Sister Mine

by Tawni O'Dell

  Did I agree to meet Cam Jack and get into his car with him because I wanted to have power over him?

  Yes.

  But once I found myself alone with him, I changed my mind. I didn’t want to have sex with this unpleasant, sweaty, groping, soft, grown man. When I tried to back out, he treated me like I was attempting to break off a business deal with him; he dropped all pretenses of pretending to woo me and made it clear that he had owned me all along.

  “You know what blackballing means, precious?” he asked me while his hands clamped onto my bare breasts and began kneading them like balls of dough. “It means you want to keep me happy, because if you don’t I’m going to make sure your daddy never sets foot in a mine again.”

  I wanted him to hit me then. I was used to being beaten. I could have dealt with that. I would have preferred it. I would have enjoyed it: seeing the look on his face when he started to get physical, expecting me to be scared, to cry and cower, and instead I would have taken it like a man.

  Being the cause of my dad losing his job was something I could not bear. His job was the only thing he liked to do, the only thing he was good at doing, the only thing that gave him a sense of worth. Being a miner gave him a place in the world. By doing it every day he earned his position on a bar stool at Jolly’s every night and the right to bitch about the unfairness of life.

  All of that would have been taken away from him if I hadn’t let Cam Jack put his thick slimy tongue in my mouth and his thick fumbling fingers up inside me.

  For the next few weeks, the dreams arrived every night as soon as I dropped off to sleep. They were incredibly vivid and horrifically violent. Each night a different woman restrained in a different manner: her raw, skinless wrists bound with barbed wire; her face wrapped in silver duct tape like a bandaged mummy; a dog collar fastened too tightly around her neck and chained to a railroad tie jutting out of a slab of concrete.

  They were violated with bottles, wrenches, fists, and knives. Blood spurted from between their legs, covering their thighs and bellies, spattering walls and the rapist’s face and arms. I could never see him clearly, and I never knew the women.

  The next day in school I’d be so exhausted and shaken I couldn’t concentrate on anything.

  I began visiting the library during all my study halls. I’d get a dictionary and go sit at a table as far away as possible from everyone else and stare transfixed at the word “rape.”

  Rape: 1: To seize and take away by force. 2: An outrageous violation. 3: An act or instance of robbing or despoiling or carrying away a person by force. 4: Sexual intercourse with a woman by a man without her consent and chiefly by force, deception, or threat. 5: A European herb of the mustard family grown as a forage crop for sheep and hogs and for its seeds which yield rape oil and are a bird food.

  “Force” was the recurring word in most of the definitions but the word that caught my eye was “despoil.”

  Despoil: to strip of belongings, possessions, or value.

  Cam Jack hadn’t been the first person to strip me of my value. That distinction belonged to my father. I was surprised to find that it was possible to have your value as a human being stripped away more than once. For some reason I thought of it as finite and singular and irreplaceable, like my mom’s rag rug.

  This is how I decided to view my night with Cam Jack from then on: not as sex, not as rape, but as an instance of despoiling.

  I decide to have a drink before I go see him at his office, but can’t stomach the depressing feel of a blue-collar bar so early in the day.

  After taking a few jobs—driving an elderly woman whose failing eyesight prevents her from driving herself into Centresburg to do her grocery shopping and ending up doing her grocery shopping for her; driving a guy who lost his license on a DUI charge to visit his girlfriend who no longer has a car because she had to sell it to pay for the lawyer she employed to handle her divorce and fight for the car (the guy told me in confidence he was getting ready to pop the question to her; I told him it seemed to me they were made for each other); and driving a woman with a broken arm home from work after her usual ride got sick in the middle of the day and left early—I end up at the Ruby Tuesday’s on the outskirts of Centresburg. It sits at the corner of an intersection between a Ponderosa Steakhouse and a Red Lobster across the road from the Eatn’Park, with a view out the front windows of the county’s PennDOT lot parked full of salt trucks and stacked high with neon orange plastic warning cones.

