Coal Run

by Tawni O'Dell

I look over at Jolene, who’s staring out the door after Val and clutching the tip in an upraised fist like she’s about to argue a point.

  “Yes,” I hear myself reply.

  She catches my eye. I smile at her. She smiles back.

  “He definitely remembers us,” I tell her.

  ———

  My reflexes aren’t what they used to be, or I would’ve followed Val out into the parking lot and tried to talk to him. It’s not until he’s gone that I realize I still don’t know anything about his friendship with Zo or where he’s staying or for how long. I wanted to tell him he should go see my mom.

  My stomach isn’t ready for food yet, but I’m feeling a lot better. I take my coffee to go.

  I park my truck in front of the sheriff’s department instead of around back where Jack likes us to park. I go in the front door where the public is supposed to enter. He doesn’t like us to do that either.

  There are no windows in the small, rectangular room. There’s a bench on each side of the doors, two surveillance cameras mounted to the low ceiling, and a large concrete keystone mounted to a boulder in the middle of the floor with the words ENFORCEMENT OF LAWS, and PRESERVATION OF DOMESTIC ORDER encircling it in gold.

  Frank’s working the desk today. He and Chuck trade off dispatcher and desk duties. He’s on the phone behind Plexiglas, frowning, and gives me a nod of recognition as I pass through the door leading to Operations.

  The rest of the building is made up of two holding cells in back, a booking room, an evidence room, an equipment room, a general-purpose room, and Jack’s office.

  There are four other deputies besides me. Two of them are named Chad.

  Pierced Chad has four earrings he’s not allowed to wear on duty, a pierced nipple, and a pierced tongue that Jack has never noticed. He’s always spit-shined and ironed, his tie perfectly knotted, his pant legs creased. He lives with his mom.

  Pregnant Chad always looks like he’s spent the night hiding in a closet. He’s owl-eyed and is usually bent over a scalding cup of coffee like he’s trying to steam lines out of his face. He lives with his expectant wife and their three children between the ages of one and five.

  Tripp Doverspike is a big, loud guy who raises ducks and has a pretty girlfriend.

  Our other deputy is Todd Stiffy, whose name alone propelled him into an armed occupation.

  Not one of them joined the sheriff’s department because he wanted to fight crime or make the world a better, safer place. On the other hand, they also didn’t do it because they like to bully people or because they get off being an authority figure with a badge and a gun. We’re all well aware that doesn’t mean much around here. The general populace is better armed than us, and most of them are better shots, too.

  They’re all decent guys, but they became deputies simply because they needed a job, and it’s a good job with good benefits and a good retirement plan. Not to mention a free car or truck with a V-8 engine and a siren.

  I became one because my reason for coming home was to confront a violent ex-con, then leave again. After Jack made the passing job offer to me in the State Store last summer, it occurred to me a few days later that being a law-enforcement officer might not be a bad thing for me to be when I eventually meet up with Reese. Unfortunately, I didn’t stop to consider that becoming a deputy would mean I’d have to do a deputy’s job. On the upside, I really like my truck.

  Pierced Chad is on the phone at his desk. He nods a good-morning in my direction. Pregnant Chad and Doverspike are on transport this week. I don’t know where Stiffy is.

  Our desks are the only places where individuality is allowed to be expressed in the building, and even then it has to be done sparingly. They float in the middle of the sterile sameness, little islands of distinction, the objects scattered on them and the pictures taped to them revealing the complexities of the man behind the deputy.

  Stiffy’s into sports. Pierced Chad loves cars. Pregnant Chad has kids. Doverspike likes ducks and has a pretty girlfriend. My desk is clean except for a calendar.

  Jack’s in his office, a remarkably empty, impersonal place considering how many years he’s occupied it. He was first elected when I was a child, not long after Gertie blew, when the populace wasn’t paying much attention to anything but survival.

  His competition was a law-and-order career cop, a former Centresburg police chief, whose campaign focused on traditional crime-fighting issues in an area with little crime but a lot of death. Jack Townsend was a self-made businessman who liberally spread his money around and held lots of rallies with beer kegs and vats of ham barbecue where people could have a good time and get away from the ghosts.

