by Ann Pancake
Dane burrows deeper into the understory, away from the makeshift track, prowling ahead until he is no longer behind Tommy and Corey, but parallel to them, hidden in leaf. Then, from the side of his eye, he realizes he can see the snake ditches. They are there. And they always come at you like that, he remembers, a crack in the natural. Creepy concrete unexpect.The snake ditches see you before you see them, and the sight of them shrinks him a little, and in his mind, quick then gone, he sees again the monkey. The four-wheeler has already reached the base of one of the ditches, and Tommy is scrambling back up behind Corey. But Dane sees Corey has miscalculated.The snake ditches are too narrow for a four-wheeler. The tires completely straddle the concrete span.You cannot drive a four-wheeler up a snake ditch.
Corey pulls the throttle back, softens the motor a little, and he and Tommy consult. Dane is huddled behind a log, gnats in a loose globe around his head, but he is afraid to reach up and wave them away. He dips and shakes his head instead. He’s sweating heavily, Dane nearly nauseated with his own just-adolescent stink, and inside him, along with all the other fullness, the contraries running: the black-red hate, a bite-your-lip-to-keep-from-crying I feel so much hate.Then, tightly twined around the hate, a desperation to be part of this thing so hated. And, finally, fitting with the hate snug as a puzzle piece, the tenderness for what you know is younger and weaker and blood. Love.
Dane knows what they’ll try next. The concrete spillway between catchment ponds. Dane knows they are full of wet summer’s runoff, and he can see the spillway—putrid algae-colored and slimed. But today no water flows over it. They are arguing now, Tommy cocking, then ducking, his head, his elbows flapping in powerless indignation. Finally Tommy gets off the four-wheeler, stomping his feet as he does, and Dane knows Corey has had to promise him a ride the second time around in order to get rid of him now.
Corey rams the machine at the steep ground alongside the spillway while Dane crawls behind kudzu to sneak a better view, and twice Corey stalls the machine while climbing the bank, both times slipping backwards some before he gets it restarted, but he does get it restarted, and he does climb the hill. And there rises in Dane, again, entangled with the hate and the love, an admiration very close to pride, of Corey and his talent with machines. Man-talent. Metal-made.
Reaching the top of the spillway, Corey turns the wheel to the left and eases out along the concrete. Apparently, there is a ledge there, or the edge of the top pond is shallow enough that he can drive in it, Dane can’t tell. The spillway is steep, maybe as steep as a sliding board, but it is higher than even the tallest sliding board they took down at school because it was too dangerous. Of course, it’s far bigger across than a sliding board, about as big across, Dane figures, as five four-wheelers parked end-to-end. And when Corey pauses there on top, Dane understands, instantly and precisely, what he will try to do. He’s going to chute down the spillway, rip into a turn before he hits the water, then gun his way back up to the top. A U-turn on a steep slant slicked with algae.
The first time, he doesn’t go all the way to the bottom, doesn’t get real close to the water—unusual for Corey, but there it is. Corey swoops down the concrete with the rag flagging, his oil-colored hair streaming in air, that hard little body moving with his machine the way other people move with horses, like his body is welded to it. And then, about two-thirds of the way down, he jams the wheel, his torso torqued from the hips, and whizzes back up, Dane can even hear the tires spit in the wet algae, in the tiny concrete grooves. Tommy is yelling and bouncing up and down in triumph, having completely forgiven Corey’s kicking him off, and then he begins clambering up the side of the spillway to claim his own turn. But Tommy’s not going to make it. Corey is already revving for a second run.
Dane is standing now. He no longer needs to hide because it no longer matters if Corey knows. Corey is plunging down the spillway, it’s happening very fast, and like in the Big Drain, he ups the ante. He deliberately dips under his tracks from the last trip, flirting with the water. Taunting. Then, an instant before he touches the poisoned-looking pond, he leans into the machine and jerks the front wheels, his face set serious as cast iron. Then it happens. Either the turn angle is too sharp, or Corey wrenches the handlebars too quick, or he’s simply gone too far down for the four-wheeler to recover. The machine flips over backwards with Corey under it and crashes into the catchment pond.
A blurb and sucking in the water. The empty in the air where the engine used to be.The slime already drawing back over, and in Dane’s mind, a high-speed repeat, he’ll come up, he’ll come up, he’ll come up, he’ll come up, come up come up come up, while Tommy slides violently down the hill, falling but not bothering to pick himself up, still moving, his mouth making whooping noises that match no feeling at all. Chancey races up and down the pond edge, head lowered, ears cocked, Dane’s head swelling with a pressure that feels like a tire pump tapped into his skull come up come up come up come up, and he can hear all his blood moving in him, the flood roar to it, like fluid rushing between his bones and his skin, and he hears his breaths as something apart from him, rapid blasting huhs as though he’s started running again.
When he has not. When he cannot, when he should be, he should be running into the water, pushing the machine off his little brother, got to listen for a rumble kiddie pool spinning you young people can run for the hills Corey’s biceps, rag fluttering, stink of the slop bucket open your Bible, please, and. Dane cannot move.
