Sister Mine

by Tawni O'Dell

  I lied on a few questions because I knew I had to.

  Have you ever been brutalized by a family member or someone close to you? No.

  Do you love your father? Yes.

  Do you get urges to physically harm others? No.

  But everybody lies on a few.

  I knew the Neanderthal from Georgia sitting next to me was answering “yes” to “Do you believe in the equality of the sexes?”

  And I knew J.T., the ex-Marine sitting on my other side, had to be struggling like hell with the question “Do you like flowers?”

  The only one that completely stumped me was “Do you masturbate?”

  This was back in the eighties when women were still fairly rare in law enforcement. Especially in the Capitol police. I was the only woman in my rookie class.

  We were an elite group. Our job was to protect the nation’s government buildings and our illustrious lawmakers, which made us a federal law enforcement agency. Getting in was no easy feat. The background check alone took six months. They interviewed everyone I’d ever known, including my old elementary school principal, who was kind enough not to mention the Naughty Penis incident. There were eight weeks of intense boot camp. The classes and written exams were more difficult than anything I did in college.

  I knew the question about masturbation was directed solely at men, since women weren’t an issue when the test was designed. It was a simple question to determine truthfulness. Any man who answered no was a liar.

  But for women it was different. We’re not supposed to masturbate. Fortunately, this part of the exam wasn’t standardized. I had a space where I could write my answer instead of filling in a bubble.

  I wrote, “Only when I have to.”

  I passed, so I guess they found me sane.

  And I’m still sane but my sanity is wearing a little thin today.

  I decide to go talk to E.J. He’s much better than any shrink. He doesn’t cost anything, he always provides me with beer, he doesn’t ask any questions, and he doesn’t offer unrealistic advice. His commentary at the end usually consists of “That sucks” and is always dispensed with more beer.

  I brush myself off after my tussle with Choker and check my face in the rearview mirror. There’s no damage but I’m going to have a honey of a bruise on my thigh. Probably one on my butt too, which is what I sit on all day to do my job.

  I’m a couple miles from E.J.’s house when I come around a bend and find him walking down the side of the road.

  I pull up behind him and slow down. He looks over his shoulder, startled at first, then cautious, his look no different than the one my dog gives me from underneath the kitchen table each time I return to the room. There’s no suspicion in it, just an animal wariness based on the primal knowledge that everyone who is not you could be a potential problem.

  His eyes are very blue in his pale face. Once summer arrives, he’ll get to see a couple hours of light at the end of each day, but that amount of sun isn’t enough to erase the effects of his subterranean existence. In winter, he doesn’t see any daylight at all during the workweek.

  Right now the sky is shouting summer; it’s a flat, bright blue dotted with white clouds whipped into a motionless lather while the land seems to be barely awake.

  “Hey,” I greet him.

  “Hey,” he says back.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Walking.”

  “I can see that. You walking anyplace in particular?”

  I can’t help noticing that I found him at the site of his rescue.

  “Back home.”

  “Where are you walking from?”

  He stops. I stop my car.

  “Home,” he says.

  “In other words you’re out for a walk.”

  “That’s what I said. Where are you going?”

  “To see you.”

  “I’m not home.”

  “Get in the car,” I tell him.

  He starts to walk around to the passenger side then stops and watches an SUV coming from the opposite direction. It slows to a stop and parks on the other side of the road about a hundred feet from us.

  A woman gets out and closes the door behind her. She smooths out the front of her pleated tan shorts over her pot belly, puts a flattened hand to her eyebrows like a visor, and scans the empty field stretching toward a horizon of low green and gray mountains.

  Two children climb slowly out of the backseat and a man gets out from behind the steering wheel, all three of them blinking suspiciously at the sky.

  The woman turns and says something to them. The children respond with groans. Their heads loll back on their necks and their arms flop at their sides like they’ve been simultaneously struck dead. The man responds by spreading out a map on the hood of his car.

  They’re tourists.

  “Shit,” I hear E.J. say.

  He’s been spotted by the woman, and she’s identified him as a local. She starts heading toward him, smiling and waving wildly. I know his gut reaction is to run in the opposite direction, but he knows she knows he’s seen her and he’s not a rude man.

  He stands his ground and lifts a hand in greeting but doesn’t smile.

  It’s been awhile since I’ve seen any strangers out here. The initial swarms of visitors that jammed the road and snapped pictures of each other posing with backhoes and cranes tapered off fairly quickly into a small but steady stream that lasted for a couple months until it became a trickle then dried up to nothing. People no longer come here for the sole purpose of seeing where the rescue took place, but if they’re in the area for some other reason, they sometimes stop by.

  “Hello,” she calls out to him.

  Her smile broadens as she gets close enough to read the J&P Coal Company logo stitched on his ball cap. She’s definitely a tourist. He watches her approach in amazement. No matter how many he’s dealt with, he still has a hard time believing in their existence. Up until a couple years ago, running into a talking dog out here would have been less surprising than running into someone like this woman.