  His opponents pointed out that he didn’t know anything about law enforcement, but his supporters pointed out that running a small sheriff’s department with limited duties couldn’t be more difficult than building a successful car dealership from the ground up.

  Centresburg has its own police department, and the state police have a barracks in this township and flex the majority of the investigative and enforcement muscle around here. Our job consists mainly of transporting prisoners, assisting the coroner’s office, and mopping up the unincorporated countryside.

  And while a sheriff’s deputy must complete specific training, meet certain qualifications, and maintain local certification, a sheriff doesn’t have to meet any standards. He’s elected.

  Jack’s done well. No one’s held the office this long in this county. No one can touch him in an election. He’s run uncontested for the past decade. He’s considered gruff but not callous, tough but fair-minded, a decent hard-ass who will tell you he’s going to beat the crap out of you before he does it. He often takes the moral high road, but, as with so many men who do, I’ve never been able to figure out if it’s because he’s a moral man.

  He’s reading the Parade section of the Sunday newspaper and doesn’t look up when I enter, but I know he’s seen me because he asks, “Where are your pants?”

  I look down at my muddy jeans.

  “In a closet at my sister’s house,” I answer him.

  “How is your sister?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “How’s your mother?”

  “Closer to your age.”

  He rattles his paper.

  “Next time I see you, I want your ass in those pants where it belongs.”

  “I really fail to see how they help me do my job.”

  “Your ass inside them,” he says again.

  I take a seat on a slippery, diner-booth-quality chair and stretch out my legs. My knee hurts. I need a drink or another pill or both.

  “Were you working yesterday?” Jack asks me.

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “You want to tell me why you responded to a call, then?”

  “I was in the neighborhood?”

  He glances up. His hair is a metallic gray, perfectly oiled and combed, and his eyes are a dark, unreadable brown. He’s kept a trim figure all these years, which is nothing short of amazing considering the diet of roast beef, mashed potatoes, and gravy his deceased wife used to feed him and the fact that he spends the majority of his time sitting behind a desk. He always dresses in full uniform, including a keystone-shaped belt buckle and matching tie clip. He never leaves the station without his hat on.

  He glances down again, turning the page, and asks me the same question he’s already asked me a dozen times since I’ve been back.

  “When do you think Paterno’s going to retire?”

  “I think he’s waiting for God to retire first.”

  He turns another page. The room is overheated and smells faintly of the smoked cheddar cheese spread he likes to eat on crackers.

  “So you did respond to the call?”

  “I dropped by.”

  “I’m going to assume you have a good excuse for not writing up a report yesterday and you plan on doing it today. I’m also going to assume that you didn’t confiscate any guns, since the las
t time you pulled that shit, I suspended you for a week without pay, and next time it will be a month.”

  He finally puts the paper down, pushes it aside, and gives me his full attention. Jack’s office doesn’t have windows. Sitting here in front of his unavoidable scrutiny is like being a toad in a shoe box with a kid’s big eye straining omnipotently through a hole in the lid.

  “I don’t care what the hell happens in a man’s house,” he goes on. “No statements, no complaints, no reports, no arrests mean no crime. Do you know what it’s called when you go ahead and take a man’s firearm from his home under those circumstances?”

  “Thinking ahead?”

  “Stealing.”

  I shift in my seat. I went back in the house while Jess was still out cold and took his other guns, including a handgun I found on a shelf in the bedroom closet.

  “I don’t want this department involved in some major-pain-in-the-ass lawsuit.”

  He tugs out another section of the newspaper and flips it open.

  “God,” he sighs, “I miss the good old days when men just used to beat the crap out of each other and women gossiped like crazy behind each other’s backs when they had disagreements instead of hiring lawyers. It’s so damn cowardly.”

  He eyes me briefly.

  “I want a report today,” he tells me.

  Thirty years he’s had this office. He could at least put a plant in it, or a picture of his grandkids. He has citations and plaques hanging on the walls, but not a single photo of him accepting any of them. There’s no sign anywhere of his love for fly-fishing, Penn State football, or his deceased wife. It’s as if he can only do this job if he steps away from himself.

