by Ann Pancake
Six months into that gray blizzard, the company started offering the buyouts. By then, a lot of the properties were good and blast-busted, with walls cracked, ceilings dropping, foundations split. Wells knocked dry. By the time the offers came, the homeowners had been told by the Department of Environmental Protection that they couldn’t prove the damage hadn’t been there before the blasting started, and no one had the lawyer money to argue with them, so many people sold, even at the pathetic prices offered them. If their houses weren’t shot, their nerves were, and those who could start over, did.
Dell and Carol talked about it, too. Discussed it, argued it, full-on fought. Lying in bed of a night in the silver glitter of the lights on the mine, Carol crumpling Dell’s hand under her chin. Pressing her lips there. Shouting at each other once while they were power-washing the dirt crust off their house—that comes back to Dell too often now, the splatty roar of the spray, the expense of the rental and still the dust sticking like paint. How hard it was when you got nowhere else to put it not to take it out on who you loved. Sometimes Dell’d take the leave side and Carol’d take the stay, then by next time, they’d have traded places on it. Bottom line was, Dell was pushing sixty, had taken early retirement, and where were their life savings? Right there in the house. Like a big pile of money blowing away littler and littler with every explosion, every dust cloud, every coal truck crashing through town.
They reached the final decision one afternoon while they were reframing family photos and Carol’s needlepoint, fixing them sturdier to the walls. They simply couldn’t begin again on what the house would fetch now. Dell remembers how they weren’t even sitting when they decided it, they were standing in the living room, finished with rehanging the last picture. He remembers the gray cast to Carol’s face, the afternoon having just reached that moment when it’s time to turn on the lights. The minute they made it definite, there came in Dell a peculiar painful rightness that he recalled from when he was a kid, back when he used to bang his head against his bed frame, against walls, usually out of anger, occasionally to salve a shame. And for a day or two, the little hole hushed its yearning.
In the meantime, the other houses were bought up; the families packed; the homes darkened. And then, when the machines finally began to retreat, still blowing up ridges but farther away, and just when Dell and Carol thought the dust might lay . . . the smoke came.
The Williamses’ house went first. They’d been gone for several months, and it sat there at the far end of town, no neighbors on its one side, and Dell and Carol and Jason slept right through the fire. Woke in the morning to the odor of smolder. Slept through because although everyone left in that end of Tout had called it in, no fire trucks showed. The second fire came about three weeks later, then the third, both in abandoned company-bought houses. Then they burned regular, about once a month, the glows of the closer fires quavering Dell and Carol’s window, choking them awake on their trash smoke stink. Sometimes the firefighters came. Other times Dell rushed out with the neighbors and their sorry garden hoses, trying to contain the flames. But what has stayed with him tightest, longest, is not the panic or the odor or the colors of blaze. It’s the noises. The pops of little things blowing up in the houses, the whoosh-roar of bigger, the shuddering wrenching cracks, then the crashes as roof parts cave in. It is the ripple sound of flames moving good. The “I’m coming” like sheets of canvas flapping in wind.
For over a year, they burned. Still, even living in the middle of it, no one, no matter how close they watched, could figure out how the fires were lit or by whom. The arsonists couldn’t be caught, even though there was a clear design, never did a lived-in house ignite, always the deserted company-owned ones, and usually those houses targeted were some distance from inhabited homes; only once did a fire jump to a place where people lived. The mysteriousness of it all terrorized everyone even worse, and more people sold, just like the company wanted. If they couldn’t shake them out, they’d burn them out—Dell suspicioned this at the first one, and by the third one, he knew. But every house burned was company property, just like county law was company property, just like state law was. When some official finally arrived to investigate, the company was behind that, too.
They pronounced it vandalism. Local boys. The locals, the officials reminded them, had a long history of vandalizing company property.
By this time, the holdouts were patrolling with shotguns in pairs. Kenny came down off the mountain to help, him and Dell doing their turns together. Jason begged in on it, too, and for nonschool nights, Carol finally said yes, although Dell never let him go farther off than reaching distance. They’d stake out the houses most likely marked, and if they had enough people, post two men at each one. If they didn’t, they rotated between them. Houses burned anyway, but never on Kenny and Dell’s watch.
