Hazard

by Margaret Combs

  “Hey, what gives? It’s nine o’clock!” someone shouted right behind me. A spattering of laughter rippled through the crowd. The cop shot us all a warning look.

  My watch was still sitting on the bathroom sink in a suburb twenty miles away—I’d slipped it off in order to wash Zachary’s sticky hands—so there was no telling what time it really was or whether something was delaying the countdown. The people around me shifted, restless and bored. Most of them were regular Joes, up from the fish docks or neighborhoods in Southie. They’d come for a thrill and break in the routine, a big boom. I, on the other hand, had been following this story for days—starting with a press conference two weeks earlier. I’d already interviewed the Loizeaux family, who were in charge of the demolition, a father-son-daughter team. They’d told me how they would wire the building with explosives in six hundred locations, a chorus of time-delay charges, igniting each in a careful order so as to jostle the building at its base and crumple it like a Tinkertoy. No flying shrapnel, no windows blown out of surrounding buildings, no collateral damage.

  Now, I imagined the Loizeauxes scrambling through the empty building, troubleshooting something that had gone awry. Some fizzle of ignition or last-minute miscalculation. If they didn’t fix it soon, my batteries would conk and so would my shoulder. The recorder was like an oversized baby, one I couldn’t put down for fear it would get trampled. I heaved it to my other shoulder and released the pause button.

  The hardest part of assignments like this was the stoicism they required, the sangfroid in the face of a clock that ticked mercilessly toward a deadline. Drumming my fingers on the recorder, I ejected the tape and put it in again, checked the decibel levels. Come on, I whined to myself. Where’s the countdown?

  I thought of Dylan and imagined him in the backyard with my sister-in-law, examining bugs, taking in wonders. All at once I missed him, missed being with him at a moment of surprise. I had been a mother long enough to know those moments came and went rapidly, without mercy, but I shook this off.

  Suddenly, there was a shift in the air, a shudder of energy through the crowd. I spied the policeman holding up his thick hands, all ten fingers splayed. He folded one pinkie and the crowd burst into a chant: “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six”—I dialed up the volume knob—“five, four, three, two …”

  “Do it!” someone shouted.

  A fusillade of flashes erupted from the Traveler’s bottom floors and scurried up its sides. A split second later, the sound hit. Boom-boom-boom. I gasped, transfixed, cringing and hunching my shoulders, stunned by the ferocity. The ground rumbled. I felt as if I were pushed right up against the building’s face, taking its blows. I tore my gaze away from the blasts and frantically checked the decibel level on my machine. In the melee, I’d completely forgotten what I was supposed to be doing. Boom! The needles slammed to the right, bouncing with a fury into the hot zone. Fumbling, I cranked the dial down, just in time for the final cascade of blasts unleashed from all floors.

  In the next seconds a teetering silence fell over the crowd. The building hesitated, as if unsure of what to do. Suddenly, in one soft, swift move, it folded, crumpling in on itself and melting like a glacier in heat, disintegrating straight down to the ground. In fewer than ten seconds it vanished.

  I had no time to record my thoughts or those of people around me. A billowing cloud of white dust and ash rushed toward me and, instantly, it covered my face, hair, clothes, and, horrifically, my tape recorder. Frantically, I wiped off the machine with my bare hand as I stumbled forward, following the cable, dodging bodies fleeing the ash cloud. I arrived at the mic cuffed to the barricade. I couldn’t breathe; no one had warned me about ash and dust, the hazards of disintegrating concrete, rebar, sheet rock, insulation. I tore at the duct tape, at the same time reeling in the cable. Then I ran blindly, away from the site, recorder pressed to my chest, heading for the outer edge of the fog. My homing instincts took me in the direction of my car and I jumped in and slammed the door. The cloud enveloped me, whiting out the windows.

  For a moment I sat and breathed. I couldn’t lie to myself: I knew the sound I’d captured was dirty and far too hot. But I’d gotten it. The story was mine. I could hear it already, and when it aired, it would stop people wherever they happened to be. They’d have the sensation of being right there on the docks, in the crowd, counting down, stunned for a split second as the blast filled their ears, awestruck. For a moment they would marvel at physics, at forces, at how small we are, how ingenious.

