Stories of Breece D'J Pancake (5 page)

“Big night in Rock Camp,” I say. I watch Ginny drink. Her skin is so white it glows yellowish, and the last light makes sparks in her red hair.

She says, “Daddy would raise hell. Me this close to the wells.”

“You’re a big girl now. C’mon, let’s walk.”

We get out, and she up and grabs my arm. Her fingers feel like ribbons on the veins of my hand.

“How long you in for?” I say.

“Just a week here, then a week with Daddy in New York. I can’t wait to get back. It’s great.”

“You got a guy?”

She looks at me with this funny smile of hers. “Yeah, I got a guy. He’s doing plankton research.”

Ever since I talked back, I’ve been afraid, but now I hurt again. We come to the tankers, and she takes hold on a ladder, steps up.

“This right?” She looks funny, all crouched in like she’s just nailed a drag on the fly. I laugh.

“Nail the end nearest the engine. If you slip, you get throwed clear. Way you are a drag on the fly’d suck you under. ’Sides, nobody’d ride a tanker.”

She steps down but doesn’t take my hand. “He taught you everything. What killed him?”

“Little shell fragment. Been in him since the war. Got in his blood…” I snap my fingers. I want to talk, but the picture won’t become words. I see myself scattered, every cell miles from the others. I pull them back and kneel in the dark grass. I roll the body face-up, and look in the eyes a long time before I shut them. “You never talk about your momma,” I say.

She says, “I don’t want to,” and goes running to an open window in the depot. She peeks in, turns to me. “Can we go in?”

“Why? Nothing in there but old freight scales.”

“Because it’s spooky and neat and I want to.” She runs back, kisses me on the cheek. “I’m bored with this glum look. Smile!”

I give up and walk to the depot. I drag a rotten bench under the broken window and climb in. I take Ginny’s hand to help her. A blade of glass slices her forearm. The cut path is shallow, but I take off my T-shirt to wrap it. The blood blots purple on the cloth.

“Hurt?”

“Not really.”

I watch a mud dauber land on the glass blade. Its metal-blue wings flick as it walks the edge. It sucks what the glass has scraped from her skin. I hear them working in the walls.

Ginny is at the other window, and she peers through a knothole in the plywood.

I say, “See that light green spot on the second hill?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s the copper on your all’s roof.”

She turns, stares at me.

“I come here lots,” I say. I breathe the musty air. I turn away from her and look out the window to Company Hill, but I can feel her stare. Company Hill looks bigger in the dusk, and I think of all the hills around town I’ve never set foot on. Ginny comes up behind me, and there’s a glass-crunch with her steps. The hurt arm goes around me, the tiny spot of blood cold against my back.

“What is it, Colly? Why can’t we have any fun?”

“When I was a young punk, I tried to run away from home. I was walking through this meadow on the other side of the Hill, and this shadow passed over me. I honest to god thought it was a pterodactyl. It was a damned airplane. I was so damn mad, I came home.” I peel chips of paint from the window frame, wait for her to talk. She leans against me, and I kiss her real deep. Her waist bunches in my hands. The skin of her neck is almost too white in the faded evening. I know she doesn’t understand.

I slide her to the floor. Her scent rises to me, and I shove crates aside to make room. I don’t wait. She isn’t making love, she’s getting laid. All right, I think, all right. Get laid. I pull her pants around her ankles, rut her. I think of Tinker’s sister. Ginny isn’t here. Tinker’s sister is under me. A wash of blue light passes over me. I open my eyes to the floor, smell that tang of rain-wet wood. Black snakes. It was the only time he had to whip me.

“Let me go with you,” I say. I want to be sorry, but I can’t.

“Colly, please…” She shoves me back. Her head is rolling in splinters of paint and glass.

I look a long time at the hollow shadows hiding her eyes. She is somebody I met a long time ago. I can’t remember her name for a minute, then it comes back to me. I sit against the wall and my spine aches. I listen to the mud daubers building nests, and trace a finger along her throat.

