Strange as This Weather Has Been, page 16
Then I realized we’d passed the turnoff to the snake ditches, and I slowed down and hollered at Corey to come back. I knew exactly where the turnoff was, I could spot it even in the jungle of July, Jimmy Make had taught it to me good. Dane was wee little, he would ride in front between Jimmy’s legs, and I’d hold onto his back, so much older Jimmy Make seemed then. “It’s in here,” Corey was shouting from way down the road, and I knew he was wrong, little pissant know-it-all, but I didn’t care. I just thrashed on into a big web of honeysuckle towards where I knew the snake ditches were, and I noticed for the first time since I’d left our yard the machines working overhead.
Then I heard Corey burrowing behind me, but he didn’t say nothing, he’d never admit out loud to being wrong, he was like Jimmy Make that way too. Our wheels and pedals hung up in the vines, we had to rip and tear, it was not just honeysuckle and kudzu, but tougher woodier stuff, and greenbrier, too. The mud on me was beginning to itch, and I could smell the gasoline mixed in the mud, and R.L. came up in the odor of gasoline, but I pushed him away by gritting my teeth and throwing hate at myself (you know bettern that). Finally we got into decent-sized trees you could walk normal under, but we still weren’t finding the ditches, and Corey started whining about how I didn’t know what I was doing. Then there they were.
That was how you’d always hit those snake ditches, with a startle. Even if you were looking for them, they were a startle when you hit them. You moving along, feeling woods, hills, wild—then, sudden-smack, that crazy concrete zigzagging all over the mountain.
Because that was the other part of it, the other way it was in these hills. You had your quiet places, Grandma places, your places where peace would settle in your chest—then you had these places, places with a sharpness, a hardness, so utterly opposite all the rumpled deep green, you’d have to slow down and refocus your eyes. Like the Big Drain, and the crumbling-down coke ovens at the far side of Yellowroot, and old driftmouths covered with rusty steel bars, and tilting-over tipples, and the mine cracks like earthquake scars in the ground, all my life I’d stumbled onto these used-up left-behind places, and sometimes I saw ahead—only these places would be left. And then there was the newer places, places they were getting ready to use up, bulldozers and front-end loaders, surveying tape, raw muddy road gashes, yellow and copper with black flecks in them, like a nasty kind of shit. And then there was the way these places made you feel, the way they could draw you to them, draw you with something I didn’t believe in but that I knew. I remembered. We’re going snake hunting, Jimmy Make would say, and before we left the house, he’d put on me my toy pistol, metal and plastic, in a holster around my waist. I’d hang tight to his back while we rode, his smell in my face, the laundry soap and gentle sweat. Sleepy smell. I lifted my bike into a ditch. Go girl, I said in my mind. Go.
Those snake ditches were a smooth ride, but they were steep.There was a trick to riding those ditches.The ditches themselves were scummy white veins, but here and there they drained into each other over broad flat tall spillways, algae-slick, and then the ponds branched out into yet more ditches. Grandma’d told me they’d been poured in the early ’70s for the same strip mine that went with the above-the-hollow road, and that cement had held up good. By the time Corey was old enough to go along, Jimmy Make had gotten rid of the dirt bike and lost interest in the snake ditches. We weren’t allowed up here by ourselves, it was too dangerous for all kinds of reasons, but Corey couldn’t keep his want off them and I knew why. I knew why because of the way Jimmy Make used to be contagious to me, but Jimmy was contagious to me no more, and I’d break Corey of it, too. Learn him.
We stood on our pedals, leaned forward into the switchbacked drains, fought for enough momentum to keep the bikes from tipping. I could hear Corey huffing.The ditches ran with water only right after it rained, and the belly-warmth of the concrete drew lizards and snakes. Mostly we’d just throw rocks at them, make them coil up or wiggle away, and Jimmy’d tell us what they were, garters and blacksnakes and watersnakes and copperheads. Once or twice he said rattler, but he may have made that up. I called him Daddy back then. He got younger the older I got. Sweat started melting the dried mud on my face and dripping gray drops onto my handlebars, my hands, but that kind of moving, that kind of grunting along, there was no good go in it to drown your thoughts. I thought of what Jimmy Make had said that morning—a deep mine was opening in Mingo County and he was going to apply. If they didn’t hire him on, he was going down to North Carolina and find him a job there—and I thought about how he had said it. Go girl, I thought. Just go.