“I know what’s going on,” Kenny started grinding. “Somebody ain’t got the balls to hang in there, face who it is. Or else somebody’s lazying off. Sneaking home for a nap.”
“I believe you’re right,” Dell eventually agreed. “I believe you’re right.”
After August, they didn’t say that anymore.
Five men were on duty that night, Dell and Kenny and Jason covering the low rancher that had been Lorenzo Mast’s, Charlie Blizzard and his cousin Burl on the other house across town. Dell and Jason were hunkered down in lawn chairs in the brush behind the Masts’ backyard, Kenny guarding the front from his own chair in the blackened house frame across the road.
Dell pulled his undershirt away from his skin, him sticky with sweat and Off and the bugs still biting. Beside him, Jason slept in an upright slump would have left a six-day crick in Dell’s neck. The Coke can was already warm and slippery in Dell’s hand, and he wrangled a colder one from the stash in his old lunch cooler, his fifth of the night, its sizzle like another layer of locust shriek. The core of his body was pulling down hard towards sleep, but his skin and his mind rode the caffeine current, memories and images, roiling up like drift. First him and Carol, at their beginning, and that led further back to a wild girl who’d been his high school love. And then the pictures were of him and Kenny, who’d come before any woman, those images, too, moving in reverse: the first day of their first real job, working underground; the night they got arrested, running the roads drunk at seventeen; the shared frustration of second-string in junior high basketball. Then clear back to a time in grade school Dell had almost forgot, both of them sent to Mr. Dickens’s office for a paddling. Dell couldn’t remember for what, and the paddling hurt, but being watched by each other was worse, which is what Mr. Dickens made them do. Dell didn’t cry. Kenny did. At least that’s how it comes to him now.
He drained the last of that Coke and shoved the can under his chair. Stepped deeper into the weeds to take a piss. When he turned back around, he saw the light.
At first he didn’t believe it, but quick it went from a winking glimmer to a blaze, ripply but constant. Dell snatched up his twelve-gauge, thumbed off the safety, jerked Jason awake. And then he was straining on the balls of his feet, every inch of him taut, him twenty years younger, thirty pounds lighter, not an achy place in him save the effort of his eyes. The loud part of his body hollering, Go, Dell, Run, close in and grab him, while his head hissed, Hold your place, hold it, you take off now and you’ll never see him if he flies out the other end. Dell’s eyes searing the overgrown juniper bushes against the house, the single back door over its three-stepped stoop, the five shutterless windows in their neat row. The fire was accelerating now, furying from the middle of the house into both ends until the whole building was puking flame, every window sheeted with it, flames battering out the roof, and Dell knew the burner had to have been flushed. Couldn’t no one survive that hot, that high.
“Kenny’s got him!” he yelled at Jason, and his boy took off so fast he slipped down on one knee. Then they were tearing through the yard towards the side of the house, Dell as fast as Jason was, not feeling his body, not fe
eling the house heat, all the while knowing—Dell did not expect, he knew—that Kenny’d either be chasing the arsonist or have him at gunpoint.
When Dell careened around the corner and into the front, he at first couldn’t find Kenny, what with the neighbors streaming in, faces red-lit, them still in the commotion of what to do. Dell finally spotted Kenny because he was the only person standing still. Kenny paralyzed in the road, taut-frozen, a mirror of how Dell’d been out back, Kenny’s gun stock in his armpit, the barrel resting in his left hand, and not a soul at the end of it. Dell rushed up to his side, and as Kenny recognized him, a realization rolled over his face. Dell saw that just as much as Dell’d expected to see two there, Kenny’d expected them to come as three.
Kenny slammed his shotgun to the ground. Dell jumped back, pushing Jason behind him. “Goddamn you, Kenny,” he heard somebody yell even though the gun didn’t trigger. “Watch yourself! Watch yourself!”
Not long after that, Carol got diagnosed and Dell turned his attention there. A couple more abandoned houses were torched that year, but as the machines gutted the mountains in the middle distance and then pulled even farther away, the fires stopped, too. After Dell quit, Kenny only kept it up a month or two more. By then, they were closing in on his own place.
