“They’re talking about a tank,” she says. “And I’ve been doing research. Some of those guys have flown drugs from Columbia and guns to the Contras in Nicaragua. Some of them have prison records.”
‘That’s okay,’ I say. “I got a prison record too, and I aint afraid of this bunch.”
She squints at me. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying we’ll handle this our own way.”
“Times have changed, Dillon. I hear the union is going to use nonviolent civil disobedience.”
I laugh.
“Times have changed,” she says again.
“How? What’s the difference between them bastards over there and the Baldwin-Felts gun thugs in my daddy’s day? Bucky Collins up to Felco has sent his younguns to his brother in Ohio. You know why? Somebody drove by and shot out their front window. One bullet hit two foot above his little girl’s bed.”
The guard on the tower raises a bullhorn. He calls, “Get away from the fence.”
“Bullhorns and video cameras,” Jackie says. “They’ve even got an outfit that specializes in catering for scabs. That’s what’s different. They’ve gone slick, and everything they do looks good on the TV news. The union has got to go slick too.”
“Get away from the fence!”
The bullhorn voice sounds like the man eats metal for nourishment. The guard on the ground is walking toward us. He carries a pistol on his hip.
“Can’t you fucking hear?” he yells. “Get away from the goddamn fence!”
“I’m with the press,” Jackie says. She pulls an ID card from her jeans pocket.
“I don’t give a fuck who you are,” the guard says.
“We’re on our side of the fence,” she says.
“That’s still company land,” the guard says. “Every fucking shack over there is on company land. Now get the hell away, bitch. You too, old man.”
“Shut your goddamn mouth,” I say.
He rests his hand on his gun butt. He has fleshy cheeks and bruised eyes under the bill of his black cap. Jackie steps back a few steps. She spreads her arms.
“Is this far enough?” she says. She takes two more steps. “Is this?”
The guard glares at her.
“Don’t tell me where I can go!” she yells.
Then I see two more men walking our way, and a Bronco with dark tinted windows pulls out of a new building of corrugated steel. It is not like me to back away from a fight, but I’m terrified that all these men will have a close look at her. They drive the roads at night in their Broncos, three and four together.
“Let’s go,” I say.
She walks backward, hands on hips, then turns abruptly and follows me. “Sons of bitches,” she says. “They treat us like we’re some kind of subversive.”
I say, “We are.”
We hold meetings in the union hall up at Raven. I hate to drive there. The company has put up floodlights on both sides of the creek so that the tipple on the far bank shines white as a fairy castle at night, and Lloyds Fork Road is lit brighter than a football game. The inside of my truck flashes from pitch dark to white to pitch dark again in a matter of seconds, and I guess my picture is taken in that bright second. I raise my middle finger in front of my face whenever I pass.
I am not the president of the local anymore, it is a boy from Daisy Creek, but they look to me for advice. I don’t say much. I am still trying to figure out the nonviolent civil disobedience. The boys at the meetings say it like it is one long word and I know they haven’t got it nailed either. It is what Martin Luther King did, and some say it is the Christian way to do. But Martin Luther King was killed dead like Jesus was. The union says we must use it or the newspapers and the TV will call us violent. But Phil Vivanti has already been on the CBS News and called the strike violent because we have flattened the tires of scab coal trucks with nails that Junior Tackett welds together in his tool shed. I have never yet seen a truck tire bleed red blood, but the TV news will weep over ruined rubber. Or they will not notice us at all.
Doyle Ray Lloyd is driving scab, running his truck named HELLFIGHTER across the picket lines every day with coal from the Trace Mountain strip job. He is the only local boy crossing the picket line. I hear the talk, that we should rock his trailer, that we should crack the windshield of HELLFIGHTER or cut the brake lines. I decide to talk to him because Doyle Ray is kin—his Papaw and my daddy were brothers.
In the evening I climb Doyle Ray’s cinderblock steps and knock on the metal door. It is a double wide trailer. Between what he makes driving and the extra he gets from his preaching, Doyle Ray is doing all right. He could probably afford to build a house, but the company still owns all the land hereabouts and they will not often let you build. With a trailer, if the company wants you gone, you can move quick enough.
