by Ninie Hammon
After that, JoJo never makes eye contact with a skinny again.
A car horn honked and startled JoJo and she dropped the letter into her lap. A white cargo van with no windows in the back had pulled up to the gas pumps in front of the Jiffy Stop. The driver, Dough Boy, waved at her, his big idiot grin colored brown by the snuff up under his lower lip.
JoJo smiled. Yep, this was her lucky day, all right. First the check and now Frank Pillsbury. She didn’t have to run all over the county to find him. The very man who could get her all the Oxycontin she wanted—or any other drug her little heart might desire—was right here. And now she had plenty of money to make a purchase.
She got out of the car and walked over to Dough Boy’s van. When he rolled his window down, the cloying sweet stink of a recently-smoked joint was so strong it made her eyes water. The big man with a riot of tangled, fire-truck red hair had a deceptively harmless, cuddly look—like a fat Raggedy Andy doll. But he was neither harmless nor cuddly; he was a cold, ruthless druggie who would sell his mother’s soul to feed his runaway Oxy habit.
“Ain’t seen you in a while, JJ,” he said. “Where you been?”
“Around.”
“You ain’t been ’round none of yore good friends.”
Translate that: you haven’t hung out in the world of totally wasted human beings who’d only wanted to get a little high every once in a while to forget about life and now they had no life to forget. Called Hillbilly Heroin in the mountains, Oxycontin was voraciously addictive. Her fiancé Avery had known that; the suckers he’d sold it to hadn’t. He was one of the dealers who’d capitalized on what had become a tidal wave of painkiller addiction sweeping across Appalachia.
JoJo’s and Avery’s had been a whirlwind romance. She’d met him at the Jiffy, had been so lonely and lost after Darrell’s death; she was ripe for picking. And he’d picked. In the beginning, she pretended she didn’t know what he did for a living; by the time he got busted, she was desperate for a way out, scared he’d turn violent if she broke up with him. When he got scooped up in the drug sting, she wanted to find the nearest Drug Enforcement Agency agent and kiss his whole face.
“Been busy.” She glanced around, then lowered her voice. “I need some Oxy.”
Dough Boy’s round face broke into a smile. “You come to the right place, darlin’. How much you want?”
She told him and he nodded. He quoted a price. It was high, but she didn’t care, didn’t even try to dicker. Just said, “Done.”
“I’ll be back here at closing time,” he said, then spit brown liquid from the plug of Skoal onto the concrete. Barely missed her shoe. “Fact is, I can make this a reg’lar stop if ’n you want. Come back whenever you need me to…” he smiled. “…refill yore tank.”
“Nope,” she said and straightened up. “I won’t need nothin’ next week. Nothin’ at all.” She turned and walked into the building.
CHAPTER 13
WILL HAD BEEN shaken by how much his home and Granny’s had changed in two decades, but he was surprised by how little the rest of the hollow had.
Oh, houses had new paint and roofs, had added rooms, carports or garages, or had refurbished the collection of car carcasses and appliances in their front yards. Trailer houses had sprouted like crabgrass on every street and the bridge over Turkey Neck Creek had been moved. You could no longer go directly from town to the mine. You had to go out to the road and around. The mine was now like a lot of things in the mountains, “close as the crow flies,” but a while to get there. Will thought of his sponsor, who had grown up on the other side of the mountain—in a town just 3 or 4 miles away that was probably a half-hour drive from Aintree Hollow.
But for all the changes Will saw, there was way more that was just as he remembered it. The grocery store that shared a building with the post office. Unlike the bright Jiffy Stop on the other side of the bridge, this store was dim and shadowy. The door still swung open on a long, arthritic spring, its screen so full of holes it wasn’t even a psychological deterrent to the flies that cruised in and out of the building. Dusty canned goods sat on its wooden shelving above well-oiled floors, and the back of the building was devoted to clothing—steel-toed miners’ boots, T-shirts, boxer shorts, work shirts, and pants. On the counter beside the cash register was a large selection of different types of snuff and chewing tobacco. Bowman and the other miners had always chomped down on a plug as soon as they left the house in the morning to oil their mouths against the black dust.
