That was the winter the mine closed for good and my father and everyone he knew lost their jobs. It was 1986, in West Virginia, and coal was our life. In a few months, I would graduate high school. Not everyone I began the 9th grade with was still enrolled. Jeremy Chesher had been working at the mine as an apprentice bolter when it finally shut its doors, and Felicity McCormick had married Perry Allaster, was now Felicity Allaster, and due to give birth in May. That same January, toward the end of the month, I watched during physics as the Challenger exploded two minutes into its mission. One second, the space shuttle was there on the screen—we were going places—and the next it was a plume of falling smoke. Mr. Flantz quickly turned off the broadcast. I had been sitting in front of Patton—I always sat in front of Patton—and before our teacher had a chance to put the event into a context he felt suitable for us, my best friend leaned forward, put his mouth next to my ear, and whispered, “I wish we were stoned.”
Patton was by far the worst student at Finch-Rockefeller High. My mother had instilled in me a studious work ethic, and I received good grades, especially in math and science. Patton didn’t have my kind of options, as my mother liked to say whenever I reminded her that I would not be going to college. Instead, we had a plan, Patton and me. We were going underground when we graduated, like our fathers, like our grandfathers, and it would be fine work because we’d be in the hole together. Before the mine closed, we used to look down on the rail yard and tipple from a hill behind the high school, sharing a joint after classes, and it was like we had two selves then: one on the hill, stoned, and another down there, sweaty, dust covered, worked.
It’s true there were times, given how poorly he did in school, when I wondered why Patton hadn’t already begun an apprenticeship. He could have been making money. But I think, sometimes, that he was waiting for me. We had grown up together. Every summer since we were eight and allowed out of our mothers’ sights, we’d gone swimming in Shawnee creek, pressed pennies on the rails in the train yard. Later, Patton taught me how to take a shot of whiskey without cringing and how to smoke a joint without coughing. He’d fingered Molly McGuire before I’d even kissed a girl and made me smell his fingers for three days afterwards. You could tell when adults spoke to him that they’d stopped thinking of him as a kid, just a man stuck in a kid’s body. I may have been the better student, but Patton always seemed one step ahead of me, a little older, a little wiser, a little more sure of himself. It was like he’d lived a whole different life before this one, and already figured out exactly who he would be now and settled into that mold. Me, I felt like my skin didn’t fit. When I looked in the mirror each morning, I saw an entirely different person staring back, a face almost shocked to be living in Finch, as if the day before I’d woken up elsewhere.
After school that day, Patton and I met under the bleachers. He started rolling a joint, turning the paper between his pointer fingers and thumbs, his nose close to the work, concentrating. There was about a foot of snow on the ground. It had stormed often and heavy that winter, and the ground always hid under a white cushion. There had been days, before the mine closed, when the chunks of coal, riding down the belt to be dumped in rail cars, to be shipped by train through the Alleghenies — onto Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Baltimore, D.C., — could hardly be seen, as if nothing at all had been pulled from the ground. My father, who had told me the temperatures never changed in the mine, complained often and wore more layers than usual to work that season. He said it was like the whole earth had frozen.
The still air felt like a sheet of ice on my cheeks. We were as far as you could go beneath the seats without having to crouch. The tip of my snow cap brushed the bottom of the benches. Patton was about an inch taller than me and the crown of his head reached the seats. He wore the same down coat he’d had the previous winter, but his body had grown. The sleeves were too short. He licked his lips while he worked. They were chapped and blistered around the edges, and when he breathed it seemed like his mouth might break apart like the shuttle, the smoky breath his own plume in the sky. He finished, stuck the joint behind his ear, and looked out from under the bleachers like he was waiting for something.
“We doing this or what?” I asked.
“Fine, yeah,” he said. “Let’s go.”
We started up the hill that overlooked the colliery. It was hard work, climbing in the snow. Beneath my coat, I dripped with cold sweat, and by the time we reached the peak my breath had begun to burn in my throat. Then, resting for a moment at the top, I heard voices behind us, laughing. I looked back. About halfway down the hill, Carly Jean and Vanessa Sunderlin, two girls from our class, were scurrying up the trail Patton and I had left.
“Hey,” Carly was shouting. “Hey.”
