by Tawni O'Dell
“Emphysema.”
“Yeah. That’s it. I swear, if he fell into a pile of shit, he’d come up with a golden turd in his mouth.”
I think back to high school and the few times I visited Jess at home. He and his family lived in a peeling, sagging shell of a farmhouse with a pack of spittle-flinging dogs roaming in and out of the propped-open front door and had a yard covered with so much junk it looked like the house had vomited its contents.
If there were such things as golden turds, Chimp obviously didn’t know what to do with them once he found them.
“Is that why you tried to kill your mother-in-law?” I ask him, getting back to the topic at hand. “Career envy?”
“I didn’t try and kill her,” he says.
He takes a few wobbling steps toward me, then stops suddenly like the ground has been yanked away.
“I was shooting at the car,” he says once he finds his balance again. “I didn’t want her to leave. That’s all. I knew she was going to drive straight back to her house and call every goddamned old lady in the tristate area and tell them what a loser I am. What a goddamned fucking loser I am!” He screams it to the heavens.
The effort makes his knees buckle, and he drops onto the muddy grass. Once he hits, he starts crying. I don’t know if it’s out of misery or because he got caught in his zipper. He puts himself back in his pants and brings his hands up to cover his face, knocking off his company ball cap with J&P COAL stitched in frayed, faded gold across the front. Losing his hat makes him cry harder.
I squat down in front of him, and my bad knee sings out in pain. It’s been almost twenty years and six operations since my accident. I can walk pretty well, but I will never again be able to squat; however, something in my mind and body won’t allow this fact to register, and I’m still constantly attempting it the same way my mother continues to make mincemeat pies for Christmas every year, even though my dad was the only one in our family who liked them.
I put my hands on Rick’s shoulders. He stops sobbing for a moment, and understanding briefly skates across his dull gaze.
“You gonna arrest me?” he asks.
“I’m going to take your gun for a while. Do you have any more in the house?”
“Two rifles.”
“I’m going to take those, too.”
I brace his shotgun against the ground and use it as a crutch to help me get back to a standing position.
“Why don’t you just stay here for a minute?” I instruct him, needlessly.
He’s already fallen over, sprawled out on his stomach, with his eyes closed, mumbling to himself. I head for the house and knock on the front door.
Bethany answers. She’s not happy to see me even though she’s the one who called and asked me to come here.
She stares at me, courteously defiant. She’s put on about sixty pounds of flesh and attitude since high school.
I try picturing her young self without the extra weight, with her hair feathered like Farrah’s, wearing Chic jeans instead of the orange stretch pants she’s wearing now, worn shiny at the knees, along with a voluminous thigh-length sweatshirt created by retailers for the sole purpose of concealing various types of female physical hell.
“How’s your mother?” I ask.
“She’s fine. A little shaken up is all. She’s lying down.”
“Your husband says he wasn’t trying to kill her. He was trying to prevent her from leaving.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I told her to just sit down and let him cool off, but she had a hair appointment. Now she’s missed it anyway.”
Behind her is a room that belongs to a woman who doesn’t put housekeeping high on her list of things to do. Toys, laundry, stacks of unopened mail, dirty dishes, and miscellaneous fragments of day-to-day life surround the two little girls sitting in a patch of cleared carpet watching TV and eating Mootown Snackers. They dip their pretzel sticks into their portions of cheese spread at the exact same moment and bring them hypnotically to their mouths.
“Has he ever done anything like this before?” I ask her.
“No.”
“Violent outbursts of any kind? Toward you? Toward the children?”
“He throws things at the TV sometimes, but he don’t hit us.”
“Does he drink a lot?”
“Not more than anybody else.”
Her stare doesn’t waver.
“Are you going to arrest him?” she asks me.
“Do you want me to?”
“That’s a strange question.”
“I’m off duty, and I have a headache,” I explain.
“You want an aspirin?”
“No, thanks.”
