Coal Run

by Tawni O'Dell

  His nose is badly bruised and swollen to twice its normal size, making his eyes look small. They have slashes of dark shadow beneath them.

  He doesn’t seem to be in any pain, though, and he certainly has a lot of energy. He doesn’t seem afraid of his dad, and he doesn’t seem upset with him either.

  I watch Jess watching his son and try to figure out what he’s feeling. I’m looking for guilt on his face, but I don’t see any. I see a kind of rough affection and some concern over the boy’s injury, but nothing that would make me think he’s the one who inflicted it.

  I want to ask him outright if he did it and, if he did, how could he?

  Danny holds the bucket out to his dad.

  “Can I keep it?” he asks.

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Put stuff in it.”

  Jess takes it from him and turns it around in his hands.

  “Okay.”

  He hands it back to him.

  “Did you say hi to Deputy Zoschenko?”

  The boy looks at me suspiciously, then casts a quick glance at his dad, who nods his assent.

  “Hi,” he says, and scoots away.

  “Well, he seems to be feeling okay today,” I comment.

  “Yeah.” Jess reaches behind his head and touches the place where I hit him with the board. “I think he feels better than I do.”

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “Yes I am.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “Well, what was I supposed to do? Let you shoot someone?”

  “I wasn’t gonna shoot anybody. I was shooting at the tires so Bobbie couldn’t leave.”

  “Yeah, your brother-in-law tried the same thing with your mother yesterday and almost shot her head off. Did you hear about it?”

  He nods.

  “What is with your family? Can’t you just let people leave and then call them when they get where they’re going and continue the conversation that way?”

  “I didn’t know what was happening. I thought Bobbie was leaving.”

  “Leaving?”

  “Yeah, leaving.”

  “You mean, really leaving?”

  “Yeah, leaving.”

  “You guys having problems?”

  “I’d say that’s none of your business.”

  He looks away from me across the valley at what’s left of Gertie. The complex is miles away but easily visible from where we’re standing. The coal silo, the locomotive shed, the rail sidings, the operational buildings and repair shops, the massive corrugated iron walls of the loading tipple, and the exterior structure of the shaft with its huge wheels and rusted cables attached to the cage that dropped men like rocks over five hundred feet into the black tunnels below—it all sits eternally still and silent like a bombed-out village.

  “What about Danny?” I ask him. “You knew he was hurt and had to go to the hospital. You saw Dr. Ed there. Why didn’t you think that’s what it was all about?”

  He looks down at his feet. Feathers of white mist land gently on his heavy black boots before vanishing.

  “You did know Danny was hurt?” I press him.

  “I was already gone when it happened,” he replies.

  “When what happened?”

  “When he hit the wall,” he says slowly, watching me carefully.

  “You’re sure you weren’t there.”

  He turns his head and spits behind him. “I think I’d know if I was there or not.”

  “You were pretty drunk.”

  “I wasn’t there.”

  “Bobbie said you were there,” I lie.

  “She did not,” he shoots back, but he doesn’t look completely convinced.

  “What are you trying to pull?” he asks me, anger rising in his voice. “You got something you want to say to me, say it.”

  We both look at Danny. He’s sitting at the top of a small mountain of ragged tires.

  “I’d just like to help if I can. That’s all.”

  “Help?” He spits again, this time near my boot. “Who says I need help?”

  “I know what it’s like. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “Know what what’s like?”

  “To have your life turn out”—I search for the least offensive way to put it—“not as great as you thought it would.”

  He gives me a questioning look with something like a smile on his lips, and for a second I think he’s going to bust out laughing. He doesn’t go that far, but his resentment is temporarily lifted. His attention drifts back to Gertie.

  “It’s been fourteen months since I got laid off at Lorelei,” he volunteers. “I was one of the first guys to go. Even though I’d worked there a lot of years, there were a lot of guys there a lot older than me.

