The Evening Hour (29 page)

When he walked through the living room, his mother looked up. “You're going out now?”

“Yeah, I'll be back.”

But he did not look at her when he said it. He got in his pickup and stared at the numbers glowing from the dash. It was fifteen minutes past eleven. He would be early, but he couldn't stay in the house any longer. He drove through Stillwell. Tomorrow he would be gone from this place. But he could not focus on what this would mean. He felt edgy and nervous, like somebody was tailing him. That ball of ice in his gut returned. He looked for cops, but saw none. He almost stopped and turned around. But he'd told Terry he would be there. Cole was going to give Terry half of what he asked for. Then Cole would leave. He wouldn't wait around for the profit. He would just go. He summoned his nerves and kept driving. But when came around the bend where the Eagle was, there were red and blue flashing lights dancing across the night. He slowed down. The ball of ice melted in his mouth. Cop cars, an ambulance. He pulled in the parking lot, cut his lights and stayed far back from the scene. After a while, someone staggered across the lot. Cole rolled down his window. “What's going on?”

The man stopped, looked up as if he'd been addressed from the sky.

“Over here,” Cole said.

He was old and drunk. He came over to Cole's window. “A shoot-out.”

“What happened?”

“It was told to me that there was some kind of drug deal. Something went bad wrong. Feds was here. Some big guy was shooting.”

“Did anyone get killed?”

“Yes. One of them did. Jerry or Gary or something. The big one was shot in the leg, they arrested him and a couple of others.” He took a drink. “Drug dealers, drug addicts. I don't know what's going to become of this country.” Then he said, “Son, would you mind giving me a lift?”

Cole stared at him, uncomprehending.

“I'm just down there in Stillwell.”

On the way back to town, the man said more about the shoot-out, and when he described the person who was killed, Cole knew for sure. He talked the entire time, going on and on about the state of the world, but Cole stopped listening. He focused on the beam of the headlights. Terry's hand on his neck. His granddaddy's hands, trying to heal him. Blue's hands. She had told him that the mysterious caul that had covered his face was a gift, and he wondered what it was, if it had been wiped away, if it was still with him, if it had blinded him or if it had hidden him. What it was he was supposed to see. After he dropped the old man off, he went back to his grandmother's. His mother was asleep on the couch, the blue light of the television soft on her face. He dropped a blanket over her, turned off the TV. Then he went into his bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and waited to feel something.

Chapter 21

He woke before daylight, but did not get out of bed right away. He lay for a few minutes under the blanket, between worlds, remembering last night like a dream. He lifted his hands close to his face and could smell the outdoors. The house was quiet and dark. “Get up,” he told himself. “Get up.” He dressed and washed his face and brushed his teeth. He looked at his hands under the bathroom light. They were dirty. He scrubbed them, cleaning under the nails. Then he made the bed with hospital corners and looked at his room and it was neat and clean. He carried his few belongings out to the pickup. In the east a faint glimmer of light trembled across the sky. When he went back in, his mother was brewing coffee.

“You're up early.”

“I didn't sleep much,” she said. “Might as well be up. Mama will probably want to drag me off to church.” His grandmother had started going regularly to a different church; she'd not gone back to Luke Cutter's.

“Maybe you'll get saved,” he told her.

“I already been.”

It was their joke, and they smiled. But Ruby's quickly faded; she looked worried. “I feel like there's still so much we need to say to each other.”

“I'll be back,” he said, and he knew this was true. “There'll be time for that.”

He did not tell her about Terry Rose. He couldn't. He did not want to believe it.

When the coffee was done, Ruby poured two cups and they sat at the table and drank it the same way, black, no sugar.

She looked like she wanted to say something.

“What is it?”

“You never ask about your daddy.”

“Would I know who he is?”

“No, I guess not. He used to live down in Bucks County. Last I heard he was in South Carolina.” She ashed her cigarette. “Joe Milligan. He was good-looking.”

“I'll remember his name.”

He finished the coffee. She asked if he wanted more, but he said no, he should get going. When she stood, he went over to her and put his arms around her and they held each other. When they pulled apart, they looked embarrassed.

“You stay in touch,” she told him.

“Better than you ever did.”

She tousled his hair. “You miss him, don't you?”

“Who?” he said, caught off guard.

“Your granddad, who else.”

“Oh. Yeah, I miss him. You?”

She nodded. He stopped at the doorway and turned to look at her once more. “He asked for you. On his deathbed, you were the one he wanted.”

For a second she looked confused. Then she grinned. “Probably he just wanted me there so he could preach at me.” She told him to be careful, he said he would. He went quickly and knocked on his grandmother's door. Her eyes were heavy with sadness.

“Were you sleeping?”

“No, I been praying.”

“I'll be all right.”

“You listen for Him. He's gonna be talking to you.”