And Pete’s Place was still there, too. Snuggled in between the barber shop and the only garage in town, the little café/coffee shop/bar/psychiatrist’s office still had rows of tables along two narrow walls, with red plastic tablecloths and red-and-white checked curtains. Appeared to be the same curtains that had been there when Will left.
He opened a squeaky screen door that rivaled the grocery store’s for holiness, and stepped inside. A man who sat alone at a table by the window lifted his deeply lined bloodhound face over the top of the newspaper he was reading to see who’d come in. Hobart Bascomb. He was smaller, with a lot less hair and way more belly, but his chocolate brown eyes still looked merry and mischievous, and his smile was as empty as it had ever been. Hob always said teeth were for sissies.
A case could be made that Will and Lloyd weren’t the only survivors of the explosion in Harlan #7. In a way, Hob was, too. He’d been scheduled to work that day on the crew with Ricky Dan, Will, and Lloyd. But he’d called in sick. Everybody knew he’d been out partying the night before and was too hung over to work.
For a moment, Hob didn’t recognize Will. Then a surprised smile spread over his face. “Well, if it ain’t Will Gribbins,” he said. His speech had that peculiar, flubbery sound common to the toothless. “I heared in the Jiffy you’s in town.” He put down the newspaper and gestured to the empty chair across from him.
“Have a seat. Want a cup of coffee?” Hob didn’t wait for Will’s reply before he signaled the waitress with a coffee-pouring gesture.
“How’s the world treating you, Hob?” Will eased down into the old wooden chair.
“Better’n I deserve. How ’bout y’self. You home for the memorial doin’s?”
He didn’t wait for Will to answer that question either. “They got me down to speak—you b’lieve that? Like I got the smarts to say some’m anybody’d wanna hear. I never shoulda said yes. I’m all tore up over it, nervous as a nun at a penguin shoot.”
The teenage waitress arrived with a cup, saucer, and coffee pot. Will started to fish in his pocket full of change to pay her, but she waved him off.
“You’re the guy was in #7, ain’t you?” she asked. With the memorial ceremony on Friday, the disaster was on everybody’s minds. When Will nodded, she smiled and told him, “Yore money ain’t no good in here,” then filled his cup and walked away.
“You gettin’ old, Will? There was a time you’s faster with coins than that.” Hob’s face lit up. “You still walk a quarter across the tops of yore fingers like you usta could? I got a big kick outta you boys’ magic tricks.”
Will sat stock-still. His heart had begun to knock out the side wall of his chest, but Hob didn’t notice.
“Jus’ t’ween me, you, and the gatepost, I always thought you’s better with coins than Lloyd was with ropes.”
As Will draped a smile between his ears and sipped his coffee, he tried to remember exactly how he and Lloyd had gotten suckered into becoming magicians.
They’d only volunteered to work on the elementary school Halloween Carnival because the two best-looking girls in the hollow were in charge of the haunted house. They figured they’d have the girls all to themselves on carnival day while they gathered up supplies to scare blindfolded children—cold spaghetti for brains, cold grapes for eyeballs, oily rice for maggots.
But somehow their job had grown to include entertaining the crowd of children waiting in line to go into the haunted house. Will couldn’t remember how that had happened, tho
ugh he remembered clearly that it’d been Lloyd’s idea for them to become magicians, and Lloyd who’d sent off for magic-trick kits he’d seen advertised in a magazine.
Once they got their hands on the kits, though, the whole thing took on a life of its own. Will became the Amazing Willdini; Lloyd became Jacobi the Magnificent. They practiced for hours, each determined to be a better magician than the other. He and Lloyd had competed with each other over one thing or another their whole lives.
The boys even took their magic into the mine with them. Will carried coins in his pocket; Lloyd’s magic rope was stuffed down his shirt. During lunch breaks, they’d amused the other miners with their skill.
“You do magic tricks the day she blew?” Hob asked.
Yes, he and Lloyd had put on a lunch-break performance that day. They had entertained men who would be dead in less than half an hour.
Will and a dozen other miners are seated on a piece of yellow plastic curtain the shuttle operator tossed on top of the crumbled coal covering the shaft floor. The profound dark is pierced by spears of light from the miners’ headlamps.
