Binder - 02 (2 page)

“That’s a happy family, right? The girl is the one I’m looking for. She was demonstrating at the Hobart mine. Maybe you don’t like outsiders or maybe the demonstrations pissed you off? I get it. So ignore her. Look at the man standing behind her. That’s her father. Do you see him? See the ribbons on his chest? That red one with the vertical blue stripe running through it? That’s the Bronze Star. These two purple ones? Purple Hearts.” This froze the three angry men in their boots. These days, everyone from a small town has a friend who lost a leg in Iraq or Afghanistan. The uniform means something in places where real people live.

“Before you raise a hand against me, look at one more ribbon on this man’s chest. See the black one with the blue and red stripes on either end? That’s a prisoner of war medal. This girl’s father was chained to a wall in a North Vietnamese prison, and beaten to a bloody pulp every day for two years before any of you were born. You may think his daughter is just some pampered college kid, and you might be right. But this man deserves your respect. He deserves to know what happened to his daughter.” I let a little indignation enter my voice. The men looked at each other, suddenly off-balance.

In truth, I’d never met the man in the picture and didn’t know if he’d even served in Vietnam. But he was wearing an Army colonel’s dress uniform with a POW medal, so I guessed at the war from his age.

“Mister, I ain’t never seen that girl. And I don’t ’preciate you expectin’ I might’ve,” the leader responded. The other two just kept staring at the picture.

“Do you work at the Hobart Mine?” It was a question I already knew the answer to from the black dust under his fingernails, the rheumatoid arthritis evident in his walk and his difficulty hearing. Plus the fact that I’d asked the manager at my motel which bar in Hamlin the miners frequented. His first answer was, “All of ’em,” but he picked one when I pressed.

“Yessun,” he answered slowly. The other two men were still trying to decipher the medals and ribbons that soldiers call “fruit salad” on the chest of the man in the photo.

“Then you’ve seen her. She’s been protesting in front of the mine entrance since the beginning of last summer,” I explained. The leader considered this for a moment, looking thoughtful but still guarded.

“Listen, guys,” I continued, “you may not know much about this girl or what happened to her, but I guarantee it’s more than I do. I’ve never set foot in this state before today. I’m just trying to help a friend find his daughter. She came here with Reclaim—the group protesting at Hobart—but the hospital has no record of her being admitted last night after the attack. The only thing I care about is finding this girl. So let me buy you a drink. Even if you don’t know anything, you can pretend you do until my wallet’s a little lighter.” I’d been in Appalachia for less than six hours but already saw a story I recognized in the eyes of these men.

“Ain’t no such thing as a bad free drink,” the big man said hopefully, looking toward the leader. Silently, the question was resolved. The leader’s brass knuckles disappeared into a pocket. The big guy took a step away from me then turned. I followed the three miners back into the bar. It was a shabby, intimate dive that wouldn’t have felt out of place in Conestoga. Technically it wasn’t even a bar, just a private drinking club, but the membership only cost a dollar and you got that same buck off the price of your first drink.

The bartender did an honest-to-God double take when I walked back in. He must have seen the men leave after me and figured I wouldn’t be drinking in Hamlin much longer. There were a few raised eyebrows along the grooved oak countertop as well, but they quickly turned back to their own conversations. We sat down at a table and the leader looked at the bartender. “Four glasses a’ Buffalo Trace,” he said, not bothering to ask me what I wanted. So I’d be paying for the good stuff, which was okay with me; anything that put them in a better mood was worth the money. The bourbon was smooth, but it wasn’t until we were on the second round that the men relaxed enough to introduce themselves.

“My name’s Caleb. You can call me Cale. This big man’s Seth and this’n’s Braden,” Caleb said as he pointed to his agreeable friend who nodded warmly to me, his suspicion having disappeared with Caleb’s approval.

“My name’s Michael. Michael Herne.” I stuck out my hand and Cale grabbed it, squeezed it hard.

“Where y’from, Michael?” Cale asked.

