Ginny is at the other window, and she peers through a knothole in the plywood.
I say, “See that light green spot on the second hill?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s the copper on your all’s roof.”
She turns, stares at me.
“I come here lots,” I say. I breathe the musty air. I turn away from her and look out the window to Company Hill, but I can feel her stare. Company Hill looks bigger in the dusk, and I think of all the hills around town I’ve never set foot on. Ginny comes up behind me, and there’s a glass-crunch with her steps. The hurt arm goes around me, the tiny spot of blood cold against my back.
“What is it, Colly? Why can’t we have any fun?”
“When I was a young punk, I tried to run away from home. I was walking through this meadow on the other side of the Hill, and this shadow passed over me. I honest to god thought it was a pterodactyl. It was a damned airplane. I was so damn mad, I came home.” I peel chips of paint from the window frame, wait for her to talk. She leans against me, and I kiss her real deep. Her waist bunches in my hands. The skin of her neck is almost too white in the faded evening. I know she doesn’t understand.
I slide her to the floor. Her scent rises to me, and I shove crates aside to make room. I don’t wait. She isn’t making love, she’s getting laid. All right, I think, all right. Get laid. I pull her pants around her ankles, rut her. I think of Tinker’s sister. Ginny isn’t here. Tinker’s sister is under me. A wash of blue light passes over me. I open my eyes to the floor, smell that tang of rain-wet wood. Black snakes. It was the only time he had to whip me.
“Let me go with you,” I say. I want to be sorry, but I can’t.
“Colly, please…” She shoves me back. Her head is rolling in splinters of paint and glass.
I look a long time at the hollow shadows hiding her eyes. She is somebody I met a long time ago. I can’t remember her name for a minute, then it comes back to me. I sit against the wall and my spine aches. I listen to the mud daubers building nests, and trace a finger along her throat.
She says, “I want to go. My arm hurts.” Her voice comes from someplace deep in her chest.
We climb out. A yellow light burns on the crossties, and the switches click. Far away, I hear a train. She gives me my shirt, and gets in her car. I stand there looking at the blood spots on the cloth. I feel old as hell. When I look up, her taillights are reddish blurs in the fog.
I walk around to the platform, slump on the bench. The evening cools my eyelids. I think of how that one time was the only airplane that ever passed over me.
I picture my father—a young hobo with the Michigan sunset making him squint, the lake behind him. His face is hard from all the days and places he fought to live in, and of a sudden, I know his mistake was coming back here to set that locust-tree post on the knob.
“Ever notice how only blue lightning bugs come out after a rain? Green ones almost never do.”
I hear the train coming. She is highballing all right. No stiffs in that blind baggage.
“Well, you know the Teays must of been a big river. Just stand on Company Hill, and look across the bottoms. You’ll see.”
My skin is heavy with her noise. Her light cuts a wide slice in the fog. No stiff in his right mind could try this one on the fly. She’s hell-bent for election.
“Jim said it flowed west by northwest—all the way up to the old Saint Lawrence Drain. Had garfish—ten, maybe twenty foot long. Said they’re still in there.”
Good old Jim’ll probably croak on a lie like that. I watch her beat by. A worn-out tie belches mud with her weight. She’s just too fast to jump. Plain and simple.
I get up. I’ll spend tonight at home. I’ve got eyes to shut in Michigan—maybe even Germany or China, I don’t know yet. I walk, but I’m not scared. I feel my fear moving away in rings through time for a million years.
HOLLOW
HUNCHED on his knees in the three-foot seam, Buddy was lost in the rhythm of the truck mine’s relay; the glitter of coal and sandstone in his cap light, the setting and lifting and pouring. This was nothing like the real mine, no deep tunnels or mantrips, only the setting, lifting, pouring, only the light-flash from caps in the relay. In the pace he daydreamed his father lowering him into the cistern: many summers ago he touched the cool tile walls, felt the moist air from the water below, heard the pulley squeak in the circle of blue above. The bucket tin buckled under his tiny feet, and he began to cry. His father hauled him up. “That’s the way we do it,” he laughed, carrying Buddy to the house.