  It’s getting close to six and the place is full. It will be empty by eight.

  Small parties of large people are seated at booths and scattered tables, mechanically shoveling food into their mouths while their eyes flit back and forth from their plates to one of the TVs mounted in each corner of the room.

  I’m sitting at the bar with a spectator’s view of the salad bar.

  A woman walks past me on her way back to her seat carrying a plate heaped with cottage cheese, macaroni, pudding, and four or five lettuce leaves buried beneath a pile of shredded cheddar, bacon bits, and croutons smothered in a creamy white dressing.

  I wonder fleetingly what Pamela and Kozlowski have been eating for the past couple days.

  The bartender presents me with my second blue margarita in a glass the size of a small beach bucket. I sip at it through a clear straw while perusing the chaotic walls hung with signed photos of movie stars who’ve never been here and mint condition antique toys no one’s ever played with.

  My thoughts wander back to the day I met Cam Jack. It was a one-in-a-million encounter, one of the rare times he stopped in at the Beverly office and the only time since the day I rode my bike to the mine to bring my dad his lunch pail that I had gone there.

  Shannon was home sick with the chicken pox and Dad had let me drive him to work and drop him off so I could have transportation during the day if I needed it.

  I was picking him up after his shift and Cam Jack was on his way out when our paths crossed in the parking area.

  He was twelve years my senior and had been managing the Jolly Mount mines for six years. His dad had put him in charge of them after he returned home from barely getting the Ivy League degree demanded of him.

  Most people around here never could figure out why Stan Jack bothered to send his son to college. It was fairly obvious that there was about as much chance of having Cam return home from Yale refined and educated as there was of a garden toad taking off and flying just because someone put it in a bird’s nest.

  Cam believed his dad did it just to humiliate and degrade him, and it would become the largest grudge he would hold against his dad for the rest of his life. He also would never forgive his father for putting him in charge of two of J&P’s smaller mines. He saw this as a slap in the face when he expected a great reward for doing what his father had asked of him.

  Most of the rest of his father’s operators were lazy, scarcely literate mini-tyrants who had no respect or sympathy for the men who worked for them, but they were afraid of Stan Jack’s wealth and power so they attempted to run mines that weren’t going to cause him any more scandal and put him in the public eye again the way the major disaster at Gertie had done.

  Cam hoped to cause problems. He spent as little time as possible managing the mines. He cut corners wherever he could.

  At both Beverly and Josephine the exhaust fans barely worked and needed to be replaced. Electrical equipment was poorly maintained by untrained men. Cables were held together by uninsulated splices. Dangerous levels of coal dust were allowed to accumulate. Some areas weren’t rock-dusted at all. None of the miners had been given self-rescuers, the small gas masks that filtered out the lethal carbon monoxide left after an explosion.

  A little over a decade later, at the time of the explosion that would kill my father, Beverly had eighteen unanswered safety violations cited against her.

  It was the beginning of September. School had just started the week before. The county fair had just ended. Autumn was in the air
at night, but the days were pure Indian summer.

  I had on a pair of cutoffs and a halter top I had made from a couple of bandannas in Home Ec class.

  He was wearing a pair of dark blue suit pants and a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the top buttons undone. A yellow tie was stuffed into one of his pants pockets and fluttered behind him like a tail when he walked. His shoes were shiny black and remarkably clean.

  He said hello. I said hi back. We made small talk. Soon we were smiling and laughing and he was telling me I was pretty.

  He asked me if I knew who he was and I told him I didn’t. I knew he was management by the way he was dressed and the softness of his hands. When he told me he was Cam Jack, I was as excited as if I was meeting foreign royalty or a Pittsburgh Pirate.

  He wasn’t terribly bad looking then. He was solid, not beefy yet. He had thick unkempt hair that made him look vulnerable despite the bully’s smirk he always wore and a big outdoorsy voice that made me think of cowboys and campfires. He had a way of tilting and lowering his head as if he were trying to hear me better when we talked that I found endearing. This was before I knew the word “patronizing.”

