Into the Web (11 page)

“What would I have in mind, Lonnie?”

A broad smile crossed Lonnie’s face. “Maybe offering a little comfort,” he said. “Nothing wrong in that.”

I pulled into Lila’s driveway a few minutes later.

At the top of the stairs, I hesitated outside the door, feeling intensely foolish now, a middle-aged man mired in a high-school romance. So foolish in fact that I might have turned and fled had Lila not come upon me suddenly.

“Roy.” She stood at the corner of the house, a basket of vegetables in her hand. “I just came from the garden.

“Mama’s sleeping.” She nodded toward the house.

“She’s not really able to take care of herself anymore.”

“Doc Poole gave Lonnie his report,” I told her. “Clayton Spivey died of black lung. The case is closed as far as Lonnie’s concerned.”

She straightened herself abruptly. “I don’t care what Lonnie Porterfield does. I’m trash to him. Always have been.”

It had been a hot summer night, Lila and I walking beside the road together, holding hands, a pickup truck roaring past, a load of valley boys in the back, waving bottles, yelling drunkenly, Lonnie in the midst of them, louder than the rest, taunting as he went by,
Be careful, Roy, Waylord girls ain’t never fresh.

“He was drunk,” I told her, repeating the same excuse for Lonnie I’d offered my father only a day before. “He was young.”

“Yes, he was,” Lila replied. “Anyway, I knew what he thought about me after that. The same way his father felt. That the girls up here are just something to be used. Something to be played with.”

“You sound like my father. The way he hates the Porterfields.”

“Maybe I am like your father, Roy.”

“You’re not in the least like him.”

She smiled. “You didn’t look at me like other boys.”

“I was shy,” I said.

She grew still beneath my gaze.

“I would have come back, you know. After college. I would have come back for you if you hadn’t …”

“None of that matters now,” Lila said.

It was then I suddenly glimpsed Lila’s life as I thought she had come to see it, as something that had flowed grimly out of our teenage romance, a stream that should have been bright and glittering but had grown dark and murky.

“Lila … I …”

A voice from inside the house called her name.

“My mother,” Lila said hastily. “I’ve got to go.”

I reached for her arm. “Lila …”

Our eyes locked for an instant, then the screen door creaked open and a thin, rawboned woman emerged from the darkened house, a mere shadow of the woman I’d first glimpsed in a metallic blue dress in the bleachers.

“Who’s that?” she called.

“We have company,” Lila told her. “A gentleman caller, you might say.” She moved past me, her eyes fixed on her mother. “Do you remember him, Mama?”

Betty Cutler leaned forward, now squinting so hard, her eyes were mere slits. The name that broke from her lips chilled me to the bone.

“Jesse,” she whispered.

“No, Mama.” Lila took her mother’s arm. “This is Roy. Roy Slater. Not Jesse.”

The old woman drew away from me instantly.

“He’s just come up to visit.” Lila tugged her mother back toward the door. “Isn’t that nice?”

The old woman’s hand fell limply to her side. Something in her eyes grew dark and accusatory. “You ain’t the man your daddy was.”

“Mama!” Lila blurted out. “You be quiet now.”

The old woman’s voice hardened. “Jesse wouldn’t have took it.”

“Mama, stop it,” Lila said sharply.

But Mrs. Cutler didn’t stop. “Jesse would have done something about it.”

“Let’s go back in the house, Mama,” Lila pleaded.

Mrs. Cutler’s eyes remained level upon mine. “Even after what they done to him at the Waylord mine.”

I stared at her helplessly. “The Waylord mine?”

“Come on now, Mama,” Lila snapped, firmly turning
the old woman away from me, whispering, “Sorry, Roy, sorry,” as she ushered her toward the door.

I waited in the yard, all but reeling from so disturbing a remark, the sound of it echoing through my brain. Through the window I could see Lila guide her mother hastily toward a wooden rocker, scolding her gently all the way.

In response, the old woman muttered something I couldn’t understand.

“Mama just says things, Roy,” Lila told me when she returned to me.

“What was she talking about?” I pressed.

“I don’t know,” Lila said. “She gets things confused. One memory floats into another one. Things whirl around.”

