by Ann Pancake
Avery takes a slow final look, the corpse-colored ground, the strangled creek, the lopped-off mountains, and on the edge of the mine, three spindly trees. This is a disaster less spectacular, more invisible, than Buffalo Creek. This disaster is cumulative, is governed by a different scale of time. Chronic, pressing, insistent, insidious. Kill the ground and trees by blasting out the coal, kill all the trees you don’t kill the first time through acid rain, kill the water with the waste you have to dump, and then, by burning the coal—Avery smirks, he’s on a roll—heat up the climate and kill everything left. Because Avery has come to understand (not learn, but understand, confirming) that the end times his mother obsesses about won’t arrive with a trumpet and Jesus come back all of a sudden and everybody jump out of their graves. No. It is a glacial-pace apocalypse. The end of the world in slow motion. A de-evolution, like the making of creation in reverse. The End Times are in progress right now, Avery is walking on them . . .
And “What do you remember?”
“I don’t remember nothing before I woke up on the mountain with that dog beside me.”
“What do you remember?”
“Don’t remember nothing before I woke up on the mountain.”
“What do you . . .”
“Don’t remember nothing before I woke . . .”
“What?”
“Don’t remember nothing” Don’t remember
Tad’s mother screaming, and at first Bucky, thought-fumbling, couldn’t place where he was, but the scream pulled him far enough out of sleep to hear a roar like a hurricane happening in his ear, its volume shooting louder by the second, and in that roar, the pops and cracks and whush. Then Tad’s father screaming back at his mother, and then an enormous grating noise, closer than the screams, and Bucky saw out the window opposite the bed—again, him thought-fumbling, he saw and he heard, but he could not understand—that the house next door was coming into Tad’s room.
The window shattered. Tad sprang off the floor and into bed with Bucky, and now Bucky could tell Tad’s parents were screaming Tad’s name, but he couldn’t tell where they were, inside, outside. He felt the house shift a little, it clenched its teeth against the pressure, it tried, but he felt it give, and he and Tad bounded off the bed and to the top of the stairs, saw black water torrenting through the first-story rooms.
The house groaned and swayed. Still clinging to each other, they ran into a bedroom on the downstream side of the upstairs, away from where the neighbor’s house was coming in, Bucky reaching for a chair to break out the window but Tad already had the pane up, and then there was the screen, Bucky socking at it, butting his body into it, and he popped out enough of it that they could struggle through onto the roof over the side porch. Now the house is truly moving, the roar so deafening they can’t hear each other unless they pull up and scream in an ear, even though they are linked by their arms. Bucky whips his head to the left, glances out over the narrow bottom, sees a mountain of black water tearing through Lorado carrying big stuff all in it, sees people splashing, sees a house fall forward on its face, then he sees across the way a man in a crouch on his garage roof, suspended, his arms extended like wings, choosing whether to dive off or hang on. A car gallops down on him and knocks him into the flood. Tad’s house coasts, free, and the roof begins to tilt, and they start sliding down the slick tin, at first scrabbling with fingers and nails and knees the ridges in the roofing, but finally Bucky grabs Tad’s hand and they leap into the water, off to the side as far away from the path of the house as they can jump.
Bucky loses hold when they hit the thick cold greasy water, then he surfaces and spots Tad’s blond head in the black slush. Tad’s mouth and eyes are bawled open, he is screaming, then a wave chops into Bucky’s mouth, the horrible taste to it, death and coal dirt, and Bucky realizes his own mouth had been as open as Tad’s. Bucky goes under. Spinning, a pressure like pliers on his chest, he can’t tell backwards from forwards, up or down either. Something bigger than he is clips his shoulder and his legs are tangled in long thin metal sheeting, and as he fights that, yet another object kicks him to the top again. Eye-level with the debris, he catches sight, between the black peaks of waves, of Tad not far away.Tad’s climbed up on something, and Bucky thrashes towards Tad, they’re both moving in the same direction, Tad spread-eagled on his stomach on a mattress and screaming directions to Bucky that Bucky can’t hear. Bucky gains on Tad, more from the push of the torrent than through his own effort, then Tad reaches both hands to Bucky, the mattress twisting and bucking, but Tad still reaches. Then he has Bucky, jerks him towards him, and Bucky snatches hold the mattress, and the mattress buckles and lists and twists as Bucky tries to mount it, and it almost overturns and throws Tad off, but Tad somehow balances it. And then the two of them are tangled on the mattress, clinging to its edges and to each other, the mattress spinning and pitching. Tad bleeds on the fabric, but Bucky can’t tell from where, Tad is too black-coated, and neither can he tell how much blood there is because of how the rain and the floodwaters have thinned it and spread it.Then Bucky is distracted from the blood by a flash of light, wild sparks, then a series of explosions—power poles toppling, a transformer blowing up, the wires hitting the water with sizzle and smoke—and then the mattress slams into something he doesn’t see and he and Tad are tossed back in.
