Gray Mountain (18 page)

“They work on Saturday, huh?” she asked.

He nodded and said, “Seven days a week, sometimes. All the unions are gone.”

They climbed to three thousand feet and leveled off. “We’re over Kentucky now, heading west and north,” he said. If not for the headsets, he would have been yelling into the roar of the engine. “Just look. Too many to count.” The strip mines dotted the mountains like ugly scars, dozens of them as far as she could see. They flew directly over several. Between them she noticed vast open areas covered with patches of grass and a few small trees. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing just ahead. “That flat spot with no woods?”

“A casualty, a reclaimed site that was once a strip mine. That one in particular used to be Persimmon Mountain, elevation twenty-five hundred feet. They took off the top, got the coal, then set about to reclaim it. The law requires it to have the ‘approximate original contour’—that’s the key language—but how do you replace a mountain once it’s gone?”

“I’ve read about that. The land must be equal to or better than it was before the mining.”

“What a joke. The coal companies will tell you that reclaimed land is great for development—shopping centers, condos, and the like. They built a prison on one in Virginia. And they built a golf
course on another. Problem is, nobody plays golf around here. Reclamation is a joke.”

They flew over another strip mine, then another. After a while they all looked the same. “How many are active, as of today?” she asked.

“Dozens. We’ve lost about six hundred mountains in the last thirty years to strip-mining, and at the rate we’re going there won’t be many left. Demand for coal is rising, the price is up, so the companies are aggressively seeking permits to start stripping.” He banked to the right and said, “Now we’re going north, into West Virginia.”

“And you’re licensed to practice there?” she asked.

“Yes, and in Virginia and Kentucky.”

“You mentioned five states before we took off.”

“Sometimes I go into Tennessee and North Carolina, but not that often. We’re litigating a coal ash dump in North Carolina, a lot of lawyers involved. Big case.”

He loved his big cases. The lost mountains in West Virginia looked the same as those in Kentucky. The Cessna zigzagged right and left, banking steeply so she could take another look at the devastation, then leveling off to check out another one. “That’s the Bull Forge Mine, straight ahead,” he said. “You saw it yesterday from the ground.”

“Oh yes. The ecoterrorists. Those guys are really pissing off the coal companies.”

“That seems to be their intention.”

“Too bad you didn’t bring a rifle. We could blow out a few tires from the air.”

“I’ve thought about it.”

After an hour in the air, Donovan began a slow descent. By then, she was familiar with the altimeter, the airspeed indicator, and the compass. At two thousand feet, she asked, “Do we have a destination?”

“Yes, but first I want to show you something else. Coming up on your side is an area known as Hammer Valley.” He waited a minute for them to clear a ridge; a long, steep valley appeared.
“We’re gonna start down here at the end of it, near the town of Rockville, population three hundred.” Two church steeples rose through the trees, then the town came into view, a picturesque little village hugging a creek and surrounded by mountains. They flew over the town and followed the creek. Dozens of homes, mainly trailers, were scattered along narrow county roads.

“This is what’s known as a cancer cluster. Hammer Valley has the highest rate of cancer in North America, almost twenty times the national average. Bad cancers—liver, kidney, stomach, uterine, and lots of leukemia.” He gently pulled back on the yoke and the plane ascended as a large hump rose before them. They cleared it by two hundred feet and were suddenly over a reclaimed mine site. “And this is why,” he said. “The Peck Mountain strip mine.” The mountain was gone, replaced by small hills smoothed by bulldozers and covered in brown grass. Behind an earthen dam, a large body of black liquid sat ominously. “That’s the slurry pond. A company called Starke Energy came in here about thirty years ago and stripped out all the coal, one of the first big removal sites in Appalachia. They washed it right here and dumped the waste into a small lake that was once pristine. Then they built that dam and made the lake a lot bigger.”