  I told him my name. He pretended to know my father. He praised the Jolly Mount miners, using the same line he’d use over twenty years later in E.J.’s hospital room after the explosion in Jojo. He said his dad always said he’d give four of his Marvella miners for just one working Josephine or Beverly.

  I wanted to ask him why, if he valued them so much, he didn’t get them a couple new exhaust fans and some self-rescuers, but I had a feeling this would have put a damper on the rest of our conversation and I wanted him to like me.

  I don’t know why exactly. Physically, he was the opposite of the type of man I was attracted to. He was nothing like Lib or Jimmy or any of the boys I’d been with. They smelled of cigarettes and engine grease and whiskey. They had big callused, scarred, dirty hands that could easily leave bruises or just as easily convince me that nothing could ever harm me if they chose to love me.

  They never appeared to be clean-shaven, and even when they were their cheeks always felt like sandpaper.

  They didn’t talk much but expressed plenty if you knew how to read them. I could tell exactly what my dad thought of someone by the amount of eye contact he made with him, whether he stuck his hands in his pockets, crossed his arms over his chest or held them akimbo, and how often and how strenuously he spit.

  Cam wore an aftershave that made him smell like a freshly shampooed dog. There was something damp and animal about his scent that the cologne couldn’t cover up completely. His hands were smoother and softer than the hands of most women I knew. His face was the same. He never stopped talking yet I was never sure what he really thought about anything.

  The mantrip rumbled up to the mine’s entry, and tired, dirty, squinting men in hard hats carrying lunch pails and thermoses began to straggle away from the hill toward the double-wide trailer they used as a bath house.

  The sight of them changed Cam’s demeanor. He looked uncomfortable and was suddenly in a hurry to leave.

  We parted and I never gave him a second thought except to occasionally think back on our meeting the way I might think about meeting anyone who was rich or famous.

  He called me one night about a week later, and I met him the next night in his Cadillac about a mile down the road from our house.

  I’ve often wondered since then if he would have been equally bold with any teenaged girl he might have encountered that day among the rows of pickup trucks or if he sensed something in me that made him take a chance. Did I give off a victim’s scent like a cat in heat?

  We drove around for awhile talking in his car before we finally parked.

  We talked about a lot of things. We even talked about the same miners he seemed in such a hurry to avoid the week before.

  I got the feeling he was lonely. I don’t think he had any true friends. He complained that the rich kids at his college called him a redneck behind his back. The rednecks back home hated him because of his wealth. I guess it never occurred to him people might dislike him simply because he was an asshole.

  Before we moved to the backseat and got down to business, he seemed nervous at having me in the car with him. He explained to me that we couldn’t be seen together.

  He said it was because the world was full of uptight, holier-thanthou Bible-thumpers and titsy feminists. According to him, the women belonging to either of these groups had pussies that were so dry, dust and cobwebs came out of them when they spread their legs. They all hated men and any type of pleasure, particularly men having pleasure. Their goal was to keep men from satisfying their natural urges, thereby keeping them weak and miserable. Since girls like me were the perfect age for satisfying those urges, they especially hated us.

  I didn’t completely buy into his pleasure-depriving conspiracy theory, but I listened politely while he expounded on the topic. I tended to think our secrecy had more to do with the fact that if my dad or any of the other miners found out what he was doing they would beat him to death with the same bare hands that worked in his mines every day.

  He never called me again after that night. I wouldn’t have cared. I had no desire to see him again and I wouldn’t have called him either except I felt obligated a few months later to tell him I was pregnant with his child.

  I signal to the bartender for one more bucket of margarita.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  THE J&P BUILDING IS by far the nicest one in downtown Centresburg. Even before the other buildings in town began boarding up their windows and padlocking their front doors as stores and businesses folded one by one in the wake of the mine closings, it stood out as the most spectacular landmark for miles around.

