The Coalwood Way (19 page)

When we got opposite the Big Store, Ginger came out of the front door, turning to lock it. The Big Store was closed, but I guess she was allowed inside anyway, since she was the store manager’s daughter. She was carrying a carton of milk. “Take me riding,” she said with a grin and a cant of her head.

“Hop up,” I said, patting Champion’s rump.

She was in a skirt. “If I had my jeans on, I’d be there, boy, and don’t think I wouldn’t!”

We said good-bye and cantered on. O’Dell laughed. “That girl’s got more spunk than any girl in Coalwood.” He turned in his saddle to watch her as she walked down the street toward her house. “You ought to ask her out.”

“I can’t,” I said sadly.

“Why not?” O’Dell demanded.

“Because I’m her friend.”

O’Dell patted Trigger’s neck. “Is that supposed to make sense?”

“No,” I said. “Except to Ginger and me.”

We were in front of Linda DeHaven’s house when Jake sped past us in his Corvette. He jammed on the brakes and backed up. He had on his junior engineer uniform. “Hey, boys.”

“Hey,” we called back.

Jake tapped the steering wheel, his brow furrowed. “Listen, Sonny, you free next Saturday?”

“We’re testing a new rocket nozzle.”

“Launch your rocket in the morning, then meet me at the Club House around one o’clock. Wear your boots.”

I said okay and started to ask him why, but before I could, Jake floored the Corvette and peeled rubber for at least fifty yards. I figured he probably wanted me to guide him on a hike. I’d done a fair amount of that when he’d brought weekend women to the Club House and was looking for something else to do with them. Then I thought maybe he wanted to gather some greens for his room at the Club House. Maybe Rollie and Frank would go along, too. If so, I hoped they’d all stay halfway sober. I didn’t look forward to hauling the three of them out of the mountains.

Linda DeHaven came out on her porch, wrinkled her nose at the smell of burning tires, and waved at O’Dell and me. “Got a date for the Christmas Formal?” she asked. The big dance seemed to be on everybody’s mind.

O’Dell took a moment to wax about the beauty of the girl he was taking, a sophomore who lived in Squire. Linda D., a classmate of ours, frowned at me when I confessed I was dateless. “You’re too picky, Sonny Hickam,” she said. “Always have been.” Linda D. and I had known each other practically from the day we were born.

I laughed. “You go with me, then!”

She laughed back. “I already got a date, boy.” Then she said, “I’m having a pajama party on Christmas Formal night. A bunch of girls are going to stick around for Slug and Carol’s wedding.”

“Slug” was Linda’s older brother, whose real name was Jimmy. Carol was Carol Todd, Ada and Ray Todd’s daughter. Their wedding was already down as one of the biggest social events in Coalwood history.

“Who’s coming?” O’Dell asked.

“Emily Sue, Tish, Tootsie, Patty, Linda B., Becky, and Dana.” She waited a beat. “And Dorothy Plunk.”

My heart did its usual flip-flop at the sound of Dorothy’s name. There was no way I could control it.

Linda D., getting cold, went inside. We headed the ponies down the road, easing slowly past the houses on Main Street Row. I absorbed the concept that the exalted Dorothy Plunk would be sleeping in a house so close to my own. I would ignore her, of course, but I’d have to calculate how best to do it. Anything that had to do with Dorothy in my own personal universe took careful calculation, even when my plan was to do nothing.

I shook off Dorothy and focused on the passing houses. So much had changed since the houses had been sold. Instead of the solid company white, many of the houses had been painted different colors—greens and yellows, mostly, but one was a shade of pink. As we passed it, I noticed Cuke’s house looked as nasty and gray as ever. It had been over a year since the company had pulled up the railroad tracks that went past his house, but it was still coated with a crusty layer of coal dust. It didn’t look like anybody was home, although it was hard to tell with Cuke. I hoped Dreama was at Dr. Hale’s office instead of being in there.

When we got up by the Coalwood school, I decided it was time to find out about Billy. “Billy seems kind of unhappy lately,” I said.

It didn’t usually take much more than the mention of a subject for O’Dell to tell you all he knew about it. But, in this case, he didn’t. He just gave me an odd look and said, “Well, I guess he is. That’s why he’s joining the navy. Didn’t he tell you?”

