Last Ragged Breath

by Julia Keller

  “No.” His head dropped back against the pillows. “Called and said she won’t be coming by tonight.” He reached over to put the remote on the bedside table. His wince when he did it was so deep that Bell could almost feel the pain herself. But he didn’t make a sound.

  “Oh. Okay,” she said. It wasn’t okay—it was damned strange and totally unprecedented, and they both knew it, yet neither wanted to acknowledge it. “Needs a night off, I bet. Got a lot on her plate these days, taking care of things at home till you’re back on your feet. Speaking of that—how’s the physical therapy?”

  She didn’t look at him while she waited for an answer. She pretended to be fussing with something on the front of her purse, a small discoloration that she rubbed at with two fingers, and then scratched at with her thumbnail. She didn’t like to see him flat on his back this way. Hated it, in fact. It was out of the natural order of things. Still. Even though she’d come here every day for weeks now. And would keep coming.

  “Going okay,” he said. And then, nothing.

  From down the hall came the high-low drift of voices. The squeaky wheel of a cart bristling with medical charts as it went rolling by. A spike of laughter. Somebody else’s TV set, tuned to a game show.

  Bell finished with the spot on her purse. She folded her hands on top of it, sat back in her chair. It was an unsettling moment. He had always been the strongest person she knew—physically, emotionally—and now he was lying in a hospital bed in a cotton gown that tied at the back of his neck like a child’s bib, too weak to raise his right arm more than half an inch or so. She’d seen him try. And fail. And sometimes, not try again for the rest of the day.

  Her cell made a noise, indicating a new text. Bell glanced at it:

  Dinner soon?

  It was from David Gage. Oh, Lord. She slid the cell back in her purse. It was the fourth time he’d texted her today. She’d only answered the first two. She liked him; she really did. But there was no spark. She’d thought she could deal with that. Well, maybe not.

  “Sheriff Ives stopped by,” Nick said. “They’re running down some leads. Could take a while, but they might actually find the bastard who put a slug in me.”

  “That’s great news, Nick. Wish I could do more to help.”

  “Not your job.”

  “Still doesn’t feel right.”

  “Doesn’t feel right for me, either—lying here like a useless sack of crap while a bunch of drug dealers are running around out there.” He needed to change the subject away from his frustration, and so he did. “Guess who called me.”

  She waited to hear.

  “Clay Meckling,” Nick said. “Wanted to know how I was doing. You know, back when he was going through his rehab, I’d drop in at the hospital, give him a pep talk, cheer him on. Tell him he had to fight. Shoe’s on the other foot now.”

  “Close as you two are,” she said, “I bet talking to him will be a big help.” She couldn’t risk saying anything else about Clay. She was afraid her voice might give her away. Reveal a depth of feeling she’d rather keep hidden.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe.”

  Nick looked at her. After the temporary lift supplied by his mention of Clay, he’d dropped back down again. His eyes had a bleakness to them that alarmed Bell almost as much as would the sight of a deep cut. The wound could be repaired; his pride, she wasn’t so sure about.

  “Mary Sue’s in trouble,” he said, blurting it out, trying to get the words over with as quickly as he could. “It’s too much for her. She’s with her psychiatrist tonight. They’re looking at changing her medication. Doing something. Anything. The stress—it’s wearing away at her, Bell, and it’s triggering symptoms. She can’t—” He faltered. He tried again, not sure how much he ought to say. He had already violated a substantial portion of his personal code: The things about which he cared the most were the things about which he talked the least. She knew that because it was her code, too.

  “She’ll be okay, Nick.”

  “How the hell do you know that? Nobody knows that.”

  “What I meant to say was that she’s a fighter. Don’t count her out.”

  He didn’t react. He wasn’t looking at her. His eyes were fixed on a spot on the wall across from the bed, somewhere below the TV set. There was nothing there.

  “Nick?” Bell finally said.

  “Mind your business, Belfa,” he said. His voice was as gray and mournful as fog. “Just mind your business.”

  A nurse came in the room, carrying a fresh IV bag. She was young and moderately pretty, with soft brown hair and perky-looking glasses with maroon frames. A yolk-yellow smiley-face button was pinned to the front of her pale blue smock, next to a name tag that read MICHELE.

