The Dragon's Playlist

by Laura Bickle

  I didn’t move to pick up the money. “You’re paying for it?” I asked dubiously.

  He nodded. “It’s the right thing to do.”

  “I don’t take money from strangers.” The rule my mom had drilled into my head now sounded as if it were best said by an eight-year-old.

  He stuck out his hand. “I’m Will.”

  I stared at his hand for a moment before taking it. “Di.”

  “There, we’re not strangers anymore.” His face split into a smile. It was so white and perfect, he must’ve seen a better dentist than the orthodontist in town who’d made my teen years hell.

  “You’re not from around here,” I said, sounding like a cowboy. I glanced at the money on the counter, still undecided about whether or not to take it.

  “No. Most of my group is from up northeast. We work on political action in the summers off from our environmental sciences programs in grad school. But we’ve met some sympathetic folks around here, folded them into the cause.”

  “You get extra credit for that?” I said sarcastically.

  “We get extra credit for gathering data. My master’s thesis is on the short and long term effects of acid drainage from coal mines.”

  “And you picked our backyard to do this in.”

  “It is the site of a new mine.”

  “I thought most research involving humans required non-interference. Observe only, unless you’re willing to get human subjects’ approval.” I had him. If he was trying to socially engineer our little community, this kind of shit would not stand in any peer-reviewed paper.

  “The data itself doesn’t involve humans. I can take pH samples from any river that’s publicly accessible. The protesting part...well, that’s more for our own ethical edification.”

  “Oh. Gotta educate the poor hicks about the error of their ways?”

  He flapped his hands. “We really just want to have a discussion. When the environment gets polluted, it affects everyone. Your mining company has applied for an EPA permit to blast mine Sawtooth Mountain. Level the mountain and dump it in the valley. If nobody stands up and says no, they’ll do it. And you guys will lose jobs... Takes a lot fewer surface miners to scalp a mountain than slope mine in shafts...”

  “It doesn’t affect you.” My face heated. “Your livelihood isn’t dependent on any of this. When school starts in the fall, you’ll be gone, on another project.”

  “Blast mining is catastrophic. Distorts the whole ecosystem. That runoff affects much larger rivers, poisons streams hundreds of miles away...”

  “Leave these decisions to those of us who are forced to live here.” Bitterness seeped into my voice. “As my father would say, you’ve got no dog in this fight.”

  He lifted his hands up. “All we want to do is talk about it.”

  “And throw some rocks.” I turned on my heel to stomp away.

  His voice carried after me: “Don’t forget your money.”

  As much as it pained me, I’d left it behind.

  “Let me know if you want to see the truth someday,” he shouted.

  He thought I was a dumb hick.

  And the only thing worse than being a dumb hick was a greedy dumb hick.

  I had my principles, too.

  Even if I wasn’t quite sure what they were, yet.

  CHAPTER 7

  I DIDN’T RETURN TO THE house until the lights had gone out. I let myself in quietly, avoiding each squeak in the kitchen floor. My mother had left a plate of cookies covered in plastic wrap on the table. A peace offering.

  My hand snaked under the plastic wrap. The cookies were no longer oven-warm, but they were my favorite. Chocolate chip. Remembering that I hadn’t eaten, I scarfed down a half dozen with a glass of milk.

  My mother and I rarely fought. Whatever our faults, we tended to forgive quickly and didn’t speak of conflict or anger afterward. This was the resolution in the dark kitchen.

  I didn’t think I’d bear a grudge. Didn’t want to. But there was a cold, still part of my stomach that wasn’t satisfied with cookies and milk. That yearned for more.

  I crept into the dark living room to check on my father. I expected to see him in his recliner, twitching in his sleep and mumbling about shadows.

  But he was awake.

  He was staring at the television. It was on mute, and static seethed across the screen.

  “Hi, Di.”

