by Ninie Hammon
She stepped out the door into the downpour with JoJo right behind her. Instantly drenched, the girl took Granny’s arm to steady her and they made their way through the mud and puddles down the hill.
The soggy hound dog followed along behind, stopping every now and then to look back at the shed wistfully.
CHAPTER 36
WILL SPRINTED—FLEW down the hill as fast as his legs would carry him. It felt more like swimming than running, though; how could there be any air to breathe in the gush of water from the sky?
Shrapnel sharp fragments of thoughts rode the breaths that exploded out of his straining lungs.
Armbands.
Today! 12:18.
Jamey!
He rounded the corner of Granny’s trailer and headed toward JoJo’s car. But the water that ran in rivers down his face blinded him and he didn’t see the 6-inch picket garden fence until it was too late. It grabbed his ankle and his momentum carried him forward. Now, he really was flying through the air, diving through the water in it. He landed belly-first in a puddle, surfed through the mud and slid into the gravel beyond it. The sharp little rocks shredded the skin on the palms of his hands. He had already scrambled to his feet before he came to a complete stop, then slipped down on one knee, leapt back up, and finally staggered the final few steps to JoJo’s car.
He yanked on the driver’s door handle. The door was locked.
JAMEY WAS SITTING with ValVleen, trying to puzzle things out when the rumble of the continuous miner ground to a halt. He looked down at the watch JoJo’d give him for Christmas. It was a Mickey Mouse watch. Had an alarm on it you could set and when it come up that time, the watch would play, “M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E.” When both hands on the watch pointed straight up, it was noon, time for lunch. The long one wasn’t there yet. Miner man had stopped early today.
Jamey picked up ValVleen’s cage and made his way down the belt line shaft back toward the face where he’d left his lunch bucket. Granny’d packed him a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, made the special way she done that didn’t have no crusts on the bread—Jamey didn’t like crusts—and had butter underneath the jelly. Grape jelly—that was his favorite.
Usually his mouth would start to water just thinking about that sandwich. And an apple, too, if there was any in the house. A banana, for sure. He loved bananas and Granny always put one in his bucket even if sometimes JoJo had to go down to the Jiffy to get it for him.
But his mouth didn’t water today. He wasn’t hungry. The onliest thing in his belly right now was scared and wondering. He couldn’t understand the confusion of the arts, and not being able to puzzle it out spooked him bad. Wasn’t nobody to ask about it neither, not Granny or JoJo—or Will. Jamey liked Will! Having him around was almost like having a daddy.
The other miners had already started to dig into their lunch buckets by the time Jamey got to them. They were arguing over football and whether the University of Kentucky had a chance to win the game Saturday with the University of Louisville. It was the biggest rivalry in the state and the only thing anybody wanted to talk about.
Jamey didn’t join in. Even if he’d understood football—which he didn’t—even if he’d knowed what the score would be like in that basketball arts, he wouldn’t a-said nothing. The confusion had set Jamey’s mind on a merry-go-round like the one in the playground at the elementary school and his thinking was going around and around in circles. Understanding was right there, but soon’s he concentrated hard, it was gone and he was still spinning. The answer was a butterfly and every time it lit, he’d try to grab it and it’d flutter away.
His fingers danced furiously in his lap and he didn’t pay no attention to Lloyd when he started talking to the other miners.
The explosion that happened in the mine 20 years ago was down in that piece of jet and he had set it free. But that miner’d had a armband on—Jamey seen it big as life. And them armbands wasn’t give out until yesterday.
How could there be a armband in his explosion arts?
His fingers twined and untwined, moving faster and faster as he focused hard as he could.
Suddenly, Jamey gave a little squeak of a cry. Nobody noticed because Lloyd was leaving. Jamey’s bright green eyes grew wide. He had caught the butterfly.
That arts… it ain’t ’bout no ’xplosion 20 years ago. It’s about a ’xplosion today! That’s why the miner’s got on a armband. It’s today!