Patton watched them, calm, as though they were small animals he didn’t want to scare away.
“You’re late,” he said, when they reached us, heaving. “Lucky I didn’t light this up already.”
I had always marveled at Patton’s ability to be harsh with girls. Whenever I tried to do the same, I stumbled over my words. Girls made me nervous.
“We were freshening up,” Carly said.
Patton took out a lighter and the four of us waited for him to get the thing going. He lit it, took a few puffs, then lit it again and passed it to me. Carly took the joint next, inhaled, let out a steam of smoke and passed it to Vanessa, who did the same, but coughed loudly.
“Amateur hour,” Patton said.
I laughed, though I wasn’t sure if I should. I hadn’t even known the girls would be meeting us, but I realized that it was them Patton had been looking for from under the bleachers before we set off. Carly and Vanessa weren’t friends of mine, though I knew enough about them. Both had promiscuous reputations. Carly had supposedly given Mitch Connel a hand job in a broom closet at school, and Vanessa, though there was no gossip about her, had the same air, likely on account of being such good friends with Carly. I hadn’t thought they were friends of Patton’s either. He’d never mentioned them—not earlier that day, not ever. But that was a normal thing to have happen with Patton. He liked secrets.
“Did you see the shuttle?” Carly said, as the four of us slid down the far side of the hill toward the tracks. Patton had said he had a new place to hang out, a place we’d like, and we were going there.
“We were in history when it happened,” Vanessa said.
Patton stopped midway down the hill and grabbed a double handful of snow. “Kablooey,” he said, tossing it in the air. Carly and Vanessa turned their heads away. The powder instantly melted on my warm cheeks. Carly smiled at Patton, giggling. I thought it would be nice to lick the snow off her chin. I imagined she was wearing that parka with nothing on beneath, but I could not see beyond the coat. She kept unzipping it halfway down, then back up, laughing, smiling, turning her head coyly away. I saw a bare sliver of chest and belly. There were breasts somewhere, I knew, but I couldn’t move the image in my mind toward them; and so my mind gave up on her body, and I thought instead that it was a shame Carly was who she was, this sandy haired girl taking Mitch Connel into the broom closet and looking at Patton like he was the top of the sky, even when he did something dumb like that, making light of a tragic thing. It was a shame there wasn’t more to her than that, or that there was, but I might never know it. I was, I realized, stoned.
Vanessa wiped her cheeks. “Don’t be an idiot,” she said.
“Merely demonstrating a fact,” Patton said.
“It did blow up,” I said.
“See, professor Michael confirms it. The shuttle went kablooey.”
“Whatever,” Vanessa said.
We walked through the rail yard. The cars sat like carcasses on the tracks, waiting to be scavenged and shipped to another town where there was still coal to carry. The lines were buried in the snow, two parallel raised mounds of powder where the rails should have been, as though groundhogs had dug a network of twin tunnels beneath a white sheet. Some ways ahead of us, the old car dump rose beside the tracks, a kind of house elevated on a complicated system of stilts, high enough above the ground to let the trains pass below. It had been replaced years before with a modern structure further down the rails, but still stood tall, looking out over the yard.
“Where are we going?” Carly asked.
“You’ll see when we get there,” Patton said.
Patton was holding Carly’s hand now, and walking in front of me and Vanessa. He whispered something in her ear and she shook her head no, but was laughing all the same, as if she didn’t really mean no. I wondered what kind of thing you said yes and no to at the same time. The deep snow made walking a struggle. I lifted my feet high, out of one and into another thick pile. It was eerie, walking in the empty colliery. I was used to looking at it from the hill, all the men working below, but now it was quiet and still, like the first moment after you wake and realize dream and night have ended and something real has begun. I could feel the wet through my socks, the snow as it crested over the edge of my boots and slid down my ankle. Vanessa tucked her hands in her pockets. Then she pointed at the newer car dump in the distance. “That’s where my daddy worked,” she said.
“Yeah?” I said.
