Saving Wonder

by Mary Knight

  “Unless you’re an elk,” I say under my breath. I can tell by the look on the ranger’s face that he heard me.

  “What’s your name, young man?”

  “Curley, sir.” I gulp and stop recording. I figure I must be in trouble. Why else do adults ask for your name?

  “Well, Curley. I think you have a future as an investigative reporter. This interview isn’t going to wind up on CNN, is it?” He laughs.

  “No, sir. It’s for a school report. No one will pay it any mind, I’m sure.”

  Papaw’s always saying that being polite is your best weapon, and it must be working, because Ranger Whit pats me on the back real gentle-like and turns to leave. Suddenly, I realize that the camera’s been recording all this time, when I thought I’d pushed STOP.

  “Ranger Whit?”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s one thing I still don’t understand.” I start a slow pan from the mountaintop removal site to the field where the elk are grazing.

  “Sure, son, what is it?”

  “Well, if the word reclamation means to bring something back to its original condition, then where’s the top of the mountain? I mean, it seems that what we have here is a field, which is real nice for the elk, like you said, but as far as I can tell, sir, the mountaintop is gone.”

  “Well now, aren’t you a smart little cuss?” He slaps his knee with his wide-brimmed hat.

  “Honest, sir, I don’t mean to be. It’s just that my papaw’s always telling me to make sure I’m using the right words. He says words are an agreement you make with other people.”

  “That so?”

  “Yes, sir. Seems to me the word reclamation is just plain wrong. Seems to me that if you’re going to remove the top from a mountain, a better word would be irrevocable, because there’s no getting it back.” That happens to be this week’s word, and I’m glad to have it in my holster, not that the ranger’s looking too happy about it.

  “Sure you’re not a reporter?” Ranger Whit shakes his head and starts walking away. “I don’t know how to answer you, Curley,” he yells back over his shoulder. “Seems like you’ve already made up your mind.”

  I watch him get smaller and smaller in the viewfinder as he heads toward a cluster of old folks taking pictures with their phones. I record a few more seconds of the elk herd and the lunar landscape, then head back to the bus. I’ve seen enough. For sure, Ranger Whit has seen enough of me.

  I expect the bus to be empty, but no, Jules and JD are all tangled up in our backseat. They don’t even see me. I slump into a front seat and wait for the tour to end.

  Now I’m the broody one. I brood about dead lakes, topless mountains, and some coal boss’s son kissing my best friend. Every stinking one of them—irrevocable.

  There’s no turning back.

  Irrevocable—adjective

  : incapable of being recalled or revoked; unchangeable; irreversible; unalterable; as, an irrevocable promise or decree; irrevocable fate

  Jules tells me that JD plays “a mean electric guitar.” He probably plays it for her up in his bedroom, like I used to serenade her with my harmonica right here on our front porch. I’d play the blues on hot summer nights after the sun sank behind the mountains and the fireflies came out. Believe me, I know it’s not the same. The guitar is cool and the harmonica is not.

  I’m not ashamed to admit it: I love wailing on old Gloria. I named her after a song I heard on one of Papaw’s Van Morrison records. I love how she fits snug in the cup of my hands, how I can carry her wherever I go.

  My Uncle Pete from up in Chicago gave her to me a few years after Pa died. He and my aunt were driving through Kentucky on their way to Florida for a vacation. He used to play harmonica for a rhythm and blues band at a neighborhood bar when he was younger, but he figured I needed it more than he did now.

  “It will always show you how you feel, Curley,” he said. “Just reach inside your heart, close your eyes, and blow.”

  He gave me a few pointers before he left, like how to play several notes at once and how to create vibrato—a kind of shimmery sound—but mostly, he said I’d be able to teach myself. It’s that kind of instrument. “When people let you down, you can always count on your blues harp to listen,” he said. “It will be your best friend.”

  Well, when I got back from the elk tour yesterday, I needed a friend real bad. I grabbed old Gloria and sat in a rocker out on the porch for what seemed like hours, wailing at the mountain. Papaw let me be until supper was ready, and even then he didn’t grill me about what was wrong. Maybe he knew there was nothing he could say to make the situation with Jules any better.