Doyle Ray doesn’t say a word when he opens the door, just stands back and lets me in. I haven’t been in the trailer much. Neither has anyone. The narrow living room is tidy. I sit on a brown plaid sofa. The walls are fake wood. A large flat cross and a picture of Jesus hang on one wall. Another wall holds a hen and a rooster made of different kinds of dried corn and beans. Doyle Ray’s wife Sandra and the two boys are watching television. She is a small woman with wispy brown hair and teeth that stick out a little ways.
“Hey, Dillon,” she says, but she doesn’t smile.
I nod toward the chickens. “That’s real pretty. You make them yourself?”
That brings a smile.
“I glued on every piece,” she says, and starts to tell me how she drew the patterns out of a magazine and painted on the shellac to make the chickens shine. It is not something I am interested in, but I can listen polite as anyone.
“Go to the kitchen, honey,” Doyle Ray says, “and take the kids.”
“Aw, Daddy,” says the oldest boy.
“Ronnie!” says Doyle Ray, sharp. They go into the kitchen without another word. I think how Jackie would act if a man ordered her out of a room, or even how Rachel would have carried on, and smile to myself. Doyle Ray is looking at the TV. Pat Robertson is on, talking about the Communists taking over Central America.
“This is serious,” I say.
“I reckoned,” Doyle Ray says, and turns down the sound, but Pat Robertson is still on, the camera never goes off him so I look away.
“There’s a strike on,” I say.
He doesn’t answer, just watches the TV like he can read lips.
“I know we aint had much to say to each other all these years. We gone our own ways. You’re a preacher, and I aint one for church. You drive nonunion. But your papaw was brother to my daddy. We’re kin. There was a time when kin counted for something in these mountains.”
“I aint joining no strike,” Doyle Ray says. “I got younguns to feed.”
“So does everybody. The boys draw eight hundred a month from the union, strike benefits, and that won’t last. Aint much when you got kids.”
“That’s more than I’d have if I quit driving.”
“You could drive independent. Or I got a buddy has a union outfit on Island Creek, hauling for union mines in Logan County. He says they’ll take you on, and that is a big favor to me because you know how jobs are. Only thing, you’ll have to drive farther to get there.”
“If I’d wanted to drive union, I’d have got on union when I first started.”
Then I see where we are going and that it will do no good to talk, but I have a need to try.
“What’s wrong with union?” I ask.
“They’re resisting the authority God set over them. They got no right to tell the company how to spend its money or tell a man whether he can work or not. It’s communistic. God give the authority to the company.”
I say, “Doyle Ray, you are letting them ride you for a mule. It’s plain stupid.”
He leans forward with his knees spread apart and his hands clasped in front of him.
“Is that all you come to say?”
“N
o. I come to warn you to watch out for yourself. When a man gets desperate, he might rock your trailer, or tamper with your truck. If I hear anybody talking against you, I’ll try and warn you, but I may not hear.”
He looks at me for the first time.
“Why you telling me that?” he says.
“Same as I said earlier. You’re kin.”
“Kin,” he says. “You know something? When I was a youngun, I worshiped you. My daddy was a drunk, but everybody on Blackberry Creek looked up to you. When you blowed that bridge, I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. I wished you was my daddy.”
“Oh no,” I say.
“Wished you was my daddy and wished he wasn’t. Wished he was dead sometimes, when he beat me. Did you know he beat me? Know he beat Brenda? I reckoned you didn’t or you would have done something about it.”
“I knew he took a strap to you,” I say. “Most men whip their younguns now and again.”
“Spare the rod and spoil the child,” he says. “That’s in the Bible, and I believe it. But he whipped hard. Didn’t you know that? I reckoned you didn’t and when you went to jail I knew you couldn’t help no way. It was up to me. And I looked at what you done and I thought, Dillon aint afraid of nothing and I aint neither. Dillon fights back and I will too. And I shot—”
His breath hitches on him and he stops. Then he hollers, “Don’t you tell me about kin! My kin is Jesus! Jesus says you will call no one father except God! Jesus says if you put your kin before God you are not fit to enter Heaven! Jesus says—”
Sandra runs into the room, says, “Honey?”
