Last Ragged Breath

by Julia Keller

  She could hear his breathing.

  “Okay,” he said. Voice quiet, subdued by awe. “I see what you mean.”

  Finding beauty within the ruins. Finding, in the darkness, something lovely, something that had meaning, if only for the person who beheld it. This was a trick Bell had taught herself early. Given her profession—one that required her to see the very worst that people could do to each other, inflicting all manner of physical and emotional pain—she kept the trick handy, like a magician who never leaves the house without that special deck of cards.

  David coughed. It broke the spell; the fragile moment collapsed all around them. His tone turned to one of complaint. “But how the hell does anybody spend their life working down here? I feel like I want to run my lungs through a car wash.”

  “Wouldn’t be my first choice either,” Bell said. “But don’t worry. These mines—the few that are left—are doomed. And Lord knows, they should be. They’re dirty and dangerous. The coal they produce is doing all the bad things to the atmosphere that you and your friends accuse it of. No defense for it. And far too many men have been killed or injured in mines just like this one.” She turned back around to face him, switching off her headlamp. Now the wall returned to being just an expanse of black rock. Not a trove of diamonds. Not a harvest of stars. “But before these mines go away entirely—before the only thing that’s left of this place is a bunch of sepia-toned photos of men in hard hats with dirty faces—I just wanted you to see it and hear it. To smell it. To feel it.”

  She was aware of something in her own throat, but it wasn’t coal dust. She swallowed it back down again. “This way of life—this place—is gone, David. Two-thirds of the coal produced today comes from strip mines, not underground mines. Since 1976, seventy-five percent of these mines have shut down. Coal miners? Down to less than a third of what there were back in the 1970s.”

  “And that’s a good thing, right? Like you said.”

  “Yeah. But what’s coming along behind it? What kind of employment is left for people in Raythune County? Salary-wise, these were damned good jobs. Jobs you could raise a family on. Build a life on. Do you really think Mountain Magic’s going to offer that for maids and busboys? For waitresses? For caddies and desk clerks?”

  He didn’t answer. There was no answer.

  “Time to go,” she said. She pointed up. “Back to the future.” And then she paused. One more thing to say. “Sorry to go all Studs Terkel on you there. I just know how hard coal miners work. And what they’ve meant to West Virginia.”

  He nodded. He let her lead the way back onto the hoist. She leaned over and pushed the brass button, the signal to Dickie Lavender that they were ready to return to the surface.

  Slowly, the platform began to rise. It was a smoother ride than the one on the way down, as they climbed steadily past the rough walls of the shaft.

  “That is pretty amazing,” David said. He watched the chipped and mysterious rock that looked as if it were sinking down past them as they were hauled up. “I can’t wait to tell my girls about—”

  A squeal of machinery, a hiss, and then a popping sound. The lights went out. The platform halted. It jerked once. Again. The hoist hung forlornly in the middle of the shaft, swaying slightly, as if even the contemplation of its current location was making it dizzy. Another jerk. Then it was still.

  * * *

  “Hey,” David said.

  “They’ll get it going again,” Bell said. “Just hang on.”

  “Don’t have much of a choice.” It wasn’t a wisecrack. There was an edge to his voice.

  “Happens all the time,” she said.

  “Really.”

  “Yeah. The motor overheats. It’s got an automatic shutoff. Once it cools, we’ll be good to go.”

  “Or good to fall.”

  “Relax, David.” She smiled at him. She turned her headlamp on, so that they could see each other. His face was taut with the opening stages of panic.

  “Believe me, I’m trying to,” he said.

  The platform jerked again; unprepared for it, they almost fell over. Then: nothing.

  “Jesus,” David said.

  “I’m telling you. We’ll be fine.” She didn’t know if they would be fine or not, but she’d learned a few things from Nick Fogelsong over the years, and one of them was: When you’re scared shitless, act brave. And keep thinking.

