KABOOM

by Brian Adams

  “Qui tacet consentire videtur; ubi loqui debuit ac potuit.”

  “Stop, Ashley! You’re scaring me!”

  “It’s an old Latin proverb: ‘He who is silent, when he ought to have spoken and was able to, is taken to agree.’ It’s what my mother says whenever I refuse to answer her annoying questions.”

  “Oh my God, I thought you were speaking in tongues! I thought the devil had possessed you!”

  Ever since the whole flag-cutting thing I had noticed that Ashley was different. She was paying much more attention in class. She was doing her homework. She was even reading books on her own rather than trash magazines. At least part of the time. It was as if a whole new world had opened up for her and she was making up for lost time. And now here she was spouting Latin, for goodness sake! Amazing!

  “So . . . I did the wrong thing?” I asked.

  “I didn’t say that. But when you go out with him to the gazillion . . .”

  “Cotillion.”

  “Whatever. We’re going to have to do your hair differently.”

  “Who said I’m going to the cotillion? He didn’t even ask me.” The whole Kevin thing was starting to freak me out. How was I supposed to know how to behave around a boy? With zero experience, I was totally clueless when it came to guys. Sure, I thought I had handled the car ride pretty damn well, but an actual date? That was another kettle of fish entirely.

  Ashley crawled over to my cushion, put her arms around me, and snuggled close.

  “Criss-cross applesauce!” I said, pouting, weakly pushing her away. For some reason I was annoyed with her.

  “In your dreams!” Ashley replied.

  We sat in silence for a moment, holding each other and watching the light of the candles flicker patterns across the walls of coal. Shimmery, sparkly, glimmery shadows of light that reflected all of the beauty of black coal right back at us. Beauty and the beast, all wrapped up into one neat little package.

  “You really like him, don’t you,” Ashley said.

  “Can you be totally in like with someone if you’ve never gone out with them?” I asked.

  “I’m totally in love with Marc Potvin and I’ve never even talked to him!” Ashley said.

  I laughed.

  “Then I’m totally in like with him,” I said.

  “Totally, totally in like?”

  “Totally, totally, totally in like.”

  “Cynthia!” Ashley pulled me even closer, if that was humanly possible. “You’re going to the cotillion. You are definitely going to the cotillion!”

  27

  WE DECIDED TO FORM a club at school. Ashley argued that it was committing social suicide, but I convinced her otherwise.

  “Clubs are for losers!” Ashley said. “We’re just beginning our dating lives and you want to do this? Form an effin club? Goodbye, boyfriends. You might as well just sign us up for the nunnery. The only guy we’re ever going to snag is Jesus.”

  But it had to be done. After all, a crusade of two is totally pathetic.

  We decided to form a club with Mr. Cooper as our advisor. Every club had to have a teacher as a sponsor. It was another lame school requirement.

  We hadn’t asked Mr. Cooper yet. But he had to say yes. He just had to.

  “We have to have a club name,” Ashley said.

  “Duh!” I said. “Something catchy. Something cool. Something that will get kids stoked to come to a meeting and join the Great Mount Tom Children’s Crusade.”

  These were the possibilities we came up with:

  No BUTS (No to Blowing up Tom)

  SMUT (Save the Mountain Under Tom)

  PORN (Pupils Organized to Resist this Nonsense)

  “I don’t know,” I said to Ashley. “Maybe we should go with something a little more normal. A little less weird. Something not quite so out there.”

  Eventually, after six diet cokes and two enormous bags of Cheetos, we decided on KABOOM—Kids Against Blowing Off Our Mountaintops.

  We were pleased with ourselves. It was actually pretty witty.

  We stayed after school on Monday to pitch our idea to Mr. Cooper.

  “A club?” he said. “I thought that was social suicide?”

  Ashley poked me.

  “KABOOM,” I said.

  “KABOOM,” Coop replied. “Interesting.” He took out his flosser and twirled it around in his fingers. He left the comb in the top left pocket of his shirt. Ashley and I looked at each other nervously. The flosser without the comb. We couldn’t quite figure out whether or not that was a good thing or a bad thing. We had yet to find a method to his madness. If there was, in fact, a method to be found.

