Sky of Stone

by Homer Hickam

  “I don’t see what’s so funny about being electrocuted,” Rita said.

  “He was pretending to be electrocuted,” I explained. “It scared us, but when we saw he was only fooling, it was funny.”

  Rita crooked her mouth and shrugged. “It must be a man thing,” she said.

  Maybe it was. I told Rita how Johnny had sent me and Bobby running back down the line to the tool car to find a rail stretcher after a rail was found to be too short. Dwight Strong had chanced along to find us there, pawing through the equipment and arguing on what a rail stretcher looked like. Mr. Strong laughed so hard when we told him what we were after, I thought he was going to bust a gut.

  “I can’t imagine how anybody would think there was a hand tool to lengthen a rail,” Rita said. “Surely you must have had some inkling Johnny was pulling your leg.”

  “Johnny knows everything, so we trust him!” I explained. “I mean, Bobby and I both just charged off, determined to find that tool.”

  She looked blank. “And this was funny?”

  “You had to be there,” I said weakly.

  I told her how we had gotten back at Johnny by getting Mr. Bolt to make us a wooden spike. “Johnny reared back with his hammer and let fly and all you could see was a cloud of sawdust. His eyes were as big as saucers! Then Bobby said, ‘Gol, Johnny, you must be the strongest man in the mine!’ ”

  Rita blinked once, then sighed. “And then all three of you laughed over this . . . this prank?”

  “Johnny and Bobby did,” I said. “Not me.”

  “Uh-huh” was her skeptical response.

  After my daily dose of anecdotes, none of which seemed to amuse her much, Rita got down to cases and quizzed me closely on technical matters—such things as the quality of the ties and spikes, whether Johnny was getting a proper level on the track, or how many rails we were putting down each day. “I’ve got everything perfectly mapped out,” she said, gnawing on her lower lip. “All Dwight Strong has to do is follow my list.”

  Since she seemed to need reassurance, I told her that all seemed to be going along just fine. Every morning when we got on shift, the hoot-owl boys had stacked fresh ties where we’d left off and provided new kegs of spikes. We were going as fast as we could, which, truth be told, wasn’t all that fast. Bobby and I still had a lot to learn about laying track.

  One night, after I’d told her yet another funny story she didn’t bother to laugh at, she asked, “Have you seen your dad? Do you think he knows how well things are going?”

  “I haven’t seen him,” I said. “But I’m sure Mr. Strong keeps him up-to-date on how things are going.”

  “It would be better if I could brief him personally,” she fumed. She picked through her food. “This has got to go perfectly.”

  “I’ll make sure it does,” I told her.

  Rita provided me with a smile, the first one in some time. “I’m counting on you,” she said. Then her smile faded. She took a memo pad from her shirt pocket and jotted down a note. “I just had an idea for a simplified application of the Hardy cross-ventilation algorithm,” she said in an urgent tone.

  I had no idea what she was talking about, but I kept it to myself. Rita wasn’t a patient teacher. She’d started talking one evening over dessert about a plan she had for pulling pillars to avoid converging zones of pressure and I interrupted her to say I didn’t understand a thing she was saying. She’d put down her fork, muttered something to herself, then refused to talk about it or anything else the rest of the meal. I’d learned my lesson, at least about asking her questions.

  After we finished eating, Rita excused herself, saying there was a project back in the drafting room she had to finish. “I’m charting a new approach to multiple face advancement,” she said, picking up her still-unmarred white helmet. “I intend to prove that shuttle loading and conveyor belts can work in tandem to simplify the echelon driving sequence.”

  “That sounds like a great idea,” I said, though I’d only understood every other word—at best. I watched her from the dining-room window as she walked across the road. She stopped once, got the memo pad out of her pocket, made another note, then kept going. I admired her anew. As soon as I could figure out a plan to make it happen, I was sure it was going to be so much fun to have such a smart and good-looking woman as my girlfriend. Maybe we could even go see a movie together at the Starland Drive-in Theater in Welch. Floretta’s admonition about Rita being a serious woman too busy for a boyfriend drifted up into my brain and just as quickly went out of it again.

