A Bird On Water Street

Chapter 1

Bridges

Living in Coppertown was like living on the moon. The whole area was raw ground, bare and bumpy from erosion ditches cuttin' through every which way. As far as the horizon, it looked like a wrinkled, brown paper bag. There weren't no bushes, nor grass neither—no green things weaving through to settle our homes into the land and make 'em look like they belonged. So why did Miss Post bother teaching us about trees when we didn't have any?

Miners used 'em all up when they started mining copper here a hundred years ago. They cut down the trees to feed the open smelting heaps where they roasted the ore before smelting it. The smoke from those stacks made acid rain, which killed off everything else. They don't do it that way no more, but nature never did come back.

Even so, Miss Post said we should all know what a tulip poplar, the Tennessee state tree, looked like, and be able to tell it apart from a pine, oak, sassafras, or maple. She said it wasn't normal to not have trees, though it seemed normal to us.

She showed us slide after slide of trees on the pull-down projection screen—thick brown trunks with leafy green tops, or long, slender branches with brush-like needles. She might as well have been showing us spaceships for all that we knew about 'em. Outside our classroom window, all we saw was what the locals called the Red Hills—land that was only good for mining copper and riding BMX bicycles.

Not that I had one.

My first bike was cheap and got busted up from me zooming down dirt roads and jumping erosion ditches—catching air, like a bird in flight. I'd had it since I was ten, so it was too small for me anyhow. I kept hinting to Mom that I needed the real deal for Christmas, a new BMX racer like the one in the Company store window. But she kept saying it was too expensive and dangerous, which made no sense at all. If I'd had a bike, after all, I wouldn't a been
walking
with Piran that day back in August when we ran into Eli and his friends, and I might not have broken my arm.

Bein' named after the patron saint of tin mining, you'd think my best friend would be some sort of angel. But he got us into more trouble than the devil himself. It was his fault I crossed the trestle bridge—I wouldn't a done it if he hadn't dared me.

O

It was still the hot days of summer then, when the air sat heavy and everything looked sort of golden. Eli Munroe and his gang, a bunch of high-school boys, were hanging out smoking at the end of the trestle bridge when we hiked by on our way to the Old Number 2 Tailings Pond.

“Look at the sweet babies,” they laughed. “Bet yu'uns is too chicken to cross the bridge.”

“Gimme a break.” I rolled my eyes and kept walking, but Piran grabbed my arm.

“C'mon Jack, let's do it,” he said. His face warped through the edge of his thick glasses as he looked at me sideways.

“No way!”

“We'll be in high school after next year, and some of those guys are gonna be seniors then. You want them callin' you coward? Best to prove up now,” Piran whispered. “I dare you. I'll even go first.”

Piran didn't wait for an answer. He stuck out his chin and stepped onto a railroad tie. Eli and his gang whooped and cheered. I worried Piran's asthma would kick in like it usually did when he was scared or stressed out, but he stayed cool as a cucumber as he balanced from beam to beam. He made it all the way across, jumped to the ground, and turned back to face me with a wide grin.

My turn.

Sunlight reflected off the windshield of Eli's old jacked-up Jeep, and I shaded my eyes. It wasn't the tallest trestle bridge in Polk County, but it was tall enough. At its base, amber water had nearly dried up from the last rain, leaving a yellow mud thick around the bridge's tarred beams. From end to end, it was probably no farther than running from first to second base, but I'd never run on beams spaced too close together for normal steps and so high off the ground.

Down in the basin, even though we didn't have trees, the hills that surrounded us hid things well enough. I listened for the train, but it was quiet—Coppertown quiet—no bugs or birds. No wind neither, which made me sweat all the more.

There weren't no way out of it. If I didn't cross, not only would I never live it down with the likes of Eli, but Piran would probably never speak to me again.

I took a deep breath, rubbed the lucky rabbit's foot in my pocket, and followed.

I was only halfway across the bridge when the train
chug, chug, chugged
into view.

“Run, RUN!” everybody hollered. But there was no way I could make it to the other side in time, and it was too far down to jump. The railroad ties stuck out like hangers beyond the tracks, which gave me an idea. I kneeled down and crawled to the edge, splinters burying themselves in my hands and knees. I gritted my teeth and grunted through the pain. The train grew closer as I wrapped my arms around one of those hangers and let my legs swing over the side.

