Misisipi

by Michael Reilly

  He checked his things as he changed into fresh clothes: a charcoal black suit, white shirt, and black shoes, a sober type of sackcloth he’d been saving for when he finally found Julianna, no doubt a solemn encounter. Funerals, weddings, trials, executions; it was his father’s advice to keep such an ensemble ready for all such occasions. Anyway, they were the only fresh items available to him. He tossed every worn item into the bathtub and shut the door on them.

  His other things were in order, even the broach. He thumbed through his wallet. Hal’s extra two $100 bills were missing. Charlie hadn’t taken anything else. She’d left Scott with just shy of 40 bucks. He supposed she had either taken pity on him for his troubles or fair recompense for hers. Right then he felt deserving of neither.

  Behind the wheel, he directed the car west at the first opportunity, deciding on a cut across the Appalachians to Nashville. No sleep til Dallas—by dusk, he reckoned. He was sick of the past, sick of running with it. To outrun it, he first had to overtake it. No more stalling. He planted his iPod in its cradle, fired up Hot Fuss, and let Brandon Flowers urge him to find his Mr. Brightside.

  Chapter 33

  Norton, Virginia

  Becky LaForce stood alone in the Applebees parking lot and waited for the love of her life. She checked her watch again—4:39pm—and, more anxious than ever now, she began to do her nervous thing—again. She stubbed the toe of her right sneaker into the ground and pushed, rotating her ankle in a tight circle above her foot. She listened to the satisfying pop the bone finally made and then started it round in the other direction.

  Where the hell is Bernard? she thought.

  She’d been waiting for over two hours already. She was stripped to her brown t-shirt with the big unicorn emblem. Her satchel lay by her side and her windbreaker was tied around the waist of her too-tight jeans. The sun beat down on her pallid arms, arms she hated for looking like sickly bloated baby seals sticking out from her sleeves. She hated how every stitch she owned seemed to pronounce her puppy-fattened pear shape. She hated her boobs. She hated her ass. She hated how easily she sweated. She hated Bernard for making her wait here, her every late-teen complex showing to the people of Norton. The whole friggin population of Virginia, dammit! She just wanted Bernard’s car to pull into the lot and take her the hell home where she could hide. She hated how looking up to Ani DiFranco would never compare to looking like Ani DiFranco.

  And now it was official. She hated protesting.

  Damn him if he got himself arrested.

  Becky turned her protest placard upside down and gripped the two-by-four handle to steady herself as she pulled her right foot up behind her butt, bending the stiffness from her weary leg. Feeling better, she repeated the exercise on her other leg.

  He’s getting 20 more minutes and then I’m hitching back to Staunton, she decided.

  Becky’s last sight of Bernard had been at the coalmine in the mountains. Becky, Bernard, and George has been part of a 40-strong sit-down blockade of the mine entrance for most of Saturday morning. George was Bernard’s year-older militant best-bud, a self-appointed poster boy for saving the world and a Tyler Durden teen-wannabe. George was always crowing about his peerless warrior exploits at the Sea Island G8 protests the year before. For months after, he proudly displayed a gash under his hairline. He claimed he’d been dealt an unrighteous blow from a fascist pig cop’s baton during a clash at a chemical plant protest in Brunswick. Bernard had let Becky in on the real cause—the swinging base of a Budweiser bottle, wielded by a big-breasted freshman from Atlanta. George had gotten a little too frisky during a Sierra Club cook-out in Savannah the night before Brunswick. He’d actually spent the protest on an ER trolley, 60 miles removed.

  Not so Norton, to Becky’s chagrin now. This morning’s events had been low-key, to begin with; a brief noisy rally in front of the municipal building in downtown Norton, where participants strayed in and out of the marching circle, taking snaps for various blogs. Even George had behaved as some locals berated and urged them all to get lives, jobs, or laid; the Bud bottle had obviously knocked some sense into him. When it was clear that the promised Roanoke Times photographer wasn’t going to show, the group bundled into assorted cars and pickups and drove five miles outside Norton, to the remote Red River Coal complex.