  It’s a stately redbrick structure with a gleaming gold clock tower and wide marble front steps leading to a set of white columns supporting a two-story-high balcony where they hang red, white, and blue bunting every Fourth of July and display a life-sized Nativity scene every Christmas now that the courthouse is no longer allowed to do it. Most visitors to town think the J&P Building is the courthouse and it might as well be. The two men who have owned it have always had more power than any judge.

  I push open the heavy brass and glass front doors and step inside. Everyone is gone for the day. The foyer is empty and the size of a barn. The floor is white marble shot through with black and gray streaks and flecks of quartz that glitter softly in the light coming from the enormous wrought-iron chandelier overhead. It’s obviously very old and reminds me of the candle-dripping chandeliers hanging in Transylvanian castles in vampire movies. It adds a sinister element to the otherwise Romanesque opulence of the rest of the cavernous entryway.

  The ceiling above it is painted in a panoramic Pennsylvanian version of the Sistine Chapel. Various highly selective scenes of Pennsylvania lifestyle and history are represented.

  There’s the obligatory portrait of William Penn and the depiction of Ben Franklin flying a kite with a key tied to the end of it. Ragged colonists overwhelm British redcoats who turn and run, and Union soldiers slaughter their Confederate brothers at Gettysburg. A hunter in camouflage and neon orange takes aim at a majestic stag, and black-faced miners trudge home from their shift with their backs turned toward a puffing locomotive carrying off carloads of coal. A red covered bridge and a horse-drawn Amish cart sit against a backdrop of rolling green hills. The steel mills of Pittsburgh, Philadelphia’s cracked Liberty Bell, a Hershey bar, a bottle of Heinz ketchup, and Punxsutawney Phil leaving the comfort of his burrow in search of his shadow are all accounted for.

  There’s not a single woman in the entire painting.

  I take a few steps toward a curving staircase carpeted in dove gray leading to the second floor. My boots make loud clacking noises on the marble that echo around the room like gunfire.

  I stop and I’m suddenly very conscious of my bare knees. I ruined my stockings in the mud with the Marine and threw them
away in the ladies’ room at Ruby Tuesday’s. Now I’m barefoot and bare-legged inside my boots. Normally it wouldn’t bother me but right now it makes me feel poor and cheap.

  I continue across the marble, setting my heels down even harder. The sound is almost deafening. Once I reach the staircase, my heels sink into the plush carpet like I’ve stepped into a field of dandelion fluff.

  At the top of the stairs is a long ornate hallway dimly lit by gold sconces with frosted glass globes. The walls are paneled in a rich dark wood and hung with portraits of stern board members past and present. A brighter light spills out from behind an office door that’s slightly ajar at the end of the corridor. I make my way toward it.

  A small gold plaque is mounted on the door engraved with the words: Cameron E. Jack, Chief Executive Officer.

  My palms are sweating. If only he’d take a swing at me then I’d know what to do.

  I pull the door open and step inside. He’s standing behind his desk with his back to me. He looks like he’s staring out the window, but the curtains are drawn.

  He turns around, even though neither the opening of the door or my footsteps have made any noise.

  “Well, well, well.” He smiles at me. “Shae-Lynn.”

  The office is immense. The distance between the door and his colossal desk is enough to make any supplicant truly nervous as he crosses the room while being scrutinized by the man he’s come to report to or beg a favor from.

  Everything is done in creams and golds except for the dark wood of the desk and his bookshelves, and the brick red leather of his chair.

  The shelves are full of leather-bound books which I’m sure he’s never read, and the walls are hung with dozens of framed photos of himself with famous people who I’m sure don’t display photos of themselves with him.

  There’s also a fair number of photos of his parents posing at various civic functions. His mom is a gray mouse of a woman who stands beside his father, dutiful and unsmiling, wearing practical polyester skirts and jackets in diluted popsicle colors with blouses that tie at the neck in big bows.