It had been on one of those watch nights before the Mast house burned, Jason not with them, that Kenny had said it. Coming on towards dawn, and them meeting up to share a cigarette after guarding separate houses all night, the clunk of the monster bucket in the distance overhead, the hish of dead earth poured over the hillside. Kenny said it just once, and in the dark. Said it not as a question, didn’t risk contradiction or conversation. “What we did, Dell,” he said. “It wasn’t like this here.”
Through Dell, a cold gust flashed, from his groin to the top of his chest. He wet his mouth to speak back, to agree. Then he stopped and let it go.
NOW HE TAKES the turnoff to Kenny’s leery and slow, the road cratered dirt with asphalt stumps rearing up out of it until it breaks down to no pavement at all. Dell straddles the worst of it best he can, eases the car into the holes when he has to, the jolts up his body so bad he can’t tell if his bones are scraping together or pulling apart. Used to be a creek run down along this road, the same creek that used to run by Kenny’s house. They played in it as boys, back when both him and Kenny lived down in Tout and it was Kenny’s grandma on the place. When Kenny got too worked up—oh, that temper, how he’d beet like a redhead, windmilling punches at air—his grandma’d screech, “You all get outta here! Go getcha in the creek!” And she was right. Even back then, water worked.
He drives by the barred haul road to the shutdown part of the mine, the guard shack plywooded over, the sign beside it peppered with pellets: COAL KEEPS THE LIGHTS ON. The last couple places him and Kenny worked, they passed every shift a sign that said that, too. Right beyond that fork, the road returns to mostly hardtop, and Dell leans into the gas. Not long after, he hits the first of the NO TRESPASSING signs Kenny’s hung all along the borders of his property and right up to his front door, some store-bought, some homemade, and finally, Kenny’s house swings into view.
It’s a big four-bedroom. Single-story, but rangy and imposing, built against the steep hill with a grand high deck on two sides. Painted a two-tone blue, baby for the walls, navy for the trim, and a full basement, a two-car garage. It makes the house that was up here before, the one Kenny’s grandma lived in, look like a goat shed. Makes the houses him and Kenny grew up in down in Tout in the forties and fifties look that way, too. But Dell can see, if he squints through the half-leaved autumn trees, the mine, crunching away to horizon like Satan’s gravel pit. The house, the bit of woodland around it, the sweep of yard that Becky cuts with the ride mower, Becky and Kenny themselves—they are surrounded on three sides. Living inside a nutcracker’s vee.
Dell pulls up beside Becky’s Blazer on the parking pad Kenny poured and jerks his brake. He reaches for his door, then stops. Sets his hands back on the wheel. Kenny crows tirelessly about how nothing nor nobody in the world will ever make him sell his place, but the truth is—nobody’s offered to buy it.
Becky meets him at the bottom of the deck steps. “Oh, Dell, I thank ye. I thank ye, and I’m sorry, I am so sorry.” She has an old denim coat of Kenny’s thrown over her shoulders, and she rubs her fists on her thighs in fret. “I feel so bad about you missing your little Amanda’s birthday, but where else can I turn? Where else can I turn?”
Dell knows sorry for him is about the least of her worries right now. “It’s all right,” he says. Kenny found her at a church function a while back, and she is fifteen, twenty years younger, and not real bright. His sensible wife, Doria, left back at the beginning of this mess. Now Becky is blocking the front door, her hand on the knob. “He says he’s gonna roll that wheelchair up on the mountain and suicide bomb em, and he’s already tried to get out on the deck twicet.”
“We’ll get him settled down,” Dell says. “We’ll get him settled down.”
He works his shoes off in the little entrance hall. Kenny always insisted on that, and it used to annoy the hell out of Dell. The ancient poodle with the stained under-eyes slingshots out of somewhere to harass his pants-cuffs until she recognizes him and retreats, snuffling, to one of the big floral-patterned armchairs. Dell takes a breath. Then he follows the dog into the living room.