Again, the utter loss of direction, of place. Again, the crush in his chest, and Bucky flutters his eyes open and sees a black darker than air ever gets. Bucky spins, lashes his arms around for anything that floats, rams his elbows into debris, his shoulders, his knees, and finally gets his hands into a mess of chickenwire tacked to the side of a shed. And then Bucky sees—and this time it’s miraculous, downright unbelievable (so much so that at times Avery continues to wonder if it happened at all (while the dead-center of him knows it did))—Bucky sees on the far side of the tar-papered shed roof the blond head, ragged full of black coal, but the blond comes through, Bucky sees Tad clawing onto the chickenhouse roof.
Then the chickenwire tears away with Bucky’s weight, vanishes into the swill, and he has to hold onto the shed itself, like Tad is trying to do across from him. He tries gripping the thin eave of the roof, but there isn’t enough jut for him to get a real hold. He’s thrown all of himself into his hands and into a little piece of his mind that knows how to hold on, and that mind piece tells him not even to bother spreading his arms to clutch the roof by its corners, it is too wide. He is going to have to climb up on top.
Bucky screams this at Tad, what he’s going to do, but Tad just stares back at him, empty-eyed, his teeth bared. He can’t hear what Bucky is saying, and how in God’s name is Tad holding on? Bucky cannot tell. He starts fighting his way onto the roof, first dragging himself with his elbows until he’s flat on it to his waist. From there, he’s able to hook up a knee. He pauses a second, and it comes to him, it seems, it does, what’s going to happen next, and he screams again at Tad, Tad again gazes back, bald-eyed, and Bucky can’t hold the awkward position any longer. He heaves his whole body up using his hands and the knee. Bucky’s sudden full weight on the roof plunges it down on his side, pitches the other side up in the air. Bucky throws himself flat on the roof to stabilize it, and the Tad side of the roof splashes back down to the surface. But Tad is no longer there.
Some dream of water walls, Avery has learned, and some dream of logs coming at them. Some dream of scaling the hills, all alone, the last person left on earth, and some just dream of running, run all night long and wake without rest. His brother Ronald still dreams of stepping on bodies, although Ronald never did, dreams of a body turning up under his feet, and his mother still dreams the loss of Bucky. Some don’t dream because they can’t remember. Instead, they live in the constant horror that one day they will recall, one night they will dream. But Avery dreams this: “Bucky, grab hold my arm!” And he can’t, not to save his mind nor his soul, know if Tad really screamed, or if the scream is dream, too.
Dane
&nbs
p; ALL SUNDAY morning and into early afternoon Corey and Tommy work on Corey’s bike in the road. Dane pretends to watch the races with Jimmy Make, but every once in a while, he goes to the window to check on them. Jimmy tells him to settle his butt down. NASCAR makes Dane want to fall asleep, and he used to wonder if that was because he didn’t understand it or if what he was understanding was all it was. He has decided he must not understand because it casts a spell on both Jimmy Make and Baron, the two of them paralyzed on the sofa with their mouths slightly open. Finally on one of his trips to peek out the drapes, which Jimmy has drawn to make the races more vivid, Dane sees that Corey and Tommy have gone. He grabs a piece of bread while Jimmy’s not looking and heads out to see what they’re into now.
As he walks down the road, he squishes the soft bread into little packed balls that he sticks in his mouth and sucks, rolling them over his tongue. It seems anymore all he wants to do is eat. No threat of rain in the sky, far as he can see, but the road, the yards, too, are empty, nobody about, and Dane wonders if that is because of the races or the heat. No fish swim in him. Just the jammed logs, heavy and grating, the chock-full ride in his gut, and still, he wants to eat, pile more in.
He sees two figures trotting up the road towards him, but he knows they aren’t Tommy and Corey because the two figures are exactly the same height. It’s the twins, David and B-bo. Even though they’re identical—each blond mallet head shaved uneven, near bald in spots, brushy in others—you can easily tell them apart. David acts normal, while B-bo acts like a car with bad brakes.
“You know where Tommy and Corey’s at?” Dane asks them when they get close enough. B-bo had come up with his head lowered and his right hand jerking his gearshift. Now he jogs in place, his motor idling in his mouth.
“They’re up in the Big Drain,” David says. “Corey and Seth are having a bike contest.”
“Idiot!” B-bo shrieks. “We wadn’t supposed to tell nobody.”
“Oh, idiot yourself,” says David. “Ain’t nobody. Just Dane.”
B-bo squeals his heels in the gravel and speeds off, David following, both moving fast in the direction of the Big Drain. Dane watches. He weighs whether seeing the contest, being there with the others, is worth the dangers of the Big Drain. He sucks on his bread, the nuggets lodged between teeth and tongue a comfort in his mouth. No fish moving. Doesn’t look like rain. Even if it does rain, the water probably won’t come out of the Big Drain because the water always comes from where it shouldn’t, and the Big Drain is where it should. Dane leans over, ties his shoe, and jogs after the twins.