  “Maybe I’d better turn off my headlamp,” she said. “In case we’re here a while. Might need it later.” Hacked out of the rock on one side were small indentations that ran up the shaft, bottom to top. A last-chance ladder. In an emergency, Bell knew, they could step off the platform and climb. But that step—from solid platform to scooped-out place in the rock that was roughly the size of the front half of your boot, with no railing, and nothing existing between you and the rock ledge hundreds of feet below but your own strength and guts—was harrowing to think about. So she didn’t think about it.

  They were roughly halfway between the surface and the bottom of the shaft, so the light at both ends was muted, distant, like a faint memory of childhood.

  “You okay?” she said.

  “No.”

  “Dickie knows what he’s doing.”

  David didn’t want to talk about Dickie. “Look, Bell,” he said. His voice was hurried, but no longer on the precipice of panic. He sounded resolute. “If this thing ends up crashing down there and I’m crushed to death—but you make it out—promise me something, okay? Promise that you’ll tell my girls how much I loved them.”

  “Tell them yourself. We’re getting out of here.”

  “What if that foreman can’t make it go again?”

  “Dickie will come through.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because if he doesn’t,” Bell said, “and we don’t make it up, he knows that Rhonda will never forgive him. Trust me—you don’t want Rhonda Lovejoy mad at you. She can make life real tough for people she doesn’t like.”

  “Don’t understand,” David said, “how you can joke right now. I really don’t.”

  Bell reached out to find his arm. She gave it a squeeze. “Better than falling apart, don’t you think?”

  He moved around on the platform, trying to dissipate his nervousness, perhaps, by staying in motion. But there was nowhere to go.

  “Seriously, David—we just need to sit tight. Dickie’s working on this.”

  “What if he isn’t?”

  She was just as scared as David was, but saw no point in dwelling on it.

  “Okay,” she said. She needed to take his mind off their predicament. Her mind, too.

  “Let’s play a game. Let’s pretend that this really is it.”

  “Great game.” His voice was glum.

  “Come on. You’ll see. Okay—so back to what you were saying. These are your last few minutes on earth. What do you want your girls to know about you?”

  She heard him sigh. Gradually, though, he was giving in to her question.

  “About me,” he said.

  “Sure. Things you’ve never told them. Advice you want them to hear. Or things about your life. Anything.” She and Carla had first played this game one summer night. Her daughter was eleven years old and a terrible storm had taken over the world; the trees looked alive, yanked back and forth by a vicious wind, their tops thrashing, and the thunder cracked so loudly that you could feel the vibration all the way down to the soles of your feet. Rain was flung against the windows with what seemed like deliberate hatefulness. Carla had rushed into Bell’s room and snuggled under the comforter. Mom, I’m scared, she said. What if the roof falls in? What if— Bell, holding her very, very tight, said, The roof won’t fall in, sweetie. She could sense, though, that the reassurance wasn’t hitting home. It was too glib, too pat, too easy. Who wouldn’t say that very thing, at such a time? And so Bell said, Maybe it will. Carla sat up in bed. Mom, what do you mean? Bell replied, If the roof falls in and that big tree out there smashes us flat, wha
t are the things that were best about your life? What are the things that meant the most to you? And Carla, instead of focusing on the storm or on her fear, focused on her answer: The best things, Mom, are you and Dad, and playing basketball. And my Harry Potter books. And chocolate ice cream. Carla’s answer reminded Bell of a scene in her favorite play, Our Town, when Emily Gibbs comes up with her own list: Food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths.

  “So what would you want your kids to know?” Bell said, prodding him again. “Doesn’t have to be huge, momentous, earth-shattering things. It can be anything you want it to be.”

  David’s voice came out of the semidarkness at a different pitch. It was stronger now, and thoughtful. “I guess I’d like them to know that I really tried to make our family work. I didn’t want the divorce. I tried like hell to make a go of it with their mom.”

  “Good,” she said. “What else?”