  “I was wondering if you could help me?” she asks him.

  He sticks his hands into his jeans pockets and shifts his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other.

  “I can try,” he replies.

  “Are you from around here?” she asks.

  “Born and raised.”

  She looks at his cap again.

  Her facial expression changes from being pleased in general to being pleased with him. He has become more than a potential tour guide; he could turn out to be the tour.

  “That’s great,” she gushes.

  I look over at her car and notice her family isn’t in any hurry to join her.

  “Then I’m sure you can help me. I’m looking for the place where the miners were rescued.”

  “You found it,” he says and motions toward the field with a jerk of his head.

  She turns her head expectantly, still smiling, and stares out at the field. Two years ago it was turned into a mud pit by tons of earthmoving equipment, drills, and cranes, all of it illuminated twenty-four hours a day by giant spotlights and flash photography, but now there’s nothing exciting or frightening or even slightly unusual about it.

  The flat, grassy land is bordered on the south by the road, the north by the hills, and the west by forest. To the east it slopes off into acres of gully. It’s one of the best places to come at night to spot deer.

  She turns back to him, obviously disappointed.

  What do these people expect to see? I always wonder. What they want is a re-creation, like the rooms in wax museums that show different forms of medieval torture. They want to see the five miners, starving, wet, and shivering with cold, huddled together in a chamber no bigger than a bathroom and half its height, staring blindly and crazily into the impenetrable darkness.

  They think they want to experience what those men experienced, even if only for a few moments, but they’re wrong.

  “
Are you a miner?” she asks him.

  “No, ma’am. I just like the cap.”

  “Were you around when it happened?”

  “No, I wasn’t anywhere around. I don’t know anything more about it than what you saw on TV and read in the newspapers.”

  “Oh, I followed every minute of it. I still remember everything about them.”

  She begins ticking off their vital statistics like someone reading from a baseball card. The only things missing are their heights and weights.

  “There was Lib, 56, the boss of the crew. Married with two grown sons and four grandchildren. He was a Vietnam veteran and you could tell how much all the others respected him. Then there was Jimmy, 58, the oldest one on the crew. His wife was a lovely lady, a schoolteacher. He had that adorable accent and used all those quaint sayings. I’ll always remember him saying to one of the reporters at their first press conference…”

  Here she breaks into an attempt at an Irish brogue that sounds like a cross between the Lucky Charms leprechaun and Desi Arnaz.

  “…You wouldn’t be trying to soft-soap me, now?” She giggles. “Who uses words like that?”

  E.J. glances over his shoulder at me through the windshield and we smile at each other, thinking of some of the other words that only Jimmy uses that wouldn’t have made it past the network censors.

  “Then there was Dusty, the youngest one, early twenties, with the skinny wife with the big doe eyes and the newborn baby and those sweet little twin girls. He’d only been working in the mines for two years.

  “And Ray. The talkative, friendly one. Late thirties. Married with two teenaged daughters.”

  She lowers her voice confidentially.

  “His wife was a piece of work. She managed to get herself into every interview. A big lady and always dressed to the nines. My husband said she looked like a drag queen going to a hoedown.”

  She laughs.

  “And last but not least Jimmy’s son, E.J. Good-looking. Never been married. Strong, silent type. Hardly said a word.”

  “Sounds like you collected the entire set of Trapped Miner Trading Cards,” E.J. comments.

  “I never saw those,” she says seriously, then after a moment smiles knowingly at him. “You’re joking with me, aren’t you?”

  He admits that he is with a nod of his head.

  She puts her hand back up to her forehead like she did earlier and peers out at the field again.

  “Is there a statue near the hole?”

  “No.”

  “A plaque?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Well, there should be,” she says indignantly.

  He doesn’t bother telling her that everyone around here agrees that there should be something to mark the spot but no one can agree on what it should be or who should pay for it; while everyone else argued, Nature immediately reclaimed it with grass and weeds.

  “Can we walk out there?” she asks.

  “Sure.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “Only during hunting season.”

  She gives him a questioning tilt of her head.

  “You might get shot,” he explains.

  “Oh,” she says.

  Before she can ask him anything else, he mutters something about being expected somewhere and jumps into my car.

  We leave her in our dust.

  E.J. LIVES IN A SMALL white ranch house set back from the road at the top of a steep gravel driveway. Structurally the house is well cared for but the premises lack any decorative touches. No landscaping to speak of. No flowers. No lawn ornaments. No curtains on the windows.

  A detached garage invisible from the road sits behind the house. His old brown Dodge Ram pickup is parked in front of it with the hood open. A few tools are scattered about. He must have been working on it again before he went on his walk.

  I park behind the truck.

  He gets out and heads straight to the garage.

  Before I follow him, I open my glove compartment and take out a bottle of Advil and dry-swallow a couple capsules. I’m starting to hurt after my fight with Choker.

  I find him bent over with his head and torso hidden behind an open refrigerator door and one dirty hand clutching the door handle. The mother in me wants to scold him for wasting electricity and letting all the cold air out. I also want to tell him he needs to do a better job of washing his hands, but I don’t say anything.

