Muckers (2 page)

The stones get blasted out from the mine all day across Nefertitty’s shoulder. Cut into stomach-sized chunks in the open pit by miners like Santiago, Cruz’s father. That’s how I know Hatley’s problems have nothing to do with old age or one sagging boob.

It’s because of what our fathers and their fathers before that have done to the mountain, poking a shaft into her seventy years ago and finding enough copper to fill her belly up with smoke. The way my pop still makes others do, shouting
orders at Santiago and the powder monkeys to blast her skin off layer by layer until they get to the insides.

Rabbit’s been watching the cigarette burn. He waits till there’s about an inch of graying embers, then blows at it, spreading ashes all over the upholstery.

“You idiot! I just washed the car,” Cruz says, snatching the cigarette back.

You’d think it was a diamond the way Cruz treats this old car since he won it off a miner. He puts up a howl and tries to smack Rabbit, but Rabbit leans far enough away and Cruz misses. That’s the end of it. The light by the Tumbleweed gas station’s up ahead, and Cruz slows down, not wanting to stop completely. We’re in the middle of enemy territory: straddling both sides of us is Cottonville—the flat-chested community they built at the bottom of the mountain to process what we mine, and who we plan on beating the crap out of in football this year. Practice starts on Monday.

“Hang on,” I tell Cruz, and get out of the car. I run up to the filling station and grab a newspaper off the top of the gas pump. The ones with two rocks on them are a couple days old and cost a penny instead of five cents. Benny from the diner lets me have them for nothing after game days, but that’s still two weeks from now.

“What is it with you always wanting to read?” Cruz says, poking the
Verde Miner
with his elbow.

“That’s how you find out things,” I tell him.

“Oh yeah? Like what? Tell me something I don’t already know.”

“Well, it says here Ty’s chickens are as tender as a mother’s love. And that Peach Kellerman’s been irrigating with the runoff. Says the cyanide helps his melons grow. He lost his wallet, too, walking into town.”

“Again?” Cruz laughs. The slick’s coming out of his hair. He smooths a hand over the black ends (which are brownish-black, really, like the feathers of a golden eagle caught by the morning sun). “And I bet Peaches can tell you what’s in the wallet, no?” Cruz rubs a thumb and two fingers together. “Dollar bills.” He smirks.

“There’s houses for rent, too,” I say, folding the paper and turning to face him. “Nine of them … 
up on Company Ridge
.” To me, that’s a sure sign the mine really is going to close, but I can already tell Cruz isn’t buying it. He takes a long drag, making the Lucky smolder red then a flickering orange before tossing it into the Cottonville dirt. And he still won’t look at me.

“What?” Cruz finally mumbles. “Don’t mean anything except higher-ups getting on Ruffner’s bad side. And they always lose muckers on quits. What is it with you Anglos? Never staying in one place for too long.”

“How much are the chickens?” Rabbit asks.

“What do you care, Rabbit? Your mom raises them,” Cruz says.

“Yeah, and she only charges forty-three cents for a pound.”

I tell Rabbit there’s a number to call and find out how much, then give him the paper. Cruz hangs a left onto the switchback that takes us up to Hatley. Now the tits have become one. All we see is the H we’re headed for. Cruz puts the Ford Deluxe in low gear, flooring the gas pedal to make it up the steep pitch. The revs reach into our guts and Cruz grins, nodding at the radio on the dash—his signal for me to turn it up.

Hank Snow’s on the radio and it’s all over now for me and Rabbit. It’s Cruz’s favorite song, only he can’t sing.

“I bet he’s got those rhinestones on right now, playing that song on the guitar!” Rabbit hollers from the back.

“They’re not playing it right now while we’re listening to it, stupid.” Cruz blows a smoke ring at the rearview mirror. “It’s a record. Huh, Red?”

“It’s a recording,” I say, not certain who to look at. “But it was done live. You know, like in the studio or on television or something.”

I don’t want to get into it or start an argument, so I look past Cruz’s profile over to Deception Gulch. It cuts deep and red to the left of us three hundred feet below, where cactus are still blooming, even though it’s nearly halfway through August and there’s been no monsoon.