  “I was working graveyard the day I found out. I didn’t know why at the time but I decided not to shower after my shift, and I drove straight home wearing all my gear. Everything. Even my belt and my helmet. Even my knee pads. My arms were stiff, and my back was aching, and the dust that always got inside the collar of my shirt felt like ground-up glass eating into my skin. I was still shivering from the cold and sweating from the work.

  “So I showed up at home still in my work clothes, and I just took a seat in the backyard in a lawn chair right when the sun was coming up over the hills. I heard the screen door open, and I looked over and saw Danny peeking out at me. Bobbie was leaning outside with him, handing him a cup of coffee to bring me. She took one finger and pressed it to her lips to warn him not to bug me and when I saw her do this . . . I don’t know, I can’t explain it. It was this kind of joy I felt that I had this woman who respected me and she was teaching my son to respect me, too. And all of a sudden I realized why I kept everything on and didn’t shower at work. ’Cause I was afraid I was never going to get to feel this way again. And being tired and dirty and aching and shivering and sweating at the same time was how I knew I was alive.

  “Reese missed out on all that. He never wanted to go into the mines. He was like you.”

  “What?” I say automatically.

  I wasn’t prepared for Reese to enter into that particular description or for me to be compared to him.

  “He and my dad used to go at it. Fighting over the mines. I didn’t understand Reese, but I didn’t hate him for feeling the way he did. Not like my dad. My dad took it as a personal insult. He hated him. He even told him that.”

  “I’m not anything like Reese,” I insist.

  “In a lot of ways you’re not, but in that one way you are.”

  “He beat his wife into a coma,” I remind him.

  “Yeah, I know that. And in that way you’re not the same. But of course you ain’t never had a wife, have you? So we can’t really be sure.”

  He stops talking long enough to yell at Danny again. I see the bright orange pumpkin bucket bobbing amid the junk.

  “I never thought Reese would ever get married. I don’t think he did either. But if you’re screwing around, there’s always the possibility you’re gonna get a girl pregnant, and that’s what happened, so he did the right thing and married her.”

  I remain silent.

  “What I don’t understand is why she would’ve been screwing around with him in the first place. They weren’t exactly compatible, and Reese wasn’t exactly oozing charm when it came to girls. I know that’s not a nice thing to say about your own brother, but hell, I know him best. We’re twins. I shared a womb with that guy.”

  He stops talking. A blanket of quiet immediately falls over everything.

  Birdsongs, insect clicks and buzzes, rodent rustlings, the far-off rumble of machinery, a car engine approaching in the distance, a dog’s bark: sounds so common I once considered them part of silence don’t exist here anymore, and in their absence I’ve discovered that true silence is anything but peaceful.

  “Point is, you got no right coming back here after all these years and telling me my life didn’t tu
rn out all that good when you don’t even know what a good life is,” he tells me while he scans the junk for Danny. “You’re just pissed ’cause your own life didn’t turn out the way you wanted it. That’s your fault.”

  “I broke my leg.”

  “Fuck your leg. I’m not talking about football. I’m talking about you. You could’ve done whatever you wanted. You ran away.”

  He calls for Danny.

  “You’re the worst kind of coward,” he says as he picks up his stick and begins moving away from me. “You’re a guy who’s afraid of himself.”

  He starts up the hillside with a coordination and speed I could never manage now. I watch him go and watch his son follow.

  I take a final look at Gertie before I leave. It’s the place where my father died and my career died. I should hate the sight of it, but I can’t.

  Despite my mother and father’s hope that I would go to college and not work in the mines, and despite my own claustrophobic childhood fears of the miles of dark tunnels, I expected to live and die tied to Gertie. My commitment to her was like a marriage vow a man gives to a woman he doesn’t really love but one he knows will make a good wife.