She knew that I’d seen it, the lie in her eyes. “I better get back inside,” she said quietly. “Good-bye, Roy.”

She backed away from me, her smile soft, almost fragrant, like a small pale flower on her lips. “I always knew you’d be a good man,” she said in words she clearly considered to be the last she would ever say to me. “Nothing could change that … nothing.”

O
n the way back to the valley, I spotted the road that had once led to the Waylord mine and the coal-blackened company town that surrounded it. A wooden sign had been nailed to a tree at the entrance to the road, reminding everyone that although the mine itself had long been shut down, both the mine and the town remained the private property of the Waylord Mining Company.

For all the times I’d swept up the road toward Lila’s house, I’d never once turned off it, but Betty Cutler’s words suddenly cut through me,
Even after what they done to him at the Waylord mine
, and fired a need in me to discover what had shaped my father, perhaps twisted him, but had, by some transforming means, made him the man she seemed to think I was but the shadow of.

The road into the town was overgrown now, little
more than parallel ruts through a snarl of weed, but still maneuverable. Peering down its twisted path, I wondered what it was in my father that Mrs. Cutler so admired, and what had buried it so deeply, I’d never had the slightest glimpse of it for all the years I’d lived within my father’s house.

I reached Waylord a few minutes later, got out of my car. A crescent-shaped line of buildings curved around a broad street. The mine lay at the eastern tip of the crescent, a square maw dug out of the hillside. It had been abandoned long ago, of course, along with the company offices and stores.

Just behind the unpainted wooden gate that now blocked the mouth of the mine, I could see the supporting timbers, thick and black, along with the steel roof bolts that held them in place. It was not hard for me to imagine the years during which the mine had been active, the clang of the bell calling the miners to and from the mine, the shuffle of their feet as they passed each other in long lines, clothed in denim coveralls, their heads decked out in plastic helmets and carbide lights.

My father had worked in the Waylord mine from the day he was nine years old, scrambling into the rickety wooden elevator, no doubt peering upward, as miners often do on the descent, drinking in a last greedy gulp of sun before the night engulfed them.

The august offices of the Waylord Mining Company sat on a slight incline, shoved up against the hillside, its wide deck lifted on high wooden stilts. From there, the owners had been able to survey their pinched domain, their mine, their stores, the gray masses who toiled beneath them. I could imagine my father glancing
toward them as he filed past, swinging his metal lunch bucket and muttering curses or making jokes at the expense of the rich men who loomed above him, smoking cigars, their thumbs hitched in their suspenders.

“Can I help you with something, mister?”

He wore no uniform, but an unbridled and menacing authority dripped from every pore. Even without the shotgun that hung in the crook of his arm, he would have given off the smoldering sense of what he was. Here standing before me was the mythical gun-thug of my father’s grim boyhood, unsmiling, wielding a lawless power to hurt and kill, able to strike terror in all but the strongest hearts.

“This is private property, you know. Posted.”

I felt a pinch of fear. “Yes, I know.”

“So you saw that sign, did you? Out by the road?”

“I saw it.”

He took a step toward me. “Well, in that case, you better be on your way. Like I say. This here land is posted.”

I’d already begun to ease back to my car, when another man appeared on the steps of what had once been the company store.

“What’s going on, Floyd?” he called.

The gun-thug’s shoulders lifted abruptly, like a dog’s ears at his master’s call. “Oh, it ain’t nothing, Mr. Hopper,” he yelled back to the old man at the top of the stairs.

“Don’t tell me it ain’t nothing,” the old man snarled. “Who’s that feller?” He pointed to me.

The gun-thug looked at me quizzically. “What’s your
name, mister?” he asked, his tone now suddenly polite, his face hanging slightly, like a scolded puppy.

“Roy Slater,” I told him.

“Says his name’s Roy Slater,” he shouted to the old man.

“Slater?” the old man said in a tone that suggested to me that he recognized the name. “Bring him here, Floyd,” he commanded.

A knot formed in my stomach. “Look, I was just …”

The gun-thug motioned me toward the old man. “Them stairs …” he began.

“Look, I didn’t mean to …”

The gun-thug peered at me quizzically. “You sick or something?”

