by Homer Hickam
Frank put in his two cents worth. “Hell yes, we do and we got to celebrate it in style! Why, it would be a crime to let it slide by without making some kind of fuss. We’re all veterans at this table, ain’t we? I, for instance, am a corporal in the Ohio National Guard.”
Rollie stuck out his chest. “Two years in the University of Kentucky ROT and C.”
“I never knew that, Rollie!” Frank exclaimed. “You’re nearly an officer!”
Rollie looked embarrassed. “I got above average in leadership potential,” he said modestly.
Frank took on the Germans. “How about you boys? You veterans?”
Dieter said something to Gerhard and then both men nodded. “ Ja. We served our country!”
“Damn!” Frank blurted. “You boys weren’t Nazis, were you?”
Dieter looked indignant. “We served in the West German Army! Gerhard and I were Maschinengewehrschützen.” To our blank looks, he made two fists and swiveled an imaginary machine gun around the table. “At-at-at-at-at!” he mimicked.
“My daddy kicked your daddies’ tails in the war,” Rollie said, apparently offended by Dieter’s mock attack.
Dieter shrugged. “Our papas are dead,” he said sadly. “The Russian front.”
“Well, those damned commies!” Rollie fairly shouted, and then pounded the table with his fist for emphasis. I was trying out my new way of holding my knife and fork, and his outburst surprised me enough that I dropped my fork. It clattered on my plate. After a bemused glance in my direction, Rollie continued. “Well, I say you’re veterans, by damn, and worthy of celebrating Pearl Harbor Day.” He looked around the table. Nobody else had arrived, but it didn’t keep Rollie from voicing a dire threat, just in case. “Anybody who says otherwise can just come and duke it out with me!” The Germans looked grateful at being defended, even if it was from nobody.
The junior engineers turned their attention to me. I picked up my fork and gave them a weak grin. “I say Sonny here’s a veteran, too,” Frank said, as if there was a big argument about it. “What I know of his rockets down at Cape Coalwood, he’s seen more action than Audie Murphy.”
Rollie took a long sip of iced tea. “It’s a done deal, then. We’re all veterans and that means we gotta celebrate.” He gave the sly eye to Frank. “Now, I wonder how we oughta do that.”
Frank seemed to be in deep thought. Finally, he said, “I’ll tell you what we need to do, every single swinging Richard Nixon at this table. After supper, we need to go up to John Eye Blevins’s establishment, get ourselves properly prepared, and then head on over to Cinder Bottom. We’ll show them damn Japs they can’t blow us up more’n once a century!”
Rollie looked at Frank with abject admiration. “Oh, lordy, what bliss!” he said.
When the Germans showed interest, Frank took me on. “You’re with us, right?”
“I could use some alcohol,” I said. It was an innocent remark. I meant I could use some alcohol from John Eye as a zincoshine ingredient, but my comment was misunderstood, of course, and got a round of hoots and hollers from Frank and Rollie.
“We could use some alcohol, too, boy!” Rollie roared. “Especially when your old man’s draggin’ our tails around his mine! How about Cinder Bottom? You game for that, too?”
“Not if I want to keep breathing,” I said. “My mom would murder me.”
“How would she know?” Frank demanded.
I almost laughed but I didn’t. “My mom probably knows we’re talking about it this minute,” I said.
The junior engineers’ faces went blank. “How would she know that?” Rollie wondered.
“This is Coalwood,” I said, and left it at that. If you didn’t live here, it was too hard to explain.
As soon as supper was done, Frank and Rollie led the way outside to Frank’s ancient DeSoto. It was missing its rear bumper, and its right front fender was severely dented. Its paint job was dull and faded. It was hard to tell what color it had been originally, but in the light that reached the street from the Club House porch lamp, it looked sort of more or less gray. I clambered into the backseat with Dieter and Gerhard. Frank hung a right at the Community Church and sped up the road, slowing at the unpaved dirt road that marked the entrance to Snakeroot Hollow. The DeSoto chugged happily, although its gears tended to grind. I suspected that was more from Frank not being able to drive a straight stick than the quality of the DeSoto’s transmission.