Cruz is too busy crooning along with “The Singing Ranger” and Rabbit’s probably too hung up on imagining the sparkles on Hank’s shirt for either of them to notice that slowly, in small ways, the mountain’s beginning to heal. Like hair that grows back on a scar somehow. But it’s too late; at least that’s how I feel. Besides, the mountain may be healing from the outside, but inside she’s dying. Been hollowed, cleaned out, and scraped bare. Eureka Copper keeps cutting back shifts, forcing people to leave and slicing Hatley’s population in half. Since those miners got killed in the blast last month, we’re two short of a thousand.

The E.C. says there’s not enough copper to make bullets and motors like they did in the Second World War. And I suppose we’ll have to drop the A-bomb over in Korea.

“Can you smell it?” Cruz’s face lights into a goofy grin. “Rainbow bread.”

Sure smells like the Palermos got the brick ovens going. It’s picture-show night, and the bakery’s gonna be jammed.

We make a hard right, turning onto the final switchback, and see the Mexican-tiled roof of our school. That’s when Cruz stops singing, and Rabbit’s not tapping on the back of the flip-top anymore. They follow my gaze beyond the roof, up to the H. But really, I’m eyeing the mining hospital just below and the balcony that leads to Maw’s room.

I wonder if we’ll heal. We’ve been hollowed out, too. Our families exhausted by the mine and the war that took my brother, Bobby. They’re even closing down the school.
Bobby’s school
. That’s how I’ll always think of it, especially with football starting. Bobby put Hatley back on the map in one season of football, winning that second Northern Crown. But there’s only sixty people left in high school, and that’s not enough to keep it going, though I sure hope it’s enough to win. That’s what I’ll focus on—winning. Nothing beyond that.

“Seniors of fifty-one,” Cruz murmurs, eyeing the steps of the school. “All frickin’ twenty-four of us.”

We’re the last graduating class of Hatley High. Our motto is “Try, it’s worth it.” And I really want to believe that. But to me, the town and the team just haven’t been the same since Bobby died.

We round the Hogback and Mrs. Palermo calls out,
“Andiamo, Salvatore,”
the braid above her head looking even whiter with all that flour.

Cruz pulls up in front of the ovens, and Rabbit’s father hauls a giant, wood-handled slab from one, with a steaming loaf of bread on it the colors of a rainbow. Balancing it in the air, he slides it into a flour sack. Mrs. Palermo rushes over to Cruz’s car and slips the bagged loaf into Rabbit’s lap.

“Mangia, mio piccolo,”
she says, gripping Rabbit’s chin. I
know that means “eat” in Italian—Mrs. Palermo stuffs Rabbit all the time since he weighs ninety-eight pounds soaking wet on the P.E. scale next to the showers. (We may only have twenty-six boys in high school, but there’s no way Coach would let a guy like Rabbit play.)

Cruz leans back and rips a steaming hunk off the green part of the bread, sucking in his breath while he proceeds to burn his fingers, then his tongue.

Brushing the sweat of baking from her hollow cheek, Mrs. Palermo gives Rabbit a golden smile—eighteen karats’ worth covering the left front tooth. Rabbit thinks that’s the reason his mother smiles, but he’s dead wrong. Whenever Mrs. Palermo sees Rabbit, her eyes light up the way the sunset does, exploding with color behind the mountain then lingering awhile, not wanting to give up the day.

She must have been over forty when she had Rabbit, which just about killed her, so he’s the only one. “A miracle baby” is what Cruz likes to say—the
bambino milagro
—with a scar above Rabbit’s sutured lip to prove it.

Mrs. Palermo pinches the fleshy part inside one of Rabbit’s chicken-skinned elbows, but she can’t get her fingers on much. And it’s at times like this that I find it hard to breathe normal. Something gets caught in my throat and my eyes start to sting.

Maw used to do that—touch me in a caring way. But that was before everything changed.

“Hush now, Reddy,” she’d whisper so only I could hear. It was after I’d fallen into Bitter Creek Gulch and nearly gotten myself killed. They’d had to stitch up both knees once they took all the mud and the prickers out. I didn’t mind the mud. I never do. I was born in it, halfway down that gulch when Maw went looking for Pop. Loco Francisco caught me.
Doused us with his holy water so many times Bobby said I arrived home cleaner than anything coming out of the miners’ hospital. Maw had Francisco baptize me right then and there.
Felix Francis
. I suppose that’s when Pop’s loathing for me started, since I’d gotten a middle name that had nothing to do with him.

