by Ann Pancake
I started on up, keeping my head low like that would hide me from the guards, then I realized how stupid that was. The sky so blue it had a hardness to it, like you might reach up and hit the underside of a blue-domed skull. Usually in July, this time of morning, the sky’d be taking on a haze, and by noon, the whole thing would be milky. Come August, the sky would whiten up by nine AM, sometimes with a tinge of poison yellow, but this year it seemed the seasons were running backwards. The summer strangely cool and wet following a warm snowless winter, that winter following the worst drought summer in sixty years. Anymore, seemed there was either too much water or too little, the temperature too high or too low. “Strange as this weather has been,” people would say, or, “With this crazy weather we’ve been having.” And I knew Lace believed the weather was linked to the rest of this mess, but I wasn’t sure how.
Then I was in the part where the trees were sliding down the hollow sides, I was passing those sediment ponds, simmering in themselves, so green with God-didn’t-even-know-what I couldn’t see a quarter inch under their surface. I had my ears pricked for guards even though I realized I had no idea how a coming guard might sound, we never saw Lyon’s nosers drive up in here, so they must have slunk around on foot, and what would you hear? Dirt hiss as they took the long slide off the rim? A crunkle of rocks? I heard nothing but the machines destructing overhead. It sounded different up in here, you could hear it more clear, the noises separated out—revving motors and backup beepers and crashes and bangs. Scrape of that humongous shovel against rock.
I tried to squint through the tore-up trees to the used-to-be ridge, thinking of guards perched up there with binoculars, pistols. Most of the ponds were jammed with logs and junk, I could see it even better now on foot than I had in the truck, and that meant next time it flooded, the ponds would hold back even less water than they had last time. Evil, Lace called it. All of it. Calculated evil. Jimmy Make’d roll his eyes. It’s not evil, he’d say. How can a woman bright as you are be so goddamned backwards? It’s just greed and they-don’t-give-a-damn. It’s money.
Greed and money and they-don’t-give-a-damn are evil, Lace would say.
I was finally coming up on that last bend before you swung around and took it full in your face. I ducked my head, hair falling over my eyes. I watched the shattered rocks under my tennis shoes, breathed with my mouth to lighten the gas smell, but the destruction kept calling me to see it. Like the pictures in the Dairy Queen had, like the sex chapter in the ninth-grade science book we never read.
So I stopped and looked up.
The first hurt I felt wasn’t for myself. It was for Grandma. Many times I’d been in a car with her and seen a highwall from a strip mine, even a small one on a mountain we didn’t know, and how my grandma would flinch. I was scared to think what it would do to her to see this kind of violence on a piece of ground she loved. But after I felt for Grandma, it was like I no longer knew where I was. I all of a sudden got dizzy, so many times in my life I’d walked up this hollow, followed the creek, and back then, you couldn’t see the top of anything. You were just in it, in the hollow, in the mountains, in the woods, up above you trees and vines and rock overhangs, and higher than that, a change in the light that let you know where the top should be. But then, finally, I did feel the hurt for myself. I understood. It was like they were knocking down whatever it is inside of you that holds you up. Kicking down the blocks that hold up your insides, kicking, until what the blocks kept up falls and leaves you empty inside.
I gazed away from the fill to a couple left-behind trees on the ridge, raggedy. I’d seen at church a picture of Calvary. Thorn trees set in a bleached earth and sky. Then I turned my head to the far left, to Cherryboy and beyond, still wooded, I tried to take comfort from that, and for a little while, the comfort came. But almost right away, the separateness set in.
I didn’t stop moving again until I hit that field of eerie boulders at the foot of the fill, sharp-angled and unweathered. Shut up and grow up. Jimmy’s voice. I looked around for guards, then I dropped on all fours and started bearwalking it again. I’d noticed last time a narrow strip of ground on one side of the fill, rusty-colored and bald, not a lot of rock on it. Solid. Then I was at the base, and I straightened up, checked over my shoulder. Scanned the mine rim, saw nothing live up there but those sorry left-behind trees. Once I got right against the bank, I smelled the ground odor in it, and that made me feel safer, and I started climbing again, this time more like a spider than a bear, and along the bottom there, it wasn’t as steep as I’d thought. Maybe it wouldn’t be so hard after all.
