by Robert Greer
“So what do you think will happen now?” Harriet asked my mom, looking around at the landscape. “Do you
think Acota will really come out here and soil this beautiful place?”
Mom shrugged and looked at Spoon. “You’re the prognosticator, Spoon. What’s your take?”
Spoon continued to chew on the toothpick that jutted from the right corner of his mouth. Against a backdrop of sunlight, he looked taller, leaner, and even more insightful than normal. His long, wiry hair drifted back and forth in the breeze, and his unblemished, cocoa brown skin seemed to glisten. “I’m thinkin’ Acota will whittle away at you one by one, bit by bit. Try and peck away at every rancher in this valley hopin’ to get what they want, sorta like a vulture peckin’ at a carcass.”
Looking sad-eyed but defiant, my mom said, “Until the valley ends up stinking to high heaven and spewing sulfur fumes, no more than a bottomless pit of coal. I sure hope not.”
“I didn’t say they’d succeed, Mrs. D. Just said they’d try. There’s lots of ways to keep the wolf from your door. Let me think on it a bit. Maybe I can come up with somethin’ to take Acota off your scent.”
Harriet flashed Spoon a reel-in-your-sails kind of look that told me that she very likely had a deeper understanding of Mr. Arcus Witherspoon than I expected. “Just make sure that whatever you’re thinking about doing is legal, Arcus.”
“Wouldn’t dream of havin’ it any other way.” Spoon flashed her a mischievous smile.
“I suppose you plan to deal with Acota when you’re not working or off somewhere searching out your roots,” Harriet said.
“Sure am. That old boy up in Colstrip who sent me that postcard all drippin’ with guilt is supposed to meet me in Butte in a couple of days. Claims he’ll lay out all he knows about our family tree on the spot. I’ll finish tracin’ out the rest on my own. When I talked to him on the phone yesterday, he sounded pretty sincere.”
“Sure seems strange,” said Harriet. “His sudden change of heart, I mean. One day he’s disowning you, and the next day he’s your closest kin. What happened?”
“I ain’t really sure. Maybe he felt bad about lyin’ to me the first time we met. Or maybe he wants to get at the bottom of his own family history as bad as I do. All I know is we’re gonna talk.”
“I sure hope that talk gets you to where you want to be,” said my mom.
“I’m thinkin’ it will,” said Spoon. “In the meantime, I’ll be studyin’ your dilemma, Mrs. D. Mullin’ over how to keep them vultures from Acota from collapsin’ down on you and yours. I’ll come up with somethin’ for sure,” he said, turning to face Harriet. “You about ready to head back into town, Harriet?”
“You need me to help you with anything else here, Marva?” Harriet asked.
“Nope. We’re done for the season as far as I’m concerned.”
“Then I guess I’ll head back to Hardin,” Harriet said, sounding as if she didn’t really want to leave. “Just let me get my things from the house.”
She and my mom headed indoors. They’d reached the front porch when I said to Spoon, “Real nice lady, Harriet.”
“Extra nice.” Spoon smiled, pivoted, and stared skyward. “And knowledgeable,” he added. “Told me as soon as she got out here to the ranch today that she’d done a little more studyin’ up on Matt Rodue. Turns out I’m not the only ex-con with a fondness for your valley. According to Harriet, Rodue did nine months of hard time back in Missouri for aggravated assault. Wonder what Sheriff Woodson has up his sleeve for dealin’ with two ex-cons.”
“You’ve got me.”
Spoon shrugged. There was a hint of bitterness in what he said next. “I just hope he tattooed Rodue with as many questions about Willard Johnson’s death as he did me.”
As I saw it, Spoon’s bitterness was well deserved. Woodson had ambushed him, as much as locked him down in his quarters one evening a couple of days after Willard’s death, and peppered him for a good two hours with questions concerning his whereabouts on the night before and morning of Willard’s death. Spoon’s next words stayed with me for the rest of the day.
“But then again, Rodue ain’t nearly as black nor half as Indian as me.”