  “And you want to form this club, why again?” Mr. Cooper asked.

  We had already explained what we had in mind. How we wanted to save Mount Tom. How we thought that getting kids involved would be a good thing. How maybe we could make a difference.

  Ashley and I had spent hours surfing the ’Net on mountaintop removal. Now I launched into the spiel that Ashley and I had practiced fifty times the night before.

  “Mountaintop removal is evil,” I began. “It just is. It will destroy the mountain. Obviously. And it’s a beautiful forest up there. And it’ll be gone. Wiped out. Obliterated. Along with all the animals that live there. No trees. No animals. No nothing. What’s our state motto again, Ashley?”

  “Montani Semper Liberi,” Ashley said, puffing out her chest.

  There she went with that Latin again. I had to smile. She was so proud of herself.

  “It means ‘Mountaineers Are Always Free,’” I explained. “It’s pretty hard to be a mountaineer, free or not, without any mountains, Mr. Cooper.”

  Coop let the flosser dangle in his mouth. It was just hanging there, half in and half out. He looked at Ashley in amazement.

  “And you know the stream that comes down off the mountain?” I continued. “The one that joins up with the Green River? The one that runs right through our town? Right in the back of our school, for crying out loud! Once they blow up the mountain they’ll dump tons of rubble and toxic waste into it. It’ll be totally polluted. Heavy metals like cadmium and selenium.”

  “And don’t forget arsenic!” Ashley shouted. “There’s arsenic, too!”

  Ashley and I didn’t have a clue as to what exactly cadmium and selenium and arsenic were, but the Internet said they were nothing to mess with.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Bad stuff, Mr. Cooper. People get really sick from those things.”

  “Tell him about the air pollution,” Ashley said. “Don’t forget about the air pollution.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That too. While they’re doing all of their evil up there, it’ll pollute the air that we breathe. I mean totally screw it up. People who live around mountaintop removal sites are much more likely to get birth defects, cardiovascular and respiratory disease. They’re twice as likely to get cancer. My mother died of cancer, Mr. Cooper. Believe me, it’s not a pretty picture.”

  Mr. Cooper took the flosser out of his mouth and started furiously combing his hair. Ashley and I hardly noticed. We were on a roll.

  “And it’s not like we’re going to get any richer,” I said. “American will take the money and run. Yeah, there’ll be jobs, but not for miners. Just for the blower-uppers and the truckers. Not many and not for long. And they’ll leave us with a blown-up moonscape and a bunch of toxic waste that will last forever. The rich will get richer and we’ll stay sick and poor!”

  “And that’s not even the worst of it!” Ashley said. “There’s climate change! Global warming!” She was standing up and pacing the room, with a fire in her eyes.

  “We’ve heard you go off on it, Mr. Cooper. Melting glaciers and rising sea levels and scarier storms and less food. The whole point of American blowing up the mountain is to get at the coal. They’ll dig up the coal and they’ll burn it to produce electricity and they’ll make the planet even hotter. You know what I read, Mr. Cooper? I read that the coal they get from blowing t
he top off of a mountain is enough energy to last the United States for one hour! One effin hour! Is that worth it? I mean, if they were going to blow the top off of a mountain and do something good it might be one thing. But for one hour’s worth of energy they’re going to blow the top off Mount Tom and fry the planet. Fry the effin planet! Talk about a clustermuck! What could possibly be worse than that?”

  Ashley collapsed on the chair next to me. She was trembling. She reached out and I held her hand.

  Mr. Cooper looked stunned. Dazed and confused. We knew that he knew all of this stuff, but I don’t think he had seen this coming from Ashley and me.

  “But here’s the good news, Mr. Cooper,” I said. We were near the end, wrapping up our rant.

  “There’s good news?” Coop asked.

  “There is. There really is. It’s not all gloom and doom. It’s not all hopeless. We don’t have to destroy the earth to get what we want! We don’t have to blow the tops off of mountains to get what we need! We just don’t! There’s all sorts of cool ways to make electricity that won’t screw over the planet!”

