by Robert Gipe
It come on me how bad I wanted brown liquor and ginger ale. I hadn’t drunk much since Nicolette’d been born. But right then, standing in that stupid store building, I wanted somebody to sit on the porch and drink liquor with. Somebody new. Somebody perfect. I said, “Come on, Nicolette,” and we went and sat on the courthouse lawn, with our back to a memorial naming everybody ever got killed in a coal mine in Canard County. Take you all day to read the names. Hundreds of them. I felt bad for every one of them, every husband, every mother’s son. But them being dead didn’t make smaller the all-day puke feeling in my stomach.
Weedeater was working for June, standing on the sidewalk holding an empty woven plastic bag, kind fifty pounds of cement powder come in. His brother was in a third-story window dropping bricks and chunks of block down on him, and Weedeater caught the bricks in the bag, or let them crash on the sidewalk if they was too big, and everyone walking down the street crossed over to the courthouse side so they didn’t have to walk through Weedeater’s dumbass ground zero.
The air got dead hot and me and Nicolette moved under a oak tree. I set there watching the stupid roll off Weedeater and his brother. June was inside, supervising her students fiddlefarting around. Weedeater caught a chunk of block in the sack, like the sack was a hammock and the block was jumping in it to take a nap. It was pretty to watch, the way he’d bend his knees and slack the bag to catch the weight, pretty like lightning is right up until the second it strikes something belongs to you and fries the shit out of it.
When June looked out the window and seen Weedeater catching that block, she went, “OH!” so big you could see it through the plate glass. She come running out and hollered at Weedeater to stop. When she hollered, he looked up, and a brick hit him right between the shoulder blades and doubled him over. His face twisted up and then the second brick busted him in the small of the back and he went to his hands and knees, sidewalk tearing the skin off the heel of his hands.
I smacked a mosquito on Nicolette’s thigh, made her a tiny insect blood tattoo. I flicked the dead mosquito and he went flying through the air leg over leg. Weedeater rolled over on his back, his legs churning like he was dreaming about riding a bicycle. June got down on her knees beside him, head going back and forth like she didn’t know what to do. Weedeater’s brother set in the third-story window frame and lit a cigarette. The skank Belinda Coates and Evie and the rest of the people taking June’s class come out to see what happened. Belinda and Evie lit cigarettes.
Belinda said, “Did it kill him?”
Evie kicked Weedeater in the foot.
Weedeater groaned: “Uhhhhh.”
Evie said, “Don’t reckon.”
“Gene,” June said, “can you hear me?”
Weedeater’s eyes fluttered open. “I can work,” he said, and raised up on his elbows.
“No, he can’t,” Evie said. “Watch them eyes roll. That’s what they do before they go in a coma.”
“Gene,” Aunt June said, “can you stand up?”
Gene rolled over, got on his hands and knees.
Evie said, “I bet he can’t.”
Weedeater stood up, and then wobbled. June got him around the waist.
June said, “Help me, Evie.”
Evie looked at Belinda, then got ahold of Weedeater under his arm. Weedeater lurched forward and about took June and Evie down with him. June got under him and held him up, kept him from crashing to the sidewalk. June and Evie walked him over to the curb and set him down.
Evie said, “This means we don’t have to work no more, right?”
By that time me and Nicolette was standing over there with them. I didn’t much care for Weedeater, but if he was going to die, I wanted to see it. But when I got close enough to see in his face, that he wasn’t going to die was obvious.
Weedeater said, “Where’s Brother?”
Evie squatted between the truck and motorcycle parked against the curb where Weedeater sat and looked him dead in the eye.
She said, “He’s up there,” and pointed to where his brother perched.
Weedeater pushed his head back until he could see what was behind and above him and said, “Brother, don’t fall.” Then he lowered his head back down, his eyes all buggy.
“June,” Evie said, “you better send him on home. Fore he sues you.”
June said, “Hush, Evie.”
