by Brian Adams
“No,” I laughed. “On the dance floor!”
“Yeah, pretty much,” Kevin said. “But don’t sweat it, I was even worse. And here’s the good news.”
“Tell me.”
“You might be a spaz, but you’re my spaz.”
Kevin turned and kissed me.
There are times in life when I get a sudden jolt, an electrical shock, a bolt of lightning, and an enormous flashing neon sign lights up the entire sky: LIFE IS GOOD! Not just good but great! An awesome dance! Ridiculous reels! A not-very-civil war in the men’s room! Grinding away, hoop skirt and all! And now, here I was, somebody’s one and only spaz.
I squeezed Kevin’s thigh and nestled my head on his shoulder.
59
AS BOTH MOUNT TOM and Kevin heated up, the pressure to do well in school seemed to increase, too. Teachers were paying more attention to me, and expecting more out of me than ever before. Whether they were for or against mountaintop removal was irrelevant. Teachers and even other kids seemed to think that somehow I now knew something about everything.
“What are your thoughts about the Articles of Confederation?” Ms. Fydenkevitz asked in history, seemingly interested in my opinion.
“What kind of atmosphere do you think Steinbeck is trying to create in Of Mice and Men?” Diaper Lady asked me in English class. Thank goodness I had read it.
Even Mister Livingston was calling on me in math class.
As much as Tom and Kevin were doing their best to distract me, I felt like I had to be on my academic game. It was all becoming pretty intense.
•
It was fifth period, right after lunch, and I was sitting in science, trying to make sense of cellular respiration when, wouldn’t you know, Kevin’s face appeared at the window of the classroom door. He motioned for me to come out.
I couldn’t help but smile. I had just spent my entire lunch with him and now, here he was, skipping class to see me again.
I had that boy right where I wanted him!
I shuffled up to Coop’s desk, clutched my stomach, and asked for a hall pass. He gave me the look.
“Girl stuff!” I said, waving my backpack and making a yucky face. “Gotta deal.”
The only good thing about getting your period was that you could use it to get away with so much stuff.
“Can’t get enough of me, huh?” I asked, putting my arms around Kevin and nuzzling his neck as soon as the door shut behind us.
For the first time ever, he took my arms off of him.
“Bad news,” he said. “Really bad.”
“What?” I asked, startled by the look in his eyes. “What happened?”
“It’s started. They’re there.”
“What started? Who’s where?”
“The logging trucks are at the foot of Tom. They’re good to go.”
“Are you serious?” I asked. I felt my breath stick in my throat.
“I am. I really am!”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Marc’s dad texted him.” Good for Ashley, I thought. She had trained that boy well.
“What do we do?” Kevin asked.
It was such a surreal moment. It was hard to take in all that Kevin had just said, hard to believe that it was actually true. After all the months of focusing on Tom, after all the letters and the petitions and the meetings and the march, after all the hard work we had put into KABOOM, I had never actually pictured how it would all go down. I hadn’t ever let myself go there.
But now, here we were, Kevin and I, standing outside Mr. Cooper’s classroom, reality jumping down our throats.
The logging trucks were at the foot of Mount Tom. The mountaintop destroyers were all set to do the devil’s work. The nightmare was beginning!
“What do we do?” Kevin asked again.
I nestled my way back into his arms, feeling him wrap them tight around me, feeling his heart beating nearly as fast as mine, feeling so close to him it made me want to burst. I wanted to freeze time and stay that way forever. I wanted to lose the horror and the pain and the tragedy of the real world and just be in Kevin’s arms. Kevin and me. Just the two of us. Nobody else. Nobody. Forever.
I breathed him in. In and out and in again.
“Take me there,” I said. “Drop me off. Come back and rally the troops. Let’s go.”
“Are you sure?” Kevin asked.
“Let’s go!” I said, not sure at all.
We ran to Kevin’s car.
