Coal Run

by Tawni O'Dell

  One of my hands instinctively jumps to my throat. I never ran with my head down. Deets’s punishment for that was to make you practice with barbed wire wrapped around your neck. He called it a Barbie Choker.

  I’m about to correct Val and tell him he was wrong—he never saw a picture of me with my head down—when he adds, “Zo made me do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Subscribe to the paper.”

  Zo made him do it? I couldn’t imagine anybody making him do anything, and certainly not an old lady who he hadn’t seen for over thirty years. I didn’t even know he knew Zo.

  “How did she make you get a subscription to a newspaper?”

  “Same way she got me to come to her funeral. She said please.”

  Emotions I thought I had successfully buried start churning inside me again. The delight I originally felt over seeing him again is slowly replaced by the sting of betrayal.

  He never wrote to me when he was in Vietnam. He never answered one of my letters. He promised he would. He promised he’d come back, and he never did, not even for a visit, not even after we all knew he was back in America, first in a VA hospital in Maryland and then somewhere in Ohio. His mom was never sure where. He didn’t communicate with her, he never asked about anyone; he just sent money sometimes. All this time I’d been telling myself he had an excuse. It turns out he didn’t have any. He had been spying on us.

  “You knew everything that was going on back here, but you never came back?”

  He says nothing.

  “Why would you bother reading about a place you didn’t care about anymore?”

  Still nothing.

  “How did you know Zo?”

  He finally looks at me with those same calm yet troubling eyes, his stare giving off a kind of stagnant serenity.

  “I’ve learned to deal with friendly people the way you deal with bears. If you stand real still and don’t make any noise, sometimes they’ll just sniff you and go away. I guess that’s not going to work with you.”

  He takes a final puff off his cigarette, then stubs it out on his artificial leg through a tear in the fabric of his camouflage pants.

  “Tell your sister she’s not fooling anyone with that powdering-her-nose routine. I know she’s watching me in her mirror. You can tell her I’m flattered. It’ll make her day.”

  He pushes himself off the wall and begins limping away.

  I start to follow him.

  “Where are you going?”

  “You always were a pain in the ass, and you still are. Asking a million questions all the time. Running around with that big fucking book with the animals on the cover. What was it called? Natural Wonders?”

  “Wonders of Nature.”

  “Yeah. That was it. Whatever happened to that book?”

  “I don’t know. My mom probably gave it to a used-book sale somewhere along the way.”

  At the mention of my mother, he pauses in his progress, then continues in a more determined way. I want to follow him. My reasons are purely selfish. I find I’m not as interested in knowing what he’s been doing as I am in wanting to know if he remembers anything we used to do together. Does he remember any of the things he taught me: how to change a spark plug, how to throw a football, how to shoot a gun?

  I was only six years old the one time he let me go hunting with him. My mother would have sent me to my room for the rest of my life if she had known.

  I don’t think Val would have let me near a gun at such a young age either, but I think he felt it was his responsibility to teach me, since my dad couldn’t do it and he had already found out he was going to have to go fight in Vietnam so he had to do it right away. He showed me how to start a lawn mower and ride a two-wheeler, too.

  He helped me hold the gun when we spotted the deer. He wrapped his arms around me from behind and crooked his finger over my finger over the trigger, then instructed me in a whisper to wait until the deer looked me in the eye before I killed her. To do it any other way was cheating.

  I looked through the scope and tried to meet the deer’s eyes like he told me to. I was far enough away that to her I couldn’t have been more than a tiny upright figure with a black stick held strangely in my paws, or more than likely I wasn’t an image at all, just a deadly scent. But I felt she was looking across the small dip of a valley separating us, through the screen of leafless trees where I hid, into the scope, down the scope, and right into my eyes, and there we stood, eyeball to eyeball, hard human blue eyes searching startled soft velvet black ones.

  Thinking about her froze me, but thinking about me ignited her. She turned and began to bound away. I tried to go ahead and shoot her even though I knew it was too late. There was a deafening boom and a kick from the gun that would have sent me sprawling onto the ground if Val hadn’t been braced behind me.

