by Ann Pancake
Corey notices Rabbit doesn’t say anything about hauling him back up.
It takes a good bit to scare Corey, but being dropped in a hole he can’t see the bottom of by a drunk man, well, that comes close. The mouse, now mice, skittle at those slippery walls. But Corey is no chickenshit. Then it occurs to him (just a little low-to-the-ground speedwagon) what kind of payback this should get him. Just how big Rabbit is going to owe. “Whereabouts is it?” Corey says.
“Once you get down there, I’m pretty sure it’s back that way.” Rabbit tips his head to the left. The rain is falling harder.
“What’s it look like?”
“Oh, it’s like a big metal box.You’ll know it. Ain’t nothing else like that down there.”
Corey sits on the grassy-sloped edge of the mine break. It’ll sound like a chainsaw starting up, that engine in it. He feeds the flashlight Rabbit hands him into his camouflage shirt and tucks the shirt tight in his jeans, carries it that way to free up his hands. Then he looks up at Rabbit, and Rabbit looks at him, and Corey scoots straight off before his brain can think.
Despite being drunk, Rabbit manages to get the rope snubbed short and taut, and he even pays it out proper, so Corey doesn’t freefall. Corey’s clinging to the rope with his gloves, he swings his feet to feel around, and he hits dirt for a while. I’m going in a mine, he has never been in a mine before. Used to be, when he was little, he would say, “I’m gonna be a miner.” And Dad would say, “Won’t be no coal left for you to mine,” and now Mom says, “Won’t be no mountains left for you to work,” and Dad has always said, “No, boy, you ain’t working in no mine.” They’re right, Corey thinks, I won’t have to go in no holes. I’ll work er on top. And scabs, Dad calls em, ditch diggers, that ain’t no mining, but Corey doesn’t care, he would run that shovel easy as handling his bike.The rope grinds up under his armpits, it hurts, forces his arms to splay out in an angle they don’t want to go. But also Dad will say, when Mom is not around, we won’t be here by the time you’re big enough to get a job. We’ll be in North Carolina then.
Corey has heard Rabbit begin to pant, and now Rabbit kind of giggles and calls, “Buddy, you’re stouter’n I thought!” Corey tightens, his body’s growing cooler and cooler, and he tells himself not to think, think instead, North Carolina. North Carolina. But Bant said they ain’t got no four-wheelers in North Carolina. You remember seeing any down there? she said, and, well, no, Corey didn’t, but he was littler then, didn’t remember anything real well. That’s a city, Bant says. You can’t ride a four-wheeler in a city, it’s against the law, it’s not street-legal down there. Corey told Dad what Bant said. Well, that’s a lie, Dad said, but like he wasn’t paying real close attention to what Corey had said.
Then, quicker than he can think, Corey drops. He doesn’t fall far, but he hits ground in a kind of squat-crumble on his bad ankle, and he screams “Shit!”
Rabbit calls, “Where the hell’d you go to?”
Corey runs his hand along the rope. “Knots gave.” He stands up, wincing on the ankle, then swagger-staggers a few short steps. Light spills down the hole, and even with the rain in it, it lights this part of the shaft surprisingly clear, even though you couldn’t see jack from up there in the daylight. The floor is puddled with water, the ceiling in places dripping with it, cool, and the ceiling is right down low to him, like a ceiling made to fit him. Standing underneath it makes him feel tall. He looks as far as he can see up and down the tunnel in both directions, but he doesn’t see any metal panel. And because of how he fell, he can’t get his bearings, doesn’t know which way Rabbit pointed, so he backs up against a rumply uneven wall, tries to see up to where Rabbit is. He hollers, “Show me yourself!”
The tiny-checked knees plop down on where the grass caves in.
“Now which way do you think it is?”
“That way,” calls Rabbit.
“I can’t see what you’re talking about.”
“That way!” and now the rope is kind of swinging around, like Rabbit thinks he’s waving it towards the box.
“That don’t tell me nothing!”
The checkered knees disappear. Next thing Corey knows, a rock is skipping past his head towards the part of the shaft on his right.
“That way!” Rabbit hollers.