On the way I made a brief pit stop and unlocked Ashley’s and my bikes, stuffing the locks and chains into my backpack.
“What are you doing?” Kevin asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But they may come in handy.”
We leapt into his car and, just the way they do in the movies, Kevin backed up, and peeled out of the driveway.
“I don’t want to leave you there,” Kevin said. “Alone. I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“You have to,” I said. “You have to come back and tell everyone. Like Paul Revere. Except you have to yell, ‘American is coming! American is coming!’ Not ‘the British.’”
“I don’t want to be away from you,” Kevin said.
“I know,” I said, reaching out and taking his hand.
Kevin was driving crazy fast. At one point we almost went off the road and into a ditch. But finally, we sped around the corner and there we were.
Ground zero. The heart of darkness.
There were a whole mess of guys standing next to the logging trucks drinking coffee and eating donuts with their hard hats on and chain saws in hand. Waiting for the word. Ready to go. Ready to log the road to the top of Tom so they could blow the mountain sky high. Ready to destroy the temple of the gods.
And it would all start with the very first cut of the very first tree.
The beginning of the end.
Kevin slammed on his brakes next to a huge timber harvester with claws and saws like something from the apocalypse. A death machine that could gobble up Sugar Daddy, Bradley Beech, Sadie’s Twin, and She, take them down with one whack, and spit out logs like tooth picks.
I took my seat belt off and opened the door. Kevin scooped me in his arms, hugged me, and then, holding my face in his hands, kissed me. Kissed me hard.
“If anything happens to you . . .”
“Go!” I said. “You’re Paul Revere, remember? Go! Now!”
Kevin kept my face in his hands, taking me deep into his eyes.
“I love you,” he said. “I love you so much!”
“I know,” I said, fighting back tears. “I know! And I am so in love with you.”
“If anything happens . . .”
“Go!” I shouted.
60
I DIDN’T HAVE MUCH TIME TO THINK. I just acted. Before any of the temple destroyers had time to stop me, I grabbed the two bicycle chains out of my backpack, tightly wound them around each of my thighs and locked them tight to the timber harvester.
“What the fuck!” the logging supervisor roared. He was pissed. Really pissed.
I had chosen my quarry well. The harvesting machine was the go-to gal, the one to get the ball rolling, the mother of the tree cutters.
Locked in tight, I had shut it down. There was no way to cut down the trees with me mucking up the works. No harvester, no trees.
Trees they could tackle. But evidently my thighs were, thank goodness, off-limits.
I assumed I’d be scared half to death, but a surreal feeling of calm enveloped me like a soothing quilt. I looked out at the scowling cluster of men huddling with their chainsaws and their hardhats as if were all a dream, and I realized that there was nothing else I would rather be doing, that there was nowhere else I would rather be. I knew I belonged right here, right now, chained to the tree harvester. It was as if I had been made for this very moment. As if this were my chosen place in the universe.
It wasn’t long before the police arrived with bolt cutters, cut me lose, and carried me
to the police car. I refused to walk. Just like the Widow Combs back in the day. And, wouldn’t you know it, just in the nick of time a television news crew arrived with the same reporter who had been at the Children’s Crusade, and they got the whole thing on camera.
“Stop mountaintop removal!” I shouted as they carried me away. “Save Mount Tom!”
The police put me in the back of the cruiser and drove me to the county jail.
•
I watched the hands of the clock tick ever so slowly, minute by minute, hour by hour, till it was almost 8:00 p.m. I had been in jail for almost six hours. Six effin hours. And nothing had happened. Other than bleeding all over my underwear, absolutely nothing.
The jailer dude called my house repeatedly but there was no answer. He even called Ashley’s and Kevin’s and got the same response. Nothing.
So I just sat there in jail. All by my lonesome. Well, me and the jailer dude, who kept getting phone call after phone call that, try as I might, I could not manage to overhear.