  Starting the car, I felt a bolt of alarm. I still had the script to write, the sound to pull, the entire concert of production, including my squabble with the engineer as I insisted on using the sound, no matter how hot. All of this meant I would return home late, after the babysitter was gone and Don had interrupted his painting time to take over. Anxiety bloomed up my neck and around my ears.

  I was a woman who, like thousands of others, didn’t know how to manage both career and family. My generation of Seventies feminists had broken through the wall of sexism only to find there were no structures in place on the other side, no supports and no guidance, only bold assurances that we could have it all. With the birth of Dylan, and then Zachary, I was baffled by my exhaustion but mostly by my husband’s impatience. He supported my career in theory but not in reality. Our arguments, some of which turned vicious, had crackled through the phone into the newsroom moments before I had to be on air, Don bellowing through the phone line over my son’s cries, “Where are you? Why aren’t you here?”

  More than once I had faltered on the air. I dreaded my husband’s voice, dreaded the disharmony and the rent in my marriage. I could not bear the possibility that my children might be growing up just as I had: in a household fraught with tension and unhappiness.

  Turning the key, I backed out and inched the wheels into traffic, heading toward the radio station’s flat-roofed building. I knew deep down this broadcast would be one of my last.

  Chapter 27

  Dave’s Diner

  Somewhere along the stifling stretch of road between Corbin and Hazard, my father swung the Belvedere into the parking lot of a roadside diner. I unfolded from the back seat and shuffled behind my parents and Rod across the hot pavement toward what I hoped was a blast of arctic air and a decent meal—anything other than the sodden sandwiches and Shasta colas we’d been trading around for six hours in the car.

  It was 1989, nearly a decade since I’d spent any significant time with either of my parents, or with Rod. Even longer since I’d last set foot in Kentucky. I was thirty-seven, a wife and mother, and I’d left my sons with my husband back in Boston so I could travel with my parents and brother for a few days. We were heading to Hazard, but not to Combs Furniture or my grandparents’ dirt farm. This time, it was to a nursing home. Papaw, at ninety, was spitting mad he’d lost his independence and the idea had arisen between my parents that a surprise visit from me, his little-seen granddaughter, might cheer him and make him forget he was never going back home.

  Above the diner’s glassed-in door, DAVE’S blinkered in the buzzing heat, half-lit and spattered with bugs. My father tugged the handle and held the door wide as we all tromped through into a blissfully frigid room. There were cracked vinyl booths, plastic place mats, and bustling middle-aged waitresses, pink-skirted and girdled, trailing whiffs of deep fry and Folgers. I paused and stood like a child, taking it in. I was both surprised and soothed to find life in this part of the Appalachians hadn’t changed.

  My mother whispered to the hostess that we’d like a corner spot and we trekked by the other tables nearly all the way to the restrooms. As we reached the last booth, my mother, now in her fifties, stepped aside, petite and fleet-footed, allowing my brother to maneuver in first.

  “Scooch in a bit, so I can fit, too,” she said, her voice breezy.

  Rod’s eyes shifted darkly, a quick zip sideways, but he complied, pushing himself along the vinyl bench. At thirty-three, Rod sported hints of a dissolving
hairline and a thickening paunch, and from the unbuttoned collar of his shirt sprouted signs of a furry chest. Even now, these features rocked me. He was inked into my heart as a boy, and his manhood always struck me as a fresh surprise. Though he bore my father’s full name, he hadn’t taken on the sleek, dark-headed spindle of my father’s physique, but rather the shorter, barrel-chested, and balding figure of my maternal grandfather.

  My mother slid into the booth and my father and I closed ranks on the opposite side of the table, tucking Rod safely against the wall, within the family. In the next instant, Dad ordered coffee all around, meatloaf, corn bread, and baked apples for himself and Rod, and for my mother and me, Cobb salads with ranch dressing on the side.

  “Mercy me, this feels good,” said my mother, fanning herself with the menu.

  The breeze ruffled wisps of her graying hair. Sometime in the last few years she’d grown diminutive, her small frame nearly doll-like now. The menu whooshed side to side, threatening to blow her backward, like an enormous turbine.

