Coal Run

by Tawni O'Dell

  There’s only one answer. Money. Money and power and social status. She’s a doctor. Of course she’s going to marry a fucking lawyer. Who else would she marry? A mechanic who can fix her carburetor?

  What was all that bullshit about guys who can’t do anything and missing guys from back home? Muchmore is a perfect example of a guy who can’t do a single goddamned useful thing. It’s all bullshit. Every word that comes out of a woman’s mouth when she talks about what she wants in a man is bullshit. Oh, I want a man with a good sense of humor. Oh, I want a man who can plant a tree.

  You never see a beautiful woman with a poor man. It’s a fact. Okay. Bobbie Raynor. Okay, every once in a while they pick a guy who doesn’t make a fortune. Okay. My mom was married to a coal miner, too. Okay, another example but it’s rare. Money and the things it can buy. That’s all they want.

  She’s totally screwed up. She has no idea what she wants. She doesn’t know. He can’t make her happy. She doesn’t even know what happy is.

  She doesn’t even need his money. She’s a doctor, for Christ’s sake, living in a cheap little shithole town where you can buy a draft beer for $1.50 on $1.50 night at Brownie’s. She’s got to be packing the money away. She doesn’t need Muchmore and his BMW. I hate fucking BMWs. I hate Germany for making them. I hate that whole fucking country.

  What can I do to get her to like me? Shit. I don’t have any money. I don’t have any way to make money. Do you know what a deputy makes? Muchmore’s mechanic probably makes five times what I make. Shit! Even if she wasn’t lying. Even if she does want a man who can do all the shit she was talking about . . . hell, I can’t even fix a toilet.

  “Ivan.”

  “Yeah?”

  I look up at Art standing behind the bar.

  “You’re talking out loud,” he tells me.

  I try to bring his form into focus. He stays hazy around the edges.

  “I’m sure nobody minds,” he adds. “I just wasn’t sure you knew.”

  “Thanks.”

  I look up and down the line of drinkers. They don’t care. They’re all thinking modified versions of the same thing.

  I can’t imagine how great it must be to find the right woman and have her feel the same way about you. The concept sounds simple, but it’s the most complicated process on earth.

  I’m not talking about settling. I’m not talking about people who find someone they think they can care about. They’re fairly compatible. Around the same age. They date for a while. What the hell? Let’s get married. Let’s have kids. That’s what we’re supposed to do. I’ll be the husband, and you can be the wife. We’ll probably split up in about ten years, because we’re going to get really sick and tired of each other, because deep down we don’t have a bond. We’re not together because we can’t live without each other. We’re doing this because we’ve got nothing better to do and because we’re scared of being alone.

  I look up from my drink again. Art’s down at the other end of the bar. No one’s looking at me. I’m pretty sure I was quiet this time.

  I want what my parents had before it was ruthlessly ripped from them. They were destined to be. No one could have conceived of or planned the way their separate lives would eventually entwine. Not even God. It was something in their individual souls calling out to each other across an ocean, then across a nation, and finally across a dinner table.

  Before my mother met Rado Zoschenko, she had heard of him. He worked in Gertie with her father. He was a foreigner originally, but he’d lived in America for ten years mining coal in Illinois. He spoke pretty good English, her dad had told them, and he had the damnedest tattoo.

  My grandfather brought him home for dinner one night. Rado was a single fellow who had just moved here and didn’t have any family. Grandpa thought he could use a home-cooked meal. All Rado ever brought in his lunch pail was a hunk of bread with a tough brown crust and a cold boiled potato. He was meticulous about removing every shred of peel from the potato before eating it, and once Grandpa asked him why, and my dad replied, “For four years all I ever get to eat in camp was peels.”

  Grandpa was dying to ask him more about this camp and what kind of parents would send their child to it, but prying into a man’s background wasn’t something he did. Instead he invited Rado home so his wife could do it.

