visit with Lynn.
“Miranda told us you’ve been hanging out with old man Farren,” Dennis said.
Jodi looked up. “He gave us some plywood for the roof,” she said, swallowing her two tablets quickly, trying to convince herself that coming out with Dennis and A.J. was not the worst idea she’d ever agreed to.
“I’d be careful if I was you, seems like a fucking creep. Ginny Highlander used to rent that trailer down the road from him and she says she and Buster were getting it on one night and she looks up and sees the old man’s face peeking in the window.” Dennis laughed. “Freaky,” he said, leaning over to roll down the window. “Tim Jenkins saw him in Lewisville too, at one of those protests against mountaintop mining. Says he saw Farren holding an anticoal sign.”
Jodi kept her eyes on the road ahead. “I don’t know nothing about that,” she said.
They stopped in at the Gas ’N Go for beer and then drove to the other side of town, down by the river. Half a dozen pickup trucks sat parked at various angles along the mud bank and the stabbing light of a campfire flickered down below.
“Moose!” A.J. called out as a skinny, leather-jacketed man hopped down from the truck beside them. The man’s left leg ended midthigh and his jeans were rolled up and clipped like a half-used toothpaste tube.
“Now this guy,” A.J. said, pointing at Dennis, “they turned away.” He looked back to be sure that Miranda was listening. “But this guy saw Fallujah.” He clapped Moose on the shoulder. “Purple Heart.”
Dennis had suffered from occasional seizures as a child. The armed forces had refused him and he had never gotten over the insult despite the evidence of the awfulness of Iraq.
Jodi watched Moose make his way down the trail in front of them and thought of that West Virginia girl in those sickening pictures at Abu Ghraib. That twenty-one-year-old from Short Gap with her pink grinning, grotesque face. The images had scrolled across the TV screen at Jaxton and the girls had ribbed Jodi about it, said her home state was getting famous. Didn’t you know, somebody commented, Charles Manson was from West Virginia too?
“This is my sister, Jodi, and her friend Miranda,” A.J. said to the crowd around the fire. “Y’all remember Jodi, don’t you?” A few people wobbled their heads but none of the faces looked familiar. “Jodi just got out of medium, so y’all better watch out.” He winked and set the twelve-pack of PBR down beside a plastic chair.
The fire leapt and sparked. It seemed brighter and perkier than any other fire Jodi could ever remember seeing. The light grew and shrank as the wind blew and whenever anybody moved their shadows multiplied and scattered under them in a million different pieces.
Miranda handed her a beer. On the other side of the fire the river went speeding by, making a nice long rush of sound. This had, after all, been a good idea.
“Did you hang out down here when you were a kid?” Miranda asked.
Jodi looked at the ring of faces around the fire, still young but growing fleshy with age, eyes glazed, yellow dirt stains on the knees of their jeans.
“No,” she said. “I hung out up on the mountain mostly.”
Miranda paused, lighter raised halfway to her cigarette. “Your parents moved to town and just kinda left you up there, huh?”
“No.” Jodi took a drink from her beer. Her head had started to hurt, a bright spot of pain like a bull’s eye in the center of her forehead. “No, I wanted to stay up there,” she said, but her words sounded a little hollow and even she had to admit there was a limit to the amount of free will you could attribute to a seven-year-old.
“Hey, this is Tiffany,” Moose said, coming toward Jodi and holding out a pint of Evan Williams. Behind him walked a blonde woman with a dollar bill safety-pinned to her T-shirt, just above her left tit.
“It’s her birthday.” Moose passed the bottle.
Tiffany took a swig and then tipped the bottle down, pouring a bit of whiskey onto the ground. “For Danny,” she said.
“Hey now.” Moose recovered his bottle. “It’s not like he’s dead.”
“Wait, is Danny in jail?” Dennis came around to their side of the fire.
“It should have worked, it always worked,” Tiffany said. “But they had those goddamn dogs and they were jumping and biting at him. They tore his shirt and he gave in.”
Jodi looked at Dennis and he smiled. “You won’t believe this shit,” he said.