  “Good evening, Mr. Fogelsong.” There was a flirty tease to her demeanor. She smiled at Bell as she switched out the flaccid IV bag for the plump new one. “Hi, there. Is this rascal here behaving himself?”

  She finished fussing with the monitors. She stood alongside Nick’s bed, small hands on the rail, and took a long, searching look at her patient. Bell had instantly dismissed this woman when she entered the room because of her youth, her cheerfulness. Now Bell realized her mistake. The nurse was absorbing a great deal of information about Nick Fogelsong just from this seemingly casual perusal; she appeared to be extrapolating, from the sag of his chin and the emptiness in his eyes, the sadness that had him in its grip, a sadness that lived beyond the healing reach of any medicine.

  * * *

  Her window was down, and so Bell could hear Goldie’s warning from a long way off. The moment she turned onto Shelton Avenue, the meaty barks and the short, jabbing yaps were instantly recognizable, breaching the walls of her house and riding the cold night air. Bell was returning from the hospital much later than usual tonight. Was that it? Was Goldie just lonely?

  As soon as Bell swung into her driveway, she saw the source of the dog’s agitation: Someone was standing on the dark front porch. If the Blazer parked at the curb wasn’t enough of a tip-off, the wide hat sealed the deal. It was Pam Harrison.

  “Happened to be in the neighborhood,” Harrison called out to her. “Decided to wait for you. Hope it’s okay.”

  “It’s fine.” Bell climbed the front steps quickly and unlocked her front door. Goldie bounced out onto the porch, giving Harrison a thorough going-over with her nose. The sheriff didn’t seem to mind; she was as stiff with dogs as she was with people, but she gave it a try, reaching down and ruffling Goldie’s fur.

  “How’s Nick?” Harrison said. “Haven’t had much time lately to stop by.”

  “He’s okay. Hard road ahead, but he’ll get there. Want to come in? I can put on a pot of coffee.”

  “No. Won’t take long. Can we just stay out here? Then I’ll be on my way.”

  “Fine.” Bell was mystified, but ready to listen. “Is this about the trial?”

  Harrison stopped petting the dog. She stood upright again. “A person could get the idea that your heart’s not in it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re doing a good job,” Harrison said quickly. “It’s not that. I just want to make sure you believe in—” She stopped.

  “Believe in what? The case?”

  “In me.”

  Now Bell thought she understood why Harrison didn’t want to come inside. Inside meant lights. It meant taking off her hat. It meant exposure of many kinds.

  “I know,” the sheriff went on, “that you and Nick were a team. A great team. I’m doing my best, but I don’t know if we’re ever going to work together like you and he did. It’s a pretty high bar.”

  “Takes time.”

  “I know. I know that. But it was me who pushed you to charge Dillard. And I just want to be sure that—”

  “The evidence is there. The trial’s going well.”

  “Still not sure why he did it. Could it really have been Hackel’s blackmail threat? Dillard wasn’t really dealing drugs. He could’ve explai
ned that, if he’d been caught.”

  “Dillard’s not the explaining type. You know that.”

  Harrison looked out across Bell’s dark front yard. “He’s had a hard life.”

  “No doubt. But he killed a man.”

  “Rhonda Lovejoy doesn’t think so.”

  “Rhonda Lovejoy’s not the prosecutor.” Bell waited. Harrison still didn’t budge, so she added, “We’re doing the right thing. Go home, Pam. Get some rest.”

  The sheriff nodded. She readjusted her hat and descended the steps, moving with a sort of nimble glide that Bell was tempted to call grace. She’d never call it that to Harrison’s face, however, knowing it would embarrass her.