They were circling the slurry pond at one thousand feet. “Starke eventually sold out to Krull Mining, another faceless ape of a company that’s really owned by a Russian oligarch, a thug with his finger in a bunch of mines around the world.”

“A Russian?”

“Oh yeah. We got Russians, Ukrainians, Chinese, Indians, Canadians, as well as the usual lineup of Wall Street cowboys and local turncoats. There are a lot of absentee owners here in the coalfields, and you can imagine how much they care about the land and the people.”

He banked again and Samantha was staring straight down at the slurry, which, from a thousand feet, appeared to have the texture of crude oil. “That’s pretty ugly,” she said. “Another lawsuit?”

“The biggest ever.”

T
hey landed on a runway even smaller than Noland County’s, with no hint that a town was anywhere close. As they taxied to the ramp, she saw Vic Canzarro leaning on a fence, waiting. They stopped near the terminal; there was not another aircraft in sight. Donovan killed the engine, ran through his postflight checklist, and they crawled out of the Skyhawk.

As expected, Vic drove an all-wheel-drive muscle truck, suitable for off-road encounters with security guards. Samantha sat in the rear seat with a cooler, some backpacks, and, of course, a couple of rifles.

Vic was a smoker, not of the chain variety, but an enthusiastic one nonetheless. He cracked the window on his driver’s side about an inch, just enough for half of his exhaust to escape while the other half whirled around the club cab. After the second cigarette, Samantha was gagging and lowered the rear window behind Donovan. He asked her what she was doing. She told him in plain language, and this touched off a tense conversation between Donovan and Vic about his habits. He swore he was trying to quit, had in fact quit on numerous occasions, and freely admitted that he fretted over the likelihood of an awful death from lung cancer. Donovan hammered away, leaving Samantha with the clear impression that these two had been bickering over the same issue for some time. Nothing got resolved and Vic fired up another.

The hills and trails led them deep into Hammer Valley, and finally to the crumbling home of one Jesse McKeever. “Who is Mr. McKeever, and why are we visiting him?” she asked from the rear seat as they turned in to the driveway.

“A potential client,” Donovan said. “He’s lost his wife, one son, one daughter, one brother, and two cousins to cancer. Kidney, liver, lung, brain, pretty much entire body.” The truck stopped, and they waited a second for the dog. An angry pit bull flew off the porch and raced at them, ready to eat the tires. Vic honked and Jesse finally emerged. He called the dog, struck him with his cane,
cursed him, and ordered him into the backyard. The stricken dog obeyed and disappeared.

They sat on crates and battered lawn chairs under a tree in the front yard. Samantha was not introduced to Jesse, who completely ignored her. He was a rugged old cuss who looked much older than sixty, with few teeth and thick wrinkles made permanent by a hard life and a harsh scowl that never left his face. Vic had tested the water from the McKeever well, and the results, while predictable, were grim. The water was polluted with VOCs—volatile organic compounds—poisons such as vinyl chloride, trichloroethylene, mercury, lead, and a dozen others. With great patience, Vic explained what the big words meant. Jesse got the gist of the message. Not only was it unsafe to drink; it should not be used for anything, period. Not for cooking, bathing, brushing teeth, washing clothes or dishes. Nothing. Jesse explained that they had started hauling in their drinking water some fifteen years earlier, but had continued to use well water for bathing and household cleaning. His boy died first, cancer in his digestive tract.

Donovan turned on a tape recorder and placed it on a rubber milk crate. Casually, and with complete empathy, he elicited an hour’s worth of background on Jesse’s family and the cancers that had ravaged it. Vic listened and smoked and occasionally asked a question himself. The stories were gut-wrenching, but Jesse went through them with little emotion. He had seen so much misery and he had been hardened by it.

“I want you to join our lawsuit, Mr. McKeever,” Donovan said after he turned off the recorder. “We’re planning to sue Krull Mining in federal court. We think we can prove that they dumped a lot of waste in their pond up there, and that they’ve known for years that it was leaking into the groundwater down here.”