  His decision made—the choices are beer, beer, and beer—he steps back, holding a beer in one hand, and closes the door with a slam, leaving a set of motor oil fingerprints behind to mark his territory.

  When he remembers me, he reaches back into the fridge and tosses me a can, too.

  I snap it open and beer gushes all over my hand. I look around for a roll of paper towels or something to wipe it off with. I don’t see anything.

  “Use the finger,” he says, gesturing toward a giant yellow foam WE ARE NUMBER ONE finger from a Steelers game.

  It’s covered in fingerprints, too, and dotted with hardened stains and flecks of dried foodstuffs. A few chunks of foam are missing, like someone has taken a couple bites out of it.

  “I’ll pass,” I tell him.

  I pull up a lawn chair and take a seat. The garage is his pride and joy and much homier than the house. He built it himself and has pictures of it in various stages of construction tacked to the back of his workbench the same way my dad used to display baby pictures of me and Shannon.

  He has an old couch out here and a small TV. His J&P baseball team cap and jersey hang on a nail and a deodorant stick sits on a shelf between a pair of jumper cables and a flashlight. In amongst a couple Ball jars of random nails and screws is a pair of photos in attached frames that close like a book. His mom just gave them to him: one is his parents’ original wedding photo and the other was taken at their fortieth anniversary celebration last month.

  Reading material consists of copies of Field & Stream, a few Victoria’s Secret catalogs he’s snagged from a girlfriend’s place, and a few hardcover novels in cracked, discolored, plastic library dust jackets, which I’m willing to bet are several years overdue.

  He has a makeshift kitchen set up on a card table next to the fridge that consists of a few mismatched plates and bowls, a battered coffee maker, and a George Foreman grill I got him for Christmas. He loves the grill so much he named it. He calls it George.

  He keeps his dinner bucket and thermos on the table, too, and I can’t stop looking at them.

  I have no idea how he’s been able to go back into the mines after what happened to him, but I guess car crash survivors get back into cars, and injured soldiers go back into battle, and abused women sleep with their abusers.

  I know how hard it would be for him to quit. I know how much he loves running the continuous miner, the sixty-ton cutting machine that’s replaced the manual jobs of undercutting and blasting that the miners of the past used to do. The machine is a wonder, according to E.J., but like most miners who have been around for awhile, he had mixed feelings about it when the company first started using it because it did the work of at least fifty men, which meant those fifty men lost their jobs.

  He’s told me there’s nothing in life that thrills him as much as the sight and feel of the miner’s gigantic steel cutter head ripping into the coal face, its dozens of carbide teeth chewing up the wall of rock with the same ease as an electric knife carving through a rump roast.

  Part of the rush comes purely from the power he feels while guiding it, but I’m sure another part comes from pride. He’s one of the best operators in the business. With him at the controls, the massive machine moves cleanly and efficiently. No one—including Lib—can match his speed or get as much coal out of a cut with as little movement.

  But even knowing how much he loves it, I still don’t understand how he went back.

  I still have the occasional nightmare where I wake up clammy and cotton-mouthed thinking I’m still standing numbly and helplessly on the h
illside overlooking the rescue site wondering if I should be praying that he’s still alive or that he died instantly.

  I can’t imagine what kind of nightmares he has.

  I take a gulp of my beer.

  “You want George to make you a burger?” he asks as he pulls up his own lawn chair.

  “Not right now. Maybe later.”

  I look around for a diversion. I want to talk to him. I need to talk. But I’m not anxious to begin.

  I spot yesterday’s newspaper sitting on top of a stack of papers in his bright orange recycle bin.

  “So you guys actually went through with it,” I comment, referring to the front-page story about the Jolly Mount Five suing J&P Coal. “It’s all anybody’s talking about.”

  He glances over at the paper too, and his face puckers like he’s just heard a bad joke.

  “We filed the papers. Whatever the hell that means. Now we’re waiting to see what he does next.”

  The way he says “he” I know he can only be referring to God or Cam Jack.

  My mind flashes to the visit he paid the miners in the hospital the day after their rescue. It was unannounced and a complete surprise since he had never bothered to show up while they were trapped.

  He went to their rooms one after the other. Suddenly there he’d be standing in a hospital room doorway: Cam Jack himself in a fine dark suit with a pristine white shirt, a steel-gray tie the same color as his slicked-back hair, and an American flag tie clip, looking hale and hearty despite his own recent hospitalizations and the rumors flying around about his failing health.

  He proclaimed that he didn’t give a good goddamn about hospital policy and being politically correct and gave them all boxes of cigars and bottles of whiskey.

  He called them “my boys” and even though that term would have caused all of them to bristle if he had used it a week earlier or a month later, at the time they didn’t seem to mind. There was nothing like a successful rescue mission to soothe the tensions between the foot soldiers and the top brass, especially when the big man himself showed up brimming with praise and bearing gifts.