Doris squinted, peering out into the darkened street. Somebody standing out there. She leaned toward the window. Dark hair and bright eyes. Flashing teeth.
There was a beating on the door. Doris put a hand over her mouth. Gonna scream. Gonna scream I swear to God! She looked around; maybe she could get Mr. Emmanuel up. Maybe he’d protect her.
More beating. “Goddammit, Doris! Let me in!”
She ran to the door. “Jake? That you?”
“Who else would it be this time o’ the goddam night? Let me in!”
Doris unbolted the door, opened it, and Jake Parkey stumbled into the living room. “Body could catch newmonia!” He coughed.
“You’ve been drinking…”
“Off my back, woman!”
“Don’t you talk that way to me, Jake Parkey! Leavin’ me here all to myself, and that Taylor boy just come back…must be something wrong with him!”
Jake turned his head to her with a puzzled look. “Huh? What you mean?”
“Why, he was just here! Standin’ in the street…lookin’ in on me!”
“Oh, you’re crazy, woman! I just left that boy!”
“I tell you it was him, Jake! I know what he looks like!”
Jake went to the window and looked out. “Well…whatever it was…gone now…” He stopped, listened. “What’s that?”
Doris looked at the wall adjoining the slab. She could hear it too. A scratching and a thumping. A movement. But louder than she’d ever heard before, as if something much larger were moving inside the slab. She turned to Jake and laughed. “Why, I don’t hear nothin’, Jake. Must be rats, don’t you suppose?”
Audra Larson finally completed rearranging the furniture, pushing the dresser up in front of her bedroom door so it couldn’t be pushed open. But maybe a bear could do that; she had no idea. At least the window was too small and too high to let in anything larger than a bird. For once she was happy about that.
She looked at the dresser critically, then moved her heavy rocker against it. She had seen Amos Nickles’s body; they’d taken it into the front of the cafe and stretched it out on one of the tables. She started to protest when Jake just shoved her out of the way like a madman. That was when she’d gone back into her quarters in the back of the cafe, and stayed there. Locked herself in.
It was terrible, living in a flimsy place like this, the walls only a couple of inches thick. She didn’t feel safe; a bear could rip his way right through.
She went to the bed and huddled there. She’d heard them when they finally came to get the body. She had no idea where they took it; she hadn’t gone out.
She was unlikely to go out after dark ever, until they killed that bear.
Daddy said she’d never get married. And despite herself, despite her strong wish to be independent, and strong, she was beginning to think that was quite a sentence that had been laid on her.
She hated Daddy for it.
“Ben? Coming to bed?”
Ben heard her, but found it difficult to speak.
“Ben…” Martha Taylor appeared in the doorway. “You need your rest.”
Ben looked up at her and smiled. “You sure look pretty tonight…”
Martha blushed, then sat on the chair beside him, tousling his gray hair as if he were a naughty boy. Her hair was almost exactly the same shade of gray; she liked that. “Old fool,” she said, and laughed.
“Martha…” He was silent then, for what seemed a very long time. Martha had long been used to her husband’s ruminations and knew he couldn’t be rushed. He would get to the point in his own good time. “I could have sworn I saw Reed up on that mountain tonight.”
“But that couldn’t have been. You said yourself his train hadn’t even gotten in yet when all that happened. He would have been halfway between here and Four Corners.”
“I know…I know. Guess it was somebody else, but that worries me… who?” Then, after another long pause, “My brother was a hateful man, Martha.”
“Shouldn’t talk ill of the dead, Ben.”
“Can’t help it…it’s true. Man like that would hold a grudge past all reasoning. I knew times when he was still thinking up vengeance for things twenty years gone.”
“But why worry about that now, Ben? Why upset yourself so?”
“I don’t know…but I just can’t seem to help thinking ‘bout him right now.” He suddenly sounded exhausted, and Martha helped him up from his chair, guiding him toward the bedroom, past the kids’ room, their snores so loud it made them both smile a little. “I don’t know…we need to take care of Reed, Martha. Make it up to him.”