“All right,” Corey mutters. Speedwagon, he tells himself. Speedwagon speedwagon speedwagon he chants in his head to drive down the other. He can hear the mine drip drip. He already has the flashlight out of his shirt, and he thumbs the switch, but nothing happens. Flicks it off, tries again. Nothing. He slaps it in the palm of his hand, nothing changes, speedwagonspeedwagonspeedwagon buddy will he owe me he unscrews the end, spills the batteries on the ground, turns them around, wedges them back in. Now he’s scared to even try again, but he does, and, there it is. No light. “Son. Of. A. Bitch,” Corey says.
He lifts his face up to the hole. “Rabbit! Your light don’t work!”
“What?”
“I said, your light don’t work!”
Silence. “Oh. You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
A shuffling around the rim of the hole. “Didja check the batteries was pointing right?”
“I tried everything.”
“Well, now.” Silence. Speedwagonspeedwagonspeedwagon, to drown out, what is coming, no, monkey monkey monkey and Rabbit calls, “Well, just walk that way feeling with your feet. It’s there on the floor somewheres.”
“How big is it?”
“Shit, it’s near big as a air conditioner. You can’t miss it.”
Corey cusses, loud, monkey.Then he just charges at the tunnel. He bows his legs a little and swaggers on the bad ankle, cussing, and he just charges along under that low roof, over the bumpy earth floor, but the harder he tries not to think (monkey), the more he does think (monkey), it’s there all along right under the cusswords (monkey), the light from the hole melting fast, and Corey decides sonofabitch isn’t powerful enough, so he switches to fuck (monkey), but fuck is really too short, so he tries goddamn motherfucker (monkey). He sees nothing metal at all, he feels nothing metal at all, the light narrowing behind him like a funnel closing, and him sloshing through cold water, his tennis shoes soaked, and the shaft is wide enough that he has to zigzag it to have any chance at all of hitting that breaker box. He keeps cracking into blunt objects, then he has to strip off his gloves, and feel with his naked hands, but they are always rocks, and it occurs to him, what if one of them coffins fell in here, and, then. He’s somehow turned a bend, and there is no light at all.
Corey stands stock-still. Without light, he is no place. First he was there. Then he is nowhere. And now, he’s not just no place, but he starts to lose himself.
All of a sudden, he’s not knowing where his parts stop. He cannot tell where he ends. His hands, his feet, fading, then his skin, too, fading, and then he’s not even knowing about his head, he is not he is losing Corey. He panics, flails, he grabs. He goes after Corey, he snatches at him, tries to bundle him back, but he finds himself swimming at air, and finally, on frantic instinct, he wheels and plunges towards where the light should be. He’s not thinking Rabbit or speedwagon or motherfucker or even monkey, Corey’s not thinking at all. The black starts to gray and then starts to shape, puddlewater splashing up and the rough tunnel sides he can finally see. Corey is still plunging after himself when he hits it, the metal stubbing his tennis-shoed toe. It’s in the dead middle of the floor.
He reaches down. He takes off a glove and feels of it, the metal. He pings it with a nail, makes sure. Then he strokes it. And with that, he is himself again. He is Corey, and sonofabitch if he hasn’t found the goddamned breaker box, and is Rabbit I can make run a no-legged man gonna owe him now.
The panel is too awkward, too bulky, for him to pick up, even if it weren’t heavy, which it is. He has to walk it end over end to the hole, and he is very careful with it, rocking it gentle, straining his biceps, feeling the good muscle there each time he catc
hes it before it falls on its side. The hardness in the breaker box, like the hardness in Corey’s body, to touch the breaker box is to feel its return. He hears deep inside him the way the speedwagon will start. He ties the box good with the rope, and Rabbit hauls it back up, and Corey can hear the pleasure in Rabbit’s grunts, and is Rabbit going to. The pressure of the taut rope erodes the mine break edges so they give a little, dirt and shale peppering Corey’s head. Him with his gloved hands on his hips watching the panel dangle, rise and spin, his knots holding, and his speedwagon, the way it will start like a chainsaw, you’ll jerk its rope to start it, and then buddy, will it wail.