The little white houses in the hollow looked snug and warm, the windows glowing. No one was out. It was too cold. Snakeroot was one of Coalwood’s two colored sections— Mudhole being the other—but I knew just about everybody who lived there, at least for the first half mile or so. After that, there was a long stretch of dark woods and then another settlement began, this one made up of older, dilapidated houses that included John Eye Blevins’s place. John Eye had lost a foot in the mine a long time ago, but for some reason the company had allowed him to stay in town. He sold his own brand of homemade liquor, ran poker games, and would take bets on just about anything, including Big Creek football games. I never heard a word against John Eye from anybody. I guess he was doing something the company and the town wanted him to do. It was another of Coalwood’s quirks.
With Dieter, Gerhard, and me following, Frank and Rollie stomped up onto John Eye’s porch and pounded on the door. They acted like they were half drunk already but I guess it was just typical junior engineer excess. Mrs. Blevins, a mountain of a woman, answered the door, frowning at the sight of us. “John Eye,” she called over her shoulder in a surprisingly sweet voice, “Frank and Rollie are here, honey. Sonny Hickam, too. And a couple of krauts, from the look of ’em.”
Mrs. Blevins wore a yellow dress covered with green fringe. Every time she moved, it looked like wind blowing across tall grass. She opened the door wider and we all walked inside. It was a tiny house that I knew well. An old, broken-down couch sat near the front door. A couple of sagging easy chairs were against the far wall. An ancient record player was in a dark corner playing some kind of music with horns and drums that didn’t have much melody to it that I took to be jazz. John Eye’s huge bulk pushed through the beads that I knew led into his kitchen. I just got a glimpse of the poker game that never seemed to end back there. I saw four men, one of them white. I couldn’t see who the white man was. The cards covered his face.
“Sonny boy!” John Eye boomed at me in his deep bass. “You after rocket fuel this time of night?”
“He’s celebrating Pearl Harbor Day,” Frank said delicately. “We’re all veterans, you see.”
John Eye ignored him. I guess I was the steadier customer. “I got three jars of your special stuff all brewed,” he said. “Get it for you if you want it.”
“Yes, sir!” I always wanted it. Then I remembered I didn’t have any money with me. “Can I pay you next week?”
“We’ll pay for it!” Rollie boomed, his hand slapping his back pocket. “If we can drink one jar.”
John Eye gave him a narrow look. “Sonny’s stuff’s pure alky-hol, not a drop of cut in it,” he said. “It’ll melt your innards.”
“Just our style!” Rollie said bravely. The innocent of pain are so often brave.
John Eye rolled his eyes but thumped on his wooden foot into the back and returned with a paper sack. Inside it were three big fruit jars of my zincoshine alcohol. Rollie and Frank made a big display of rummaging through their wallets but failed to come up with the cash to pay him. They looked at the Germans. Dieter got the message and dug into his pocket and came up with some scrip, company coins. John Eye took them, counted out the cost—six scrip dollars, total—and handed the rest of the coins back. Mrs. Blevins brought in a tray with some tiny crystal glasses on it. Frank did the honors, pouring each of us a drink. I confessed I couldn’t have any of it. “Get the boy some water,” Frank said, and I knew I was off the hook. I guess he was afraid of my mother.
I’d had some of the zincoshine drink before, the first time Roy Lee
had carried me to John Eye’s to buy some, and I knew it was lethal. It was 100 percent pure alcohol and went straight from your stomach to your brain where it started killing cells by the handful. I worried a little for Frank and Rollie. They didn’t seem to have all that many brain cells to lose.
Frank raised his glass. “Here’s to all the dead men at Pearl Harbor and every man who ever fought America’s wars,” he said solemnly. Then he added, “And Germany’s, too, except for them damn Nazis, not counting Dieter and Gerhard’s daddies.”
“Prost!” cried the Germans. They downed their brew together and immediately started coughing and wheezing and eye-watering, the standard response to zincoshine juice. Frank and Rollie watched and then did the same with exactly the same result. I knew what they were feeling. It was like drinking liquid fire.
Rollie gasped and then bent over and made a long, strangled exhalation. Frank pounded him on the back. “Attaboy, Rollie!” he yelled. “Give them Japs hell!”
Three more rounds left the four young men dazed. That’s when Frank started to cry. “Wha’s wrong, Frank?” Rollie asked solicitously. “Tell ol’ Rollie.”