  I had spent enough years away from my family to miss them and feel remorse—a persistent sense that I’d run off without good cause. Perhaps it was because I was nearing forty and felt time whizzing by, but a deep part of me wanted to reconnect, to feel my way back to my roots. Also, after all of this time away, I was deluded; I had forgotten that disability doesn’t get any better or even stabilize. When my parents had called, surprising me with their invitation, I considered it a sign. Settling now in a plastic booth, about to share a meal with my family and the simple pleasures of coffee and conversation, I felt a wash of gratitude.

  In short order, the main dishes arrived and for fifteen minutes we ate in peaceful silence, clinking the tines of our forks against scarred, durable dishware. Twice, the waitress sidled up in her apron and perky hat, lifting an eyebrow, her hand gesturing with the coffee pot. The third time, my mother, father, and I chorused a hearty “No, thank you!” and broke into laughter at our shared horror, Dad cupping his hand like an umbrella over his cup. We had the good sense to pass—three cups of caffeine were too much at this dimming hour of the day—and besides, with another hour’s drive ahead of us, it was time to push on.

  Roddy, however, thought differently. He thrust his cup across the table, aiming for the spout in the waitress’s hand, bumping the lip of the pot, and sending hot blots splattering over the bread basket.

  My father raised his hand to keep the waitress from pouring.

  “Now, Rod,” he said, “you’ve had enough.”

  “Oh!” my brother barked, banging his cup down on the tabletop. Little pings rang out from the silverware. He hunched his shoulders, tilting his head, pulling his eyes to the side.

  Left to his own devices, my brother would swallow all the Folgers in the world, loading every cup with mounds of sugar and dollops of cream. For all of his thirty-three years, he hadn’t acquired restraints of any sort—no matter how diligently my parents had tried to teach him. If allowed, he’d take in third and fourth helpings of coffee, not to mention Coke, burgers and fries, milk shakes, and pie a la mode, until his chemistry jittered and his symptoms of flinching and twitching rose to a feverish pitch. Recently, the doctor had warned my parents that Rod now had high cholesterol and elevated blood pressure, and he’d urged then to redouble their efforts with his diet.

  “I’ll just check back with you in a little minute,” the waitress said, eyes flitting to each of us. Tucking the pot to her ribs, she hurried away, her nylons zizz-zizzing to a faraway booth.

  To anyone glancing from across the room, my brother would have appeared in that moment as a stricken boy, subdued and hushed, his dark-circled eyes receding beneath the ledge of his brow. But I knew differently. My breath quickened and I pushed my shoulders back against the seat, bracing for what I knew would come next. Rod dropped his head forward and shouted straight down to the table top.

  “Dad! Have some more coffee!”

  My mother flinched, her hands hopping in the air; then quickly, she straightened the napkin in her lap. A memory flashed in my mind, not of a moment, but of a time when she didn’t have this kind of composure; when her frustration and sorrow at what had befallen my brother billowed out from her like smoke. We’d never spoken of those early years when I was five and six years old, when life was a blur of doctors and thickening horror that my baby brother was broken and nothing was going to fix him. Even now, sitting in this booth, slipping into middle age, it didn’t occur to me there was any reason to retrieve those years, to sort out their confusion and undo their hold on me.

  My father paused, leveling his gaze.

  “Lower your voice, please,” he said.

  “Oh, no!” Rod shouted. “More coffee!”

  Now, we had an audience. Without lifting my eyes from the mug pressed between my palms, I knew most people in the room were fixating on our commotion. Chatter diminished in widening rings, until the only noise other than my brother’s was a spattering of muted kitchen sounds.

  “Let me have your cup, please,” my father said.

  My brother’s eyes cut hard to the side, a startled shot from beneath his brow.

  “No!” he barked. “Have my coffee!”

  His body trembled in the seat and his fingers fluttered about his mouth. A thick pulp moved through my chest. I stared at the black surface in my coffee cup as it shuddered from his outrage.

