Phantoms

by Jack Cady

  I found myself in a little caravan. The hay truck was in front, followed by a beat-up ’41 Buick that looked as bald and ragged as its tires. I was behind the Buick.

  Rust drew a line around the trunk of the Buick, and rust made the same kind of line around the back window. The junker blew a little smoke, but not much, and it bucked real hard when the guy braked, like a car about to kneel and pray. The driver tailgated up to the hay truck, swung out to see if he could pass, and cut back in. Cowboy stuff. Impatient to get somewhere unimportant. I might have known it was Ellis because Ellis was said to drive a junk Buick, but I wasn’t really thinking. Just another slow down. There was a flat run two miles further on. Wait it out.

  My pickup felt like a tin can, and, compared to an over-the-road rig, it was. It didn’t stand high enough so a man could see much road. It was suspended like a brickbat on a roller skate. And, mind you, it was the best pickup made back then.

  The sun stood just behind the hills. Trees, rocks, and cars looked like paper cutouts pasted against a red sky. A guy stood in the hay truck. He was also silhouetted, watching road. I hadn’t noticed him before, but suddenly he was there. He steadied himself by holding onto the hayrack. He looked like just another farmer, or farm help, headed home at the end of a weary day. Then it came to me that he looked familiar. I almost hit the brakes.

  Things happened fast, and yet it was like slow motion. It was like one of those movies where people get shot and take time flopping. The Buick gunned up to the rear of the hay truck, braked, fell back. An oncoming car flew past like the driver was late for an appointment at a cathouse; sixty, maybe seventy. And it was then that the guy standing in the hay truck, the familiar guy, turned and pointed to the Buick. He gave a road sign saying that he could see clear road. He rolled his hand.

  The Buick jumped into the oncoming lane to pass the hay truck, and it jumped right into red lights twirling, because Jerry had been chasing a speeder.

  Perfectly square, head-on wrecks almost never happen. What mostly happens is two cars hit on the corners, and the backends rise and twist. Sometimes the cars roll. This head-on was only absolutely square one I’ve ever seen.

  The impact caused Ellis’s Buick and Jerry’s Mercury to lift straight up, as much as a foot off the road. The sound was too sharp for a normal wreck. No tires squealing. Just explosion, while I ran the narrow shoulder to get the hell away from them.

  The front ends of both cars disappeared, and the heads of both men appeared through windshields. Combined wreck speed, something in the neighborhood of 110 mph. Dirt and dust from the undersides of the cars burst above the dark road, and the cars for a moment looked like they rested on a cloud. They settled. The farm truck pulled over. I pulled ahead of the farm truck, because you don’t pull in behind a wreck. You don’t do it because the road is gonna get blocked.

  There’s no sense going into how it looked. The front ends were gone. The two heads, what were left of them, seemed to be trying to stare each other down. They did not look brotherly. I stood with a fire extinguisher expecting the worst, but the wrecks didn’t burn. The farmer flogging the hay truck came up to me, took one look at the mess, and sicked in the ditch.

  "You okay to go for a phone?" I asked.

  He was all trembly, but no kid. "I can manage. What would make that damn fool try to pass."

  "Because he’s a damn fool." I wasn’t admitting to nothing. "Go phone the sheriff," I told the farm guy. "I’ll set out the flares." When he pulled away I took a moment to look at his truck. There was nobody in back, no man nor ghost, and the land was going darker.

  I attended the wedding, and for a country wedding it was nice and not too corny. The flower girls were shirttail cousins from somewhere. Molly and May starred as bridesmaids, and Mary was prettier than angels. A country preacher, in a black suit that was slick with wear, and white shirt with frayed collar, managed to be dignified. Bessie looked sweet. Luke looked like a man who didn’t know whether he was happy or trapped. I have no doubt that the ghost was in the neighborhood, but I didn’t see him.

  As it turned out, Luke was both happy and trapped. He worked with Bessie, and through the first few years Bessie’s place prospered. There was no more trouble. Luke managed to get anointed, or ordained or whatever it took. He got a small church back in the hills and spent time both there and at Bessie’s. He and Mary raised two kids, both kids bright and sassy. Time passes, though, and things change.