  “Well, I suppose I’d like them to know about my work. I changed fields, you know. A lot of my graduate research was in microbiology. Lab work. But I looked around and I realized what was happening to our world. So I shifted to environmental science. I know there won’t be any easy answers to the problem of climate change. But whatever those answers are—they’ll come from science. Not politics.” She heard, for the first time since they had been shocked by the halt of the hoist halfway up the shaft, a note of hopefulness in his voice. “Yes. That’s what I want them to know. How much I love them and how much I still love their mother. I always will. And how much I love this planet. Corny as that sounds.”

  “Doesn’t sound corny at all.”

  “How about you? What do you want Carla to know?”

  Bell started to answer. Then something occurred to her. She would never know if that idea had somehow drifted up from the depths of the Drago No. 4 mine, rising on the back of a rich plume of coal dust, or if it had been in her mind all along, and just needed a jolt to shake it loose.

  “David,” she said. “What if I lied?”

  “Pardon?”

  “What if I threatened to tell a different story about you? That you were a terrible coward in these last few minutes? That you were disappointed in your girls, and you hated their mother, and you hated your work?”

  “I don’t know what you—”

  “What would you do?”

  “Well,” he said, “I’d be pretty pissed, frankly.”

  “How pissed?”

  “I’m not following what you’re—”

  “If I was blackmailing you with that threat, what would your response be? Remember—I’m going to tell a heinous lie about you. A lie the world’s likely to believe. So—would you do my bidding?”

  “I might,” he said. “But I’d try to stop you first.”

  “Exactly.”

  Fourteen minutes later, the man-hoist began to grunt and moan once more. In another five, they crested the surface. They were met there by the sweaty, dirt-seamed face of Dickie Lavender.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, yanking open the gate. “Shoulda warned you. This thing sticks worse’n a rusty truck door. Gets hung up every few trips. I been outside with the electrician, trying to get ’er going, else I woulda shouted down to you, tell you what was going on.”

  “We did okay,” David said.

  “Piece of cake,” Bell put in.

  David looked over at her. And she realized, based on what she read in his eyes, that he now understood. Sometimes it happened that way: You both tried to make a relationship work, but then you realized, in a moment when you weren’t even thinking consciously about it, that it was never to be. No blinding flash of revelation, no grand moment of truth. Just a sober, quiet knowing. It wasn’t going to happen between them. And that was okay. Disappointing, perhaps, especially to him—but okay.

  On paper, David was perfect for her. In the real world, though, things were different. She knew the man she wanted. And it wasn’t David Gage. She might never have another chance with Clay Meckling, and she might be alone for the rest of her life—but she wouldn’t compromise. She couldn’t. Something in her blood made her that way.

  Dickie Lavender, having no idea about what had just passed silently between them, thumped Bell’s helmet. Then he thumped David’s, too. “Lotsa people,” he said admiringly, “scream like stuck pigs when the man-hoist quits like that in the dang middle of the trip. Or they start yelling to Jesus. But you two were as cool and comfortable as a couple of old miners. Oughta be proud of yourselves.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Rhonda Lovejoy stopped the car. She did it too abruptly, with a hard punch of her right foot, and the vehicle’s tires shrieked their indignation as the hindquarters fishtailed wildly to the right.

  “Holy crap,” her passenger yelped. “You trying to put me through the windshield, or what?”

  “Look over there.” Rhonda ignored his complaint and pointed eagerly. “On the concrete pad in front of the garage. That black one’s an Escalade. The other one’s a Lexus. Come on.”

  Before Jake Oakes could tell her one more time just how truly bad an idea he considered this to be—how foolish, reckless, and most likely ineffective—Rhonda had already scooted out of her car. She’d parked within sight of Walter Albright’s ostentatiously massive brick house in Harbor View, a new housing development located just past Blythesburg. There was no harbor here, hence no view of same; the name had been chosen because the developers thought it sounded snooty and exclusive, as if these were elegant oceanfront estates in Connecticut, not gaudy McMansions set down in a converted farm field in West Virginia.

