Strange as This Weather Has Been (38 page)

He reaches down. He takes off a glove and feels of it, the metal. He pings it with a nail, makes sure. Then he strokes it. And with that, he is himself again. He is Corey, and sonofabitch if he hasn’t found the goddamned breaker box, and is Rabbit
I can make run a no-legged man
gonna owe him now.

The panel is too awkward, too bulky, for him to pick up, even if it weren’t heavy, which it is. He has to walk it end over end to the hole, and he is very careful with it, rocking it gentle, straining his biceps, feeling the good muscle there each time he catches it before it falls on its side. The hardness in the breaker box, like the hardness in Corey’s body, to touch the breaker box is to feel its return. He hears deep inside him the way the speedwagon will start. He ties the box good with the rope, and Rabbit hauls it back up, and Corey can hear the pleasure in Rabbit’s grunts, and
is Rabbit going to
. The pressure of the taut rope erodes the mine break edges so they give a little, dirt and shale peppering Corey’s head. Him with his gloved hands on his hips watching the panel dangle, rise and spin, his knots holding, and his speedwagon, the way it will start like a chainsaw, you’ll jerk its rope to start it, and then buddy, will it wail.

After he hauls Corey back up—a couple iffy moments at the crumbly edge, then Corey claws his way out—Rabbit backs the station wagon as far as he can over the bad brush, and the two of them load the panel in the rear. Corey bears the same weight Rabbit does. It is outright raining now, the rain with a chill to it, more November than August. Rabbit slams the tailgate shut, then swigs a victory drink, a swallow as long as his neck. Then he offers it to Corey. Corey has tasted whiskey before. He knows how it will ram, then fire, his throat, so he is careful, he doesn’t cough or gag. He just wipes his lips with his bare arm and says, “Ahhhgg. Oom.”

During the trip back on Route 9, Rabbit doesn’t crack thirty-five again, so more cars and trucks whip and barrel around them on the endless double yellow lines. Again, Rabbit is reclined in his seat, slouched with his head thrown back, one windshield wiper cranking a rhythmic shriek. Cory slouches, too, full of what he has done. Him and Rabbit up at the old house, he sees, working, Rabbit showing him how to put things together, Rabbit letting Corey use his tools, Corey saying,
Well, now, I don’t want to mess your stuff up,
and Rabbit saying,
Hell, you’re not gonna mess nothing up, I can tell you know how to handle tools,
and Rabbit just about to show Corey exactly what part they need to make the engine fire when Corey hears the siren and then notices the lights.

He turns to look behind them, hopeful it’s the rescue squad. It is not. Now Rabbit, with a long-suffering exhale, is pulling off on the shoulder. He pitches the pint bottle under his seat and cusses.

It’s not even the deputy. It is Pinky McCutcheon himself at Rabbit’s window. Pinky looks right over Rabbit to Corey, and says, “Who do you belong to?”

I DIDN’T have an alarm clock, but I could tell myself what time to get up before I fell asleep at night, and then I would. I decided this time I’d try before it was even light at all, figuring the nosers wouldn’t roam too far in the dark. I woke when I wanted, and I saw the boys’ door was open, and I snuck out careful not to make a noise, but I wondered if Corey couldn’t smell gasoline from a deep sleep. Baron pranced up from where he slept between the chair and couch, the strangeness of me leaving at that hour. I’d been planning to tie Chancey, but when I got outside, I saw he was up and gone.

Dew lay heavy as rainwater on the metal gate, and on above, those holding ponds outbreathed a steam like winter mouths. Smoking nastiness. It was lighter up in there than it had been down at the house because of the trees and ridges gone. I hadn’t guessed the light right. At first I stuck close to what was left of the creek, now knocked to a trickle and poison-filled.

I climbed up to walk along the ponds, on the grass, out of the rock. At the toe of each pond, a gummy outlet drained into the next one over rocks chickenwired together, the water a green-gray spew with
fuzzy stuff in it. As I walked, the water pulled at me. I knew from Lace what might be in that water, the chemicals, the metals, and how would they do your skin? Plunge my arm in and skin rapid-shrink away? Saran Wrap thrown in a fire? And then the muscle, that’d go, too, snap, crackle, pop. And finally the poison would hit bone, and, true, the bone would slow it, the poison would have to work harder, but before too long, the bone would be pocked all over with little burned-out pores. Something like my face. Up over the mine rose a cloudpile strange for the morning, more like something you’d see in the afternoon. Clouds bumping along the bald level rim, clouds busy, stepping back and forth in front of each other, jostling for space.