I’d clawed up maybe two body-lengths when the voice came from so close it didn’t even yell.
“Hey.You. What’re you doing up in here?”
I waited for a minute with my face to the wall. Then, without lifting my hands or feet, I looked back.
He wore a goatee and black sunglasses like skiers have. Carried a little Igloo lunch cooler. And where in the world did he come from, I thought for a second, but right after that, I knew—of course that was how he would come.
“Thought you were a girl,” the guard said. “That hair.”
I let loose and slid down. My tennis shoes slipped when they hit the rocks, and I felt the burn of a scrape on my ankle. He’d fixed on me those wrap-around black lenses, his eyes so gone it seemed it was his mouth was staring at me. And my first fear, that he’d arrest me, sunk back a little, because him looking at me there called my outsides back. I went bony and ugly again. I dipped my head, and my hair fell forward and screened my face, and I stood there hating every little gut in his body. And scared to the core over what he’d do next.
“C’mon over here,” he said. He’d found a flat place on one of the sharp rocks to set his butt. I did what he wanted, balanced my own behind on the rock he pointed out for me. I kept an eye on the holstered pistol jutting off his hip. I held myself as far away from him as I could without leaving the rock, my hair over my face, I could smell the gas in it, while he opened his cooler. Held out to me a Little Debbie fudge brownie. “Have a bite to eat,” he said.
I couldn’t tell if he was teasing or serious. The brownie made my stomach roll, but I figured I better do whatever he said. I went on and took it, then he pulled a sandwich from a baggie for himself. I could smell the salami in it, and he started grinding away on that sandwich, a slow eater he was, sounded like a dog in something wet. I sat there, sweating now under that shout sky, the cellophaned Little Debbie slippery in my sweaty hand, thinking, Could he arrest me himself, or did he have a cell phone he’d use to call Pinky McCutcheon come do it? I didn’t see cuffs, but I didn’t see a phone, either. I thought about that story Jimmy Make liked to tell, about when he was a kid and him and his friends were messing around a strip job after hours, and a guard they never even saw fired a bullet right over their heads. Gave ole Ronnie a new part in his hair. Jimmy would laugh about it. The sweat sliming my skin fired the gas odor higher, and I wondered could he smell it, too, and finally he finished the sandwich. Cleaned his goatee with a pull of his palm. Turned to me and took off the glasses, and I saw his eyes, blue, with pale stubby lashes. “Where you live at?” he said.
“Down there at the head of the hollow.” It rolled right out of my mouth.
“So what’re you doing up in here?”
Again, the question too fast, me too scared, to lie. “Looking to see if there’s a slurry impoundment behind that fill.”
When I said that, the guard looked away. Put his sunglasses back on. The goatee looked coarse as pig bristle. Then he laughed, just a little, not a nasty laugh, not like he was mocking me, but he laughed.
He wadded the baggie back into the cooler and pulled out a banana he laid across his knee. He eased over heavy onto one haunch, his belly following in a wave, and he wrestled from his front jeans’ pocket a little pearl-handled knife. He ate the banana off the knife in slices, the knife teasing up against his tongue, and each time the blade touched it, I both
cringed and wished for it to cut.
“Now honey,” he finally said. “We wouldn’t put nothing up there to hurt you-all.” He held out to me a banana slice on his knife, and I didn’t bother to shake my head. “How you’re gonna get hurt is roaming around up here where you’re not supposed to be. That gate was locked for a reason.” He finished the banana and slung the peel off into the rocks where the yellow showed up foreign and bright. “You don’t got no hazard training,” he said. “What happens if you’re up in here and a blast goes off and you don’t got no hazard training?” What happens if we’re down at our house and this fill fails and we don’t got no hazard training? the backtalk surged quick to my tongue, but I didn’t say it. I didn’t say it. Now my blood so hot in my face I wondered for a second would that gas catch flame, but I didn’t say it, and the noser just rattling on, “No, it ain’t a pretty sight. Nobody’s crazy about this here, you know. But men got to feed their families.” He kept nodding to himself like I was supposed to nod with him, like I’d never heard that before, and I thought, go on and say what comes next, say Coal’s all—“Coal’s all we got around here,” he said. “And when we’re done, we’ll clean er up. Pile it back on and smooth and grass it up. It’ll look nicer than before we started.”