She drops her eyes away from mine for the first time and looks down at my jeans and mud-caked Caterpillar work boots, then takes in my black dress shirt, black sport jacket, and the tie I borrowed from Dr. Ed that he pulled out of a filing-cabinet drawer and tossed to me while telling me not to worry about the stain. It wasn’t blood, it was gravy, and no one would notice it because it blends in well with the pattern of migrating ducks.
“Why didn’t they send an on-duty deputy?” she asks suspiciously.
“I was easier to find. Look, if your mother wants to press charges, I’ll be happy to take him back to town with me.”
“He did commit a crime, didn’t he?”
“Well, yes. Shooting at a person with a twelve-gauge shotgun is always considered a crime in the state of Pennsylvania, even if the person shot at is the perpetrator’s mother-in-law. Unless of course it’s mother-in-law season,” I add, smiling.
She doesn’t smile back.
“Okay,” I try another tack. “Here’s what will happen if I arrest him: I’ll take him to jail. He’ll stay there until he’s arraigned, and then you’re going to have to drive into town and post bond and give him a ride back home. Even if your mother doesn’t want to press charges, the state will. You won’t have to testify because you’re his wife, but your mother will. She’ll have to take time off work to do it. She could end up having to take off several days, maybe even a week, without pay. If you retain your own attorney, you’re looking at thousands of dollars. At the very least, you’re going to end up paying a considerable fine and court costs. He might get jail time, which will go on his permanent record and make it difficult for him to find future employment once he’s released.”
“We can’t afford that,” she answers.
I nod.
“How about for now I’ll just take the guns? He said he has a couple rifles.”
She doesn’t hesitate. She leaves the room immediately, wanting to get this all over with. On her way past the girls, she nudges one in the kidneys with her foot and tells her to go load the dishwasher.
She returns quickly, carrying two rifles: another Winchester and a Remington .30-06, the same make and model Val used to hunt with.
I take the Remington and raise it to shoulder height like I always do when I’m around one. This one has a nice high-powered scope. I look into it, aiming through the front window at Rick, passed out in a muddy yard next to a goose dressed like a rabbit.
I start aiming at things in the house. Pictures on the walls. Empty beer cans on the coffee table. I come to a stationary exercise bike in a corner draped with towels and T-shirts and Christmas twinkle lights.
Bethany Blystone is staring at me with embarrassed rage. I slowly lower the gun and clear my throat.
“You used to be a Raynor, didn’t you?”
She walks to the front door. I sense I’m supposed to follow. She holds open the door.
“I’m still a Raynor. That don’t change just because my name did.”
“Are you aware that Reese is being released on Tuesday?”
She says nothing.
“Have you had any contact with him recently?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I’d like to keep an eye on him so I can help out if he encounters any difficulties making the transition to life ou
tside prison.”
“You mean you want to harass him?”
“Something like that.”
I step outside, and she stands in the doorway staring at me uncertainly. A shadow of her former skinny, frightened self passes over her, the self that used to live in the same house with Reese.
“He’ll go to Jess,” she announces, and shuts the door on me.
Back at my truck, I unlock my footlocker and put Rick’s guns inside with a half dozen others.
I grab a blanket and go check on him a final time. He’s unconscious, but he’s on his stomach so he won’t choke to death if he throws up. I cover him. I don’t know how long he’ll be out here.
The little girl who was nudged in the kidneys comes walking over. She’s not wearing a coat or shoes. She has a football with her and a Sharpie permanent marker in her hand.
“He’s fine,” I assure her.
She doesn’t even glance at him.
“You should go in the house before you catch cold,” I tell her.
She holds out the ball and marker to me.
“Mom wants to know if you’d give us your autograph. She says it would mean a lot to Dad.”
The request is delivered as two separate statements. There’s no asking involved.
I take the ball from her and take the lid off the marker.
“You got any stickers?” she asks me.
“What?”
“Stickers,” she repeats. “Dr. Ed always brings stickers.”
“Does Dr. Ed come here a lot?” I ask.
“When Daddy loses his job, he gives us our shots here instead of us going there. I don’t know why.”
