Any Other Place

by Michael Croley

  Owen went into the yard, still carrying the stripped wood in one hand and his knife in the other. “They supposed to be done stripping that side of the mountain there,” he said, pointing with the knife.

  Above us two men jumped into their bulldozers and another four or five men ran and hopped in their pickup trucks.

  “Something’s scared them awfully bad,” I said and realized how much I was beginning to talk like Robert’s family.

  “They running like scalded dogs on top of that hill.”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m going to walk up there and see.” Owen folded his knife and put it in his pocket. He started down the road and I followed.

  “They’re not going to let you up there,” I said.

  “I’ve lived here thirty years. I ain’t never seen men move like that unless somebody’s trapped in a mine, and they’re just stripping these hills. There ain’t a mine shaft for anyone to be trapped in. Something’s bad wrong on that hill.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  He stopped in his path and turned around. I saw Robert in Owen’s cheeks and eyes. His eyebrows were gray at the edges, still with hints of red in them. “I just know,” he said and moved up the hill.

  He stepped on briars and held them down with his foot for me to cross. They grabbed and clung to my jeans, scratched little cuts along the backs of my hands. Owen didn’t want to use the main access road. He wanted to make his own path. I wiped sweat from my face and looked to the top. We were halfway there, but it was a steep mountain. Mud stuck to our shoes, and it made the trail we were walking slippery.

  “Come on now, Miss Shin. We’re almost there.”

  He held out his hand for me to grab and pulled me up to a level place.

  “This shouldn’t be so hard,” I said. I was trying to catch my breath and bent over my knees.

  “You just not used to these mountains the way I am. Come on,” he said. “Let’s find out what’s happening.”

  Owen took big steps up the slope like he was twenty years younger. He pushed away tree limbs as we got higher and then used them to pull himself up. He didn’t slip once, even though his shoes and the bottoms of his jeans were caked in mud. I followed him up the mountain, doing my best to mimic his movements.

  The closer we got, the clearer the men’s voices became. They were frantic. “Hurry up, Cole!”

  “Goddamnit, Artemus, I need you over here now.”

  “Where in the hell is Lonnie with that dozer?”

  “What is it?” I said to Owen. “What are they yelling about?”

  “It’s the impoundment,” Owen said. “Something’s wrong with it.”

  “What’s that mean? What’s an impoundment?”

  “It’s a big pond they keep all the waste in from the mining process. They dam off the waste and filter the water through it. See there,” he said and pointed.

  I stood on my toes and looked, but I couldn’t see anything except the bare mountains to the right of us that stood even higher than Gatliff Mountain.

  “On the other side of all that is the waste. All the watery sludge and slate they don’t use they put in there. Like one big toilet.” He walked toward the men but was stopped short when another man spotted us and came over.

  “Sir,” he said. “You can’t be here right now. You’re on private property.”

  Owen looked at the man and tilted his head. “Lowell Deaton?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re Charley’s boy, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What’s happened here, son?”

  Lowell snuck a glance over his shoulder and took in the other men running to the impoundment. They had pulled off their coveralls to move faster. There was so much shouting and so many engines coming to life that all sense of a plan seemed to have vanished. I peered down the mountain, seeing how far away the house was from us.

  “I can’t tell you that, sir.”

  Owen stepped closer to the man, who now looked like a boy. Maybe twenty, my age, at the oldest. “Lowell,” he said. “I live three hundred yards down this mountain. That’s my house right there,” he said and nodded over his shoulder. “If something’s wrong, I got as much goddamn right to know as anybody.”

  The boy fidgeted, unsure of what to say to Owen. Owen stepped even closer, removing all daylight between him and the boy, and Lowell Deaton buckled. He leaned to Owen’s ear, as if someone might hear him if he was too loud, and said, “The impoundment’s busted. All this rain has put pressure on the walls, and now the slurry is seeping out and cracking through the dirt.”

  “Are you going to be able to fix it?”

  He shook his head. “It don’t look good. Now, you’ve got to get before they see you and me,” he said.