  I was pondering the door through which Rita had disappeared, when Victor and Ned came up to my table. “We’re heading over to Cinder Bottom again,” Victor said. “Going to get our ashes hauled.”

  “Have fun.”

  “You got to ease up, boy,” Victor said. “Come on with us.”

  “We don’t usually take long,” Ned said. “In and out, that’s us.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, could you loan us forty bucks?” Victor asked.

  “No!”

  Victor and Ned left, shaking their heads. Floretta came over and swept up my empty plate. “You should have gone with ’em.”

  My mouth dropped open. “You think I ought to go to Cinder Bottom?”

  “Don’t get persnickety with me, young man. I ain’t saying to go whoring. I just think it would be a good idea for you to keep Victor and Ned company, that’s all. Be good for you to see how silly they act around those girls.”

  “Why?”

  “It never hurts to look in the mirror even when it ain’t exactly you looking back.”

  She had lost me with that one. She shook her head, mumbled something about a boy and his brains and gonads getting all mixed up, and headed back to the kitchen.

  Late that night, Ned and Victor returned, clambering up the stairs with exaggerated shushing sounds. I heard them a full five minutes before they thumped up against my door. I threw it open. “What now?”

  “We got one for you, Sonny boy,” Ned said, leaning against the doorjamb. His breath almost knocked me down. It smelled like pure Keystone rotgut.

  “Her name is Sucrose,” Victor said. His shirt was buttoned one button off all the way down.

  “Sucrose?”

  “Yeah, sweetest little girl you ever seed. We told Sucrose all about you.”

  “Sucrose?”

  “Well, hell, she wanted a name that told her customers how sweet she was, but one of the other girls already took Sugar,” Ned said.

  “She asked us for help, us being college graduates and all, so we named her,” Victor slurred, though proudly. “We know our chemistry.”

  “But Sucrose is an awful name,” I said. “Why didn’t you name her Candy? Or even Cookie?”

  Victor frowned. His lower lip started to tremble. “You rat bastard! If you’d have gone with us, that pretty little girl wouldn’t be stuck with that awful name!”

  “You really are a lousy friend, Sonny,” Ned said, tearing up. “You know we ain’t creative. We’re engineers! Now poor little Sucrose is gonna hate us her whole hussy career.”

  I closed the door in their ruddy, sweaty faces. Shortly afterward, I heard twin thumps in the hall and crawling sounds.

  DURING THE man-trip ride inside one morning, it occurred to me that Bobby was four years older than me and might, as a result, have a tad more experience with girls. Of course, that wasn’t too difficult. Any experience was pretty much more than I had. Maybe that was what Floretta was getting at, that even an experience in Cinder Bottom was better than nothing.

  I decided to question him during lunch. We were sitting on a stack of ties. Floretta had packed me three sandwiches, and I was already worrying they wouldn’t be enough. Fortunately, she’d also thrown in two Twinkies, a banana, an apple, and two boiled eggs with a wax paper packet of salt. The way my stomach growled all the time, I figured I’d need every bit of it to get through to supper. It was occurring to me lately that maybe I had som
e kind of disease. I’d read about them, where men ate all the time but still faded away to nothing. I’d have gone to see Doc Lassiter, but I was always too hungry to take the time.

  “So, Bobby,” I said. “What do you think about Rita?”

  Bobby wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, leaving a slimy smear of black streaks around his lips. He pushed his glasses up on his nose. “She’s a fine-looking woman.”

  “But what do you think about her and me—together, I mean.”

  “You and Rita?”

  “Me and Rita.”

  “You really want my opinion?”

  “I really do.”

  He shrugged. “Not likely. She’s got experience in places you don’t even have places.”

  He might as well have slapped me in the face. “What does that have to do with her falling in love with me?” I demanded.

