Fragile Beasts (24 page)

“Really?” I say, smiling.

“You shouldn’t be so hard on him. What you saw today was a colossal act of integrity.”

“Miss Jack?”

I turn around at the sound of Klint’s voice and pop the remainder of the cake into my mouth. I cough and almost choke. Luis hands me my water.

“Kyle says you wanted to talk to me.”

“Yes,” I sputter.

Luis sets the keys on the counter and leaves us, humming.

My coughing fit passes.

I frown at Klint’s hat, and he removes it.

“You owe me an apology,” I state.

“I don’t owe you an apology for not accepting a gift. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Actually, it is wrong not to accept a gift, but that’s not why I’m upset. It was the way you did it.”

“Sorry.”

“Complete sentence, please.”

“I’m sorry.”

I glance at the keys.

“Can you throw a baseball that far?” I wonder.

I realize from the look on his face that I’ve asked a ridiculous question.

“Yeah,” he says.

“I think I gave you the wrong impression. The truck isn’t solely for you. I bought it thinking of Kyle, too.”

“Kyle?”

“Yes. You saw how excited he was. I know how much he dislikes being driven to and from school by Luis. It makes him feel like a baby,” I tell him, knowing that I’m voicing his own complaints. “Think how much Kyle would love to go places in that truck. Losing your father has been a terrible ordeal for him. This truck could help take his mind off his troubles.”

“He did seem pretty excited.”

The same torn expression I saw earlier plays over his face again. He twists his cap in his hands and looks up at me.

“I want to pay you for it. It will take me a while. I don’t make that much at my job, but I have some saved up already.”

“All right. If that’s what you want.”

I wait for the smile but don’t get it.

I hand him the keys.

He takes them and walks sedately out of the kitchen. I stand perfectly silent listening at the door. When he gets far enough away that he thinks I can’t see or hear him anymore, he starts to run. I let him go, enjoying the slaps of his shoes on Marjorie’s freshly waxed floors almost as much as a smile.

C
apitalism is based on the concept that in order for someone to succeed, someone else has to suffer.

I just learned that in school yesterday from my history teacher, Mr. Pankowski. He’s the only teacher in the whole school district with a Ph.D., so everyone calls him Doc.

He’s a smart guy, but he doesn’t dress like one or talk like one either. He uses regular words, and he wears old faded jeans, scuffed brown loafers, and the same two baggy sweaters over different-colored shirts with the collars sticking up crookedly every day. He’s tall and thin, and his eyes have the permanent starved, weary look of a rescued POW or one of my aunt Jen’s ex-boyfriends. I think he’s only in his thirties, but he has a worn-out face. He’s the opposite of Luis, who has a smooth, youthful face and happy eyes. (I still don’t know what Luis’s formal job title is. Klint calls him Miss Jack’s “Taco Boy.” I’ve been trying to explain to Klint that there’s a big difference between Mexico and Spain, but so far it’s not getting through to him.)

I’m enjoying Doc’s class not just because he knows a lot but because he doesn’t sugarcoat anything. He tells it like it is and he doesn’t take sides, even though you know he probably has a side and it’s fairly easy to guess which one it is. He doesn’t think the way to learn about a war is to memorize a bunch of dates and names of battles. He makes us study the people living in the opposing countries, their sameness and their differences and how some of those differences go back forever and can’t ever be changed and maybe shouldn’t be changed. He says going to war to protect yourself is okay, but doing it because you think you can change someone else is always going to turn into a never-ending disaster. People will only fight so hard to try and hold on to what they have, but they’ll dig in and fight forever to protect who they are.

It’s too bad President Bush didn’t take Doc’s class, but he probably would’ve slept through it anyway like Klint did.

According to Doc, usually the men who are succeeding at capitalism don’t want to be anywhere near the men who are doing the suffering. That’s why they go off and live in cities like New York or Paris or travel around on their yachts.

Stan Jack—Miss Jack’s brother—was an exception. He could’ve lived anywhere in the world, but he didn’t even go as far as Harrisburg. He based his business in Centresburg and built his mansion in the middle of nowhere.

