by Homer Hickam
As I drove the Buick through the night, every curve in the mountain road came back to me. When I reached War, I parked by Big Creek High School and walked across the bridge to the Owl’s Nest Restaurant. The Dugout was in its basement and my excitement rose as I got nearer, but I discovered, to my vast disappointment, that it was dark and dead. I went inside the restaurant and talked to the counter maid. “Ed’s gone off to Florida for the summer,” she said of the Dugout’s disc jockey. “Be back in the fall, I expect. Maybe not, though. I heard he’s cleaning swimming pools down there. There’s good money in that. Say, ain’t you Sonny Hickam? Good on you for winning that science fair medal. Wanta cheeseburger?”
“On the house?” I asked hopefully. My stomach was growling.
She raised her eyebrows. “Sure, plus thirty-five cents.”
“How much do they cost otherwise?”
“Thirty-five cents.”
I was starved so I took her up on her offer, poor as it was, and then trudged back to the Buick and drove to Coalwood, contemplating the taste of fresh West Virginia onions and life in general. I dawdled the Buick along. I was in no hurry to get anywhere because I had nowhere to go. “Sad times,” I said to myself, remembering the phrase Roy Lee had often used on me when I was down in the mouth about something.
When I got back to Coalwood, I slowed at the mine and eased my way down Main Street. I figured Tag Farmer was around somewhere. Although there was no official speed limit in town, it was pretty much what Tag thought it ought to be, and there was no use getting pulled over.
At Coalwood Main, I drifted past the Club House, the big three-storied neo-Georgian mansion that the elder Mr. Carter had built for his son and his new bride. The bride, a New Yorker, had taken one look at Coalwood and headed back to Yankeeland, so it had never been used for its original purpose. During the 1920s, it had been converted into a boardinghouse for single miners, but it had since been remodeled several times. Although the Club House still housed visitors and a few permanent guests such as Dr. Hale, Coalwood’s dentist, it was also used for holiday parties, retirement banquets, wedding receptions, and just about every important social occasion.
I had the sudden urge to visit Cape Coalwood. I knew I wouldn’t see much, not in the dark, but it just didn’t seem right to be in town and not see the place where once the other boys and I had found a certain measure of glory. When I reached Frog Level Row and bumped up on the dirt road that led to the cape, I floored the Buick, just for the fun of it. Finally, some excitement! I roared around a curve and saw, too late, a good-sized boulder sitting in the middle of the road. I hit the brakes, but the Buick rode up on the big rock and I heard the shrieking of agonized steel. Every idiot light the Detroit engineers had decided to stick onto the instrument panel went bright red, and then the engine died.
It took a while for my heart to stop trying to beat its way out of my chest. When I climbed out, I heard something liquid pattering into the dust beneath the car. I was no auto mechanic, but I suspected that probably wasn’t a good thing.
I walked around the Buick, kicked one of its tires in frustration, and then began trudging toward home, oblivious to the merry stars twinkling brightly in the narrow swath of black sky between the mountains. Once, when I had lived in Coalwood, I had seen those same stars as evidence of the glorious future I was going to have in space. Now I hardly saw them at all. My head was down, my hands jammed in my pockets, my immediate future an unknowable mystery except for one sure thing: I wasn’t going to Myrtle Beach in the morning.
7
MR. DUBONNET’S OFFER
THE ANNOYING ring of the home telephone downstairs woke me up the next morning, and even though I put a pillow over my head, the blamed thing wouldn’t stop. There was only one person I knew who could be so persistent, so I threw on my shirt and pants and went to answer it. “So how’s life?” Mom asked in as sweet a tone of voice as she ever used on me. I was instantly on guard. It was a question loaded for bear, and I knew I was the bear.
I sorted through possible answers and landed on a considerably condensed version of the truth. “Dad’s fine, Nate Dooley’s fine although he has a broken wrist, and I wrecked the Buick last night.”
She didn’t seem surprised at any of my news, which told me she already knew it. “Are you hurt?” she asked.