It was the only time since I’d met him that I’d ever known Spoon to allow the question of race and its direct effect on him to filter its way into a conversation. I could tell from the pained expression on his face that no matter how much he might try to explain the reasons for what I realized was genuine anger, he couldn’t make me understand.
As quickly as his anger peaked, it was gone. “No matter,” he said with a dismissive shrug, locking eyes with me. “The important thing to remember in life is that regardless of how bad you might end up gettin’ treated, don’t never let nobody with an agenda stop your train from makin’ it to where it’s goin’.” He glanced toward his pickup, where Harriet now sat patiently waiting. “Gotta roll, TJ. See ya later.” Adjusting his Stetson, he headed to the truck and got in.
As the truck rolled off, I knew that I’d just seen a side of Spoon that he kept well hidden. A side that was capable of taking him back to places he didn’t want to go. I also had the feeling that he’d never let me see that side of him again.
While Spoon had promised to think about how to best deal with Acota, it turned out that Ricky Peterson and my dad had been working on strategies of their own. I was barely in the back door of the house when my mom waved to me from the kitchen and said, just above a whisper, “TJ, step in here for a minute. I need to talk to you about something.”
I stepped from the mudroom into the kitchen, still mulling over why Sheriff Woodson likely hadn’t taken it upon himself to grill Matt Rodue the same way he’d grilled Spoon and choking on my own anger since I knew exactly why. Then I noticed the ponderous look on my mom’s face. That look, one Dad liked to refer to as “New York serious,” was one I’d never been able to get used to. It was a look that Dad always claimed had totally enchanted him when as a young navy seaman he’d first seen my mom onstage in a chorus line of June Taylor dancers.
Looking around as if she thought someone might be watching or listening, Mom said, “Did Spoon and Harriet get off okay?”
The way she phrased the question, as if it were some kind of courtroom preamble to where she really intended the conversation to go, caused me to stop short.
“They’re a good match, Spoon and Harriet. Don’t you think?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think Spoon appreciates the scrutiny.”
Mom smiled. “You know what, TJ? I don’t much care what Spoon thinks. At least not on that issue. More often than not, it’s the most jagged rock in the river that requires the strongest stream force to smooth it out. If Spoon doesn’t want me asking about him and Harriet, then he shouldn’t offer to transport her out here to the ranch. But that’s not what I want to discuss with you,” she said, corralling her emotions and glancing toward my dad’s study, where he and Ricky remained sequestered. “I need to talk to you about something that has me terribly worried. Something I think Ricky and your dad might be planning. They’ve been far too secretive for their own good lately, and it’s bothering me to the point that it has me thinking about your brother, Jimmy, and things that happened a long time ago. You know, it’s been years since I’ve really thought about Ricky and Jimmy and that fire down at the gas seep that left Ricky’s arm pretty much useless.”
She tried to force back a frown, but one came anyway. I could tell by the look of anguish on her face that she’d been struggling to keep from going back to what she called one of life’s dark places. “Ricky was one heck of a trouper after that fire,” she said finally. “Wrapped up in gauze from his belly button to his neck like he was—hurting to high heaven and never once complaining. That boy’s skin flaked and oozed for close to a year, and he never once turned angry—never once sloshed around in self-pity. Then again, he comes from the kind of stock that wouldn’t have permitted it. He and your dad are a lot alike, you know.”
“Yeah, I know.” I wanted to add, “And Ricky’s a lot like Jimmy,” but I didn’t.
Looking more nervous by the second, she said, “For some reason I’ve got this horrible feeling that the two of them are conjuring up something that can’t turn out well for any of us. That fire at the seep all those years back forged a pact between them that you might say is unhealthy. Ricky’s guilt over starting a fire that left him permanently injured and almost got Jimmy killed is the kind of guilt that won’t let him say no to the father of his long-dead best friend, and your dad’s no better. I think he sees Jimmy’s reflection in Ricky.” She let out a sigh. “They’re planning something dangerous, TJ, I know it. Something so dangerous that I think it could end up costing us this land. I need you to help me find out what it is and help me stop them.”