I said to Evie, “You can’t quit till you gone too far, can you?”
Belinda Coates said, “Well, it’s true, aint it?”
I looked Belinda Coates dead in her eye in case it was possible to kill a person with pure hate. Kill my dog. You must’ve lost your mind when you done that, Belinda Coates.
“Hey!” Evie hollered up at Weedeater’s brother. “You need to take him home.”
Weedeater’s brother set there with his arms crossed, smoke rising out from between his fingers.
“Say!” Evie said.
Weedeater’s brother tapped the ash off his cigarette.
Evie said, “You better hope don’t none of that get on me. I’ll come up there and beat your ass myself.”
Weedeater’s brother didn’t say nothing. I doubt he was scared of Evie, but he didn’t much look like one to fight.
Belinda Coates said, “What are you doing here?,” looking at me.
I heard they was having a pillhead bitch contest and I come to put my money on you, I wanted to say, but since Nicolette was there I didn’t say a thing.
Nicolette took hold of my hand and said to Belinda Coates, “You’re not nice,” and then she looked at me and said, “What’s wrong with her?”
I said, “Hush, baby. Or she’ll take you to court.”
Weedeater stood up and said, “Where’s my bag?” And he started to spin like an airplane in a war movie that’s had its wing shot off.
Evie said, “June, you better get him out of here.”
June said, “Maybe we should take him to the hospital,” and when the word “hospital” come out of her mouth, Weedeater’s brother went, “Now hold on there,” and he come flying down the stairs out to us, said, “This here’s a family matter. You aint sticking him with no big hospital bill.”
Belinda said, “It’s the college ought to pay, itn’t it? He was doing work for the college. They got insurance. They got to.” Then she got over in Weedeater’s face, who was by then leaning on the front of the truck there at the curb, and said, “I bet that smarts, don’t it, Gene? I bet your organs are bruised and busted from that, aint they?”
Evie said, “He could be drowning in his own juices and not know it.”
“Here,” Belinda said, “you ride in my car.”
It had got confusing fast for Weedeater’s brother. You could see it on his face.
June said, “I guess we should get you checked out, Gene. If the college won’t pay, I will. It’ll be OK.”
June had got soft living in Tennessee. You don’t say you’re going to pay people’s doctor’s bills, even if you are.
Her saying that made me not want to stay in Tennessee.
GENE
That Woman took me to the hospital in her little red car. Brother rode up front. They didn’t talk much, Brother and That Woman. I did hear That Woman say she was sorry for hollering at me, getting me distracted, getting me hit in the back with a hunk of concrete.
“That’s all right,” I heard Brother say. “He’s easy distracted.”
That’s good, I thought. I didn’t want That Woman feeling bad.
When we got down there to that hospital, the one in Canard, I was hearing little birds sing. I asked Brother were there really birds singing, and he said he didn’t know, maybe, somewhere they was birds singing.
DAWN
June took Weedeater and his brother to the emergency room, and did get the college to pay for it, but I reckon she got in some hot water for it, cause they was waivers she didn’t get everybody to sign, but the college did pay for Weedeater’s hospital. I reckon they took their time on it, and
Weedeater’s brother was sore about it, still sore about it, always will be sore about it, I reckon.
Weedeater was all right, nothing broken, but the college told June Weedeater couldn’t work no more for them, not on June’s projects, cause he didn’t have sense enough. When June told him, he started crying, which gave me the creeps cause a man cry over a piddly little job like June was giving him, aint no telling what all else he’d do. I mean, she was still letting him mow her yard. Wasn’t like she put him on a train out of town.
Also, it turned out Pharoah, the dog I got for June that I always wished for my own, wasn’t killed after all. She was hemmed up in the house all day while June was doing her Hollywood sign, but after the college fired Weedeater, many days Pharoah went to stay with Weedeater. Which was fine, cause June kept her flea medicine up to date.
