by Robert Gipe
DAWN
Me and Nicolette ate bubble-gum ice cream for breakfast. Hubert had potatoes. The July sun come early, made it hot in the booth closest to the front window in the old drugstore. Nicolette wore orange, purple, and white striped tights, her favorites. I told her she was going to burn up, but she said she didn’t care. Said she wanted to play I-Spy.
“I spy with my little eye something black,” Nicolette said. “Something black, Momma.”
I said, “Hush, baby.”
Hubert said, “You shouldn’t give her ice cream for breakfast.”
Hubert rolled his bottom lip between his teeth. He had ketchup in his beard hairs. I asked Hubert did Sidney Coates know Momma stole his thirty thousand dollars. Hubert drank coffee, stared at nothing.
Nicolette said, “Can I go to the bathroom?”
I said, “I’ll take you in a minute.”
Nicolette said she could go by herself.
I said, “No, you can’t.”
She said, “Yes, I can.”
I said, “Listen, if you’re not back in two minutes, I’m coming to get you.”
Nicolette took off running and I ate some of her ice cream, asked Hubert how he was going to find Momma.
Hubert said, “I’ll find her.”
I said, “I want to go with you when you hunt her.”
I said, “I’m going.”
Hubert said, “What are you going to do with her?” and pointed towards the bathroom.
I said, “Leave her with Houston.”
Hubert blew across his coffee.
I said, “She’ll be all right.”
Hubert said, “It’s been two minutes.”
I said, “Do what?”
Hubert said, “Since she went to the bathroom.”
“So?” I said. “She’s slow.”
Hubert said, “You told her you’d come get her.”
My mind crowded up like a teenager’s funeral visitation. Momma pilled up. Momma snitching on Sidney Coates for selling pills and cocaine and everything else. Sidney Coates getting busted and the cash in his house seized. Hubert trying to pay back Sidney the money he lost so Sidney don’t kill Momma. Momma stealing the money Hubert was going to give Sidney to keep him from killing her and then her run off with it with a tanning-bed addict from Tennessee. And the thing was, it wasn’t just us. Everybody in the county had some crazy like that. Idiots fanning out from Drop Creek to Feist, like locusts in the Bible, stealing anything the pawn shop would take, passed out and pissing on decent people’s sofas, staggering through the dollar store like zombies. The whole thing weighed you down. Made you feel like you were packing cinder blocks everywhere you went.
I turned to see Nicolette put her foot on the bottom row of the birthday card rack next to the table, wanting a higher-up card. I caught the rack right as it was about to tip.
Nicolette said, “Momma Trish needs a card,” the stripes over her serious pudgy thighs knocking together at the knees. “She could be scared. She could be getting robbed on the road or stabbed with a knife or throwed in the river.”
Nicolette had been listening to murder ballads with her papaw Houston.
I put her back in the booth, said, “What good’s a card gonna do if she’s stabbed or throwed in the river?”
Nicolette said, “I don’t know.”
I asked her which one she picked. She showed me one with a dog on it, said some dopey thing about birthdays and dog years.
Sidney Coates come in the diner, his lips shiny and fish-thick. His eyes darted around like unruly children. Smell of blood filled my nose. You could always smell blood on Sidney Coates, but you never could see it. He slid into a booth on the other side of the store.
All of them were going to jail. Hubert. Sidney Coates. Albert. Evie. They were going to get rounded up like everybody else, get their picture put in the paper in V-neck T-shirt and tank-top sleeping clothes, khaki pants and housedresses pulled on right before they got cuffed, parading in front of cameras, not even covering their faces, sit in jail a while, come out meaner and tireder and looking less like they thought they could ever win. You felt sorry for them.
Sidney Coates sat drinking coffee with one hand and pop with the other. The waitress brought him a dish of ice cream, and he spooned it in his coffee. He spooned it in his pop, too. Hubert sat looking at Sidney Coates. Sidney Coates raised up like his back hurt. Hubert got up and went over to Sidney Coates’s booth.
