Coal Run

by Tawni O'Dell

“I still stand by that. I’d rather see two men have a fistfight than take some pissant problem to court and spend their life savings on a lawyer instead of the camper they always wanted. Are you telling me you and Jess were resolving a legal issue last night? A property dispute, maybe?”

  “I don’t even remember what we were fighting about.”

  “You want to tell me what’s going on with you?”

  “No.”

  “Jolene and the boys doing okay?”

  “They’re fine.”

  “Your mother?”

  “She’s fine, too.”

  “How about if I insist you tell me what’s going on with you?”

  “How about if I admit that there is something going on with me but I’m not sure exactly what it is?”

  “That’s a start.”

  “You have any advice on how to figure out what’s bothering me that doesn’t include seeing a shrink or talking to God?”

  He cups an elbow in one hand and scratches his chin with the other.

  “Fly-fishing.”

  “I don’t fish.”

  He nods, his hand still resting on his chin, sort of caressing it now. I can’t see the slightest shadow of stubble on his face, not a single dark pinprick of a hair beginning to surface. I’ve never believed he shaves; I think he uses a kind of facial herbicide.

  “That’s too bad,” he says.

  He drops his hand and hooks both thumbs back in his pants pockets. His eyes sweep the parking lot. He notices another passing car he feels compelled to acknowledge with a brief raising of his flattened hand, like an Indian chief in an old western greeting the white man.

  “I don’t want you going out on any calls for the next couple days unless there’s absolutely no one else available,” he tells me, “and I don’t foresee that happening. Friday we’ll all be at Gertie. I’m assuming you’ll be going, too.”

  “I’ve heard about it. What is it exactly?”

  “Just a little memorial service at the mine we have every year.”

  “What time?”

  “Nine thirty-three. Same time it blew.”

  He looks at his watch.

  “I’ve got to get over to the dealership. The new Broncos came in today. I want to check them out.”

  He gives my legs a final disapproving glance, adjusts his hat, and starts across the lot to his car. I wait until he’s out of sight, then I get in my truck and drive to Safe Haven.

  My mom and Zo both insisted they didn’t know who paid for Crystal’s care and that as long as her expenses were being met, they abided by her benefactor’s wishes and didn’t attempt to find out who he was.

  I have to know for sure. I have to know if Chastity’s information is true and Muchmore has a conscience. Not only a conscience but integrity. He’s kept his generosity hidden all these years when he could have made it public and received the respect and affection of a community that otherwise doesn’t think too highly of him.

  Not just integrity but compassion. He could have lessened his guilt in a lot of ways: done pro bono work for battered wives, given a hefty donation to a women’s shelter, left the public defender’s office or maybe even left criminal law altogether. Instead he chose to pay a very large sum of money out of his own pocket to keep Crystal in a clean, respectable place where she’d be well taken care of and exposed to nice people, even though it probably doesn’t matter, since she’s incapable of knowing where she is. She lost everything else. He made sure she got to keep her dignity.

  His kindness eats at me, because it wasn’t my kindness.

  I want to believe I would have cared about her and her orphaned son even if I hadn’t broken my leg that night at Gertie. I want to believe that their fates would have plagued me the same way they have for the past sixteen years even if I had gone on to have a successful career and a good life. I want to believe that my conscience didn’t kick in just because my own life had been ruined and I found that blaming myself for what happened to Crystal and the boy added welcome fuel to the blaze of self-pity that was already consuming me.

  But I’m afraid the truth is that after I recovered from the initial horror of the crime itself and the guilt I felt over my own personal involvement in her life, I would’ve gone on with my life uninterrupted and never given them a second thought. The same way I did from the very beginning. I never thought about them before they were harmed.

  The drizzle has stopped. The sky is still lead-colored, but a bright crescent of white sun has begun to appear from behind a sooty gray cloud. The corridor of light it casts is harsh, since there’s no blue sky to absorb it, only metal clouds to reflect it. It falls across Safe Haven making the wet blacktop of the parking lot glimmer and the white walls of the building look freshly scrubbed.