I figured that by now someone would have come and rescued me. Bailed me out. Sprung me loose. Helped me fly the coop. Whatever it was they called it.
Where was my dad? Where was Kevin? Where was everyone?
Maybe Kevin had gotten in an accident on the way back to school, and no one knew I was here. Maybe he was lying in some hospital bed somewhere. Maybe he was dying. The love of my life, and maybe he was dying. Maybe he was dead!
I lay on the hard concrete jailhouse floor and desperately tried not to let my mind wander to the dark side.
Instead, I replayed the scene over and over in my head. Not the one of me chaining myself to the harvester. Not the one of me being carried away by the police. There would be plenty of time for those reruns.
It was the closing scene with Kevin that was running rampant through my brain.
“I love you,” he had said. “I love you so much!”
I could handle the cops. I could handle jail. But if anything happened to that boy . . .
After what seemed like an eternity, two police officers finally came in and unlocked the cell door.
“Cyndie,” the heavier one said. It was the same one who had cut through my bicycle chains and carried me to the police car. “Let’s go.”
“Where?” I asked. “Go where?”
“To the gymnasium. At the high school. It’s where we’re holding everybody.”
“Everybody?” I asked. “What are you talking about? What do you mean, ‘everybody’?”
“You tell me,” the cop said. “You’re the one that started this whole damn mess.”
“Tell you what?” I asked, confused at best.
“What’s going on,” he said. “We must have arrested close to a hundred people. No way they could all fit in this dump. So we’re putting them in the gymnasium. You’re going to join them.”
“Arrested them for . . .”
“Don’t go playing dumb on me,” the cop said. “They were doing the same damn thing you were doing and you know it. Blockading the mountain. Stopping the loggers. And now a bunch of them have all gone and dressed up in Union blue and Confederate gray and they’re occupying the place. Who would have thought the Rebels and the Yanks would ever agree about anything. Somebody told me that Stonewall Jackson and Abraham Lincoln are sitting up in the same tree! Abraham Lincoln, for God’s sake! I’ve been on the force for twenty-three years and I’ve never seen anything like this.”
I sat up on the floor and stared, wide-eyed, at the officers.
“Come on, Cyndie,” the heavy-set one continued, mopping his brow. “It’s been a helluva long day. Please don’t make us carry you. My back is killing me.”
I got up and walked out the jailhouse door.
Epilogue
IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE I’m the same person as the girl I was a few months ago.
I look back on the me who started her sophomore year in high school, on the me with her drive-bys and her kingdoms of boys and her ridiculous jar and her utterly lame life, and I think to myself, Wow! Not bad, girl. Not bad at all!
I know it sounds like bragging. I know it sounds like I’ve turned into this big-headed bitch with all this swag. It’s not like that. It really isn’t.
But, truth be told, I feel pretty good about myself.
People ask me how I did this. People ask me how I helped organize the group that shut down the mountaintop removers. That saved Mount Tom. That helped spark new groups all over Appalachia.
And I tell them this: If I can do it, then anyone can!
It’s not like I had signed up for this. It had fallen in my lap. I was an accidental activist.
But accidents can be good things. No—great things! I wouldn’t have missed this accident for the world!
When you’re right, when you have truth on your side, when the stakes are so high, then it’s not that hard to be the one to step up. I mean, don’t get me wrong, this was no cakewalk. But it was also fun as hell.
In fact, when they took me from the jailhouse to the gym it was heaven. People clapped and cheered and hugged me. It was beyond awesome! Too many wows to even list!
Kids in the gymnasium jail! Arrested! Just like the real Children’s Crusade of 1963. Martin Luther King Jr. would be proud. And so would my mother. I just knew it.
“I got arrested!” Britt said, leaping into my arms. “Just like you! I got arrested!”
Sure enough, Britt and half of the circus (including her new heartthrob stilt boy) had joined the blockade and ended up in the makeshift gymnasium jail.