Now Tommy is screaming in a way Dane has never heard before, deeper and louder than any little kid should be able to scream, moan in it, and Dane, still not moving, strains his eyes into the surface of the pond, clouded and boiling—and Dane’s insides finally go.The fish rip a hole and the logs spew free, the water torrenting after them, let-go loose loss pain, and Dane falls on his knees him shit himself, him did, him did. Him shit himself, him did, Tommy screaming—
Then he hears different yells. He snaps his head around, sees Jimmy Make stumbling through the fresh track in the brush. The look on Jimmy Make’s face so unfamiliar that at first Dane knows it’s Jimmy Make only by the stagger.
Bant
SEPTEMBER came like it always did, that no-season month between summer and fall. The woods still green, but exhausted from the heat, you could see it in the leaves if you pulled them close. They looked ready for the change. We waited, too.
Two weeks after Labor Day, I turned sixteen. I’d been looking forward to that birthday for a couple years, but now I didn’t want anything made of it. Only thing I had to celebrate was not missing my period in late August, and that was relief, not happiness. Lace tried anyway, brought home a Dairy Queen cake nobody but Tommy could enjoy. Me, Lace, and Dane just filling our places at the table while Tommy ate up on his knees leaning forward. Lace let him have all of our pieces.
Past my candles, I watched Dane across from me, in that old army jacket of Avery’s that he’d taken to wearing all the time since Mrs. Taylor moved to Cleveland, a little before Jimmy Make left. He’d grown over the summer, now he was near tall as me, but he was always trying to hide the growth under the jacket like it was a tarp. I watched him. His face marring up with pimples right when mine was finally starting to clear. I was scared to think what might become of Dane. He never cried over Corey. Tommy did, and I did, and Lace did, and Jimmy Make did, too. Dane just tighter shut. Since Corey’s funeral, Lace had gone to the cemetery on the edge of town a couple times a week, and usually she took me and Tommy with her. Dane, seemed he’d know when she was going before she did, shut himself up in his room and not answer back even when she opened the door and spoke right to him.
The fall stayed unseasonable, just like the summer had been, and a strange skiff of snow fell that first weekend of October, cold setting down like a lid that lifted three days later. Uncle Mogey said in his life he couldn’t remember a snow early as that. Then, a week after, we heard an enormous slurry impoundment had busted over in Martin County, Kentucky.
That was on the West Virginia border, not far from us, and the first few days we couldn’t get any real news on the disaster, only word of mouth. Then when Lace finally got hold of a Gazette with the official story, it was even worse than the rumors had been. It said the impoundment had been sitting on top of a mountain just honeycombed with abandoned deep mines, and finally its bottom simply gave out. The sludge lake dropped into the shafts, shot through the mine tunnels and out through the blocked-up drift mouths, and 306 million gallons of poison muck killed everything in the waterways for a hundred miles. Didn’t kill any people (and that was the real act of God, Uncle Mogey said, because, of course, an act of God was where Lyon blamed it), but it buried their properties in what they said was a toxic black pudding some places seven feet deep. And nights after that, I’d wake and taste it. Toxic black pudding. The way the sounds cut sharp, then stick gobby and bitter on your tongue.
That put the fear into even the holdouts, the ones who said it would never happen, at least not that bad. For a little while, people kind of came together like they used to back when I was small. Uncle Mogey’s turned into a gathering place. Loretta and some of her people came, Charlie too, and Maxie and the Williams, Bell Kerwin and the Hills, and other people I’d never even met. I saw in the way Mogey moved he was feeling worse than he ever had, but he turned nobody away.We sat under the Jesus poems and the blast cracks in the walls, and they told memories and hearsay of Buffalo Creek. They named to each other the slurry impoundments we knew about around here—the ones behind Deer Lick, the one at Mayton that people said was 900 feet high, the one behind the elementary school in Raleigh County—and when they got done talking about that, they’d wonder on the ones we didn’t know about, the ones that we’d just heard tales about—like Yellowroot—and the ones so deep hidden we didn’t have any idea. No one knew where all those impoundments might be.
You’d have thought Martin County would make me want worse to find out what was behind our own fill. And I did wait a little for that want. But the want never came. I hadn’t been up the hollow since before Corey’s accident, hadn’t seen the mine site since the night with R.L. Yeah, the impoundment bust scared me, scared me bad, but worse, it made me even more helpless than before. And from helpless, I had learned, what a short step it was to I don’t care. How else could you grow up, how you could walk around in your body every day, unless you learned not to care. And by that standard, I realized, I’d been wrong when I was younger. By that standard, it was Jimmy Make, not Lace, who’d been grown up all along.
Corey could have made Lace give up, too, but I wasn’t surprised when it did the opposite. Lace got heavier and heavier into the environmental group, especially once Jimmy Make left, which meant now she was telling me not only stuff she picked up at the Dairy Queen but stuff from the meetings, too. She heard that the Martin County spill was twenty times bigger than the Exxon Valdez—then she explained what that was to me—“and some scientists are calling it the biggest environmental disaster in the history of the eastern United States.”