“It’s a woman, what else?” he wept. With the zincoshine juice under his belt, he had turned desolate.
“There, there,” Rollie said.
The two Germans, their faces flushed and their eyes nearly crossed, looked at the two Americans with what I took to be abject admiration for the deep conversation they were having. “There, there,” Dieter said, and Gerhard said it, too, although from him it sounded more like “Der, der.”
Frank stood up, swaying. “A woman is a precious thing,” he groaned. He dropped his glass. It bounced and rolled on the floor. Frank watched it with glazed eyes. “But damn them!” he cried. “Damn them all to hell!”
“You got that right, Frank!” Rollie said, staggering off the couch and putting his arm around Frank.
The Germans just watched, their jaws unhinged.
Tears flowed down Frank’s rosy cheeks. “I havta have her, Rollie,” Frank slurred.
“Who’s her?” Rollie cried. “Tell me and I’ll go get her so you can have her right here on this floor!”
The Germans were mesmerized by the two junior engineers. “Hear him,” Dieter said, looking into his empty glass, then licking the rim.
Frank moaned. “She’s in Cinder Bottom. You know her, Rollie. What’s-her-name!”
Rollie’s brow furrowed. Obviously, he was deep in thought. “The girl with the glass eye?”
“The very one!” Frank wept. “What’s-her-name.”
“Velma,” Rollie said.
“Velma! God, how I love that girl!”
“But didn’t she kick you out of her room, said you tried to cheat her?”
“Yeah! That’s the one!” Frank cried out. “And I did, too. I tried to pay her with a two-dollar bill. Figured she’d think it was a twenty. Now I got to go tell Velma how sorry I am, show her how much I love her. If I just had twenty bucks.”
Dieter wiped away a tear and pulled out his wallet. He contemplated it. Rollie saw it and snatched it from him. “Here, Dieter, you want to make a contribution, right?”
“I don’t know that I have twenty bucks,” Dieter said. “What is a bucks?”
Rollie fumbled through his wallet. “Naw, you don’t. You got three tens, though.” He withdrew them from Dieter’s flattened wallet and offered them to Frank. “Will they do?”
Frank peered at the bills. “Well, it ain’t twenty bucks,” he said, grabbing them, “but it might do if I beg a little.” He stuffed the money into his pocket. “I’m going to go find out right now!” He lurched to the door.
Rollie staggered after Frank but fell on his face. “I’ll go with you,” he told the floor.
Frank barged outside and then disappeared into the darkness. Dieter and Gerhard sagged back on the couch and studied the ceiling. There were some cobwebs up there, but otherwise it didn’t seem to me all that interesting. A cold wind blew through the door Frank had left open.
The poker game murmured on in the kitchen behind the beads. I went out on the porch to see how far Frank had gotten. He was on the hood of his car. It looked like he was taking a nap. I came back, carefully closed the door against the chill, and prepared to wait until somebody got sober enough to drive me out of the hollow. I didn’t relish walking in the cold. I suppose I could have waited all night, but the beads swept back and none other than Tag Farmer walked out. He didn’t have his uniform on, just a plaid shirt and khaki pants. I realized he had been the white man in the back playing poker. He looked over the scene. “Come on, Sonny,” Tag said. “Let’s get you and these boys home.”
I went with Tag to get his car, which had been discreetly parked in a grove of trees around a curve. John Eye and one of his fellows dumped Frank, Rollie, Gerhard, and Dieter in the backseat. Legs and arms went in all directions. I climbed in the front and Tag drove us down the hollow. It would have been dangerous to strike a match in the car, considering the combined alcohol breath of the unconscious men in the back. I clutched my paper sack with the two precious fruit jars of zincoshine juice in it. Tag didn’t have anything to say except “I never met the first junior engineer who ever had an ounce of common sense.”
“Two of them are Germans,” I said.
“A goose is still a goose,” Tag replied. “Don’t matter where it flies in from.”
15
A CUTE COUPLE
TAG HELPED FRANK and I helped Rollie inside the Club House. Dieter and Gerhard helped each other. Mrs. Davenport was waiting up for Frank and Rollie as if it was a nightly duty for her, which it probably was. “Those boys,” she said, with nearly a mother’s pride. “Almost every night, they plan to go to Cinder Bottom, but I think they’ve actually made it only once.”