  Critical Fork Road was Red River’s private access road into the mine. Once there, George briefed everyone on how important it was not to obstruct the public highway or to get collared for trespass; merely denying access however, he advocated, was fair game. To hear George reasoning—Becky wondered, just how hard had Miss Sierra Big Tits actually hit him?

  Becky and Bernard watched as the blockade took shape. Ten participants lined up directly outside the entrance gates. George then applied crazy-glue to their palms and they held hands with the person on each side. It seemed rather extreme to Becky but George assured everyone that mild acetone solution was on-hand to safely reverse the process. The line spread out so their arms were fully outstretched and they sat themselves on the gravel.

  Three older men, the principal in a John Deere cap with a gallery of tattoos on his meaty arms, produced a long length of chain from the bed of a pickup. It was the biggest chain Becky had ever seen, the links as thick as bananas. With directions from George, they moved along the line, winding the chain around the arms of the people as they went, until everyone looked like Mexican banditos with glimmering bandoliers of silver.

  Two cars were maneuvered within reach of either end of the line. John Deere Guy’s companions scrambled under each engine and wound the chain ends around the axles, padlocking them out of sight. George glued the free hand of each end person to the fender and that was that. There wasn’t a slack inch of chain to be had across the ten souls spread between the two cars. George claimed the authorities wouldn’t risk the injuries that cutting it apart would invite. Becky suspected that, if proved wrong, he would relish the bloodletting anyway. John Deere Guy removed his cap and wiped his forearm across his bald head. He was sweating so heavily, Becky expected him to leave a shiny blue smear of tattooist’s ink behind. He nodded his assessment to George. George gave him a thumbs-up. John Deere Guy worked the line, checking the comfort of the chain-gang.

  In all, it took five minutes. Everyone—chained and unchained—hollered and whooped. John Deere Guy accepted firm backslaps and handshakes. The keys for the padlocks and the locked cars themselves got tossed into some other undisclosed trunk. A banner was unfurled and erected above the blockaders. It declared:

  STOP

  MOUNTAIN

  TOP

  REMOVAL!

  MOUNTAINS

  DON’T

  GROW

  ON

  TREES!

  iLoveMountains.org

  Everyone else carried homemade placards. Becky’s own read:

  Fossil Fools Won’t

  Make Me Extinct

  She brandished it high as they walked in a circle around the blockade.

  30 minutes after, the morning’s first coal truck came hauling out of Critical Fork Road. The protestors all whooped some more and moved aside to reveal the human chain. Then they whooped and hollered even louder and made a big Boo-And-Hiss at the driver in the high cab of the hulking machine.

  A Norton PD cruiser arrived ten minutes later. Two cops demanded to know who owned the chained cars. Everyone played dumb and kept walking. One of the cops bent over the man in the middle of the chain—a bespectacled retired local high school teacher named John Mullins—and asked if he knew where the keys were. Mullins looked the most senior and authoritative person on the line, which comprised souls from 17 to 71 and of all walks and experiences. Mullins denied knowing the whereabouts of any keys, an honest answer. George stayed conspicuously quiet in the ever-moving circle, sheepishly watching the cops’ efforts to get a handle on the scene. By now, four coal trucks waited to exit the mine and a returning one was parked up out on the main road.

  “Shit on a stick,” one of
the cops muttered within earshot of Becky.

  A supervisor from the mine came out of the gate to get a first-hand look at the flies on this particular fromage.

  “I can’t loan you none of our own cutters, guys,” he told the cops, “lessin we wanna end up with a destruction of property writ or get sued for accidentally lopin an arm or two offa these clowns. Am real sorry but you gotta get em moved by yourselves, Eddie.”

  Amid more Boo-and-Hiss, Officer Eddie and his partner ticketed every one of the protestors’ cars but there was little else they could do.

  Sometime after Eleven, Sheriff Tom Packer arrived. He was kitted out for his regular Saturday fishing, which probably accounted for his present expression—lemon-sucking sour. After ripping Officer Eddie a new one, he walked his ire on over to the blockade. Meanwhile, Lennie Unwin, local mechanic fixer-upper for the department’s cruiser fleet, unloaded an acetylene tank from the back of Packer’s truck.