“We’ll do our best,” she said, looking up into his eyes, suddenly frightened. “I’m sure we both will.”
Once again Mr. Emmanuel wakened from the dream drenched in sweat. He’d been drowning. The room had filled with water, he’d opened the window to climb out when small hands had grabbed his ankles, pulling him down. He twisted and turned, struggling, and in fighting off the grip dragging him under had turned around to see his attacker: a dead little girl with jelly eyes, her hands clenching his flesh like two sets of long white teeth.
He’d screamed and she’d opened her mouth as if to join him in the scream, but no sound came out of her mouth. Just mud. Rivulets of yellow, mine-acid mud.
He stared around the dimly lit bedroom, his heart pounding like a jackhammer against his ribs. He could hear Mrs. Parkey’s rats in the slab next door, scrabbling at the wall as if hungry for his meat.
Damn the woman anyway. He knew he could never have heard them if she hadn’t ranted so much about their nightly visits.
Inez Pierce checked in on her brother Hector one final time before going downstairs to bed. She was furious. He could have been killed. Naked as a jaybird. It was so bad this time she’d gone past embarrassment. There seemed no point to being embarrassed; everybody knew, no one was going to be surprised. But it still bothered her. She thanked God their parents weren’t still alive.
When she passed the window at the second-floor landing, she thought she saw something out in the yard. A woman in white, wrapped in fog, out walking on the lawn. Redheaded. Beautiful. Inez gaped, the sweat popping out on her forehead. Her bowels suddenly loosened, and she was afraid she was going to mess all over herself right there on the stairs. At her age.
“She hates us…she hates us all…” Inez whispered.
Now why had she said that? There was no sense in it. But somehow she knew. Then the image was gone, and it quickly became evident to Inez that the whole thing had been a trick of the light.
Brother Hector wasn’t the only squirrel-head in the family. Maybe it was catching.
Joe Manors sat huddled up on the pillows at the head of his bed, three empty liquor bottles on the nightstand. Inez wouldn’t be too happy if she knew about those; he’d have to get rid of them before she cleaned in the morning.
He couldn’t sleep; there’d be hell to pay in the morning at work. Tomorrow was Thursday though; maybe he could catch up on sleep during the weekend.
He just couldn’t get his mind off the little girl he’d seen—or thought he’d seen—up on the Big Andy. A little girl just like his baby sister. She’d died of the chicken pox a good thirty years ago. Only his sister had had black hair, black as the highest-grade coal. This one had been blonde. Freckled.
But of course he’d just thought he’d seen her. It had just been the dog, and the way the light and shadows had played across its heaving sides.
There seemed to be some sort of light outside his window, but somehow he knew he shouldn’t look out. He turned his face toward the wall and closed his eyes so that he wouldn’t even see its reflection.
In his dream Reed lay buried at the bottom of layer upon layer of earth. His body covered with filth and cobwebs. His body mummified. The earth around him alive, crawling with life, life thick to the point of revulsion.
Above him he could feel the giant excavator on Big Andy Mountain, its steel maw a dozen feet ac
ross, its power consumption far greater than that of the entire Simpson Creeks area. It began gnawing at the dirt, devouring tons of it at a time. First the covering vegetation, then layer after layer of subsoil and rock strata, overburden, looking for the sea of pure coal, looking for Reed’s body so it could strip it down too, layer after layer.
Reed could feel the excavator chewing at his head, gnawing away his hair, stripping off his scalp, cutting through the bone of his skull, seeking the soft, gray layers of brain, hungry for the thoughts sleeping there, peeling them, stripping them away until the skull was emptied like an oyster.
He awoke in a sweat, and at first he thought he had left his light on, the bare bulb over his bed blinding him with its halo.
But then the glow became a face, a woman’s face, her hair in flames. Reed screamed and leaped from the bed, but she still seemed to be there, following him, and even though he would not look around to check, he was sure she was reaching for him, trying to embrace him with her pale, cool arms, the flames licking at her face, at the ceiling, and reaching out for him as he ran for the corner.