I pondered his question. Billy had been a member of the BCMA for nearly a year. He had come to the launches and put in his two cents worth and I had listened to his ideas, usually good ones, but beyond that, I couldn’t remember when I had ever actually shared more than a few minutes of conversation with him. It was odd when I stopped to think about it. Billy Rose was one of my best friends, at least if anybody had asked me that’s what I would have said, but I couldn’t think of a single time in the entire history of my life when I had actually sat down and talked to him. That was pretty sad, now that I thought about it. “When did he tell you?” I asked.

“When I was at his house a couple weekends ago.”

“I’ve never been to his house,” I confessed. The truth was I wasn’t even sure where it was. Somewhere up Six Hollow, that’s all I knew.

We rode quietly on, O’Dell volunteering no more information on Billy. I guess there was little else to say about it, or maybe he didn’t know any more. “It’s hard to believe we’re so close to graduating from high school,” he said after a bit. “We’ve been in school twelve years. In a way, it seems like forever.”

I smiled. “Do you remember your first day at school?”

“I sure do. I was in Mrs. Williams’s class. She accused me of talking too much.”

“She must’ve gotten you mixed up with somebody else,” I said, laughing. “I’m sorry I missed it. Our class was so big, they split us in two. I was in Miss Stapleton’s class, remember?”

“But we all took recess together,” he said. “I didn’t know any kids except the ones from Frog Level. I was kind of scared, meeting you kids from the main part of town. I remember you, though. You kept running into things. You also fell off the slide and bloodied your nose.”

“That’s because I was nearly blind. I didn’t get my glasses until I was in the third grade.”

We rode on. “Wonder where we’ll be in twelve more years?” O’Dell asked.

“Cape Canaveral,” I replied confidently.

O’Dell shook his head. “You maybe, but not me. Daddy says he can’t afford to send me to college. I’m thinking about the air force.”

I took in O’Dell’s unhappy news. I was sorry to hear it, but it put me in a ticklish position. Of all the Rocket Boys, it appeared I was the only one who was pretty sure he was going to college. I couldn’t blame them if they resented me for that. “You can work on their rockets,” I said, trying to find some light in his situation. “Then come on down to the Cape afterward.”

“All I want out of the air force is the GI Bill,” O’Dell replied morosely. “But I wish I could just go on to college and get it done.”

“I do, too, O’Dell,” I said.

“It’s not your fault, Sonny,” he replied, and pulled on Trigger’s reins to turn him around.

“Thank you, O’Dell,” I said, fully meaning it. I turned Champion around, too, and we headed back down the valley.

The sun was fading behind the mountains when we got to the barn built behind the Carrolls’ house. Red had built the barn for the ponies the year before and it smelled of fresh lumber, hay, and horses. The Carrolls were an industrious family, given to country living. They raised pigs and, for a while, even kept a cow. There was a time when nearly every family in Coalwood raised some kind of animal for food, but the practice had dwindled as the pay at the mine had gone up and the houses were fenced and built closer together.

We unsaddled the ponies and groomed them. O’Dell said his dad wanted their stalls changed, so we shoveled the soiled straw into a wheelbarrow and dumped it behind the barn. Then we climbed into a loft full of baled hay and loose bedding straw. It looked to me like the Carrolls had enough hay and straw in their barn to last a lifetime. O’Dell laughed when I said so. “We’ve got even more bales of hay under a tarp outside,” he said. “Daddy bought a bunch of it when it was real cheap. But now that we don’t have a cow, it’s probably going to go sour before the ponies can eat it. They prefer oats, anyway.”

After we finished mucking out the stalls, put down fresh straw, and saw that Trigger and Champion had their bucketful of oats, O’Dell invited me inside his house. The Carrolls were about to have supper, and Red asked me if I wanted to join them. The smell of ham and butter beans got my stomach to growling so I quickly agreed. Riding a pony can build a powerful appetite. O’Dell had two younger brothers and a sister. Everybody bowed their heads and Red blessed the food. Then, after he said “Amen,” he nodded to me and said, “Dig in, Sonny.” I didn’t need to be told twice.

Mrs. Carroll sat beside me. She had sewn our original BCMA flag, coming up with the design of an owl riding a rocket. “Sonny, O’Dell says your flag is getting kind of worn out,” she said, and handed me a folded cloth square.