  “Ain’t y’all a lil long in the tooth for this kinda mil’tancy, you specially John?” Packer taunted Mullins and the other elder protesters. “I heard they’s all kids doing this down in Campbell County last week. I imagined that hip replacement of yours would put the brakes on all the Che Guevara fandanglin you been up to lately.”

  Lennie donned neon-blue tinted goggles and waited, welding torch in hand. In his grimy gray overalls, he looked like a blue-collar mad nuclear scientist; Bruce Springsteen PhD, ready to light the fuse of his atomic suicide machine. Becky couldn’t resist taking his picture.

  George, hiding at the back of the throng now, moaned loudly to John Deere Guy, “I said you shoulda took the wheels off the cars. Now they’re gonna burn the chains.”

  Edith Mullins, seated beside her husband, snapped back in George’s direction, “Ain’t a chance I’d let you take our wheels off, Sonny Jim! I wasn’t risking my muffler sounding like your wet fart whinnying now.”

  Sheriff Packer allowed himself a wry smile as the dissent grew.

  “Sugarcane, shush you hear?” John Mullins urged his wife. “Hold the line.”

  “Hold your own line in your own time, Sugarcane!” Edith struggled to her feet, bringing the entire blockade up with her. “This road’s giving me piles. Tom Packer, you put so much as a pimple in the paintwork and I’ll have you on a spit roast from now til election day,” she shouted. Then, whispering beside Packer’s self-satisfied face, she added, “And if we’re going to publicize medical secrets, I can just as easy holler here to high Heaven what I know is putting the ‘sire’ back in your siren these days.” Edith—a part-time nurse—looked at her husband proudly. “Certainly don’t need little blue pills in our bedroom.”

  Packer’s smugness gave way to a stony face of action. “Light er up, Lennie. Let’s run this herd,” he barked.

  “Yeah Boss!” Lennie wriggled on his back under the first chained car. Becky heard the torch ignite with a pop and sparks quickly bounced onto the ground under the engine block and flickered behind the grill. A minute later, the chain on that side went slack with a thud as it hit dirt. Lennie switched sides and cut the other car loose. As he scrambled out and stood, the crowd booed and hissed him mercilessly.

  Lennie daubed a crocodile tear from one lens of his goggles. “Y’all can swing dick til Doomsday,” he hooted back. “All this fussin bout a few black shiny stones. I got me some solar panels on my trailer now. Got me Tivo’ing the Playboy channel with God’s own great furnace. Now that’s climate change I can get with.”

  Once everyone was fully unglued, Sheriff Packer gave assurances there’d be no action if they would all just scat so he could get back to Bear Creek. But as the others slipped away, George produced his ACLU pocket version of the Bill Of Rights and started haranguing Packer on the finer points of the 1st Amendment. Becky waited in Bernard’s Chevy, until it became apparent that George wasn’t going to slink quietly away. Worse still, Bernard was standing by him. Awesome! Livid, she jumped ship to the Mullins’ car as they were pulling away. She yelled at Bernard to haul ass back into town in the next five minutes if he ever wanted to see her again.

  Hardly the ‘Battle in Seattle’, Becky thought now, more like The Fools on the Hill. But it had passed peaceably and both sides got to go home feeling victorious. She suspected that today showed she wasn’t an activist at heart, at least not at the sharp edge where rhetoric ended and revolution began. She believed passionately in the causes which moved her: climate change, Third World sweat shops, Native American relations and, nearest and dearest, the contentious coal-mining practices on her doorstep in the Appalachians. But she was also an 18-year old Virginia girl with a future to figure out.

  And right now that meant food. Becky was starving. She wanted to ditch the damned placard and go into the Applebees to wait. She certainly couldn’t bring it in with her. If they didn’t throw her out for being an out-of-town anti-mining agitator, she’d definitely get booted when she tried to sit and order tap water for the next hour; her wallet was in Bernard’s glovebox.

  Just then, a silver BMW with Massachusetts plates pulled into the lot and swung into an empty space.