  The night my leg was crushed, I was drunk out of my mind. I walked around the gutted complex with my bottle of whiskey, staring at the ragged gaps in the equipment walls, the maze of stilled conveyor belts, the rust-streaked iron hull of the massive loading tipple. I was overwhelmed by the power still echoing in the silent, forgotten machinery. I felt insignificant, like an unchewed morsel of flesh waiting to be digested inside the bowels of a wounded metal beast.

  That’s the way I wanted to feel. I had done something unforgivable, something I could never fix, and what was even worse than what I had done was the fact that I was so callous and self-absorbed I never even realized I had done anything wrong until two lives were destroyed.

  I took a seat on the ground inside one of the buildings and drank until I passed out. When I woke up, it was dark. A shaft of moonlight fell through a hole in the ceiling into the center of the room like an empty spotlight.

  The first thought I had was of my dad. Not my dead dad. Not the dad I knew briefly before he died. But the dad I never got to know. The dad I would have known now.

  I was sad when my dad died because I loved him. He brought security and stability to my life, and he made my mom happy. But I was a very young child. I had only known him for a few years and then only known him through a child’s eyes with a child’s perception.

  As the years passed, I missed him much more than I did those first days, weeks, even years after his death. I constantly found myself in need of his guidance. I always had to wonder if he had lived and I had been able to know him as I grew older, would I have been a different person? A better person? Would I have made different choices? Better choices? Would a young mother not be lying comatose in a hospital bed? Would her son not be an orphan?

  I’m pretty sure I went to Gertie that night looking for my dad and the other miners. I wasn’t expecting ghosts to appear and give me advice or warnings. I was looking for an explanation of them that could somehow lead to an explanation of myself.

  Long before Gertie became the site of so much death, it had been a source of life for all of us. For me it was the closest thing I had to God.

  The skittering of an animal made me look up, and a shower of rust flakes and soot rained down on my face. I caught sight of a tiny twitching nose and beady black eyes peering down at me for a second; then they were gone, and I was left staring at the teeth of a gear wheel lying half off the ledge, teetering above me.

  A lot of people have told me I was lucky. It could have crashed down on my skull or my chest instead of my leg. It could have crushed my femoral artery, and I would have bled to death long before I was able to crawl to the road and get help.

  A lot of other people have told me I’m the unluckiest bastard on the face of the earth to have that kind of freak accident happen and have it ruin a promising career and the fame and wealth that would have come with it.

  I always believed the latter, even though I never cared much about the fame-and-wealth part of it. Football was what I did best. It was what I was supposed to do, and when I couldn’t do it any longer, I was lost.

  I didn’t run away from home. I don’t know if I can ever make Jess or Jolene or anyone else understand this. I was thrown into the dark, and I never gave up looking for a way back.

  8

  JOLENE’S FRONT DOOR BURSTS OPEN, AND EB COMES TEARING out of it wearing his pirate costume from last Halloween, complete with a plastic-hook hand, eye patch, and Jolly Roger hat. He’s also wearing a red necktie striped with gold and green.

  Harrison trails behind him, his hands plunged deeply into the pockets of his baggy, oversize jeans.

  Eb yanks open the passenger-side door and hops in. He makes himself comfortable on the seat of my truck after he messes with some knobs on my radio and checks out the TuffNet computer screen where I’ve shown him how to run license plates. He removes his Jolly Roger hat, sets it in his lap, and grins at the LICK M——E— bumper sticker. His gold hair is dark with sweat, and the skin beneath the sprinkling of freckles on his cheeks and nose is pink with exertion.

  He scrunches up his entire face like the top of a drawstring bag and asks, “How’s Grandma Zo?”

  “Well, she’s fine. As fine as she can be.”

  “You mean she’s dead.”

  “Well, yes. You and your mom talked about that, right? You know that’s not going to change.”

  “You checked at the funeral?”

  “I did. But you know what? Grandma Zo looked very peaceful. I know she’s up in heaven now. She’s where she wants to be.”

  “With Liberace.”

  “Right.”

  He falls silent and sticks a finger in his mouth to wiggle a loose tooth.