  The sound made the deer run faster. Her tail flickered in and out of the trees like a white flame until it disappeared completely.

  Frustrated tears stung my eyes. I waited for Val to laugh or lecture, but he didn’t do either. He took the gun from me and leaned it against a tree while he lit a cigarette.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I missed,” I said, trying to keep my voice from cracking.

  “You know why?”

  “Because I’m a bad shot.”

  “You’re not any kind of a shot yet,” he grunted.

  “Because I was too slow?”

  “Because you didn’t want to kill her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He picked up the gun and started walking.

  “I mean don’t ever try and kill something unless you really want to kill it.”

  “Why?”

  He stopped walking and looked down at me. I remember the cigarette flicking up and down in his teenage mouth when he spoke.

  “Because it would be pretty stupid to kill something you didn’t want to kill, wouldn’t it?”

  Now I watch him walk out the front door of the funeral home and decide it would be pretty stupid to follow a man who doesn’t want to be followed.

  I feel a sharp pain in my finger and jerk my hand out of my pocket. I’d been rubbing the rabbit’s foot he made for me and slipped into my hand the day he left for basic training.

  A perfect drop of bright red blood beads on my fingertip. The fur and flesh are long gone. All that’s left now are bones and claws.

  ———

  I need a drink. I’m not embarrassed or apologetic about the craving. Needing a drink isn’t any worse than needing to collect Beanie Babies. I’d rather be a drunk than a moron.

  I leave my truck behind at the funeral home and head down the street on foot. I’m going to catch hell from Jolene for leaving, but I don’t care.

  It took me a long time to get used to the fact that Val had been sent away to fight in a war. I adapted to the idea, but I never accepted it.

  Next I adapted to the news that Val had lost his leg. I changed my plans for us. I knew he wouldn’t be able to hunt anymore or take the long walks through the woods he used to love. I knew he wouldn’t be able to stand over his truck’s engine or probably slide underneath it either. He wouldn’t be able to jump up off the couch all of a sudden when the Steelers scored a touchdown or play horseshoes or play catch. I knew he wouldn’t be strolling on a Saturday morning from his backyard down to the mailbox, singing the chorus to a Foghat or an Allman Brothers tune, to get the mail before his mom so he could hand it to her, and it would be smeared with oily black fingerprints, and she’d scream at him, and he’d come out the back door grinning at me. I knew he wouldn’t be able to do all the repair jobs he’d been doing for my mom since my dad died. I knew there was a good chance his fantasy girl would never go for a ride in his truck or have anything to do with him at all now that he was going to be a one-legged freak. I didn’t know if he’d even be able to drive his truck anymore.

  I came up with other things for us to do. Board games. Crossword puzzles. Watchin
g TV. I thought maybe he could still throw a football or a horseshoe but do it sitting down.

  I was prepared for him to come home in his altered state, but he never did. I even eventually adapted to that.

  Now I guess I’m supposed to adapt to the fact that we have somehow miraculously found ourselves together in the same town again after all these years and he doesn’t seem the least bit interested in hanging out with me. I could pursue him, but I don’t know where he’s staying or for how long. I don’t even know anyone in town who might know.

  There are six bars in town. Brownie’s is my favorite. It’s a dark lane of a bar with a sputtering Miller Genuine Draft sign hanging in the only window. It’s named after the owner’s dead dog, who wasn’t dead at the time he opened the bar. He has a photo of the ginger-colored mutt tacked onto the wall next to the men’s room, amid an impressive collage of magazine pictures of naked women and yellowed newspaper clippings of me breaking tackles.

  I prefer Brownie’s to other bars because the clientele is composed of career drinkers. There’s none of the false camaraderie or violent outbursts or slobbering confessions of amateurs to deal with. Only the silent, steady, earnest consumption of alcohol by men who drink not because they think their lives turned out poorly but because they turned out exactly the way they thought they would.