  The reception area is empty except for a young mother sitting on one of the overstuffed couches, straightening her little girl’s overall straps while instructing her not to run or touch anything.

  The receptionist is on the phone. I nod at her as I pass by and begin following the Christ night-lights lining the baseboards. Even during the day, they have an opalescent glow to them.

  The place is quiet. Breakfast is over. Midmorning naps and cable reruns of Murder, She Wrote and Matlock have begun. It’s a weekday, so there aren’t many visitors.

  The first-floor hallway is empty except for food trays carrying the beginnings, ends, and middles of meals. I raise the battered tan plastic covers on a few plates. Strips of brittle red bacon. Scoop-shaped yellow mounds of scrambled eggs. A bright green lettuce leaf with a shiny-slick slice of bright orange canned peach. Untouched pieces of tan toast with hard, unspread squares of pale butter lying on top of them.

  I look up when I hear a strange sound.

  It’s Jess and Danny coming at me from farther down the hall. Danny’s carrying the orange pumpkin bucket he found at the junkyard the other day. He’s swinging it at his side. The noise is coming from whatever he has inside it.

  They stop a few feet away from me. Jess has changed his shirt since last night, trading in one checked flannel for another, and he’s wearing a different ball cap—a black one with the call letters of a Pittsburgh hard-rock radio station emblazoned across it in red—but he still has on the exact same face. He hasn’t slept or showered or eaten. The hollows beneath his eyes are smudged with purple shadows. His lower lip is swollen, and he has a red tear at one corner of his mouth, but neither of these injuries is painful enough to prevent him from chewing. He takes a tin of Skoal out of his back pocket and holds it in his palm in preparation for going outside.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask him.

  “Visiting my sister-in-law.”

  “Since when do you visit Crystal?”

  “I do it from time to time. I didn’t realize I had to clear it with you first.”

  We stare at each other. I have nothing to say.

  My method in getting Bobbie to tell me what really happened to Danny may not have been honest, but I don’t feel bad for telling the lie that got her to admit the truth.

  I wonder if she’s seen him since this morning. Probably not. It wouldn’t have made any sense for him to drive into Centresburg this morning to run errands, then go home, then come right back again.

  When she does see him again, she’s going to tell him about our conversation. I’m confident of that. She’s going to tell him I know, and that will be the end of any possible friendship Jess Raynor and I might have left.

  In my zeal to find out the truth, I never stopped to ask myself if I really wanted to know it. Now that I know, I’m sure I don’t want to know. What good is going to come out of it? Am I going to save Danny Raynor? Am I going to save Jess or Bobbie? And exactly what would I be saving them from? Each other? Their own lives?

  Suddenly the shitbox apartment I left in Tampa doesn’t seem so bad. Not having a single meaningful social relationship outside my friendship with my boss and his son sounds great. I fondly recall my job killing bugs, and it seems al
most enjoyable. I’m able to convince myself that I actually miss the fumes, that I miss putting my ear up against a stucco wall and hearing the skittering of a nest of three thousand cockroaches, that I miss doing battle with palmetto bugs the size of sparrows, that I miss the inability to ever adjust my body temperature between the sticky white heat of the great outdoors and the refrigerated blasts from people’s homes and apartments. It would be so easy to go back.

  Val’s words ring in my ears: We get to pick when we fight. We have the luxury of choice. And it’s one big fucking luxury.

  My silence seems to enhance my ability to hear other sounds. I hear water being poured from a pitcher. I hear the phone ring at the front desk. I hear Danny shift his bucket from one hand to the other.

  When Jess speaks again, I feel like he’s shouting in my ear, but he hasn’t stepped any closer and he’s using his usual quiet tone of voice.