“No, but the Buick is.” When she didn’t answer for an entire second, I improvised a plea for sympathy. “Mom, can I come to Myrtle Beach now? Dad doesn’t want me here.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“Pretty much.”
“How bad’s the Buick?”
I allowed a mild groan, still looking for some motherly
compassion. “I ran into a rock. It must have rolled down off the mountain. Something got busted up underneath.”
“Where did it happen?”
“I was going down to Cape Coalwood. I just wanted to see it.”
“What did your dad say about that?”
“Nothing yet. I haven’t seen him this morning.”
“Then you’d better talk to him,” she said.
“Then can I leave Coalwood?”
“No, you can’t leave Coalwood. I told you your daddy needs your company while all this mess about Tuck Dillon gets sorted out. Sometimes I think you never listen to a word I say!”
“He doesn’t act like he needs my company,” I said. “He told me to take the Buick and head for Myrtle Beach.”
Her chuckle filled my ear. “Well, you kind of messed yourself up on that score, didn’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am. I guess I kind of did. But how long do I have to stay?”
“Until I say you can leave.”
“When will that be?”
“I’ll let you know,” she replied. “I’m hanging up now. I’ve got roofers in today. Talk to you later.”
“But—” I began, but it was too late. She’d already hung up. I looked at the receiver, then slammed it down. The bell inside the phone protested with a single surprised chime.
I jumped when I heard Dad say, “You break that telephone, young man, you’ll be paying for it, too!”
I waited for him to yell at me about the Buick, but he was leaning over the dining-room table digging into a pile of letters and bills, and it seemed he had other things on his mind. “Do you ever study at all down there?” he demanded, and I saw his index finger pressing against my VPI grade report. “Mediocre in math, mediocre in chemistry, mediocre in everything except English. What are you going to be? A literary engineer?”
I opened my mouth to explain and then closed it. I had no explanation except to say I was doing the best I could. Even I didn’t believe that was entirely true.
His forehead, creased with deep furrows, lifted. “What the blue blazes were you doing down at Frog Level, anyway?”
“I went to see Cape Coalwood,” I said.
“There’s nothing to see,” he said. “Your old shed is long gone—weekend carpenters got it for the lumber, I expect—and your slab of concrete is covered up with silt. There was a flood this past spring, washed a good part of that dump away. Last time I was down there, there were already saplings pushing up. We’re not dumping on it anymore. Give it a few more years, it’ll be a forest.”
The shed he was talking about was the Big Creek Missile Agency’s proud blockhouse. The slab was our launchpad. The dump was once the finest rocket range this side of Cape Canaveral. Every vestige of the old cape had been destroyed. Dad had managed to diminish in a few words a place I considered grand and glorious.
He went back to stirring the mail, my grades thankfully pitched to one side. “In case you’re wondering,” he said, “a tow truck hauled the car over to Welch to the dealer about an hour ago. Tag found it where you abandoned it and called me.”
“Let me know how much it costs and I’ll pay for the repairs,” I said.
He looked up. “You? With what?”
“I’ll get a job,” I said. “I’ll send you the money.
”
He fingered a letter, tossed it down unopened. “What kind of job?”
I explained my plan, which I had just made up. I was going to hitch to Myrtle Beach that very day (I didn’t mention Mom’s latest directive), and there I’d beg for a job aboard one of the tourist fishing boats, baiting hooks and swabbing decks. I would keep mailing money back to Dad until the Buick repairs were covered.
Dad heard me out, then shook his head. “That’s your craziest plan yet,” he said. “Anyway, I talked to your mom this morning, too. She doesn’t want you down there. She says she has her hands full as it is without having you to worry about.”
That shut me up and also told me exactly what kind of box I was in. Dad didn’t want me in Coalwood and Mom didn’t want me in Myrtle Beach. What was I supposed to do, live up in the woods somewhere?
“What are you thinking?” Dad asked, as if he really wanted to know.