  The Blazer left the curb. Side by side up on the porch, Bell and Goldie watched it go.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  “Drago Mine Number Four is operated—when it operates at all—by the Brassey-Waltham Company of Pittsburgh, which in turn is owned by Central Energy Consortium—known as CEC—of New York City, which in turn is a subsidiary of Roscoe-Althorp, an international energy company based in Brussels, Belgium.” Bell was reading off a sheet of paper, and she made her voice suitably dry and singsong, like a bored third-grader reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

  “Let me translate for you,” she said to David, folding up the sheet upon which she’d scribbled the mine’s provenance, and slipping it into the back pocket of her jeans. “Every few days a handful of miners goes down and scrapes a few dozen truckloads of bituminous coal out of here—and the rest of the time, it’s just a big hole in the ground. Nobody really claims it. Not enough coal production to care about.”

  They stood at the gated entrance to Drago No. 4. It was a clear, mild, pink-skied Saturday morning. The fourth week of Royce Dillard’s trial would be getting under way on Monday. And Bell needed a break. A break from the trial, a break from her daily visits to the hospital to see Nick, a break from everything. Just a short one—but the scenery had to be completely different.

  This would do. She had texted David late the night before with a proposal: If he was still interested, she’d make good on her promise and get them down into Drago No. 4. They could only stay for a few minutes—just long enough for Bell to prove to him that it did indeed possess a singular, rough-hewn kind of beauty—but this was their chance. His return text was filled with exclamation points and YES in all caps.

  He had joined her here twenty minutes ago. To the left of the mine entrance was the tipple, and beyond that, a ramshackle building called the bathhouse, where the miners donned their gear at the start of their shifts and, when they came back up, showered off the sweat and the coal dust. The foreman, a man named Dickie Lavender, had rummaged through the bathhouse and come up with the things they would need: one-piece denim coveralls that fit over their clothes, leather utility belts, steel-toed boots, helmets and headlamps. Dickie just happened to be Rhonda Lovejoy’s uncle’s stepson. When Bell had mentioned to Rhonda that she’d love to take David Gage for a quick dip down into Drago No. 4, a mine that hadn’t been updated since the 1950s, Rhonda had snapped her fingers and said, “Got just the fella for you.”

  Lavender was younger than Bell had expected. He couldn’t be more than twenty-five or so. He had spiky orange-red hair and freckles of the same shade that stood out like stars against his dead-white skin. Bell wondered what that skin looked like by the end of his shift.

  “I’d like to say that I’ll be in big trouble if anybody gets wind of me letting you down here,” Lavender opined, “but the truth is, nobody gives a damn about this place anymore. Nor the people in it. Used to be, the old guys tell me, there was three shifts working here, day and night, every day of the year. Big beautiful seam of coal. Prettiest thing you ever did see. Pocahontas seam. One of the biggest ever. That was forever ago, though. Nobody wants our coal no more. We’re like animals that’re going extinct, you know? Last of our kind.” He scratched at the side of his head with a dirt-grimed fingernail. He seemed as philosophical as a Buddhist monk. “Can’t be helped, though. It is what it is. You guys ready to go?”

  He opened the gate and stepped to one side to let them board. Bell and David walked onto the wooden slats of a small, rickety-looking contraption called a man-hoist. The slats were so far apart that you could easily see between them—and what lay below the platform was a shaft that plummeted some seven hundred feet, a distance impossible to contemplate without a little shiver of dread.

  “This here’s a real old mine,” Dickie said, closing the gate behind them. There was only room for two. “Shaft was dug out by hand back in the 1930s. Can you beat that?” Marvel in his voice.

  A cool wind wafted up from the bottom of the shaft. Dickie waved and grinned. He pushed a small brass button next to the hoist. Three short bells rang, a signal that the hoist was on its way down. With a jerk and a shimmy, the platform began its creaky descent. David had grabbed Bell’s arm at the first twitch of motion, and she patted his hand. “Think of it like you would a subway ride,” she said. “For a miner, this is the morning commute.” He nodded. He let go of her arm. His lower lip was tucked under his upper one; he looked like a schoolboy concentrating on a math problem. A schoolboy in a hardhat and goggles, that is. Bell didn’t want to contemplate what she must look like in this getup; a pair of oversized denim coveralls that gave her the general dimensions of a manatee did not constitute the most flattering of ensembles. No temptation to take any selfies.