  JD’s coming by in a few minutes with a laptop he’s loaning me and to show me how to use this editing program for the video I took yesterday. Our project is due in a few weeks. When he called last night, he was all hog wild about the footage I took up on the mining site. He said Mr. A’s going to go bonkers when he sees it, since everyone knows he hates Big Coal and anything that goes against the environment.

  I figure JD was trying to make me feel better after yesterday’s incident. Once the older folks started piling back onto the bus, both he and Jules yelled for me to come back and sit with them, but I just couldn’t. I wound up jammed against a window, sharing the seat with an older couple about Papaw’s age.

  I’m still wailing at the mountain, blowing my blues through old Gloria, when JD and his dad pull up our driveway. Mr. Tiverton waves at me before turning the car around to leave. I guess JD will be walking over to the Cavanaughs’ later to hang out with Jules. I’m pretty sure I’m not invited.

  “Hey, Curley.” JD raises his fist for another one of those bumps, but I let it hang in midair. “Nice sound, man.”

  “Hey.” I stand up and slip the harmonica into my back pocket.

  “Here.” He hands me the laptop. “I found some cool stuff online. I downloaded a video on elk being relocated to Kentucky. I think you’ll like it. Well, you won’t like it, but I think you’ll be able to use it.” He seems downright twitchy.

  Suddenly, I think about him having his arms around Jules in the back of the bus and I get mad all over again. Before I know what I’m saying, I blurt out, “So how’s Jules?” There’s a sickening tone to my voice, like how a first grader might sound, and I wish I could take it back.

  “Well … uh … she’s fine.” He’s staring down at the porch floorboards through his greasy bangs when suddenly his face lights up. “Oh, yeah … she’s definitely fine.”

  “Fine” comes out all stretched out, like he’s thinking about kissing her or worse, and he grins at me like I’m going to “ha-ha” him right back or punch him on the shoulder like those football jocks do when a pretty girl walks by. I don’t really want to invite him in, but I need to know how to work the editing program, so I nod my head in the direction of the door. “Come on.”

  JD follows me into the kitchen, and we work at the table. He’s already loaded the editing program on the computer, and we use the footage from the mining site for practice. In about an hour, I’ve pretty much got it down.

  “You’re not bad for someone who doesn’t even own a computer,” JD says as he shows me how to superimpose titles over video. His pointer fingers click, click, click across the keyboard, like chickens pecking seed. “If you get stuck, call me, okay? My social life is pretty nonexistent right now since we moved down here.”

  Except for Jules, I force myself not to say. “What about that video footage?”

  “Oh, yeah. I almost forgot. I downloaded it this morning.”

  JD clicks on an icon, and up pops a video titled Elk Restoration in Eastern Kentucky. It starts out with a proud-looking hunter in an orange vest posing for the camera between the antlers of a fallen elk. The word restoration hovers over the hunter’s gun, and I think of something Papaw told me this morning when he gave me my new word.

  “Curley,” he said, “some words will change the entire way you look at something. Take this week’s wo
rd, juxtapose, for instance. It’s a verb that simply means to put one thing next to another in order to compare the two, but whoa, Nelly. Sometimes that simple action will flip the shades up on something you were previously blind to seeing and this little explosion will go off inside your head. Boom!” And he smacked his palm against the table, making me jump.

  So when JD starts the video, I notice how the word restoration is juxtaposed over that gun and then I look down at the body of that dead elk and then back up at the hunter’s smiling face and, well, to tell you the truth, all that juxtaposing makes me mad. It’s like they’re saying, Isn’t this cool? We brought all these elk out here to Kentucky so we can kill them.

  Now, don’t get me wrong, I like guns as much as the next guy. Papaw and I have a target set up in the field behind his woodshop, and I’m a pretty good shot. But ever since the age of ten, when I was out hunting with Papaw and one of his buddies brought down a doe, I haven’t had the stomach for it. It wasn’t the blood exactly, it was the breathing that got to me. And then watching the breathing stop.