My own father had been a bolter like Jeremy Chesher aimed to be, deep in the hole. When it came to seniority that put him above Vanessa’s father. He got paid more, but it was also a riskier job; he was more likely to get hurt. This was one of the reasons my mother wanted me to do anything but go to work in the mine. The stress gave her crows feet and panics, moments where she said she couldn’t breathe and needed me to bring her a glass of water, quick, quick. She could hardly handle worrying whether my father would make it out of the tunnels alive each day. The last thing she wanted or needed was another man underground.
“Think about the girl you’ll marry,” she’d tell me. “Putting her through all this.”
But that didn’t matter to me. Everyday, my father would come home covered in coal dust, owl rings around his eyes from the goggles, and I’d think of how one day those would be my goggles, my eyes. I’d think of Patton and me eating lunch by the light of our headlamps, of riding the man-trip each morning and stepping into that cool tunnel air, always the same temperature, always right.
Our plans didn’t change when the mine shut down. One way or another, we figured we would work, if not in Finch, then somewhere else. But other things changed. My father, who had worked the mines all his life, stopped looking for a new job. My mother told me it was because the few that did open received inquiries from nearly every man in the Finch area, and others from nearby towns who had seen the same thing happen to their mine. It was easier for her find employment, which she did, taking on secretarial work with a lawyer in Beckley. My father assumed her responsibilities at home, but he was not so meticulous, and my mother, too tired at the end of the day, would not correct his mistakes. We lived in a state of disrepair—the kitchen cluttered, the bathtub run with mildew and scum, laundry left hanging on the line till our shirts and pants stiffened.
“I’m getting a job,” Vanessa said.
“That’s cool,” I said.
“No it ain’t,” she said. “Ain’t nothing cool about it.”
Patton stopped at the base of the old car dump. A thin-runged ladder rose from the ground to the house.
“I been using this place. It’s like a clubhouse, with a view,” he said.
“A clubhouse?” Carly said.
“It’s cool,” Patton said. “Trust me.”
One by one, we hoisted ourselves onto the ladder. The rungs were cold and slippery. It was a long way to the base of the dumping house. Patton went first, followed by Carly and Vanessa. I took up the rear. As I climbed, I could see Vanessa’s legs working with each stretch upward. Her thighs bent at the hip, pulling body taught against faded blue jeans.
Patton already had a bottle of whiskey open and was taking a swig when I pulled myself inside. He’d been keeping it up there since he commandeered the place, supposedly a week earlier, or so he told us. When it had been functional, the car dump was the last spot the coal from the mine went before chuting into the rail cars lumbering by on the tracks below. It was like a black stone cave in there, the wood and machinery stained, like a char, from years of use, the air cold and dank. A system of gears, pulleys, and cables occupied the center of the room. A conveyor belt ran out the back to the sorting and washing operations. A door Patton showed us led to the control room, and the only sign that the place had been occupied recently were two overturned milk crates and a deck of cards that Patton had brought and left.
“Yep,” Carly said, taking a swig of whiskey. “Cool.”
Patton led us outside to a metal gangway with no railing. “Take a look,” he said. “A view for a king.”
Over the tops of bare, snow fringed trees, Finch nestled in the holler—the Dollar General, Lou Anne’s, Vick’s Hardware—a model train set, miniature and distant. Further away, the little homes we lived in—squat, two story cottages—gathered on the hillside clearings as though in quiet meeting.
I felt two hands grasp my shoulders, Patton’s voice, don’t fall. My body jerked forward over the edge of the gangway. I saw the ground below, white and hard, before the same force pulled me back, and I fell to the gangway, scuttling away from the edge. The girls laughed.
“Fuck, man” I said, standing. I brushed snow from my pants and coat. Patton backed off, raised his hands in concession.
“Just a joke,” he said. “Relax. Have a drink.” He took the bottle from Carly and held it out to me. I noticed how her eyes slid from the bottle, up his arm, to his face. Awe. Something about Patton and how he was that I couldn’t name. And many years later, I would think of that moment again—an older Carly asleep beside me—how they’d laughed, how she had given him that look. But then, I took the bottle from Patton, and my anger melted as quickly as the whiskey warmed my throat and belly. The sun began to set over the holler, and the four of us played spades on a milk crate, passing the bottle in a circle. The sky turned pink and purple, and clouds burst over the mountains, bleeding light. It was, somehow, a happy, beautiful time.