  The hoist continued its drop. Every few feet it paused, swaying slightly back and forth as if making up its mind if it wanted to keep going, and then, with a reluctant groan, it resumed. The creaks grew louder and more frequent. Craggy gray rock seemed to slide upward past the hoist as they dropped. When Bell looked straight up, she saw that the light at the top was only a frail dot now. The lower they went, the dimmer it grew. Soon, though, a light at the bottom of the shaft began to blossom.

  “Still can’t believe that a McDowell County boy’s never been down in a coal mine,” she said, hoping that a bit of teasing might put him at ease. She pronounced it MacDowell, the way the natives did.

  “Yeah, well, if I had—I think I’d remember,” he answered, in a hoarse, choked-sounding voice. He coughed, as if that was the problem.

  The hoist bounced against the rock ledge at the bottom of the shaft, bounced again, and then settled itself with a heavy thud, a brief grinding noise, and another thud. Bright lights burned all around them, lights that seemed to spiral outward from a central core. Miners walked by with purposeful strides, heads bent, intent on their jobs, few of them bothering to check out the new arrivals that the hoist had deposited here. Even the skinny men looked burly, bulky, wrapped as they were in the thick coveralls and boots and helmets—just as Bell and David were, but on these men, it looked different. It wasn’t a costume. She and David were tourists, and this was temporary; these men were workers, and this was their livelihood, for as long as it lasted. They looked like men who had emerged not from one of the corridors radiating out in four different directions from this spot, but from the deep and mysterious past, living throwbacks to an era when human muscle and will were the primary sources of energy. Coal, the coal pulled forcibly out of the earth with that muscle and will, was secondary. These men were dirty-faced phantoms from a dying—really, already dead—era.

  “Here you go,” Bell said. She stepped off the platform and gestured for him to follow. They were engulfed in a world of shiny black rock. The strong lights gave the sides of the walls a wet look. The air smelled like hosed-down gunpowder. She could sense David’s apprehension. The distance from floor to ceiling was about five feet; they had to bend over as they moved. A neck ache tomorrow morning was a sure thing.

  “Just step over here a little ways,” she said. “Got to keep the way clear.”

  More miners came along, spines curved to accommodate the ceiling, walking singly or in twos. Some were holding thermoses by the plastic handles, or lunch boxes. They talked in low murmurs, like people i
n church. Occasionally there was a loud string of laughter that seemed to be passed on down the line, dying out by the time it reached the last man. That group disappeared in a corridor and another three or four men appeared from another. The men had to walk to one side, because rail tracks ran down the center of each corridor.

  “A lot of those men are doing what’s called dusting,” Bell said. “They spread rock dust around the face of the seam. Air and coal dust is a highly combustible mix. The dust makes it safe. Well—safer.”

  Before she could say another word a violent shaking ensued. The vibration of the rock beneath their feet made it difficult to stay upright. Bell’s legs felt liquefied. A massive roar of machinery filled the cavern. This time, David didn’t reach out for her arm; he was ready for surprises. The noise went on for several minutes and then suddenly cut off.

  “That’s a continuous mining machine,” Bell said. “Just tears the hell out of the rock walls, dragging out the coal. It digs in a sort of square pattern so it makes four walls—a room. In each room, it leaves pillars of coal to hold up the roof. And then it comes back and takes out the pillars.” She pointed down one of the corridors. Visible in the distance was a mammoth rack of spotlights bolted to both sides of a giant black block with enormous mechanical arms.

  “Can we go see it?” David asked. Eager as a kid.

  “Nope. It’s a worksite. We’d be in the way. This’s as far as we go.”

  “So where’s all this beauty you were bragging about? So far, all I’ve seen is rock. And all I’ve gotten is a mouthful of coal dust.”

  Bell swung her head toward one of the empty corridors. The light from the lamp on her helmet struck the dark wall, and it was as if a secret cache of diamonds had suddenly spilled in their laps: Tiny chips of mica in the rock glittered in a rippling swath. These points of light, caught in the illumination from Bell’s headlamp, seemed to leap and dance like living things. During this minute or two when the mine was quiet—no machines, no men—it was as if Bell and David stood in the heart of a dense forest, one that quivered with thousands of fireflies, or were perched in the midst of a night sky that seethed with stars.