Читать книгу Junkin' - Strat Boone's Douthat - Страница 9

Benny tensed slightly at his dad's mention of Alice Miller. He shrugged and leaned back in the rocker, gazing up at the porch ceiling, where the mud daubers were constructing a row of dried-earth igloos that looked like little Quonset huts. He tilted the chair back for a better look, thinking that the insects’ creations looked a lot like the pictures of the structures left behind by the ancient cliff dwellers.

Maybe that’s what happened to them, he thought. They’re mud daubers now.

“Well?” his father said.

“Well, what?”

“Benny, you know damned good and well what I'm talking about.”

“Look, dad, it's none of your business.” He got up, brushed some of the dust from his pants and turned to go inside.

Marvin grabbed his arm. “Sit down, Benny. I want to talk to you.” He took another long pull on the oxygen tank, coughed up some dark stuff and sent it sailing over the porch railing. “OK, maybe it ain't none of my business, but you know it's not right to be foolin' around with married women. After all, Alice Miller is married to a friend of yours.”

“Dad, Alice and Bobby are separated. And you know as well as I do that I haven't seen Ruth in more than six months. I can't help who calls me, can I?”

“No, but you can do something about Ruth and Billy. You can get your ass up to Columbus. You can get yourself a job and take care of your family. It ain't right; you down here, cuttin' up that mine while your wife and little boy are up there all alone.”

Benny shrugged and slapped at a fly on his boot.

“Besides, you're liable to get arrested for trespassing, or arrested for stealing, if you don't quit going up there to the mine.”

Benny yawned. “Flies seem to be getting worse, don't they?”

Marvin scowled. “Don't change the goddamned subject. I'm not talking about flies here.”

“Dad, I've told you before that the company doesn't care about that mine anymore. If they did they wouldn't have just walked off and left it. You oughta see the bathhouse. Two years ago, more than 300 men were in there after every shift. Now, it's a stinking shit hole, all busted up and full of rats. Looks like a place you'd see in New York City. It's unbelievable. Looks like that movie about the Bronx.”

“You could get a job...”

“Hell, I'd love to get a job. You tell me, where’s a mine electrician gonna get a job around here? What are there, 30 miners working on Cabin Creek these days? I can remember when there were 3,000. You tell...”

“Tell you, hell!” Marvin shouted, red-faced. “I don't have any goddamned answers. All I know is you can't stay around here, junking and drinking from morning to night. You're wasting your life, can't you see that?”

Grandma Early appeared at the screen door. “What's all the fussin’ about?”

“Oh, Dad's after me to go to Columbus.”

Marvin struggled out of his chair. “Damn it, Benny, listen to me. You can always come back when the mine reopens. I've seen these shutdowns before, lots of times. That mine will be runnin' full blast again, you wait and see. Just wait 'til those Arabs and Jews blow up the Middle East and the oil's all burned up, then you'll see.”

Benny shut his eyes, trying to make Marvin's voice go away. When he reopened them, the fly was back on his boot.

“Well, you're just plain wrong this time,” Benny said, waggling his foot. “Things will never be like they were around here; now they can get cheap coal from South Africa and Brazil, places where the miners are lucky if they make ten bucks a day. There’s no way we can compete.”

“You're forgettin' something, Mister. You're forgetting that this is the best steel-makin' coal in the world. They still need it for that, don't they?”

“Yep, at least they would, if we still made steel in this country. Besides, they build cars out of plastic these days. Did you know that?”

“Well, then, if...” Marvin's voice broke off in a fit of coughing that bent him double. When he finally got his breath back, he said, “If that's the case, and the mine ain't ever gonna reopen, then why ain't you in Columbus? Tell me that.”

Benny laughed. “Dad, you should have been a lawyer,” he said, getting up and going inside.

His grandmother was sitting at the kitchen table, stringing beans and listening to a teary fat woman on TV. The woman had on so much makeup she appeared to be wearing a mask. She was crying, and begging for money, saying her husband wanted to build a Christian retreat somewhere down in South Carolina.

“Seems like all the women on TV are crying today,” Benny said, grabbing a handful of beans.

“Don't be disrespectful, Benny. That's Tammy. Her and her husband are ministers. They are God-fearin’ folks and they are doing the Lord's work.”

She smiled as Benny began breaking up the beans. “I'll swan, Benny, you and your daddy fight worse than an ol' married couple.”

They sat across from each other at the table, stringing and snapping the beans and dropping them into a big, fire-blackened pot. The aroma of witch hazel, which his grandmother wore as a sort of combination perfume and skin bracer, brought back those long-ago nights in the featherbed. She'd made the down mattress herself, stuffing it with feathers from the geese her parents had given her as a wedding present.

Benny's favorite story, the one he always used to beg for when he was little, was about the mine wars and how the governor had called out the state militia after his grandpa Early and the other miners went on strike in the 1920s.

“Your grandfather helped bring the union to Cabin Creek,” she would say. “He wasn't yet 40 when he died but he lived long enough to see the union in every mine along the creek.” She would hug Benny at that point and add, “I thank the Lord for that.”

“Benny?”

“Yeah, Grandma?”

“Tell me, what are you going to do, about Ruth and Billy?”

“I don't know, Grandma. Russell Johnson, of all people, came up to the head of the hollow today to ask me that same question.”

“Russell stopped by here to see me this morning,” she said, worrying a bean as she talked. “He'd like to be friends with you, Benny.”

Her fingers were just blurs. Benny had always been fascinated by his grandmother’s quickness, that and the fact that her hands were always so busy, always doing something. When he was little she had told him they were “Grandma's helpers.”

“Russell rubs me the wrong way. I don't trust him. Can't help it.”

“He's my grandson, same as you, Benny. I see him different than you do. Now, tell me, what are you going to do about Ruth and Billy? It's time you did something.”

He reached for another handful of beans, but his grandmother intercepted him. She took his hand, squeezing it with surprising force.

“Benny?”

Her hand was cool and dry, as if made from pale marble. His were the same slender shape as hers, a fact that had caused the older boys at school to tease him and say he had girl's hands.

She held him fast, waiting.

“Benny?”

“I don't know what I'm going to do,” he said finally, looking her in the eye for the first time. “Things keep changing so fast, I can't keep up with them. Seems like yesterday I was making $40,000 a year and people were comin' to the house almost begging me to quit my job and work for them. Now, Charlie's gone. Ruth and Billy are gone. The jobs are gone. There's nobody to ask for a job now, even if I wanted one.”

“Don't you want a job, Benny?”

“Not if it's in Columbus, I don't.”

“You could try it, couldn't you?”

“Grandma, you know as well as I do what they think of us in Columbus. Up there, we're all just a bunch of dumb hillbillies. We’re white niggers as far as they're concerned. I like it here. I know everybody and everybody knows me.”

She withdrew her hand from his.

“You're a stubborn man, Benny. Prideful, too. And you know what the Bible says about that.”

Benny wanted to get up and move around, but his grandmother's gaze nailed him to the chair.

“Billy needs you up there, Benny. A man's place is with his family. A big city is no place for a woman and child to be alone.”

“Look, Grandma, Ruth's doing just fine. I send her money almost every week, and she does have a job, you know.”

“Benny, I'm not talking about money. Your little boy needs a father.”

“Well, far as I can tell, Billy's doing okay. Whenever I call him, he's so busy watching TV he hardly even hears what I'm saying. It's almost like I'm talking to myself. And he's never called me once the whole time they've been up there. Not once.”