“What’s got you convinced they’re planning something so serious?”
Her eyes to the floor, she walked over to the kitchen drawer where she kept bottle openers, corkscrews, and bag clips. Her eyes darted from side to side as she pulled the drawer open. “I found something your dad left lying on a workbench in the barn the other evening. It was there when I went out to get some of my canning supplies.”
She shoved the drawer’s contents to one side, lifted the drawer liner, slipped several sheets of paper from beneath the liner, and handed them to me. “I want you to read what’s on those pages carefully, TJ, top to bottom, and tell me what you think. It’s had me worried something terrible for almost two days.”
When I pulled up a stool to sit down and read the paper-clipped pages, she said, “No! Read it in your bedroom. We’ll talk about what you’ve read in the morning.” Her voice wavered as she spoke, and suddenly her nervousness became mine.
“Okay,” I said, draping a reassuring arm over her shoulders.
“Run along, now, before your dad comes in here and gets to wondering what we’re talking about and why I came to you with what’s in that article instead of him.”
I glanced down at the headline on the top of the first piece of paper: “Fire in the Hole.” The title didn’t mean much to me, but a little later, as I slowly read through the article in my room, I found myself shivering in fear and sharing my mom’s concern.
Seventeen
After spending the rest of the day second-guessing my dad, sharing the guilt my mom must have felt over invading his privacy, and running the contents of the “Fire in the Hole” article through my head like a newsreel, over and over until I knew its contents by heart, I had a good idea of what Ricky and my dad were up to.
When I reread, in the privacy of my room that night, the seven pages of the Science and Nature magazine article that had run the previous November, it no longer seemed dry and boring, as it had during the day, or for that matter just another scholarly paper spelling out the hellishness that could result from underground coal fires. It seemed real.
My dad had highlighted a paragraph in yellow that pointed out that China and India, with the largest number of coal fires in the world, had done little to combat them. Only the United States had made attempts to manage such fires, which were most rampant in America’s
oldest eastern coalfields. Few fires, it seemed, had ever extinguished themselves.
It was a paragraph near the end of the article that gave me a better sense of what my dad and Ricky might be planning. That paragraph explained that underground fires produced subsidence, or cave-in, zones that made coal mining dangerous, if not impossible, within fifty miles of the zones. In legalistic language, the article went on to state that no coal mining of any sort was allowed on government-owned lands, including BLM land, national forest property, or adjacent private property judged to be at risk for subsidence and the spread of underground coal fires. A footnote listed two federal statutes forbidding anyone to mine such sites, noting that such actions were a criminal violation and that violators would be subject to a $100,000 fine per site and five years in jail.
I was fearful that my dad and Ricky were planning to keep Acota out of our valley and off our land by starting an underground coal fire. I couldn’t imagine how two normally right-thinking men could have come up with such a risky scheme, but the more I thought about it, the more I found myself believing it was possible that they had. I spent the next hour or so trying to come up with a logical rationale for such a scheme before drifting off to sleep at four in the morning.
I woke up in a sweat, uncertain just how long I’d been dreaming about my dad’s navy experience as a Seabee and demolitions expert. I’d seen him take out hillsides with half a dozen well-placed charges of dynamite in order to control soil erosion without disturbing a single wildflower on the adjacent hill. I’d watched him cut in miles of right-of-way for fence with a road grader or a backhoe and barely brush a rabbit hole. I’d seen him burn off fifty-acre patches of cow-clinging thistle and toxic spurge before stopping the fire line on a dime with a perfect backburn and several loader buckets full of well-placed dirt. If anyone could start a fire and then turn around and either blast or bulldoze the life out of it, which was what I suspected he and Ricky ultimately had in mind, there was no question Dad could.
Even so, the risk seemed disproportionate to any possible gain. He’d be starting a fire he might not be able to stop. A fire that could leave behind smoldering pits, tree stumps venting smoke, and fissures spewing flames from the ground forever.