  Owen squeezed the boy’s arm, and Lowell moved away, back toward the crowd of workers. The dozers and backhoes were pulling out clumps of earth in big raking motions and pushing the mounds of earth toward the waste site. I wasn’t sure what was about to happen, but I got scared when I saw that. Something about the faces of the men running the dozers showed they knew what they were doing wasn’t going to be fast enough.

  “We better get down the hill,” Owen said and grabbed my hand. “Go down the access road. It don’t make a damn who sees us now.”

  I made my way toward the road, all the time looking back to see what kind of progress those men were making, who were covered from the waist down in nothing but that thick slurry, like wet, black concrete. They began to backpedal away from the spill as the sludge pooled around their feet, filling the tracks of the trucks and dozers.

  Owen never turned, though. He kept going down the hill toward the house. I didn’t know a man his age could move so fast. The last time I turned, I saw just how massive that impoundment was, and I couldn’t imagine how much it held and what would happen if all of it ran down the mountain. The men were now jumping in trucks, piling into the back of the beds. Their shovels submerged. We made it to the bottom, and any minute I knew they’d pass right by us.

  At the house, Owen ran in, tracking mud everywhere. Evelyn jumped up from the couch and looked at him and then me, too alarmed to say anything to either of us. Owen grabbed the phone in the kitchen. “Robert, you need to get home right away, son. We’ve got to get out of here. The impoundment on Gatliff is giving out. It won’t be long before it’s completely gone. I don’t know how much time we have.”

  Evelyn’s face fell at that. She knew exactly what that meant, and that was when I became very afraid. She moved past me to see for herself what we had just run from, and then she came back to Owen. He had not yet hung up. He held the phone tight in his hand and nodded. “Okay, get here as soon as you can.”

  When he was off, we both looked at him, expectantly.

  “It’ll be at least thirty minutes for him to get out here. Evelyn, go in the kitchen and put some food up for us. Shin, go get some clothes for us and put them in a suitcase, and make sure we have flashlights, batteries, and matches.”

  “What are you going to do?” Evelyn asked him.

  “I’m going to go tell these other people in the valley we ain’t got much time.”

  But outside the window, already, the trucks came racing off the mountain and driving down the road. Their tires spit dirt and gravel, and they honked their horns as they went, some stopping at houses along the way. I saw the men telling the families to leave, to get out of the valley. Other men jumped out of the trucks, and their wives came running to them with babies in their arms, their other children following behind. Then they were lifting the kids into the back of the pickups, and the wives were holding the children close to their chests, and the trucks were off again.

  Now cars and trucks were screaming down the access road, but they weren’t stopping. These were the men who didn’t live in the valley. Even when they rounded the corners, there were no brake lights flashing. I couldn’t move my hands to put anything in a suitcase, and th
en it was too late for us to do anything but run.

  The sludge and water didn’t come on us all at once, but it came quickly. It broke through the impoundment and carried a chunk of dirt as big as a car down the mountain into the road. I screamed when I saw it, and Owen called from the porch for us to just get out of the house. “We don’t have enough time,” he said.

  He carried a flashlight and grabbed Evelyn’s hand. “We’ve got to get to higher ground,” he said. We went to the backyard, its field of tall grass pulling at my knees as we made our way to the base of the mountain behind the house. Our feet sank in the mud with each step, and it was so hard not to check and see if the dirt and sludge was right on our tails. I saw the sludge slip over the sides of the mountain, pouring through the trail Owen and I had just made, crashing onto the little road, filling the ditch, and trembling over. It was less than fifty yards from the house, and I kept hoping the water wouldn’t make it that far, but we all knew it would. Stunned, we stopped for a moment and watched.

  The slurry built up and crossed the road—now mailboxes were floating—and with one big surge it ran into the yard. It moved the way lava does, and I heard the earth rumbling above us. A pickup truck washed down the mountain and crashed to the ground and then was picked up by the current of waste, moving away from the house. The porch was covered now; one more minute and the house would be ruined. Evelyn covered her mouth and reached out as if she could stop it by will. Owen grabbed her and pulled her close. “We’ve got to get up this mountain,” he said. “There’s no time.”

