Fragile Beasts (25 page)

Coal Run was also the site of the Gertie explosion, one of the biggest mining disasters in Pennsylvania history. Ninety-seven men were killed.

I ask Jerry if he was living there when it happened.

“I’d just gone to bed after coming off the graveyard shift,” he answers me, staring into the distance like he’s talking to himself.

I study his face after he says this, looking for the telltale signs of a miner’s life in his eyes that I’ve seen so many times in the eyes of Bill, and Tyler’s uncle, and the other miners I’ve known. It’s there: the stubborn loyalty and sadness of a dog who knows he’s going to be fed and kicked by the same man.

I’m dying to ask him more, but I know I better not. He’s the kind of guy who only talks when he wants to say something; no amount of questions will get anything out of him.

He finishes his first beer and opens another, then takes a seat on the
ground and leans against a tree trunk, his long, thin legs bent at the knees making sharp triangles beneath the dirty gray fabric of his work pants. He picks up where he left off without any prodding from me.

“I woke up and thought we were having an earthquake. The whole house shook. The windows shattered. Pictures sprang off the walls. The dresser drawers flew open before the whole thing fell over and crashed on the floor. Then I heard the siren and knew what had happened. What I’d felt was an underground explosion so powerful it could break glass and knock over furniture two miles away.

“I ran outside and there was the rest of the people in the town standing there staring dumbfounded in the direction of the mine.”

He tells the story squinting intently at the empty space in front of him like he’s watching his past life unfold before him on an invisible screen but the picture’s blurry.

“What’d you do next?”

“Found my mother. That was the first thing I did. I knew my brother was working that shift. Then I spent the next three days digging for remains and survivors like everybody else.”

“Were there any survivors?”

“Nope.”

“Does that mean your brother … ?”

“Yep. All we got back was part of a leg and a foot still inside its work boot. We buried it in one of those coffins for babies.”

He tells me this in a matter-of-fact way like he’s explaining where he keeps the weed killer.

I imagine Klint being nothing but an arm and a hand in a baseball glove. I picture myself digging for him, praying that he’s still alive but hoping if he’s dead he died instantly like Dad and El Soltero and didn’t have to suffocate two miles beneath daylight blind and buried alive in a coal tomb.

While I’m thinking all this, I start to get a creepy sensation in the pit of my stomach that makes my hands feel clammy and the skin on the back of my neck crawl. I can see Klint all too clearly trapped in the darkness, but I can’t tell what’s pushing down on him. I can only sense it’s the burden of his life filled with secret pain he won’t ever reveal to me. He’s not screaming to get out. He’s not thrashing around or crying. He’s lying very still, staring back at
me. His blue eyes that all the girls love are black and terror-filled but resigned. He won’t fight, he’s silently telling me. He’s given up. He wants to die.

I shake my head to get rid of the idea and take a big gulp of my beer.

Jerry hasn’t noticed anything. He hasn’t looked at me once during his entire story.

“Did you keep working in the mines after that?” I ask him, trying to distract my thoughts.

“For a while. Then word spread that Mr. Jack was looking for a full-time handyman and groundskeeper for his sister’s mansion in the country after he moved his wife and kid to Centresburg. I’d worked for J&P Coal for twelve years by then, all of them in Gertie.”

He pauses and adds, “You know that’s the mine he named after his mother.”

“Sure,” I say, even though I didn’t know.

“I wasn’t too anxious to keep working in the mines after the explosion. I met with Mr. Jack and got his approval. Then I came out here and once I saw Miss Jack, I took the job without even asking what it paid.”

This last statement catches me off guard, and I turn and stare at him waiting for a smile that means he’s joking, but nothing changes in his wooden expression.

Luis said Miss Jack had been El Soltero’s girlfriend, and he doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who dated ugly girls. And now it turns out Jerry took a job working here based solely on how she looked. Could she have been beautiful? That would make her the human equivalent of a dried flower.

Jerry chugs the rest of his beer and stands up, and I know he’s done talking, but there’s one final question I can’t resist asking him.

“What was Mr. Jack like?”