  I also like it because I’m largely ignored. In every other bar in town, I’m mounted behind smudge-free glass in galloping, ball-clutching glory, my past more relevant than my present and all my current failures, misdeeds, and shortcomings neatly excused, forgiven, and overlooked for the simple fact that I used to be very good at sports. Harrison calls the phenomenon O-Jayfication.

  I walk past the post office, then past the somber stone face of the First National Bank built by Stan Jack—the J of J&P Coal—back when the area was producing more raw tonnage per miner than any other coalfield in Pennsylvania. It still houses the bank’s officers and three yawning tellers who busy themselves counting and recounting the money in their drawers and balancing their own checkbooks. Their customers’ banking is done at the ATM machines out at the mall.

  Next to Brownie’s is the abandoned Woolworth’s building. The display windows are boarded up with plywood. The big blue block capital letters spelling out the store’s name have faded to silver shadows that can only be seen when the light isn’t too weak or too bright.

  The three buildings form a sort of condensed history of the town. First National. Woolworth’s. Brownie’s. Boomtown. Shutdown. Remnants.

  By the time I reach the bar, my knee is throbbing. It’s been bothering me ever since I squatted in Ricky Blystone’s front yard.

  For the most part, my injury doesn’t usually interfere with my job. In theory, being a deputy should require a certain level of physical fitness and the ability to break into a sprint if needed, but the reality is, we spend most of our time sitting behind a desk, in a car, in an amazing variety of uncomfortable chairs and benches while we wait in hospitals, prisons, courtrooms, people’s living rooms, auto-repair shops, churches, restaurants, bars, and anywhere else where an individual’s rage, stupidity, carelessness, or the combination of all three finally brings him to rest.

  Dr. Ed gives me prescription painkillers on the sly so nothing shows up on my insurance records that could alert anyone to a problem with my leg. According to my sheriff’s-department physicals, I don’t have a problem.

  The falsified records are necessary but ultimately unimportant. Anyone who wants to challenge my physical capabilities can do it easily enough by digging up any of the old newspaper and magazine articles that ran when I broke my leg.

  PENN STATE ALL-STAR PINNED UNDER MINING EQUIPMENT. BEARS LOSE PROMISING BACK. FREAK ACCIDENT CRUSHES ZOSCHENKO’S LEG,CAREER. JOE PA PAYS HOSPITAL VISIT. DITKA ON THE LOSS OF IVAN Z.: “A SAD DAY FOR FANS OF THE RUNNING GAME.”

  But everyone who knows me can’t imagine why anyone would have a problem with my being a deputy, so they don’t think there’s anything wrong with a little white lie. To the greater statewide law-enforcement community, I’m simply a deputy in a no-crime county whose competence is vouched for on the local level, and there’s never been a reason to question that competence.

  As for the local level itself, Jack Townsend, Laurel County’s sheriff for the past thirty-five years, estimates he won around fifty-thousand during my four years playing Nittany ball. One of those wins came in the last three seconds of a game against Miami when we were seventeen-point underdogs. I took a swing pass on third and long and ran fifty-seven yards for a touchdown. That game alone put the down payment on his hunting camp in Sinnemahoning, some of the best fly-fishing in the world.

  It was Jack who convinced me to come work for him. We ran into each other at the State Store this past summer right after I came back. We were both buying the same bottle of whiskey for ourselves and the same pink wine in a box for the same woman. He had been widowed two years earlier and was only on his second date with Jolene, but it would be his next to last. She was about to discover that men in their sixties fall asleep around nine o’clock every night.

  I take my usual seat at the end of the bar and join the assembly-line drinking. Soon I don’t care that Val thinks I used to run with my head down or that I walked out on Zo’s funeral or that Reese Raynor is days within my grasp and I’m not nearly as excited about it as I thought I was going to be.

  On my way back to the bar after my second leak, I stop to look for Reese in any of the newspaper clippings chronicling my fame that are interspersed in the pieces of naked women. The photos have been taped up haphazardly, at strange angles, with many of the women’s heads covered over by other women’s breasts, legs, crotch shots, and asses. The result is a patchwork of dismembered female parts, which is all a man drinking at Brownie’s is in any condition to handle. Just a part. Not a whole female.