I unfolded the cloth. It was another flag, completely hand-stitched. “Thank you!” I said, searching for something more to say to express how I felt. I was just so grateful. Mrs. Carroll had a ton of work to do every day with all her kids and her house. Yet, she had taken the time to sew us up another flag. I settled on Quentin’s vocabulary. “It’s prodigious!”

“Is it worth a hug?” she asked.

It was. I kissed her cheek, too.

WHEN I got home, it was after dark. I found Dad dragging a huge Christmas tree through the back gate. He had his miner’s lamp set on the fence so that he could see what he was doing. One of the branches had tipped off his hat and Poteet had picked it up. She sat, Dad’s hat in her teeth, her tail wagging furiously. “Your mother always likes a big tree,” Dad said, grunting with the effort. I hoped he wouldn’t start coughing.

Together, we propped the big pine against the back porch near Mom’s bird-feeding station. “She usually picks her Christmas trees out,” Dad gasped. “I thought I’d do it for her this year.” He gave a few coughs, as if testing his lungs, and then swallowed heavily. I didn’t mention the obvious to him. With Mom heading for Myrtle Beach, she didn’t need or want any tree.

Dad went back to the gate and held his hand out. Poteet trotted up to him with his hat. He took it, gathered up his miner’s lamp, and got back in his truck, driving off, I presumed, to the mine.

I looked at the tree. If it was going to fit in the living room, it was going to need to be trimmed by several feet. Mom, probably hearing the commotion, came out on the back steps and pondered the tree in the glow of the porch light. “And there it shall remain,” she said, and turned on her heel and went back inside.

It hurt my heart to hear her words. Never, in all my born days, had Mom ever been anything but completely, totally delighted with a Christmas tree. To my chagrin, I felt responsible for her new attitude. If only I had told her from the start I would work on her blamed Christmas Pageant, I thought. And maybe if only I hadn’t given her such grief over her forcing me to be with Dad and Poppy last Christmas. Then I went further to think that if only I hadn’t let Chipper out, then maybe . . .

But there was that blamed phrase.
If only.
I surely wished it could be banned from the English language.

I went upstairs and got out my list. I added
Mom and
Christmas Tree
to it. It was an odd little list, no question about it, and it seemed to me that it was missing something very important, something so obvious that it should have just jumped out and hit me right between the eyes. Still, I believed that somewhere in that list, maybe actually in between the words, was the answer to that thing that, every so often, vexed me so. Then, finally, I remembered to put one more thing down. It was past time and I was proud that I did it:
Billy.

20

SIX HOLLOW

I FOUND MOM looking at a suitcase on a chair in her bedroom. It was open but empty. “Can I borrow the car?” I asked. “I want to go up to Billy Rose’s house.”

She tore her eyes from the suitcase. “Why?”

“Because I’ve never been before,” I said. Then I told her about Billy quitting school and joining the navy.

She didn’t act surprised. “I’ve been hearing some bad things about Arnee Bee,” she said darkly. Arnee Bee was Billy’s dad. She pondered me. “What say I go with you? I could visit Henrietta Johnson. I haven’t talked roses with her in a coon’s age.”

I wasn’t sure who Henrietta Johnson was but I said okay. I aimed the Buick up the road past the mine and turned in at the Six company store. Mr. Dantzler had closed it the year before when many men up Six Hollow had lost their jobs and business had fallen off. The store’s vacant, dirt-smeared windows stared at us. Somebody had finger-written GO OWLS on one of the windows. Another message said HICKAM GO TO HELL. “At least they spelled it right,” Mom said grimly.

The road up the hollow had been built out of slack and cinders. It was potholed and rutted. We entered a row of sagging, dirty houses with peeling paint and knocked-out windows. “I don’t remember it looking like this,” Mom said. “Haven’t been up here in a couple of years . . .” And then her voice trailed off as she turned her head to look at a house that had burned down. Charred boards stuck out in crazy angles where the roof had collapsed. There was a plastic doll without a head in the front yard.

Scrawny chickens pecked at pebbles along the road. Runny-nosed children, playing in yards stripped of grass, stopped and watched us with big eyes. Their coats were dirty and torn. “This is where the trick-or-treat children came from,” Mom said. She seemed to be talking to herself. “I thought somebody had brought them in from some other town. . . .”

