by Chris Cander
Alta, her month-ago self, lowered her head and let the door fall closed on Sonny Schumann. Now at her breakfast table with yet another cup of tepid coffee and a windowful of rain-smashed memories, she looked and looked outside but saw nothing. All the ticked-away minutes adding up to nothing. Just the world traveling its slow way around the sun.
For all anyone knew, Alta mourned only two lost miners — more than anyone ever should — her son most of all. Her love for John was private, and her grief would be, too. Nobody would ever know the fathomless depths of her loss or the crushing weight of her guilt.
Well, I don’t know if I can wait that long. John’s last words to her in person. “Did you do it?” she asked the empty room. All she knew was that he had asked Walter — the obstacle that stood in his way — to take his shift. Then they were dead, and nobody knew why.
The town called John a hero. Eyewitness accounts saw him running toward the mine after the others had already gone inside. They all thought he’d intended to save everyone, but died instead. But the townsfolk didn’t know how he stood to profit from their loss. That she was the fallen woman who’d driven him to such madness. She’d told him she’d marry him when her husband was gone. Didn’t she, therefore, deserve some of the blame?
You are my always.
Maybe he didn’t do it. After all, even the investigators hadn’t yet figured it out for certain. In need of someone to blame, everyone seemed to agree that it had been planned by the missing renegade named Sparky Magee.
The rain abated. The windows were streaked and steamed; the coffee, cold; the silence, sterile. There was nobody home. No clothes to wash and iron, no meals to cook and warm on the stove while she stole away. No one to steal away to.
She wondered about the asparagus. If weeds grew on the graves of her three lost loves. Whether she would survive.
Alta looked down at the paper. The front page announced that President Truman was heading to Key West for a vacation in the sunshine. She’d never been to Florida, or anywhere but where she was right then, in a lackluster coal-mining town with mountains like arms around her, always squeezing. Every day of all her thirty-eight years had been spent in a town that, at its greatest density, contained only a little more than seven thousand people. She used to imagine traveling to some glamorous place, maybe even moving. Folding the Sentinel, she pushed it deep into the potato peels in the trash.
Then she thought of her lost aunt Maggie and how abundant with pleasures her life had seemed. How elegant she’d looked that first time Alta saw her, just off the train from New York, standing in her flapper dress smoking a cigarette. That was the day she’d first encountered John, too. Both of them, Maggie and John, mesmerizing and mythical in her thirteen-year-old mind. And even as Alta aged, even after Maggie disappointed her and, many years later, John fell in love with her, both of them retained in her mind some of that dazzling, inaugural splendor.
Alta pushed herself away from the table. She went into her bedroom and knelt beside the cedar hope chest her father had made her. Underneath her wedding dress and Abel’s christening gown and a quilt that had belonged to her grandmother, next to her mother’s Bible and the first watercolor she’d painted — a small brown mouse asleep on a bed of lettuce — was the Motion Picture magazine with Colleen Moore on the cover that Maggie had given her in 1925. She looked at the starlet’s porcelain skin, her rosebud mouth, the faded orange-and-maroon cover. Alta pressed it against her chest, just as she’d done more than a quarter century earlier, and carried it back to the kitchen table.
Listen, do you like motion pictures? Maggie’s effervescent voice bubbled in her memory. I’ll take you to one sometime, you and me, okay?
Flipping open the magazine, she read the articles and film novelizations, gazed for minutes apiece at the photos and advertisements, until she found the cigarette that Maggie had given her with a wink and a promise: Don’t smoke it yet. I’ll teach you how sometime. Alta peeled it carefully off the page and held it between her fingertips. Maybe she should go now, to Florida or Paris or someplace even farther away. Distract herself with beaches or art galleries or foreign languages. What did she have to keep her here? What left did she have to lose?
She found a box of matches in a drawer and sat back down, put one end between her lips and struck the match. She lit the flattened cigarette and inhaled until her lungs filled all too quickly with hot smoke and stale tar, then slapped her free hand against her chest in protest. A few seconds later, she’d coughed it all out and she held the burning thing out away from her and wondered how that kind of suffocation could become a habit. She stood at the sink while a month’s worth — a lifetime’s worth — of hot tears ran down her face. Everyone she loved was gone.