“Virginia—the other one.” My GTO still carried a set of the state’s stark white plates with blue letters. But I was actually living in the District of Columbia. Still, “Virginia” sounded a lot closer to “West Virginia” than D.C. I’d lived there for almost a decade, so it wasn’t much of an exaggeration.

“You know this girl you lookin’ for?” Seth asked.

I shook my head. “Never met her. I’m doing a favor for her father.”

“These hippie chicks all look the same to me,” Cale said. I wondered if he was talking about the blue streak in her hair, the nose ring or just the fact that she was protesting. Staring at the photo, I had to admit she was as mysterious to me as she was to Cale, though I met a few like her in college after I left the Army. “Every one a’them thinks we’re tryin’ to kill the planet just ’cause we need to feed our kin. Some of the local kids are nicer, but those from up North all think we’re damn stupid hillbillies here jus’ ’cause we do a day’s work.”

“People think the same thing about my hometown,” I observed. You wear the dirt under your fingernails forever.

“A mine town is a place that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily,” Seth, the big guy, said somberly.

“Are you quoting Flannery O’Connor?”

“Paraphrasin’. We may be miners, but it don’t mean we ain’t readers,” Seth replied, his face dead serious. He held that expression for a moment before starting to chuckle. The sound rattled in his chest and rolled around his throat until it was real laughter that shook the faded green paint on the wooden panels of the room. Braden laughed more at Seth than the joke and after a moment, Cale joined in. So did I.

We started talking for real then, trading stories of small town life. I found myself liking Cale in spite of how quick he’d been to pull a pair of brass knuckles on me. By the time we hit our fourth refill, I was starting to get hazy even though I’d been to the bathroom twice to stick a finger down my throat. It seemed like the right time to ask about the girl again.

“Cale, why did things get out of hand with these kids? Isn’t it normal to have protestors at a big surface mine?”

Cale had a warm bourbon glow and I could tell he wanted to help me. He waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. “It warn’t miners done that. I’m not sayin’ we loved those eco-nuts. They tied up things pretty good the last coupla’ months, that’s for sure. Ain’t been no layoffs, though, and as long as they got you clocked in, they got to pay you whether you can get to your rig or some dumbass teenager is all laid out on it. They may think we’re hillbillies, but nobody hates those kids ’cept management. And no-fuckin-body likes management.” They clinked glasses to that. “I’ll tell you the God’s honest truth: if we got a call from upstairs tellin’ us to tweak up those kids, we’d’a done it. But nobody got that call or I’d’aknowed about it.”

“But you were ready to rough me up for asking about one of the protestors.”

“A man comes inta’ my damn drinking club askin’ damn stupid questions, I’m gonna tweak him up. But I’m not gonna stomp on some soft college kid just ’cause she thinks we’re killin’ the damn planet. You look like you’d go a round or two jus’ for the fun, anyways.”

I knew the truth when I heard it, but even if I hadn’t, I would have taken Cale at his word. He wasn’t showing the caution of a man wondering if the law was about to come down on him and his friends. I know something about company towns and I suspected that if a bunch of miners assaulted those kids, a man like Cale would have heard about it. But that left me with more questions than I had when I was sober.

“Do you know where those kids are staying?”

Cale looked stumped but Braden spoke up. “I heard they camped up in a holler ’tween here ’n’ the site. Which’n was that?” he asked himself. “Stone holler?” Seth nodded agreement. Or maybe he was just drunk.

An hour later I walked carefully back to my motel, grateful that I had chosen one that I could reach by foot from the bar. I inhaled slowly to steady myself, dragging in the smell of burning wood fires. A damp wind was blowing in my face, threatening rain but delivering only a cold chill. It was that time of year when fall tips toward winter and the world feels more dead than alive.

3
Friday

I was surprised how warm it was when I pulled myself out of bed the next morning. Normally I’m up before dawn—then again, normally I don’t drink. It was still early when I forced myself to take a run that was more penance than exercise, but it was already well into the seventies in the last few days of October. Indian summer had always been my favorite time of year growing up—the days when you woke up expecting to wear a sweater but got to pull on a t-shirt instead.