  “Hi, Dad.” I padded across the floor and forced myself to kiss the top of his head, which suddenly seemed balder than it had been. I’d been avoiding him, afraid to see what he’d become. I wanted him to remain the bear of a man he’d always been in my mind. And the more I saw him like this, the more he felt diminished. He grew smaller and faded, and I couldn’t stomach it.

  I sat at the edge of the couch, uneasily. In the darkness and static-shadow, it was easier to imagine him as who he used to be. I could pretend.

  I closed my eyes, tried to picture him whole. “How are you feeling?”

  “Like I got my ass kicked.” His words slurred, and there was a thin whistle that could’ve been a laugh. “But how are you, Smurfette?”

  Nobody had asked me that since I’d come home. And my father hadn’t called me that since I was in fourth grade. A lump rose in my throat. “I think I’m okay. Just sort of confused about stuff.”

  “What stuff?”

  “What I’m supposed to do.” I opened my eyes and stared at the television, unable to keep the illusion of darkness and normalcy wrapped around me. Funny. Shapes seemed to writhe in it. Like one of the mirrors in Julie’s books. Almost like silhouettes of people were moving in it. A faint hiss accompanied their movements. Or maybe that was just my imagination.

  “Life’s full of ‘shoulds.’ It sometimes feels like you’re in a box, one that keeps getting smaller.” He messed up his s sounds, a little like a cartoon snake. I guessed it was the medicine.

  “Yeah.” If I stared hard enough at the screen, there seemed to be a large man and a little girl in it. My psychology professor would undoubtedly call it projecting. Maybe pareidolia?

  “Di, you’ve always tried to do the Right Thing. But there’s no such thing.”

  “What?”

  “There’s no such thing. You do the best you can at the time. But don’t let yourself get boxed in by what other people think you should do. Before you know it, you’ll be living your life for others. And you’ll wake up one morning wondering what happened to your life.”

  “Do you…do you feel that way?”

  The hiss of a laugh again. “Oh, yes. The thing about being stuck in this chair…gives me cause to think. A lot. And as much as I love you and your mother, I wish that I’d taken the two of you somewhere else.”

  “Dad. We’ve had a good life.” A shadow passed over the screen, like a big wing.

  “It would’ve been better somewhere else. But I was afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?” I couldn’t imagine him being afraid of anything. Not my father.

  “Of moving someplace I didn’t know. Of doing something different than what my father had done. Having to start over, in a funny landscape that didn’t feel like home. Afraid of change. It was just easier to stay one more day. And each day rolled right on into the next. Years passed. And here we are.”

  The big and small figures seemed to come back on the screen, but some distance separated them. “You aren’t—weren’t—happy?”

  “I was content. Safe. But I never reached any of the ambitions I had when I was your age.”

  That startled me. I couldn’t imagine him wanting anything other than what he already had. “What was it you wanted?”

  “You’ll laugh.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I wanted to be a big city cop. Like those detectives on television. With the new shiny cars, and the motorcycles, and fancy suits. I wanted to be one of those guys. A good guy. Fighting the good fight, saving the world from bad guys. And looking pretty darn cool doing it.”

  Actually,
I could sort of picture it. He’d always religiously watched Law and Order. “Why didn’t you?”

  “Life happened. I met your mom, and she didn’t want to move. We got married, and we had a baby. We tried moving her parents in with us, until her dad went off the beam. And then my parents died, and then…”

  He trailed off, and I thought he was asleep. I felt a deep pang of guilt at being part of the cause of him staying. But then he whispered: “But I was afraid. That’s the truth of it. I was afraid of failing. That what I wanted wasn’t real.”

  “Dad, I—”

  “Don’t be me. Don’t stay here. Go and grab life by the tail, Di.”

  “Dad…”

  But a snore emanated from his chair.

  The small figure on the screen was alone now.

  I took that feeling to bed with me and woke up with it the next morning. I rose in the gray light before dawn, showered, and dressed in my mother’s clothes. I fiddled with the blue streaks in my hair before tucking them behind my wide headband. I supposed I should cut them off or find some way to bleach them out. Maybe I could dye my hair brown to cover it.