He takes a snuff tin out of his back pocket and puts a pinch of tobacco inside his lower lip. He works the chew around a bit, then spits in the grass behind him. When he picks up the empty wheelbarrow, I’ve decided he’s not going to answer me, but he surprises me as he starts walking away.

“Ruthless bastard,” he says. “That was the general consensus.”

After Jerry and I split up, I take a long walk down the road. I don’t get passed by very many cars out here but when I do, I grin and wave, knowing it’ll drive them crazy trying to figure out how they know me when they don’t.

By the time I get back to the house, I’ve started feeling weird about Klint again. The image I had of him being crushed like a trapped coal miner keeps coming back to haunt me.

Something inside me panics and I’m overcome with a need to make sure he’s okay.

I’m bounding up the porch steps when he comes walking out the front door.

He looks good, and the worrying I’ve been doing about him seems stupid. He’s washed his hair and is wearing clean jeans, a shirt with a collar, and the new buttery suede Timberland hiking boots I got him for his last birthday because I’d seen him admiring them when we were at Shaw’s Sporting Goods getting a new pair of cleats. He’s only worn them twice, and both times he complained that he looked like a fag lumberjack.

“What are you all decked out for?” I ask him.

He makes a serious face while brushing at his shirt cuffs and tugging at his collar.

“Dinner, my good man,” he says in a poor English accent. “I can’t wait.”

“Are you sick or something?”

“Tyler’s coming.”

“What? Tyler?” I cry in absolute astonishment. “You asked Miss Jack if you could invite Tyler to dinner?”

He grins at me.

“Yeah. Why not?”

“How did you do it? What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Excuse me, Miss Jack, but would it be possible for me to invite one of my friends to dinner, too? I’ve told him a lot about you and how nice you’ve been to me and Kyle and he’d like to meet you.’”

“No way you said that.”

“Yeah, I did.”

“You think she bought it?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re wrong. She’s not stupid.”

“She said, yes. If she thought I was messing with her, she would’ve said no.”

“Not necessarily. Not if she knows what you’re doing and has plans of her own.”

The smile leaves his face for a moment as he mulls over the idea.

I shake my head at him, as much out of respect for his daring as in disbelief.

“Jesus, Klint. You invited Tyler to dinner? I don’t think I’ve ever seen him use a fork. He even eats Jell-O with his hands.”

His smile returns.

“I know.”

We both hear the rumble of a car coming up the drive. As it gets closer, I recognize the purr of Shelby’s engine and see a flash of red in the trees.

“Who’s that?” Klint asks.

“Shelby.”

“Shit,” he says.

He goes inside, and I’m left standing on the porch like an overeager, loser idiot who’s been waiting for her since the crack of dawn.

She parks and comes walking toward me, smiling, in a brown-and-red plaid miniskirt, a clingy red sweater, and flat brown shoes with sparkly copper buckles on the toes. All that red makes her chestnut hair glow and brings out the golden flecks in her tea-colored eyes.

I can picture her standing in front of her closet full of perfect outfits for every occasion picking out this one: autumn weekend wear for dinner with her parents and persnickety aunt. But I like to think she chose the miniskirt for me.

On her wrist is a chunky gold bracelet made of heart-shaped links. It jingles past my ear as she reaches around me to give me a hug. I hold her close and bury my nose in her hair.

She pulls away and gives me a funny look I’ve never seen before. For a moment I try and convince myself it’s love I’m seeing, but then I realize it’s surprised confusion. I guess I buried my nose too deeply.

“Hey,” I tell her.

All week long I’ve been practicing what I was going to say to her. “Hey” wasn’t it.

“Let me go say hi to Aunt Candace and Luis and I’ll be right back,” she tells me, and I take some satisfaction in realizing she didn’t ask about Klint.

I watch her run up the stairs and try to catch a glimpse of her panties. I can’t help wondering what kind she’s wearing. Silky ones. Lacy ones. Plain cotton ones. Maybe a thong. Probably a thong. Girls only wear thongs nowadays, according to Tyler, and he should know since he has three older sisters and two younger ones and sees their underwear piled on the dryer before they come
and put it away. Thongs are impossible to fold, he’s informed us, and equally impossible to sort out among all those girls, so his mom heaps them all together in what he says looks like a snarl of multicolored fishing line.