After he hauls Corey back up—a couple iffy moments at the crumbly edge, then Corey claws his way out—Rabbit backs the station wagon as far as he can over the bad brush, and the two of them load the panel in the rear. Corey bears the same weight Rabbit does. It is outright raining now, the rain with a chill to it, more November than August. Rabbit slams the tailgate shut, then swigs a victory drink, a swallow as long as his neck. Then he offers it to Corey. Corey has tasted whiskey before. He knows how it will ram, then fire, his throat, so he is careful, he doesn’t cough or gag. He just wipes his lips with his bare arm and says, “Ahhhgg. Oom.”
During the trip back on Route 9, Rabbit doesn’t crack thirty-five again, so more cars and trucks whip and barrel around them on the endless double yellow lines. Again, Rabbit is reclined in his seat, slouched with his head thrown back, one windshield wiper cranking a rhythmic shriek. Cory slouches, too, full of what he has done. Him and Rabbit up at the old house, he sees, working, Rabbit showing him how to put things together, Rabbit letting Corey use his tools, Corey saying, Well, now, I don’t want to mess your stuff up, and Rabbit saying, Hell, you’re not gonna mess nothing up, I can tell you know how to handle tools, and Rabbit just about to show Corey exactly what part they need to make the engine fire when Corey hears the siren and then notices the lights.
He turns to look behind them, hopeful it’s the rescue squad. It is not. Now Rabbit, with a long-suffering exhale, is pulling off on the shoulder. He pitches the pint bottle under his seat and cusses.
It’s not even the deputy. It is Pinky McCutcheon himself at Rabbit’s window. Pinky looks right over Rabbit to Corey, and says, “Who do you belong to?”
Bant
I DIDN’T have an alarm clock, but I could tell myself what time to get up before I fell asleep at night, and then I would. I decided this time I’d try before it was even light at all, figuring the nosers wouldn’t roam too far in the dark. I woke when I wanted, and I saw the boys’ door was open, and I snuck out careful not to make a noise, but I wondered if Corey couldn’t smell gasoline from a deep sleep. Baron pranced up from where he slept between the chair and couch, the strangeness of me leaving at that hour. I’d been planning to tie Chancey, but when I got outside, I saw he was up and gone.
Dew lay heavy as rainwater on the metal gate, and on above, those holding ponds outbreathed a steam like winter mouths. Smoking nastiness. It was lighter up in there than it had been down at the house because of the trees and ridges gone. I hadn’t guessed the light right. At first I stuck close to what was left of the creek, now knocked to a trickle and poison-filled.
I climbed up to walk along the ponds, on the grass, out of the rock. At the toe of each pond, a gummy outlet drained into the next one over rocks chickenwired together, the water a green-gray spew with fuzzy stuff in it. As I walked, the water pulled at me. I knew from Lace what might be in that water, the chemicals, the metals, and how would they do your skin? Plunge my arm in and skin rapid-shrink away? Saran Wrap thrown in a fire? And then the muscle, that’d go, too, snap, crackle, pop. And finally the poison would hit bone, and, true, the bone would slow it, the poison would have to work harder, but before too long, the bone would be pocked all over with little burned-out pores. Something like my face. Up over the mine rose a cloudpile strange for the morning, more like something you’d see in the afternoon. Clouds bumping along the bald level rim, clouds busy, stepping back and forth in front of each other, jostling for space.
There’d been a second flood, a little flood, two nights ago. The clouds made all afternoon and evening, sun shining at the same time, the sun just boiled the clouds up fuller. I watched the clouds build as I painted, and by the time I got home, the sun was finally covered, and Lace and Dane were worried. Jimmy Make was not, and I understood why. The May flood still seemed maybe a fluke, and the week before, we’d had a false alarm, we’d moved the cars and Lace made Jimmy stay up, but nothing happened. Now Jimmy Make and Lace argued over it, Lace talking about camping up at the Ricker Place, Jimmy saying that was stupid and we had nothing to “camp” with anyway. Finally Jimmy did move the truck with the mower and weedeater in it up on the above-the-hollow road. Because Lace had to work the next day, Jimmy said he’d stay up and watch.