No, JoJo’s car wasn’t locked. The driver’s side door was just hard to open. Will had had trouble with it when he borrowed the car to go see Lloyd. He yanked on the door handle again but it was too wet for him to get a good grip.
Cupping his hand in an umbrella over his watch, he checked the time. Straight up noon. There was no time for this!
He raced around to the other side of the car and that door came open so abruptly he fell backward into a puddle. Scrambling to his feet, he dived into the front seat and slammed the door behind him, then forced himself to calm down enough not to pump the gas pedal and flood the engine when he turned on the ignition.
It caught on the second attempt and he roared away, fishtailing in the little bit of gravel between the house and the pavement.
He fumbled around, tried one knob and then another until the windshield wipers finally turned on. But with rain pouring down like the sky was an open fire hydrant, the wipers barely cleared a space before it was covered up again. Will hunkered down low and peered through the part of the windshield that was the clearest.
His range of sight extended only a few feet in front of the car, but he didn’t slow down, just roared through the waterfall, a missile fired down the rain-slathered street. If a car pulled out of one of the side streets in front of him, Will would hydroplane on the wet asphalt and plow right into it.
He was betting his life that he was the only person in Aintree Hollow stupid enough to drive in such a deluge.
As he swerved around parked cars and squinted at a scene that appeared and disappeared in rhythm with the wiper swipes across the glass, the fragmented thoughts of the dash down the hill were replaced by an amazing clarity. His thinking was reasoned and methodical.
What exactly did he plan to do once he got to the mine? Run up to the outside foreman and say, “We gotta get the men out of there, #7’s gonna blow again today”?
Right. And the foreman would say, “And exactly how do you know that, Mr. Gribbins, sir?”
No, there was only one way to get Jamey and the other miners out. Will would have to go in there himself and say…well, something. Or do something. He’d figure that out once he got inside the mine.
Inside the mine.
A sense of horror passed slowly down through his body the way cold water sinks because it’s heavier.
Inside Harlan #7.
He’d sworn. If God got him out of that mine alive he’d never…
Who was he kidding? There was no way on earth he’d be able to force his unwilling feet to carry him underground.
Jamey.
Could he do it for Jamey?
LLOYD LOOKED AT his watch. Straight up noon. Time to go. He’d been seated on the edge of the group of miners eating lunch and arguing about football. Didn’t say nothing. Just listened.
He had that same peculiar sense of brightness that he’d had this morning, like all the lights were headlights with circles around them. But this time, it was more than that. There was light coming off the miners themselves that was so brilliant he squinted and had to look away.
Was that light the glow of life, maybe? Them men was shining with every breath they took in. An ordinary moment, and their lives produced a light bright as the detergent blue of those funny lamps in the parking lot at Walmart in Pineville.
Warmth, too. Lloyd could feel heat radiating out from the knot of men. In the mine’s 58 degrees, it felt like standing next to a wood stove.
And Lloyd Jacobs was about to put it all out, make each of those warm, bright beings cold corpses. Cold and dark. But
cold was better than warm. Warm never lasted. Cold was permanent, like the surface of the moon. Cold was the natural state of eternity. Wouldn’t need no air conditioners in heaven. Wouldn’t get none in hell.
Lloyd pushed his mind away from that thought and from Jamey, too. The boy wasn’t eating, hadn’t even opened his lunch bucket and Lloyd knew Granny’d made something good for him. Fruit and sometimes a cookie or a brownie. She always done that for Bowman and Ricky Dan and Will, and for him, too, when he was around.
Instead of eating, the boy sat there thinking. Lloyd could tell by his dancing fingers that Jamey was trying to figure something out or remember something important. And his heart went out to the boy. So innocent. He didn’t deserve to die with the others; he was Ricky Dan’s son. Seeing’s how Lloyd had killed Jamey’s father, didn’t he owe Ricky Dan a life? Jamey’s life?