  The coffee pot was percolating by the time I made it to the kitchen, still on the timer for my father’s shift work. I took the first cup, poured it into a travel mug. I made my lunch, as I used to do when I was in school: peanut butter and jelly with an apple and a granola bar. By the time my mother stirred upstairs, I was out the door into the misty dawn.

  Off to my first day of work.

  I don’t know what I expected, really. I’d had jobs before, but not of the office kind. I knew to show up, take notes, and do as I was told. I was good at that part.

  I followed the ribbon of road to the mine, picking out the outline of Sawtooth Mountain on the horizon. What Will had said last night, that they intended to flatten it…what would that mean for the underground miners? Would they be retrained for surface mining? Or, would jobs really be lost?

  That was what the picket signs said. True to Will’s word, the protesters were staged two hundred feet from the entrance to the mine, along the main road. I held my breath as I fell in line behind a group of cars pulling into the parking lot. The protestors waved their signs, but seemed oddly subdued. They were fewer in number than yesterday, and some of the young men sported bruises.

  Will stood beside the white line at the edge of the road. His eyes met mine through the broken windshield, but he made no other suggestion that he knew me.

  I drove past, following the train of cars through the gate. There was a sheriff’s deputy car parked beside the gate, and the deputy was in the gatehouse, talking to the security guard from yesterday. When I pulled up to the window to wait for the arm on the security gate to be lifted, the guard pointed to my car and said something behind the glass that I couldn’t hear. The deputy flagged me over to the side of the road while the other cars passed by. He stood beside my car with his thumbs in his belt loops. One of his knuckles had a Band-Aid on it. Had he been the one to give Will his shiner?

  “Security told me what happened to your car yesterday, ma’am,” he said.

  I blinked. No one had ever called me “ma’am” before. Maybe my mother’s clothes made me look older. I fingered the lace cuff on my blouse self-consciously.

  “Um, yeah.” I hoped to God he wasn’t going to write me a ticket for the broken windshield that I couldn’t afford.

  “The mine administrator wanted me to find out if you want to swear out a police report so we can make an arrest.” He leaned on the top of the car and squatted down, looking at me through his sunglasses.

  I didn’t feel like I had much choice. But something rebellious turned in me. “No, that’s okay. I’ll just go get it fixed.”

  He frowned beneath his mustache. “Did you see which one of ’em threw the rock?”

  I shook my head. “I couldn’t see...it was all really fast.”

  I couldn’t tell what he was thinking behind those dark glasses. His finger tapped on the thin roof of the car, like a trickle of rain from a gutter.

  “Please. I have to get to work. I can’t be late... It’s my first day,” I said at last, knotting my fingers at the bottom of the steering wheel.

  He stood back then, gestured to the windshield. “Get that fixed. I don’t want to give you a ticket.”

  I swallowed hard. “Thank you.”

  I joined the school of vehicles swimming to the parking lot. I snagged my notebook and lunch, and minced through the gravel to avoid scuffing my mother’s good shoes. A stream of men descended into the mine like ants, lunch pails and time cards in their hands.

  At the end of the lot stood Jason’s truck. He was sitting in the cab, staring into the rearview mirror. Our eyes met, and he nodded. He must’ve been waiting there for me. I don’t know if he meant to talk with me or just make sure I arrived safely. With him, it could’ve been either.

  I didn’t want to talk right now, so I scurried to the trailer as fast as my borrowed shoes could carry me.

  Mr. Peters, sitting behind his desk, glanced up at me, then the clock.

  I held my breath. I was five minutes early. My dad had always been early. Most of the men who worked the mine were.

  Peters looked away from the clock. “Good morning, Di.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Peters.”

  He frowned under his mustache. “I heard you ran into some trouble yesterday. I’m sorry about that.”

  “It was no big deal.”

  “In the future, security will see you to the end of the road. That was uncalled for, and it won’t happen again.” The tone of his voice led me to believe he really had the power to make that happen. He reached into his desk drawer, pulled out an envelope, and handed it to me.