  The narrator’s saying something about how the restoration of elk in eastern Kentucky has been a boon to both hunting and the tourist industry, when JD starts picking up where he left off about not having any friends.

  “I guess that’s the thing I miss most about Indiana, my brothers back in the ’hood.”

  I nod, even though I really don’t know what it’s like to have friends like that, except for Jules, of course. On the laptop, the video’s narrator drones on and on as elk are corralled into a holding pen by men dressed in camouflage. They’re poking them with sticks.

  “My old man says he bought this company here in Hicksville to get me away from all of those bad influences back home—as if he isn’t one of the worst. It’s all about work to him. What’s good for coal is good for us, he keeps saying, like it’s one of those incantation thingies Jules and her mom talk about.”

  “Mantras?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Like it’s a friggin’ mantra or something.”

  A big crowd of people—the narrator estimates three hundred—are all standing around this field waiting for the van doors to open. A bystander keeps saying how this is the best thing that’s ever happened to Kentucky, when JD starts having a hissy fit right next to me.

  “But you want to know the truth? I’ll tell you the truth. James David Tiverton II couldn’t care less about Mom or me. I mean it, Curley. I know you met him and I know how he can come across—like a good old boy, sympathetic to your cause and all—but I’m telling you: His heart is as black as coal.”

  JD’s words stun me, like a wave of heat from a rip-roaring fire in our woodstove. I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed so much hate, except for maybe in Carl Jenkins before he gave me that black eye. It’s not just the hate, though. If what JD says about his father is true, Papaw and I are sunk. I stare at the video flashing across the screen. A cheer goes up from the crowd as elk come charging down the ramp and into the open field, some with collars on.

  JD reaches across the table and taps STOP, freezing an elk midleap. “I’d have caught the first bus back to Indiana, Curley, if it weren’t for you and Jules.”

  Well, I don’t mind telling you, if JD’s hate for his father had me plastered to my seat, this news has me shooting straight down through the floor.

  “Me?” I say. I can believe Jules, but … “Me?”

  He laughs. “Yeah. I know that sounds weird, but you’re a lot like my friends back home.” He fiddles with the silver piercing in his left eyebrow. “You say what you think.”

  “Uh … well … thanks … but … that’s not exactly true.” Like what I think about him, for instance.

  JD presses SAVE and waits for the program to close. I’m relieved that our little tech session is ending, but then he says, “And then there’s Jules—”

  I let out a groan. I can’t help it. I’ve been stuffing it since Jules set eyes on him.

  “Jules says you guys have been best friends since forever.”

  My heart does this little flip. She talks about me?

  “So I want you to know I’m not going to hurt her or anything. I know you’re probably freaking out about that, me being an older guy and all.” He forces a laugh. “You probably don’t see a lot of nose rings or piercings back here in the hills, either.”

  I continue to stare at the freeze-frame of the leaping elk and don’t say a word.

  “Honest, man … me and Jules? We’re just having some fun, you know?” He shrugs like he’s shaking something off his shoulder. Like dandruff. For some reason, this little gesture hits me like a punch in the gut, when you’d think I’d be doing handsprings.

  “Does she know that?” I say, sharper than I intend. I want to sound, well, lackadaisical. I want him to think that Jules and I have talked, that I know all about the “fun” they’re having.

  “Of course.” He shrugs. “She’s the one who keeps saying we shouldn’t get too serious. Besides, I know I’m her first boyfriend and all and she’s … well … sweet, you know? Spunky … but sweet. Not at all like the girls back home in Indiana.” He spins his studded armband around on his wrist. “So no worries, Curley, my man. I’ll take good care of her.”

  “Don’t do me any favors.” I slam the laptop shut and push my chair back from the table.

  “Whoa—” JD puts his hands up in the air like he’s surrendering to the cops. “Dude … I was just trying to ease your mind, you know, about our mutual interest. We’re cool, right?”

