Coal Run

by Tawni O'Dell

  But despite all this, there’s still deprivation in the air. It’s something my father predicted years before it happened.

  My mom told me once about a conversation she had with him not long before he was killed. He brought up the inevitable extinction of the coal-mining industry, which was a pretty radical discussion to have with a woman whose family had been tied to the Pennsylvania coalfields since the time of the Molly Maguires. But the signs were already there, and the future was laid out fairly clearly to anybody who wanted to see it. Environmental concerns, cleaner fuel alternatives, cheaper steel imports, labor disputes, and the undeniable fact of nature that the coal we had the technology to reach would eventually run out all pointed in only one direction. My mom knew it as well as anyone.

  What struck Mom the most about their conversation was that Dad didn’t focus on what the loss of all these jobs would mean to a family’s pocketbook. He wasn’t overly concerned about tables without food on them or Christmas trees without gifts under them or children without shoes on their feet.

  Times had changed since Mom’s great-great-great-grandfather first took a pickax and a shovel and was dropped down a hole to dig coal. The work itself hadn’t changed that much. Or the dangers. But the world outside supposedly had. It was a kinder, gentler America now, according to my dad. There was the union. If that failed, hopefully there were other jobs to be had. If that failed, there was unemployment compensation. There was welfare.

  No one would starve: This was a very important point with my father, that he kept making over and over again by pounding his fist on the armrest of his favorite chair and flashing his fierce blue stare, but it wasn’t the most important point, and as he was a man who had faced starvation himself and who had lost his mother and sisters to it, Mom thought it should be. His main concern was spirit, she told me. His fear was a poverty of purpose.

  “You can have all the food and toys and even all the bombs,” he told my mom while they shared one of their last nights together, “but no man can protect himself against uselessness.”

  I take side streets to Jolene’s house. She moved to Centresburg the same year I moved to Florida. She only had Josh then. Now she’s the mother of three boys and the wife of no one and seems equally pleased with both situations.

  She’s a career waitress, not only in the sense that she’s been doing it long enough to consider it a career but in that she has always seen it as a career option to be taken just as seriously as being a teacher or an astronaut. If asked what they do for a living, the other women who wait tables with her will reply, “I work as a waitress.” Jolene will proclaim, “I am a waitress.”

  I was disappointed in her for a lot of years. I thought she could’ve done more with her life. When she got pregnant with Josh right out of high school and made it clear that she had no intention of marrying his unemployed, soon-to-enlist, nineteen-year-old father because, as she put it fondly and accurately, “We have a great time messing around together, but I can’t imagine depending on him for anything more than a boner and a pizza,” I thought she should’ve had an abortion.

  Once she decided to have Josh, I thought she should’ve been one of those very pretty, very noble unwed mothers I used to watch on ABC Afterschool Specials who somehow managed to find good, affordable child care for her baby while she worked two jobs to put herself through college and still found time to do volunteer work at the old-folks’ home and bake cookies for her older brother, who was away at Penn State on a football scholarship driving a new sports car that a grateful alum gave him after his team won the Sugar Bowl in ’83.

  When she got pregnant with Harrison, I thought she should have had an abortion. She was still young. She could still do something with her life. Josh was seven now. He was in school all day. One kid wasn’t so much of a burden, but two was a lot. Maybe she could still go to college. Maybe she could still get married, but not to Harrison’s dad, since he was a one-night stand in a Red Roof Inn and she had forgotten to get his phone number. And his last name. And money for the room.

  Once she decided to have Harrison, I thought she should’ve been a slightly older, very pretty, very noble unwed mother of two, who has a full-time job as a waitress and takes night classes while still finding time to bake cookies for her brother, who was now living in Florida killing bugs for a living, drinking for a hobby, and limping around on a leg with a synthetic knee.

  When she got pregnant with Eb, I picked up the phone in the office trailer of Perez Pest Control at the end of our workday and called her while my boss, Mr. Perez, and his son, Ernesto, looked on, grinning at me while passing her letter back and forth between them, pausing to appreciatively eye her feminine handwriting on the pale pink stationery and to smell the hint of perfume that clung to it. I told her to marry the guy. Whoever he was. Marry him, for God’s sake.

  After an ominous silence—ominous because Jolene is never caught without an instant counterremark to a command—she said to me, “You haven’t called me in eight years, and the first time you decide to take the time out of your incredibly busy, bug-killing, ESPN-watching, hanging-out-at-Hooters day and pick up a phone and spend a few bucks to talk to your only sister, it’s to tell me how to live my life?”

  “Yes,” I said, then thought better of it. “I mean, no. I mean, I’m not really paying for it. I’m calling on the company phone.”

  She made a small indignant huff before she steamrolled on.

  “A life that you have made clear you have absolutely no interest in? When I call you and you miraculously happen to answer your phone and I start to tell you about me or Mom or the kids, I know you’re watching TV or you’re doing one of your stupid crossword puzzles and you’re not listening to anything I say.”

  “What?” I asked her.