“No.”

He took this for the truth, turned, and headed for the stairs, motioning me along. “Them stairs,” he repeated. “You got to watch how you take ’em. Some’s about to give in. Just foller me and you won’t fall through.”

I followed him up the stairs, carefully avoiding the ones he avoided until we reached the spot where the old man waited, his frame bent like a piece of tin someone had hammered into a misbegotten shape.

“You looking for something here in Waylord?” he asked.

“No, I just wanted to see where my father worked, that’s all,” I answered. “The Waylord mine, I mean. The hoot-owl shift. That’s the one he worked.”

The old man grinned. “So he was a night miner.” He studied my features. “You say your name’s Slater?”

“My father’s name is Jesse. Jesse Slater. Did you know him?”

The old man’s eyes shot over to the gun-thug. “Floyd. Go on back down to the gate.”

The gun-thug nodded slowly, then thudded down the stairs, his great hulk weaving like a wounded bear.

“That boy can’t think two steps ahead of hisself,” the old man muttered, then turned to me. “You don’t look like you’re from here. Don’t talk like it either.”

“I live in California now.”

The old man cast his eyes about the dead town almost nostalgically, and the threatening nature of our previous exchange suddenly faded, leaving a soft light in his face. “They ain’t nothing left of this place. Used to be lively, though. Name’s Hopper. Asa Hopper.” He offered his hand.

I shook it. “Glad to meet you.”

“Like I said, don’t get many visitors up this way.”

I looked at him silently for a moment, trying to figure out how to begin, then decided simply to state it flat out. “The truth is, I’m trying to find out something. Just something an old woman said to me once.”

“Uh-huh.”

“That I’m not the man my father was. I think she said it because my father did something. She mentioned the mine. I got the idea that it must have happened here. Whatever he did.”

A silence fell between us, and I could see Hopper’s mind turning slowly, dredging the bottom of his long memory. “There ain’t nothing to be done about it now, son,” he said finally, his tone quiet, measured. “Most of them fellers is long dead. The ones that done it.”

I suddenly understood the purpose Hopper thought I must have had in returning to Waylord, the mission he
assumed I’d set myself, dear to the heart of all who lived in the hills: vengeance.

“I wasn’t planning to do anything to anybody,” I assured him. “I just came here to—”

“It was all the talk around here, you know,” Hopper said. A grim wonder swam into his eyes. “Nobody figured he’d live, your daddy, but this young feller, a doctor, come up from Kingdom City and tended to him after the beating.”

“Why was he beaten?” I asked.

“ ’Cause he acted smart,” Hopper answered. “Smarted off to ’em. He was just a kid, and all. Sixteen, maybe. Just a kid. So they figured he’d cave in the minute he got spoke to.” He nodded. “Right in there. Right by that little candy counter. That’s where he smarted off, and that’s when they done it.

“Everybody figured it was planned out ahead of time,” Hopper went on. “ ’Cause them fellers was all standing in different places in the store. When your daddy come in, I mean. Sort of like they was already in position. Waiting for him. The sheriff and them guys that worked for him.”

“The sheriff?” I asked. “It was Wallace Porterfield who beat my father up?”

“Him and two more that worked for him,” Hopper answered. “Deputies.”

I gazed through the dusty glass, surveying the room as Hopper continued, placing the sheriff and his men in the places he indicated. One of them at the front door, a second at the rear, Wallace Porterfield halfway between the two, the massive fulcrum upon whose orders
each moved, and finally the store’s owner far off to the side, watching it all from behind a stack of cardboard boxes.

“Mr. Warren run the company store back then,” the old man said. “Managed the whole thing.” He cleared his throat roughly, coughed into his fist. “People said it was Sheriff Porterfield that started it all. Come up to your daddy, sort of put his hand on his shoulder. Said, ‘Come with me, boy.’ Or something like that.”

I saw my father turn to face the enormous granite boulder of Wallace Porterfield, heard him speak the words local legend placed in his mouth.

“Then Porterfield reached into one of them jars over there,” Hopper said. “Took out a piece of penny candy and stuck it right in your daddy’s shirt pocket. Looked him right in the eye and said …”