  I can only imagine what my relatively sheltered, teenage mother, who had never traveled farther than the twenty miles it took to get to the Crooked Creek campground where J&P had its company picnic every year, thought the first time she met this mysterious, jet-haired stranger from another land who took her hand in his and announced with Old World ceremony, “Meeting you is pleasure.”

  Grandma had been prepped beforehand and knew to steer the dinner conversation to this camp Rado had talked about. It couldn’t have been that bad, she had scolded her husband earlier.

  “Didn’t you have wienie roasts or sing-alongs?” she asked my dad.

  He gave serious thought to her question, finding nothing offensive or amusing about it.

  “No, we didn’t have these things,” he said after he finished swallowing, placed his fork on the table, dabbed at his mouth with his napkin, and folded his hands in his lap.

  “I suppose worst thing was fleas. They were so bad we would wake up in the morning and our arms would be bleeding from where we scratched so hard in the night.”

  Everyone at the table stopped chewing.

  “Or maybe not,” my father corrected himself. “The worst would be the radiation poison, of course. It’s what killed most of us. It was a slow way to die. It started with throwing up and headache. Then your hair falls out and your toenails fall off.

  “A lot of the Russians would kill themselves once they knew what was happening. They don’t have problem with this. Suicide is a way of life for them. They treat as a romantic thing. Not for Ukrainians, though. Nothing would ever cause a Ukrainian to take his life. This is only for God to do. Or Stalin, I suppose.”

  Grandma clapped a hand over her mouth, and Grandpa fumbled with his fork before it clattered onto his plate.

  “Did you call this place a camp?” he asked my dad, squinting at him over the meat loaf.

  “Sure. Yes, a camp. A work camp,” my dad struggled to find the right word. “Gulag.”

  “You mean like one of Hitler’s concentration camps?” my mother’s younger brother, Kenny, asked.

  “Yes . . . well, in a way,” my dad continued to struggle with words. “We were workers, not prisoners.”

  “Then you could leave?” my grandmother asked.

  “No, we couldn’t. It’s hard to explain. I was prisoner, yes, but I was also sovok. I was worker. It was important that we thought of ourselves as workers. I was a miner. I mined uranium.”

  A dumb, awkward silence fell over the room. My mother was the one who broke it, speaking to my father for the very first time in her life.

  “And now that you’re free . . . you’re still a miner?” she asked him.

  My dad looked at her. She stared back at him and saw in his gaze a man who had endured more suffering than she could ever imagine, yet he hadn’t been made weak or bitter or numb because of it.

  He smiled at her and reached for his third helping of mashed potatoes, soft and fluffy white without a trace of peel, and shrugged.

  “It is something I know.”

  She was eighteen. He was thirty-three. Four years would pass before he would approach her with any romantic intentions. She went to college in Slippery Rock and got her degree in home ec. She wanted to be a dietitian on a cruise ship and travel the world, then maybe open up her own restaurant someday, or a catering business.

  The summer she graduated, my father presented himself at her family’s home with flowers for her mother, vodka for her father, and for her an album of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony no. 6 in B Minor, “Pathétique,” performed by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra.

  In his own way, he would show my mother the world without ever takin
g her anywhere.

  I look up again and try to find Art. I need another drink.

  I can’t find him. I look down the bar. I think I see him, but his head has taken on a bizarre elongated shape and his skin has turned brown.

  I eventually realize I’m staring at the mounted deer head near the door. At closing time some drunk always pulls up a chair and stands on it to stroke the velvety nose and touch the amber glass eyes.

  I look to the other side of me.

  “Hey,” Jess Raynor says to me.

  “Hey,” I say back, maybe a little too loudly.

  I didn’t hear him come in, or for all I know he’s been here all night.

  “Why aren’t you home with the little lady?” I ask him. “Trouble in paradise?”

  Art comes by and hands Jess a beer. I push my glass forward, and he pretends not to see it.

