Black Water

by Ninie Hammon

  T.J. looked out the back window of the truck as they drove away from Bailey, leaving her in the dirt on the side of the road in front of the house where Seth Cosgrove and his wife and children lived, where Macy Cosgrove lived. Then they turned a corner and she was gone and Dobbs was pulling to a grinding stop in front of a house that had an unfamiliar name on the mailbox. Hendrix. It was obviously occupied because the yard was littered with chickens, pecking in the grassless dirt in search of whatever it was pecking chickens pecked for. There were pigs in a pen on the far side of the house and their aroma wafted out into the front yard in a red tide.

  On the other side of the road was a vacant tumble-down shack with the door hanging open on one hinge and the roof collapsed on the far side. A gigantic oak tree that had to be a century old took up almost the whole front yard, must have been fifteen feet around and seventy feet tall, with a gnarled, textured trunk and low limbs perfect for little-boy climbing, if any had lived there when the families of miners had waited in the shack while the menfolk “went down” to pull the coal out of the guts of the mountain.

  T.J. reached over the seats to the gun rack on the back window of Dobbs’s truck, lifted the shotgun down off it and grabbed a handful of shells out of the basket on the side of the rack.

  “What are you planning on doing with that? Order them up the mountainside at gunpoint?”

  T.J. didn’t reply, merely hopped down out of the truck, shoved the shells in his pocket and headed across the road toward the house. Truth was, he didn’t know what he intended to do with the shotgun. Taking it was one of those things a man just did and then figured out the why of it later on. Dobbs left a tail of dust hanging in the air as he gunned the Jeep and sped down the road to search for more occupied houses.

  The house T.J. approached was a coal camp house but a second story had been added, and not expertly. The wood didn’t fit together properly at the seams so the inevitable leaks that had sprung up over the years had been patched with old, unpainted barn wood that had turned gray with age.

  The house had a side addition, too, that was as tall as the two stories it was attached to. It appeared to be held upright by the brick chimney on the end where birds now perched on the top. A wide porch was affixed to the front door, literally added on, with its own roof, held up with four posts that formed the corners of the porch railing. The spindles were missing in spots, but it appeared sturdy. What didn’t appear sturdy were the three porch steps that sagged like a swaybacked mare. T.J. kept to the outside edges where the steps were attached to the frame as he climbed, thinking as he did so that if his was enough weight to break through the wood, there couldn’t be anyone inside older than the age of twelve.

  He had his fist drawn back to knock when the door beyond the screen swung open.

  “What you want?” asked the man inside.

  He was small, with gray hair and a bony frame under the t-shirt and overalls he wore. His lower lip was swollen with a plug of snuff, his teeth dark from it, and he sported a beard as wild and wooly as those twins in the cough drop commercials.

  Or ZZ Top.

  “My name’s T.J.—”

  “I know who you are.”

  “Do I know you?” T.J. tried to place the face, mentally removing the beard, adding fifty pounds.

  “Don’t know if you know me or not, but I know you, know who you are, anyway. I used to work in the lumber yard in Fairmont. You’s with your friend — Hobbs or something — when he was loading up a truck to build a fence a few years back.”

  Then it came to T.J.

  “Harlan Bolyard. Your brother Mitchell was the mailman—”

  “You want to talk about my brother, go bother him. Like I said, what chew want?”

  T.J. looked around the man into the house.

  “Your family home?”

  “The wife and little bit’s here. The boys is out catting around somewhere, stirrin’ up trouble likely. You gonna tell me why you’re here?”

  “Got bad news and worse news.” He tried to keep his voice level, keep the tension and fear out of it. “You and your wife and child have got to get out, right now. You ain’t got time to grab nothing to take with you. You got to turn and run, uphill, to high ground. The dam’s about to blow!”

  “The dam?” The man acted like he didn’t even know what the word meant. “You’re crazy. There ain’t nothing wrong with that dam.”

  “You don’t think so? You seen it lately?”