There’d been a second flood, a little flood, two nights ago. The clouds made all afternoon and evening, sun shining at the same time, the sun just boiled the clouds up fuller. I watched the clouds build as I painted, and by the time I got home, the sun was finally covered, and Lace and Dane were worried. Jimmy Make was not, and I understood why. The May flood still seemed maybe a fluke, and the week before, we’d had a false alarm, we’d moved the cars and Lace made Jimmy stay up, but nothing happened. Now Jimmy Make and Lace argued over it, Lace talking about camping up at the Ricker Place, Jimmy saying that was stupid and we had nothing to “camp” with anyway. Finally Jimmy did move the truck with the mower and weedeater in it up on the above-the-hollow road. Because Lace had to work the next day, Jimmy said he’d stay up and watch.

I didn’t hear the cloudburst. Wasn’t any thunder to it. What woke me was something big and heavy slamming the base of the house, that and Baron yipping. I sprung up and into the living room where Lace was hollering at Jimmy Make, what had he been doing, why hadn’t he warned us? and I could tell by looking at him he’d been out of a deep sleep no more than a few minutes longer than I had. Lace yelling, “Let’s get the kids out now!” and Jimmy yelling back, “Get em
out where? It’ll knock em down. It’s dark. We’re safest in here,” and Baron on the back of the couch, barking at the waters out the window. Jimmy Make yelled, “It’ll only rise so high, there’s less rain this time than there was in May,” and Lace screamed, “How the hell do you know? You weren’t even here,” while Tommy in his pajama bottoms clawed at my arm, “Where’s Chancey at? Where’s Chancey at?” and more stuff hammering and slapping along the underpinning. “When it moves. When I feel this house move. When it shifts. What do we do then, Jimmy? When it starts to go?” Lace had gone beyond hollering, she was speaking hard cold little sentences now, and Jimmy screaming back, “You’re the one wants to live in the middle of this mess!”

That goddamned Corey had already sailed out of bed and jerked open the kitchen cabinet for the big high-powered flashlight Jimmy used to spotlight deer. While Jimmy Make stood in the living room window with his face pressed against the pane and his hands framed around his face, trying to see, Corey knelt in the broad sill of the push-out window in the end of the house, the glass cranked open to kill the reflection and the light shining out on the water. I was still standing at the end of the hall, right before the living room, I couldn’t figure out where to move, and I could hear Dane in the bathroom dry-heaving, and I felt for him. I knew he wouldn’t bring nothing up. But then my feet felt wet, and at first I thought I was imagining it, but then I felt it on the tender parts, the instep, between the toes, and I understood it was high enough this time to seep up through the floor. I ran to where Jimmy Make was, thrust my face against the window like him. Out front, the leaping water, no moon on it, all you could see were darker angled objects studding up out of it and the foam glittering white. Then Corey was hollering, “She’s dropping! She’s dropping!” And Corey was right. That was all the higher it got.

I found Tommy crouched on top of that old high-boy dresser in Lace and Jimmy Make’s room. It was the highest place in the house
he could have got except the refrigerator. Some kind of instinct in him. Lace and Jimmy began to fight again.

By the time I hit the boulder field at the foot of the fill, the hollow was full of light. The rocks, they shook me up like they always did. Hard to put a word to it, but it was like the middle of the world showing itself where it shouldn’t.When it should stay a private secret place. I dropped over and fast-crawled them, making myself not think.Then I crossed over to the side of the fill, back to the earth wall I’d tried to climb last time. It was easier this time, that little practice helped, and I think I got four or five body lengths up.

What I thought first was that I’d misstepped and somehow set it off myself.The ground started rolling, and then I heard the boom, and I understood it was a blast, and the second I understood that, I was skidding on my side down the earth wall. My arms still flung above my head, grabbing, and me brown-blinded, pelted and battered, the air full, my eyes full, my mouth, dirt dust gravel fly rock, and beside me, the fill seethed and rolled more rapid than the wall, one long skinny channel of rocks in the fill, it was avalanching. And then rocks the size of baseballs were hitting me, and I couldn’t tell where I was, but I heard Lace,
protect your head,
and I threw my arms around my head and balled up.

Then the boom drew back into itself, away up on the mine, and I was at the bottom, in the big raw rocks, my arms still around my head, some stones still hailing a little. My arm and leg a long scrape from sliding down, and they stung, and although the big boom was gone, my heart echoed it inside me, while the fill still shifted and rolled, trying to resteady itself. I opened my eyes and raised up, and I could see, despite the dust in the hollow like a fine brown blizzard, the blast cloud up over the mountain, slow-shrinking now.

Then I looked back over the boulder field and saw in the dust clouds a spot of bright blue. Beyond the blue, some creature bolting
back down the hollow, too small for a deer and too big for anything else wild, and I realized it was Chancey. Which meant, I understood next, the blue was Corey or Tommy.