“I was wondering what you were going to do about Tuck Dillon,” I said. It wasn’t the only thing I was thinking about, of course, but it was one of them. The accident just didn’t make sense.
“Tuck Dillon.” The way he said it, as if correcting my pronunciation, made it sound like I had no right to say Tuck’s name out loud.
I stuck with it. “They say—” I began.
He interrupted me, his voice weary but tinged with defiance, as if he were doing me an extreme favor merely by replying. “Don’t tell me what ‘they’ say. I don’t care.”
It was amazing that Dad could still push buttons inside me I didn’t even know were there. I choked back a bitter response. “I just want to help,” I said.
His good eye drilled into me. “The one thing I’m sure of in this old world, little man,” he said, “is I don’t need your help.”
And with that said clearly and just as clearly heard, he walked away and out the back door while I stood in the dining room for the longest time, my face burning.
I HAD nothing to do at the house except to continue to make myself miserable. Though I was pretty good at doing that when I put my mind to it, I decided instead to go down to the Big Store for a soda pop. Maybe I could mull a few things over down there.
One thing about Coalwood hadn’t changed. It was nearly impossible to walk anywhere. I hadn’t taken ten steps out of the front gate before a car stopped. It was Tag Farmer, driving his company-supplied Dodge. I subsided onto its bench seat. The floor was littered with empty pop bottles. “Morning, Sonny,” he said. “Did you wear your eyes out in college?” I didn’t know what he meant and said so. He chuckled. “You couldn’t see that rock?”
Thanks to the fence-line, the gossip circuit that went up and down every hollow and cranny of Coalwood, everybody in town was sure to have chewed over my battering of the Buick until they’d reached some consensus, most probably about my stupidity or lack of driving skills. I longed to be back at college, where I had only the occasional department dean to hold forth on my inadequacies, not an entire town. Although I knew it would probably do no good, I told Tag my side of it.
“There’s already a rumor you rolled the Buick,” he said. “I heard Cleo Mallett claim it was three times.”
The gossip was worse than I’d feared. “Tag, you know I didn’t roll the Buick! I just hit a big rock and knocked the oil pan loose or something!”
He laughed. “Remain calm, boy. That’s the way it is around here. Have you forgotten so fast? Everything has to be a little bigger than the way it really happened. How else would we occupy our time, after all, if we didn’t make up a few tall tales now and again?”
“I haven’t forgotten. I just hoped I was exempt since I’m not a Coalwood citizen anymore.”
Tag gave me a sharp look. “Who said you weren’t a Coalwood citizen?”
“Me, I guess,” I replied glumly.
I’d given him something else to laugh about. “Sonny, you ain’t never going to be nothing else but a Coalwood boy, don’t matter how far off you go or how big you get. Don’t ever forget that.”
I started to argue with him, then gave it up as a lost cause. For all I knew, he might have even been right.
When we got to Coalwood Main, Mr. Bledsoe, a roof bolter, came out of the post office, strolled up to the Dodge, and started complaining to Tag about his neighbor’s yard. “I swan, he hasn’t mowed it in two weeks. Hidy, Sonny. Back from school and already tore up your old man’s Buick? Fast one for good and bad, ain’t you? Rolled it over twice! You must have been flying. Lucky you didn’t kill yourself. You best get those grades up, too, young man. So, Tag, what you gonna do about that long grass?”
I started to reply, then clapped my mouth shut. What good would it do? I wasn’t the least bit interested in Mr. Bledsoe’s problems, either, so I excused myself and headed for the Big Store.
Junior, the venerable clerk of the drugstore section, was wiping down the counter. He despised fingerprints and smudges. All the glass cabinets and aluminum soda and milk-shake dispensers were shining like mirrors.
Junior’s eyes widened behind his wire-rimmed spectacles when he saw it was me. His close-cropped hair had turned gray around the edges since I’d seen him last, and deep creases had appeared on his chocolate-colored face, but he was still Junior. “Sonny Hickam! Back to Coalwood, I swan!”