But all the news died down real quick, like it always did when something happened around here, if the news got out at all. Who matters and where. On the other hand, it turned out somebody did think we mattered, only in a different way, because that was the last months of the election campaign, and a second Bush was campaigning in our state harder than anybody had, people said, since John F. Kennedy.
Another thing that changed after Corey died was that Lace started going to church again, even though before she’d been mad at the churches. I heard Loretta and Charlie Blizzard get into it over the church-going up at Mogey’s one evening, Charlie asking Loretta how she could still stand it with so many preachers preaching, “God gave man dominion over the earth” and “The good Lord put this coal under the ground for us to use.”
“Bullcrap and foolishness!” Loretta snapped back. “Them preachers are the ones have always spoke for the companies, you know that, you were raised in a coal camp. Anybody with a grain of sense can see we’re destroying what God made. ‘The Earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it,’ Psalm 24. He wants us to fight for it, and I pray every day for God’s help in this fight.” As she said that, I knew she was right, I heard Grandma’s voice deeper under hers. But I still couldn’t go myself.
In the middle of all this, Jimmy Make came back. In October, a month after he left, and October’d always been the month I loved the best. The mountains blooming good-bye, and how the sky pulls away to show you itself in October. Beautiful blue like we don’t often get around here, and it no longer crouching down on you as it sometimes does. He came back late on a Saturday morning, when he knew we’d all be home, and afterwards, I’d wonder how careful he’d planned it. Whether he’d spent the night before at Hobart’s, waiting.We were eating lunch, and I heard a vehicle, but I didn’t think much of it because it didn’t sound familiar. But then Chancey and Baron ran to the door, Baron yipping, but not in a watchdog way, more like I-can’t-wait, and I guess we all suspicioned it then, but Tommy said it for sure. “There’s Dad!” Then looked like he’d be in trouble for naming it.
Dane was sitting right across from me, and I saw his eyes change. Tommy dropped his sandwich and ran to the window. I watched Lace without turning my head, but her face wasn’t telling me nothing. Jimmy waited for us to come out on the porch, too scared or too proud to come to the door, and when we did—and we all did, Lace too—I saw he was in a gray minivan with a crumple in the front fender and a long pair of scratches down that side.
He swung out with his head lowered or hung, I’m not sure which, and Chancey and Baron ran to him, and I thought Tommy would, too, but Tommy stayed back. Jimmy wore a navy blue windbreaker I’d never seen and had his hair cut real close. He swung out, flinched at the weight on his leg, and looked at us. Then he called across, his voice pitched a little higher than it normally was, “I got me a good job in Raleigh.” I saw him swallow. “I come to take down there anybody wants to go.”
The screen door slammed. It was Dane going back in. Tommy walked down the steps into the yard, but he stopped there. Chancey was sniffing the North Carolina tires, and you could hear the minivan’s radio playing low, raspy and tough, Jimmy Make’s favorite. Classic rock. The radio playing, and things speeding up now, and in my ears I heard the damped-down roar. Roar that’d come first at the funeral, and now at the cemetery, it came every time, and these days I was always at a distance, even without the roar, but when the roar did come, I’d start watching from even further away. And I heard Tommy say, at that distance, “Why don’t you stay here, Daddy?”
And Jimmy say, “You know staying here’s a bad thing for us all.”
I saw that Tommy didn’t move.
Now Dane was coming back out carrying a box piled with his clothes. I couldn’t even think where he got that box until later we saw how he’d dumped out the Christmas decorations. He walked right past Lace and me without looking at us, his head turtled down in that army jacket, and when he got to Jimmy Make, he didn’t look at him, either. He slid open the van door, set his box on the seat, climbed up beside it, and slammed the door shut.The sun bounced off the closed windows. I couldn’t see him anymore.
Tommy had not moved. Him in a too-big Marshall sweatshirt all four of us had worn, the cuffs hanging loose, partway ripped from the sleeves. I was watching his back quiver, hard enough that you could see it even under the big shirt, and from my distance, I heard Jimmy Make say, “Tommy, it’s up to you to decide.”
And Lace say, “He’s too young to decide.”
And Jimmy, “You say that because he won’t pick you.”
Now Tommy was outright crying. A new kind of Tommy crying, not crying because he was mad or’d been done a wrong or wanted attention or’d busted something. I saw Lace drop down beside him, and I watched her turn him towards her and pull him against Jimmy’s old flannel shirt that she wore. She said something in his ear. Tommy bawled louder, clung tighter to her neck. I saw her kiss him, t
hen gentle pull his arms loose. She held his hands down with hers and kissed him again. Lace was crying, too.
When she stood, Tommy looked behind at her one time. Then he went. Stumbled across that scraggly yard with his hands over his eyes and his elbows cocked out, his back gone from that high quiver to a full-length shudder with the sobs. The roar in my ears so loud, me so far, everything moving but me. Jimmy Make stepped forward and picked him up and kissed the top of his head, and I’m not sure I’d ever seen him do that. Then he carried Tommy around to the passenger seat, Tommy kind of pulling away from him, his back arched and his face in his hands. But he didn’t try to climb down. Jimmy slammed the door and came back to the front bumper. He had his head down, like he was going to scuff his feet. But then he looked at me.