They sat there like they were old farmers talking about hay and husbands lost their way. They sat with their hands on the table, their backs straight, like standup citizens. Their lips barely moved when they spoke. Their heads didn’t move at all. I figured Hubert was trying to get Sidney to go easy on Momma even though he didn’t have the money to pay back what Momma cost Sidney. Whatever Sidney was saying was mostly no, because Hubert’s neck started stretching. His head moved towards Sidney Coates. Hubert’s mouth opened wider and his jaw hinged open and closed faster.
Sidney Coates took a pen out of his shirt pocket and started drawing on a napkin. Nicolette sat jammed up next to the window glass, me between her and them men.
Nicolette slipped under the table and ran up the drugstore aisle before I could grab her.
I said, “Nicolette, come here,” and she didn’t do nothing but keep on dashing up and down. I got up and she ran over to the booth where Sidney and Hubert sat. I scooped her up in my arms.
She said, “That’s me,” and pointed at the napkin Sidney Coates was drawing on. He was drawing a picture had to be Nicolette cause the stripes on the tights Sidney was drawing were just like hers. When Nicolette said, “That’s me,” Sidney didn’t do nothing, just kept on drawing.
I turned to go, and Sidney Coates cleared his throat. Then he took the picture of Nicolette and tore it in half, stacked the pieces and tore them in half again. When they got small as he could tear, Sidney Coates cleared his throat and emptied his hand of the napkin pieces into his red plastic pop cup. He held his butter knife by the blade and used the handle to push that paper past the ice cream down to the bottom of the cup.
Then Sidney turned his stuffed deer eyes on me, eyelids riding over the glass balls like a shirt not covering a fat man’s belly. He cleared his throat again. His eyes popped open and he stared at me like I was what he ate, like I was bleeding and he wouldn’t have no trouble catching me,
He just kept staring like I was supposed to melt so he could eat me with a spoon instead of having to tear me into chunks he could fit in his mouth.
I set Nicolette down, said to Sidney Coates,
Sidney Coates smiled.
I said, “Hubert, I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” and I walked out of there.
When I got outside, the summer light blinded me, light clear as children crying in the night, bright as welder sparks, the sky full of pressure, mashing me down inside myself.
I said, “Where you at, Nicolette?” even though her hand was right there in mine.
She said, “What are you doing, Momma?”
We went and got in the car, the seats already hot in Mamaw’s Escort. I headed back up the mountain, out to Mamaw’s house where didn’t nobody ever go and if they did, we could see them coming.
I didn’t put Nicolette in the backseat, didn’t put her in the car seat. I kept her in the front seat with me, kept my hand on her except when I shifted gears, and we went back to Mamaw’s. On the way, I didn’t mind the rock trucks slowing us down, didn’t mind the sun blinding me.
When we got out at Mamaw’s, Nicolette asked me why I was breathing so hard and I said I wasn’t. She knew better but it didn’t matter she knew better because she was just a little girl and I was a grown woman, her mother, and mothers know best, except when their husbands die in coal mine accidents and they grieve themselves down in a pill bottle and get in trouble with the law and start wearing tape recorders when they go buy Oxy and get other people arrested and get their lives threatened and the lives of the people close to them thre
atened and then them not even care cause they’re so far gone, but other than that, other than when that kind of stuff happens, mothers always always know best.
GENE
I got through that first day in the coal mine. I come home and slept in the chair. Didn’t eat nothing. Woke up the next day, walked down to the store, bought a biscuit with sausage and bacon and egg, some pop and crackers and snowball cakes and Vienna sausages, and Sister’s old man took me back up there again and I started in again and cried a little the first hour, and a little less the second, and by the third day I didn’t cry the whole shift. But I kept getting more and more give out.
* * *
THE DAY the pump pumping water out of the mine failed and the water backed up, it was third shift, the wee hours of Sunday morning, no repairman on the site, us running coal.