Next to Will, one of the men who operates the roof bolting machine rests against the column of coal. Will leans over, pulls a quarter out of the man’s ear and holds it up for the other miners to see.
“What the…?” The pinner man feels around in his ear as if there might be another quarter in there, and if there is, he wants it out. “I wanna know how you done that.”
“A magician never reveals his secrets,” Will says.
Ricky Dan is seated on the other side of Will and he bursts out laughing. “If you’re a magician, I’m a Chinese airplane pilot!”
Bowman is leaned against the pillar beside Ricky Dan, his legs extended straight out in front of him. As the miner man, Bow operates a machine shaped like a shoe box that runs on a thousand volts of electricity, with a revolving drum on the front studded with tungsten carbide bits. Called a continuous miner, the machine can rip more coal from a coal face than two dozen miners with picks. It also creates more coal dust and more cracks in the roof where methane can seep into the shaft. A small operator’s chair—with a cage on top of it that’s jammed down like a coffin lid—is located on the side. The continuous miner fits so tight in the shaft the top scrapes the roof. The operator sits for hours, his legs folded Indian style in front of him with a constant stream of dirt dribbling from the roof onto his helmet and down his shirt. Bowman relishes the opportunity to dust off and stretch out.
“Com’on, Will,” Bow says, “how’d you do that?”
Will doesn’t answer Bowman’s question. Instead, he holds out his open right hand in front of him with the coin in his palm.
“Now you see it…” he says, and closes his hand in a fist.
Conditions in a coal mine ought to make it the perfect place to do slight-of-hand—absolute darkness, harsh light, and shifting shadows. Add to that the haze of coal and rock dust that shines in the lights from the shuttle and continuous miner 50 feet away; black dust motes in a sunbeam. There shouldn’t be so much dust. The bad air means the mine’s ventilation isn’t working like it’s supposed to. A lot of other things in this dog hole mine don’t work like they’re supposed to, either.
Despite the murky air, the miners’ headlamps pose a problem to Will’s performance. With all of them trained on what he’s doing, he has to get it just right, so when he makes his hand into a fist, he’s careful to leave his thumb on the inside. As he slowly opens his right hand again, he passes his left hand in front of it to hide the deft movement of his right thumb that slides the coin off his palm and down between his middle two fingers. It protrudes from the bottom side of his hand but is invisible from the top.
Palm up, his hand looks empty and he concludes with a flourish: “…and now you don’t.”
The shuttle driver spits out an expletive with the tobacco juice he squirts off the edge of the curtain. “That ain’t right.” He shakes his head. “That just ain’t right.”
He’s a new guy, down from Hazard. Showed up this morning to apply for a job just as the outside foreman got a call from Hobart Bascomb saying he was sick. Sick…yeah, right. Hob was probably still drunk! The foreman had hung up and put the Perry County miner to work on the spot. Will heard the guy whoop and holler, “This here’s my lucky day!”
Seated across from Will, Lloyd pulls his magic rope out of his shirt. It is a strong nylon rope no bigger around than his little finger that appears to be more than a yard long. In truth, Lloyd has several ropes of varying lengths, not just one; he conceals the breaks between them with his hands as he holds them out in front of him and has a long, unbroken rope stretched up his shirt sleeve.
“Here we have a rope, a single rope,” he says, then lets one end of palmed rope piece drop. “Well, no, actually we have two ropes.” He picks up the end of the rope he dropped and lets two other ends drop out of his other hand. “Where did all these ropes come from?”
“I seen that. I seen what he done!” the mechanic squeals. Lloyd palms the small rope pieces in his right hand as the man reaches for the rope in his left. “See, it ain’t one piece it’s…” The man grabs the end of the rope Lloyd has stretched up his sleeve and pulls. A solid rope, 4 feet long, slides out through Lloyd’s fingers. “Well, I never…”
“Hey, Lloyd,” Will says, misdirecting the miners’ attention for the instant it takes Lloyd to shove the short rope pieces up his sleeve. “You tie knots in that rope?” He knows Lloyd can; he’s watched him practice.