She says, “I want to go. My arm hurts.” Her voice comes from someplace deep in her chest.

We climb out. A yellow light burns on the crossties, and the switches click. Far away, I hear a train. She gives me my shirt, and gets in her car. I stand there looking at the blood spots on the cloth. I feel old as hell. When I look up, her taillights are reddish blurs in the fog.

I walk around to the platform, slump on the bench. The evening cools my eyelids. I think of how that one time was the only airplane that ever passed over me.

I picture my father—a young hobo with the Michigan sunset making him squint, the lake behind him. His face is hard from all the days and places he fought to live in, and of a sudden, I know his mistake was coming back here to set that locust-tree post on the knob.

“Ever notice how only blue lightning bugs come out after a rain? Green ones almost never do.”

I hear the train coming. She is highballing all right. No stiffs in that blind baggage.

“Well, you know the Teays must of been a big river. Just stand on Company Hill, and look across the bottoms. You’ll see.”

My skin is heavy with her noise. Her light cuts a wide slice in the fog. No stiff in his right mind could try this one on the fly. She’s hell-bent for election.

“Jim said it flowed west by northwest—all the way up to the old Saint Lawrence Drain. Had garfish—ten, maybe twenty foot long. Said they’re still in there.”

Good old Jim’ll probably croak on a lie like that. I watch her beat by. A worn-out tie belches mud with her weight. She’s just too fast to jump. Plain and simple.

I get up. I’ll spend tonight at home. I’ve got eyes to shut in Michigan—maybe even Germany or China, I don’t know yet. I walk, but I’m not scared. I feel my fear moving away in rings through time for a million years.

H
UNCHED
on his knees in the three-foot seam, Buddy was lost in the rhythm of the truck mine’s relay; the glitter of coal and sandstone in his cap light, the setting and lifting and pouring. This was nothing like the real mine, no deep tunnels or mantrips, only the setting, lifting, pouring, only the light-flash from caps in the relay. In the pace he daydreamed his father lowering him into the cistern: many summers ago he touched the cool tile walls, felt the moist air from the water below, heard the pulley squeak in the circle of blue above. The bucket tin buckled under his tiny feet, and he began to cry. His father hauled him up. “That’s the way we do it,” he laughed, carrying Buddy to the house.

But that came before everything: before they moved from the ridge, before the big mine closed, before welfare. Down the relay the men were quiet, and Buddy wondered if they thought of stupid things. From where he squatted he could see the gray grin of light at the mouth, the March wind spraying dust into little clouds. The half-ton cart was full, and the last man in the relay shoved it toward the chute on two-by-four tracks.

“Take a break” came from the opening, and as Buddy set his shovel aside, he saw his cousin Curtis start through the mouth. He was dragging a poplar post behind him as he crawled past the relay toward the face. Buddy watched while Curtis worked the post upright: it was too short, and Curtis hammered wedges in to tighten the fit.

“Got it?” Buddy asked.

“Hell no, but she looks real pretty.”

Estep, Buddy’s front man, grunted a laugh. “Damn seam’s gettin’ too deep. Ain’t nothin’ but coal in this here hole. When we gonna hit gold?”

Buddy felt Estep’s cap-light on his face and turned toward it. Estep was grinning, a purple fight cut oozing through the dust and sweat on his cheek.

“Chew?” Estep held out his pouch, and Buddy took three fingers before they leaned against each other, back to back, stretching their legs, working their chews.

“Face is a gettin’ pretty tall,” Estep said. Buddy could feel the voice in his back.

“Same thin’s happenin’ up Storm Creek,” he said, pulling the sagging padding up to his knees.

“An’ Johnson’s scratch done the same.”

“Curt,” Buddy shouted, “when’d they make a core sample on this ridge?”

“Hell’s bells, I don’t know,” he said, trying to work in another wedge.

“Musta been sixty years ago,” Estep said. “Recollect yer grandaddy shootin’ at ’em. Thought they’s Philadelfy law’ers.”

“Yeah,” Buddy laughed, remembering the tales.

