Strange as This Weather Has Been (36 page)

By spring of’ 99, when the dozers first went up the creek to dig the sediment ponds, I’d started making phone calls to agencies. Loretta had given me the job of combing the Beckley classifieds for permit applications. The companies tried to slip those past you and wrote them in such a way you couldn’t understand them unless you were trained.
Charlie trained me. I even went to a permit hearing, and although I was too backwards then to speak at the mike, I was there.

Jimmy Make’d spent the winter of ’98-’99 looking for any deep mine or construction outfit that might be hiring, but nobody was. He acted like he wouldn’t work for a mountaintop job, but truth was, even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t have gotten on, most of them passed over workers with union experience, and, besides, the skills you needed on those operations were different from what you learned underground. When I got home, I still told Jimmy some of what I’d learned, I had to tell somebody, but while he’d asked a few questions back at the beginning, now he said nothing at all. And I could feel it start to grind in him. I was familiar with that in him, the way he could push back without actually opening his mouth. In April, when a few days were getting warmer, he spried up and started tinkering with his lawnmower and weedeater. He made flyers by hand for his “business” and went to the Madison library to photocopy them, then he drove all over the county putting them up, he even put an ad in the paper, now that wasn’t cheap. And with all that, the cockiness came back in him, the swagger in his limp. Then he did start talking back.

“Nothing to do but get used to it or move,” he shrugged, not taking his eyes off the TV to prove how deep he didn’t care. “Why’d you think I wanted to stay in North Carolina?”

I knew he knew that’d make me mad, and I wanted to ignore it, but I couldn’t leave it be. “This is my homeplace, Jimmy Make,” I said. “What about the kids? What do they got to look forward to if we don’t fight?”

“Fight?” he snorted, and then he turned from the screen to face me, this know-it-all how-stupid-can-you-be look. “Honey, you won’t never beat coal. It’s who has the money, the rich people always win, that’s how it’s always been, especially in the state of West Virginia. That’s why the smart people get out.”

Then after we ran through that tired give-and-take for about a month, I finally said, kind of quiet and calm, “Well, some people are fighting.”

I said it to test Jimmy Make a little, see what he’d do, although I mostly figured he wouldn’t even know what I was talking about. So I was surprised when I saw he right away did.

“You stay out of it, hear me?” He sat up and swung his feet to the floor, and I saw his eyes lit live for a change. “You stay clear of the shit-stirrers.”

“I’ll do what I damn well please, just like I’ve always done.”

Jimmy Make swallowed, he ran his tongue inside his mouth to wet it, and I saw he’d gone past mad to scared, and that surprised me a second time. It even scared me a little. “You keep the hell away from the shit-stirrers.” He said it snaky, between his teeth.Then he stopped and dropped his voice even lower,Tommy and Corey coming up on the porch. “You can’t do a thing about this here, and you’ll just turn people against us. End up making it even worse for me and the kids.”

By July of our second summer back, we were hearing the blasting, still distant, not enough to shake the house, but there it was. And by August, it was clear Jimmy Make wasn’t going to get any more “handyman” work this summer than he had the summer before. I blamed that on him. He blamed it on me. He still wouldn’t apply for what few minimum wage jobs there were, even though that would have doubled our income and been easier on his back. We were in a terrible tight for money, I worried about it just all the time, and going into that fall, I couldn’t even get the kids school clothes, it was all we could do to eat, and a lot of that we did on credit. Thank god the house was paid off. Tommy turned five that year, and in August he started kindergarten. It was just a couple weeks after that I got the visit from Bell Kerwin.

Late morning, nobody home but Jimmy Make and me, and I remember I was out back hanging laundry when I heard Bell calling
from the front of the house. I went around and there she stood, her hands balled down into the single pocket of the apron she wore, grinding. A friendly and calm type of person she’d been when I was a kid, but that was before her middle boy’d got bad into drugs, and since then—it’d been years by now—Bell’d moved deep into herself. But today she looked even more nervous than she usually did, those half-hidden hands kneading, her not meeting my eye. I invited her in, but she said no, she didn’t have time to sit and visit, she’d just had to come up and tell me, at the head of the hollow like we were.

“Tell me what?” I said.