  “Maybe a better question is to ask what you’re doing here? Why you visit her all the time now that you’re back? And bring her presents? Maybe even ask you after all these years why you were so interested in Reese’s trial? And why you’re so interested in him being released now?”

  I hear the creak of a body shift on a mattress. I hear Angela Lansbury reveal the murder weapon and the murmurs of approval from patients watching the show.

  Jess looks down at his son.

  “Did you say hello to Deputy Zoschenko?” he asks him.

  “Hi,” Danny says, staring into his bucket.

  “Hi, what?”

  He looks up for a moment at his dad, but not at me.

  “Hi, Deputy Zoschenko.”

  “How are you, Danny?”

  “Good.”

  His nose and the skin around it are an iridescent collage of gray and green and yellow.

  “What have you got in there?”

  He holds out the bucket. It’s half full with rocks and some hard candy he took from the basket at the reception desk.

  Jess puts one hand lightly on Danny’s shoulder. Danny moves closer to his leg and slips a hand around his dad’s thigh. I know I’m not mistaking what I’m seeing. There’s no fear between this boy and his father.

  They start to move past me.

  “If I were you,” Jess says to me, “I’d go see her right now.”

  I wait until they’re gone before I go to her room.

  She’s awake, staring straight ahead at constant blankness. Viewed from the doorway, her body makes an inhuman hump, like several scrawny cats curled up beneath the sheet.

  I walk over to her and set the gift-wrapped box from Marcella’s on her bedside table.

  The damp, unclean smell of the bedridden is overly strong around her today. No amount of floral-scented soaps and mountain-fresh laundry detergent can cover it up completely. It comes from within. The unhurried internal rotting of organs and muscle. The spoilage of blood.

  I pick up her hand full of dissolved tendons and pebbly pieces of bone. It feels like a small glove filled with marbles.

  An aide has dressed her in my least favorite nightgown. It’s a pink, gauzy, clearance-rack negligee that exposes the knobs of her shoulders and the ridged boniness of her chest.

  I stare at her and think about the small handfuls of breasts she had and how they would have grown larger when she carried her child. Did she nurse him? I wonder. Did she teach him “The Itsy Bitsy Spider”? Did she ever think about what he might be when he grew up?

  I know nothing about her years as a wife and mother, nothing about her years as a girl and daughter, nothing about the time before and after me. I’ll never know anything about her except for the three afternoons we met on the road and the one day she got up the nerve to approach me in school.

  My worst fear is that she’s whole and well inside. That the walking, talking, smiling, moving, thinking, watching, wanting, waiting, willing girl I knew briefly is buried alive inside a body that can’t move, see, speak, or feel. What if her memories are intact, the good and bad, and this is all she has to keep her company forever in her frozen darkness?

  I sit down in my chair and pick up the gift. I show her the box before I unwrap it. I tell her how surprised she’s going to be. I take my time and tell her about the weather and the guy who rolled around in the chicken shit. When I pull the rooster out of the box and hold it up to the light, I can almost convince myself that she’s fine and she understands.

  A nurse has combed and parted her dark hair and fastened it back on either side with small silver barrettes. Her eyes, though sightless, are still a clear brown. Her limbs, though useless, aren’t petrified into unnatural poses. She can hear out of one ear. What she hears, no one knows but her. Can she interpret sounds, or are they nothing more than stuttering, skittering signals trapped and doomed among the broken connectors and crushed circuits of her brain?

  I get up and walk over to the shelf where the rest of her animals and figurines are displayed. That’s when I see the boy. I’m so startled by his presence I almost drop the rooster on the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  Young man is a more accurate description than boy. I’m sure he’d be offended by the term “boy.” He’s standing in a corner, half hidden by the other bed. I don’t get the feeling that he was hiding on purpose, but that he had moved there before I even arrived to get as far away from Crystal as he could without leaving the room.

  He stares at us raptly, without horror and pity for her but also without any desire to try to understand what he’s seeing, adapting to her condition but not accepting it. His eyes are glassy and bloodshot from crying.