  We crossed Poplar Creek, stepping into the cold water. We were soaked up to our hips. The sludge was in the field now, all the way up to the windows of the house. It kept coming at us, and we waded through the creek, the water rising past our waists and the muddy bottom filling our shoes. We scrambled on our hands and knees out of the water and just kept climbing. It didn’t seem like we could get high enough on the mountain; we just kept moving as fast as we could. Mud covered our clothes and lodged underneath my nails. I felt little nicks from the bushes on my hands and face. Evelyn’s hip was hurting her, but Owen held her and pulled her up with him. We climbed so high we were even with the top of Gatliff and saw across the field to the busted dam.

  “It looks like someone stuck a ton of dynamite in there and blasted a hole,” Owen said.

  Sludge kept washing out of the hole, filling the valley like a bathtub. Trailers and homes were swept under its weight and floated in the sludge. I saw fish on top of the water. Along the mountainside other people were scrambling up, and then we all saw it. It was a man. He was shirtless, trying to wade through the sludge but being swept up in the power of its current. His head bobbed up and down, under, and then reappeared, his face and hair covered so that all we saw was the opening of his mouth as he gasped for air.

  “Lord, God,” Evelyn said. She stood up, we all did. But there was nothing we could do. He was trying to reach us, but it was useless. The sludge, somehow, came even faster, ripping through everything. He grabbed hold of a telephone pole, and the force was so strong his body was laid out flat. We couldn’t hear his screams for the sound of the sludge flooding the valley, and then we saw it pull his clothes from his body, and he lay in the sludge naked, his white skin stained black, his arms still clinging to the pole. He kicked his legs like a fish fighting the current, but we saw one arm slip and then the other, and soon his body was moving away from us, turning and twisting in the mess. I covered my eyes, not wanting to see if he was swallowed under.

  We sat down then, unable to speak or look at each other. The other families on the mountain were sitting now too, and mothers held their children close to their chests. Some of the miners who had run down the mountain were pacing near the creek bank, watching the blackness rise closer to all of us.

  “How long will it keep coming out of there?” I asked.

  “It’s untelling,” Owen said and sat. He pulled his chewing tobacco out of his back pocket. “All the waste goes into that impoundment. Hell, there could be ten years, maybe more, of buildup in that damn thing. It’s only going to get worse.”

  Babies were crying, and men were cussing. Screams and shouts all around. The walls of houses caved in, broke into pieces, and were carried away by the sludge. It kept pumping out of the hill like a broken spigot.

  “My God,” Evelyn said, and that was the only sound from any of us for a long time.

  I’ve never felt so helpless as I did that day. All around me the world turned black, the valley one big spilled bucket of paint that none of us could use but that would color our lives forever.

  The rain started again, a big cloudburst, and this seemed to push more sludge out. There wasn’t a blade of grass or garden patch in sight. Trees shot up from the black water as if we lived in a swamp now instead of a valley. Owen held Evelyn close to him and rocked her into his side. I still don’t know how she didn’t cry at seeing the tiny house, the only one they’d ever lived in once they married, fill with all that waste.

  All we could do was wait on Robert and his brother, Johnny, to show up and come get us. We didn’t know how long that would take or if he’d even be able to reach us from the road. In the distance the sludge had mixed with the creeks. Two ingredients not meant to make anything.

  The valley was gone. All that was left was that murky water, and I saw how far it spread up the base of Gatliff and all the way down the road out to the main highway. From where we were it looked almost as large as a lake and the mountains around us like islands waiting to be devoured and covered. For hours we sat on the hill, shivering in our wet clothes and not knowing what to do or how we were going to get someplace safe. I had my head down when I heard the motor on the little johnboat and looked up to see Robert and Johnny waving at us. Robert’s shirt and face were covered in grime, his brown jacket soaked like a wet paper bag. Owen helped Evelyn, and we walked down the mountain. The sludge had come over the creek, twenty yards up the hillside.