No, she decided, she wouldn’t go anywhere else. There was no point in it. She would stay where her memories were buried, a weed growing on their graves.
Opening the tap, she ran water over the cigarette until it disintegrated into nothing and fell down the drain.
PART TWO
March 19, 1964
Lidia Kielar slid into the booth across from her friend Peggy. This was only their second time taking part in the pep rallies. Every Thursday night in the spring, after baseball season started, the high school kids gathered at the school’s front steps and did cheers along with the cheerleaders. When it got too dark, or too cold, they moved to the Sugar Bowl, drinking Cokes with peanuts, and listening to music by Frank Sinatra and Ricky Nelson. It was 1964, but the old Wurlitzer didn’t have songs by the Beatles or the Supremes or the Four Seasons or the Beach Boys yet. Lidia and Peggy didn’t care. They were happy just to be there.
Peggy shrugged off her overcoat and shoved it down in the seat next to her. Bouncing a little in the seat, she smiled as she looked around, proud of the way she filled out her mohair sweater. She knew it was like honey to the Verra Bears.
“Isn’t this great?” she whispered, leaning forward. Lidia could see a player elbow his friend as Peggy’s chest pressed against the Formica table.
Nodding, Lidia shrugged out of her brother’s hand-me-down jacket and hung it on the rack beside the booth. She finger-combed her dark blonde hair, and settled herself in her seat. It was rare for her to be out socializing at night, needed as she was at home. But she’d done her homework and fixed her father’s dinner right after school, covered it and left it on the kitchen table. Her brother, who would turn eighteen in a week, was already doing an eight-hour shift in the mines: the third shift, which meant he’d be asleep until after she got home. He started at eleven at night — the hoot-owl shift — but because it was the easiest shift, it was safer for him.
“How do you think you did on the math quiz?” Peggy asked. Before Lidia could answer, Peggy began to hum along with Paul Anka on the jukebox. Her eyes drifted around the diner and landed on the new boy in school, Danny Pollock. “Hey there, lonely boy …,” she sang under her breath, flashing a coquettish smile in his direction. She dropped her gaze and looked back to Lidia.
“Did you see who’s over there?” Peggy asked, leaning forward again and tilting her head with eyebrows lifted.
Lidia looked over her shoulder and saw him standing at the counter, holding a Coke. From the corner of his eye, he stared back at her, his face nearly expressionless. Inside, Lidia felt herself give way. Her eyes dropped to her lap, her hands suddenly damp.
“Danny Pollock,” Peggy said, flashing a quick smile at him. “I heard he’s a really good second baseman.” She giggled. “I bet I could get him to prove it.”
Lidia smiled and kicked her lightly under the table. “You’re awful.”
“No, I’m not.” She winked. “I’m terrific. Or at least I will be.” They both laughed at that. Peggy took the straw out of her drink, then tipped it back to drain the last bit. It was shocking, the way Peggy wiggled her tongue around the inside of the glass, her plucky disregard for the manners her mother would slap her for ignoring.
As Peggy set down her glass, her mou
th full of soggy peanuts, Danny Pollock slid into the seat next to her. Peggy turned and looked at him with wide eyes, mute but for the sound of frantic swallowing.
“Ladies,” he said, nodding first at Peggy and then at Lidia. “Buy you a Coke?”
“Well, isn’t that sweet of you, Danny?” Peggy said, recovering. She kicked Lidia under the table.
Lidia shot her a smile, then looked down at the tiny flowers on her skirt.
“My friend here is a quiet little bird sometimes,” Peggy said.
Danny propped his head on one palm, threading his fingers into the sandy-colored hair above his ear. Lidia could feel his curiosity before she saw it, and when she looked back up at him, she couldn’t stop.
“I’ve never seen a girl as pretty as you,” he said to Lidia.
She blushed.