  “Tell him about wind!” Ashley said, popping out of her chair again.

  “Like wind energy. Windmills make electricity, Mr. Cooper! There are big ones going up everywhere! They’re putting them out in the ocean and on people’s farms and all sorts of places!”

  “And solar,” Ashley said. “Don’t forget about solar!”

  “And solar!” I said. “We can make electricity from the sun! We could put up solar panels at school and make our own electricity! Think of it, Mr. Cooper! I mean, which would you rather have? A blown-up moonscape of a mountain or a bunch of solar thingies on the roof? Is that awesome or what?”

  “Super-awesome!” Ashley said. “And here’s the best news of all, Mr. Cooper!”

  “There’s even better news?” Coop asked.

  “There is!” Ashley said. “Just think of it, Coop—I mean Mr. Cooper: you could be part of something big here. You can be part of something huge. You can be . . .”

  “The club advisor!” we both shouted out.

  “The club advisor?” Mr. Cooper asked.

  “Exactly!”

  Mr. Cooper went all quiet on us. He bowed his head and he rubbed his eyes and he took long, deep breaths. He had forgotten about the comb and it was now dangling from the top of his head, twisted around one of his gray hairs, just hanging there. He looked ridiculous, but we didn’t care.

  “KABOOM?” he asked.

  “KABOOM,” I replied. “You don’t have to do anything. Like extra work. We’ll do it all. Seriously. You just have to let us use your room and, like, I don’t know, give us the okay and all. It’ll be fun.”

  “KABOOM,” Mr. Cooper said again. “And it will be fun?”

  “Super-fun!” Ashley said. “And we’ll clean up after ourselves.”

  “Unlike the mine owners,” I said.

  “We really will. We promise!”

  “God, as if I’m not in enough trouble with the administration,” he mumbled. “And now I’m going to be the advisor to an anti-coal club in a coal-mining town? That’s going to go down really well.”

  “You mean you’ll do it?” Ashley and I both shouted out at the same time.

  “Girls, do you know what John Muir once said?”

  John Muir was Mr. Cooper’s favorite dead environmentalist. His go-to guy.

  “No,” we replied. “What did John Muir say?”

  Mr. Cooper rose up on his tiptoes, plucked the comb from his hair and flung it into the trash can. “John Muir said, ‘God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools!’” Mr. Cooper’s voice boomed and he pounded the desk with his fist.

  Still holding hands, Ashley and I waited for the punch line.

  “And you know what I say?” Mr. Cooper asked, his voice rolling like thunder. “God may not be able to save the trees but you two girls just might. God only knows, but you girls just might.”

  We sprang out of our seats and gave Mr. Cooper a great big tree-hugging hug.

  KABOOM!

  28

  “YOU’RE DOING WHAT?” Auntie Sadie asked, putting down her hoe and giving Ashley and me the evil eye.

  “We’re starting a club at school,” I said. “KABOOM. Kids Against Blowing Off Our Mountaintops.”

  “I thought forming a club was social suicide?” Sadie asked.

  We were over at Auntie Sadie’s helping her in her garden, and she was in a foul mood. It was the usual weather, hot and humid, and Auntie Sadie had turned into one massive dripping ball of sweat. I had mistaken her fall peas for weeds and had hoed the hell out of them. Ashley had forgotten to latch the goat gate closed and Sadie’s goats had gotten loose and wreaked havoc on her fall flowers. One goat had ripped one of Auntie Sadie’s bras off her clothesline, snuggled in on top of the winter squash, and was happily munching away on the triple-D cups.

  Sadie was the one who put the bop in the wopopaloobops. Her boobs made even Ashley’s seem concave. Sadie’s bra was bigger than the effin goat, which had refused to turn it loose even after Sadie had hit it in the head with her hoe. And while she was herding it back into its pen, another goat grabbed on to the bra’s other cup and now they were having a spirited tug-of-war. All of the other goats had stopped grazing to watch.

  Ashley and I laughed so hard that Ashley peed in her shorts.

  Not surprisingly, none of this had gone down well with Auntie Sadie.