“I’m just visiting,” I said defensively. I put my quarter down and Junior served up a pop and then wanted to know all about my life as a college boy. “It’s tolerable,” I told him.
“Well, you better get those grades up,” he said. “And stop rolling your daddy’s car.”
“Yes, sir.” I sighed.
“How’s your daddy? He holding up all right on this Tuck Dillon thing?”
Before I could answer, a big hand grabbed my shoulder. I nearly spit out my pop. It was Mr. John Dubonnet, the union chief.
“Sonny, good to see you, my man,” he said. “Making Coalwood proud in college, are you? Your grades could be a mite better, I guess, but you’ll make it. You come from good stock, at least on your mama’s side. Those Lavenders never could drive. Guess that explains your accident down at Frog Level. One time, your mama hit a cow with your daddy’s brand-new roadster. Didn’t hurt the cow but totaled the car.” He laughed, I suppose at the memory of Dad’s wrecked roadster.
I took a moment to absorb his greeting, filled as it was with information, genealogy, history, gossip, and a curious kind of logic all at once. “Hello, Mr. Dubonnet,” I finally replied.
He kept smiling. “When you going back to school?”
“September.”
“And how are you going to pay for the Buick? I hear your daddy said he’s giving you the bill.”
Junior brought his chores a little closer to hear my an-
swer. Whatever I said would be all around town in less than an hour after I said it, so I knew I’d best choose my words carefully. I worried over them a bit, then polished them up. “I don’t know,” I said, smooth as grease.
“Well, I have an idea,” Mr. Dubonnet answered instantly. “Why don’t you go to work in the mine?”
My laugh just burst out of me. I couldn’t help it. I heard Junior behind me chuckle, too. I guess neither of us had ever heard anything so outrageously ridiculous.
Mr. Dubonnet ignored my response. “A couple of years ago,” he said patiently, “when Mr. Van Dyke was the general superintendent, he got it in his head that Coalwood college boys ought to be able to work in the mine during the summer to help pay their tuition. I—that is to say, the union—agreed to it, even though nobody ever signed up. But I think it’s still a good idea. As a matter of fact, Bobby Likens came to me a few days ago, asked for work. I said I’d make it happen if you signed on, too.”
Bobby Likens was the son of the Coalwood School principal. I didn’t know him very well. He was four years older than me, so he’d always run with a different pack of boys. I’d heard in one of Mom’s letters that he had just graduated from Emory and Henry College. She had also written that he was on his wa
y to medical school. I guessed that was why he needed the money. I was glad I wasn’t in the same situation. My parents were paying my way through school. “No, thanks,” I said to Mr. Dubonnet. But I thought to myself: Never, not in a million years.
Mr. Dubonnet tilted his snap-brim hat back on his head. “Give it some thought, son. You could make some good money. You’d be doing Bobby a favor, too.”
“Why not just let him work by himself?”
He shook his head. “One boy makes a problem. Two boys make a crew. It’s complicated.”
I puzzled over his answer for a moment, then decided that even if it didn’t make sense, it didn’t matter. “I’m not going to work in the mine, Mr. Dubonnet.”
“You’d make three dollars and fifty cents an hour,” he said.
Three dollars and fifty cents an hour! A veritable fortune! Before I could stop myself, I asked, “What would I have to do?”
“All you’d have to do is join the union,” he answered.
Junior whistled. It was my sentiments, exactly. There was about as much chance of a Hickam joining the United Mine Workers of America as a Republican being elected to office in McDowell County.
Mr. Dubonnet nodded to me, then went off to the grocery section. “So what you gonna do, rocket boy?” Junior asked. He might as well have gotten out a pen and pad to write down what I was about to say.
“I’m not a rocket boy anymore,” I said slowly so he’d get it down just right for the fence-line gossipers. “I’m a college boy. And I’m not going to work in the mine.”
Junior responded with a sympathetic but doubtful smile. I had the sudden opinion that he knew my fate better than I did.
8
THE UMWA