Strange as This Weather Has Been (37 page)

Now they’re turning off onto a paved road back up a hollow. Corey has passed the road many a time, but he’s never been up it or given it a second thought. It’s a short hollow, only six or eight houses on either side before the road starts climbing, steep. The road narrows, gets tunnelly in the heavy green brush, but stays weirdly paved. Down below, you can occasionally see an overgrown railroad spur, covered with the kind of plants grow over and around old clinker beds. Lot of rabbit tobacco. Then they round a bend, and boom, Corey insucks: right smack in front of them the world turns to tipple.

This humongous old tipple. It is one of the biggest tipples Corey has ever seen, ain’t nothing in the windshield but tipple, nothing out the windows, either, and overhead, the chutes and belts, some of them having broke off sudden and just hanging out there in midair, and wires and cables dangling all over like dead snakes, the tipple bleeding rust down its corrugated walls and aluminum pieces of it having shuffled loose and flapping there, and Corey, his chest hardening, he bounces higher in his seat. The flashlight, the rope, the NO TRESPASSING signs all over with their tongues sticking out, but him and Rabbit will just throw a fuck-you finger back, they’ll be strutting in after that part . . .

But Rabbit does not stop. He drives right under the tipple, past more NO TRESPASSING signs, and Corey is left turned around in his seat on his knees, until the tipple is shut out by how the road curves.

Then the asphalt starts breaking down here and there, dipping, in places it’s completely caved in and the station wagon seems almost like it’s driving on its side, Corey expects to hear a scrape. He knows
they are mine breaks, a long-ago deep mine under them and the road caving into the tunnels, and what would you see if you fell all the way through? And Corey pictures Paul Franz and them in the back of the station wagon, real nervous about these mine breaks, while Corey rides at ease with one arm out the window. They pass a jeep wrecked in a gully right off one of the worst dips, the kudzu moving to bury it, and if you look hard, under the plants, there is metal all around, cables and truck parts and big pipes and rusted square things. The green stuff rising quick and pressing through that metal to where you can’t tell what the metal was, poison ivy, Virginia creeper, a million just plain weeds. Strangling and pushing, in-growing there, birthing a new kind of species, this crossbred vegetable metal. Rabbit cruises along in a cool slouch, his pint bottle upright between his checkered thighs. “Oh,” he mentions as they nosedive into a road buckle so sharp-angled seems it might take the headlights out, “this here mountain is just chock-full of deep mines.”

They shake clear of the brush a little, pull a rise, and down below, Corey can see an unfenced cemetery, gravestones kind of scattered on it. When he looks closer, he sees several graves have fallen clear through. Just a chute of earth dropped down like a plug gone, and he’s never seen anything like that. Rabbit’s taking a gulp from his bottle as they hit another big crack, and a hefty slog spills on his checkered pants, but Rabbit just brushes at it.Then the plants close back in again, shouldering on you, the humping and heaving green, pressing, and the sky pressing, too, towards rain, the air heavy with it. Bust-ready. Corey cannot wait.

The paved road peters out in a broadish flattened place under a hillside that has been sliced straight up and down to make a sheer orange cliff a couple stories high. The face of this cliff is drilled at neat intervals with augur holes the size of garage doors, like a row of garage doors straight back into the mountain, and, shit, forget the
tipple, an augur hole would beat the tipple all to hell. Corey gets his bounce back, but tamped down so that Rabbit will not notice, and now Corey is seeing shadowy metal stuff, and rubber and wires, and
like passing that grate at the end of the Big Drain,
and . . .

But Rabbit has already got his flashlight and rope and is staggering off into the overgrown field away from the augur holes, his little bottle stuck in the elastic stretch waistband of his double-knit pants. Corey swings out and follows through the bad brush there, coarse tan grass and nasty locust saplings and mountain olive. He carries his work gloves, the locust thorns ripping at his jeans legs, and it starts to sprinkle finally, the rain seeming to fall from far, far away, the sky so far above the high augered cliff. Then Rabbit draws up sudden and stops.

Corey almost walks right past him, then gulps an “ah!” despite himself. They stand on the edge of a mine break so camouflaged with grass there is no way you could have seen it ahead of time unless you were circling directly over it, like a bee. The hole is biggish, two, three feet across, and it falls in on itself soft, the grass still growing down its sides where it collapses in, and below that, you can see nothing but dark.