  Bobby frowned behind his mask of gob dirt and sweat. He took off his helmet and ran his hand through his sandy hair. “Are you saying she loves you?”

  “Not yet,” I said, “but all I need is a plan. I thought maybe you could help me figure one out.”

  Bobby slumped against the ties and shook his head. “Love’s not the same as laying track, Sonny. Or building rockets, for that matter. You can’t make it happen by working hard. Forget it and find yourself a girl your own age. That’s my advice.”

  Johnny had gone off behind a crib on down the line to eat his lunch. I guess he needed to get away from Bobby and me every so often, don’t ask me why. We heard his footsteps coming back and then the sound of spikes being pulled. “Gaw,” Bobby moaned. “Where does he get his energy?”

  I didn’t know. I squashed my sandwiches into my mouth and then stuffed in my Twinkies, too. I’d eat the fruit and eggs when it wasn’t my turn on the hammer.

  On the way to the track, Bobby asked, “Are you going to take my advice?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then why did you ask me for it?”

  “I hoped you’d tell me something I could use.”

  “No,” he said. “You hoped I’d tell you something you wanted to hear.”

  “I just need a plan.”

  “If there was a plan that would win over a woman, every man in the world would pay you good money for a look at it.”

  “So I should just quit?” I complained. “That’s your advice? Just give up?”

  Bobby stopped and dropped his chin on his chest. “It doesn’t matter what I say. You’re not going to listen, anyway.”

  “Boys!” Johnny bawled. “Time’s a-wasting! You say your prayers? Lunch would be the right time for the onliest one you know, Bobby! God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for our food! Haw! Come on, let’s get the lead out!”

  Bobby groaned. “He isn’t human,” he said.

  “Boys!”

  “On our way!” we chorused.

  THE NEXT day before we got going on the shift, Johnny drew me aside. “Something I heard in the union meeting last night, Sonny. There’s going to be open testimonies in the Tuck Dillon investigation.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Anybody can attend.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “You should come to the union meetings. You might learn something.”

  “I meant to come but I fell asleep.”

  Johnny nodded tragically. “Jake Mosby was there and made the announcement. He said the decision had been made so that the men would know the mine was still safe.”

  “Does that mean my dad will testify in front of God and everybody?”

  “It does.”

  A flash of anger surged through me. It wasn’t right that Jake should have such power over my dad! “Did he say when the testimonies were going to be held?”

  “Nope, but he said where. The Club House parlor.”

  That, at least, explained why Floretta had been in a dither that morning. I’d heard her muttering something about “new drapes.”

  “Thanks, Johnny.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  I mulled his question over. “Attend the testimonies, I guess. And then call my mother to tell her what I heard.”

  “I wish your mama would come home,” Johnny said. “Don’t seem right in Coalwood without her.”

  I agreed with him and said so. But the more the summer wore on, the more I was convinced she never would. She’d painted her fox on the kitchen wall, a declaration of her independence, and headed south. If there was anything that could bring her back, I surely didn’t know what it was.

  22

  THE BET

  IT WAS toward the end of June when I came off the man-lift into the bright sun, looking forward to a long, hot shower followed by supper with Rita, when, all of a sudden, Johnny’s hoarse voice boomed across the black dirt. “What do you think you’re doing, Garrett Brown?”

  Johnny took off, pushing through the miners queuing up at the shaft. Bobby and I looked at each other, shrugged in unison, and followed him until we arrived at a big flatbed truck beside the lamphouse. The truck had a stack of railroad ties on it, and beside them, a big man, his fists on his hips, stood laughing.

  “Those are our ties, Garrett!” Johnny yelled. “Put ’em back where you found ’em!” The man only laughed even harder.

  At the back of the truck stood a couple of boys I recognized as Delmar Crouch and Chinky Pinns, classmates of mine at Big Creek High School. Although they’d been star football players, they hadn’t been good enough to get a college scholarship. To them, that meant their choices were either the military or the mines. They had obviously chosen the mines, at least until the draft caught up with them.