Then the first light of morning broke through the window, and the apparition dissolved slowly into the illuminated dust motes floating before his window.
Chapter 15
Joe Manors climbed aboard the Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer using leg and arm muscles that seemed to creak with every movement. Not a moment too soon: the day foreman was staring down at him from his yellow pickup on the edge of the embankment. Fool was going to slide over the lip someday; here he was ridin’ everybody’s ass about safety all the time and the man himself was a walking accident. Wouldn’t break Joe’s heart none if the truck took a high dive.
He’d barely made it; he was pretty sure the foreman would use just about any excuse to get rid of him. The foreman didn’t like hiring the local men for his crew—that was well known—but it was hard getting people to work this far back in the woods. Joe felt satisfied that he’d be hard to replace.
Foreman was talking to Mr. Emmanuel now. Then the two were laughing, looking like idiots when you couldn’t hear the sound of the laugh. Joe set his jaw and warmed up the engine a few minutes, then started up the cut.
Joe had seen pictures the Nole Company PR people had taken of the Big Andy for some of their slick company magazines and advertisements. To show how well they were taking care of the land they were stripping, to show that it didn’t look as awful as everybody said.
The problem was the pictures were of the south side of Big Andy, with Simpson Creeks just out of view, hidden by one of the smaller ridges. They hadn’t stripped there at all, yet. All the stripping had taken place on the north side, eating into the base and side of the mountain like a bad case of tooth decay. Sometimes Joe got nervous when the big augers started working sideways into one of the exposed coal seams; he imagined them boring right into the backyard of Charlie Simpson’s store. Big Andy was becoming a shell pretty fast, like one of those fake western towns in the movies, with no back to them.
It was a shocking change…coming into work in the morning. You’d be walking up the mountain, under the trees, the earth so alive with small animals and growing things you couldn’t help but feel a little better about things. Then you’d cross that all-too-visible line near the top of the ridge…and suddenly you’re on the moon, and you could swear there hadn’t been life here in a million years.
Ninety-foot cliff walls and piles of gray rubble and great scars in the earth. Joe had never seen anything like it anywhere else in the world. While in the service he’d seen burnt and bombed-out areas in Vietnam that had shaken him badly, just to look at, but even those places had more life than the strip mine. Spoil banks hundreds of feet high, drifting like old vomit down to Big Andy’s base. Snapped-off trees and boulders as big as cars—some of the blasting had sent boulders like that dangerously close to farmhouses further downslope. Pools of acid water when it rained. Erosion so bad it was like the ground just melted under the mildest rain. Baked deserts and frothy white sulfuric streams containing no life whatsoever, not even the hardiest. Avalanches thundering across land that had been farmed a hundred years and more.
Joe was all a part of that—he had to admit it—but a man had to eat, and these days if he was going to live in the Creeks, he’d have to work in the mine. There was just no other way.
Joe’d spent some time in Cincinnati as a welder, making good money, but he hadn’t lasted a year in the city. He still had a wife and daughter up there somewhere, who wouldn’t leave. But he didn’t fit in; few of the people from Appalachia in the big cities did, and they ended up in their own “hillbilly ghettos.” At least in the Creeks he knew everyone, knew everything that was going on. That gave him a feeling of some control. In the city a man didn’t control anything. And he didn’t even understand his next door neighbor.
Once they knew you were a newcomer in the city, they seemed to think you were out to breathe their air. And the only way to see more than a hundred feet ahead of you was to look straight up. You didn’t get a chance to build anything in the city, to make anything. And everything there already had a name. You could walk miles around the Big Andy and not find anything with a name.
Couldn’t keep pigs or a cow in the city; most times you couldn’t even have a cat. You got buried under cement.
So you came home to these hills that your great grandfathers sold right from under you for fifty cents an acre, to the mine owners’ lawyers with their fancy contracts and their “long deeds,” and then you went and sold yourself to the children of those mine owners. You got black lung and hoar cough, but at least you died where your daddy died.