“I mean it,” he said. “You must get that all the time.”
Peggy swiveled toward him with her eyebrows pinched together. “No, actually, she doesn’t,” she said in a petulant tone.
“I don’t believe that for a second,” Danny said.
“It’s true,” Lidia said, looking at Peggy.
Peggy cleared her throat and bounced once in her seat, as though to change the subject. “Oh, I’m just teasing, aren’t I?” She reached over the table with her hand open, and offered Lidia a smile that wasn’t quite synchronized with her eyes.
Lidia played it off, bringing her hand up and placing it near Peggy’s. Peggy squeezed it once, then let go. “So, Danny,” she said, moving slightly closer to him. “How do you like Verra so far?”
Danny hauled his gaze from Lidia and turned his head slightly toward her friend. “Um, I like it fine. I like the team. I didn’t get to play as much back home as I do here.”
“But you’re really good!” Lidia said.
Danny smiled and she reddened. “Thanks,” he said. “But a lot of fellas were good back in Jersey. Verra’s a smaller pond. So I’m a bigger fish.”
“Are you going to stay here after you graduate?” Peggy asked, swirling the few bits of ice left in her glass with her straw. “You only have another year.”
“I wasn’t planning to. Don’t know if you know it or not, but my mama and I came here because my grandfather needed the help. He’s getting on in years. And since Daddy died, Mama said there wasn’t really much sense in refusing to come.” He shrugged. “I was thinking about going back to Jersey for college, though. Or maybe New York. I want to be a lawyer.” Then he looked at Lidia with an expression she couldn’t read. “But you never know.”
Then, as though pulled back from a distant memory, he glanced at his watch. “Look at the time. It’s a school night, ladies. Can I give you a lift home?”
“You have a car?” Peggy asked.
Danny nodded. “My daddy’s. Okay, well, technically now it’s Mama’s. But she let me drive it all the way here from Jersey.” He reached over and picked up Lidia’s unfinished Coke and took a sip. Then he held it out to her and she smiled, downed the last of it in one gulp. As she reached for her jacket, Danny jumped up, taking it before she did. He held it for her, waiting for her to slip first one slender arm, then the other into the sleeves. Nobody had ever helped her on with her coat before.
“Let’s go then,” Lidia said.
“Ahem,” Peggy said, glancing down at the crushed overcoat on the seat behind her.
Danny huffed a short laugh through his nose. “Sure,” he said, and reached down to help her into it.
There was a brief pause at the passenger door of the 1955 Dodge Coronet. “Lucky me,” Peggy said. “Lidia lives closer, so you’ll have to drop her first. I’ll ride in the back and then switch to shotgun after.”
Danny looked at Lidia but she only smiled and said, “It’s okay. I don’t mind.” He opened the door and Peggy bounced into the backseat. Then he took Lidia’s hand and helped her in, an unnecessary gesture she happily accepted.
They pulled up to Lidia’s house, and she noticed through the window of Danny’s shiny car that the wooden porch seemed to sag. The paint was beginning to chip around the doorframe. She did what she could to keep the house and garden neat, but since her mother had died nearly two years before, her father had started taking on extra shifts. The time he once spent fixing and mending and building around the house was now spent underground. He said it was for the extra money, but she knew different. They never spoke about such things, but she knew.
She looked too much like her mother. And her brother was such an unfathomable disappointment. Even though it wasn’t his fault.
“Thanks for the ride,” Lidia said.
“Jump out, honey,” Peggy said from the back. “It’s my turn up front!”
Lidia climbed out, pulling the seat forward for Peggy; then she stood on the patch of yard amid tiny green stalks of rye grass pushing up through the dirt into spring. Danny leaned in front of Peggy toward the open window. “Goodnight, Lidia.”
Peggy waved at her and said, “Toodles, Lid! See you tomorrow!” Lidia thought she could see Peggy arch her back and push her mohair sweater closer to Danny’s cheek.