The Big Drain sticks out of Yellowroot Mountain about a third of the way up its side, kind of above Mrs. Taylor’s house, but of course you can’t see it from there. It is hidden, deeply buried in woods and in brush, it’s a secret place, despite how big it is, and the only people who even know about it are those other people have shown. Exactly why it’s there, Dane does not know, he knows only that it’s been there all his life. It’s twice as tall or more than he is, higher than a regular room, and where it disappears into the mountain, about forty steps from its mouth, it’s capped with a grate. Many people have tried to get through this grate, including Bant one afternoon a few years ago while Dane squatted on the concrete side, watching. Praying that she wouldn’t make it, but the grate is a thick rusted criss-crossed steel and nobody has ever managed to get past it. On its other side, the grate is hung up with shale and slate and rocks and coal, mountain guts, and the guts wash onto the floor of the culvert now and then, the water behind them coming from who knows where.
Dane hauls himself up to its mouth, huffing and stumbling, him made even clumsier than usual by the slice of bread remnant he still carries in one hand, and he passes the NO TRESPASSING signs. How come they can do what they please with my property, destroy it however they want, and I can’t set a foot on theirs? Mrs. Taylor again. He pauses at the opening, taking in the scent, a heavy odor of cool dirt and old concrete and get-in-the-ground. We worked for our house.They can destroy my property we worked for, but I set foot on theirs, they’ll arrest me and haul me off to jail. He rolls his bread in his mouth, peering into the Drain. Up overhead, the grind of the machinery, them working on Sunday. It is hard to see from light into dark, and although Dane squints and strains, he still makes out only the boys’ drain-distorted voices and their shape. A mucky ankle-deep spit crawls out of the Drain and dribbles from its mouth, and who knows what all’s in that water, but the want to see is strong in him, the rain far away, so he steps up inside.
The temperature drops as soon as he enters the tunnel, and now he’s surrounded by the smell. He likes the smell, he hangs his mouth open to taste it, careful not to lose the bread ball in his gums. He walks the culvert spread-legged, straddling the gooey water, his tennis shoes slanting awkward down the concrete walls. His eyes slot open to the dark like a cat’s, and he sees it is Corey and Tommy and B-bo and David, and also Clyde McCaffey, Seth not here yet. They have to know Dane has come in, but they act like they don’t. This is what they always do, even Tommy ignores him, here where he can afford to, when he doesn’t need Dane to listen. B-bo is trying to climb the drain wall by reversing up one side of the tunnel as far as his tennis shoes will take him, then barreling down through the bottom and sprinting up the other side until he crashes to his knees. The drain rocks and booms with the muffler noises from his mouth. Clyde, a boy about fourteen, catches on and starts shouting his own voice through the drain. His voice is changing, he can holler from low moany hooooos all the way up into whistle-pitched shrieks, the concrete rolling and largening his voice, and that sets off David, who sings a commercial tune at the top of his lungs, and Tommy, who makes like a fire whistle, and B-bo, who simply screams. Dane shrinks. He feels the crotch of his pants stretch from the pressure of the straddle, and he wills it not to split. The noise sluices back and forth along the drain walls, deafening and crazy, and it ricocheted down that hollow. Didn’t shoot straight down. It would bounce from one side to the other. That’s how it completely missed some houses on one side set even lower than houses it hit on the other side, and he wants to slap his hands over his ears, but he’ll lose his bread.
Only Corey doesn’t holler. Corey stands near the grate to the side of the water, up the wall a little, his arms crossed over his chest, his bike leaning against his hip. His heavy bangs shield the top part of his face like a visor. Dane’s stomach logs grind. Corey wears his camouflage pants and an army green T-shirt, its sleeves pushed up to his shoulder nubs to show off the chamois rag he has tied around his bicep.
Suddenly, they all shut up. They’re watching something behind Dane. Dane turns and sees Seth pushing his bike to the drain mouth. What has shut up the others is not so much Seth’s approach as it is Seth’s clothes. He wears some sort of racing getup, maybe motocross, and, true, he has outgrown it, the waxy groundhog blubber popping through so the shirt can’t stay tucked, but, still, it is a racing uniform, neon colors and a big black 44. For a moment, it strikes everybody silent.
Tommy is the first to crack it. “Coor-EE! Coor-EE! Coor-EE!” He chants his loyalty, which triggers Clyde again, and then David and B-bo, and Dane, caught off guard, claps his hands over his ears and loses the last of the bread slice to the poison water trickle.
“What’s the winner get?” Clyde asks.
“Ten bucks,” Seth says. Something Dane knows Corey doesn’t have.
“That’s if he wins,” says Corey. “I win, I get to ride his four-wheeler.” B-bo revs the engine in his mouth.
“Clyde’ll mark it,” Corey tells Seth. “Three tries.” Seth nods. Everyone knows Clyde is impartial and has shown up only to see somebody get hurt.
Corey pulls his bike as high as he can up one side of the culvert. Lace bought the bike last summer at the IGA lot off some man from McDowell County, a mock mountain bike with no gears, and it was rusted, so Corey and Tommy have sanded it down and repainted it with some old paint they found that didn’t stick good to m
etal, which turned the bike into a kind of mess that Corey has convinced himself and Tommy looks tough. Dane watches Corey climb the wall.