Ashley (who, along with Marc, was also a jailbird) filled me in on the news. Kevin had played the role of Paul Revere to a T. He had even burst into the front office at school, switched on the microphone, and announced to the entire student body what was going down. A little more high-tech than the lanterns in the Old North Church steeple, but, hey, he done good.
With all of the KABOOMers leading the charge, kids came to the rescue! Piggy had removed the chains from his wardrobe and locked himself to a tree, finally scoring that sweet opportunity to truly “stick it the man.” Sam the Fisherman had woven a web of fishing line through trunks of trees that even chainsaws might have a hard time cutting their way through. Frank had knelt in the middle of the road with his Bible open and his lips moving in silent prayer until he was hauled away. Jon Buntington, lying in front of a tree harvester, had actually been smiling. And Ashley and Marc the Mountain, handcuffed hand in hand, refused to be separated even when they were arrested.
And they say all we teenagers care about are our Facebook status and how we look and what we wear. Ha! Take that one and shove it up your logging machine!
Kevin, aka Private Paul Revere, had also called my father, and the news spread like wildfire to the reenactors. Just a few nights earlier Ashley and I, bidding a bittersweet farewell to our beloved secret, had told Dad about our mini-mine, and he had done some research at his college library and was convinced that the mine really was part of a long-forgotten Civil War fortification. The Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac joined forces and transformed themselves into Revolutionary Minutemen and swarmed the mountain in a moment. Kevin and my father, both of whom had quickly changed into their Confederate uniforms, occupied the tree that was to be the first one cut.
“I never dreamed,” my father said after the dust had settled and we were home again, “that the proudest moment of my life would be having both of my daughters wind up in jail. Up in heaven Mom is smiling!”
There were lots of arrests for trespassing that afternoon. That’s what they charged us with: trespassing. You could blow up the top off an effin mountain and call it business as usual, but if you tried to save the very same mountain you got busted for trespassing.
Go figure.
The papers and the TV had a field day. We were splashed all over the news. Front page, even. Not just in West Virginia but in other states as well. Just like Widow Combs. Afterwards, Ashley and I brought the KABOO
Mers to our mini-mine and Piggy found an old Civil War–era canteen in the stonework above it. The newscaster who had covered the story when I was getting hauled away returned to do a lengthy piece on KABOOM featuring us KABOOMers at the mine and focusing in on the Civil War connection. The State Historical Preservation Office came marching in and demanded that the whole project be put on hold while they surveyed the site. American Coal Company, reeling from bad publicity particularly after the press revealed that they had known all along about a historic site on the mountain, was forced to put their mountaintop removal plan on hold. There was even a rumor floating around that American was going to donate the land to our town for a historical and natural preserve.
We had won!
Mount Tom, at least for the moment, was safe.
Who would have thought?
•
I’ve always loved stories where good triumphs over evil and truth wins out in the end. That’s pretty much what happened here, except that good got a restraining order over evil and it’s all tied up in court and a bit muddled over what will happen to Mount Tom next. But hey, you’ve got to celebrate life’s victories, permanent or not.
There’s a full-fledged archeological dig taking place at our mine and the stonework above it. All sorts of awesome artifacts have been found, including Civil War guns, bayonets, and even the barrels of three cannons. Ashley and I have been helping out at the dig after school, and Ashley is now convinced she wants to become a Civil War reenactor.
“No offense,” she told me, “but no lame nurse thingy for me. I want to be a Union general or something. On a horse.”
Kevin has gotten word that he’s been promoted to a captain among the reenactors, which means he’ll now outrank my father. Dad couldn’t care less. He’s head over heels with Mrs. Yabonowitz, and the two of them have been double-dating with Auntie Sadie and Mr. Cooper.
And speaking of couples, the dipshit duo, Bert and Michael, got caught breaking into a liquor store after they somehow managed to lock themselves in the freezer overnight. Just when I thought they couldn’t get any stupider they went off and did that.