She led the way up to the second floor and unlocked their rooms with a skeleton key she carried on a loop of string around her wrist. Each room had a bed, a table, and two straight-backed chairs. The toilet was down the hall. I thought they were the loneliest rooms I’d ever seen, and it made me glad I wasn’t a junior engineer. The Germans’ rooms were no better.
I went down the hall to visit the toilet. When I came back, Tag had already gone. I went outside to get my bike, but before I could leave, a woman came up the porch steps. I recognized her even though she had her coat pulled tight around her throat and a scarf on her head. It was Dreama Jenkins. She was holding a red bandanna to her mouth.
When the porch lamp hit on her face, I saw that it wasn’t a red bandanna at all but a white handkerchief soaked in blood. A big purple welt had closed her left eye, too. Mrs. Davenport met her at the door. “Lord, girl, what happened to you?” She pulled back the kerchief and inspected Dreama’s face. Then she caught sight of me, standing to one side. “Sonny, call Doc Lassiter. Quick, now.”
“Just need a room. Don’t need no doctor,” Dreama said through her swollen lips.
“Well, you’re gonna get one, honey, and Tag Farmer, too. What’s this?” She inspected Dreama’s mouth. “Lord, you’ve lost a front tooth.”
Dreama pushed the bloody cloth to her mouth. Her tears started flowing. “Yes’m,” she mumbled.
“You need Doc Hale, too,” she said. “He ought to be home soon.” Doctor Hale, the company dentist, lived in the Club House in one of the fancy apartments on the main floor.
I followed them inside. Mrs. Davenport took Dreama into the parlor and sat her down in one of the plush, wing-backed chairs. There was a black phone in a well under the stairs. I went to it and dialed 226, Doc Lassiter’s number. It was busy. Then I dialed 555. Tag’s mother said she’d tell him to come back down to the Club House as soon as he got home.
When I told Mrs. Davenport that Tag would be along but Doc’s line was busy, she said, “Run on down to Doc Lassiter’s house. Tell him to get off the phone and get on up here and hurry his backside doing it.”
Doc’s house was about a half a mile from the Club House. I tore down
the street, turning the corner at the Dantzler house and then past the apartments, running all the way. Doc had been on the phone, he said. He grabbed his black bag and we headed out together. It wasn’t far enough for him to drive. When we got to the Dantzler house, Ginger came out, wearing her Big Creek jacket. “Mrs. Davenport called to see if Doctor Hale was visiting my folks,” she said. “Then I saw you going by with Doc. What’s wrong?”
I stopped while Doc went on. I explained to Ginger what had happened. “I’ll go with you,” she said.
“I don’t think you should,” I said. “She’s pretty beat up.”
“Oh, Sonny, don’t be silly. Of course I’ll go. I know Dreama. Come on!”
We walked quickly toward the Club House. “How was New York?” I asked.
“It was wonderful. Have you ever been?”
“I’ve been to Myrtle Beach,” I said.
She laughed and took my arm as we went up the Club House steps. I felt my face flush at her touch. “Sonny, it just felt so alive! All those people going somewhere, all so busy, all so smart. I went ice skating at Rockefeller Center, too. You should have seen me! I only fell down once!”
“I bet you were the prettiest girl there,” I said, and then gulped at my forwardness.
But Ginger just said, “Thank you, sir.”
I saw that my message to Tag had been delivered. His car was parked outside the Club House. Mrs. Davenport had Dreama on the couch in the parlor. Ginger and I waited discreetly in the hall until Doc finished. “I’ve cleaned her up,” Doc said to Tag and Mrs. Davenport. “That’s about all I can do. I can tell her to put ice on her lips and her eye but I know she won’t. She doesn’t need any sutures. Time will heal her now as much as anything.”
“What about her tooth?” Mrs. Davenport demanded.
“That would be Eddie Hale’s department,” Doc said. “She’ll need some pretty expensive work. Eddie only works on Coalwood people, though, and she’s not from here.” He regarded Mrs. Davenport’s disapproving look. “I don’t like it any better than you, Helen, but that’s the rule. If she’s not married, she’s not a Coalwood woman. It doesn’t matter whose bed she sleeps in.”