Danny had attempted to conceal a quarter pound of weed under the voluptuous folds of his belly fat. He’d done it before and gotten away with it—no one wanted to look up under that sweaty girth—but the dogs had done him in this time.
“Possession?” Dennis said.
Tiffany shook her head and took another swig of whiskey. “Possession and intent to distribute.”
Jodi felt a jolt of fear. She pictured Dennis’s duffel bag up in the rafters. There was certainly enough in there to land a distribution charge. She caught Dennis’s eye and he smiled.
“Hey, I know what you’re thinking.” He inhaled and held the joint out to Jodi. “But just relax, you ain’t muling that shit, you’re just storing it and nothing bad’s gonna happen, okay?”
He came in close and grabbed both Jodi and Miranda by their shoulders, the weight of his body thrown against their backs.
“You ladies must get lonely up there on the mountain.”
Miranda looked first to Jodi and then over her shoulder at Dennis. “We keep busy.”
“Oh, sure, sure.” Dennis wobbled, his fingernails pressing into Jodi’s skin. “I was just thinking I’d give you all the opportunity to meet some folks.” He lifted his right hand, waved at the ring of people around the fire, and then brought it to rest on the back of Miranda’s neck. He had both hands on her now. “But ain’t neither one of you said hardly two words since you got here.”
Jodi gripped her can of beer, the metal cool and too thin, crumpling under her grip.
“You’re all tense, honey.” He was massaging Miranda’s shoulders.
Jodi stared off across the river toward Randolph Mountain, its buckled ridge barely visible in the moonlight. “Nothing much has changed around here, has it?” she said.
Dennis let go of Miranda with his right hand and turned to face Jodi. “Sure it has. For one thing we’re all more attractive than we used to be, don’t you think?” His laughter shot out too fast, loud and lonely in the night air.
“Hey, Dennis, come piss on this fire,” A.J. said. It seemed he’
d taken more of his pills and now he was rallying the crowd back toward the trucks.
Dennis and two other men pissed away the remaining flames in a hissing cloud of rank steam and then the group of them scrambled back up the clay bank together, their voices ricocheting and mixing in with the gurgling river. At the trucks there seemed to be some sort of confusion. Jodi and Miranda moved toward A.J.’s pickup but then Dennis grabbed Miranda’s arm and said, “Hey, let Tiffany ride with him,” and in the drunk dark they were separated: Jodi up in the cab with A.J. and Tiffany, and Miranda off in another truck.
“All right, you two ready?” A.J. crowed, passing Jodi and Tiffany fresh beers.
They drove around the back way toward town again, the headlights tunneling along the empty road.
“I think old Dennis has taken a shine to your friend,” A.J. said.
Jodi gripped her beer can, the cold liquid spilling across her knuckles as they rounded a sharp curve.
“What?” A.J. leaned up past Tiffany. “Y’all too busy up there homesteading to have a little fun every now and then?”
Jodi looked away and downed the rest of her can in one long swallow. “You got any more of those pills?” she said.
A.J. laughed. “All right, that’s more like it.” He lifted up out of his seat to rummage through his pocket. “You know these don’t grow on fuckin’ trees, though.”
“I can give you some money.” Jodi nodded. “You got me coming and going though, huh? Sell me pills and then sell me the piss to cover it up with.”
“Hey,” A.J. said, “I got whatever you need.”
They drove through town and out the other side, toward the old strip mine where A.J. veered off the pavement, the truck engine ripping through the quiet night. They bounced along the gravel berm in total darkness until the floodlights of a CSX freight spilled suddenly into the truck cab, the engine rumbling low but steady alongside them as the pieces came together in Jodi’s head.
“No fucking way,” she said as a dry terror shivered through her. “No, wait—stop—”
A.J. grinned and pushed the truck up into fourth gear and the train let out a long whistle blast. On the left the shadow of an old warehouse flashed by. On the right there was nothing but the metal tracks and light and the sound of the train keeping pace. The wail of the whistle caught in Jodi’s chest and stayed on, clanging there.