GENE
Before light the morning after That Woman sent me home from her sign-making job, Sister’s old man come banging at the front door window to the little house out behind Sister’s. I was dead asleep in the chair. Pharaoh come up off her front feet, barking in a fright. Sister’s old man wore khaki work clothes, partying-like-a-younger-man lines around his eyes.
He said, “Gene, you want to work?” They was already sweat on his lip and forehead.
I asked him where at.
“Running coal,” he said. “Up Dogsplint.”
I went with him in my day-before clothes and he didn’t stop talking the whole way up Drop Creek.
“This is your chance,” he said. “Change your life.”
He talked like he didn’t have no part in Sister killing herself.
“You do a good job here,” he said, “and you could be working a good long while. The work is lined out.” Said it like I didn’t know he was into them pills, like I didn’t come in there and find him wasted, popcorn all over the floor, scrawny blond head in his lap strung to a bag-of-bones body.
“I’m counting on you not to screw this up,” he said, like I didn’t know. “You think you can do that?”
I just let him drive, looked out the window, tried to think of something else. We drove by a gang of men in jail orange weedeating, hanging off the sides of a gulley, chewing tobacco and not looking up. Their T-shirts was dirty and yellow.
* * *
THEY’S A lot of training you go through before they let you work in a coal mine. Training on the equipment, safety training, training on all the laws, training on what to do if something goes wrong. I done all that back in the spring, got my miner’s card, and Sister’s old man tried to get me to work then, but after Sister shot herself, I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t do nothing, really. They’s a couple days couldn’t nobody find me. I run up on the mountain behind Granny’s, out where me and Brother played when we was boys. I stayed up there in the spring woods, little sprigs of green and purple, pretty yellow sprouts poking up through the dead leaves, for most of a week.
I piled brush and heaped up rocks, tried to tidy the woods best I could. I don’t know why. Wadn’t no point to it. Just piling stuff up. Sleeping in the wet, listening to the rain.
Ever since that time, when I see something human-made out in the woods, like a little run of rock wall, or rocks set in a square—most times, I expect I’m like you, I think, well, they must’ve been a house here, or some cow pasture or cornfield, and generally, I expect that’s right, that’s what it was. But now I think too maybe that was some other person’s life flown all to pieces and they come out here to set something in order where nobody but the birds and squirrels would bear witness. We just don’t know what all’s happened, do we?
As we pulled up to the mine, a memory come to me. At that training for coal miners I went to, one of them running it asked me to carry a tray of danishes with frosting striped across them, each wrapped up by itself, into the room where the coffee was. One man grabbed one off as I went by, but ever time I got to a door, one of them men would open it for me, or push them fellers piled up in the hall out of the way. Somebody was always watching out, making sure I got on my way, and I got it in my head that meant something about coal miners, about how they pay attention to each other, pay attention to how to keep things moving forward.
When I got to the mine, they give me stripes to wear, said I’d pay em back out of my first check. Same for the rubber boots with a steel toe. They give me a respirator in case I got into bad air. They give me a battery for my light, which hitched to the front of my hard plastic cap.
I was sitting there with my stuff on, my back against the strand-board wall of the locker room, when a man decked out same as me come smiling my way. He was clean and red-bearded and you look in his eyes and they was calm, like Sunday morning, like That Woman’s eyes, and you could tell he’d be a good one to work with, that he’d work safe and not let you get in trouble. He stuck his hand out.
He said, “Denny Stack.”
I told him my name and he asked was I ready to go. I said I was. We stepped out into the hot damp of the July morning and into the cool dark of the mine, like stepping into the mouth of a giant fish just come out of the water. There were fans big as Granny’s dinner table pushing air in one tunnel, pushing it out another. Cables snaked in and out of there, cable thick as a child’s arm, carrying juice to run the equipment. The walls of the mine, called ribs, were solid coal. Cutting machines ran loud as locomotives, steel toothbrushes with drill-bit bristles scrubbing the coal from the wall onto a belt. The belts rumbled and rattled on their supports, carrying the coal out of the mine. The coal seam would rise and fall in height and so then would the top, which was rock, not coal.