Jesse rested his chin on his cane and seemed to doze. “No lawsuit’ll bring ’em back. They’re gone forever.”

“True, but they didn’t have to die. That slurry pond killed them, and the men who own it should have to pay.”

“How much?”

“I can’t promise you a dime, but we’ll sue Krull for millions.
You’ll have plenty of company, Mr. McKeever. As of now I have about thirty other families here in Hammer Valley signed up and ready to go. All lost someone to cancer, all within the past ten years.”

Jesse spat to his side, wiped his mouth on a sleeve, and said, “I heard about you. Plenty of talk up and down the valley. Some folks want to sue; others are still scared of the coal company, even though it’s finished up there. I don’t know what to do, really. I’ll just tell you that. Don’t know which way to go.”

“Okay, think about it. But promise me one thing; when you get ready to fight, call me, not some other lawyer. I’ve been working on this case for three years, and we haven’t even filed suit yet. I need you on my side, Mr. McKeever.”

He agreed to think it over, and Donovan promised to come back in a couple weeks. They left Jesse in the shade, the dog once again by his side, and drove away. Nothing was said until Samantha asked, “Okay, how do you prove the company knew its sludge pond was contaminating Mr. McKeever’s water?”

The two in the front seat exchanged a look, and for a few seconds there was no response. Vic reached for a cigarette and Donovan finally said, “The company has internal documents that clearly prove it knew of the contamination and did nothing; in fact it has covered up everything for the past ten years.”

She opened her window again, took a long breath, and asked, “How did you get the documents if you haven’t filed suit yet?”

“I didn’t say we have the documents,” Donovan said a bit defensively.

Vic added, “There have been a few investigations, by the EPA and other regulatory agencies. There’s a lot of paperwork.”

“Did the EPA find these bad documents?” she asked. Both men seemed tentative.

“Not all of them,” Vic replied.

There was a gap in the conversation as she backed off. They turned onto a gravel road and bounced along for a mile or so. “When will you file the lawsuit?” she asked.

“Soon,” Donovan said.

“Well, if I’m going to work in your office, I need to know these things, right?”

Donovan did not respond. They turned in to the front yard of an old trailer and parked behind a dirty car with no hubcaps and a bumper hanging by a wire. “And who is this?” she asked.

“Dolly Swaney,” Donovan said. “Her husband died of liver cancer two years ago, at the age of forty-one.”

“Is she a client?”

“Not yet,” Donovan said as he opened the door. Dolly Swaney appeared on the front porch, a crumbling addition with broken steps. She was huge and wore a large, stained gown that fell almost to her bare feet.

“I think I’ll wait in the truck,” Samantha said.

T
hey had an early lunch at the only diner in downtown Rockville, a hot, stuffy café with the smell of grease heavy in the air. The waitress placed three glasses of ice water on the table; all three glasses went untouched. Instead, they ordered diet sodas to go with their sandwiches. With no one sitting close, Samantha decided to continue the questioning.

“So, if you already have thirty clients, and you’ve been working on the case for three years, why haven’t you filed suit by now?”

Both men glanced around as if someone might be listening. Satisfied, Donovan answered in a low voice, “This is a huge case, Samantha. Dozens of deaths, a defendant with enormously deep pockets, and liability that I think we can make clear at trial. I’ve already spent a hundred thousand bucks on the case, and it’ll take much more than that to get it before a jury. It takes time: time to sign up the clients, time to do the research, time to put together a legal team that can fight the army of lawyers and experts Krull Mining will throw at its defense.”

“It’s also dangerous,” Vic added. “There are a lot of bad actors in the coalfields, and Krull Mining is one of the worst. Not only is it a ruthless strip miner, it’s also a vicious litigator. It’s a beautiful lawsuit, but dealing with Krull Mining has scared away a lot of
lawyers, guys who are usually on board in the big environmental cases.”