  “No, JD, we’re not cool. First of all, Jules is more than a ‘mutual interest.’ She’s my friend. Second, you talk about her like you know her, but you don’t. You don’t know the first thing about her. You don’t know her at all.” I’m working up steam to say a lot more, when Papaw sticks his head around the kitchen door.

  “Everything all right in here, boys?”

  “Yeah, Mr. Weaver.” JD grabs his backpack. “I was just going.”

  Papaw meets my steely gaze with his own cold stare. “Curley? Don’t you have something to say to JD here?” JD freezes in front of the door, waiting.

  I know what Papaw is expecting me to say, how he wants me to thank JD for “everything,” but how can I? Sometimes when you juxtapose things, it makes you feel sad or even mad because it shows you how wrong something is—like when I juxtapose JD and Jules. Sometimes that “new light” Papaw talks about being cast is more like a shadow, blotting out everything good.

  I meet JD’s eyes as he turns around expectantly.

  “No, Papaw. Don’t worry.” I wave my hand in the air like I’m shooing away a fly. “I already said it.”

  Juxtapose—verb

  : to place in nearness or contiguity, or side by side, often for the purpose of comparison

  For the last four days, Jules and I have been walking to and from the bus stop together, just like in the old days before JD. Usually, I tell Jules the word for the week or she’ll ask and we’ll try to use it at least once on the way to school or on the way home. But this week, for some reason, I can’t bring myself to tell her what it is. It feels like a secret before the thing that makes it a secret has had a chance to happen. Crazy, huh?

  All I know is that I’ve been fixating (two years ago, February) on this dream catcher key chain I made for her in third grade that’s clipped to a buckle on her schoolbag. At the time, I thought it was a sissy thing for a boy to be making, so all the materials I picked out—pipe cleaner, feathers, and beads—were black. I had in mind a dream catcher for a ninja warrior, which at the time I wanted to be.

  “If you don’t want it, I’ll take it,” Jules said after art class that day.

  “Sure, here,” I said, and the gift was made. I told her it would protect her against evil spirits, a stupid childish fantasy that’s obviously not working.

  Spring is coming to the mountain in spurts. Today is chilly after a couple of days of spitting cold rain. Jules and I slog our way home along the creek bed, tryi
ng to avoid crushing the clusters of bloodroot blossoms poking out here and there, like tiny white asterisks among all the dead leaves. When I was a little boy, I used to get terrible sore throats. Ma would use bloodroot to make a powerful medicine, mixing the bitter, red juice of its roots with maple sugar to hide the taste, which it never quite did. She always looked so worried about me, though, so I kept the bad taste to myself.

  “JD tells me your part of our elk project is really coming along.” Jules’s voice sounds like a little girl’s as it breaks the silence between us.

  Since the elk tour, Jules and I have managed to keep JD out of our conversations. It’s as if we were both pretending he didn’t exist, which suited me just fine, so I have to wonder why she’s bringing him up now. I decide to take the high road.

  “Yeah, he was a big help with the video I’m making.” I say this matter-of-factly, like JD and I are buds, like I didn’t almost kill him last Sunday afternoon.

  “Oh? He told me he wasn’t so sure. Something about you getting your underwear all bunched in a wad.” She stops to shift her pack to the other shoulder and examines me, like she’s trying to read my face and probably my mind, something she’s usually pretty good at.

  “Oh, really?” I notice the dream catcher swinging from its chain. “He was the one who got himself all in a tizzy talking about his old man taking him away from his ‘brothers’ up north, like he wishes he’d never come here.” It doesn’t feel good telling on anybody like this, even JD, but gosh darn it, he started it.

  “He said that?” She looks at me as if she doesn’t believe me, and that really ticks me off.

  “Yeah … he even said he doesn’t have a social life down here in Hicksville.”

  She flinches. It’s barely perceptible, but I see it in her face above the place where her dimple usually shows up when she’s smiling. Good. What I said hurts. But then this twinge of guilt starts pinching at me and I have to tell the whole truth, which, I don’t mind telling you, I absolutely hate.