“Don’t pay to move rock,” Denny said.
We kept walking in. It didn’t seem real to me. Seemed like I was in a movie come on after you went to sleep in your chair.
“You get used to it,” Denny said.
I barely seen Denny behind the light on his cap. He was glare and shadow. My cap was green, cause I was green. Green cap showed everybody to watch out for you. That you was new. This mine was the one Dawn’s daddy died in, Hubert’s brother. A coal-cutting machine had pinned him to the rib, cut him in half. Denny told me about that as the seam got lower, squatting as he caught his breath.
We had been walking twenty minutes I guess. The top was four feet off the floor, and it kept sloping down till it was like crawling around under a house that didn’t never end.
“You get used to it,” Denny said again.
Denny told me about a man who got into juice, got fried like a squirrel. He told me about big round rocks that fell out of the ceiling, looked like the big kettles the old people used to render their lard and make their soap.
“Kettle rock drop right out of the top,” Denny said. “Mash you flat as a flitter.”
We got to the place where I was going to be working, the seam barely a yard high. Denny shone his light down on the ground beside where the big conveyor belt was carrying out coal. He said, “See that coal’s fell off the belt?”
I said I did. We was both on our knees by then. Mostly over on our elbows, too.
“Well,” Denny said, “that’s your coal. Shovel it back on the belt.”
“Then what?” I said.
“Aint no then what,” Denny said. “You just move on down the line and do it again. Till somebody come and get you.”
I threw my light down the tunnel. The light just run out of gas in the darkness, stopped shining, and the darkness went right on.
“Here’s how,” Denny said, and he lay over on his side, started shoveling coal back on the belt.
Looked to me like about the most uncomfortable, unnatural act I’d ever seen.
“You got it?” Denny said over the rumble of the belt.
I said I did. Denny nodded, handed me the shovel, said he’d be back after while. Said he’d come get me around dinner time. I went to shoveling, on my back in the gray mud, my shoulder mashed into the ground, my side getting wet, throwing the shovelsful of coal across my front onto the belt. The grind of
the cutting machine came to me through the dark up the belt, ungodly loud. I kept scooting down the beltline, kept shoveling, but after I guess thirty shovel loads I tried to sit up, but the top wasn’t hardly high enough for me to do it, so I lay back down and kept shoveling. It was hard to get my light on what I was shoveling, but I kept at it. Kept at it. It wasn’t twenty minutes I wanted out of there so bad I thought I might cry. But I kept on. Move, arms, move, I said to my arms.
It was cool in the mine, so I didn’t really notice when I started sweating. When I did, I took me a drink out of the milk jug of water Denny’d give me. Since I couldn’t hardly raise up I had to kind of lean sideways and tip that jug into my mouth. I lost a fair amount of what come out. Then I went back to scooting and shoveling. I tried counting the shovel loads. Got up to five hundred and I had to go to the bathroom. Sister’s old man had got me a big coffee which I don’t normally drink. I crawled down the tunnel got into a side spot, worked my pants down, and cut loose right there on the ground. Heard something squeak like an old car trunk hinge when that poop of mine hit, a rat most likely. I went back to shoveling.
While I was working, I tried to think of something else—birds flying through the sky, the sky so big and white. Leaves floating down off trees in the fall of the year, swirling in the sky, headed ever which way like people coming out of a ballgame. But I couldn’t think of anything for long, because my shovel would stop.
And Denny’d told me: don’t let that shovel stop.
I loaded the shovel blade again. Turned it out on the belt. Again. Again. Again. I kept thinking any second they was going to come and tell me it was time for a dinner break, and they didn’t come and didn’t come. Then come out of my throat a baby noise, and then tears, and I cried. I aint going to lie to you. The tears come out of me like I was a busted main.