I know why, but I don’t explain to her that when Daddy loses his job, he also loses his benefits. Dr. Ed won’t accept lack of an insurance card or any other reason people give him for not bringing their kids in for their vaccinations. If they won’t come to him, he goes to them.
I finish signing the ball and hand it to the girl. She puts it up against her face. At first I think she does it so she can read it, but it’s because she wants to smell the ink.
I search my pockets for something to give her. I wish I had something pretty, but all I come up with is the half-eaten roll of Certs and the rabbit’s foot Val made for me before he left for Vietnam. I give her the mints.
She takes them and gives me a shrug. There’s gratitude in the jerk of her shoulders. It’s enough. I know that this girl could never say thanks. It would imply that I had done something for her.
I get back in my truck and watch her trudge over to the doll stroller. I’m going to wait until she’s safely back inside the house, even though I’m not sure exactly how safe that is.
In the meantime I finish eating my sandwich while reading the bumper stickers people and local businesses have given me over the past eight months since I’ve been back that I have plastered on my dashboard: OLD HUNTERS NEVER MISS, THEY JUST LOSE THEIR BANG. MCCREADY SEPTIC SYSTEMS: THIS JOB SUCKS. MY WIFE, YES. MY DOG, MAYBE. MY GUN, NEVER. WELDERS HAVE THE HOTTEST RODS. PUFF N’ SNUFF FOR ALL YOUR TOBACCO NEEDS. DIAL 911: MAKE A COP COME.
One is from the Salt Lick Motel. The word “Salt” has been worn away completely. In my boredom I’ve peeled away some of the other letters. It now reads LICK M— —E—. My six-year-old nephew, Eb, gets a real kick out of this.
2
WHEN I WAS A KID, A TRIP TO CENTRESBURG WAS AS MOMENTOUS as a journey to see the Great Wall of China or the Taj Mahal. In some ways it was more exciting and enviable than traveling overseas to exotic locales, because those places didn’t impress the people who lived in Coal Run. It wasn’t that they hadn’t heard about them or didn’t appreciate their significance; it was simply that they had no need to go there and we were a community ruled by need.
Need as a noun, not as a verb. Needing to have something was never reason enough to get it. Having a need usually was.
The one exception to this rule in my family, the only time we were allowed to blatantly want something frivolous aside from the annual circling of toys in the Sears Christmas catalog, was when we went to Centresburg.
The riches of Woolworth’s five-and-dime store were able to tempt even my widowed mother, a woman who spent her nights hunched over a box of coupons, a grocery list, and newspaper sale flyers with the concentration of a general studying maps and reports from the front.
The display windows were a carnival of things no one needed: ruby-red wineglasses, bolts of glittering silver rickrack, thermos-size bottles of pink perfume with names like Moonbeam Mist and Starfire spelled across them in gilt letters, bowls of shiny, grim goldfish—all of it could be seen from the municipal lot where Mom parked the car after circling the block for fifteen minutes waiting for a space to open up inside it because she had never learned how to parallel-park on the street.
Jolene and I were allowed to spend fifty cents and share a bag of the salty yellow popcorn sold at the lunch counter. After giving us our dollar and an extra quarter for the popcorn, Mom would instantly disappear down the stairs to the mysterious lower level known as House Wares.
I always headed straight for the baseball cards or the Hot Wheels. Jolene was always torn between the pet section, where she had become deeply involved with a peanut-butter-colored hamster she called Peanut Butter, and the jewelry counter, where she would stand with her tiny hands and nose pressed up against the glass staring at the colorful rows of fake birthstone rings that sparkled fiercely in the store light but turned a uniform shade of dirty-ice gray if they were worn anywhere else.
She couldn’t afford to buy anything at either location and usually settled for a pack of sequins from the notions department that she took home and poured out into the square of sunlight that appeared in the middle of our living room carpet between the hours of two and four in the afternoon and entertained herself by flicking them around with her stubby toddler fingers and watching them shimmer.
