Sky of Stone (14 page)

“Sonny boy!” he yodeled. He clutched my shoulders, pushed me and pulled me, turned me around, and gave me a complete once-over. “Damn you’ve grown!” he said, squeezing my shoulders. “Feel those muscles, too! I heard you’d taken up coal mining. You’ll make lots of money. Then back to school, eh?”

“We can only hope,” I responded. “What are you doing here?”

Jake’s grin faded. “Tuck Dillon,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Sonny, I’m on the investigating team.”

My grin disappeared, too. I asked, “Does Dad know this?”

He shook his head. “We’re going to be fair, Sonny. It’s an honest investigation to find out the facts of the case.”

He had called it a “case.” That made Dad sound like a suspected criminal. “Jake,” I said, my stomach tightening, “don’t be a part of this.”

“It’s my job, Sonny,” he said stiffly. “I didn’t ask for it but I got it because I know Coalwood.”

Mr. Fuller came back out on the porch. “Let’s go, Jake,” he said.

Jake shrugged. “Sonny, I’ll talk to you later.”

“Sure,” I said. I watched him join Mr. Fuller on the porch steps, then walk down the sidewalk and across the road. Then I remembered something. “Hey, Jake,” I called. “Where’s your Corvette?” Jake had always driven a cherry-red Corvette. To me, it symbolized who he was, a man who knew how to squeeze fun out of life.

Jake turned and walked backward a step. “Sold it,” he called back. “Got me a good, hardworking Nash.” Then he turned around and went up the steps with Mr. Fuller and into Mr. Bundini’s office, leaving me openmouthed in astonishment.

Mom gone, Dad in trouble, me working in the coal mine, and Jake without his Corvette.
If the world got any more peculiar, I didn’t think I would recognize it at all.

19

WATER TANK MOUNTAIN

F
LORETTA PACKED
a lunch for my Sunday picnic with Rita. “Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches might be fine for you but ain’t right for Miss Rita,” she said.

She handed over a wicker basket. When I hefted it, I figured she had enough food in there to feed a half-dozen junior engineers, or a regiment, which was about the same. “We’re going hiking, Floretta,” I said. “I can’t carry all this heavy stuff up a mountain.”

Her voice was dangerous. “You be careful with Miss Rita up there, boy. She may think she’s a coal miner but she’s still a girl underneath all that. I want her back here in the same condition she left.” She eyed me. “What’s that on your belt? A nasty old army canteen! Has it ever been washed?”

Now that she’d mentioned it, I didn’t guess it had, not since my uncle Robert had brought it back from the Italian campaign, anyway. I had used it all through childhood to carry water up in the mountains during my adventures there. Floretta held out her large, flat hand. “Give that thing to me. I’ll run some hot water and soap through it and try to get some of the scunge out.”

I dutifully unclipped the canteen and handed it over. I heard the sink run fast and furious for a minute, then Floretta came through the swinging kitchen door and handed it back. “The water in it was as brown as dirt,” she said, sounding triumphant.

At the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs, Floretta vanished into the kitchen. It was Rita and she was wearing her khakis and tall lace-up boots. She gave me one of her delicious smiles. “This is going to be so much fun,” she said. She let her eyes rest on the basket. “Is that as heavy as it looks?”

“It’s just what we need,” I replied, nodding at the kitchen door behind which I knew Floretta was listening. Lugging the basket with both hands, I walked Rita toward the double screen doors that led to the porch. “Don’t worry,” I whispered. “I have a plan.”

“Where are we going?” she whispered back.

I lost my whisper. “Water Tank Mountain. There’s a nice view from up there. I want to swing by my house first. I’ve got a backpack in the garage and I can unload this stuff into it. And, if you don’t mind, I’d like to take Dandy and Poteet along. I think they’d like the exercise.”

“Dandy and Poteet?”

“My dogs. They won’t be much trouble.”

Before we got off the porch, a familiar voice asked, “Where you folks headed?”

Jake was sitting in the porch swing. He was wearing Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt, his feet clad in sandals. “Hello, Rita,” he said, not bothering to get up.

“Jake,” she said.

Jake smiled, then gave me a wink. “Rita and I have something in common, Sonny. Our fathers both own a percentage of the steel company.”

“I’m sure Sonny is fascinated,” she replied. “And how is your father, the
real
Mr. Jake Mosby?”

I was surprised to learn that Jake was a junior, like me. All the years I’d known him, that had never come out. “As fine as a watch, Rita,” he said. “I presume your father is the same?”

The screen door smacked open and Mr. Fuller came out on the porch, crossed over to the other side, and sank into one of the metal chairs. Rita’s eyes cut toward him. “Let’s go,” she said.

I did so, gladly, muttering something in the way of a good-bye to Jake. When we got out of earshot, Rita said, “Where do you know Jake from?”

“He used to be my friend, even helped me with my rockets. He’s here with that other fellow on the porch—Fuller’s his name—to do the Tuck Dillon investigation.”