Then I was hurtling over those bad rocks. Leaping from one surface to the next hardly slipping, something inside me knew how to go, and when I got right up on the blue, the dust settling, I saw it was Tommy, and I yelled his name, but he didn’t raise up. The back of his T-shirt was still heaving, and I reached down, jerked him up, pulled him to me. The beat of his heart I felt both in his ribcage and under his spine, he was completely full of it, heart, and he was coated with pea-sized pebbles and dirt and dust, and of course he was crying, and I said, “I should beat your butt for following me up here.” I meant it to sound mean, but it came out like a sob. He said something back through all the snot in his head, I couldn’t tell what, but then he turned to look at me, his face moving from scared to stubborn to insulted, and when I finally heard him sniffle, “Corey got to go,” I realized he was talking about the snake ditches.

DANE WAKES in the air between the bottom bunk and the floor, he comes to in that second he spends in the air, then he slams on the floor, still wearing the boots, and the boots are tangled in the sheet, so the sheet comes with him. And Lace is hollering, and then Dane thinks how much farther Tommy had to fall, and he reaches out and across the floor, patting for Tommy, but Tommy is not on the floor. So Dane gets on his feet and stretches up and reaches in the top bunk, pats again, Tommy not there, either, and Lace is in the room, her arms and legs stiffened, her hands open, her face yelling for Tommy, and Dane throws back all the covers, but Tommy’s not there. While Corey just lies on his couch, perched on one elbow, watching. He hasn’t even been knocked off the couch by the blast, even though he is smaller and lighter than Dane is. Then Lace wheels away so fast from the empty bunk and back to the hall that Dane gets knocked down one more time.

Corey vaults out of bed after Lace, smashing down on Dane’s arm as he goes, and the front screen slams twice. Dane wobbles to his feet,
the logs high in his chest, heaving, and then he is climbing into the top bunk. He pulls himself into the top bunk, his hands mushy like they’ve lost their bones, and there he sits rigid on Tommy’s mattress, his legs crossed, the bottoms of his boots in his hands.

He’s sat there, not moving, for a long time, when he hears them again in the yard. Lace still yelling, although you can hear the loudest of it is over, and Tommy still bawling, Dane listens. He doesn’t hear Bant.

The logs lunge. “Move,” he tells his body. His body does not. He swallows, the logs right under his throat. “Move,” he says again, he makes it sound harsh, and this time his hands let loose his boots. His legs unfold, and Dane swings down low enough that he can peek out the window behind Corey’s couch.

Bant is stalking away from Lace, towards the Ricker Run, her shoulders hunched forward, her hair hiding her face. Dirt all over her clothes. Lace is hollering, “You hadn’t gone up there—you get back here!—he wouldn’t’ve followed—Bantella See, right now! Old as you are, you know better!” and Bant disappears around the back of the house.

EVEN BEFORE that visit from Bell Kerwin, we’d been hearing the heavy equipment. Muffled distant at first, but by October, exactly a year after Charlie told me about the permit, we were hearing it right up over our heads. Killing the trees, I knew that’s what they did first, and I knew it didn’t necessarily mean an impoundment was going in. But it for certain meant the death of Yellowroot. If I’d looked at it head-on, I don’t think I could have borne it. Because through all those hard, hard years, I understood now, as I’d lost my self, my dream, my dad, my mom—it was place crept in and filled the lack.

The other thing, though, I’d learned through that loss, is that anger is easier than grief.

By then, I wasn’t any longer just listening at the Dairy Queen. I was talking. I spread the word whenever I could, lots of people didn’t really understand what was happening, just like I hadn’t, because of how the industry kept it hidden up over our heads. And my manager, ole Connie Peters, didn’t like it one bit, but Connie didn’t like to confront anybody but kids, so mostly she just gave dirty looks. I’d tell people the truth, too, say I wasn’t against coal mines, “my dad
and granddad and husband were all miners. I just believe they can do it a better way, a way that would actually give us more jobs and not ruin everything we have.” Some people would laugh at me, and some would wave me away with their hand, and a few would get mad. But the more people I talked to, the more I came to understand that most people, they thought just like me. True, there were some who’d admit it wasn’t pretty, but then say we had no choice, coal is all this place has ever had and ever will. But that bunch, I figured out, was one way or another making a living off it. Then there were a few who actually called it a good thing, said knocking off the mountaintops provided flat land and cheap coal. “Cheap coal!” Loretta would say. “Look what we’re paying for their cheap coal—for somebody in Ohio, Virginia, New York, Michigan, Iowa, Europe, even, to have their lights, we’re losing everything we got.” And I knew the ones who said that about the cheap coal were the few at the very top, the ones sick and crazy from greed.