She pulled her hands out of her pockets then. She had a watch on, and she went to turning it back and forth on her wrist, her still looking at the ground. “Ralph heard it at work. Now, Lace, you know there’s so many rumors going around anymore I don’t know if it’s true or not, but up here like you all are, I had to tell you.” She finally stopped her hands then, and she looked directly at me. “Ralph heard they’re putting in a slurry impoundment at the top of Yellowroot Creek.”

THERE IS nothing to do but to tie Tommy up. So that’s what Corey does. He sneaks the clothesline under the house while Tommy’s eating his cereal, then he lures Tommy under by calling, “Hey, looky what I found.” Mom has already left for work, she’s opening today. Dad’s supposed to be watching them, but truth is, Dad doesn’t much care what they do as long as they’re not too noisy. Once Corey gets Tommy under the house, he pins him down and ties him to the plumbing. Threatens to take Tommy’s tricycle apart and throw the wheels up in the holding ponds if he screams before Corey’s out of sight. Then Corey is out of sight.

Every few days over the last couple weeks, Corey has dropped in on Rabbit’s yard, copycat Tommy tagging behind. Rabbit, if he was outside at all, was always buried to his belt in the freezer, and he never told them to leave, but he never paid them much mind either. Corey might have given up, but what choice did he have? The ruin of the bike, the cheat of the ride . . . then, like a miracle, it seemed Rabbit was getting used to them. How a real rabbit might if you were patient and fed it carrots and grass,
like when we found the possum, patience,
like I been saying, see? patience
. He was getting used to them. Then, last Monday Rabbit pulled out of the freezer and stood sideways to him and Tommy, wiping his hands in a black rag. He had never done something like that before, standing beside them like men, and it made Corey brave, so Corey went on and said, gruffing his voice, “Think you’ll get that thing running?”

And Rabbit said right back, like somebody’d shot a hole where his voice came out, “Honey, I could make run a no-legged man.”

A couple days after that, Corey got his guts up again—the desperation helped, and also Rabbit’s confidence about the no-legged man—and he squatted down to the freezer and he called inside, “Hey, after you get done with this projeck, think you could give me a hand with something?”

And after some very long minutes—that’s how Rabbit usually answered, not like a shot in his face, but like there was a gap between the words floating out your mouth and injecting into Rabbit’s head—Rabbit said, “Why the hell not?”

And finally, yesterday, the biggest miracle of all. Him and Tommy walked up on Rabbit’s hind end hanging out the freezer, and Corey said, “Hi, Rabbit,” and Rabbit grunted back, like usual—he wasn’t so backwards he couldn’t grunt—the grunt kind of pinging the metal inside.Then, lo and behold, Rabbit crawled out again. He crawled out, stood up, wiped his hands in his rag, and said, right to Corey, “You wanna give me a hand with something?”

And Corey, too stun-thrilled to control his voice, chirped “Yeah!” looking around for what might need it.

Rabbit said, “You come down here tomorrow morning.” He flipped his rag at Tommy. “Leave that one at home.”

Corey runs as fast as he can as far as he can so Tommy won’t be able to catch up after Dad hears him screaming and turns him loose. Corey was careful to tricky up the knots. It will take a while.
It’s about a mile to Rabbit’s house, but Corey does not tire. After he puts decent distance between him and Tommy, he eases into a trot, unless he sees somebody out who might notice him, then he speeds up. He’s worn the right clothes for helping Rabbit—the oil-splattered jeans, the camouflage T-shirt, the chamois rag—and he carries a pair of Jimmy Make’s White Mule work gloves, them flapping huge-handed as Corey pumps his arms.

But when he reaches Rabbit’s house, Rabbit’s not in the yard. Corey hadn’t thought of that. The freezer just sits there, all coffined up, the end where Rabbit usually sticks out covered by the metal panel. Corey’s not sure what to do. He stands in the front yard a while, hoping Rabbit will see him, then,
Hey, Rabbit
, he calls inside his head. A mind message. He waits. He waits a good while. But soon Corey knows there is nothing but to knock on Rabbit’s door, and Corey has never done that. He’s not sure anyone has.

The house is a very dark green, like it wants to disappear into the hill, the brush. The particleboard porch is heaped with trash bags. Corey takes a breath and sidles past the station wagon, peeking in to make double-sure he didn’t just overlook the DUI contraption last time, then he climbs up on the porch, straddling trash bags, and waits again, hopeful that Rabbit heard his feet. Something in the trash moves. He reaches up and knocks, the door with a punky give to it, like your knuckles might leave dents. The thing in the trash bags moves. Then the door swings open. Rabbit peers from behind it. An odor solid as stone rolls onto the porch—stale hamburger grease, months-old woodsmoke, and very dead cigarettes—and in the middle of that odor hangs the more compact and immediate smell of Rabbit. Rabbit’s yellow smell that he carries always, soaked-up liquor leaking out his skin, but today the smell is the purest Corey has ever smelled, and it pours straight from his mouth. Corey realizes from Rabbit’s look that Rabbit has no idea why he’s knocked.