“There ya go,” says Rabbit. He begins uncoiling his rope. Right then, Corey understands.

“You wanna put me down there?” Corey meant to ask it steady, but it comes out cheepish. He wants to bite himself.

“Yeppur,” Rabbit says. “Won’t work the other way.You ain’t strong enough to lower me.” Rabbit is already ringing rope around Corey’s chest, snugging it under his arms.

Corey steps backwards a few steps. Inside his ribs, a little mouse begins to run at slippery steel walls. “What for?” he asks.

“Well, there’s an ole panel off a breaker box down there. I think it’ll do the trick.”

“How do you know it’s down there?” Corey asks.

Now Rabbit is tying knots, and Corey’s never been this close to him before. Rabbit is fumbling around him, the yellow smell in rings, urine, then last week’s liquor, then today’s. “Oh, me and my cousins been all through these tunnels. We seen that breaker box and knew it was near this hole because of the daylight coming through. But it was too much to drag it all the way back to where we come in.” The bristled face, the unnameable color, and on top his hatless head, the oily copper coils. Rabbit finishes his knotting, steps back, and studies his work. “Once you get hold of it, untie yourself, fasten the rope around the panel good, and I’ll haul er up out of there.”

Corey notices Rabbit doesn’t say anything about hauling him back up.

It takes a good bit to scare Corey, but being dropped in a hole he can’t see the bottom of by a drunk man, well, that comes close. The mouse, now mice, skittle at those slippery walls. But Corey is no chickenshit. Then it occurs to him (
just a little low-to-the-ground speedwagon
) what kind of payback this should get him. Just how big Rabbit is going to owe. “Whereabouts is it?” Corey says.

“Once you get down there, I’m pretty sure it’s back that way.” Rabbit tips his head to the left. The rain is falling harder.

“What’s it look like?”

“Oh, it’s like a big metal box.You’ll know it. Ain’t nothing else like that down there.”

Corey sits on the grassy-sloped edge of the mine break.
It’ll sound like a chainsaw starting up, that engine in it.
He feeds the flashlight Rabbit hands him into his camouflage shirt and tucks the shirt tight in his jeans, carries it that way to free up his hands. Then he looks up at Rabbit, and Rabbit looks at him, and Corey scoots straight off before his brain can think.

Despite being drunk, Rabbit manages to get the rope snubbed short
and taut, and he even pays it out proper, so Corey doesn’t freefall. Corey’s clinging to the rope with his gloves, he swings his feet to feel around, and he hits dirt for a while.
I’m going in a mine,
he has never been in a mine before. Used to be, when he was little, he would say, “I’m gonna be a miner.” And Dad would say, “Won’t be no coal left for you to mine,” and now Mom says, “Won’t be no mountains left for you to work,” and Dad has always said, “No, boy, you ain’t working in no mine.”
They’re right,
Corey thinks,
I won’t have to go in no holes. I’ll work er on top.
And scabs, Dad calls em, ditch diggers,
that ain’t no mining,
but Corey doesn’t care, he would run that shovel easy as handling his bike.The rope grinds up under his armpits, it hurts, forces his arms to splay out in an angle they don’t want to go. But also Dad will say, when Mom is not around,
we won’t be here by the time you’re big enough to get a job. We’ll be in North Carolina then.

Corey has heard Rabbit begin to pant, and now Rabbit kind of giggles and calls, “Buddy, you’re stouter’n I thought!” Corey tightens, his body’s growing cooler and cooler, and he tells himself not to think, think instead,
North Carolina. North Carolina.
But Bant said they ain’t got no four-wheelers in North Carolina.
You remember seeing any down there?
she said, and, well, no, Corey didn’t, but he was littler then, didn’t remember anything real well.
That’s a city,
Bant says.
You can’t ride a four-wheeler in a city, it’s against the law, it’s not street-legal down there.
Corey told Dad what Bant said.
Well, that’s a lie,
Dad said, but like he wasn’t paying real close attention to what Corey had said.

Then, quicker than he can think, Corey drops. He doesn’t fall far, but he hits ground in a kind of squat-crumble on his bad ankle, and he screams “Shit!”