Lloyd twists the rope into a slip knot, a square knot and a sheepshank knot in rapid succession. For a finale, he ties the rope in a vicious-looking hangman’s noose.
“’Bout time to get back to work,” the boss says. Will drops his coins with a clunk into his empty lunch bucket; Lloyd shoves his ropes down the front of his shirt. “I want you boys,” the boss indicates Lloyd, Ricky Dan, and Will, “to go up and lay track.”
As the continuous miner digs the shaft deeper and deeper into the mountain, the rails for the mantrips loaded with supplies or transporting miners in and out of the mine are left farther and farther behind. The track now ends more than a quarter of a mile up the shaft from the mile-deep face where two crews of miners are at work.
The men get to their feet, bent over under the 48-inch roof. Will shivers and Ricky Dan leans toward him.
“You okay?” he asks, but Will says nothing. It’s cold and dank here. Water constantly drips out through cracks in the roof, stands 2 or 3 inches deep on the muddy floor. The damp seeps into the miners’ bones, but the chill Will feels has nothing to do with the temperature.
Afraid of what Ricky Dan can read in his eyes, Will won’t meet his gaze. When he feels Ricky Dan’s hand on his shoulder, the small gesture almost brings tears to Will’s eyes.
“You’re gonna be fine, Will,” Ricky Dan’s voice is quiet so the others can’t hear.
Will is wearing Ricky Dan’s old “red hat.” Shortly after he turned 18, Ricky Dan had gone to work in a huge mine that employed hundreds of miners. Big mines like that required every miner who’d worked underground less than a year to wear a red helmet to let veterans know he was a rookie, so they could watch out for him, make sure he didn’t get hurt—or do something stupid that put the rest of them in danger. Since Ricky Dan had come by his two years of underground experience illegally, as an underage miner, he’d had to suffer the indignity of a red hat. In small operations like #7 where all the miners knew each other, red hats weren’t necessary. But Will wore it anyway because it had belonged to Ricky Dan.
The other miners pick up the litter of their lunch—apple cores and bread crusts, but Will has nothing to pick up. In the three months he has worked full-time in Harlan #7, he has never eaten a bite inside the mine. He feeds his sandwich every morning to Worthless, Ricky Dan’s coon hound. He doesn’t bring anything in his lunch bucket but an extra water bottle to add to the large Clorox Bleach bottle full of water he carries with him. There
are no drinking fountains in a coal mine. There is a porta-potty, though. Mining regulations require it. But the miners know they’d better not use it—servicing a porta-potty costs money.
Will glances at Bowman as the big man settles into the small seat on the continuous miner and curls his legs in front of him. Ricky Dan had been working as the miner’s helper, learning to operate the coal-chewing shark from his father, the best miner man in Harlan County. Bow flashes Will a kind, knowing smile, then turns on the machine, moves the head into the face, and unleashes a screaming, vibrating, roaring rumble as the metal blades tear into the coal seam, first near the floor, then moving gradually up to the roof. Will turns and follows Lloyd and Ricky Dan toward the track shaft. He will never see Bowman Sparrow again.
“I don’t remember if we did magic that day or not,” Will lied, and struggled to keep his voice level. Hob eyed Will up and down.
“I ain’t gonna lie to you, Will. You look worse’n folks was tellin’ me you did. And you talk funny, too, got a right queer accent.”
Will threw his head back and laughed.
“You don’t look so good yourself, Hob.”
“Yeah, but I got a ’xcuse. I got a cancer.”
“Hob, I was…I didn’t mean…”
“Aw, it ain’t gonna kill me, least not anytime soon. But it keeps me out the mine.” He paused, reached into his pocket and removed a crumpled package of cigarettes. “And ya never know—might be it’s savin’ my life same as my hangover done.”
“Folks hold it against you, Hob—that you should have been down there and you weren’t?”
Hob’s face turned solemn. “No, far’s I know ain’t nobody’s nose outta joint ’bout that. It’s…I think I bother people ’cause I’m a reminder of how random it is. How a man’s livin’ or dyin’ ain’t got a whole lot to do with how good he is or how hard he works or how careful he is. if ’n it’s his time, it’s his time.”