  May married a banker in Corbin, and Molly went off to Cincinnati. She got a job and went to college. She teaches in a country school. Bessie hired help for a while but things were not the same. She retired and moved into London. Her restaurant stood empty until the fires.

  Everybody guessed, but nobody could prove, that the fires came at the hand of one of Ellis’s buddies. The restaurant burned, and Bessie’s little house burned. Nothing to be done about it. At least nothing was.

  Jimbo and Tommy and I ran Highway 25 until the interstate opened. After that, I kind of lost track, except I saw Molly once in Cincinnati. She was just walking along a sidewalk, on her way to a summer class for teachers. We talked for a while. Bessie had passed on, and was buried on the hill where her house had been. Her girls didn’t like it much, but they had honored her wishes.

  And trucking changed. Lots of fancy rigs. CB radios happened, and that was one of the worst things ever. All of the comradeship came out of the road. There was nothing much left out there but bad mouths, bullshit, and cowboys turning the freeways into fester. Movies started showing truckers with monkeys and big-boobed babes in their cabs.

  And, of course, we got old. Tommy went off somewhere, chasing a skirt. Jimbo actually married a nice Italian girl and settled down in Boston. I thought about such matters and decided against. The road had me, even after I retired.

  It’s a long road, and it winds and turns on itself. It goes somewhere, I suppose, but men who drive often only think they’re going somewhere. I was in upstate Michigan near the Canadian border, and pushing a Dodge camper, when I thought of Dive Bomber Hill. Nothing much was happening in Michigan, so I drifted south.

  Coming around at the top of Dive Bomber Hill, and hanging a right, the road looked the same. I rolled it easy and pulled off where Bessie’s place used to sit. Nothing there but young trees and overgrowth. I slept for a while in the camper, and woke when the sun stood behind the hill and the sky was red. It seemed like the ghost had been waiting to meet me. Out there among the young trees a little pocket of mist moved as deliberate as a man pacing.

  I waited. It didn’t approach. I kept waiting. It moved up the hill. I waited until it was clear that the ghost wanted nothing much to do with me. It didn’t dislike me, but it sure as hell didn’t trust me. I waited until I finally understood that the ghost was doing the last thing a family man could do. It stood between the road and Bessie’s grave, protecting the grave.

  The Souls of Drowning Mountain

  [This story is in memory of Andy Strunk,

  coal miner of Gatliff, Kentucky.]

  Mountains in eastern Kentucky have names: Black Mountain, Mingo Mountain, Hanger Mountain, Booger Mountain, and, among a thousand others, Drowning Mountain which rises above a hollow where sits Minnie’s Beer Store. Both mountain and store carry tales, and I’ll tell but one. It says too much, maybe, about folks helpless beyond all help, and angry as sullen fires. There will be however, some satisfying murders.

  When I first saw Drowning Mountain these many years ago I was ‘full of piss and vinegar’ as old folks used to say. Thought I knew it all. Had knocked off four years of military duty, then worked my way through college. Took a job with a government agency that was partly in the business of welfare, and partly in sanctimonious advice. My assignment was a railroad town in southeast Kentucky.

  I’d seen my share of bad stuff in the bars of Gloucester and in Boston’s Scollay Square. I’d seen green water over the flying bridge of a cutter. I’d seen fire at sea. I’d dealt with the dead and dying; figu
red I could handle whatever came.

  The day I arrived trains hooted, ladies gossiped in summer heat while fanning themselves on front porches. They stayed away from town. Hatred, downtown, boiled along the streets like ball lightning. It dawned on me that I was the only man in sight who wasn’t wearing a pistol.

  "We’re in the middle of a coal war," my new boss told me. "Keep your head down and stay polite." His name was Bobby Joe and he was from around there. He’d done army time. Rail-skinny, shrewd as a razorback, but smiling. After the army time he’d come back to the hills. Almost everybody from the hills returns sooner or later.