My hands had made fists.They were squeezing through the brownie I still held, I realized the brownie was oozing out of its wrapper and onto my fingers. I looked away from him, I raised my face to the mine. Before, when I’d looked up at that dead mountain, I just wasn’t able to see it as real. It wasn’t like the separateness I felt these days from live mountains. It was just that my mind didn’t have any way to hold the dead ones. But right then, the guard still rambling—“and rabbits’ll come on it. Your daddy and brothers can hunt. It’ll be good for rabbits”—I stared my eyes into Yellowroot, I opened my eyes so wide they burned, and, show me, I thought. Pushing my hardest towards the real. Show me.
And sudden, like waking up, my mind did let it in. My mind opened and let it past my eyes. The recognition hit my scalp and collared my throat, and my mouth swelled thick—but I couldn’t hold the realness for more than a few seconds. I had to drop my face away from what I saw. But all I had to drop it to were those rocks, those rocks fresh from the center of the earth and what those rocks carried, some warning from the world, and always the end of something, it just always was, something in this place had been at its end since I was born, me forever butting my head against it, the end, and him saying, “Wish you’d go on and eat that. I don’t like eating in front of people.”
By the time he cracked open a Dr Pepper and started sipping slow as whiskey, I knew for sure. He wasn’t going to arrest me. I didn’t matter enough for him to bother. My punishment was this—the waiting.Then once I knew he wasn’t going to arrest me, I realized that ever since the fear had drained away, I’d been wanting him to arrest me. I had. And I knew something else, way underneath. Something even worse.
I knew I’d wanted him to arrest me because if he did, I could have felt okay about not doing nothing more.
After he drained the Dr Pepper, his voice went back to how it really was. Nasty, poisoned, and low.
“Okay, let’s see how fast you can get your butt back across them rocks and down that hollow.You done pretty good getting in.”
Dane
DANE LIES in the extra-dark of the bottom bunk, his insides full of flipping. A nausea of fish swimming. All day it has looked like rain.The underside mesh of the top bunk, where Tommy sleeps, is ripped, and it clouds down to darken Dane’s bunk a third time. The first dark the regular dark of the darkened room. The second dark the dark the top bunk makes. Despite the three darks, Dane can see his feet, enormous, under the covers at the foot of the bed. Tommy finally shut up about ten minutes ago, and Dane can hear Tommy’s breath, wide-spaced flutters. Dane is full of fish, Tommy of moths. Corey is full of metal, a little steel-made man.
Dane had the fish swimming in him, the slosh of dirty water, long before they went to bed. Then they went to bed and Tommy riled the fish even harder by telling Dane about the monkey. For weeks, Tommy has gone on and on about the monkey in the drift pile behind Chester’s house, a monkey that returns to Tommy every night when the lights go off. A monkey Dane has not seen, will not see, because Dane does not need to see the monkey. Some things Dane understands sudden and sharp, a slap of understand. The monkey Dane understands. Tommy and Dane have to go to bed earlier than Corey and Bant because Tommy and Dane are the youngest. Even though Dane is twelve and Corey is ten, Jimmy Make explains that Dane is younger in his mind than Corey is, so Dane needs more rest. In truth, Jimmy says this because Tommy won’t go to bed by himself, and Corey will fight Jimmy Make about going to bed, while Dane will just sulk. Still, Dane has to go to bed.
All day it looked like rain. It did rain for twenty minutes or so mid-afternoon, then the rain slunk back up in the sky to hang there and taunt. And again after supper, it started, steady, but soft, raining right on into the dark to where you can’t see what it was doing, you can’t tell. Rain too soft to hear on the roof. Sneaking. All we can do is listen for a big rumble, Mrs. Taylor talking. And Tommy, But, but, but, when Chancey chomps down on it, the baby monkeys might come out and run. They’ll run under people’s houses, and then what’ll we do? The fish flip and butt through pinkish stomach waters. Set traps for em . . . Dane leans out of his bunk and reaches under the bed.