Rabbit calls, “Where the hell’d you go to?”

Corey runs his hand along the rope. “Knots gave.” He stands up, wincing on the ankle, then swagger-staggers a few short steps. Light
spills down the hole, and even with the rain in it, it lights this part of the shaft surprisingly clear, even though you couldn’t see jack from up there in the daylight. The floor is puddled with water, the ceiling in places dripping with it, cool, and the ceiling is right down low to him, like a ceiling made to fit him. Standing underneath it makes him feel tall. He looks as far as he can see up and down the tunnel in both directions, but he doesn’t see any metal panel. And because of how he fell, he can’t get his bearings, doesn’t know which way Rabbit pointed, so he backs up against a rumply uneven wall, tries to see up to where Rabbit is. He hollers, “Show me yourself!”

The tiny-checked knees plop down on where the grass caves in.

“Now which way do you think it is?”

“That way,” calls Rabbit.

“I can’t see what you’re talking about.”

“That way!” and now the rope is kind of swinging around, like Rabbit thinks he’s waving it towards the box.

“That don’t tell me nothing!”

The checkered knees disappear. Next thing Corey knows, a rock is skipping past his head towards the part of the shaft on his right.

“That way!” Rabbit hollers.

“All right,” Corey mutters.
Speedwagon,
he tells himself.
Speedwagon speedwagon speedwagon
he chants in his head to drive down the other. He can hear the mine drip drip. He already has the flashlight out of his shirt, and he thumbs the switch, but nothing happens. Flicks it off, tries again. Nothing. He slaps it in the palm of his hand, nothing changes,
speedwagonspeedwagonspeedwagon buddy will he owe me
he unscrews the end, spills the batteries on the ground, turns them around, wedges them back in. Now he’s scared to even try again, but he does, and, there it is. No light. “Son. Of. A. Bitch,” Corey says.

He lifts his face up to the hole. “Rabbit! Your light don’t work!”

“What?”

“I said, your light don’t work!”

Silence. “Oh. You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

A shuffling around the rim of the hole. “Didja check the batteries was pointing right?”

“I tried everything.”

“Well, now.” Silence.
Speedwagonspeedwagonspeedwagon,
to drown out, what is coming, no,
monkey monkey monkey
and Rabbit calls, “Well, just walk that way feeling with your feet. It’s there on the floor somewheres.”

“How big is it?”

“Shit, it’s near big as a air conditioner. You can’t miss it.”

Corey cusses, loud,
monkey
.Then he just charges at the tunnel. He bows his legs a little and swaggers on the bad ankle, cussing, and he just charges along under that low roof, over the bumpy earth floor, but the harder he tries not to think (monkey), the more he does think (monkey), it’s there all along right under the cusswords (monkey), the light from the hole melting fast, and Corey decides
sonofabitch
isn’t powerful enough, so he switches to
fuck
(monkey), but
fuck
is really too short, so he tries
goddamn motherfucker
(monkey). He sees nothing metal at all, he feels nothing metal at all, the light narrowing behind him like a funnel closing, and him sloshing through cold water, his tennis shoes soaked, and the shaft is wide enough that he has to zigzag it to have any chance at all of hitting that breaker box. He keeps cracking into blunt objects, then he has to strip off his gloves, and feel with his naked hands, but they are always rocks, and it occurs to him, what if one of them coffins fell in here, and, then. He’s somehow turned a bend, and there is no light at all.

Corey stands stock-still. Without light, he is no place. First he was there. Then he is nowhere. And now, he’s not just no place, but he starts to lose himself.

All of a sudden, he’s not knowing where his parts stop. He cannot tell where he ends. His hands, his feet, fading, then his skin, too, fading, and then he’s not even knowing about his head, he is not he is losing Corey. He panics, flails, he grabs. He goes after Corey, he snatches at him, tries to bundle him back, but he finds himself swimming at air, and finally, on frantic instinct, he wheels and plunges towards where the light should be. He’s not thinking
Rabbit
or
speedwagon
or
motherfucker
or even
monkey,
Corey’s not thinking at all. The black starts to gray and then starts to shape, puddlewater splashing up and the rough tunnel sides he can finally see. Corey is still plunging after himself when he hits it, the metal stubbing his tennis-shoed toe. It’s in the dead middle of the floor.