I had on my shoes, but Corey didn’t, and although I was still mad at Corey, I flinched at how the pedal must feel in the tender caved-in part of his foot, but I also knew Corey thrived on that kind of thing, stupid rag fluttering on his arm. We hit a nearly vertical spillway, and Corey acted like he was going to ride it, but I made him get off the bike and walk up along its side, on the ground. I realized we’d have to walk our bikes all the way off from the top, and before we did, I’d have to talk Corey into it, else he would coast down and kill himself. Then we were back in the ditch, huffing, pumping, and I studied the concrete, passing slow under my front wheel, and I saw no snakes except one dead garter. I took care not to run over it. Jimmy only used his pistol on the big ones and never on lizards. I’m gonna make you a snakeskin belt, Cissy, he’d say. He never did. But now even all the snakes’d been run off, and as we got higher, the machines got heavier, thicker, the sound like grinding your molars while you have your fingers in your ears, only you don’t have the say-so to stop it.
Now we were passing more and more thrown-over trees, so we were getting closer.To the coal company, trees were nothing but in the way, they just bulldozed them over the side, and there they dangled, their roots spooky, hairy and dirt-clotted. Waiting to wash down on top of somebody, and Corey, nodding at the trees, called at me, “You could make you a good fort out of them there” (learn him). When Dane would get scared of the snakes, Jimmy Make would hold him. He’d stroke his back. But he’d also say, Look at Bant, Dane. She’s not scared. Ole Cissy, she’s a tough one, he’d tell Dane. Every time, whether he really shot his pistol or not, we’d all three lie flat on the ground, playing at escaping ricochet bullets. I’d aim with my pistol, pretend, and Jimmy would pretend right along with me, Jimmy Make was always better than Lace at playing that way. Jimmy Make could mean it.
The culverts had given up switchbacking and now they ran nearly vertical, our bikes nearly up and down under us, it was like riding ladders, and we leaned every ounce of our bodies over the handlebars just to keep the bikes from bucking over and backwards.The air burnt my lungs, and the muddy sweat, odored with gasoline, still dripping on my hands and arms, and even in all that, the thought came to me: better lie low up there, what if he’s working close enough to see, and then I cussed myself. Girl, You know bettern that. At this point the contest was not who was in the lead, but who had to get off their bike first, and although I didn’t care, Corey lost anyway, not by giving up and getting off, but by forcing on until he wrecked. He skinned his knee in the ditch, stopped a few seconds to lick and suck the blood. I got off, too, and we pushed the bikes awhile, and then we reached where the ditches ended. Soon after that, we got to where the live trees ended, and we had to drop our bikes altogether and crawl. And then the go was really gone, there was nothing left but push, but try, and I knew Jimmy Make wasn’t bluffing this time. And I knew that meant I would have to choose.
The dead trees dangled all around us.We chinned ourselves up by the roots of the vines and scrub still left in the ground. Then everything live stopped, and the ground under the tree trunks was shale, loose dirt, and rock, and it was easier to climb the trees than climb the ground. We climbed the trees backwards, from their tops into their roots. The machine noise had turned from the teeth-grinding sound to rumbles and clashes. Up here out of the woods, the sky was easy to see, hurtling overhead, heavy with clouds, making to rain. I was using the side of my shoe to cut little steps in the loose dirt, I tested each step ginger, shifted my weight onto that one while I made a new one, the first one already collapsing under my sole. Corey gripped with his bare toes.