He sat with her on the end of the bed and handed her a manila envelope that was stuffed with cash. She felt the weight of it. She'd never refused his money, no matter where it came from.

“I'll be back. You know I will.”

He told her that when he came back, he wanted to find her living on a nice plot of land somewhere, far away from the mining.

“Wherever I am, they ain't gonna walk all over me again,” she said.

“You'll keep fighting?”

“I will. Will you?”

“I'm gonna start,” he promised.

He kissed her cheek, and her old hands clutched onto him.

“Go on,” she whispered.

When he started his truck, his mother waved from the porch, but his grandmother was inside, praying. He did not want to be afraid anymore, there was no time for that. No time for feeling helpless. The world was big and uncaring, and he was going into it, like Jonah swimming into the belly of the whale. He heard his grandfather's voice: “You surely are your mother's child.”

Light shone from the east as he drove to Green Hills, where everything was still. He pulled in front of Lacy Cooper's and walked up to the trailer and slid the second envelope behind the screen door and left without lingering. He remembered the Christmas presents and hoped that she would take this: it was all that he could give her. Then he drove through Stillwell. He went past everything that was familiar. He passed the Wigwam and the bank and the Laundromat. No cops pulled him over. Everything was quiet. He parked on the street behind the nursing home.

He went in through the side door and stepped into the familiar smell of ammonia, cafeteria food, old bodies. He looked around. Larry Potts twiddling his thumbs. Cole touched his nervous hands, waiting until the thumbs rested. Then he went into the rooms of everyone he knew. He said good-bye, and if they were sleeping, he just looked at them. He thought of all those who had died. Remembered what he'd taken from each of them. He'd not returned any of it, not a single piece, and he wondered if they could forgive him.

He went to see Elvira Black, who'd been moved here against her will. She was sleeping, hooked to oxygen and fluids. He touched her face and her eyes fluttered. He told her good-bye, but she did not wake up.

As he was coming out of her room, he saw an aide bent over Hazel Lewis, trying to get her shirt back on, and he ducked back into the room and waited. When he looked again, the aide was gone, but Hazel was there, grabbing at her shirt.

“It's so dang hot,” she said.

He pulled down her shirt and put his arms around her and smelled her moldy, stale smell. She began to cry. He'd never seen this before. “Shh,” he said.

“Cole, Cole, Cole,” she said.

He said, “That's my name. Don't wear it out.”

Then he drew back and she looked at him and said it was so hot, and he said he knew it was, and that he was sorry, but it would not always be this way.

Mabel Johnson was in her rocking chair like she'd been waiting on him. “You're up early,” he said.

“Early bird gets the worm.”

He asked her how the new aide was treating her, and she said all right. Then he touched her hand and told her he was going.

She told him to get into her dresser. “Go on,” she said.

He pulled open the top drawer and took out the blood-red scarf.

“I know it's getting warm now, but you take it with you to wherever you're headed.” She motioned for him to lean closer, and then she held the scarf up to him. “It'll look right handsome.”

He wrapped it around his neck. It was soft, delicate. He had never worn nor owned such a thing. He told her he felt proud to wear it.

She did not like good-byes, she told him. So he kissed her cheek and she called after him, “You be careful.”

He turned east and drove up the mountain. As he passed by the Eagle, his fingers curled around the steering wheel. The lot was empty, no signs of last night. The hurt in him was dull and throbbing, and he sucked in his breath, afraid to let go. His knuckles were a spine of white, and he forced himself to loosen his grip on the wheel. He kept driving and turned onto Rockcamp Road. His grandmother had told him to make peace with his grandfather, but what he had to make peace with was bigger than any one man. He drove around the barricade and pulled up on a slope, hiding his truck in a grove of pines. When he got out, he wrapped the scarf around his neck like something to ward off evil spirits.

He did not go near the swimming hole. Last night seemed like a strange and sad memory that hummed inside of him, a dull pain. He did not know if Terry Rose had been setting him up or was just asking for help; he would never know. He felt sorry for Terry, sorry for all of them. Up on the hillside, he looked across the land and saw his empty trailer and his grandparents' house, the blackness still spread over the yard. It still took his breath away, how bad it was. It looked as if something had fallen from the sky, rolled down the mountain, and left a burning gash. The cemetery was washed away, the bones of the dead, lifted up out of the earth. But what did bones matter? Everything turned to dust. Rage jolted his blood.

He cut up through the forest and headed up the mountainside in the direction of where the mining site would be. It would be a long walk. He would have to go all the way around, bypassing the Heritage gates, and head up the backside of the mountain. He was not in good shape and the cigarettes did not help. He stopped often to catch his breath. Sweat clung to his back, but he did not take off the scarf. He wished he'd brought water. His granddaddy used to walk the mountains and hills like a mountain goat; he would not have tired out like this, not even in his old age.