Instead of being happy, though, I felt disjointed and out-of-place in a myriad of small ways. The cozy, dilapidated Main Street on a small grid joined by Sycamore, Walnut, Elm and Oak Streets, the view of hills in the distance and the battered pickup trucks that crowded the church across the way could all have been ripped from my childhood, but the reproduction was imperfect. To an outsider, my Catskills town would be unlovely in its details. There, an overgrown lawn with an old Plymouth up on four cinderblocks is easier to spot than a flowerbed. The cement mill, tens of abandoned lots and miles of flecking paint and failing shingles all testify to our condition. But a sense of order persists. Our town center has its limits; we separate our commercial and residential despair.

Hamlin had an advantage to start. The mill that loomed over Conestoga was absent, replaced by a coal mine somewhere over the horizon. But instead of a town built by settlers before a mill overtook it, Hamlin was unambiguously a mine town. Driving in the previous evening on Route 3, I’d been greeted by a row of modest houses on half-acre lots on one side of the road faced off against an industrial yard filled with monstrous steel pipes on the other. Hundred-year-old houses with rocking-chair porches were pushed up against cinderblock office buildings and small warehouses. It was hard to imagine sustaining the bucolic disbelief of childhood on those streets. But most people would say that about my town, too.

I showered and found a diner a block from my motel. The eggs were good, and the sausage had a smoky flavor I’ve never tasted further north. I persuaded a waitress to part with the location of Stone Holler after confirming she had heard the “hippie kids” were camping there. I was tempted to check out of my motel but didn’t. Instead I left my single duffle bag on the bed but grabbed the large manila envelope I’d found propped inside the door when I returned from breakfast. My old boss hadn’t changed.

I’d spent seven hours the day before driving from Conestoga to see the man in an office building just outside of the District of Columbia, and then another six and a half hours straight from there to a hospital in Charleston, only to be told the girl whose name I gave them had never been admitted. A triage nurse with thin lips and the faint stink of tobacco on her scrubs refused me access to any of the other protestors who’d been assaulted. With more than a dozen hysterical and grieving parents in the ER, I didn’t press the point. I’d been told as much before I started the trip but wanted to confirm it myself; nothing makes you look so much like an idiot as not checking your basic facts. I was eager to locate the Reclaim campsite because, truth be told, I wasn’t sure the girl I was looking for was actually missing.

It was just one thing among many that had bothered me when I’d met my old Army commander. His office sits on the top floor of a nondescript building in the Rosslyn section of Arlington, Virginia. I hadn’t been inside the building in almost five years and felt an involuntary shiver run down my spine when I crossed the threshold.

We call him Alpha. I know his real name—I learned it some years ago by accident—but it was never used around the Activity. That’s what they call his unit, as the actual designation is classified. Alpha had phoned me at 5:30 on Thursday morning. He’s an important man, the kind who briefs senators and presidents. He’s not the kind of man you say “no” to, not without careful consideration. I did that once. This time I agreed to meet with him when he asked me to come see him at lunchtime that day, even though a long drive and two angry sisters stood in my way.

Alpha was somber that afternoon. It was a relative thing as the man never smiles, but I saw something in his eyes that told me to tread carefully.

“I understand your mother is not well?” he asked. It was the closest he’d come to an apology for disrupting my family visit.

“She had a stroke on Saturday.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I need to ask a personal favor,” Alpha said, using neither my given name nor the old code name he’d have trotted out if he wanted me to run an errand for the Activity. This told me something in itself. Alpha is the kind of man who stockpiles favors while scrupulously avoiding owing them, a sort of Polonius in the government service.

I was in Alpha’s debt because of some trouble I’d run into the year before in Conestoga. Alpha ran interference with the FBI and kept me out of custody long enough for me to resolve things on my own. It ended up working out in his favor, but the man took a risk on me. It was the kind of obligation I would have honored even if it cost me my job. He knew that, too.

“Of course, sir,” I replied, my back rigidly straight in a leather chair with arms. I’d rarely sat in his presence before.

Alpha handed me a red folder from his desk. I flipped it open and saw the face of a girl at her high school graduation. Her dark hair had a streak of purple running through it that matched her robes, and she sported a nose ring.