At last we reached the final boost to the very lip of what was left of the mountaintop. A vertical loose-earth wall.Then we were fingernailing it, and Corey toenailing it, then I got my arms up over the lip, and I tried to drag my body after, but there was too much give. The bank caved in and scrawled out from under me, until finally I just swam at it with all fours, swallowing a little shale as I swam, and eventually the bank fell enough and I rose enough that we were the same level, and I had enough of my body lying flat on some kind of shelf that I could pivot the rest of me onto it. I looked back at Corey under me. He was still scrabbling, his face bunched hard with effort, the light dirt showing bright in his hair. I got up on my knees, reached down for Corey, and throwing everything I had left into my shoulders and arms, I clawed Corey up by the straps of his tank top.
Corey
COREY staggers to his feet, still a little off-balance from Bant’s grab. He shakes his arms and legs to shed the dirt, tosses back his bangs. And then he sees.
As soon as he sees, he can’t see enough. His eyeballs aren’t big enough to hold what he can almost see, he wants to stretch his eyes wide like you can do your lips, for a big ole burger, for three-layer cake. Corey’s stomach hardens, his chest, his arms clench.
It’s too far to walk to. It is across a long long way of dirt and rocks and raw roads and terraced earth and black mounds. But it is there, if I had me one . . . It is a great grand giant thing, here in this place of puny things, you can see big things on TV, but this place full of sorry-ass piddly things, only things around here big enough to stretch your eyes are the coal preparation plant at Deer Lick (to look on it, a glory it was, gasp in his chest, they passed it at night, lit all over like a carnival ride and roller-coaster-shaped, but a real roller-coaster, not a game one, the livening violence to it) and that one silo at Performance Coal. And now this here.
Corey has seen this machine in Gazette pictures, but in real life, he’s seen it just once, and that was in the dark. Them driving up Slatybank, trying to take the shortcut because Dad had stayed too long at the man with the parts’ house, and Dad pointed out the giant on the ridge overhead. Corey looked back, and he saw it on the night horizon. They were mining twenty-four hours a day, so it was all lit up along its neck, and instead of seeing it in metal, Corey saw it in lights, a cluster of stars, Corey saw a swinging constellation come down. When Corey’d seen it in the paper, Dad had told him its real name was dragline, but its nickname was Big John. Like something out of Star Wars, Dad said, maybe the biggest piece of machinery ever built, twenty stories tall, for sure the biggest shovel in the world, and we have it right here in West Virginia. And they call us backwards, Dad said.
Now Corey sees it in its metal, in daylight. It’s big enough to dry up the spit in your mouth when you look on it, Corey can tell how big by the D-9 dozers and haul trucks antcrawling under Big John. Big John’s neck looks like one of those huge power transmitters that straddle the mountains to carry off the electricity the coal makes, and the neck is planted in a pivoting base the size and even the shape of sixty army tanks welded together. Swinging off the neck, the shovel itself, roomy enough to hold twenty or so of those monster rock trucks and throw them over the ridge, the rock trucks themselves so big Dad’s truck, Dad said, would only come halfway up one tire.
If I had me a four-wheeler, if I did, Seth, Seth has one, and he is only nine, Corey’s brain, soaked in the size of this thing, if I had . . . He could sneak up in here when they weren’t working. Sometimes they do stop working, you know by the surprised stillness in the hollow, and Corey could sneak up in here and ride across the site for an up-close look. Blare that four-wheeler through craters and traps, tear around and skid and wheelie, jump ditches, and when he hit one of the roads, he’d really cut loose, ride like hell to the very edge, brake, burn rubber, slam stop at the last minute before hurtling over the fill. And if there was a blast when he was at it . . . Whoa.
Then, no, matter of fact, he wouldn’t just look at the machinery. He’d go on and climb right in. He’d start with those big rock trucks, monkey right up and swing into a cab, grip the big wheel, that plastic hard as steel in his hands. Try the D-9 dozers next, he’d take his time, saving the best for last, he’d handle the controls, pump the pedals, them big treads rumbling under him, they can go over anything on earth.