For a moment, he seriously considered sparing Jamey. Alls he’d have to do was think of some excuse to send him back outside, away from the face and the explosion that was only minutes away. Tell him to go fetch something. Or give him something to take to the outside foreman. Jamey’d never hurt a fly, was a gentle, kind, good soul. He didn’t deserve to…
No, and neither did the rest of them. Lloyd hadn’t deserved what happened to him his whole childhood, neither. You played the cards you was dealt. That’s all you could do.
He couldn’t rescue Jamey. The others might notice, get suspicious. It was luck of the draw he come to work today. He shouldn’t have been here but now that he was, there was nothing Lloyd could do to make it right.
Lloyd got to his feet and dusted his hands off on his pants.
“Got to go, boys,” he said, interrupting an impassioned sermon by the scoop driver about the lineage of the University of Louisville’s quarterback. “They need me out front for the ceremony.”
Lloyd knew the other miners had been thinking about the ceremony, or more accurately what the ceremony represented. He suspected the argument about football was nothing more than whistling in a graveyard, a way to get them past the event so they wouldn’t have to deal with the emotions attached to it. When it was announced there’d be a memorial service, the miners had decided to conduct their own, to pause at 12:18 for a minute of silence in memory of the men who’d been killed. Most every man seated here had lost somebody that day—a father, brother, uncle or cousin. Aintree Hollow was all family.
Digging coal in Harlan # 7 was a little like working in a haunted house, not that any of the miners would lay claim to seeing ghosts in the shadows. But it was impossible to be in the place where so many had died and not feel their presence in some way. It was equally impossible not to be scared, given that the dead men had been killed doing the same job you were doing. Miners wouldn’t own up to nothing like that, least not while they was in a mine. But they talked about it to their wives. And when they got drunk.
“You got a speech all planned out, Lloyd?” asked the jovial shuttle car driver, but there was no cheer in his voice. “Seems to me like it’d be hard to come up with the proper words for some’m like that.”
That was precisely the reason—well, one of the reasons—Lloyd had refused when he’d been asked to speak. He didn’t have nothing to say and if he’d tried to get all pious-like, the audience would have made him for the phony he was.
“Yeah, got it memorized,” he tapped his temple. “It’s all up here.”
“Well don’t let it get lonesome all by itself up there,” said the loud-mouthed miner man.
Lloyd ignored him.
“Be back in an hour or so. Might take a little longer.” He looked at the shuttle driver. “And trust me, I would rather be right here cuttin’ up with you guys than have to go do what I got to do. I hate it, I really do. But I ain’t got no choice. I’m…sorry.”
He could tell they thought that was an odd thing to say. But they’d figure he was talking about leaving the face. The boss wasn’t never supposed to leave his section. Nothing short of a once-in-twenty-years memorial service was reason enough to break that rule.
Lloyd looked at Jamey one last time before he turned and plunged into the darkness. And he saw recognition wash over the boy’s face, watched his fingers grow still in his lap. Whatever he’d been trying to figure out, he’d come up with the answer.
JAMEY SAT VERY still. His eyes were huge. Understanding had taken his breath away.
What should he do?
Whatever it was, he’d better do it quick. The arts said the mine would blow up today! And the watch on that miner, it’d said 12:18. Jamey’s Mickey Mouse watch was sometimes slow and sometimes fast but it was at least noon now. And it took about half an hour—close to that, Jamey’d never timed it—to get from the mouth of the mine to the face in a mantrip. It’d take longer to run all the way back out on foot.
He let out a little whimper of fear. Not of what the arts had shown. Fear that he wouldn’t be able to figure out what to do about it.
He looked pleadingly at the little yellow bird in the cage. ValVleen looked back at him as if she knew what he should do and would tell him, but it wouldn’t do no good because he wouldn’t understand her.
He had to figure this out on his own. Even if his uptake wasn’t fast as some people’s, he had to come up with a answer, it had to be the right answer and he had to come up with it now!