  It wasn’t sealed, and I looked inside. A keycard to bypass the gate, and a handful of twenty dollar bills.

  “That’s not necessary,” I protested. My face burned. I hoped to God they hadn’t taken up a collection for my windshield the way they had when my dad got hurt...

  He shook his head, waved his hands dismissively. “Consider it hazard pay. The company will make it right. In the meantime...I hope you took good notes yesterday. Gabby went to the hospital at three a.m.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “Still in labor, last I heard.” He sighed. “Big labor for a little girl. But she’s tough.” He stabbed a thumb at the back office. “If you wanna get started organizing the timesheets, that would be great.”

  “Yessir. Thank you, sir.”

  I looked at the envelope, tucked it in my pocket.

  Funny how I wouldn’t take Will’s money. But I’d sure take the company’s.

  *

  Gabby had left me good notes, both on her work and the boss’s coffee preferences.

  I kept the coffee pot percolating all day, and Peters drank like a water buffalo. The phone rang infrequently, and mostly with questions about time cards and mailing addresses that I could call back about. I organized the timesheets by supervisor and flagged the ones with colored sticky notes that still needed signatures. Peters came and went, and I had a good deal of time to myself to dig through the files and familiarize myself with the place. Gabby had thankfully taped her password to the corner of her computer monitor and left the voicemail password by the telephone. I took the fax machine apart before I figured out how to load paper, too embarrassed to ask Mr. Peters for help.

  Gabby’s desk faced a small window that looked out on the mountain. She kept a spider plant by the windowsill that I dutifully watered, spilling water on a file cabinet containing voluminous files of EPA regulations and Army Corps of Engineers feasibility studies. I avoided the cabinet labeled “SAFETY INCIDENT REPORTING” entirely. I wasn’t ready to read about the details of my dad’s accident. Not now. Maybe not ever.

  Peters returned at midday to tell me to go to lunch.

  “Get outta here.” He waved to the door. “Just be back in an hour.”

  I grabbed my lunch and headed toward m
y car. The first shift of men was already on lunch break. Some of them ate outside, others climbing into their cars to head into town to pick something up. I sat behind the wheel with my lunch in my lap and stared at my watch. I didn’t want Jason to find me. I didn’t want to talk. And the car was stuffy in the spring heat. I reached into the backseat for my violin and old tennis shoes.

  Leaving my mother’s pumps on the floor of the car, I climbed out, then headed across the lot toward the lush greenness of the mountains.

  I climbed uphill for about fifteen minutes. After being inside with the air conditioning, it felt good to be moving. Pausing on a slope facing away from the mine, I found a flat piece of sandstone that was warm from the sun. I spread out my lunch and ate it among the blooming rhododendrons, contemplating the silhouette of Sawtooth Mountain. I took my shoes off and pressed my bare feet to the gritty stone. Some of the vibrations from the mining and heavy equipment grumbled here, even on the blind side. It was a rough, staccato rhythm, not a musical hum.

  I opened my violin case, picked up my instrument. I pressed the wood to my chin, closed my eyes, and drew my bow across the strings. Though I could feel the jarring rhythm of the inexorable mining beneath my feet, I tried to find my own music, obliterate it with the murmur of the strings. My fingers pressed the strings, and the notes reflected from the body of the instrument thrummed in my throat.

  The violin sang, almost of its own accord, an old song my mother used to play on the radio, “Landslide,” by Fleetwood Mac. Stevie Nicks’s gravelly voice echoed in my head like rain in a metal bucket, singing about mountains, and changes, and her father. As I played, my pulse adjusted to meet the rhythm and tempo. Each inhalation came in unison with a saw of the bow. Every cell of my body sang.

  And, for a moment, I forgot. I wasn’t Di. I was just the song, ephemeral and incapable of being captured. I imagined those released notes traveling deep within the world, never fading, vibrating like the bits of matter I’d read about in string theory. Eternal and wild.