“Member?” Corey says. “You told me come down this morning.” Corey flaps the gloves a little. “Give you a hand.”

Rabbit breathes out the smell, so pure it’s more amber than yellow.

“Oh. Yeah.”

Rabbit looks away, out over top Corey’s head. The trash bag thing flops free and drops over the side of the porch into the weeds.

“You wait out here on the porch for me.”

Corey waits in the yard instead of on the porch. He flashthinks ahead to him and Rabbit stealing up the run to the old house while Dad watches TV and Mom’s at work. He sees Rabbit step through the hole, then kind of reel back in wonder at what all Corey’s got. Hears Rabbit say, “Well, look here, Corey.You’re closer’n you thought. If we just take this and hook it up to them things . . . yeah, it’ll take some fooling with. But I’d say, in a week, we got it, buddy.”

Rabbit slams out the door and stumbles past Corey, carrying a flashlight and a coil of rope. To Corey’s surprise, he opens the station wagon’s tailgate and hurls the stuff in. Rabbit wears a tight pair of double-knit pants with teeny-tiny checks and a blue Dad’s Dog Food T-shirt. He climbs in the front seat, and right before he shuts the door, he stops, looks at Corey, and says, “You comin?”

Rabbit hunkers down into some serious key-turning and gas-stomping. The interior of the car is kind of falling in all around, and although some places have been stapled back up, they aren’t holding real good. Behind Corey, there are no more seats, just a gutted-out space covered by carpet with a bad rash. Rabbit finally jerks out the radio, reaches behind it, and fools with something there while alcohol rises off him like a speech balloon over a cartoon character. The engine catches for good. As they back out, Corey studies the steering column again, pondering where they might have attached the DUI contraption, but then his eyes get snagged by Rabbit’s hands on the
wheel. The hands are pure black. Not creased, not smeared. They are black-dipped like a DQ cone, only blacker than chocolate, the very blackest at their tips, grading off a little as you look farther down his hands to his wrists. A working man’s hands. Corey nods.

Now they are pulling out Yellowroot Hollow Road, they have rolled to a half-stop at the stop sign, and Rabbit is turning right, away from town. Corey’s insides brighten, ha, riding with a drunk you don’t hardly know, and
I ain’t scared. Don’t care what Mom and Dad do if they find out, either.
Rabbit accelerates, and the car talks back with a series of sharp smacks, sounds like that old-timey Jacob’s ladder toy of Dane’s, and Corey sits forward, alert. Rabbit doesn’t talk with his voice, though his breath talks, in little grunts, and he holds a steady thirty-five—Corey can see it on that big speedometer curving across the dash—and Rabbit’s reared back like he’s in a recliner, his head slumped nearly level with the steering wheel, but far, far away from it. Finally, Corey asks, “What do you need me for?”

The Rabbit gap again, the space between the words leaving your mouth and hitting his head. Then. “Oh,” Rabbit says. “We’re goin up in here to pick up a part.”

From behind, a monster engine comes bearing down, and Corey spins around in his seat to watch,
will it get us this time?
like he always does when a coal truck’s coming, at Dad’s truck, at the school bus, and it is always thrill Corey feels, never fear. The truck stampedes them like a steel hurricane, the grille surging enormous in Rabbit’s rear window, Corey grinning back, he can feel the truck in his teeth, and the millisecond before it crashes them to kingdom come it lunges over the double yellow line and explodes past, its dirty wake lifting the station wagon off its tires. At least a little, seems to Corey. Rabbit doesn’t even seem to notice that something went by. And, ha, Route 9, who would think this sorry-ass narrow road could even hold a coal truck and a car at the same time, sometimes it’s like the truck casts a
spell and swells the pavement for a second just so it can get by. Corey faces front to watch it disappear, his hands on the dash, and then he notices how his hands are dirty even on their tops. He opens them and admires the grime creased into them, unwashable dirt from the hours he’s spent trying to fix the bike.