Every house seemed to get tireder and poorer as we drove farther up the hollow. Windows were busted out, fences drooped, trash lay in the ditches. I saw a rose trellis arching over a gate and it stirred a sudden memory. I remembered who Henrietta Johnson was. She was a colored lady who had helped Mom out when we’d lived up on Substation Row. It was when Dad had come down with cancer of the colon, and Mom was staying with him a lot at the hospital. She didn’t want Jim and me to come home from school and find the house empty, so Mrs. Johnson had started coming by every day. Besides making sure we boys got supper, she also did some light housekeeping. Mom had planted one of her first rose gardens in the backyard about that time, and Mrs. Johnson came to admire it, so much so she had planted a rose garden at her own house. Every so often, Mom would want to go see Mrs. Johnson’s roses, to admire them and have tea with a woman who had become her friend. I remembered the Johnson house being neat as a pin, its white paint gleaming, and the trellis covered with bright red roses. But now, as we passed it, I saw the trellis was broken down, a scraggly brown network of dead vines the only indication that anything had ever bloomed there. Mom looked at the sagging trellis and the ghostly house behind it. “Poor Henrietta,” she said, her fingers at her mouth. “Why didn’t she let me know she was leaving?”

I pulled up in front of the tiny crackerbox of a house O’Dell had described as being Billy’s. The front yard was a strip of black slack dirt. The porch sagged on cinder blocks, and one of the windows had a pane missing. A piece of brown cardboard covered it. When I stopped, Mom stayed seated. “Are you coming in?” I asked her.

“Will you be long?”

“I don’t think so. I just want to say good-bye. I’m not sure when he’s leaving, so I thought I’d better catch him while I can.”

“I’ll wait for you,” Mom said. “If you boys need to talk, you don’t need me around.”

“I’m sorry about Mrs. Johnson, Mom,” I said.

She shook her head. “I still can’t figure out why she didn’t let me know she was leaving. We were friends.”

“If Mr. Johnson got cut off, I guess Dad was the one who had to do it,” I said. “Maybe she got mad at you over it.”

“No better woman in Coalwood than Henrietta Johnson,” Mom said. “I always meant to come visit her. I don’t know why I didn’t.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I thought I understood how she felt. Neglecting a friend seemed the surest way to lose one.

When I got out of the car, I was hit by a foul odor coming from the ditch that ran in front of Billy’s house. The coal company had installed indoor plumbing in all the houses in Coalwood, but when the houses had been sold off, the utilities had been sold, too. I wondered if Six Hollow was still connected to the sewer line. It didn’t smell like it.

A flimsy board lay over the ditch. I walked across it and climbed up on the porch and knocked at the screen door. The door was ripped at the bottom, as if it had been kicked in. It took a couple of knocks before Billy answered. His forehead lifted at the sight of me. “Sonny?”

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

Billy looked past me, saw Mom sitting in the Buick, and then opened the door. The odor of cigarette smoke filled the air. The door opened into the living room. There was a faded green sofa along the far wall, a wooden table sitting beside it holding a clear glass ashtray piled high with butts. A small, sour-looking man regarded me from the sofa. He was wearing a pair of old canvas pants and an undershirt. It was Arnee Bee Rose, Billy’s dad. When he saw me come through the door, he nervously jerked the cigarette from his mouth as if I’d caught him smoking when he wasn’t supposed to. He blew a purplish plume up at the ceiling, then narrowed his eyes at me. He slowly and painfully got to his feet, holding one shoulder higher than the other as if it hurt him to stand up straight. “Homer Hickam’s boy,” he said, by way of a greeting, and then glared at his son. “Billy, you comin’ up in the world, ain’t ya?” My eyes strayed to the couch where there was a big hole in one of the cushions. He saw where I was looking and said, “I fell asleep with a cig in my hand. Getting a new couch next week, all the way from Bluefield. Ain’t we, Billy?”

Billy shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Come on,” he said miserably, and led me to the back of the house. An open doorway led to a tiny kitchen, where two little girls sat at a card table, playing with some ragged dolls. They watched us go by but said nothing. There were three doors in the back. The one in the middle led to a tiny bathroom. As I went by, I could see there was no water in the toilet bowl. Billy opened the door to the left. “This is my room,” he said.