  “Last week, as a matter of fact. That dam’s fine.”

  So much for bluffing.

  “You think I’d come here and tell you to run for you life for no reason?”

  “I don’t know why you come here, what it is you really want. But I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  Bolyard went to close the door in T.J.’s face but T.J. lifted the shotgun and he hesitated.

  “I ain’t here to hurt nobody. I’m here to save your darned fool neck.” He could hear the scared in his voice and didn’t try to hide it. “We ain’t got time to stand around jawing. You got to run!”

  “What, you gonna shoot me if I don’t?”

  He stared at T.J. belligerently.

  Definitely not a man who could be bluffed.

  “No, I ain’t gonna shoot you.”

  “Then get off my por—”

  “But I will shoot your chickens.”

  T.J. turned and pointed the shotgun at the nearest chicken pecking in the dirt in front of the porch. He pulled the trigger and the bird exploded in a bloody mass of buckshot, feathers and bones, emitting a small squawk before it disintegrated.

  Dobbs drove past three houses — shacks — that clearly were unoccupied after he let T.J. out in front of the house with Hendrix on the mailbox. Then he ground to a stop in front of the last house on the stretch of road before the valley widened about a hundred yards farther down, and the creek flowed out across a large meadow. The road curved around the right edge of the meadow, hugging the mountainside, leaving no room for houses. And there were no houses in the meadow, either. If there had been, they’d flood when the sludge water hit them, but wouldn’t likely wash away because the water would spread out in the unrestricted area. The monster would lose its force, spend itself filling the meadow with black goo.

  But this house would take a hammer blow from the raging flood waters. Even a strong structure wouldn’t be able to withstand the force that would be unleashed against it, but a coal camp house like this … splinters. Even though it was farther from the source of the flood than where he’d left Bailey and T.J., the house would offer no protection to whoever was inside when it collapsed.

  In truth, the house wasn’t strictly a coal camp house. It was a modification of the original design and one more artfully executed than the house where he’d left T.J. The original structure stood pretty much as built — shoebox shaped, tin roof, porch sticking out like a Groucho nose off the front of the building. But an almost identical structure had been built right beside it on the same piece of property and a covered breezeway stretched out across the space between the two with doors into the buildings on each end.

  It appeared that the second structure was occupied and the first not, but he’d have to check to make sure. The structure on the right had curtains on the windows and there was a clothesline stretching between the posts that held up the porch roof with clothing on it. A sheet, pants in a couple of different sizes and socks and underwear.

  Dobbs hurried as fast as his ever-increasing bulk would allow across the weedy front yard and up the steps to the first house, the one he thought unoccupied. He banged hard on the door, waited, banged again. When he banged a third time, no one answered in that house, but an elderly man stepped out onto the porch of the other house, looked at him and called out, “Don’t nobody live there. Who you looking for?”

  Dobbs plastered his best imitation of a smile on his face then, and called back, “Then this here, sir, is your lucky day.”

  T.J. Hamilton had once describe
d Dobbs as “a man whose still waters run deep … with sharks cruising around on the bottom.”

  Growing up in a bigoted world, the best friend of a black kid, had given Dobbs an appreciation for the contradictions in life as well as a skill he used often. Take a single true fact, “I’m late because I was out fishing, Ma…” with generalizations that skirted around the edges of that truth, “…with some guys…” and then chuck the truth altogether when he had to and put the best possible face he could on an outright lie: “…and Charlie Phillips stole my pole — that’s why I don’t have any fish.”

  Dobbs cleared his throat, swallowed once, hard, and put that long-honed skill to work, with the slightest bit of added pressure being that if he couldn’t pull this off, he and some other folks were minutes away from drowning.