After the sun set, Patton lit two battery-powered lamps. He teased Carly Jean with ease when she complained of the low temperature. She needed to pack on a few pounds, he told her, like a bear preparing for hibernation. Meanwhile, I struggled to make conversation with Vanessa. I offered her my coat, but she refused.
Pretty soon, we were all sloshed. We’d finished playing cards, and Patton and Carly were sitting on a milk crate looking out over the darkened rail yard through the open door leading to the gangway. He had his arm around her.
“C’mon,” Vanessa said, grabbing my hand.
She pulled me to the control room, where there was nothing to sit on, so we sat on the planked floor. There was a complicated panel of lights, levers, and buttons against one wall. Vanessa kept the door ajar, but we could not see Carly and Patton through the crack. It was like we were children hiding, crouched and breathless.
“I promised Carly I’d leave them alone eventually,” she said.
“Why?” I said. But I knew why, of course.
Vanessa smiled. “Don’t be an idiot. Carly promised Patton something.”
“Why’re we here then?” I said. I didn’t get it. Patton could have snuck off with Carly on his own if he’d wanted to. It sometimes seemed like he had this secret life I never knew about, and this could have been a part of that, like commandeering the car dump in the first place, like sneaking the bottle of whiskey out of the Elkwood Tavern. He didn’t need me here to fool around with Carly Jean.
“They thought I would like you if we spent some time.”
“Do you?”
“You don’t talk much,” she said.
Patton and Carly had quieted. I pulled my knees to my chest and rocked on my ankles. Breath smoked between me and Vanessa. I thought I could hear movement—bodies shuffling, a zipper—outside the room.
“What’d she promise him?” I said.
Vanessa made a gesture with her hand. She put her fist up to her mouth, slid it back and forth as though over a pole, and stuck her tongue into the side of her cheek at the same time.
“Right,” I said.
“I don’t know if I like you enough.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Twenty,” she said, a whisper so low I wasn’t even sure I heard the words. “Twenty bucks oughta be enough to make up the difference.”
“Really?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, smiling. “Really. I ain’t like Carly.”
I undid my belt and pulled my jeans down to mid-thigh. Vanessa did the rest, just like I’d imagined. She rubbed me a little, even though I didn’t need it because just the thought of what we were about to do got me excited. Then I was in her hands, and in her mouth, just the tip, like a kiss, and more, deeper. I know now that she was reluctant—there was doubt in all her movements that I would come to recognize, later in life, as inexperience—but then I didn’t know anything. I closed my eyes, and let the good feeling spread over me like nothing I thought I’d ever felt before and certainly nothing I could do to myself. I wanted it to last forever. I wanted to be able to say, I felt this good, this long, and so I forced myself to stop thinking about what was happening, to let all that good feeling settle into the background and bring up something terrible into the front of my mind.
I thought of falling. It was the first terrible thing I could come up with: the astronauts’ bodies dust and cloud now, part of that pink-purple sky we’d seen earlier when the sun went down. How for two minutes they must have felt like I did, lifting off, only to have everything, their mission, their lives, end in a flash of blinding-burning light. I wondered if they really fell to the ground, or did they just float higher and higher, into the dark, become stars. Did they feel anything? And would they sign up again—would they, given the chance? I didn’t know any of the answers. All I knew was that it worked—it was working. And it might have forever.
I can’t say what happened exactly. Carly screamed, Vanessa pulled away, and I thought for a second she would take me with her, a part of me caught on her teeth. When I looked out of the control room door, Patton was gone, and Carly was kneeling outside, bent over the edge of the gangway. She was calling for him, and I remember thinking, I cannot hear his answer, but he has made some kind of hand gesture, a thumbs up. He’s okay.
I pulled up my pants, and Vanessa and I ran to Carly’s back. She shined one of the flashlights down on Patton. The yellow light shook, her hand shook, over his body. He lay sprawled on his back, a figure resting in the snow, pants down at his ankles. He was exposed, his penis hard and engorged, but faltering, lying flat against his stomach. I thought I saw a smile, but he was still. His body was still, completely. “Patton,” Carly shouted. “Quit kiddin.” He didn’t answer. A slow plume of breath rose from his mouth—a second, a third, the body’s way of following through on what it had started—and then they stopped.