She never got the hamster, but she would eventually own a pinkeyed white rabbit a boyfriend presented to her one Easter. She would go on to own a museum’s worth of Woolworth’s jewelry, most of it from male admirers, some of it from Mom. I was the one who finally bought her the birthstone ring. Green for May.
I did it one day, out of the blue, during one of our trips to the store. I was watching her stare at the ring like she always did, and I realized that when I first started watching her do this, her face was pressed up against the side of the glass and her eyes were level with the ring and now she was tall enough to look down at it from the top of the counter.
Maybe she didn’t need that ring. Maybe she would never need it, but in my mind she had earned it, and since I was the person who recognized this, I felt the need to give it to her.
Centresburg hasn’t changed much since Jolene and I were kids, except when we were kids, everything functioned. The buildings and structures are all still here some thirty years later, but the reasons behind them are long gone.
The twin stacks of Franklin Tires belched clouds of chalk-blue smoke that hung in the air like they’d been drawn there. Jolene and I used to find shapes in them: a cow, a car, a big head, a castle, an alligator. We always knew when we drove by the stacks again on our way out of town that the object would still be there. Those clouds never moved or shifted like the white clouds God made.
Idling train engines rumbled in the rail yards waiting for their cars to be loaded. If we happened to be sitting next to them at the red light at the corner of Union and Seventh Streets when the tipples opened, the rain of coal was so deafening it drowned out the sound of the radio and always made Mom jump, and Jolene and I would laugh.
Packard Mining Equipment had a fleet of flatbeds always coming and going carrying gigantic drill bits and colossal cogs and gear wheels I used to imagine were going to be dragged up the beanstalk to fix the giant’s clock. A constant melodic clanging came from the plant, accompanied by hisses of steam. Long after I was home again, lying in bed at night, I’d hear that sound playing in my he
ad. I’d fall asleep to it.
I drive quickly down the corridor of shuttered warehouses and heaps of scrap metal.
To the left sits Franklin’s smokeless smokestacks. To the right sits the silent, burned-out shell of Packard. A fire raged through it a couple years after it closed, gutting it and scorching the red brick to the color of spoiled beef.
At the rail yards, rust-streaked coal cars sit beneath the disintegrating metal mouths of giant loading tipples waiting for a final run that’s never going to happen.
Alongside it is the faded billboard: WELCOME TO CENTRESBURG. WE’RE IN THE MIDDLE OF IT ALL.
I’ve never been exactly sure what we’re in the middle of. Certainly not the state. We’re in the southwestern quarter. We’re not in the center of the county or even the township.
Jolene’s youngest son, Eb, is convinced it means we’re in the middle of the universe and stands by that belief even when his middle brother, Harrison, explains to him there can’t be a middle to something that doesn’t have finite boundaries. Harrison thinks it means we’re in the middle of a bunch of crap.
There’s no denying the amount of crap, but not far from these crumbling carcasses stretched out in their shadows is a thriving thoroughfare whose fast-food restaurants and convenience stores lead like yellow brick to the local Oz: the county’s biggest Blockbuster and Super Wal-Mart.
Behind it a new development of tidy, bright, white Monopoly-marker houses dots a backfilled hillside that used to be a moonscape of strip mining.
It’s an odd kind of depression and a purely blue-collar American one, from what I know of poverty in other countries, past and present, that my father was always quick to point out to me on television news shows and in books and newspapers when I was little.
No one’s starving here; on the contrary, many are fat. No one’s lacking material goods; everyone has clothing, a place to live, a TV to watch, and a car to drive.
Most people have been able to find a way to make a living since most of the mines closed and Franklin went under, too. There’s a small United Can & Container plant twenty miles west of town. There’s a branch of a state university about thirty miles in the opposite direction that requires a small army of secretaries, food-service workers, janitors, and groundskeepers. There’s the hospital. There’s a new juvenile-detention center that provided a lot of construction jobs while it was being built; now it has a full-time staff of thirty-five. There’s Sheriff Jack’s car dealership. There are stores and offices and restaurants to work in.