  “Fine,” I reply.

  “One more thing,” he says. “You know Reese Raynor is getting released tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow: the immediacy of the word should fill me with anticipation or dread, but it does neither.

  I wonder what’s going through Reese’s mind on his last day of captivity. Probably the same thing that was going through it on his first day. The same thing that goes through a dog’s mind from the moment he’s chained to his doghouse to the moment he finally drops dead: When am I going to be fed?

  “I’ve told everyone to keep their eyes and ears open. But I want you at your desk for the rest of the week unless I personally give the word for you to do something else.”

  “What? Why? Because I answered that call yesterday when I wasn’t on duty?”

  He pushes his chair back slightly from his desk and laces his fingers over his gut. I see the glint of his belt buckle between his knuckles.

  “Do you remember Reese’s trial? You were there every day. It wasn’t too long after you got out of the hospital after your first surgery. You were in a bad way. On crutches. Wearing a knee brace. Anyone could tell to look at you, you were in a lot of pain. But you were there every day. You never did tell me why.”

  His fingers begin to tap on each other.

  “You want to tell me now?”

  Jess was there every day, too. He was the only one from their family who ever showed up. I wonder if Jack ever wondered why Jess was there.

  “No,” I answer him.

  He slides his chair back up against his desk and tugs out another section of newspaper.

  “So what are you saying? I’m tied to my desk for the week because eighteen years ago I went to the trial of a guy who’s being released from prison tomorrow?”

  “You’ve been a little off lately. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Distracted, maybe. And making too many judgment calls when you’re out on the job. Thinking too much for yourself.”

  “Sorry about that. I’ll try and think less.”

  “Leave the thinking to me. I’ve got something for you to do before you get to your paperwork. Do you know Ronny Hewitt?”

  “Yeah. We played football together.”

  “Do you remember where he used to live? Out near the Run?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He still lives there. He and his wife built a house next door to his folks. I want you to go out there. Apparently Andy Lineweaver’s picnic table was washed down the creek during that last flood we had. He thought it was gone for good, and then he spotted it last week in Ronny’s yard. Ronny says it’s his now. Andy waited until Ronny left for work this morning, and then he showed up with his truck to take it back. Turns out Ronny forgot his wallet and came back to the house, too. They’re in the process of beating the shit out of each other. It’s getting bad enough that Ronny’s wife just called us. Apparently it’s a helluva nice picnic table. Andy just bought it last year.”

  I stare back at him. “Are you kidding me?”

  “I don’t want to send Chad or Stiffy. Breaking up a fight is messy.”

  He opens his new section of newspaper, shakes it out, lays it flat on the desk, and begins reading.

  “They might get their pants dirty.”

  7

  THE ROADS TO COAL RUN ARE HILLY, TWISTING, RUINED ONES with broken shoulders and potholes made a generation ago by coal trucks too heavy to travel them and left unmended by a generation who doesn’t come out here anymore. Clumps of houses, lone trailers, gap-faced barns, a beer distributor, and a one-pump gas station fly past my window before I plunge into a corridor of trees, several miles long, where the day’s weak light filtered through the bare branches onto the blacktop makes the air look watery and gray.

  I resurface suddenly to an isolated place where the hills roll away from the road on all sides in purplish-gray waves. Surrounded by the emptiness, I feel suspended, floating, like I’m bobbing in the middle of an ocean of earth. Then the landmarks of Coal Run begin to appear: an abandoned ball field scarred with gopher holes, my boarded-up elementary school, a drive-in theater where rows of rusted speaker posts stand at attention in the weeds like a suicide cult waiting for instructions from the great peeling white screen.

  I avoid the road that goes past my old neighborhood and head straight to the Hewitts’ house.

  It’s a pretty little ranch painted barn red with white trim. A little farther down the road sits the other Hewitt home like a proud parent wearing the same colors, but it’s about twice the size and beginning to show its age.