  Bobby Joe assigned me a secretary named Sarah Jane, also from around there. She called me Mister James, not Jim, and we did not warm toward each other for weeks and weeks. Sarah Jane was thirtyish, overweight, pale beneath tan freckles, wore frumpish housedresses, and there was nothing about her that would make any preacher claim her a candidate for heaven. She knew her job front and back. I admired her, but didn’t understand her anger.

  There seemed no end to everybody’s anger. My experience with middlewest small towns and large eastern cities meant nothing. I understood ghettos, poverty, welfare, rich bastards, cops, especially rich bastards and cops.

  Yet, nothing matched up. There wasn’t a kitty cat’s chance in a dog pound that I could understand Minnie’s Beer Store or Drowning Mountain.

  "Walk easy," Bobby Joe told me. He spoke slow and southern, but in complete control. "If you bust ass you’re courting trouble." He kept me on a short leash for two months. I warmed a chair behind a desk and talked to old men and tired women.

  Then Bobby Joe turned me over to a field rep named Tip. We visited small towns, took hardship claims and gave advice. We visited people who were shut in. When we drove along thin and rutted side roads we changed from white shirts to chambray shirts, because men in white shirts looked like revenue agents. Men in white shirts got shot.

  What thoughts came to pass? These: This is not real. No one lives this way. This place is straight out of medieval times.

  Tip was from around there. He looked more like a hill farmer than a government agent. Lank, with longish hair, thin mouth. He could talk tough as barbed wire, and yet the old people we dealt with were crazy about him. "Tell you about Drowning Mountain," he said one day. "Maybe you’ll understand why I’m pissed off ninety percent of the time."

  We were outside of Manchester, Kentucky, scouting around the top of a ridge called Pigeon’s Roost. Huge broadleaf trees covered the hillside, tangles of bramble, little wisps of smoke on a hot summer day. Smoke, probably from stills.

  Tip had a way of explaining the world by telling stories. "Didn’t used to be called Drowning Mountain," he told me. "But it sure as sweet Jesus earned its name."

  Even today, all these years later, it breaks my heart to think of it. I’ll condense what Tip said.

  These mountains are limestone with seams of coal. Sometimes the seam goes straight into the mountain, but not often. It usually angles in and the coal shaft follows one or more seams. Those shafts are propped with timbers, and generally slate lies above the coal. Take out the coal, slate falls, even sometimes, when propped.

  Because the limestone is porous there’s always ground water. In those days, when miners hit a narrow seam they sometimes had to lie on their backs in water, underground and between rock, pushing shovels backward over their shoulders to draw out loose coal that had been blasted. In mining camps, even little boys knew how to set a charge of dynamite.

  Were these men screwed? You bet they were. Mine owners used up men worse than bad generals killing their own armies. Coal camps were the kinds of hells that made chain gangs look like a vacation. Men actually did owe their souls to the company store. Even if men had enough imagination to leave town they had no money. They were paid in scrip. Plus, they didn’t know any better. Lots of those men had gone into the mines at age 12.

  So, in a coal camp, way, way back in World War I, they had driven a shaft deep into the heart of the mountain. When the seams played out the shaft was abandoned. Twenty-six years later, no one remembered the shaft was there. The coal company opened a seam on the other side of the mountain. The seam drove in on much the same angle as the old shaft because of a fracture in the rock.

  Miners blasted their way in, propped the slate, drove deeper, and deeper; and on a fatal day blasted through to the old, forgotten shaft that had filled with ground water. Seven men died that day, drowning in darkness in the middle of a mountain.

  "Ah, no," I told Tip.

  "Helluva note," he said. "Makes you sorta sick, don’t it?" Tip was the kind of guy, who if he had been a preacher, would have been a good one. He would not have been hellfire, only tough and kind.

  "The reason I tell the story," he said, "is because next week we go to Drowning Mountain."

  It was a miserable weekend. The office closed. Nothing to do except keep my head down and wait. The town sat in a dry county. Each election, preachers and bootleggers went to the polls and kept it dry. A wet county was just next door and Tennessee was not all that far off, but there was nothing going on in those directions. I hung out at the drugstore, slurped coffee, listened to gossip.