It was a tiny room, its floor covered with a sickening shade of yellow linoleum. Blankets and pillows were scattered about. A kerosene lantern sat on a rough wooden table littered with school books. “I share it with my brothers and sisters,” Billy said. He nodded toward the lantern. “The electricity got cut off last month.”

I tried to imagine the room at night, when Billy slept there with six children. It was also where Billy studied and did his homework. Billy made almost straight A’s every semester. I thought of my room in comparison and felt a twinge of shame. His father started to yell at someone, a stream of curses. Billy ignored it. “I still don’t know why you’re here,” he said.

“I heard you were going to join the navy.”

“That’s right.” He was subdued.

“Billy, I know you’ve been mad at me—”

“I’m not mad at you,” Billy said. “I’m just tired of you.”

I couldn’t imagine what he meant. “Tired of me?”

Bill gazed through the grimy window. The light that pierced it looked cold and gray. “I’m tired of you talking about going down to Cape Canaveral and working for Wernher von Braun, tired of you building your rockets and people coming down and applauding you for doing it, tired of you being who you are and me being who I am.”

“They don’t applaud just me,” I said. “It’s for everybody in the BCMA. You, too.”

“Me? What’s my job with the BCMA? Did you ever invite me to help you calculate a nozzle? Or had me down to your house to help load a rocket? Not once. I chase after your rockets, find them for you. Hell, you could train a dog to do that.”

“I never knew you wanted to do anything more,” I said weakly.

He tucked his thumbs in the pockets of his faded jeans. “You never cared enough to know,” he said. “Why are you really here?”

The truth was I really didn’t know myself. “I guess I just wanted to see where you lived,” I said. It was the best I could do.

He swept his hand around the room. “This is it,” he said bitterly.

Mr. Rose was yelling at someone or something, or maybe he was just yelling to be yelling. A baby cried somewhere in the house. Billy grimaced when something crashed in the living room. It sounded like the ashtray. “Yeah, my daddy’s a drunk,” he said. “Guess he’s got a right to be with his pelvis crushed and not healed right. But he’s getting harder to control. . . . He hits my little sisters too hard sometimes and then he . . . I don’t know what’s going to happen. Only thing I know is the navy’s got a place for me and I’m going.”

“Billy, is there anything I can do?” I asked.

He shook his head. “You’re a little late. I’ve already signed the papers. There’s nothing anybody can do. It’s just the way it is.”

WHEN I came out of Billy’s house, the Buick was empty. I found Mom down the road at the old rose trellis. She was fingering the dead vines. A couple of dirty kids stood watching her. One of them kept sniffling and then wiping his nose with the back of his hand.

“I asked”—she nodded toward the kids—“and they said the house has been empty for over a year.”

“There was no way for you to know.”

“Your dad had to know,” she said more to herself than me. “He knows everything that happens in this town. But he didn’t tell me. Maybe he didn’t think I cared. I guess the way I go on about Coalwood, he has a right to think that.”

It was getting dark. “We better get on home,” I said.

“Do you know why your dad is in 11 East, Sonny?”

“No, ma’am.”

“I heard you had a run-in with the Mallett boys because of it.”

I shrugged. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

She nodded. I suspected she’d already gotten a complete description of what had happened. “What do you and Jake Mosby have cooked up next Saturday?”

“I think he wants me to take him hiking or get some greens or something,” I said. “Why is Dad in 11 East, Mom?”

“Because he’s trying to save the world, as usual.” She fingered the old vines. “How’s Billy?”

“He’s signed the navy papers.”

“I could hear Arnee Bee yelling.”

“I don’t know how Billy gets such good grades in that place.”

“What else did Billy say?”

“He said he was tired of me.”

She frowned. “What did he mean by that?”

“He thinks I’ve got the world on a string. He makes straight A’s and nobody cares. I make an A in anything and everybody celebrates. That’s the way he sees it.”

“Maybe that’s because that’s the way you see it,” she said, smiling. “You’ve been known to get full of yourself from time to time.”

I was tempted to say that if that was so, I came by it honestly. Wisely, I stayed silent.

Mom’s smile faded as she looked back up the hollow, toward Billy’s house. She squared her shoulders. There were gears turning in her mind. I could see it in her eyes. But all she said was, “Gol, it stinks in this old place.” And then, “Sonny, take me home.”