  “You’re going to give me advice? You? A guy who ran away from home because he broke his leg and couldn’t play football anymore. Boo hoo! A guy who’s never come home for a single visit and never calls and never writes and never says thank you for the tons of cookies I make for him—his favorite, pecan tassies, which are a major pain in the ass to make because you have to put the dough in all those tiny little tassie cups and then spoon the melted butter and brown sugar in and then put the pecans on top, and it takes hours. Hours!

  “And whenever Mom or I try to come visit you, you always find some lame excuse for us not to come, like you’re suddenly moving or you’re sick or you’re having your apartment fumigated, and I want to go to Florida! Damn you! I look great in a bikini. Women who look great in bikinis should get free trips to Florida constantly. As a matter of fact, that should be the criterion for being allowed to take a trip to Florida. It shouldn’t have anything to do with, ‘Can you afford it?’ It should be all about, ‘Does anyone want to see you in a bikini?’ I have a brother who lives in Florida, and I look great in a bikini. With that combination I should be spending half my life in Florida.

  “Do you know Josh is twelve years old now and he’s never shaken Mickey Mouse’s hand or paw or whatever you call it? What do you call it? Is it a hand or a paw? Do mice have paws?”

  “They have feet.”

  “But he wears gloves.”

  “He gets dressed in the dark.”

  Another silence. Then, “I’m not going to marry Randy Craig. He’s a nice guy, but I already have enough laundry to do.”

  She hung up, and I hung up, too. Ernesto and his father continued smiling grandly. I told them that she wasn’t getting married, and some money exchanged hands.

  I didn’t bother telling them the details of the conversation, except for her belief that women who look great in bikinis should get free trips to Florida. They agreed wholeheartedly.

  Mr. Perez broke out a bottle of rum and a bottle of Coke, and we set about drinking Cuba Libres and thinking up various fund-raisers that could pay for the free trips until Mrs. Perez called and Mr. Perez left happily to be with the woman he loved and Ernesto and I were left to continue drinking until Ernesto’s wi
fe called and he left to be with the woman he was afraid of. I ended up calling Jolene back and thanking her for the cookies.

  She came to Florida when Eb was one and a half and was sure her body had sufficiently returned to looking great in a bikini. She drove down by herself with the three boys and never talked about the trip except to announce after they arrived that they weren’t going to talk about it.

  Josh was a teenager by then and wouldn’t be caught dead shaking Mickey Mouse’s hand or paw or foot or whatever it was, so Harrison did it after waiting in line for two hours in 102-degree heat.

  Afterward we got to spend another hour at the nearest air-conditioned first-aid station with twenty other sunstroke victims, being offered water, orange juice, and Dumbo-shaped cookies by tan, pretty girls in short, bright yellow, health-professional smocks. If they had served beer, it would have been my favorite spot in the whole park.

  Eb came down with a bad cold after being refrigerated so soon after being simmered in his own body fluids for most of the day. Harrison got an ear infection from the swimming pool in my apartment complex. Josh got a bad sunburn and developed a crush on the cute blond transvestite who lived two doors down from me. Harrison said he was bored every day.

  All the summers since then, Jolene’s taken the boys to Lake Erie.

  The trip wasn’t a total disaster, though. After seeing her again after all those years and seeing her boys, too, I realized I wanted back some of the role of big brother that I had purposely thrown away when I left. I didn’t want all of it back. I just wanted the part where I checked up on them and made sure they were doing okay, so I started calling her instead of always waiting for her to call me.

  For Jolene’s part, she stopped trying to convince me to come home again. I can’t say why exactly. It couldn’t have been because she saw I was happy and doing well, because I wasn’t. It couldn’t have been because she saw that I had found a place where I was better off, because I hadn’t.

  I think it might have been as simple as her needing to see firsthand how I was living to understand how serious I was about staying away. She finally realized that knowing the reason I left wasn’t the same as understanding why I couldn’t come back. My mom always knew the difference. She never once asked me when I was coming home.

  A few more years passed. The cookies kept coming. Photos of the boys kept coming. Strangely enough, once Jolene stopped bugging me about coming home, I started to consider it. Then one day I received a newspaper clipping, sent anonymously, with no return address, and home became all I could think about.

  It was one of those pieces about violent crimes in rural areas that periodically ran in the city newspapers. Reese was always the highlight of these stories, and, despite the fact that he committed his crime almost twenty years ago, he was the centerpiece in this one, too. It seems the story of the Coal Run redneck who beat his wife into a coma in front of their three-year-old son and then, after serving only two years of his six-year sentence, beat a fellow inmate to death and was sentenced to fifteen more years holds timeless appeal for the local crime reporters.

  In a sidebar Reese’s impending release date one year later was mentioned, along with a quote from Laurel County’s sheriff, Jack Townsend, who said, “If he chooses to come back here to live, there’s nothing we can do about it. Coal Run is his home. We’ll just have to hope he’s learned his lesson.”

  In the margin, written in black pen, was a question for me: “What are you going to do?”

  I couldn’t figure out who sent it to me, and I still don’t know. Whoever it was would have had to know my address in Florida and, more important, my tie to Reese, and no one knows my tie to Reese.

  I couldn’t get the question out of my mind.