Jamey’s hands began to do their little dance in his lap again. But they didn’t have to dance long. The answer to the what-should-he-do? question came quickly and clearly.
He had to warn the other miners. He had to get everybody out of the mine right now!
A smile of satisfaction started and then died on his face.
How could he do that?
His fingers twined more, wiggled frantically.
Well, he’d have to tell them the mine was going to blow up.
No, he couldn’t do that. They wouldn’t believe him.
How could he get them out of the mine without telling them it was going to blow up?
He thought hard as he could. Sweat popped out on his forehead and upper lip. Tears of strained concentration leaked out of his eyes and made clean streaks in the coal-dust smudges on his face. His fingers twirled around and around each other.
Think, Jamey! Think!
Then it came to him. The answer dropped into his head as if someone had whispered it into his ear.
There was a way to get the other miners out without explaining how he knew the mine was going to blow up.
Only one way.
And once that way became clear to Jamey, his heart broke right in two in his chest.
WAVES OF THUNDER crashed against the mountainsides like surf against the rocks, then rumbled up the hollow with a roar so like an explosion Will sucked in a ragged gasp. Before the rumble had rolled all the way to the top, a sharp, distinct clap went off with a deafening crack, and a white spear of lightning stabbed down out of the sky into the woods off to Will’s left.
But even the bright bolt of lightning couldn’t erase the image that filled the screen of Will’s mind. The image had appeared there as soon as Granny’d said Jamey’s arts had shown a miner wearing an armband. It was so vivid it filled his whole mind, almost pushed the task of keeping the car on the road out of his consciousness.
It was the image of the scoreboard in Rupp Arena.
Harlan County 68; Marion County 64.
The score in the relief sculpture Jamey had created years ago of the Harlan County High School boy’s basketball team with their state championship trophy. The sculpture that showed the score of the game three days before it was played.
The score was correct; the numbers, accurate. Jamey had released them from the rock where they’d been “engraved in granite” so to speak. At least engraved in jet.
What he’d carved came to pass, exactly as his arts had shown it.
So if Jamey had sculpted an explosion in Harlan #7 today, wasn’t that event as “engraved in granite” as the basketball game? As immutable as
the score?
As Will careened around a pickup truck stopped on the roadside to wait out the storm, his thoughts were unhurried. Almost pedantic.
He would have to go into Harlan #7 himself to warn the miners of the imminent explosion, but in his heart of hearts he didn’t believe that a warning would do any good. The explosion was a done deal. As soon as Jamey’d released it from the rock, it was…destined to be.
Will didn’t understand that. He couldn’t have explained it. But he did believe it. According to Granny and JoJo, Jamey had never carved a future event that didn’t happen.
So if Will went into that mine to warn the miners, he would die in there with them. He would become one of the figures in Jamey’s arts, blown backward by the force of a massive explosion.
His was a suicide mission. Which, of course, begged the question—was he prepared to go into Harlan #7 knowing he’d never come back out?
CHAPTER 37
ABOUT 35 FEET from where Lloyd crouched on his heels was a bright yellow curtain over a break along the rail line. Lloyd got to his feet and made his way to it, grabbed the right side and in one great yank, pulled it free from the roof bolt plate it was attached to, sending one of the roof tacks pinging off the side of the nearby coal pillar. He yanked again and again until the curtain was a pile of yellow plastic at his feet. He’d already removed the curtains over the previous three breaks up the line.
Now, all he had to do was wait. Just like water, moving air took the path of least resistance. It would turn after the last curtain it came to and move in the shortest unblocked path out toward the fan sucking it through. Without curtains to route air to the face, the clean air would never get that far and gas would quickly begin to accumulate there.
Lloyd had a methane detector as well as a possum light. The methane detector was a hand-held gauge that read out the percentage of air-borne methane. Right now, the possum light was burning low. Lloyd pushed the button on the methane detector; it read 1 percent. But it would only take a few minutes with no ventilation for the readings on both meters to change dramatically.