Some people say he did it because he loved the Pennsylvania countryside. He cared about the hills he ripped up and the rivers he polluted. He was devoted to the wildlife he hunted and killed. He valued the people and built his empire with an eye not solely toward making himself rich, but also toward bringing jobs and prosperity to the region.

But most people say he was a power-hungry sadistic SOB who got off on watching people grovel or, better yet, watching the suffering in their eyes and knowing they couldn’t do anything about it.

(I’ve been wondering lately if Satan’s Banker might be a picture of him, and since I’ve been thinking this I’ve been covering it with two T-shirts at night.)

There’s always been a rumor that he killed his partner Joseph Peppernack, the P of J&P Coal, who was the heir to Peppernack Steel and the partner who put all the money into their company while Stan contributed the ambition and cunning. They were hunting up in Cameron County when Peppernack took a tumble off a cliff and broke his neck. The county coroner ruled it an accident; a year later when Stan Jack finished building his hospital in Centresburg, he gave that same county coroner the job of head administrator.

To this day, if a guy gets royally screwed over in any way—from having his woman leave him to getting laid off from a job—the coal miners around here say he was “peppernacked.”

Plus everyone knows the story of the miner who attacked Stan Jack during the strike of 1958. It was the first time a strike had turned violent here since the 1800s. Two supervisors were badly injured, and one miner was killed.

Another miner snuck into Stan Jack’s office and beat him with a crowbar. Stan barely lived through it. The miner was arrested, and a couple days later
hung himself with a belt in his jail cell while awaiting trial, which was kind of suspicious since the prison uniforms didn’t have belts.

Miss Jack doesn’t talk about her brother. I don’t know how involved she was with her brother’s shady dealings or if she got along with him, but obviously he liked her enough to leave her his mansion and a lot of his money.

I remember the first time I saw his house. It was a photo in a book called
Human Capital: An American History of Men Owning Men from the Age of Slavery Through the Establishment of Labor Unions
. I came across the book in a university library while Dad and Klint were meeting with some athletic department bigwigs about scholarships.

There along with sketches of Africans in chains being dragged off slave boats and black-and-white press photos of workers with raised fists picketing in front of factories was a picture of the very house I’m living in now with a caption identifying it as “The former home of Stanford Jack.”

On the next page was a gray, grainy photo taken of one of J&P Coal’s old company towns. It showed about three dozen one-room shanties clinging to the stripped hillside, stubborn and ugly, like a cluster of warts.

I know the place. It’s not far from the railroad tracks and an abandoned tipple where a bunch of us kids used to play when we were little. The tin from the roofs was scavenged long ago, and the wood from the shacks has rotted away. People haven’t lived there for fifty years, but Mother Nature doesn’t seem to want it back. Nothing grows there. Not even weeds. During the summer when the mountains are covered in lush green, what’s left of the town can be seen from the interstate as clearly as a scab on a knee.

Now I wish I’d taken the time to read about Stan Jack, but how could I have guessed that I’d ever be staying in his house? It’s exciting in a creepy way to be here, sort of like living with the sister of Darth Vader.

The other reason I like Doc is that his brother, Nate, is the baseball coach for Western Penn University. It’s a college not far from here. It’s not as big and well known as Penn State and not as prestigious as the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania in Philly, but it’s a place where a guy could get a half-decent education and play for a fairly respectable ball team.

Klint’s good enough that he might get some offers from a few of the major Division I schools in some of the best conferences, but the competition’s fierce and scholarship money is scarce even at the schools with the most famous baseball programs.

Full scholarships are almost nonexistent, and when they do happen, they almost always go to pitchers. The little money that’s left usually goes to up the middle positions. Klint plays one of them: second base; he’s got that going for him.

He could maybe get 50 percent and still go to a big school in a pretty good conference, but he could get a full ride to a smaller school and that’s what’s most important because we’ve got no way of paying for college. Working a job, keeping up with classes, and playing ball sounds impossible to me, plus there’s no job Klint could get that could pay for something as big as college. Taking out loans would be okay if there was any guarantee he’d be able to pay them back someday, but one thing I know for sure is there are no guarantees in life about anything.