  ———

  I park my truck in front of Jolene’s house and honk the horn. She lives in a quiet neighborhood made up of a collection of small, working-class houses. Some are clapboard. Some are brick. Some sided in white or gray aluminum.

  Hers is a rosy one with white gingerbread trim and an old-fashioned front-porch swing. It’s in good condition, because there are about a dozen men on her street who’d do anything to be close to her, including painting her eaves, cleaning her gutters, trimming her hedges, and shoveling her sidewalk in winter. Fortunately, the women like being near her, too, and let their men do it.

  Her front door opens, and Jolene steps outside carrying her purse and a folded garbage bag. Her heels click across the porch floorboards. She’s halfway down the front walk when she stops suddenly and calls out to me, “I have six black dresses. They’re all low-cut or have fringe. Except this one.”

  She spreads out her arms and turns around once. Her fingerfuls and armloads of rings and bracelets clink and twinkle as she twirls. She’s wearing a very short, very tight, black dress.

  “It’s very nice,” I say.

  “You don’t like it.”

  “I said it’s nice.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It’s an angora blend.”

  “It’s great.”

  “Wait. I’m having second thoughts.”

  “Shit,” I say.

  “I love it, but it is a little short. People might think it’s inappropriate.”

  She looks down at her legs. Like a child or a dog, Jolene’s sense of wrongdoing depends solely on how others react to her and has nothing to do with listening to her own conscience, since this part of her is always telling her to do whatever she wants.

  “I haven’t been to a funeral in a long time. What will other people be wearing?”

  “Funeral attire.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What will Zo be wearing?”

  “Zo? Zo is the corpse.”

  “I know. What will she be wearing?”

  “How the hell would I know?”

  “You’re the one who found her.”

  “That doesn’t mean I get to dress her.”

  “Who does?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What was she wearing when you found her?”

  “Stop it, Jolene. Would you just shut up and get in the truck?”

  I don’t tell Jolene, but I remember exactly what Zo was wearing the day I found her stretched out on her couch waiting for me to pick her up and take her grocery shopping: a tiny, cotton-haired woman dressed in navy polyester pants and a matching vest over a striped blouse, a tan raincoat, and the kind of clear plastic rain kerchief that folds up into a perfect little triangle and slips unseen into an old lady’s big white pocketbook.

  Jolene starts digging through her own purse the minute she climbs into my truck. I glimpse lipsticks, hair clips, a packet of Dr. Scholl’s corn pads, a pink satin bra, rolls of LifeSavers, a Fisher-Price pirate holding a sword between his teeth, nail polish, gum wrappers, an old campaign button that reads CLINTON FOR PRESIDENT. INHALE IN ’96, an undeveloped roll of film, her name pin from Valley Dairy, a construction-paper valentine, men’s phone numbers—with and without names—scribbled on everything from dollar bills to the backs of labels ripped from beer bottles, and a pair of pantyhose.

  She stops searching when she finds a twist tie. She sets it on the seat beside her and glances in my direction.

  “Nice tie,” she snickers.

  “It was the best I could do on short notice.”

  “You should have borrowed the one Eb offered you.”

  “It had Scooby-Doo on it.”

  “Ducks are better?”

  “By the way, what kind of six-year-old has a collection of neckties?”

  “He likes them. They make him feel dressed up.”

  She shakes out the bag and starts picking trash off the floor. She holds up a beer can in front of my face.

  “You’re going to get fired,” she tells me.

  “I can’t. It would violate Jack’s religion. He’s a Penn State alum.”

  She picks up
a can of shaving cream and shakes it to see if it’s empty. Satisfied that it is, she puts it in the bag.

  “So you’re not taking Eb?” I ask her.

  “He’s too little to take to his grandma’s funeral. Josh offered to go, but I needed him to stay home and watch Eb. Harrison refused to go because she’s no relation of his. That’s the way he put it.”

  “Nice,” I grunt.

  “Sometimes I can’t believe the mouth on Harrison, and he’s only eleven. We had another fight today. We fight all the time lately.”

  “What was the fight about?”

  “I’m not sure, exactly. As I was leaving, he said, ‘Even a hooker doesn’t try to pick up men at a funeral.’ ”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘Yes, a hooker would.’ ”

  “I think you missed the point.”

  “I got the point. He thinks I’m obsessed with men, but the truth is, I hardly ever date. He knows that. When do I have the time to meet anyone? And where am I going to meet him? And frankly, who’s left for me to date?”

  “There’s some guys out at Safe Haven on life support.”

  “Very funny.”

  I sympathize with Harrison. I know what it’s like to have a pretty, unmarried mother and then to arrive at an age yourself where you start to be interested in girls and you realize the guys sniffing around your mom are thinking the same thoughts about her that you’re thinking about your Farrah Fawcett poster. If your mom responds favorably to their thoughts, you’re not sure if you should be happy for her, or protective of her, or angry at her, or repulsed by her. I was doubly cursed. Eventually Jolene came of age, and I had a pretty sister, too.

  The best and worst of male intentions were constantly pulling in and out of our driveway: my mom shunning most of their advances, Jolene accepting most of their advances, but neither one of them the least bit attainable.