  He lumbered back down the steps, crossed the yard and joined the man standing on the porch. A woman had come to stand behind him in the shadows. She appeared to have almost no hair. Sick, chemotherapy perhaps. But probably not. She had a certain look, her features thick and heavy, that was not as uncommon among mountain folk as some wanted to believe. For all the disclaimers about how mountaineers had been disrespected for years for inbreeding, the plain truth was that there had been, was now and at least for the foreseeable future would continue to be too much marrying among people too closely related to each other. It was unavoidable. If you were born, grew up and died within thirty miles of where your parents and grandparents had done the same, the gene pool was, of necessity, limited.

  Dobbs was out of breath by the time he made it up to stand in front of the man who had stepped back into his house but kept the screen door pushed open in front of him. Without missing a beat, Dobbs reached into the hip pocket of his overalls, pulled out his wallet and extracted from it a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill.

  “How’d you like to make yourself a hundred dollars?” he asked.

  The man was small and wiry, wearing no t-shirt under his overalls. His arms were scrawny, with boney nobs at the elbows and shoulders like the joints on an action figure doll that a kid could pose in different positions. Bald, except for a bathtub ring of gray hair above his ears, he wore wire-rimmed glasses, and now, up close, Dobbs could see the concave lips that indicated there was not a single tooth left in his mouth.

  But when he opened it to speak, Dobbs saw he’d been wrong. There were two. One on the upper right side, blackened and crooked, another on the bottom on the left. That tooth stood like a lone tombstone, straight and tall and perfectly white.

  A couple of different looks played across the man’s face as he stared at the hundred-dollar bill Dobbs held by the corner, the way you’d hold a dead mouse by the tail.

  One was greed. The other was suspicion.

  Suspicion won the tug-of-war.

  “Who are you and what do you want?” he demanded.

  Dobbs ignored the question and continued with the spiel he had constructed in his head in the handful of seconds he’d had to concoct it after he dropped T.J. in front of the previous house. T.J. was maybe going to use intimidation, a threat to get the people to run for their lives. Bailey would likely use charm. Dobbs wasn’t cut out to be good at either one. But he did have that hundred-dollar bill.

  “It’s your lucky day because those people ain’t home, which means you get to be the last person I offer this money to,” he said, affecting a totally authentic West Virginia dialect. “It ain’t no joke, ain’t no trick. I’m serious as a heart attack. This here one-hundred-dollar bill is yours — and I get to make fifty dollars for giving it to you — and all you got to do to earn it is run up the hillside behind your house.”

  The man pulled back into his house and started closing the door in Dobbs’s face.

  “You ain’t draggin’ a full string of fish!”

  “Okay, then, I’ll give you my fifty, too, ‘cause if I can’t get everybody in this holler to cooperate I don’t get no bonus. Just hear me out.”

  The man didn’t look any less suspicious, but upping the ante turned up the force of the greed in his eyes. One hundred and fifty dollars was a lot of money to a man like this. He hoped the man wouldn’t demand to see the fifty-dollar bill as well, because all Dobbs had left in his wallet was a twenty, a ten and a couple of ones.

  “Some flatlander from the University of Kentucky come knocking on my door a couple of days ago and said he was doing a survey for the U.S. Bureau of Mines. He give me some cock-and-bull story ‘bout why they wanted to know. But ‘neers ain’t stupid as them folks think we are and I know what he was really after. Them folks is covering their butts. They may say they’re gonna put warning sirens in all these hollers ‘cause they care about the safety of the folks who live down hollow from a strip-mine impoundment.” He made a disdainful sound in his throat. “Riiiiight. You and me both know they figure sirens is cheaper than the lawsuits they’d get slapped with if somethin’ happens to one of them dams.” He looked up the street toward the top of the hollow and his heart began to beat faster. He was taking entirely too long with this. Any second now … any second…

  “But I was glad to take the fool’s money!” Dobbs reached into his front pocket and pulled out Uncle Hurl’s pocket watch. “He give me this stopwatch, said he’d give me fifty dollars for every survey I completed and a two-hundred-dollar bonus if I got everybody in the holler to cooperate in the test.”

  He had the guy’s whole attention now. He had not stopped looking at the $100 bill since Dobbs took it out of his wallet.