Doyle Ray stops dead. “You better leave,” he says.
He walks to the door and opens it. When I go out I nearly fall down the wobbly cinderblock steps, and he slams the thin trailer door behind me.
This will be a long strike. It may have no ending. Families will keep on drifting away as they have these thirty years. They will come back to visit. Already I see them on the weekends. They say the companies in North Carolina or Tennessee where they have gone tell a fellow when to take a crap and the boys down there just sit back and take it. They say it’s not the same as home, and they can’t stay away from the mountains. I have heard of people in South America, religious fanatics, who cut themselves and whip themselves until they bleed and even nail their hands to boards. I think the boys who leave are like that, returning to the place that is no longer home, coming back again and again until they are cut and bleeding and the pain of loss is all that binds them to these hills. Those of us who stay are like that too, holding on to what wounds us like picking up ground glass.
Some day there will be nothing left. Kin will die, the mountains will be ground down to dust. Wooden coal camp houses were not built to last the ages.
HASSEL, 1988
Brenda thinks her brother Doyle Ray’s coal truck is in love with the Batmobile. You cannot explain to her that cars and trucks don’t have no feelings. When we go to where the cars is parked in Winco bottom, she sees HELLFIGHTER setting beside Doyle Ray’s trailer. Doyle Ray tilts the truck bed back to keep the water from collecting, and HELLFIGHTER looks like an elephant on Wild Kingdom about to mount the Batmobile, which is usually parked nearby. After Brenda married Toejam she learned about such things. Now when she sees the Batmobile and HELLFIGHTER, she rears back and hollers, “Wuv! Wuv!”
The Batmobile is an old car. If it was a person I reckon it’d be over a hundred. I was ready to turn it into scrap metal years ago, but Louelly wouldn’t hear of it because it was Homer’s car. She thinks the Batmobile is blessed. Once her and Ethel’s Tiffany was near killed in it. A pickup truck come round a curve at them and Louelly slammed on the brakes. That there truck just grazed the car door before it flipped into the creek and the driver, a drunk fellow from Jolo, died. I put up a white wooden cross on the spot beside the road, and Louelly painted a red cross over the scratch on the Batmobile’s door.
So I got Junior to overhaul the engine one more time, as a wedding present for Toejam and Brenda. For his own wedding present, Junior wired the inside with four horns. That way anybody setting in that car can honk at someone they know when they ride up and down the creek. The button on Brenda’s horn is red, and when she pushes it the horn plays “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.”
The scab trucks has been hauling the coal out of the hollow every day, just like they done back in the sixties. I have an idea that we should block Lloyds Fork road with our cars. I don’t mean to brag, but I can think up plenty to do for this here nonviolent civil disobedience. If Martin Luther King was alive, he’d be glad to know me.
So we meet in Winco bottom like in the old days of the Roving Pickets, only now Doyle Ray’s trailer sets there instead of Dillon’s house, and Sandra Lloyd watches us from the porch with her face all drawed up like we are some kind of varmints. I can’t stand to look at her, she’s so sour. Doyle Ray is on the road, but he will be coming through, hauling a load in HELLFIGHTER.
We drive up the main highway below the golf course, take Lloyds Fork off to the right, and then stop. We fill up both lanes and leave spaces so cars can go back and forth slow-like between where we parked, but the coal trucks will not have room to come through. I stand at one end of the line with a red flag to direct traffic, and Junior stands at the other end.
Ten minutes later, a line of coal trucks arrives. The Property Rights boys lead the way in them Broncos with the dark windows. But they stop when they see the trucks can’t follow them and pull off the road. The men in black get out and stand in a bunch. One of them has got a telephone, and I reckon they are calling the state police, but it will take a heap of wreckers to move us and jail cells to hold us. Twenty coal trucks set with their engines idling, shaking and grumbling while them drivers get impatient and stamp their gas pedals. The drivers stick their heads out their windows and cuss, except for the truck in front, which is HELLFIGHTER. Doyle Ray Lloyd will die before he will cuss.