It made Joe angry. It made most of the people Joe had ever known angry as spit, but it was the kind of angry you learned not to do anything about. You buried it when you buried that rich topsoil under tons of rock with the dozer blade. And it made you just a little crazy. Made you look as old and scarred as the land itself.
Stripping was a simple process, really. It was possible for a very few men with the right equipment—and without all the hazards usually accompanying tunnel mining—to reduce prime forest and farm land to bare rock in a relatively short time. The speed of it was scary sometimes: you wouldn’t have thought all that destruction could happen that easily.
Some PR person for one of the coal companies had come up with a pretty clever plan for explaining away the ugliness of it sometime back in the seventies. He thought the devastated areas would be of interest to tourists one day; the coal companies could provide guided tours. It had been a big joke among the locals as to whose devastated area was worth most as a tourist attraction.
Mr. Emmanuel had to admit that Joe was a pretty good worker. Watching him down there on the dozer, it looked as if the man were actually attacking the ground in frustration and rage. Whoever said mountain people were natural conservationists didn’t know what he was talking about.
He still had that feeling of being watched. And once…a shadow…like a bear? He wasn’t sure. Could have been a man. He was just getting paranoid, like everybody else.
He wondered about what the Parkeys had said about that Reed Taylor fellow. A man like that—his entire family wiped out by the flood—might hold a grudge against Nole coal. He was young, rash…he might have revenge in mind.
Mr. Emmanuel tried to remember exactly what Reed Taylor looked like. Dark black hair…it was all he could remember. Why couldn’t he remember any more?
He looked around at the workers on the embankment, down in the cut, on the other slopes. They all wore hard hats. He couldn’t tell their hair color.
As Joe drove up the cut, he noted how much the area was beginning to resemble some giant washboard, each cut backed by a small ridge of waste material.
At the crest of the cut, just like the cut a highway made in the side of a mountain, there was a ridge with a few trees on it, and a razorback of exposed rock. Joe knew that that grassy area around the trees was thriving with all kinds of life; he wa
s terribly aware of that every day he began work, and his first task every morning on the job was to put those kinds of thoughts out of his mind.
He dropped the blade into the edge of the soil, moving forward and skinning the topsoil off the layer of clay beneath. The bloom came up almost immediately—small pieces of carbon flaked off the coal vein far beneath. It was a rich area.
As the blade cut deeper, the topsoil peeled off in waves, like giant plow furrows, but Joe wasn’t planting this morning. As he approached one of the old trees, he could see the branches trembling, then the tight net of roots began pulling from the ground, then the whole tree began to topple, branches breaking, roots groaning against the strain.
Every so often he would push the mass of debris and uprooted trees over the side of the mountain, where it joined a steadily growing pile of refuse below.
The dozer blade was like a knife, cutting through everything. Small animals cascaded off both sides of the blade track; grapevines and ferns and all manner of vegetation were torn out of the ground and crushed.
A couple of days ago Doris Parkey had made suggestive remarks to Mr. Emmanuel. At least he thought they were suggestive. The woman might be so ignorant and crazy she didn’t really know what she was saying.
He wondered if he could make love to such a woman. Anything was possible, he supposed. But she had a large, strong husband. A beast of a man…hardly human, really. And Mr. Emmanuel didn’t want to risk a physical confrontation.
But what was he thinking of? He didn’t want the Parkey woman…he couldn’t.
Something moved in the brush and loose gravel behind him. But when he turned…he could see nothing.
Scraping away and scraping away at all that awful aliveness in the Big Andy. That wrinkled maze of ridges. Like skinning some creature alive. Sometimes Joe had this nightmare that after scraping away at Big Andy’s massive body for years they’d finally reach his insides…reach something. He didn’t think he wanted to be there when it happened. There were lots of places on the Big Andy he’d never been, woods so thick and entangled they were almost impassable. It agitated him just to think about running a dozer into those areas…no telling what might get turned up.
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