There were frantic moments after that, of trying to stir Patton back to life, of running for help. But he was already dead, near instant, a broken neck. It was, according to the medics, not the fall itself, but the way he landed. There was a funeral. Patton’s parents would not speak with me or Vanessa or Carly, and we did not speak with each other, either. I stood alone with my parents in the white graveyard as he was lowered into the ground. For a time, it seemed the largest problem in Finch wasn’t the closing of the mine. A child had died. There were programs in school, on alcohol, drugs and sex, and a counselor from Charleston came to speak at an assembly about how we were coping. Those were a strange few months. I wanted to leave Finch, badly, leave the accusing looks from my classmates, as though I were responsible for all that was happening to us, leave my unemployed father, and leave Patton’s grave, which I could not visit after the funeral, though I tried, standing just outside the cemetery gates. Sometimes, I would see Carly’s silhouette sitting before his headstone, her head bowed as though in prayer. I wanted to know then what she prayed for, and if I could have snuck up behind her like a ghost, I would have done so, and listened.
I never saw Vanessa again after that last year of high school—and, as far as I know, she never asked, nor told anyone, about the deal we’d made—but I did run into Carly a few years ago. I was living in Washington and had come home for my father’s funeral. One of those nights, after my father was laid to rest, I went down to Elkwood. Carly, I saw coming through the door, was bartending.
For the rest of the school year after Patton died, Carly had been an important, if not infamous, person, the last to touch him alive. Now, wiping the bar down, she was just a regular person who may have, for all I knew, never left Finch. The air was smoke and neon. There were a few old men sitting at the counter, and a young couple in the corner whispering. Carly wore a low cut blouse, heavy makeup, and her hair was black, not the girlish sandy-brown she’d had that day. But it was Carly alright. I would not have forgotten her face.
“What can I do you for?” she said, leaning over the counter a bit so that I could see her cleavage and the edge of a turquoise bra.
“A Budweiser,” I said.
She reached into the fridge behind the bar, popped the cap off a bottle, and set it down in front of me. Then she took an extra long look at my face, and maybe I should have looked away like a stranger, spooked by someone taking too long an interest in me, but I did not. I stared back until her eyes widened and she saw who I was.
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Shit,” she said again, a hand over her chest as though her heart might’ve murmured.
It was quiet in the tavern that night—but for the few customers giving me an out-of-towner look—and Carly and me got to talking. At first it was like nothing important had ever happened to us together. I found out she had left Finch for a few years, but returned to live at home and save some money when she lost a bank teller job in Charleston and never left again. She had no family, no kids, and neither did I, I told her.
“You hitched?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, you look like you’re doing okay for yourself,” she said, pointing at the tie around my neck. I was wearing a button down shirt and had a suit coat draped over my chair. The truth was I had been dressed that way for the funeral, but I did not remind her that, because the other truth was that it was not much different from what I normally wore.
“I’m okay,” I said. “I guess so.”
“Okay’s good enough in my book.”
I stayed until her shift ended. I wasn’t drunk—I kept my pace—but I did not want to go home either. I was having fun, just talking to her. I’d say it was like old times, but we never really had old times, just that time. Patton hung there with the cigarette smoke hovering to the ceiling, and I wondered if Carly ever thought she had loved him, because that would seem the kind of thing a teenage girl might do after what happened, convince herself of that.
We had one last beer together after she locked up. Then she said she needed to go home. I should follow her in my car, she said, and I agreed as though this was something we did everyday, a habit of our lives. But what I always come back to happened later, our bodies slick with sweat, the turquoise bra lying on the floor. Carly said, “You know, you kind’ve kiss like him.”
I did not think it could be true, but it seemed Carly wanted it to be.
“Is that a nice thing to say?” she said.
I lay still next to her. We were not touching. I did not think, when the time came, that I would be able to sleep.
“It’s just a thing to say,” I said. “Not nice or otherwise. Just a thing.”
“Maybe,” she said, rolling over to grab a cigarette. She lit it and exhaled. “I guess you’ll be headed back to Washington tomorrow?”
“I guess,” I said.
And that’s exactly what I did. That’s exactly what I’ve done.
This story has been republished with permission of the author.