  I don’t move or make a sound. His face shows embarrassment, but it’s quickly defeated by the more powerful grief, then replaced for a moment by the mechanics of good manners.

  He takes a step toward me. He has on a long-sleeved shirt with a collar, a pair of dark gray pants, and black loafers. He dressed up for this visit.

  I stare at him boldly, helplessly, searchingly. I try to understand as much as I possibly can about him in that split second before he opens his mouth to speak.

  I decide that he has a good home and a good family. He gets good grades. He has a steady girlfriend he likes to buy presents for. He’s not filled with rage or confusion or an unbearable emptiness. He believes in God and hard work and that every vote counts. No one and nothing has dug a hole in him until today.

  He walks toward me and puts out his hand. I’m not sure I want to shake it. I’m not sure what it will do to me.

  “I should have said something the minute you walked in. You must be Deputy Zoschenko. I’m John Harris.”

  He catches himself and looks over at Crystal.

  “I mean, John Raynor.”

  I can’t take my eyes off him. His presence has the paralyzing power of a great stag stepping out of a line of trees into a wide-open field. Even the most hardened hunter has to take a moment and marvel at his majesty before he pulls the trigger.

  “Sorry,” he says again, and drops the hand.

  I’m not even conscious of my rudeness.

  “I wasn’t eavesdropping or anything like that.”

  “No, it’s okay,” I say, finally finding my voice.

  He makes a nervous, apologetic laugh.

  “This must be a shock for you. Finding me here like this.”

  “It’s a shock.”

  “The nurse told me how you come and visit her all the time. She said you’ve been really nice to my mom.”

  His voice breaks off. He looks at Crystal. He’s forcing himself to do it. In his eyes is the hope that it will get easier the more he does it. I don’t have the heart to tell him it won’t.

  “I never knew about her. I never knew about any of it until about a month ago. My parents—” He stops again. “My adoptive parents,” he goes on after a deep, shaky breath, “decided to wait until I turned twenty-one to tell me. They felt I had a right to know, but they didn’t think I could handle it until I was an adult.

  “I wante
d to see her if we could find her. They didn’t try and talk me out of it. They helped me find her.”

  “It sounds like you have great parents.”

  “Yeah, I guess I do.”

  He looks bewildered for a moment, and then his eyes travel all over the room, making a wide arc over Crystal this time. They end at the shelves of blown-glass animals. I hand him the rooster. He sets it down gently, then starts picking up the others one at a time.

  “She was a good mother to you before this happened to her,” I tell him.

  He makes himself look at Crystal again. He stares at her face, at the blind empty eyes, at the chin caked with drool, at the caved-in cheeks.

  He breaks into gulping sobs.

  “I don’t remember her at all.”

  “That’s okay,” I tell him from a distance.

  I’m still afraid to touch him. He probably doesn’t want to be touched. He turns his back to me, and I watch his shoulders shake. He’s holding the ruby red prancing horse.

  “How could someone do that to a person?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He’s still in jail, right?” he asks, turning around to me suddenly.

  An iron wave of protectiveness rises up inside me. My eyes dart to the clock on the wall. Reese has been a free man for several hours.

  “You don’t ever have to worry about him,” I promise him.

  “My parents said the adoption documents were sealed by the court so he wouldn’t be able to track me down if he ever got out.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you know him, too?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  He begins to calm down. I walk over to the nightstand next to Crystal and pick up the box of Kleenex. While I’m over there, I give her a kiss on the top of her head.

  He watches me with guilt and a mild sort of horror. I reach out the box to him, and he plucks out a tissue. He blows his nose, still holding the little red horse.

  “What you’re doing for her is amazing to me. I guess you must have been really good friends. Either that or you’re the nicest person on the face of the earth.”

  “No,” I tell him. “Believe me, I’m not.”

  I put the box back and take out my wallet.