Coal Run

by Tawni O'Dell

  June 6, 1969

  Dear Zo,

  We’re all getting medals for the last battle I told you about. They were just going to give one to the lieutenant, but he put up such a stink we’re all getting them. None of us care too much one way or the other.

  You asked me once what my first impression of ’Nam was, and I don’t remember if I ever answered. To be honest, it was probably the smell of shit. Somebody was burning shit from the latrines near the airstrip, which is how they get rid of it over here. Or maybe that was second. Probably the heat was first. It hits you when you walk off the plane like somebody’s thrown open a furnace door. For a second I forgot to be afraid of the fighting, and instead I was afraid of the place. Holy fuck, I thought to myself. I’m in a jungle.

  Then I thought about the Zoschenko kid next door and this book he was always dragging around. Natural Wonders or something like that. It was this big book the size of a phone book, and it had this section on the jungle. He loved that section. He was always showing it to me. And the prairie-dog town. The kid was obsessed with the prairie-dog town. I told him once he had a much better chance of seeing one of those than a jungle, and now here I was in a jungle.

  But I’ll tell you what, as many guys as come through here, you don’t ever see any rich kids over here. I don’t know what they’re telling you back home, but there are no rich kids here. No movie stars either. It’s not like World War II, when everybody from Clark Gable to Jimmy Stewart signed up.

  There’s even a class system within the army. It hit me the other day that our platoon is always sent out on ambush. We’re always point platoon when it comes to combat or contact. And we have the most blacks, rednecks, and guys who have a history of problems with authority figures, like Lucius and Cunningham. We have a lieutenant with a girlfriend back home named Rosita. Is this a coincidence?

  Sweeney says I’m getting fucking paranoid, but I’m sorry. When I see this shit. When I think about how many guys died just on that one fucking hill. When I see the body bags getting dumped off the choppers and some of them rip open and shit pours out you can’t even identify as human. The piles of boots with guys’ names on them and blood inside them. Do you know what has to happen to someone to get blood in the bottom of his boots?

  I don’t know what I think anymore. I guess all I’m saying is, there’s an endless supply of rednecks, blacks, Hispanics, and fuck-ups between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. That’s all I’m saying. If we ever have to call up Stan Jack’s son, we might want to reconsider this war.

  The reason I’m telling you this is because I’ve decided I’m going to do another tour. Here’s the way I look at it. I’m just getting good at knowing what to do here, and if I leave, I’m going to get replaced by a guy who’s just as green as I was, and when he gets good at it, he’s going to get replaced, too. What kind of fucking sense does that make?

  I’m not noble or brave or any of that crap. I’m feeling good about my decision. I’m like one of those people who donates their dead kid’s organs so another kid can live. I bet sometimes when it gets hard for them thinking about their dead kid, they think about the kid they helped who’s still alive, out there smiling and happy and running around, and how happy his folks are that he’s not dead. That’s sort of the way I think at my lowest moments. I think about the guy back home I’ve never met and I’m never going to meet who’s going to get to keep his life.

  It’s my one small stand against stupidity.

  Take care of yourself.

  Your friend,

  Valentine Claypool

  Rifleman

  101st Airborne Division

  I finish reading and slide the letters back into their envelope.

  Chastity stirs slightly. I reach out and touch her.

  THURSDAY

  21

  WE SPEND THE NIGHT IN ONE OF ZO’S GUEST ROOMS. CHASTITY’S absence next to me wakes me in the morning, and I find her standing in front of a window with her bare feet in a patch of sun-soaked throw rug on the honey-colored wood floor, wearing nothing but her pink T-shirt, tugging her fingers through her curls.

  The smile she gives me lets me know that I didn’t dream last night, and I didn’t dream making her feel the way I’d been dreaming of making her feel.

  “If it isn’t the great Ivan Z,” she says, her voice still throaty with sleep.

  She turns her back to me so I can see her bare ass while she steps into her panties.

  “You’re doing that on purpose.”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Come here.”

  “I can’t. I’m late. I have surgery this morning.”

  “Come here.”

  She walks over to me, smiling. I grab her and pull her back into bed with me.

  She pushes me back and straddles my chest, clamping my sides with her bare legs, the triangle of her panties inches from my face. For the first time in my life, I’m beginning to see the bright side of being a man no longer able to perform in the missionary position.

  “You’re very cute,” she tells me.

  “Cute? Puppies are cute. You’re supposed to tell me I’m strong and sexy and I’ve got a lot of stamina—”

  “And that you have a big dick?”

  “That’s always good.”

  She hops off me before I can grab her again.

  “I’m late,” she says.

  She picks her jeans up off the floor.

  I get out of bed as quickly as I can, but she’s fully dressed by the time I do.

  “Do you want to have dinner tonight?” I ask her.

  “Ivan, last night was great.”

  “I sense a ‘but’ coming.”

  She hands me my own jeans so I don’t have to bend down.

  “No, there’s no ‘but.’ It’s just that I am involved with someone else. Seriously involved.”

  “You stayed the night.”

  “I know. I wanted to.”