  “All the houses are gone, Dad,” Robert said. “Nothing’s left.”

  “Only the foundations, I guess,” Owen said. “We’ll build ours back, though. Take us a little bit, but we’ll put it back together,” he said and squeezed Evelyn.

  “Maw, you okay?”

  “I’m fine. My hip’s hurting, but that’s all.”

  Robert stepped out of the boat and came to me. He didn’t know if he should hug me or not, so he rubbed his fingers across the back of my hand.

  “How bad is it?” I asked. “We couldn’t see where it ended.”

  “It’s not stopped,” he said. “It’s spread nearly all the way out to the Cumberland River. Dead fish are everywhere, some even in trees. It’s pretty bad. I don’t know how y’all survived.”

  We watched the water fill the valley, churning the earth into a paste of mud and mixed branches. The paltry little houses in the valley, some no bigger than two rooms, with their slanted roofs, the shingles worn thin and flapping in the wind, were crushed. It didn’t take much for the water to wash away those homes, those lives. And really, that’s what it did. It took away the one thing most of them had free and clear in the world.

  I looked at Owen and Evelyn. I saw their lives, already drawn, already lived. Gone. Erased. The shavings brushed away with the hand of God and being cleaned with His tainted water. A shiver ran down my back, and I shook myself. What had we been doing for the last half year? What were we planning? Owen kissed Evelyn on the neck. It was something he never did, and that’s when I knew they both saw the finality of their lives, and I thought of my own parents.

  It takes us all a long time to see our parents as just human. I knew that despite my father’s faults, he did love my mother. When she sang in the courtyard he went outside and sat beside her and chewed on a piece of dried squid and listened to her voice. She had this way of hitting every note with just the right amount of emotion, and if she sang something sad, I could see her eyes well up and get glossy, but no tears fell down her face. She
wouldn’t let them. She just held those notes a little longer, her bottom lip quivering. When she was done my father would take her hand and rub it, setting it in his lap, then pull her body into him, and she would sing again.

  “It’ll be okay,” Owen said to Evelyn. “We’ll be all right. Haven’t I always figured something out?”

  She just nodded to him then and smiled.

  Owen led her to the water’s edge. Night was closing in. The water on the mountain was so thick it looked like we could walk across it. The boat was too small for all of us to fit in, so Robert told Johnny to take their parents out and then come back for the two of us.

  I watched him help Evelyn into the boat. He held her arm until she was sitting all the way down, and then he stepped away. Above all, I knew I had married a good man. He came to me, and we watched them back away from us, the three of them waving. Johnny called out to say he would be back soon, and the three of them waved.

  Robert put his arm around me, and for the first time in a long while, I leaned into him, almost putting all my weight on him. All I wanted to do was fall down, to lie with him and not think so much anymore.

  “It’s going to take a long time before things get back to normal,” he said. “I can’t believe what’s happened. Look at it, Shin. Nothing’s the same.”

  He smelled like the rain and cold. I pushed closer into him. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know how to make myself happy. I just wanted us to be on our own and to feel like you and I were starting a life together. Nothing’s worked out like I thought it would.”

  He pulled away and looked down. I bit my lip and looked out over the water, as if some answer was floating in that disaster.

  “What are you saying?” he asked.

  “I thought my life would be different. I thought when we came here life was going to get easier, better than it was, but it’s only gotten harder.”

  “It’s been a tough day, and we had a fight. Things are going to get better.”

  “No, they’re not. It’s all going to get harder now. I was so happy that you and I were going to have our own place, but then your father said you would never leave Kentucky. And that’s what I was upset about last night. I didn’t dream of this, Yobo. I didn’t dream of leaving my family to come to this place, but I came here because I love you. And now, just when you and I were going to have our chance, that’s going to be changed again, too. Owen and Evelyn will need to stay with us, and until you and I are alone, I don’t know how we’re ever going to have a chance to be with each other, to learn to love each other in the way we need to.”