  “What test?”

  “All’s you got to do is run up the side of the mountain.” He indicated it with his chin. “Fast as you can. And I got to use this here stopwatch to time how long it takes you to get up a hundred feet.”

  The man started to close the door again.

  “Yore crazy.”

  Dobbs wanted to push, offer something else. But he was good at reading people, so he took a chance.

  Letting out an elaborate sigh, he dropped the watch back into the front pocket of his pants and reached for his wallet to return the hundred-dollar bill.

  “Suit yourself. You just cost yourself a hundred and fifty dollars and me two hundred.” He gestured back up the road. “You’re the only man on this road didn’t need the money. Seth Cosgrove’s family made it out of the house and up the hill in thirty-seven seconds flat, and he’s got them little kids and a baby. He made $175, $100 for participating and a $25 bonus for every child under the age of seven.” Dobbs paused for a beat. “Maybe he’ll use some of it to buy a case of beer and you can help him celebrate.”

  It took every bit of strength Dobbs had to turn around and start slowly back down the porch steps.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Kavanaugh County Sheriff Brice McGreggor ran as fast as he could up the rutted dirt road, leapt the potholes and circled several rocks as big as washing machines. He held his rifle in the low-ready position — snug against his shoulder with the barrel pointed at the ground. As he approached the flattened top of the mountain, he slowed. Moved from cover to cover. Behind a big rock. Shielded by a mound of fossilized coal sludge that had been returned to its original solid state by time and the sun. But there was no cover at the top. It was flat and featureless.

  As he climbed, he saw tire tracks in the soft dirt. A Jeep. Raymond Dobson drove a Jeep. But so did every third mountaineer in Kavanaugh County. It meant nothing, and even if it did mean something, he couldn’t think about that and the ramifications of it right now.

  Peering out from behind the last large rock, he could see nothing but an expanse of flat dirt. But he was on the level of the lake. The dam itself sloped down in front of the lake with rocks piled up on the steep incline that led to the hollow below. He couldn’t see anyone on that incline without coming out into the open. And as soon as he did, he’d be a target.

  He stepped out from behind the rock. Standing tall the better to see over the lip of the dam. He lifted the rifle barrel, cocked his head to the side to look thro
ugh the sight, a small optic with a four-power magnification, the kind used by the military. He’d only taken a couple of steps when he heard a voice from the other side of the dam, someone down on the face of it. The someone was laughing.

  “How’d you do that?” The sheriff advanced in the direction of the voice, rifle ready. “How’d you find me?”

  As he approached the dam, a man came into view, standing on a rock about twenty feet below the top of the dam, halfway across. Just standing there, his hands hanging loose at his sides. A single piece of duct tape was wrapped around one of them, all the way around the back of the hand and the palm.

  The description given to law enforcement agencies in three states had been accurate. The man was six feet, 170 pounds, wearing a black t-shirt and jeans. The t-shirt had a white skull emblazoned on the on the front. His face was all sharp angles, hard enough to break up concrete.

  As he got nearer, Brice could see a blue nylon backpack on a nearby rock. It was unzipped and flat, appeared to be empty. In a single sweeping glance, Brice put it together. Some of the rocks near the flat backpack were dark on one side. Damp from the dirt that had been beneath them before they’d been moved. The man had shoved the rocks aside, digging to make a hole for…

  “Get your hands in the air and lock your fingers behind your head,” Brice called out as he continued walking slowly toward the man.

  “Think you can stop me, do you?”

  “Do it now.”

  “And if I don’t? What are you going to do, shoot me?”

  “Derrick Osbourne, you are under arrest for attempted murder of a police officer.” Unless Fletch hadn’t made it out of surgery. Then, the charge would be murder. As he spoke, the sheriff continued to move closer, closing the distance between them. If he had to shoot, he couldn’t miss, and the man was still too far away. “You have the right to remain silent. If you give up—”

  “Put a sock in it. I know what my rights are.”