  She goes back to the window. I’m putting her on the spot and I don’t want to do this, yet at the same time I want her and I’m not sure how to get her. I still don’t understand what happened last night. I would have never thought of a dead old lady’s house as a love nest.

  “How about if I put it this way?” she says, turning back to face me. “I’m not a woman who usually sees more than one man at a time.”

  “So if you’re seeing me, that means you’re not seeing him?”

  “That line of reasoning was practically algebraic,” she says, smiling. “Pretty impressive for a dumb jock.”

  “I know what a hypotenuse is, too.”

  “That’s geometry.”

  She hands me my shirt.

  “Or are you trying to tell me if you’re seeing him, you don’t want to see me?”

  “I’m in a hurry. Can we work on your math skills later?”

  I stop her from leaving by grabbing her around the waist.

  “Do I have a chance? That’s all I want to know.”

  She smiles up at me, but her dark eyes are serious. “Maybe you don’t realize it, but when I look at you, I have to ask myself the same question: Do I have a chance with this guy? You’re not sure of anything in your life. You’re not even sure you’re going to be living here a couple months from now.”

  I have no honest reply to give her.

  “I can’t make any promises or even predictions about what will happen between us,” she continues, “but I want to keep seeing you. That’s the best answer I can give you.”

  She kisses me.

  I feel pretty good. It’s a better answer than I was hoping for.

  ———

  I load my truck with a couple boxes of Zo’s stuff to take to Jolene. I put the envelope with Val’s letters in my glove compartment, under my gun and Vicodin.

  Even though Chastity’s late, I drive slowly. I’m trying to prolong the time we’re together and avoid the moment when she’ll get out of my truck and maybe walk out of my life.

  “Have you ever
been out to the Coal Run junkyard?” I ask her as we approach it.

  She nods. “Of course I have. My family made a special trip once right after they declared it a disaster area but before they put up the barbed wire. We wanted to see the chasms with the fire burning inside them.”

  “You were part of the masses that actually walked out here and risked falling into four-hundred-foot-deep fiery sinkholes?”

  “Sure. Who could resist that?”

  I slow near the top of the hill so we can look around. Whether drawn by curiosity, disgust, or fear, it’s impossible to speed past this place. It’s nature’s version of a haunted house.

  There’s a truck parked at the side of the road. I pull up behind it and stop.

  “Do you mind?” I ask her.

  “Mind what?”

  “There’s someone down there I need to talk to.”

  “Are you kidding? Down there? This was a cool place to come to as a kid, but now I’m a grown-up and I’m late. To perform surgery,” she adds emphatically.

  “Five minutes. I promise. That’s all.”

  I get out before she can convince me not to, and I start down the hill.

  Jess is standing near the bottom between a rust-speckled filing cabinet and a shattered microwave.

  By the time I reach him, he’s moved farther away and is toying with the knobs of a Hotpoint stove. He has his head bowed over a burner, and the brim of his cap conceals his face from me.

  He straightens up and studies the clock. He bangs it a couple times with his fist.

  “Nice stove,” I comment.

  He opens the oven door and peers inside. He crouches down and rests his hands on his thighs while studying the interior. Then he puts the entire upper half of his body inside.

  “Reese get to your house okay?”

  “Yeah,” his voice echoes from inside.

  “Is he there now?”

  He pulls back out again and adjusts his cap.

  “He closed down Sweetwater’s last night. Then he closed down Brownie’s. I expect he’ll sleep most of the day, then do the same thing tonight.”

  “So Bobbie and Danny are alone with him right now, and you’re messing around in a junkyard? You’re okay with that?”

  He turns his back on me and starts walking toward the spot where the dryer disappeared. I trail after him and catch up as he stops to examine a VCR by turning it over with his foot.

  “I know about Bobbie,” I tell him. “I know she hit Danny, not you.”

  His gray eyes narrow with suspicion, which makes him look a lot like Reese except there’s no malice in his expression, only the beginning paranoia of a man realizing he needs to protect his family but he’s not sure from what.

  “What the hell do you want from me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You lied to Bobbie and said I told you I hit him. What the hell was that all about?”

  “I was trying to get her to tell me the truth.”

  “And you decided the truth was I punched my son in the face.”

  “It was an easier truth to accept than thinking Bobbie did it.”

  He starts pacing. His heavy, careless footsteps make me nervous. I keep expecting the ground to split open and him to disappear inside it.

  “She’s not a bad mother,” he blurts out, his eyes pleading with me now. “She isn’t. She’s a really good mother.”

  “I’m sure she is.”

  “You don’t understand. Things have been rough for us. It’s not easy having all those kids and me losing my job. She worries all the time. And now Reese coming.”

  He stops pacing. A few wisps of steam crawl up his boots and disappear behind his jeans.

  “That day we had a big fight about Reese. She told me if I let Reese stay with us, she was leaving. Him or me, she said. And I picked him. Course I was really mad at her and I didn’t think she was serious, but it still don’t make it right. What I said. It was a rotten thing to say. Maybe the worst thing I’ve ever said to her.”