But that came before everything: before they moved from the ridge, before the big mine closed, before welfare. Down the relay the men were quiet, and Buddy wondered if they thought of stupid things. From where he squatted he could see the gray grin of light at the mouth, the March wind spraying dust into little clouds. The half-ton cart was full, and the last man in the relay shoved it toward the chute on two-by-four tracks.
“Take a break” came from the opening, and as Buddy set his shovel aside, he saw his cousin Curtis start through the mouth. He was dragging a poplar post behind him as he crawled past the relay toward the face. Buddy watched while Curtis worked the post upright: it was too short, and Curtis hammered wedges in to tighten the fit.
“Got it?” Buddy asked.
“Hell no, but she looks real pretty.”
Estep, Buddy’s front man, grunted a laugh. “Damn seam’s gettin’ too deep. Ain’t nothin’ but coal in this here hole. When we gonna hit gold?”
Buddy felt Estep’s cap-light on his face and turned toward it. Estep was grinning, a purple fight cut oozing through the dust and sweat on his cheek.
“Chew?” Estep held out his pouch, and Buddy took three fingers before they leaned against each other, back to back, stretching their legs, working their chews.
“Face is a gettin’ pretty tall,” Estep said. Buddy could feel the voice in his back.
“Same thin’s happenin’ up Storm Creek,” he said, pulling the sagging padding up to his knees.
“An’ Johnson’s scratch done the same.”
“Curt,” Buddy shouted, “when’d they make a core sample on this ridge?”
“Hell’s bells, I don’t know,” he said, trying to work in another wedge.
“Musta been sixty years ago,” Estep said. “Recollect yer grandaddy shootin’ at ’em. Thought they’s Philadelfy law’ers.”
“Yeah,” Buddy laughed, remembering the tales.
From near the opening, where the rest of the relay gathered for air, came a high-pitched laugh, and Buddy’s muscles went tight.
“One a these days I’m gonna wring that Fuller’s neck,” he said, spitting out the sweet tobacco juice.
“What he said still eatin’ at ya?”
“He ain’t been worth a shit since he got that car.”
“It’s Sally, ain’t it?”
“Naw, let’er go. Worthless…”
The group laughed again, and a voice said, “Ask Buddy.”
“Ask ’im what?” Buddy shined his light along the row of dirty faces; only Fuller’s was wide with a grin.
“Is Sal goin’ back to whorin’?” Fuller smiled.
“Goddamn you,” Buddy said, but before he could get up, Estep hooked both his elbows in Buddy’s, and Fuller laughed at his struggle. Curtis scrambled back, grabbing Buddy’s collar.
“I reckon you all rested ’nough,” Curtis shouted, and when they heard coal rattling from the bin to the truck, they picked up their shovels, got into line.
Buddy loosened up, giving in to Curtis and Estep. “Tonight at Tiny’s,” he shouted at Fuller.
Fuller laughed.
“Shut up,” Curtis said. “You and Estep work the face.”
Estep let go, and they crawled to the coal face and took up their short-handled spades. The face was already four feet high, and both men could stretch out from their knees, knocking sparkling chunks into the pile, pushing it back for the relay.
/> “Bet this whole damn ridge is a high seam.”
“Make it worth more than ten swats a day.”
“By God,” Buddy said, and as he dug, wondered if the money would make Sally stay. Remembering Fuller, he hit the face harder, spraying coal splinters into the air.
Estep stopped digging and ran a dirty sleeve across one eye. Buddy was coughing a raspy wheeze, flogging coal to his feet. “Stop killin’ snakes—throwin’ stuff in my eyes.”
Buddy stopped digging. Estep’s voice washed over his anger, leaving him small and cold in the glint of the coal face, yet bold and better than Estep or Fuller.
“Sorry, it’s just I’m mad,” he coughed.
“Get yer chance tonight. C’mon, pace off—one, two…”
Together they threw the relay back into rhythm, added speed. The chink of spades and scrape of shovels slipped into their muscles until only the rumble of the returning truck could slow them. The seam grew where it should have faulted, and they hunkered to their feet, digging toward the thin gray line of ceiling.