The forest was threaded with cracks and slips, water pouring out from gashes. Other places were bone-dry. What used to be Little Blue Stream was buried. Everything around here had been named. Dove Creek and all of its offshoots, dozens of fishing holes and hollows and knobs and hills. Sugar Holler, Big Lick, Bony Knob, Red Bird Hill, Garden Hole. All of these names that were a part of him like the scripture itself and now all of it disappearing. He climbed over caves of brush and piles of rocks, the places where snakes liked to hide. His granddaddy used to come up here in the summer to hunt them. Cole did not go with him then, too scared. But now he was not afraid. There were worse things to fear. Last night's swirling ambulance lights. Lifting Arie Webb out of the sludge. He did not want to see, but he kept walking.

He came to a sign that said “No Trespassing, Property of Heritage Energy” and went around it. He had been in these woods a thousand times. He used to come here to kneel in the forest with his hands pressed to the dirt. He used to walk with his granddaddy; he used to walk with Terry Rose. He used to dig for ginseng. He knew the plants and trees and birds. But in the last few years, he'd stopped. Too busy, he'd told himself. But that was not it, it was something else. He was afraid that he'd no longer belonged to this place, no longer deserved it. Now he tried to remember what it used to look like. Light shining through the tops of trees; green moss on stumps; blooming foxglove and little pink azaleas, like teardrops.

It was not the same woods anymore. Not the place where he'd gone 'senging with his grandfather, where he'd camped with Terry Rose. The mudslides, broken trees, all of it confused him, and after a while he wasn't sure where he was. The machine noises grew louder, beeping, shoveling, whining. He thought of Blue, lying down in front of a dozer.

He stopped by an old sycamore and put his hands on its mottled bark. Saplings stood around his waist and ankles, and the mother trees grew around them, gleaming with new leaves. It was spring; everything returned in the spring. His grandfather had believed in the power of the wilderness. The wilderness called to the old prophets. John the Baptist and Moses and Elijah and Jacob and even Jesus himself. His granddaddy, in times of sorrow or pain, would come up to these woods. He'd pray and fast, and give himself over. He was a believer. He was a good man, but he was not God, he was no angel.

Now he knew where he was. He was getting close to the ridgetop, and if he went up to that dip between the sweetgum and the yellow birch, he would come to the small clearing where he used to watch the sun rise. He had watched it with his granddaddy, who took him up here and told him he'd better listen hard because God had a soft voice. And he watched it with Terry Rose. They camped here and woke up together and smoked cigarettes and drank coffee and watched the sun rise, leaning against each other, quiet, so quiet that Cole thought that maybe that was as close to God as he ever got. Now he went forward, clambering up the slope, leaves and twigs sliding under his feet.

He stopped.

He stopped because the mountain stopped.

The world stopped.

“Jesus,” he said, dizzy, faint.

He held on to the limb of the sweetgum and looked out onto the mining site. It was all below him, around him. He'd read the statistics and seen pictures and caught glimpses of the sites from the road, but never had imagined how immense. And he was seeing only a part of it. The land simply dropped off a few hundred feet, and below and across from him, all over, was the mining site, which looked like something from outer space, like an asteroid had hit here, or some kind of government testing site. The raging blood raced up to his head, and he felt like he was going to be sick. What had been forest and mountain was no longer here. Just gray rock and scars, bulldozed earth, and glistening seams of coal. The site was so big that the gigantic bulldozers and the 240-ton dump trucks looked like toys. They moved like bloated insects across the site, over the roads they'd carved out and around the blasting holes, the noise of them drowning out birdsong or any other natural noise. On a remaining hillside, newly felled trees lay like bodies, thousands of them. His granddaddy had taken him to the mountaintop and said God is all things good. Cole wrapped his arms around his chest. He thought of Terry Rose, crumpled in the parking lot of a run-down beer joint, dying in a pool of his own blood. The dead hung up in the trees. Buried in sludge. The bodies laid out on the hillside and all those who cried over them.

He looked at everything so that he would not forget. All of this was up here behind him, and he'd never looked. Too scared, too stubborn. No wonder he could not sleep. His granddaddy always said that bad sleep indicated a guilty conscience. He'd been down there, just a mile down there, counting his money and selling pills and stealing and screwing and making promises, and all the time this was right here, looming over them.
Where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.
He was at the gates of hell. He tried to recall the original contour of the land but could not remember. He closed his eyes and tried hard to see it, but nothing. This was his granddaddy's granddaddy's land, and in a few months, what he now stood upon would be gone.

He opened his eyes. The leaves on the trees around him were coated with ash from the blasting below. He looked out again at the missing mountain and felt dizzy. He slowly got down on the ground. It was too much, the feelings inside him. He lay down on his stomach and pressed his hands into the cool dirt. He'd never felt so alone or small. Dirt on his hands. Blood pumping through him. He tried to think of Bible verses, but there were none. But he heard the words of his grandfather:
I had to lose everything, I had to forget all of it.