  I come to a rolling stop about twenty feet away from Ronny’s well-tended front yard, where a guy, who I assume is Andy Lineweaver, has him pinned to the ground and is beating him with pistonlike arm movements.

  Ronny’s wife is standing by screaming, crying, and holding a mobile phone. I slam the door loudly when I get out. She looks my way, intense relief showing on her face.

  “Thank God you’re here!” she cries, and comes stumbling toward me.

  I look past her to the men. Ronny doesn’t seem to be moving much.

  “Hey!” I call out. “Hey!”

  I jog over to them. I glimpse the picnic table in back of the house, at a slant, half in and half out of the bed of a pickup truck. It is a nice one.

  “I said, Hey.”

  I grab Lineweaver by the back of his shirt collar and pull him off. His arm is still pumping. He jabs me in the ribs with his elbow enough times that I start to get annoyed. I wrench his arms behind him and push him to his knees. He tries to bite my ankle. I lodge my good knee into the small of his back, hold his wrists with one hand, and lean onto the back of his neck with my other forearm until he finally stops thrashing around.

  “Son of a bitch!” he bellows.

  “It’s a picnic table,” I explain to him through clenched teeth.

  Ronny’s wife runs over to where he’s sprawled out on the ground. His chest is rising, and I hear moaning.

  “It’s my picnic table!” Lineweaver shouts. “He stole it!”

  The wife looks up from Ronny.

  “He didn’t steal it!” she screams. “It washed up in our backyard!”

  “He’s stealing it now! Son of a bitch!”

  Lineweaver tries to break free. I put more weight on him.

  Ronny stru
ggles to a sitting position. His wife uses her shirt to wipe the blood off his face. He holds himself around his gut, moaning. He starts to cough. I watch him to see if he spits up blood.

  Lineweaver jerks beneath me. I give his arms a sharp yank.

  “Are you going to behave, or do I have to cuff you?”

  “Fuck you!” he says.

  I pull his arms back until his chest is lifted off the ground.

  “I didn’t hear your answer.”

  “I said yes!” he cries out.

  “Yes what?”

  “Yes to whatever you said.”

  “It was an either/or question. Pay attention.”

  “Let go of my fucking arms!” he screams.

  I drop him. He lies in the grass, cursing.

  I get up very slowly, listening to the internal scream coming from what’s left of my knee joint. Sweat stings my eyes, not from exertion but from pain.

  “Are you all right?” I ask Ronny.

  He blinks at me from a face that looks made of purple putty. He starts to speak. It’s hard to hear him at first as he mumbles through his swollen lips, slick with blood and spit.

  “When a man owns a piece of land and it’s registered legally with the courts and everything,” he begins, “then everything on it is his until he dies or gives it to his kids for all perpetuity, and it don’t matter how it gets there.”

  Lineweaver brings his arms around in front of him and slowly raises himself off the ground.

  “What the hell is he talking about?” he asks me.

  “I think he’s quoting the Magna Carta,” I reply.

  “So you’re saying even if you steal something, it’s yours,” he says to Ronny.

  “The police can come and take it from you if they know you stole it, but once you get away with stealing it, it’s yours and no one can take it back.”

  Lineweaver takes a step toward Ronny.

  “You’re so full of shit,” he says.

  “Besides, I didn’t steal that table. It landed here.” Ronny turns to me. “Ain’t that an act of God, Ivan?”

  “If it isn’t, I don’t know what is.”

  “So it’s mine,” he says boldly to Lineweaver.

  I find myself smiling at him. Ronny wasn’t exactly the brightest guy I ever knew. I admire his attempt at logic for the same reason I always admired the truly ugly girls in Jolene’s pageants. There were always a surprising amount of them, girls who didn’t have a chance in hell but were out there anyway with their Vaseline-coated teeth and duct-taped cleavage giving it their all. They didn’t know it, but they were there to pad out the roster, to finance the pageant and the queen’s reign with their six-hundred-dollar entrance fees that they had to beg, borrow, and sacrifice for. Pageant officials called them “plugs.” The girls called them worse things. Jolene called them “worker ants.”