“Get some picks,” Buddy grinned.
“Naw, needs shorin’ yet.”
Curtis slipped through the relay to the face, his light showing through the dust in up-down streams. When he got down to them, they leaned against the sidewalls to give him room, and he stuck a pocket level to the ceiling, watching as the bubble rose toward the face.
“Knock off till Monday,” he said. “We ain’t got the timbers fer this here.”
As the men crawled out toward the bloom pile, a whisper of laughter seeped back through the mine to the face, and Buddy dropped to his belly to slink outside, unhurried. Even a clam crawl had winded him, and he waited by the chute for Estep and Curtis as the cold air dried his sweat, sealing the dirt to his skin. He could hear, beneath the whining low gears of the coal truck, the barking of a dog down in the hollow. He sat down hard and leaned against the chute.
From the entrance to the hilltop was a wold of twenty yards, the dead stalks of broom sedge rippling in the wind. Buddy figured the overburden of dirt could be moved in a month, the coal harvested in less than a year. He knew Sally would not wait, was not sure he wanted her.
He remembered a time when the price of her makeup and fancy habits would have fed his mother and sisters something besides the mauve bags of commodities the state handed out.
Estep came out, and Buddy offered him a smoke as they watched the truck shimmy under the bin, leveling its load.
“Goddamned cherry picker,” Estep grunted toward the driver far down the hill.
“Gonna be lots more cherry—all that goddamned coal.” Buddy looked to the western ridges where the sun set a cold strip of fire.
Curtis came up behind them, smiling. “I’m goin’ home an’ get all drunked up.”
“Last time I done that,” Estep said, “got me a new baby. Gonna watch ol’ Mad Man here so’s he don’t tear up Tiny’s.”
“That’s where I’ll be, by God,” Buddy said, as if there might still be something to hold to.
“Just leave ’nough of Fuller to crawl in that doghole on Monday,” Curtis said, taking off his cap. Buddy stared at the lines of gray in his hair where the coal dust had not settled.
“I ain’t makin’ no promises,” Buddy said as he started down the path toward the road.
“Pick ya up about eight tonight,” Estep yelled, watching Buddy wave his lunch bucket from the trail.
Night rose up from the hollow, and as he came to the dusty access road, Buddy could feel the cold air washing up around him, making him cough. Patches of clouds gathered over the hollow, glowing pink. He turned onto the blacktop road, banging his lunch box against his leg as he walked, and remembered hating Fuller as a boy because Fuller had called him a ridge runner. After twenty years of living in the hollow, he knew why Fuller hated him.
He laughed again at the thought of the coal. He would have a car by fall, and a new trailer—maybe even a double-wide. He tried to think of ways to get Curtis to give up dogholing, and for a moment thought of asking Sally to go into Chelyan with him to look at trailers, but remembered all her talk of leaving.
Through the half-light, he could make out the rotting tipple where his father was crushed only ten days before they shut it down, leaving the miners to scab-work and DPA. The tipple crackled in the cold as the sun’s heat left it, and on a pole beside it an unused transformer still hummed. No more coal, the engineers had said, but Buddy had always laughed at engineers—even when he was in an engineer company in the Army. At the foot of the smoldering bone pile where the shale waste had been dumped, Estep’s little boy stopped, searching.
“What ya doin’ there, Andy?”
“Rocks,” the boy said. “They’s pitchers on ’em.” He handed Buddy a piece of shale.
“Fossils. Ol’ dead stuff.”
“I’m collectin’ ’em.”
“What ya wanna save ol’ dead stuff for?” he said, handing the shale back.
The boy looked down and shrugged.
“You get on home, hear?” Buddy said, watching as Andy disappeared down the secondary, leaving him to the hum of the transformer. He wondered why the boy looked so old.
As he started back up the road, he could hear the dogs packing up, their howls echoing from the slopes, funneling through the empty tipple. The clouds had thickened, and Buddy felt the first fine drops of a misty rain soak through the dirt on his face. When the trees thinned, he saw his trailer, rust from the bolts already streaking the white paint of last summer. The dogs were just up the road, and he wondered if they could smell Lindy, his bluetick bitch, in the trailer. Sally sat by the window, looking, waiting, but he knew it was not for him.