Lidia waved back at both of them and watched the car pull slowly away, until the taillights disappeared around the bend of the road. Once the dust settled back down along the curb, she turned and walked up the porch steps. But with her hand hooked into the pull of the screen door, she paused. She took a slow, deep breath and turned around. It was late, nearly ten, and she needed to pack her brother’s dinner bucket and then wake him, a challenging, tiresome process even when her mind was focused. But tonight, her mind was wandering.
To the Sugar Bowl. To the cool leather seat of Danny Pollock’s daddy’s car. To his sixteen years and deep brown eyes and easy smile. To Peggy and her sweater and second base.
She sank down on the top step of her family’s buckling porch and stared up through the clear, dark night at the countless stars. Seeking Orion, the hunter, she leaned back to watch him make his stealthy, patient way across the sky. He’d traveled some distance by the time she saw a pair of headlights glowing at the far bend of the road. They moved slowly and then came to a stop in front of her house. In the same spot as before, but facing the other direction. Danny stepped out, closing the door quietly behind him.
“I really wanted to take you home second,” he said when he got to the base of the porch.
She smiled. “Me too.”
He climbed the first step. “Did you know I’d come back?”
She thought for a moment, looked up at Orion. “No,” she said. “But I hoped.”
He took the last two steps and held out his hand. She stood, not knowing what he wanted, but deciding right then she’d give it. He was handsome, but in an unremarkable way. His interest in her — to her amazement — was obvious, but unthreatening. And she wasn’t so much excited by him as she was soothed. She put her hand into his.
He brought it to his lips and kissed it, light as a breeze, then walked backward back to his daddy’s car. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Lidia.”
“Tomorrow,” she said. And to her own infinite surprise, she kissed the tips of her fingers and blew it in his direction, a line drive to second base.
He laughed at that, reaching up fast to catch the kiss coming at him, straight out of the air.
January 5, 1965
Three hundred and thirty feet into a section just twenty feet below the surface of the earth, inside a glistening cavity worked out from between layers of slatestone, somebody laughed.
“Eagan, you can waste your day off if you want to, but there’s no sense in you registering. The United States Army ain’t gonna send no retards to Vietnam.”
Somebody else shoved the speaker hard enough to make him drop his pickax, but a round of low snickering spread among the men nonetheless.
Eagan Kielar turned red and dropped his chin. He didn’t care for people pointing out his defects. But he didn’t know what to say to them once they did.
“Shut up, Sam. He can’
t help it he’s retarded. Just get back to work.”
It was still dark when Eagan’s shift ended that early-January morning. Inside his nostrils, the air was dry and sharp, and he drew it in with great heaving breaths. Each time his lungs inflated to capacity, he exhaled a steaming mouthful with an audible huff. He sounded like an agitated bull, and with the bulk bundled into his padded jacket, he looked like one, too. Charging into the wind, he walked past neighbors’ houses with their Christmas lights still twinkling around porch posts. He paid no attention to the small group of boys on bicycles who rode toward him on their way to school, then halved, then regrouped once they’d passed him, like a school of striped rainbow trout in New Creek. He didn’t hear the random bark of a dog, or the gritty rumble of a pickup truck engine, or the shouts of mothers calling goodbye to their children.
When he got to his own house, Eagan pulled open the screen and pushed open the door, which he then forgot to shut behind him. The screen crashed shut against the frame and he stood there inside it, his hands hanging thick and heavy against his thighs. He glanced around at the familiar room: the polished grandfather clock, the yellow tweed couch with worn armrests, the floral wallpaper. The smell of bacon and cabbage that clung to everything. He felt better here.
“Eagan, you can’t leave the door open like that,” Lidia said as she walked into the living room, wiping her hands on her apron. She pulled him farther inside, then closed the door with an efficient push. “Here, take off your jacket. Your breakfast’s almost ready.” Reaching up, not quite on tiptoe but almost, she tried to help him. “Let’s get you into your bath.”
He remained still, not responding to her familiar, gentle, busy movements, her small hands on his shoulders trying to work off his coat. He stared at the grandfather clock against the wall next to the faded picture of his parents from their high school prom, which listed slightly to one side.