I’m always amazed at how calmly he can talk about girls’ underwear. Not just their panties but their bras, too. I almost break out in a sweat just thinking about it.

Shelby comes back out, shaking her head over the chaos in the kitchen. She starts talking about nothing in particular and I nod and watch her. She has a very animated, breathless way of speaking. Everything sounds urgent and exciting coming out of her mouth, even bad stuff.

I remember one time when we were at one of Klint’s ball games, a couple girls from my school kept staring at her and whispering to each other behind their hands and busting out into shrieks of laughter. I figured they were making fun of me, but later I ran into them at the concession stand when I went to get Shelby a drink and one of them was doing a dead-on imitation of her.

They recognized me, but it didn’t stop them.

I got Shelby a can of Sprite and as I was leaving one of the girls called out to me, “She’s a total phony.”

I didn’t think much of it. I chalked it up to female jealousy. I know a lot about this particular topic.

Once when my mom and aunt Jen had just finished one of their big blowouts, and Aunt Jen had gone storming out of the house calling my mom a heartless bitch while my mom called her a worthless slut—when an hour earlier they’d been giddy to see each other and had been complimenting each other’s hair and making plans to go shopping—I asked Dad why they did this.

He said it was because the most powerful emotion women feel is jealousy.

I said I thought it was love for their children, and he laughed and repeated, “Jealousy.”

I asked him what was the most powerful emotion men feel, and he said hunger.

As Shelby talks, she starts to wander and I follow. Before I know it we’re in the woods where the late afternoon sun is filtered through the leaves, softly coating everything in gold. Beyond the trees is a sky the same Easter egg blue as my first school backpack, but it’s slowly being filled up with mounds of threatening gray clouds.

Shelby talks about her classes, and how she’s happy she’s going to see her
sister tonight even though she’s in big trouble with their dad again, and about going shopping with her mom in New York next weekend.

I don’t pay much attention to what she’s saying; I just like the sound of her voice.

I want to ask her if she knows Calladito killed El Soltero and her aunt Candace was there and she was in love with him, but then I remember her surprise at our first dinner with Miss Jack when she found out her aunt even knew Manuel Obrador. She couldn’t know anything about their story.

The real question for me is why? Why doesn’t she know? She’s been around her aunt her whole life, and I only met her a month ago and during that time I’ve been overcome with curiosity about the bulls, and El Soltero, and Luis, and her obsession with everything Spanish. How could Shelby not want to know?

It could be one of those family things where nobody cares. I had a friend in elementary school whose grandfather was one of the guys in World War II who first drove up to Auschwitz when they were liberating the prisoners. He said no one in the army had any idea it was as bad as what they were going to see. It was a fence lined with living skeletons in rags shouting in strained, cracked voices in many different languages but then someone shouted “Freedom” in English because they realized the tanks were American. Soon they were all shouting “Freedom!” and “America!” He and the other war-hardened soldiers on top of the three tanks stared back in bewilderment, and tears streamed down their young faces.

Teachers loved to trot this guy out to talk to their history classes, but if you brought up the topic in front of his own family, they rolled their eyes and turned up the volume on the TV.

I remember how casually Shelby threw off my question about Ventisco and her aunt’s love for Spanish things by saying that she spent some time in Spain when she was young and liked it. I thought her answer was on the weak side. A woman vacationing in a foreign country brings back trinkets; she doesn’t bring back livestock and people.

“So everything’s fine with Aunt Candace?” Shelby asks after she finishes filling me in on her own life.

“We’re getting along.”

“She can be tough sometimes. She has very definite ideas about how people should behave.”

“Most people do. Even quiet guys like Bill. You should see how he acts if you mow vertically instead of diagonally.”

She smiles at me.

“Yeah, but her ideas are so old-fashioned.”

“I don’t know. She wants people to speak properly, and be polite to each other, and care about art and other cultures. None of that’s bad stuff. It’s basically what separates us from the animals.”