Denny come by to check on me. Things was running good. It was my fourth day. I’d worn my stripes all once, washing them in Sister’s washing machine, and even though I still had the green cap on, I didn’t feel quite so new. I had my thermos of coffee and my gallon of water. I had me a couple of pork chops in my dinner bucket and my dinner bucket hid. Denny give me a pat on the shoulder before he went back to work, and I was feeling all right.
Little while after Denny left, I fell asleep laying on my side shoveling belt, deader than a hammer, dreaming of That Woman, my shovel curled up to me like That Woman in my dreams. That cold wet of that mine water backing up come crawling on me and I woke up and kept shoveling, but the water kept getting higher till it was a foot deep and rising in a space barely a yard high and still didn’t nobody come and the water rising rising rising. I wondered was I still in my dream, but I was awake as you, and when that water had filled my little pass halfway up, I started on out and I reckon I had took too long to leave because I couldn’t keep my head out of the water, and had to hold my breath. It wasn’t for long, maybe a minute or two, but that’s a long time to have your head underwater.
My mind started playing tricks on me when I was stuck underwater.
I seen big lizards with fins like fish around their necks. They come swimming through green and orange and yellow hula hoops, lightning flashing in the water. They was oil in the water catching that lightning like thick soap bubbles. Them round fossils you found in the top spun in front of me, looked like seashells, like poker chips. I heard singing like mermaids, high-pitched and squealy, like Holiness women when the music lifts you up on your toes. I seen That Woman all dressed up in ferns and seaweed. Her head bobbed backwards and forwards unconscious.
I wondered did I look like a sea monster. Was my face all scaly? Did people dread the sight of me when they heard me walking, stealing along on my big paddle feet? The water went down my throat and nose at the same time and it felt like water went in my eye sockets. In that instant, when I felt like my head was about to crush, I didn’t want to be covered up no more with water. I wanted out of that.
My hand was flat against the top and there not room enough for me to get my head up out of the water. I figured out I could lay back and get my nose out for a little bit. But to breathe not water you had to focus real hard on not panicking.
I was making a fair job of it. I wadn’t flailing too hard. But I was flailing, where I never was good at swimming and generally avoided water. After a while it got to me, got me panicked. I stopped thrashing and goodbye come on my mind. Goodbye to Brother. Goodbye to Pharaoh. It has hard to settle in on my goodbyes thrashing around like that. The water pushed me. You’d’ve thought it would have pushed me to where it was going, but it didn’t. I stopped saying goodbye. Stopped flapping my arms trying to get to air that wadn’t there. I took a minute to feel of myself. Felt my belt hung on the conveyor. I reached right quick and unbuckled my belt. When it come loose, I come loose. I flowed headfirst with the water. I put my arms out over my head, out front of me, so I wouldn’t bust my head on nothing, and before I knew it that water was pushing harder, and I was going faster, faster than I really wanted to go. And where I still wasn’t getting any air, I went back to saying my goodbyes, in particular to That Woman.
Told her I’d enjoyed taking care of her yard and her dog and that I was sorry if I’d paid her attention unwanted. About that time there was a kind of upswoosh and the water kept flowing but I could get up on my hands and knees and I was sucking air. Sucking that good sweet air.
DAWN
June’s little red Honda car sat under the carport when me and Nicolette pulled up at Mamaw’s. A leather bag color of a caramel cream, nicer than any bag I knew, sat on the backseat next to a purple-and-red duffel bag June had ever since I’d known her. There were pieces of posterboard and a set of magic markers showing through a Megamart bag back there too.
June came out of Mamaw’s house the same time Hubert pulled up in his dark green pickup with the blue-tint windows. June came up to her car, put her key in the lock, acted like she couldn’t see me.
I said, “Where you going, June? Going to hunt for Momma?”
June said she was going to West Virginia.
I said, “What for?”
Hubert came up and stood beside me. June called the name of some hippie stoner actress who had been coming around telling everyone she didn’t like mountaintop removal and using her famousness to get people stirred up about how bad it was. June said she was going to West Virginia to get arrested with this actress up on a strip job somewhere.
I said, “How long you going to be gone?”
She said she didn’t know.