A smaller school wouldn’t be so bad for Klint. He’d get a lot of attention and playing time. He’d still get noticed by pro scouts and could still be on the road to a great future. It’s his pride that’s going to screw up everything. He thinks if he doesn’t go to a school with a nationally ranked team, it’s the same thing as saying he’s not good enough to be on a nationally ranked team, but it’s not true. He’s good enough to play ball for any school, but the program might not be good enough for him. I can’t make him understand this any more than I can make him understand that Spain isn’t a country filled with banditos in big sombreros drinking tequila and eating tacos all day.

I was in Doc’s class for a couple weeks before he mentioned Klint to me. He asked me to stay for a minute after class one day to compliment me on my essay.

I already felt like I knew Doc before we talked privately because I was one of the few kids who talked to him in class. He told me he was sorry about what happened to my dad and used the topic of Dad as a way to ask about Klint, too. I guess I could’ve been offended, like the only reason he cared about my essay was because he wanted to find out something about Klint, but he seemed to read my mind and told me this wasn’t true.

It turns out Doc could care less about baseball, but he loves his brother and wants to help him. We have that in common.

He tried to talk to Klint about going to West Penn when he had Klint in class, but he said he rarely saw him awake.

I had a good laugh over that one.

Every time Doc’s tried to pin him down in the halls since then, he always
manages to escape. I told Doc not to take it personally. Klint has a fear of teachers because he has a fear of learning anything new that might make him have to change one of his opinions.

Doc laughed at that one even though I didn’t mean it as a joke.

Nate has tried to talk to Klint, too, at games and tournaments, but Klint takes one look at the WPU on his ball cap and walks away.

While Dad was still around it didn’t matter as much to me where Klint went to college. I knew our lives would go on the same, and Klint would come home and visit us on breaks. Now I don’t know what will happen to me, and the idea of Klint going to college twenty miles down the road from here sounds like a good deal.

T
ODAY’S THE DAY
Shelby and her family are coming for dinner.

I got up earlier than I wanted because I couldn’t sleep. I ate my Corn Pops and wandered around the house a little bit. When we moved in, Miss Jack told us we could go anywhere we wanted except for her room and Luis’s room. We could even check out the basement and attic. Apparently she doesn’t have a secret room where she keeps some crazy, drooling, axe-murderer relative locked up or one that’s filled with the bones of the kids she supposedly ate after Ventisco killed them for her.

I was kind of disappointed to find this out.

I was hanging out near the main staircase looking at some paintings when I heard loud voices coming from another room. I followed them as far as the dining room and realized it was Miss Jack and Luis arguing in the kitchen. I couldn’t understand any of it, but I knew it was probably about dinner. Whenever they disagree about food or wine, they always speak Spanish.

I went outside and I’ve been sitting here on the front porch steps for a while thinking about what I’m going to say to Shelby, and how good she’s going to look, and if it would be a good thing if I can get her parents to like me or if she’s one of those girls who only likes guys her parents hate when Jerry comes down the drive pushing a wheelbarrow full of mulch.

I wave at him. He nods. I figure he’ll keep going, but he comes over to me, stops, takes off his ball cap, runs a plain white handkerchief over his face, and puts his cap back on.

He gestures at the house with his head.

“Miss Jack and Luis going at it?” he asks me.

“Yeah.”

“In Spanish?”

“Yeah.”

He nods again.

“Want some help?” I ask him.

“Love some.”

Working with Jerry turns out to be very relaxing. He doesn’t say a word to me the whole time. When we finish, he walks away and comes back a few minutes later carrying a six-pack of beer.

He pops open a can and hands it to me.

We drink in silence except for one comment he makes about Mr. B’s hunting skills and how he’s been happily finding bodies all over the place. He says Mr. B reminds him of a cat he had when he was a kid growing up in Coal Run. I’m intrigued by this because Coal Run is a ghost town now. A mine fire went crazy and spread through miles of tunnels underneath it, poisoning the ground and burning all the way through to the top soil in some places. The air smells like sulfur and the ground steams. The government came in and put up barbed wire and warning signs and made all the people move. This was almost forty years ago, but nothing will ever change there. It’s impossible to put out a mine fire. The town will burn forever.