  The main rich bastard in town was named Sims. He ramrodded a coal corporation. Sims was one of those sanitary pieces of crap that wear summer suits and carry perfumed hankies as they walk across the faces of dying men.

  Sims’s chief armament was a guy named Pook. Pook had the reputation of a real nut buster. Pook was an actual killer with at least two murders notched to his gun. Gossip said the sheriff was afraid of him.

  The two showed up Sunday afternoon, walking Main Street like they owned it. Sims said "howdy," or even, "howdy, neighbor" to grim-faced men who stepped aside to let him pass. Sims had a bald spot, a sizeable gut, and dainty little feet. He seemed cheery. He had jowls like a pig, and a sneer that could push people backward. On Sunday afternoon he went into the bank. The banker came down and opened up just for him.

  Pook stood outside the bank. He looked like Godzilla with a haircut. Or a better description, maybe: he looked like a storm trooper, but with a .45 automatic on his hip, not a Mauser.

  People didn’t talk to him. Pook couldn’t out-sneer Sims, but his look told folks that he figured them for dog dump. When Sims came from the bank the two cruised town in a new Cadillac, snubbing everybody; the Cadillac black and shiny.

  On Monday morning Sarah Jane tsked. "You take it slow, now," she told me. "Jim."

  It was the first time she ever called me anything but mister.

  Bobby Joe talked to Tip, real quiet. Both men looked serious.

  "What’s the war about?" I asked Tip. We left the office and headed for Drowning Mountain.

  "The usual," he told me. "Wages, mechanization, it’s pitiful." He kind of hunched over the steering wheel. He kept a low profile in the hills. His car was a beat up Ford made before WWII. "The men only know one kind of work, and there’s no other work. They strike in order to go back into the hole at a bit higher pay, which is like asking to jump smack into hell." He paused. "And there’s something worse. Stripping."

  I’d heard about it. Strip mining was coming into fashion. It destroyed whole mountains. Strip mining made 6,000-foot mountains into smoking piles of rubble. Trees gone. Not a stick of vegetation. Not a tree. Only broken rock. Sulfuric acid rose in the air and washed in the streams. Strip mines were profitable because they needed a few machine operators, but no miners.

  "There’s something else," Tip told me. "Before we get to Minnie’s I gotta prepare you." Even though he was the guy in charge, he looked off-guard and hesitant.

  "You might meet some people," he told me, "who you won’t know, and maybe I won’t either, if they’re dead or alive. If you want to stay happy take it for granted. Don’t try to study it out. Don’t back away."

  "Why? Come to think of it, Why and What?"

  "Dead or alive, all these folks have is each other. They stick together. There
’s talk of stripping the mountain."

  "Sims?"

  "Not all rich men are crap, and not all crap-heads are rich. But, yep. Sims." Tip actually looked relieved . . . probably because I didn’t make a deal out of that ‘dead or alive’ business. I’d come to trust Tip, and if he said don’t figure on something, it seemed best not to figure. What he said made no sense. For me, it was wait and see.

  "I got more to tell," he said. "There’s a history."

  He explained that Minnie’s Beer Store sat in an abandoned coal camp. Old men were sparsely scattered in cabins along the sides of the hills. Most were widowers, but some had young wives because there were no young men for girls to marry. The young men had gone away, some to the Army, some to other coal camps.

  Miners, back then, were more spirits than real by age 40. They moved slow as cold molasses because of black lung, silicosis, violent arthritis. Their hair, if they had any, was white and their faces were black. Coal dust gets under the skin. It doesn’t even go away in the grave. When bones become dust, they are still tainted with coal.

  "So much anger," Tip murmured. "They’re furious about being screwed, but most of them don’t know how much they’re screwed. They don’t know how to fight back. So, they’re really furious about not knowing." He slowed the car, making a point. "That dead and alive business. It happened at least once before, and it happened during a coal war."

  As we approached, rusting rails ran beside a road of thin macadam once laid by the coal company. The hills were covered with hardwood trees, and here at the end of August a little spot of yellow, leaves changing color, appeared amid stands of green. The narrow road was rutted now. Most of the railroad had been torn away and sold for scrap.