From near the opening, where the rest of the relay gathered for air, came a high-pitched laugh, and Buddy’s muscles went tight.

“One a these days I’m gonna wring that Fuller’s neck,” he said, spitting out the sweet tobacco juice.

“What he said still eatin’ at ya?”

“He ain’t been worth a shit since he got that car.”

“It’s Sally, ain’t it?”

“Naw, let’er go. Worthless…”

The group laughed again, and a voice said, “Ask Buddy.”

“Ask ’im what?” Buddy shined his light along the row of dirty faces; only Fuller’s was wide with a grin.

“Is Sal goin’ back to whorin’?” Fuller smiled.

“Goddamn you,” Buddy said, but before he could get up, Estep hooked both his elbows in Buddy’s, and Fuller laughed at his struggle. Curtis scrambled back, grabbing Buddy’s collar.

“I reckon you all rested ’nough,” Curtis shouted, and when they heard coal rattling from the bin to the truck, they picked up their shovels, got into line.

Buddy loosened up, giving in to Curtis and Estep. “Tonight at Tiny’s,” he shouted at Fuller.

Fuller laughed.

“Shut up,” Curtis said. “You and Estep work the face.”

Estep let go, and they crawled to the coal face and took up their short-handled spades. The face was already four feet high, and both men could stretch out from their knees, knocking sparkling chunks into the pile, pushing it back for the relay.

“Bet this whole damn ridge is a high seam.”

“Make it worth more than ten swats a day.”

“By God,” Buddy said, and as he dug, wondered if the money would make Sally stay. Remembering Fuller, he hit the face harder, spraying coal splinters into the air.

Estep stopped digging and ran a dirty sleeve across one eye. Buddy was coughing a raspy wheeze, flogging coal to his feet. “Stop killin’ snakes—throwin’ stuff in my eyes.”

Buddy stopped digging. Estep’s voice washed over his anger, leaving him small and cold in the glint of the coal face, yet bold and better than Estep or Fuller.

“Sorry, it’s just I’m mad,” he coughed.

“Get yer chance tonight. C’mon, pace off—one, two…”

Together they threw the relay back into rhythm, added speed. The chink of spades and scrape of shovels slipped into their muscles until only the rumble of the returning truck could slow them. The seam grew where it should have faulted, and they hunkered to their feet, digging toward the thin gray line of ceiling.

“Get some picks,” Buddy grinned.

“Naw, needs shorin’ yet.”

Curtis slipped through the relay to the face, his light showing through the dust in up-down streams. When he got down to them, they leaned against the sidewalls to give him room, and he stuck a pocket level to the ceiling, watching as the bubble rose toward the face.

“Knock off till Monday,” he said. “We ain’t got the timbers fer this here.”

As the men crawled out toward the bloom pile, a whisper of laughter seeped back through the mine to the face, and Buddy dropped to his belly to slink outside, unhurried. Even a clam crawl had winded him, and he waited by the chute for Estep and Curtis as the cold air dried his sweat, sealing the dirt to his skin. He could hear, beneath the whining low gears of the coal truck, the barking of a dog down in the hollow. He sat down hard and leaned against the chute.

From the entrance to the hilltop was a wold of twenty yards, the dead stalks of broom sedge rippling in the wind. Buddy figured the overburden of dirt could be moved in a month, the coal harvested in less than a year. He knew Sally would not wait, was not sure he wanted her.

He remembered a time when the price of her makeup and fancy habits would have fed his mother and sisters something besides the mauve bags of commodities the state handed out.

Estep came out, and Buddy offered him a smoke as they watched the truck shimmy under the bin, leveling its load.

“Goddamned cherry picker,” Estep grunted toward the driver far down the hill.

“Gonna be lots more cherry—all that goddamned coal.” Buddy looked to the western ridges where the sun set a cold strip of fire.

Curtis came up behind them, smiling. “I’m goin’ home an’ get all drunked up.”

“Last time I done that,” Estep said, “got me a new baby. Gonna watch ol’ Mad Man here so’s he don’t tear up Tiny’s.”