  “That’s why you thought she was leaving?” I ask him.

  He nods.

  “I went off with a bottle and a six-pack and my gun. She yelled after me I’m no different than Reese: a good-for-nothing drunk who gets his kicks killing things.”

  He takes his cap off and clutches it in both hands the way the surviving men did for weeks after the Gertie explosion whenever they’d see my mom or any of the widows.

  “I guess after I left, Danny was crying, and she yelled at him to shut up, and he wouldn’t, and when she asked him what was wrong, he said he didn’t want her to say bad things about his dad like that, and she smacked him. She said it was a reflex. She said she didn’t even feel herself doing it.

  “It don’t give her an excuse for what she did to Danny. She knows it. She feels worse about it than anybody else could ever make her feel. She hates herself now. And I don’t want her to. Danny doesn’t either.”

  I realize what he’s been doing lately, why he always has Danny with him. He wants to believe in his wife, but he’s afraid to leave her alone with his son now.

  “That’s all I’m going to say about it. It’s our business, and we’re going to be okay.”

  He puts his hat back on and starts walking away from me. I follow.

  His hand suddenly reaches out to stop me from taking another step. We’ve arrived at a ragged depression in the earth. There’s a drop-off about five feet deep, and then the land resumes again in steaming, crumbling peaks and valleys like a small, smoggy canyon.

  He kneels down. I start to speak, and he hushes me with a finger to his lips. He waits until he hears a faint hiss like a tire leaking air before dropping the finger and pointing into the hole.

  “There,” he says.

  I look down but don’t see anything except broken dirt and torn roots. He gets up and wanders off, returning with a mop handle.

  “How long have you known John was my son?”

  “I didn’t know until I saw him yesterday. He looks like you.”

  “Then you didn’t send me a newspaper clipping about Reese getting out of prison when I was still in Florida?”

  “I never even knew you were in Florida. Maybe Bobbie mentioned it at some point since she sees Jolene now and then, but I don’t remember.”

  He kneels again and sticks the handle deep into the crevice and scrapes at the walls. Sparks glow inside the black dirt like tiny red jewels.

  “But you knew he wasn’t Reese’s son?”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t know who the father was.”

  “Did Reese know?”

  “That you’re the father? Hell, no. He would’ve called the newspapers. ‘I’m raising Ivan Z’s son.’ He thought you were hot shit.”

  He sets down the mop handle and feels around in the dirt with his hands.

  “He knew Johnny wasn’t his, but he didn’t want anybody to know,” he goes on. “He never told anybody, not even my mom. I only found out by accident, and then he made me swear I wouldn’t tell, and when Reese makes you swear to something, you usually stand by your promise.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “One time I tried to talk to him after he beat up Crystal pretty bad. He got all upset and said it was none of my business. Then it hit me all of a sudden that I never once saw a mark on Johnny. So I asked him about it, and he said he never touches the boy. And I asked him why not? And he said, ‘ ’Cause he ain’t mine.’ ”

  He pulls out his hands, claps them together to brush off the dirt, and looks up at me.

  “He wasn’t raised in a barn, you know. My mom managed to get some values into him. One was you don’t mess with other people’s stuff.”

  He moves a few feet away from his original digging spot, kneels down again, and leans his ear to the ground.

  “John was your mom’s grandson, or at least she thought he was. Why didn’t she try and keep him? Or at least try and stay in touch with him?”

  “I guess she thought he was
little enough he could start over and never know about what happened. He had a chance for a brand-new life. If he had stayed here, he would’ve had to live in this town knowing his daddy was in jail for almost killing his mommy and knowing everybody around here knew about it. He could’ve never had a good life here. Too much pain and gossip. She would’ve been keeping him because she wanted him, not because it would’ve been best for him. My mom may have her failings, but being selfish ain’t one of them.”

  I think about how selfish I was. I never thought about my mother in regard to John. She never got to know him either: a descendant of her union with the man she loved and lost, a living piece of my father’s identity, not a photograph of a lid on a stick or a portrait of a czar. I kept her from knowing her first grandson.

  “You think she was a bad person for thinking that way?” Jess asks me.

  “No,” I tell him.

  He stands up and takes a small white box out of the pocket of his Woolrich coat.

  “I was going to drop by the sheriff’s department today on my way to work and give you this.”

  He hands me the box. I take it and open it. Inside, lying on a piece of cotton, is Crystal’s necklace.

  “Bobbie and I took her personal effects when it turned out her folks didn’t want them,” he explains. “I think it was too painful for them. I think they decided to try and pretend she never existed. Some people deal with a lost child that way.”

  I stare at the cage the size of my thumbnail and the chips of dull color captive inside it.

  “You should give this to your son,” he urges me. “It belongs to him now.”

  “I didn’t tell him who I am,” I reply, still staring into the box. “I think it’s best. I’m not planning on seeing him again.”

  He picks up the mop handle and moves about two feet away from where he last knelt. This time he stretches out across the ground on his stomach, grips the pole two-handed, and starts plunging it into the gash in the earth.

  “That’s your business.”