I am standing with Louella and Toejam beside the Batmobile. They have stuck a sign on Brenda’s wheelchair that says American Coal Stole My Medical Benefits. The Batmobile is the first car in line. Its flat black paint does not catch the early morning sun but it is a wide old car, and with its high back fins it looks like a wild creature out of one of them Saturday afternoon Japanese movies on TV. Louella has wiped the bumpers clean of mud and coal dust, and GOD IS LOVE stands out red and clear.
Brenda wants to blow her horn. Toejam holds her in the open door and she stabs the red button twice with her finger. After “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” Toejam carries her to a pile of railroad ties beside the road and holds her on his lap. I am thinking Doyle Ray must see his sister there, her head limp on Toejam’s shoulder as she stares at the car and smiles. Perhaps the sight will make him turn around.
Then Dillon Freeman walks over to HELLFIGHTER. He stands up on the running board and holds the side mirror. Some boys from Jenkinjones see them and think Dillon is giving Doyle Ray a hard time. They move closer, waving their arms and yelling Scabbie Scabbie Scabbie. A spray of tobacco juice covers Doyle Ray’s windshield like old blood and runs down over the wipers. Then a rock hits the windshield.
Doyle Ray has been leaning out the window, talking to Dillon, but he starts back and hollers “Lord!” when that rock hits the glass. HELLFIGHTER gives a big lurch forward and keeps going. Dillon jumps down just in time and lands hard in the gravel beside the road. Doyle Ray has the door half open and yells, “The brakes is gone!” and the front wheels twist around. One tire lifts off the ground and the truck spins like some big awkward animal. Then HELLFIGHTER settles with a big crunch on top of the Batmobile. The car’s roof collapses and that windshield crumples like white crepe paper. HELLFIGHTER blunders on into a red pickup truck, dragging the Batmobile and crushing it under its tires.
After HELLFIGHTER comes to rest, everything gets real quiet. Then Brenda, setting in Toejam’s lap beside the road, starts in to scream. Doyle Ray has hit his face on H
ELLFIGHTER’s door and is slumped over the steering wheel. When we haul him out, he is unconscious and the blood runs from his smashed mouth. An ambulance comes from Annadel and takes him to the Grace Hospital.
Doyle Ray has what they call a broken mandible and all his front teeth are gone. His jaw is wired shut and his face looks like the laced side of a football. I go to his trailer to ask how he is doing and that Sandra shuts the door right in my face.
And Brenda is so upset she won’t say a word, not “wuv” nor “hi.”
JACKIE, 1989
One night Ethel Day was on picket duty at the shack outside Number Thirteen tipple when there came the sharp whine of a bullet and her hand resting on the door frame opened up like hot melting wax. Ethel saw the taillights of a Bronco vanish around the curve before she fainted. Junior Tackett found her there when he stopped to bring her a thermos of coffee. He wrapped her hand in a red bandana and drove her to the hospital where the doctors picked out the splinters of metal and wood, and formed tendon and bone into an unyielding claw.
Junior called me at three in the morning. I grabbed a camera and flash and drove to the picket shack. It was still several hours before dawn and no one was around. Night creatures keened high up on Trace, as though the mountain itself was alive and lamenting. I took pictures, then drove slowly back toward Felco, lightheaded from want of sleep. A vehicle with high bright headlights pulled in close behind me. I speeded up a little but the headlights stayed with me. At a wide place below Felco I pulled off the road. In the same instant I saw the vehicle was a black Bronco and it was pulling off the road behind me. I pumped the accelerator and pulled onto the road at full speed, rear end skipping back and forth as my tires caught the rough edge of the pavement. The Bronco followed.
I flipped my rearview mirror to dim, taking some small comfort at reducing the relentless lights to pinpricks, and tried to think. It seemed best to go on home. They probably knew who I was and where I lived, so there was no use playing games. My neighbors at Felco had dogs, some were light sleepers, and many of them had guns. I would be safest among them.
The Unquiet Earth Page 34