For a moment I kicked, my feet seeking purchase on something, anything. But all they hit was air. My stomach turned upside down and my head spun. I pressed my cheek against the hot, sticky tar on the beam as I held on. It stunk like burning tires up so close.

“Stay away from Company property, Jack,” I remembered my dad saying. “It's dangerous.” But the Company owned nearly everything around and there weren't much left to do in Coppertown without some sort of danger involved. What was I supposed to do, stay inside all summer? I was old enough to take care of myself. Still, right then I was wishin' I'd listened.

The train roared toward me, its whistle shrieking so loud my head rang. From where I hung barely below its path, it looked like an enormous iron monster with a front grill full of metal teeth rushin' to chew me up—fierce and hungry.

I couldn't feel my fingers anymore, let alone the rest of me. Later, I claimed the vibrations shook me loose—but to tell the God's honest truth, I let go.

I dropped a hundred feet into the mud below. Okay, maybe it was just fifteen feet, but I remember the
squish!
and
splat!
of all that mud, which probably saved my life, right before the
crack!

Pain shot through my arm.

Eli and his gang couldn't get out of there fast enough. They climbed over each other, piling into his beat-up old Jeep, and took off in a cloud of dust. But one of 'em was slow and got left behind.

“Will McCaffrey!” Piran shouted. “That's Ray Hicks' son in that ditch and yer dad works at the mine. Do I need to spell out what'll happen if you don't get help, and fast?”

I didn't know whether to hate Piran or love him at that moment,
but I didn't have much time to think about it. I blacked out.

When I came to, Piran was sitting next to me sucking on his inhaler and crying about how sorry he was for gettin' me into that fix. I was crying because I hurt so bad. He wedged himself underneath me so his leg was a pillow for my head. It was awkward, but we were such a blubbering mess, I didn't care.

When the tears dried up and Piran's breathing calmed down, he told me jokes to keep my mind off the pain I was in. Of course, I'd already heard all his jokes before.

“Don't you have any new material?” I gasped.

“Dang, I don't know. I'm sorry, Jack.” Piran teared up again. “My pa is gonna kill me when he hears about this—especially that we was headin' to the old tailings pond . . .”

We weren't supposed to be there neither. It was where the Company dumped water they used for separating out the last of the minerals from the ore. When they closed a pond, they'd stop pumpin' water into it. So, despite the name, the Old Number 2 Tailings Pond didn't look like a pond at all. It was all dried up, with nothing but white, crusty silicate dust in its place, which blew all over Coppertown on windy days. The tailings pond looked like a desert with copper-colored water seepin' around the edges and covering rocks in mustard-colored iron slime. The acres and acres of the tailings pond looked even more barren than the rest of Coppertown, which is why we thought it was cool, I guess. It looked like another planet, so we pretended we were on
Star Trek
out there and zapped each other with invisible ray guns.

“You don't have to tell him,” I choked out.

“Why else would we be out this far? My dad may not be a miner, but he's not stupid.”

“Heck, he might be the smartest of 'em all,” I struggled to say. The sun beat down on us like an oven. I was so thirsty, my tongue swelled to baseball-size. “He doesn't have to go underground for his job.” Piran's dad was the town's postmaster and it seemed like it embarrassed him sometimes.

“But underground is where the big money is,” he said. “If it weren't for my asthma, I'd be a miner.”

I had to be hallucinating. “What? Why?”

“Are you kidding?” Piran replied. “It never rains or snows down there, stays the same temperature all year. The whole town treats you like royalty and you get a discount at the Company store. I want to be a miner like you someday.”

Like me? I tried to swallow, but my throat was too dry.

I wanted to love mining like Piran did, like my dad did—the hard hats, the strength, the camaraderie. But then I'd think about all the people I knew of who'd been killed or injured in the mines—all the explosions and collapses. How Dad had to scrub at the end of each day but never did come all the way clean.

None of that seemed to scare my dad. His father, my Grandfather Hicks, was killed 'fore I was born, and my dad wore his death like a badge of honor.

“We're miners, Jack,” he'd say. “It's in our blood.”

One thing I was sure of, mining was
not
in
my
blood. Dad was expecting me to follow in his footsteps and I'd have to tell him I didn't want to before long. It made my stomach hurt. He went to work in the mine at seventeen, and his brother, my Uncle Amon, at fifteen—just two years older than me.

“Maybe you could put in a good word for me once you get in there,” Piran said.