I didn’t hear the cloudburst. Wasn’t any thunder to it. What woke me was something big and heavy slamming the base of the house, that and Baron yipping. I sprung up and into the living room where Lace was hollering at Jimmy Make, what had he been doing, why hadn’t he warned us? and I could tell by looking at him he’d been out of a deep sleep no more than a few minutes longer than I had. Lace yelling, “Let’s get the kids out now!” and Jimmy yelling back, “Get em out where? It’ll knock em down. It’s dark. We’re safest in here,” and Baron on the back of the couch, barking at the waters out the window. Jimmy Make yelled, “It’ll only rise so high, there’s less rain this time than there was in May,” and Lace screamed, “How the hell do you know? You weren’t even here,” while Tommy in his pajama bottoms clawed at my arm, “Where’s Chancey at? Where’s Chancey at?” and more stuff hammering and slapping along the underpinning. “When it moves. When I feel this house move. When it shifts. What do we do then, Jimmy? When it starts to go?” Lace had gone beyond hollering, she was speaking hard cold little sentences now, and Jimmy screaming back, “You’re the one wants to live in the middle of this mess!”
That goddamned Corey had already sailed out of bed and jerked open the kitchen cabinet for the big high-powered flashlight Jimmy used to spotlight deer. While Jimmy Make stood in the living room window with his face pressed against the pane and his hands framed around his face, trying to see, Corey knelt in the broad sill of the push-out window in the end of the house, the glass cranked open to kill the reflection and the light shining out on the water. I was still standing at the end of the hall, right before the living room, I couldn’t figure out where to move, and I could hear Dane in the bathroom dry-heaving, and I felt for him. I knew he wouldn’t bring nothing up. But then my feet felt wet, and at first I thought I was imagining it, but then I felt it on the tender parts, the instep, between the toes, and I understood it was high enough this time to seep up through the floor. I ran to where Jimmy Make was, thrust my face against the window like him. Out front, the leaping water, no moon on it, all you could see were darker angled objects studding up out of it and the foam glittering white. Then Corey was hollering, “She’s dropping! She’s dropping!” And Corey was right. That was all the higher it got.
I found Tommy crouched on top of that old high-boy dresser in Lace and Jimmy Make’s room. It was the highest place in the house he could have got except the refrigerator. Some kind of instinct in him. Lace and Jimmy began to fight again.
By the time I hit the boulder field at the foot of the fill, the hollow was full of light. The rocks, they shook me up like they always did. Hard to put a word to it, but it was like the middle of the world showing itself where it shouldn’t.When it should stay a private secret place. I dropped over and fast-crawled them, making myself not think.Then I crossed over to the side of the fill, back to the earth wall I’d tried to climb last time. It was easier this time, that little practice helped, and I think I got four or five body lengths up.
What I thought first was that I’d misstepped and somehow set it off myself.The ground started rolling, and then I heard the boom, and I under
stood it was a blast, and the second I understood that, I was skidding on my side down the earth wall. My arms still flung above my head, grabbing, and me brown-blinded, pelted and battered, the air full, my eyes full, my mouth, dirt dust gravel fly rock, and beside me, the fill seethed and rolled more rapid than the wall, one long skinny channel of rocks in the fill, it was avalanching. And then rocks the size of baseballs were hitting me, and I couldn’t tell where I was, but I heard Lace, protect your head, and I threw my arms around my head and balled up.
Then the boom drew back into itself, away up on the mine, and I was at the bottom, in the big raw rocks, my arms still around my head, some stones still hailing a little. My arm and leg a long scrape from sliding down, and they stung, and although the big boom was gone, my heart echoed it inside me, while the fill still shifted and rolled, trying to resteady itself. I opened my eyes and raised up, and I could see, despite the dust in the hollow like a fine brown blizzard, the blast cloud up over the mountain, slow-shrinking now.
Then I looked back over the boulder field and saw in the dust clouds a spot of bright blue. Beyond the blue, some creature bolting back down the hollow, too small for a deer and too big for anything else wild, and I realized it was Chancey. Which meant, I understood next, the blue was Corey or Tommy.