Kenny sits at attention in his wheelchair. Ironed jeans, steel-toed boots, a paisley pajama top. The chair is pulled up to the picture window, and under Kenny’s right arm is snugged the black plastic case of a student-model guitar. The neck of it follows Kenny’s forearm. The tip is pointed at the pane. Dell clears his throat.
“Hey, buddy.” The bellow in his own voice catches Dell off guard, even though it’s how he usually talks to Kenny now. “What’s going on up here?”
Kenny snaps his head around. As if he’s not watched Dell all the way up the drive, didn’t have him and Becky at the end of the guitar case when they stepped up onto the deck. Kenny stares at Dell a hard five seconds, working a little his mouth. His eyes ringed dark, his face caved so the bones stand in peaks, and his silver hair slicked, he reminds Dell of a chicken-coon cross. The eyes slide off Dell’s. Kenny pivots back to his vigil.
“Done got that side.” He swings his free hand to the left. “Done got that side.” Flings it past his face to the right. “Done got all that behind, and now they’re coming after the front side, too. Gonna burn me and her out and blast right up under the house.”
Behind Kenny’s back, Becky raises her eyebrows and nods, See? Dell ignores her. He saunters across the persimmon-colored carpet into the kitchen, where he takes a place at the table so he can watch Kenny across the living room. Everything Dell does, he does noisier than usual, including an exaggerated sigh of contentment when he settles into the chair. Kenny does not turn around.
“Can I get you a cup of coffee, Dell?” Becky asks, like she always does, her overloud too. At least she’s quick enough to remember her lines.
“Oh, yes, please,” Dell booms. “Don’t mind if I do.”
“Black, right?” Becky asks.
“Black’s right,” says Dell. “Like my pap always said, ‘Drink it black, or don’t drink it at all.’”
On the little TV next to the microwave, Rachael Ray is whipping up some kind of Mexican dish. Dell thanks Becky for his coffee, and she sits across the table with her own, sugaring it heavy enough for a cake. Then they commence the pretending-to-watch the show, each sipping slow, now and again making a comment to each other for normalcy’s sake. Both with an ear, an eye, constant-cocked to Kenny.
Dell can remember when Kenny’s whole family had to live in this one room, the kids doing their homework on sawhorses. How Doria’d hung Christmas decorations on the insulation the December before they got the drywall up. Kenny built the house little by little, whenever he had the money, and Dell’d helped him off and on until he’d get sick of being bossed and take a break
for a while. He always came back, usually after Kenny called and asked him to drive up and see some new tool or piece of equipment he’d got, which was as close as Kenny could come to an apology. Dell sneaks a full-on look at Kenny. He can feel that it’s still too soon.
Becky refills his cup. He’d had to ask Jason many times to show him the houses that he built before Jason finally did, one time about a year ago. A subdivision, Jason explained, an old horse farm split up. He and Jason glided in Jason’s new Ford Explorer over fresh-paved streets through acre after acre of immaculate vacant homes, bulked up and bulging on undersized lots. The streets deliberately unstraight, snake-tailing into dead ends that made no sense, everywhere treeless, hill-less. Until Dell, despite how he’d looked forward to this, despite his pride in what his boy did—build things—started to get carsick for the first time in sixty years. He had to ask Jason to stop. By this time, they’d reached the outermost ring of the maze, where houses still under construction stood half-naked in their pressed woodchip skins, their Tyvek wraps. Dell stepped out and breathed deep: odor of raw lumber, fresh-poured concrete, and something chemical he could not name. He looked over his shoulder, expecting Jason behind him. Jason sat in the Explorer, fooling with his cell phone.
Dell hits the bottom of his second cup. Usually that signals that the wait’s been long enough. He glances at Becky. She opens her hands in an I-don’t-know. So Dell reaches towards Kenny, not with his body, not with his hands, but with the how-long-he’s-known-Kenny, that’s what he uses to catch where Kenny’s at. But still Dell can’t tell, and if he starts too early, Kenny won’t play. Dell goes on and risks it.
“Hey, Kenny,” he calls, forcing a casualness in his tone. “I hear you all been getting some real bad shakes up here.” Dell waits. Kenny does not move. Dell swallows. “I don’t see no cracks, though.”