  “Hey, nice car,” she said as the smartly-dressed driver walked past.

  “Whatever,” he snapped and disappeared through the entrance.

  Becky smiled anyway.

  Chapter 34

  Scott took the booth directly beside his car. He stole furtive glances to the traffic on the main street as he settled in. The frumpy girl had moved on and he closely eyed every SUV which passed, in case a certain blue Navigator with blackened windows made an appearance.

  Relaxing, he studied the menu closer. He was still scanning it when the girl slid into the seat opposite.

  “Hey, what’s your game?” he snapped.

  “Sorry,” Becky apologized. “I didn’t mean to butt in.”

  “So butt out,” he said, gesturing to another booth with a jerk of his head.

  “You’re from Massachusetts?” she asked.

  Scott looked around the Applebees, half-expecting to spot a familiar pair loitering at some other seat. No one was paying attention to him. The only suspect character in the restaurant was this girl now.

  She said, “I just saw your plates and—”

  He cut her off bluntly. “I’m lost. How about you get that way too?”

  “I… don’t understand,” she stammered.

  “Whatever you’re hustling, I’m not buying. Find some other sap.”

  “I’m not hustling,” she whined. “I just wanted to ask you about colleges in Boston. I was thinking about enrolling up there when I graduate.”

  “Don’t know any. Take a warm coat and a big hat. That’s all I got for you.” Scott leaned intently over the menu.

  “My name’s Becky LaForce. I’m just trying to ask you some questions.”

  Scott kept his attention on the menu. “Lemme guess. Your mother named you after… I dunno… Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. You were laughed out the American Idol auditions. Only Avril Lavigne understands your pain. Now you’re running from it all but the cash dried up ten miles ago. Am I close?”

  “Rebecca De Mornay, actually. She’s some actress. Way prettier than me. As for the rest, well, I can’t sing to save my life so I wouldn’t set myself up for that kind of public lynching. You’re kinda nasty enough to be a judge on it though.”

  “So don’t sit and take it. Go and cry on Ryan’s shoulder. Don’t I have a right to privacy, even in this backwater?”

  “God, I’m sorry you’re in such a pissy mood. But don’t take it out on me. You’re not the only one who’s had a shitty day. I only wanted to ask you about—”

  “About what?’ Scott stared her down. “Harvard? Yeah, right. MIT? Look—”

  He broke off as the waitress circled round to them. She placed two large waters into the no-man’s middle of the table and flicked open her pad.

  “Thanks for stopping by, folks. How are y’all doing today?”

  “Just peachy,” Scott growle
d. He thrust the menu at her. “The honey baby backs. Green salad.”

  The waitress looked at Becky. Mired in awkward embarrassment, Becky silently returned her stare.

  “Nothing for her,” Scott said. “She’s leaving.”

  The waitress tore his receipt, dropped it between the two glasses, and scurried away.

  Scott could see Becky was visibly upset now. She had a cherub childlike face, her jaw and neck carrying those tetchy teen traces of last stubborn puppy fat. Her big blue eyes glistened behind a thin teary film. Her chipmunk-cheeks were reddening with stinging hurt. He felt a prick of remorse rise as she sat, purse-lipped, across from him.

  Yeah, you got her now. Some grifter she is. She’s too scared to even move. Boo-ya, Scottie boy.

  “What age are you?” he asked.

  “18.”

  “From where?”

  “Staunton.”

  “Show me your wallet.”

  “I can’t. It’s in Bernard’s car.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “My boyfriend.”

  “Where’s he?”

  “I think he might be in jail right about now.” Becky pulled a napkin from the dispenser and sniffled into it.

  “You’re not interested in Boston, are you?”

  She shook her head.

  “So what’s your sob story? Better make it good. My bullshit meter is getting twitchy.”

  “I don’t have a sob story. I’ve just had… a shitty morning. I’ve been standing out in the parking lot for hours,” she croaked.

  “Waiting for me?”

  “No. Gawd, no. I don’t even know you. What would I want you for?” She threw him a shocked look.

  “What then?”