When the scheme I’d been conjuring up for most of a day began to make no sense to me, I quietly left my room just before six and headed for Spoon’s quarters to get his take on the nightmare I imagined.
I found Spoon wide awake in his room packing, of all things, a lunch. He didn’t seem all that surprised to see me.
“Ham and swiss on rye,” he said with a smile, topping off a ham sandwich with a double layer of cheese and a slice of Jewish rye. “Fit for a king. First thing I had when I landed in San Francisco on my way back from ’Nam.”
As he wrapped the sandwich in wax paper, I spotted two more neatly wrapped sandwiches lying next to a cooler on the old carpenter’s chest he used for a coffee table. Remembering that it was Spoon’s day off, I asked, “Where are you headed?”
“Searchin’ out my roots, what else?” he said before setting his sandwich aside, eyeing me pensively, and asking, “Pretty early in the mornin’ to be runnin’ me down. You got a problem, TJ?”
Uncertain how to broach the subject, I said, “Yes. It’s about my dad.”
“He got you bentonitin’ ditches again?” Spoon asked with a chuckle, aware that I hated riding the endless miles of our irrigation ditches and sealing up cracks and potential leaks with the sticky, claylike dike plugger called bentonite.
“Nope.”
“Then what?” Spoon asked, taking in the weighty look on my face.
My answer came in a rush. “I think my dad and Ricky Peterson have cooked up some crazy scheme to try and keep Acota out of here by starting an underground coal fire.”
Spoon eyed me with disbelief. “Don’t make no sense to me,” he said, placing his sandwiches in the cooler. “Nope, no way they’d do that at all.”
“I’ve been telling myself the same thing for almost a day now.” I slipped the neatly folded “Fire in the Hole” article out of my back pocket and handed it to him. “Have a look at this.”
Spoon glanced at his watch. “Afraid I’m gonna have to make it quick. I’m meetin’ Harriet in town at the Merry Mixer for breakfast, and then we’re headed up to talk to that toothless old geezer in Colstrip about him bein’ my kin.”
Spoon pulled a stool up next to the carpenter’s chest and quickly read through the article. Seconds after finishing, he let out a sigh. “Sounds to me like we don’t want any part of no coal fire. You might as well spray this valley with Agent Orange.”
He handed the article back to me. “What makes you so blessed sure that Ricky and your pa are planning to start one?”
“Just a hunch, and my mom agrees. I think Dad’s planning to u
se his demolition experience to start a fire and then put it out. Once there’s a documented subsidence fire, Acota will never be able to mine this land.”
“And I think you’re way off base,” Spoon said, shaking his head, walking across the room, and extracting a couple of sodas from the dented refrigerator he’d bought at a farm auction the previous summer. “I’d say it’s more likely that he and Ricky are lookin’ for some legal way to keep Acota outta here.”
“Could be,” I said with a shrug, feeling relieved. “But how do you think I can find out?”
Spoon smiled and placed the soda in his cooler. “I’d ask your pa.”
“But he’ll know that Mom and I took the article and read it. She found it lying out on a workbench.”
“Then he shouldn’ta left it lying around.” Clearly preoccupied, he eyed his watch again. “Sorry, TJ, I gotta go.” He picked up the cooler and headed for the door. Looking back at me, he said, “Talk to your pa.”
As the screen door creaked open, I asked, “Think that old Cheyenne guy up in Colstrip will tell you the whole truth this time around?”
“I’m hopin’ he will. Hate to waste a trip. As for the truth—like they say, it can set you free. Go talk to your pa about that article. The truth’ll come out.”
Spoon was down the tack room’s two rickety porch steps and halfway to his pickup when I decided I might as well go talk to my dad right then.
As Spoon nosed his pickup down the lane and toward the county road, I saw my dad, with his right foot planted on an old cottonwood stump, several yards back from the lane. Up and out at first light, as was his custom, he held a coffee mug in his hand. Thinking, It’s now or never, I waved at him and trotted his way. His return wave seemed halfhearted. Shifting his left foot up onto the stump just as I reached him, he said, “See Spoon’s outta here real early.”