  “Okay,” he says.

  “So did you have fun yesterday?” I try to change the subject. “Josh baby-sat, right?”

  His sadness passes, and he brightens up as he begins one of his breathless narratives.

  “Josh made Harrison cry. He said we’re all bass turds ’cause Mom wouldn’t marry our dads. He said being a bass turd is bad and people don’t like you ’cause of it and make fun of you. Then he made Harrison cry ’cause he said at least we know who our dads are but Harrison doesn’t. So he’s like the biggest bass turd. A huge one.”

  He notices Harrison standing outside the truck and clamps his mouth shut and gives me a look that tells me we’re supposed to keep our conversation a secret.

  Harrison leans in the open window.

  “Hey,” he says to me.

  “Hey,” I say back.

  “I told Uncle Ivan we’re bass turds,” Eb bursts out, having kept the secret for as long as he could.

  Harrison stares at him with older-sibling disbelief burning in his dark eyes.

  “I don’t get why you got so sad,” Eb adds. “You know who your dad was. He was Passing Through.”

  “That’s what he was doing, you idiot. Not who he was.”

  “Come on. Get in,” I tell him. “We’ll go for a quick spin, and I’ll let you turn on the lights and siren.”

  “That’s not a thrill for me, Uncle Ivan,” he sighs.

  “It’s a thrill for me,” I tell him.

  “Me, too,” says Eb.

  He stares at my face for a moment, and then he and Eb exchange knowing looks.

  “How was your day?” he asks me.

  Eb suppresses a giggle.

  Jolene already discussed my black eye with them. Jolene’s only objection to it was that her boys might think it was cool that I was in a fight, so I agreed to let her tell them that a woman did it.

  “It was good,” I reply. “I saved a picnic table. I bought a bunch of footballs at Wal-Mart and signed them to donate to the hospital auction tonight. And I spent the rest of the day at my desk doing paperwork. How was your day?”

  “We’re doing a
cool project in school,” Eb begins before Harrison can even draw a breath. “I need a can. It can’t be a big can like a coffee can, and it can’t be flat like a tuna-fish can. It has to be a soup can or a can that looks the same as a soup can, and it has to be cleaned out, and the label has to be tooken off, and the lids, too.

  “If we have extras, I can bring them in, too. Some kids might not have any cans. You never know. Miss Finch says it’s okay. We can bring in lots. Do we have those kinds of cans?”

  “I’m sure your mom has those kinds of cans,” I answer.

  “But not empty ones. We have to have empty ones. We had potato-chip chicken last night, and it didn’t use any cans. You missed it. Why didn’t you eat dinner with us last night? Why didn’t you sleep on the couch last night? You said we were going to play Mario Kart before I went to school when Mom wasn’t looking.”

  I clear my throat. Harrison looks away from me down the street. He knows I don’t have any excuses Eb would understand or ones that he would understand or even ones I understand.

  The same thing is true when it comes to trying to justify all the years of their lives that I missed.

  Eb had dressed up for the occasion of my return home in navy blue pants, a white shirt with a collar, and a clip-on tie with cartoon dinosaurs on it.

  He marched up to me and extended his small hand with the gumption of a tiny businessman about to try to sell me futures in his company.

  “Hello, Uncle Ivan. I’m your nephew, Everett Craig. We met once when I was very young. We have pictures.”

  I took his little hand in mine and felt a kind of calm I hadn’t felt in years, the calm of not being judged. Everett Craig didn’t care what I was now or who I was then. He had never seen me play ball. He had never seen me run down a field darting in and out of defensive backs with the grace and abandon of a deer fleeing through a grove of trees. He had never seen me recently on bad days take fifteen minutes, with tears of pain streaming down my face, to lower myself onto a toilet to take a crap. He had never seen me drink tequila shooters in a Tampa Bay Hooters until I passed out with a disgusted waitress caught in my drunken grip promising to fuck me real good later if I’d just let her go now.