I said, “What about your class?”
She said, “I got that covered.”
I said, “What about Momma? Your sister? Your sister you said you come here to help,” and here I kind of mocked June, “find her way through the darkness.”
June said, “Dawn.”
I said,
June said, “Dawn, honey.”
I said, “Cause if you are, I wish you’d tell me where that light is, cause I don’t have no idea, and I’d sure like to know.”
June opened the car door and I slammed it back. Nicolette said, “Mommy,” and looked like she was fixing to cry, and I said, “Don’t you dare cry,” and Nicolette cried anyway, but quiet, and Hubert picked Nicolette up and held her in his arms. June stood there stiff and straight, her eyes watering up behind her turtleshell driving glasses.
June said, “I was wrong about your mother.” She put her hand on the door, said, “I was wrong about myself. I can’t do nothing for her.”
I said, “You’re just scared. You’re scared because Belinda Coates slapped you one time. You going to give up on your own sister because of that. That sucks, June. That sucks so hard.”
June’s eyes flashed fire. She was finally mad. She said, “Well where should I go, Dawn? Where should I go to hunt her? Hunh? I’m as likely to find her on the road to West Virginia as anywhere.”
I said, “Not if you aint looking for her.”
June stomped her foot on the concrete pad. She dropped her keys. “Dawn,” she said, “Who do you think I am? What kind of person do you think I am?”
I said, “A quitter.”
Hubert asked June who this man Momma went with was. He asked her about Calvin.
“He’s some friend of Kenny’s,” June said.
Hubert said, “The radio station guy?”
“Mm-hmm,” June said.
“Don’t reckon Kenny’s got no part in it,” Hubert said.
June said she didn’t think so.
“Mm-hmm,” Hubert said.
Two four-wheelers went by on the Trail below. Each four-wheeler had a boy and a girl doubleheading. They were laughing and talking back and forth, speeding up and slowing down, so the four-wheelers were right next to each other, rolling along being all carefree together.
Hubert said, “So you seen her last when?”
“Early that morning,” June said.
“Driving what?” Hubert said.
“Some kind of old car,” June said. �
��Big Buick or Pontiac or something. Had a bumper sticker said ‘The Power of Pride’ on it.”
“Right,” Hubert said.
June said, “Well. I’m going.”
Mamaw walked out of the house. She walked towards us and waved, said, “Hubert.” Then she went around the side of the house and out of sight. June got in the car. I was done hollering at her. I felt heavier than a truck motor. June’s window rolled down. She put her elbow on the door.
“Bye, Dawn,” June said. “I’m sorry.”
“Bye, sweetheart,” June said to Nicolette.
“Bye, Aunt June,” Nicolette said. “Be careful.”
Aunt June looked at Hubert and tightened her lips. She backed the car out of the carport, out the driveway, and drove off down the Trail. Nicolette went the way Mamaw went.
Hubert said, “You all right?”
“Might as well be,” I said.
Hubert said, “I’ll find her.”
“No, you won’t,” I said. “Something’ll go wrong and wash her right back here. She won’t be able to hide.”
“Well,” Hubert said. “Might as well hunt her while I’m waiting. Be something.”
I said, “You reckon?”
Hubert asked what I was going to do. I told him I was going to stay there till something else made sense.
“Well,” Hubert said, “you got my number.”
I said I did.
Hubert said, “Keep your head up.”
When I didn’t answer, Hubert climbed in his truck and left.
GENE
I walked out of the coal mine and didn’t go back. Walked past Sister’s husband without saying a word. He said something to me, but I didn’t hear it. I got a ride home from Denny Stack, the miner’d been nice to me my first day. Turns out Denny Stack is kin to That Woman. He’s Cora’s brother’s boy. He told me that in the truck on the way back to Sister’s. He dropped me off, and I went in my place and took off my clothes. Fell asleep in my drawers on the chair in the front of the house. I come to to the sound of Pharaoh barking outside. That Woman was standing in the door. I pulled my pants on. My head spun like a washing machine.