FOUR
Benny watched Junior's battered Plymouth Fury come skidding across the parking lot, with ZZ Top's “Sharp-Dressed Man” blaring at full volume. Junior braked to a stop and Benny leaned in the window, scowling. “Where the hell you been, Chicago?”
“We had a bl-blowout,” said Norvil, who sometimes stuttered when addressing Benny. “Junior's spare was flat and we had to roll the d-damn thing a mile back down the hollow to the g-gas station.”
Benny stared at the slim, long-haired boy behind the wheel. “Junior, I oughta kick your ass for makin' us wait up here with the snakes and lizards with no beer. And, turn down that goddamned radio.”
Junior grinned and handed him a tall, gleaming can. “This Bud's for you.”
“That would make a good commercial,” Benny said. “This Bud’s for you! I like it, but I like ‘This Bud’s for me’ even better. And I told you to turn off that damned radio.”
“Well, it was the last cold one. Mary’s cooler is busted again,” Junior said, turning down the volume.
“Well, it sure as hell's not very cold now,” Benny said, popping the tab. He took a swallow and proclaimed, “Bud's like...”
“...like gravity,” Junior crowed. “The same every time.”
Dwayne and Norvil burst out laughing. Even Benny couldn't keep a straight face.
“Junior,” he said, “you're a total fuckup, just like your old man. You even sound like Charlie when you laugh. Of course, your daddy was a lot smarter than you are.”
Norvil spoke up. “Hey, D-did'ja hear the news? It was on TV. They’re talkin’ about putting in a dam and flooding the upper part of the hollow. Everybody down at the store was talkin' about it.”
“Wouldn't surprise me,” Benny said, chugging his beer. “In fact, it's not a bad idea. We could start an underwater salvage business. We'd put our beer in the lake. That way, we wouldn't have to drink this warm crap.”
Junior climbed out of the Plymouth and flexed his arms, striking a muscleman pose. “Let's get to work. There's some killer weed floating around these parts right now and I'm busted flat.”
Benny suddenly made a fist and leaped forward, aiming for Junior's unprotected stomach. Then, he pulled back an inch short of contact.
Junior doubled up reflexively. “Gotcha!” Benny growled, adding, “You're lucky I'm in a good mood today, kid.”
Benny gave the boy an affectionate slap on the arm. Then he reached into the backseat, extracted a couple of beers and said, “You're just gonna have to wait a while 'cause it’s too hot now. I’ll be back in a couple of hours, when the sun's gone over the mountain.”
“I'm going too,” Dwayne said, grabbing a beer.
Junior looked up at Norvil, who was a good six inches taller and at least 40 pounds heavier than he was. “Leave the torch, then. Me and Samson here will cut up some stuff while you old-timers lay in the shade. We can load it later. I gotta make me some money.”
Benny grimaced as he and Dwayne headed back to the truck. The asphalt was now so soft he felt as if he were wading across it.
“Go ahead, get the stuff,” Benny said as he hoisted himself into the cab. “But be careful and wear the goggles when you're cuttin'.”
“Yes, mother,” Junior said mockingly. “I promise.”
Benny watched in the rear-view mirror as Junior leaped onto the truck bed, grabbed the torch and leaped back down again, seemingly without effort.
“I don't believe gravity affects that boy at all,” he said, starting the engine.
They bumped down the narrow hollow, hemmed in by the steep, green hills rising on either side. The creek was on their immediate left. A long row of crumbling stone foundations poked through the weeds on the right. Behind the foundations was a smoldering black slag heap 20 feet high and half as long as a football field. Thin, acrid curls of smoke seeped from its surface, like steam escaping through the pores of some giant, sleeping beast.
A visiting reporter had once described the smoking gob pile as a “black volcano from hell.” But to the folks who lived along Cabin Creek, it was just part of the landscape, a stinking, worthless pile of discarded rock and slag that sometimes, when the wind blew wrong, made it hard to breathe. There were slag heaps all over the hollow, but this was the only one that was burning at the moment.
It wasn’t uncommon for these smoldering refuse piles - they would ignite, go out and then reignite from time to time - to claim the lives of the unwary, especially on cool nights. The victims often were young boys who had scraped together a few beers and snuck off to clandestinely drink them while perched atop the gob piles for the warmth they emitted. But this cozy refuge also gave off toxic fumes that eventually would overcome their victims, whose scorched bodies would be found the next morning, looking like the mummies pulled from the Egyptian pyramids. Later, federal grants eventually would be used to remove these toxic eyesores but not before they had made their contributions to the coal industry’s continuing body count.
Benny and Dwayne had driven a little over a mile when Dwayne said, “Russell's got no call to talk like that, especially about his own brother.”
Benny waved him off.
“He's an asshole. Forget it.”
“But, you'd think...”
“Dwayne, I said forget it. You know how Russell is. He only cares about Russell; he’s always been that way, least long as I can remember.”
Dwayne paused, and then said, “Benny, you think they'd really flood the hollow?” I mean, there’s still lots of coal under these hills? And lots of people live along the creek, especially down at the lower end. The old folks like my mother, your dad and Grandma Early, why they've lived here for years and years. You think they'd run them off and flood their places?”
Benny couldn't imagine his grandmother letting anybody run her off of Cabin Creek. His earliest memories were of being curled up in her featherbed, snuggled against her while she told him for the umpteenth time about how the coal company gun thugs had evicted her, her husband and their children, including Benny's dad, from their company-owned house.
She would always start out by saying it was the dead of winter. Then she would tell how the company thugs came in and started grabbing her things. He could remember her exact words: “They set us out in the middle of the road. They even shoveled the hot coals from the stove and put them in a bucket. We all huddled around that bucket out on the road until them coals burned out.
“After that, I decided if I did just one thing in this life, I would own my own home. And I do, thank the Lord.”
Benny would invariably shiver as his grandmother recalled that terrible winter and how she had awakened many mornings in a tent, with frost in her hair.
He had never seen his Grandpa Early, who was killed a few years before Benny was born. But Benny felt as though he knew his grandfather because his grandmother had told him so much about him. How he'd fought the coal operators who tried to keep the union out of Cabin Creek, how he borrowed a top hat two sizes too big to wear the day they got married, how he'd always liked his eggs fried hard, same as Benny liked his.
There was at least one photograph of his grandfather in every room of the house, even the bathroom. His grandmother talked to them as she went about her day. “Carson,” she'd say, she always called him by his middle name, “we've got to get out and get those `taters planted 'fore they go bad.” Or, she might discuss the peculiarities