Tomorrow, Sunday, is Dane’s only day off because Mrs. Taylor doesn’t believe in working on Sundays, like his grandma didn’t, so Dane doesn’t work. The Dairy Queen does believe in working on Sundays, so Mom does. When his grandma was alive, they went to church every Sunday. Then they moved to North Carolina and lost the habit, then Grandma died, then they moved back home and Mom went to work. Dane was a little boy when they went to church, a true little boy, not just little in his mind, but little all over. Dane matched himself and God matched Dane, back then God was big enough to cover him all over, a cape. God’s trying to tell us something, Mrs. Taylor will murmur, shaking a finger towards her roof, and beyond that, the valley fill, the mine. God’s telling us something. And Dane believes her. But God tells Dane nothing anymore.
He tries to remember. Those hours and hours spent in church beside his grandma, never speaking, never sleeping, not even permitted to sag. Dane understanding not the content of what the preacher said, not the words, but absorbing the atmosphere like a tight mesh net, the reward and punish, the protect and threat. And along with that, the patience and restraint they learned from those hours of sitting still in church, from the age of three or four, the endurance. To take it, they learnt. Dane learnt well, better than many, and he will always carry that in him. But now he knows what can get past God. An act of God, they called it.Tried to blame it on him. Mrs. Taylor says, I say God must be getting awful tired of being blamed for what man does. But. Still. Dane sees. God may not have done it, but God let it be done. His will be . . . God smaller and farther away and no longer big enough to cover him, even little in his mind like he is.
He lies in the extra-dark, listening for rain. A rumble. He hears only the television noise. Dane sleeps in the bottom bunk because he used to have a problem. The problem had to do with wetting the bed. He’s done it outside of bed, too, although he hasn’t done it for a long time. Dane has learned to hold back, hold in, but then there was the day at the bus stop with Corey and B-bo and David from down the road when they saw the AEP truck run over a cat. Truck clipped the cat into the air, cat coming back down under it and the wet sound of the tire. And the pee just let go, B-bo screaming, Him pissed himself, him did, him did! Him pissed himself, him did! Dane’s stomach clenches down on the fish swimming in him. He strains to hear rain, his eyes wide open, staring at the lumps in the foot of his bunk. Still young in your mind, your mind needs rest, Jimmy Make says.
His mind is not growing right, and Dane knows this by looking at his body. In the last nine months or so, Dane has grown strangely shaped. Hips, waist, thigh
s, swelling to a bigness without any length, and his body not bothering to grow at all above his waist. The bottom of his body out of proportion to the top, leaving him . . . Dane fears it so bad it’ll barely bubble into words. Leaving Dane. Strangely woman-shaped. And Dane looks at his body, this peculiar taper, and he imagines his head there at the top. Although on the outside, it looks more or less like a normal head—thin dark hair, large dark eyes, the dark half-pennies under them—Dane figures Jimmy knows that the taper continues to his brain. The brain as out-of-proportion to his upper body as his upper body is to his lower body. A little handful of shy stubborn slow-to-grow brain.
Last year in school Mrs. Baker had Dane sitting on the side of the room beside the map, and a lot of the times he was supposed to be doing something else, he would sit and study North Carolina. Part of North Carolina is lined and humped like West Virginia is. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Baker tells them, the humped part is their own mountains, just stretched farther south. But the other part of North Carolina has no black lines, bald but for town names and dots, red roads and blue rivers. Jimmy Make took them to that unlined part of North Carolina. Jimmy Make wants to take them back. Mrs. Taylor has heard about a school they built on a mountaintop removal site after the company was gone. One day all the kids were eating in the lunchroom when the school dropped six inches into the ground, and when they ran to the doors to escape, the doors wouldn’t open. The six inches of ground held them shut, so the kids had to crawl out the windows.