  “Least I get some paradise now and then,” Jess answers in his low rasp.

  “I can get paradise anytime I want it.”

  “Yeah,” he snorts.

  He looks all around him, up and down the bar at the entirely male clientele except for two women with big hair and screeching laughs sitting at a dark corner table that no one is drunk enough yet to approach.

  “I can see that,” he laughs.

  I get off my stool and position myself in a way I’m pretty sure is almost a little intimidating.

  “You know what?” I say. “You’re a fucking bass turd.”

  “Yeah?” he says back.

  “Yeah.”

  “I got the feeling you’ve got something you want to say to me. Something you really want to say to me.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Yeah? Well, I’ve got something I want to say to you, too.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. You want to say it here, or you want to say it outside?”

  “Let’s go outside. I’ll say it outside.”

  “Hey, guys,” Art says.

  “Don’t try and stop us,” I warn him.

  “I’m not. I want paid.”

  I throw some odd bills on the bar. They’re crumpled and greasy-looking. Jess takes a couple clean, crisp ones out of a nice leather wallet and lays them flat on the bar. The wallet’s probably a gift from Bobbie, or maybe Danny. When he’s not busy picking his teeth up off the floor, he’s out working a paper route to earn money so he can buy dear old Dad a wallet for Christmas.

  What the hell is that? I have three nephews. I never hit one of them, and not one of them ever bought me a wallet.

  We step outside. The streets are deserted. Nighttime commerce and entertainment belong to the mall now. Downtown is used only for drinking.

  “Your kids get you that wallet?” I ask him immediately.

  He plants himself a few feet away from me. Behind him white plaster flakes litter the sidewalk in front of Woolworth’s like the building has dandruff.

  “What?”

  “Your wallet. Your kids get it for you?”

  “No. Bobbie did. What’s it to you?”

  “I fucked her once, you know that?”

  The words are out before I can stop them. I wouldn’t have stopped them anyway, even if I had been given the chance. The best and worst thing about being shitfaced drunk is that it allows you to say all the things you’ve always wanted to say but didn’t out of respect for yourself and others.

  I brace myself for his attack. Nothing comes. He tilts his head a little like he’s studying a blueprint. He smiles at me.

  “Yeah, I know. Bobbie told me. We were having a big fight when that happened. She saw me giving Kelly Kowalski a ride one day after school, and Kelly was wearing that pink miniskirt of hers. You remember Kelly’s pink miniskirt?”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “Bobbie got mad at me and accused me of some shit, and we kind of broke up. She only did it with you to get back at me. When I asked her how it was she said . . .” He pauses, and a big grin plays across his face. “She said, ‘The rumors are greatly exaggerated.’ And we laughed so hard I almost threw up. And then everything was okay between us again. In a way you were responsible for getting us back together.”

  I throw the first punch. He steps aside, and I miss him. The momentum from my swing turns me around, and I’m left facing the door of the bar, and for a split second I can’t remember where I am, why I’m here, and who I’m with, but I do remember I’m pissed about something. I can’t remember what exactly, but I know I’m willing to fight to the death in order to defend my right to be allowed to be able to continue to be pissed about it.

  I feel a hand on my shoulder. Jess yanks me around to face him again. He gives me a shove in the chest, and I stumble backward. It occurs to me he’s not as drunk as I am. It occurs to me he’s not drunk at all.

  I’m not afraid, though. Jess doesn’t fight. I remember a time Reese beat him up in school. Reese with the bill of a grimy ball cap yanked low over his flat stare, wearing a black T-shirt with a cracked Judas Priest decal on the front, standing in the hall next to Jess at his locker, and then there was a sudden eruption that ended in Jess’s being beaten to a bloody, snotty pulp and Reese’s being ushered off to the principal’s office kneading his bruised knuckles.