  I don’t find Reese, but I find Jess. He’s in a picture with Deets, who’s standing on the sidelines in his cheap, shiny, gray polyester game-day pants and his silver-gray team jacket with red flames leaping up his back. He’s a wide, solid stump of a man, bald because he shaved his head at the beginning of every season to prove he wasn’t easily embarrassed, so the first time he slammed into the locker room during halftime to tell us we were embarrassing the hell out of him, he could point to his head and scream, “And I’m not a man who’s easily embarrassed!” His arms are folded across his barrel chest, and he’s glaring pop-eyed while shouting at Jess.

  Jess was Deets’s other star player. He had almost been my equal. He had speed, strength, intelligence, desire, but he also had fear. He didn’t like to get hit. He didn’t like to hit back.

  Deets tried to torture the fear out of him. He used to make him rush the concrete wall at the back of the school. He’d make him take a three-point stance and then time him with his stopwatch to make sure he sprinted the distance to the wall, where he slammed into it full force with his shoulder.

  One time I watched him hit head-on and knock himself unconscious for a couple seconds. I saw the bruises on him in the locker room the next day. I saw the way he could barely move in school. But he’d do it all night long if Deets told him to and never complain about it, yet when it came time for a game, he still flinched every time he took the ball in his hands. He still took the path of least resistance every time, even if it meant losing yards.

  I let my eyes wander over the rest of the wall. I linger over a pair of long legs in red stiletto heels covering the last few paragraphs of the account of my career-ending accident. The headline reads: DISASTER STRIKES AGAIN AT GERTIE. Of all the countless articles written about me in newspapers and magazines, my local paper was the only one to make no mention of me, my crushed leg, or football in the headline and the only one to print a photo of the abandoned mine and make it five times the size of the one they printed of me shaking hands with Mike Ditka after I signed my contract with the Bears.

  I’ve gone over the night of my accident hundreds of times in my h
ead, trying to figure out why I went to Gertie that night. I had been there often enough during my childhood after the explosion. There was nothing to stop us from going, except warnings from our mothers. The buildings were abandoned but unlocked. The shafts were all left open. J&P never bothered closing its mines with anything more than word of mouth.

  Kids went there on dares to look for ghosts and morbid souvenirs, or to climb up, jump off of, crawl into, and hide under things they weren’t supposed to go near. Some just went out of curiosity. The empty complex could be seen clearly across the valley from the Coal Run junkyard. It sat gutted and forbidding against the lush hillside, tempting and frightening at the same time, like an old castle or the stripped gray skull of some colossal monster.

  I went for the same reasons everyone else did, but there was something more that drew me there, something unpleasant but irresistible, the same thing that forced me to go look at a dead kitten on the side of the road instead of turning away as soon as I glimpsed a swarm of flies around it from a distance. Knowing it was dead wasn’t enough; I had to see the small, mangled body.

  Gertie haunted me, not just because it spoke of death but because it also whispered disturbing truths about life.

  From the moment it blew, everyone talked about—but never outwardly accused—the new continuous miners: large, steel-toothed cutting machines that ripped the coal directly from the face and dumped it onto conveyor belts that led to shuttle cars on the tracks.

  The miners had been against them from the start. They used to gather in our kitchen and talk in deep rumbles about the loss of jobs and the new dangers involved.

  Not only would the machines put many of them out of work, since one continuous miner could rip more coal from a face than twenty human miners with chain cutters could, but they made more coal dust and left more cracks in the ceilings where methane could escape into the air, creating a lethal combination for the smallest spark to ignite.

  J&P told the union they were exaggerating the safety issue.

  The union backed off. There had been a lengthy strike only two years earlier that had turned violent and left one miner badly injured and another one in jail. No one wanted to go through that again, plus no one was sure of the legality of striking because your company wanted to update its equipment and improve its output. It was fine to fight for better wages, benefits, and safer working conditions, but what were the chances of winning a fight against progress?