  Garrett Brown, the leader of the Caretta track-laying crew, looked like a tank with legs. “We ran out of ties on our end, Johnny,” he boomed, “so we came over to get some of yours. You boys are so slow, you don’t need ’em.”

  “You must be doing a fair sloppy job to be going so fast, Garrett,” Johnny growled, his hands reflexively balled into fists.

  Garrett laughed. “We know what we’re doing. Not like you and these college boys.”

  A crowd was gathering around the back of the truck, not only miners coming off the man-lift but the ones who were supposed to be getting aboard for the next shift, too. Several foremen came over for a look, pushing their white helmets back on their heads and frowning at the delay.

  “These boys can lay track as fast as any men in this mine,” Johnny said.

  Garrett had a laugh like rolling thunder. “You willing to lay some money down on that?”

  I recalled Johnny telling me that gambling had been the hardest thing he’d had to give up when he’d become a Holy Roller. Now I watched him hesitate, struggle for words. “Get thee behind me, Devil,” he finally muttered.

  “Come on, Johnny,” a miner said. “You got to put your money where your mouth is.”

  “What’s the bet?” asked another man, his face plastered with coal dirt.

  “Johnny’s college boys here against Garrett’s football boys!” came the reply from a clean-faced evening-shift worker.

  A chorus of hoots and cheers rose from the assembly. Even the foremen joined in. Everybody seemed to be having a lot of fun. Bobby leaned against the bathhouse wall, his arms crossed. His eyes were narrowed behind his glasses, taking everything in. In my estimation, he looked dangerous.

  “How do we call it?” asked one of the foremen, Mr. Early Smith.

  “We measure the main line,” Garrett said, “then figure out where the middle is. Whoever gets there first wins!”

  “Ain’t a proper bet,” somebody said. “Look at Delmar and Chinky. Those puny college boys’d never have a chance!”

  Bobby suddenly became energized. He jutted out his jaw and strode into the clearing of men behind the truck. “Who said that? Who said I was puny?” He surveyed the men. “Come on, let’s hear it.”

  I sidled up next to him. “Leave it alone, Bobby,” I whispered out of the corner of my m
outh.

  Bobby’s blood was up. “I say we can kick their tails, no problem,” he said, pushing his glasses back up on his nose with his finger.

  I pushed mine back up, too. “Are you kidding?” I hissed. “Look at those Caretta boys!”

  He ignored me. “You hear what I said?” he yelled. “We can beat anybody laying track in this mine!”

  Johnny kept balling his fists and unballing them. His lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. He looked as miserable as anybody I’d ever seen.

  Garrett Brown jumped down from the truck bed. “You heard Bobby Likens, folks! He says he can beat us. I say he can’t. Let’s start tomorrow to find out! The hoot-owl shift can measure tonight to find the center and make a mark on a post. Then we race to it. How about it, Johnny?”

  Johnny looked up abruptly, then opened one eye. It was fierce. “You know I’ve given up sin, Garrett Brown!”

  “Come on, Johnny, this is just a little sport,” a voice urged from the crowd. “No evil going to be done. Why, we’re all churchgoers here, ain’t we?”

  A flurry of nodding black-and-white helmets indicated that only God fearers, Bible-thumpers, and pew sitters were at the scene.

  “My uncle will set up a line,” somebody said. It was Teddy Blevins, John Eye’s nephew. John Eye’s Snakeroot Hollow emporium would take a bet on nearly anything.

  “A hundred dollars is my bet, Johnny,” Garrett said, and put out his hand. “That’s a personal bet between you and me. The rest of you men can set up your own game.”

  Dollar bills and bags of scrip instantly appeared in various hands. Why the miners carried money into the coal mine was beyond me, but they did. Maybe I would’ve carried some, too, if I’d had any.

  Teddy produced a little spiral notebook and pencil and started to write down the bets. A friend of his stepped up and took off his helmet. Pretty soon, it was filled with money.