  When Sadie gave you the evil eye you knew it. It was scary. Beyond scary. The lazy left eye went partly closed and sort of shriveled up and quivered, while the right got bigger and bigger until it seemed to migrate into the center of her head, cyclops-like. Now it was staring, unblinking, bearing down right on the two of us.

  “What?” I said. “What’s wrong? I told you already, I’m sorry about the peas.”

  “And I’ll buy you a new bra,” Ashley said. As if that was going to happen. I could just see Ashley going into Macon’s Clothing store and custom-ordering a triple-D bra. She’d have to get a shopping cart just to haul it out of there. “I swear, it’s for my friend’s auntie,” she’d say, to the guffaws from the person at the counter. “Yeah, right,” they’d snicker back. And then Ashley would go off and klonk them on the head with her purse and all hell would break loose.

  “KABOOM,” Sadie said.

  “Yeah. Don’t you think it’s a good name? Sort of like the sound it makes when they blow up mountains. Get it?”

  “No,” Sadie said. “I don’t get it. How many times have I told you girls: leave it alone. Coal is the life blood of this town and you know it. Take away the coal and what do we have? Huh? Tell me. What do we have?”

  “A mountain?” I said.

  “Clean air?” Ashley said.

  “Clean water?”

  “Healthy people?”

  Sadie waved her hoe at us menacingly. She cut quite the figure. A 300-pound, sweat-dripping, red-faced, hoe-twirling cyclops. If some tourists from Washington, D.C., had come driving by at that very moment, they would have U-turned and high-tailed it back across the state line muttering something about inbreeding and the need for forced sterilization.

  “I thought you said there was nothing moral about coal?” I told her, reminding her of her story about Bill Mayrose and the mascot scam.

  “Moral or not, healthy or not, a working miner is a working man!” Sadie yelled. “A man with a job. A man who can put food on his table. Have you thought about that?”

  One look at Sadie and you knew certain people should put a little less food on their table.

  “Okay,” I said. “I get it. There are jobs when they cut down the trees and blow up the mountain and haul the coal away. I get it, Sadie, I really do.

  “But what happens after that? What happens when it’s all over? We’re left with a moonscape instead of a mountain. We’re left with a river unsafe to e
ven look at let alone drink from. We’re left living in a town that nobody wants to live in, let alone visit. I thought we were ‘Wild Wonderful West Virginia,’ like all the fancy brochures say. I thought we were supposed to become the tourist destination of the nation? Yeah, right, as if that’s going to happen. People won’t come here to see or to do, Sadie—they’ll come here only to see what not to do.”

  “It’s a cruel world, girls,” Auntie Sadie said. “Best to face the facts and accept it. Let sleeping dogs lie. You’re girls. You’re fifteen. There’s nothing you can do about it, so there’s no use trying. Like it or not, it’s a cruel, cruel world.”

  “It’s a beautiful world, Auntie Sadie,” I said, my voice rising in intensity. “It’s a beautiful, beautiful world. And Ashley and I are going to do everything we can to keep it that way!”

  I was facing off with Sadie, both of us with hoes in our hands. Even the two goats had put their tug-of-war on pause and were huddled by the fence, their attention turned expectantly toward us. If this spiraled down into a hillbilly girls’ wrestling match then I was sure to get crushed. Literally.

  I had never spoken to Auntie Sadie like this. I had never spoken to anyone like this. Except to Britt, of course, but that didn’t exactly count.

  “Put the hoes down and no one gets hurt!” Ashley said.

  Thank God for Ashley. If I had had to stare down that cyclops eye for one more millisecond I was going to lose it.

  Relieved, I turned away.

  The goat spectators had lost their interest and gone back to grazing. The bra tug-of-war was over. Both sides had won. The bra had snapped in two and both goats were cheerfully munching away, each with a cup of its own. There had been no need to fight over it. There was enough of that bra to keep the whole herd happy for a week.

  “Mr. Cooper’s going to be the club advisor,” I said.

  Sadie put the hoe down and ran her fingers through her hair. Her face had morphed back into two eyes. Thank God. The cyclops thing was a bit too much.

  “What?” she said. “Come again?”