And, finally, he’d scale Big John. That vast mountain-handling piece of gorgeous machinery. And as Corey climbs it, the smell of its fluids, the good grease he’d get on his clothes. And maybe he’d cut himself a little on something. Maybe he’d bleed a little there. He’d crawl in, settle in the seat, take a look at how it ran, push his legs to the pedals, grip sticks and handles.That giant, his body in that gigantic body, his body running that body, and the size, the power of that machine: inside Big John, Corey can change the shape of the world. Corey can.
Bant
WHAT I SAW punched my chest. Knocked me back on my heels. At first I saw it only as shades of dead and gray, but I pushed my eyes harder, I let come in the hurt, and then it focused into a cratered-out plain. Whole top of Yellowroot amputated by blast, and that dragline hacking into the flat part left. Monster shovel clawed the dirt and you felt it in your arm, your leg, your belly, and how lucky Grandma died, I thought. I thought that then. And past where Yellowroot had been, miles of mountain stumps, limping all the way over to what used to be horizon, and what would you call it now? The ass-end of the world. Moonscape, that’s what many said after they’d seen it, but I saw right away this was something different. Airiness emptying me. Because a moonscape was still something made by God and this was not, this was the moon upside down. A flake of the moon’s surface fallen to earth, and in that fall, it had kept its color, nickel and beige, kept its craters, its cracks. But then it landed not up, but moonside down.
My tongue moved in my mouth. It had lost all water, tasting what I saw. Then I realized I had my knee and one hand in that weird brittle grass, and I jerked my hand to my stomach and got myself up quick. Deer won’t even eat that grass. Now you know if deer won’t eat it . . . We’d come out on this raised embankment at the very edge of the mine, and I got back my balance, but the wind across that dead flat stirred the gas in my hair. Then I noticed Corey standing a few feet below me like he’d been freezetagged, his fists on his hips Jimmy Make-style, that stupid rag fluttering. There you go, Corey. There you go. You kids won’t have nothing but to clean up their mess. I hardened my face again and scanned the killed ground until I got to where I thought the Yellowroot Creek valley fill should be. Thing was, you couldn’t tell anything about size or distance up here, because, I realized right then, this was nothing. And you cannot measure nothing. What I could tell, because Cherryboy was not nothing yet, was how close they were getting to it, creeping viselike around the head of Yellowroot Hollow.
I tightened my chest and turned away. Walked down the spine of the bank a piece. A haul truck passed under us, machinery jarring in my teeth, and more blocks inside me, tumbling down. Tumbling. Now I had my back to Cherryboy. I was just staring at where Yellowroot wasn’t anymore. Then I was remembering what Yellowroot had been.Yellowroot, shaped like a rabbit with its ears laid back, Grandma showed me that. It took its name from goldenseal, she said, that was the real name of yellowroot. Yellowroot’s the country name, Grandma said. Now yellowroot’s what you use for a sore throat, gargle that, nothing better for it. Turn your mouth yellow, your throat yellow, too. Everything in these woods was put here for a reason. Then I was hearing something else. Corey. I’d nearly forgotten about him, but it was Corey making a noise. Making a motor noise in his mouth, soft, I don’t think he even knew he was doing it out loud. And then I knew Corey had learned nothing at all.
My arms flooded with wanting to knock him down, fling him off the bank, and rub his face in dead dirt. I wanted to hear him yelp and cry. But truth was, deep down I’d known all along Corey couldn’t understand. I’d just had to try, but, no, that was a lie, too, why I’d really brought him . . . The real reason I’d brought him was I was scared to see it first time by myself. And I knew I had to see it before I could decide. Of course Corey did not understand, and Dane understood only in a way before word, before memory, and what did Jimmy Make understand?
Understood that move-the-mountain draw, the power, the suck, the tempt. Understood anyway the wrongness of it all. Understood he could not stop it. Understood he had to go. Did he understand how Lace would choose? How I would? Would he understand why? That’s just how he is, I wanted to say to her. Why can’t you see that’s just how he is? Go on and love him anyway. And I remembered the sleepy smell. The ginger in how he held me little, him my father and just a little older than I was now. I remembered how he’d never left, not through all those years, not even when she wouldn’t marry him, not even afterwards when she did and things got worse. He never left.