  From here she and Oakes could see a portion of the lengthy, triple-wide concrete pad that constituted Albright’s driveway, and had as well a beguiling peek at his rolling, meticulously landscaped backyard. The house included a two-story, four-car garage, topped by a small replica of a sailboat that served as a weather vane; the copper was well on its way to oxidizing into the classic blue-green shade. Albright apparently liked to indulge in the Harbor View fantasy himself.

  Rhonda and Oakes got back in her car. They needed to see the place from another angle. Their suspicions were being richly fed by every frill and accouterment they came across: This was too much house, too much garage, too much everything for a retired state trooper, even one who had worked an additional two decades as security chief for a chain of truck stops. Rhonda had done her due diligence before setting out: She’d checked with her niece, Judy—a real estate agent in Collier County—and discovered that Walter Albright’s wife, Gloria, had purchased the $950,000 home just over a year ago. She paid cash. And she filed the title in her maiden name—Gloria Bransted. Judy was able to find out all of this because she was Rhonda’s niece. And Lovejoys always knew where to look.

  Rhonda was glad that Oakes had agreed to accompany her. “Agreed” was too generous; “consented under coercion” might be closer to the mark. Rhonda had stopped by the courthouse early Saturday morning and found the deputy just as he was finishing up the night shift, ready to head home, whereupon she announced to him her plans to drive over to Harbor View and snoop around Albright’s property. During one of her visits to Nick’s hospital room, Rhonda explained, Nick had talked about Albright. About how inefficient the old man had become at his job, how slipshod and forgetful. Something had clicked in Rhonda’s head—and so, she told Oakes, she was going to check it out. Right now.

  You can’t do that, Oakes said. Watch me, she’d snapped back at him. You’re crazy, he replied. Could be, Rhonda said, adding, But I’ll be damned if I’m going to keep sitting around without lifting a finger to find out who shot Nick Fogelsong. He’s my friend. Oakes shook his head and said: Friend or not, it’s Collier County’s lookout, not ours, and besides— At that point, Rhonda started walking away. Hold on, Oakes called out. You can’t go by yourself. And she turned back to him and said, Well, okay, but you’ve got to change out of your uniform first. Dressed like that, you can’t sneak up on anybody.

  As they drove t
oward Harbor View he had expressed his surprise that there was a passel of palatial homes in such a benighted area of the state. “You’re making a common mistake,” Rhonda had reprimanded him. “You think it’s all shacks and trailers in these parts. No. There’s houses that serve the high end, too—doctors, lawyers, people with real money. Go-to-hell money, we call it. And that’s the problem these days. There’s high and there’s low. But there’s no middle.”

  Then he’d asked another question: What made her so certain that, if Albright had been involved in a drug ring, and profited handsomely from same, there would be sufficient evidence of that at his home? “Oh, Jake, Jake,” Rhonda said, giving him a piteous glance as she swung her car toward the exit marked BLYTHESBURG. “What’s the point of having more money than other folks if you can’t show off to the neighbors? Subtlety is not a virtue much prized by the sort we’re talking about. Believe me—if Walter Albright took payoffs to let Highway Haven turn into an open-air drug market, he’d put that money to good use. He’d be conspicuous about it—and he couldn’t help himself. In a funny kind of way, all those shiny new toys would help a man like Albright feel better about what he’s done. They justify it. Working all those years in law enforcement for peanuts, while the bad guys rake it in—why, it’s only right and proper that he finally gets a taste of the high life. You see? Okay, so here’s the bet. I say there’ll be at least one riding lawnmower, a motor home, a trampoline, a snowblower, and maybe a Bobcat in an outbuilding.”

  Oakes laughed and said, “I’ll see your lawnmower, your motor home, your trampoline, your snowblower, and your Bobcat, and I’ll raise you a swimming pool and a hot tub.”

  While they watched, an overweight man came out of the back door of the house. He headed toward the Escalade. With a jaunty nonchalance, he flipped a set of car keys up in the air and then caught it again. Flip and catch. Flip and catch. It was cold this morning, and he wore a green plaid coat. On his head was a ball cap with a Peterbilt logo.