“I know Amos Fuller. My father’s had a run-in with him more than once. He knows what I think of him. Are you worried about the investigation?”

“Dad could lose his job,” I said, shrugging.

She looked back at the porch. “Your dad’s smarter than both of those two put together.”

“How do you know Jake?” I asked.

She tossed her head, her long black hair falling down her back. “We grew up together, practically. When my father would go to Ohio for the board meetings, we’d usually stay at Jake’s parents’ house. I spent one summer on their farm in Kentucky. They had horses. Jake and I used to go riding all the time. But we never really got along. He was too childish even though he was older than me.”

We climbed into her car, a white Ford Thunderbird with little round portholes in back. I stowed the basket in its minuscule trunk. There was barely room, but the little car was flashy and suited her. The interior smelled of leather and her perfume, a scent I would have been happy to inhale for the rest of my life. She went smoothly through its gears but left a little rubber on the road in front of the Club House. I saw Jake had stirred himself out of his chair and was leaning on one of the porch pillars. He had an odd half smile on his face. He raised his hand, but I didn’t give him one back.

On the way up Main Street, heads turned in our direction at nearly every porch and yard. We were leaving behind a lot of wagging tongues, that much was for certain. At the corner of Tipple and Substation Rows, I directed Rita into the alley behind our house. Dad’s truck was gone. He was up at the mine, I figured, even if it was a Sunday afternoon. She parked the T-bird, and I went inside our garage and returned with a canvas backpack. Like the canteen, it was an artifact of my uncle Robert’s World War II Italian campaign with the United States Army Signal Corps. I opened it up and packed Floretta’s sandwiches, some little tubs of coleslaw, a few boiled eggs, and a tablecloth. I left behind everything else—the thermos and the cloth napkins and silverware and the vase with the rose wrapped in wax paper.

I rattled the back gate, and, as expected, Poteet came bounding out of the basement with Dandy waddling close behind. I let them out and introduced them to Rita. “Won’t they get lost?” she wondered.

I laughed. “All I have to do is tell Poteet to go home and she’s better than any compass.”

“I’ve never owned a dog,” she said, taking a step back when Poteet sniffed her knee.

“Then you’ve missed one of the pleasures of life.”

We crossed the road to Water Tank Mountain and climbed up to the dirt road that led to the Coalwood School. When Dandy reached the road, he was panting and his head was down. I went over to him. “You all right, boy?”

“What’s wrong with him?” Rita asked.

“He’s fifteen years old.”

“Is that old for a dog?”

I worked to keep the surprise at such a question out of my voice. “Yes, very old. Mom always said it’s about seven dog years to every human one. That makes him a hundred and five.”

Rita absorbed the information. “Father would never let me have a pet of any kind. He said he was allergic to fur.”

I had never heard of such a thing and immediately suspected her father was lying for his own convenience. I didn’t voice my suspicions, though, it being impolite. I pointed, instead, to a break in the foliage. “There’s our path.”

“I didn’t even see it,” she marveled.

“It’s easier to find in the winter. It’s steep at first, then there’s a fire road that’ll take us out to where it’s clear-cut. Then we’ll angle up the mountain to the water tanks.”

“Lead on, Hawkeye,” she said.

I hitched the backpack on my shoulders and scrambled up the steep hillside. I grabbed trees where I could to help me climb. Rita slipped a couple of times but then caught on to the natural rhythm of going up a West Virginia mountain: dig in your toes, grab a tree and pull, and then keep climbing.

We reached the fire road, and Poteet took off, her nose to the ground. She soon discovered a patch of milkweed that made her sneeze. A puff of white, drifting seeds rose around her. Dandy panted up beside her, his nose in the air. When he sneezed, Poteet nuzzled him. Then he sat down on his haunches, looking puzzled. I squatted beside him and moved my hand back and forth in front of his eyes. Rita came up alongside us. “He’s blind or nearly so,” I said. I hugged him, and he shivered even in the heat of the day. Rita knelt and let her fingers graze Dandy’s head. She jerked back when he moved. “He won’t bite you,” I said.

“Dogs scare me.”

“Most dogs just want to be loved,” I said. “It’s only the ones who don’t get any attention who get mean. Dandy and Poteet, they’re loved and they know it, pretty much.”

She touched him again, and Dandy arched his head. “He likes it,” she said.

“He sure does. You have a way with him, Rita. Dogs know things about people. He knows you’re nice.”

When I looked up, I found Rita watching me. “You’re an interesting fellow, Sonny Hickam,” she said.

“How so?”

She stood up. “You wear your heart on your sleeve, for one thing,” she said.

“Some people think that’s a failing,” I replied, wincing. It was true. When I’d been so much in desperate love with Dorothy Plunk in high school, Roy Lee had told me the only way to win a girl was to pretend you didn’t like her, at least at first. Because I just couldn’t fathom why such a thing would be true, I could never manage it.