Lindy smiled at Sally, wagged at the sound of Buddy’s footsteps from the bedroom and down the hall. Sally walked away from the door window and set the plates by the stove.
“Estep’s stoppin’ ’round eight,” Buddy said, frowning at the turnips and beans beneath the potlids of supper. “No meat?”
Sally said nothing, but took up her plate and dolloped out her food, leaving the side meat for Buddy. She watched him serve himself, and found herself staring at the freckles of black dust embedded in his face. A dog bark broke her stare, and she went to the table. She could hear them sniffing under the floor.
“They bother hell outa me,” she said when Buddy sat.
“Well, she stays in. I don’t need no litter of mutts.” Buddy mashed fat between his fork prongs, fishing the lean from the mess, and watched Sally eat. “They’s gonna be money, Sal.”
“Don’t start up. They’s al’s gonna, but they ain’t never any.”
“This time’s for sure. Estep an’ me, we worked that stuff today. A D-nine dozer an’ steam-shovel’d a-fixed us real quick. Curt’s got the deed an’ all.”
“Thought yer folks settled these here ridges.”
He remembered standing in the sun at a funeral—he could not say whose, but the scent of Vitalis from his father’s hands had turned his stomach, and his new shoes pinched his feet.
“Never had a pot to piss in, neither. Stick ’round, Sal.”
With her fork, Sally drew lazy curves in her beansoup, and shook her head. “Naw, I’m tired of livin’ on talk.”
“This ain’t talk. What made ya stay with me this long?”
“Talk.”
“Love? Love ain’t talk.”
“Whore’s talk.”
His hand flashed across the table, knocking her head askance, and she flushed. She got up slowly, put her plate in the sink, and walked down the hall to the bedroom. Buddy heard her turn on the TV, but the sound died down, leaving only the whimper of the dogs. He watched his plate turn cold, grease crusting the edges.
Getting bourbon for his coffee, he sat his plate on the floor for the bitch, and went to the window. With lamplight shining green in their eyes, the pack circled the trailer, talking, waiting. He turned off the lamp and looked for the thing Sally stared after, but only the light gray sky and
near-black ghost of the road touched the hollow.
In the darkness he found his .30-.30 rifle and flashlight, opened the slatted window, and poked them through. Passing over two strong-boned hounds, his beam landed on a ragged spitz, and he fired into the marble-lights, the shot singing through the washes and gullies.
The dogs scattered into the brush beyond the road, leaving the thrashing spitz to die in the yard. Lindy paced the trailer’s length to the sound of the whines, but when they stopped, she settled on the couch, her tail flapping each time Buddy moved.
The shot jerked Sally from her half-sleep, but she settled back again, watching the blue TV light play against the rusty flowers of ceiling leaks as the last grains of cocaine soaked into her head. She stretched, felt afloat in an ocean of blue light rippling around her body, and relaxed. She knew she was prettier than the girls in the Thunderball Club, or the girl on the TV, and lots more fun.
“Lotsss,” she whispered, over and over.
Buddy’s silhouette stood in the doorway. “They won’t be back,” he said.
“Who?” Sally sat up, letting the sheets slide away from her breasts.
“The dogs.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Ya can’t make any money at it, Sal. Too much free stuff floatin’ ’round.”
“Yeah? An’ all this money yer makin’s gonna keep me here?”
He turned back down the hall.
“Buddy,” she said, and heard him stop. “C’mon.”
As he shed his shoes, she noticed the slope in his back more than usual, but in turning to her, his chest swelled when he unbuttoned his shirt. From where he stood, the hall light mixed with the TV, flashing her eyes white and pink as she moved in the blanket-wave to make room for him.
He climbed in, his cold hands stroking her waist, and she felt the little tremors in his muscles. She dragged a single finger down his spine to make him shiver.
“When ya leavin?”
“Pretty soon,” she said, pulling him closer.
Stories of Breece D'J Pancake Page 4