  How was I here again? A mere week ago I was in my own life, navigating normal chaos, knowing which way to move and what was expected of me. If there were tantrums thrown, they belonged to my two- and four-year-old sons, tiny rages I calmed with hot baths and story books and soothed with early bedtimes. I had forgotten what it was to face a tantrum larger than me, and hopeless.

  “Have some, Dad, now!”

  Gripped with a sudden weariness I leaned my head back against the booth. Across the table, my brother’s features hung over his plate; the delicate moon of his scalp shone through his thinning hair. In that small moment, I wondered where he’d gone; so little was left of the boy I remembered. I thought of his flat-footed steps chasing after me in Grandpa’s store; the shy dip of his chin when he said “Hi” for the first time. A quick stab shot through me. I wished now for that boy, and all of his childhood passions: for his mechanical lady bug toy with its blipping eyeballs, for color-in-the-dots and worn-out Crayolas, for Elvis’s syrupy songs spinning round and round the turntable. I also longed for that moment by the swimming pool when he put himself aside long enough to lotion and soothe me—anything but this fierce and furious braying in a booth.

  In the next instant, Rod lifted his cup and moved it in a jittery path toward my father’s open palm. Then he released it, jamming both hands between his knees, plunging his nose to his plate, and expelling shallow puffs of air. Leftover bread crumbs blew around in circles and out to the far edges of his dish.

  When we were children, long ago, I knew how to be with him, how to sound out hard-to-say words, like “six” and “Jell-O,” how to teach him again to knot his shoestrings and take my hand when we stepped from a curb. I knew how to keep him from harm, leaping to his side and planting myself between him and the bully world. But now, I couldn’t fathom what to do. I didn’t know how to help him, to be his sister in this situation, save for lunging toward the pot and plying him with more coffee.

  Seconds passed—I could hear the ticking—and somewhere off to the side I sensed the waitress glancing over, checking if she might safely approach with our bill.

  Don’t, I warned her silently, catching her eye. Stay there. This isn’t over yet.

  Proving how out of practice I was, how thin-skinned I’d become in my years away, I jolted hard as Rod exploded once more, his “Coffee, Dad!” splaying my hands. I rocked my own cup, knocking over my water glass, spraying a volley of ice cubes and sending a flood of sugar and salt packets across the table and splattering to the floor. The couple at the next table, a balding man and his wiry, wispy-haired wife, stared, unabashed
, mouths agape. The man’s chin pressed back into his collar as he sat alert and incredulous, his mouth dropped at the corners, as if he were about to get up, cross the few feet to our booth, and fix this bad business once and for all. His wife swiveled her chin, as if to say, Really, how could you?

  My father took no notice.

  “You’re going to have to lower your voice,” he said in a steady tone.

  In the midst of my fluster, I couldn’t help marveling. My father was tightly wrapped and reserved, a man of few words and little laughter. Not an affectionate man. But he was exactly the type of person to have with you when your brother was losing it in a restaurant.

  “Okay! Yes!” Rod’s chin whapped the table. “Have my coffee!”

  “You’re not lowering your voice.”

  Turning his head, Rod touched his ear to his plate and grimaced, pulling his lips back into a toothy grin, like a horse.

  “Okay! Okay, Dad, I be nieeeeece.”

  “You’re still speaking too loudly.”

  “Ray … he can’t,” my mother said, her voice a whiff of sound.

  “Okay, Dad!” Rod bellowed. His ear-splitting volume was enough to get us thrown out onto the street. “Have my coffee now!”

  Inside that moment, I felt a deep, unspeakable shame that I hadn’t somehow spared my brother or my parents from this, fixed it so they could find some peace. For all of my blue ribbons and straight A’s and diligent patience teaching Rod numbers and words growing up, and for all of the healthy boy children and grandchildren I went on to bear, I couldn’t thwart the relentlessness of my brother’s struggle. A great lumbering guilt stirred in me, shifting awake the memory of my departure all those years ago, its moments catching up to me: my open suitcase on the bed, my breathy bustling about the room, my mother bending to the floor, layering a steamer trunk with linens and extra towels, the two of us sitting and bouncing on the lid, defied by its bulge as we pounded at the latches, choking with laughter.