I try to remember the sound of Maw’s voice. I know it’s much softer than Mrs. Palermo’s and that the accent’s all Antrim, as if Maw just rode off the Irish Glens and hopped on a train to Hatley. She used to smile like Mrs. Palermo, though. And bake bread, too. I’m hoping I can do something to bring that all back.

IF I HAD A DIME
in my pocket right now, I’d ride up to the soda fountain and have Benny make me a Horse’s Neck with a squirt of chocolate on that dip of ice cream. That would give my stomach something to work on. But Coach would tear my head off, and I don’t get paid by Ernie till Friday. So I keep walking my bike up Second Street, guiding it over the cobblestones as I climb the concrete steps—all fifty of them—next to our house in the Hogback.

“You know what you gotta do this year, Red. Nine years is a long time!”

That’s Cussie Rakovich’s dad from next door. Already he’s hollering at me and we haven’t even had our first practice yet. I’m nowhere near his driveway to respond, so I nod.

School starts next Monday, but there’s only one thing around here the town cares about besides mining, and that’s football. (Just because we’ve only made it to the state
championships twice in twenty-six years doesn’t mean you give up hoping.)

There’s really sixty-two steps from our house at the Rakoviches’ driveway to the top of the hill, in case you’re thinking it’s no big sweat hauling a bike up this pitch in August when Benny could fry an egg on the lunch counter. But I avoid the first dozen steps if I take the back porch. All our houses are stacked in rows up the side of the mountain: three stories in front, two out back, with a street on either end. Cruz says we Anglos must like living in a fishbowl since there’s plenty of opportunity to look inside. But I can’t see being stuck in a gulch like he is as a whole lot more private when you’ve got nine brothers and sisters around.

It’s good to have on the orange-and-black uniform again. Feel the heavy stitching of number 7 across my back, same as Bobby’s. He won Hatley the Northern title in ’41 as quarterback, but they lost to Tucson in the state championship. Hatley’s never come close since. The town’s aiming for me to change that and I sure want to. They say it’s finally my turn. No more backup QB. I start now, since Winslow’s graduated. And it’s my last shot.

Things level off when I make it up the hill to School Street, so I hop on my bike and ride to the other end of town where the field is. Rabbit’s dad’s on his burro delivering bread, hollering, “Give ’em _ell down in … Go _uckers!”

I know he must’ve said “Muckers” and that we give it to Cottonville, but the afternoon wind’s found a way into my helmet so I can hardly hear through the leather. And I’ll blame the sweat dripping down my jersey on the desert sun. I promised myself I wouldn’t get nervous this year, but I won’t have the bench to lean on. And the truth is, I don’t know if I’m all that good on my own, and I’ve got to be. It’s
the town’s last shot, too. All they have left is this season and me to get it right. But they think I’m as good as Bobby was. In two weeks they’ll find out I’m not.

Upper Main’s about to run out when I get to Gibby, who gives me a wave from the icehouse. It’s where the pavement ends and our field begins—on the only hundred yards of even ground in Hatley, hanging over the pit at slag level like a chin—and where Coach Hansen is standing, lit up by the sun.

I press the brakes and watch the silent picture show Coach is giving, his lips opening and closing like a furious drill sergeant’s as the shovels grind out ore behind him and drown out the commands. Coach is weaving his body side to side, forgetting all about that scar and pumping his legs so fast you’d think he’d fall right into the pit.

I yank off my helmet, but I still can’t hear him until I start pedaling again and get deep into slag level, too. We don’t measure our town in feet but in pit levels, according to where they dig. Slag level is where we begin, going up or downhill from there. Below slag it’s ten cuts down the mountain to the 1400 level, but they’ve already gone underground by then. Above slag there’s five ledges blasted through a stubborn rock face of diorite towering above our field. And then the mountain runs out.

“You guys did nothing but sit on your butts all summer, didn’t you?” Coach starts yelling. “And drink and smoke and stuff your faces with tamales. Well, we’re gonna squeeze the living Schlitz out of you boys by the twenty-fifth!”

Coach looks way too fit up this close, his white T-shirt stretching tight across his chest, which is thick from those years in the service. And I know he’s got it in store for us. There’s a
W
wedged in between the names Ben and Hansen.
The old players say it means “Wild” because of the crazy things Coach cooks up for us in order to win.