We continued our hike, working our way to the end of the overgrown fire road where a narrow path began. It led into a wide clearing, a swath cut by Appalachian Power and Light to make room for the electric power lines that led down to the mine. The company had widened the swath even more when it had chopped down hundreds of trees, both hardwoods and pines, to use as posts, headers, and cribs.

Every time we stopped to catch our breath, we could see more of the valley and the encircling mountains. “It’s beautiful,” Rita said as we stopped beneath some crab-apple trees and drank some water out of my canteen.

“I just wish it would rain,” I said. “It’s been almost a month. It doesn’t take long for all this brush to dry out. If it goes on much longer, a little heat lightning, or somebody playing with matches, and the whole county could go up.”

Rita made no response. Then I realized she wasn’t admiring the mountains at all. Her eyes were on the Olga Number One tipple.

The tipple complex was a black scar in the valley. A huge brick chimney dominated it. A hundred feet high and long dormant, the chimney stood in a lake of coal dust and gob. Behind it sat Dad’s grimy office and the shabby lamphouse and bathhouse. The man-hoist, a black iron structure with twin bullwheels on top, was a forlorn skeleton against the green of the mountains. Up until 1957, the man-hoist had been part of a much larger and more active complex—properly called a tipple—used for lifting, sorting, and dumping coal into miles of railcars lined up on four sets of tracks. All that work had been moved across the mountain when a new tipple and preparation plant had been built in Caretta. The Coalwood tipple wasn’t really a tipple at all anymore, just a place for Coalwood miners to go in and out of the mine. “That’s Dad’s little slice of heaven,” I said of it.

She studied me. Our eyes met. “You resent all the time he spends there, don’t you?”

“I used to,” I confessed, looking back toward the mine. “From way up here, it seems pretty small and dirty. Not much for a lifetime of work.”

“Maybe you need to look at it a different way,” she said. “More like an engineer. Look at how the grounds are laid out. It’s easy to see the plan from this vantage. The lamphouse is perfectly situated to get the men in and out in a hurry. The bathhouse is set back so the shifts won’t be bunching up in front of it. Your dad’s office is placed so he can watch who’s going in and out of his mine. I can see where the old tracks used to be and also the foundation of the tipple. See how it’s angled perfectly to match the contours of the valley? And have you looked at the masonry work on the lamphouse and bathhouse? It’s very fine.”

“They were built by Italian stonemasons,” I said. “Mr. Carter brought them all the way from Italy. They put in the foundation of the Club House, too, and the wall in front of it. One of them was Johnny Basso’s father.”

“I’ve never been able to understand,” she said, “what some people think is ugly. To me, if something works according to its design, that’s true beauty.”

“Spoken like a true engineer,” I said.

“I’m proud to be an engineer, Sonny,” she said in a voice she could have used for praying. “I’ve always loved mechanical things. That’s not very girllike, I know, but that’s the way I’ve always been. Father came home one time from a trip to Europe—I guess I was about five years old—and I’d taken apart every mechanical and electrical device in his apartment. I just wanted to see how they worked.” She smiled at the memory. “Father and the housekeeper tried to keep radios and clocks and whatnot away from me after that. But I’d get to them when they weren’t looking. Sometimes I’d take them apart and put them back together and they never knew. I learned a lot doing that.”

“I never had that kind of curiosity about how machines worked, not until rockets came along,” I admitted. “I was more curious about people. Otherwise, I just liked to read.”

“Engineers don’t read,” she said, chuckling. “Except maybe technical manuals.”

I shook my head. “I couldn’t get by without a good book.”

“The last book I read was
Moby-Dick
in college.”

“You’re kidding!”

She shrugged. “I don’t like to be bored.” I fell silent, at a loss for words. Then she said, “I’m going inside the mine before this summer is out.”

“Good luck.”

Her eyes flicked toward me, then away. “You don’t think I will?”

“No.”

“Then you’re wrong,” she said.

We stayed on the path until we reached a clearing on the highest ridge. It held the two structures that gave the mountain its common name, a pair of cylindrical wooden tanks that held Coalwood’s water supply. The water in them was pumped up from a vast underground lake beneath the mine. There was no cleaner or apparently healthier water in the world. There was something in it—I’d heard about a natural fluoride—that kept Doc Hale a pretty happy dentist, even though the miner’s habit of chewing tobacco still gave him plenty of work.

Poteet and Dandy skirted the water tanks and then went over the ridge to the other side of the mountain. Poteet had picked up the trail of some animal, most likely a rabbit. I set my pack on a big flat rock that had boulders equally spaced around it. Years before, I had been one of a group of boys who had worked for days to position the big stones. Many the summer day I had sat there with Roy Lee Cooke, Benny Brown, Jimmy Evans, or Roger Lester, happily eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and swigging water from our old canteens. That had been a grand time. Every morning when I was a boy, I was eager for the new day.