  Jess didn’t even try to shield himself. He just took it. The next day the two of them were sitting together at the end of the cafeteria table, eating their brown-bag lunches in their traditional stiff silence. Jess had to stay after practice for a week and run laps as punishment for letting himself get beat up when we had a big game that Saturday.

  The memory gives me added optimism. I regain my footing and take another swing. This time he blocks the blow with his arm.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he asks me.

  “You’re a fucking loser, Jess. Look what you did with your life. Nothing. You did nothing. You’re nothing. You’re less than nothing. You’re nothing.”

  “Shut up. You don’t know shit about my life.”

  I say the one thing I know will humiliate him the most.

  “You beat up your little boy.”

  He rushes at me. He picks me up by my deputy’s jacket and smashes me against the wall.

  “That’s a lie!” he shouts. “Take it back!”

  I take another swing. This time I connect with his stomach. It knocks the air out of him, and he lets go of me. I follow it up with a punch to his jaw, but he still has more coordination than I do. He grabs me by the hand when I try to throw another one and wrenches my arm behind my back.

  “I want my guns,” he says into my ear.

  “What?”

  “I want my guns back,” he says again, his grip tightening.

  I feel all the bones in my hand grinding together. Even at my most fit, I never had the kind of raw brute strength he still possesses now. When I was playing in a game, I might have had it, or if I had to rescue someone from a burning building, I might have it, but it would require an adrenaline rush to rouse it.

  “I don’t have your guns.”

  He pushes me up against the wall, and I feel my face scrape against concrete. He gives me a punch in the kidneys that brings tears to my eyes.

  “I want my guns,” he tells me again, this time with a sense of urgency in his voice.

  “I’ll get them to you,” I wheeze.

  “I want them now.”

  I turn my head to try to look at him. His face is right next to mine. I can see a small cut on his chin where he must have nicked himself shaving, and a few faint Barbie choker scars still circling his neck. Jess always had a hard time keeping his head up.

  “I don’t have them.”

  “I want them by tomorrow,” he says, “or I’m coming to get them. They’re mine. You got no right to them.”

  “I’ll bring them by your house,” I promise.

  He lets go of my hand. I bring it around in front of me and look down at it expecting to see it bent and crumpled like a cartoon paw that’s been crushed under an anvil.

  I slide to
the ground and sit there. I won’t give him the satisfaction of curling into a fetal position until he’s gone.

  “Jess,” I call out.

  He stops and turns around. I look up at him. His bottom lip is split, and there’s a small trickle of blood on his chin.

  Seeing the injury I inflicted gives me a momentary thrill of triumph, but then I feel bad. It brings back all the conflicting emotions that always surrounded my relationship with Jess.

  When he made a great play, I was happy for him, but I also secretly wished he’d screw up next time, making me look better in comparison. When he failed, my gut reaction was to feel bad for him, but I also felt glad for myself.

  I remember once when I was ready to quit the team after a bad sandpapering for pussyfooting, Jess joined me in the locker room and explained to me that Deets knew what he was doing. How he was a man who thought inflicting a punishment you could survive was the highest form of praise and sending you home happy with yourself was an insult. How he wasn’t preparing us to play college ball or pro ball the way I thought he should be, how he was preparing us to live the kinds of lives our fathers did in case we couldn’t play ball. The playing-ball part was easy. How Jess was right, and I thought he was smart for figuring that out, but I couldn’t admit to him that I thought he was smart. How he was going home to his dad because his dad was alive, and how he was supposed to be happy about that, but how he must have had days where he wished he was going home to a ghost instead.

  We were great football players, Jess and I, because football, like our lives, was about love and rage and feeling both at the same time for the same reason.

  I reach into my jacket pocket and toss a key ring to him. He catches it in midair.

  “Zo left you her tractor mower,” I tell him.

  I watch his mud-caked boots and the frayed cuffs of his jeans walk away while I stay seated on the ground.

  I feel something else tucked inside my jacket, and I take it out, too. It’s the envelope Eb gave me earlier in my truck.