Preston took off like an antelope. “Yahoo!” he caterwauled, flashing his sharp white teeth in the dark ahead of us.
“Preston hasn’t coughed since we got here, Frederic,” said my mother as we began climbing.
We passed a house with a sign in front that said SYLVIA TASSO, PIANO INSTRUCTION, which Preston eyed with distrust, because while he was big on the piano, he wasn’t much for piano teachers. Dad announced, “Here it is!” stopping in front of a little bungalow perched on a level spot on the apron of the mountain. “Our new home!”
It was a real ripsnorter. Better than anything we’d ever had back in Mississippi, because there we’d lived in a lean-to made of rusty tin. The house at 403 C Street had a wooden floor, a stove, running water, a sink for washing dishes, and electric lights. It had a bedroom for my parents and one for Preston and me. It had a bathtub. Inside the house! The icebox was already filled with ice. My dad said somebody from the Victory company must have gathered it earlier that day in the peaks of the mountains above us and brought it down. There were fresh eggs in the icebox, too, which was good, since we were starving and all we had were the ragged socks in our lopsided box and the clothes on our backs. There was even a pine table with four chairs around it waiting for us in the kitchen.
“The company is giving all this—to us?” marveled my mother.
“They take care of their own! Three cheers for Victory Fuels!” exclaimed my dad, seating himself proudly at the head of the table like the newly crowned king of a small but significant nation.
“Look at this!” cried my mom, opening a glittering chrome bread box on the counter by the sink. “Store-bought bread!”
I cringed as Preston tore open the bag, snatched the heel, and stuffed it into his mouth, which he could stretch so wide it still gave me a start, even though I’d known him nine solid years.
We heard our new neighbor begin the Minuet in G Major by J. S. Bach on her piano.
“Tomorrow, I start work in the coal mine,” declared my dad, rising from the table and taking my mother’s hand. “But tonight, I hope you’ll dance with me.”
Preston looked at me and I looked at Preston as our parents whirled around the floor. “They’re good,” he admitted in surprise. “Even Dad.”
“The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers of Arizona,” I declared. We’d never known our parents had it in them.
Later, I woke up in the dark beside Preston in our new bed. He breathed as serenely as a puppy. I lay in our room, which smelled of green wood and fresh paint, watching the window curtains billow around me as if I were suspended in a cloud. The face of the old windup alarm clock I’d brought from Mississippi glowed twenty to five. A coyote sang outside. His pals joined him. Chilly desert air rolled down the mountain and poured into my room. I’d never heard a coyote in my life, and now a whole choir of them howled at the moon thirty feet from my head.
I’d never seen a mountain, and now I lived at the foot of one.
I’d never smelled the desert—and Preston was right. It did smell like perfume. Very interesting perfume. Kind of a cross between a bed of roses and an asphalt parking lot.
And Preston could breathe! I felt the dark spirit that had been hovering over our family ever since we’d walked out of Governor’s Hospital rise on the wind, turn west, and fly away.
A light appeared in the kitchen. Past my half-opened door, down the hall, I saw Dad take a seat at the table, alone in a bright yellow pool. Mom bustled up and set down an empty plate in front of him, which he stared at as if he’d never seen a plate before. Mom disappeared, but, a few seconds later, she reappeared with scrambled eggs. Before long, she was back with sausage, then coffee. Dad hardly moved. While Mom stood beside him admiring the breakfast she’d prepared, he finally picked up his fork as if to dig in, but as soon as she turned her back, he put it down and sat very still.
At five a.m., he’d start in the Victory Mine. He wouldn’t come up until five p.m. For most people, that might seem like a long time, but he used to work twenty-four hours straight sometimes in Low Ridge, farming land that belonged to somebody else to raise cotton that he had to trade away for less than what it cost to feed us. Sharecropping. Sometimes the temperature hit 107 degrees. Sometimes swarms of snakes invaded the fields. But he never complained, or missed a day, and he sure as heck never got the look in his eye that he had now.
But of course he had never ridden an elevator down a hole in the ground for half a mile to spend twelve hours without seeing the sky.
“Preston still hasn’t coughed,” I heard my mother say. “Not once. We did the right thing, Frederic.”
I reached out and found Preston’s hand as he slept, and my father, because he had to, stood up straight, took a breath, squared his shoulders, kissed my mom, and clomped out into the darkness wearing new leather boots—the company had given him those, too, along with the pick and shovel leaning against our mailbox and the lamp screwed to the front of his helmet.
Peering under the edge of my bedroom curtain, I watched him trudge toward the Victory sign at the mouth of the pit.
Out of the dimness, a tall man appeared. His shoulders were approximately as wide as a pool table; he had long legs, a little bowed, turned-in toes, and enough curly black hair for a flock of sparrows to nest in. In the glow of the Victory sign I saw him laugh, snatch the helmet off Dad’s head, and drop-kick it into the crowd of miners who’d materialized from the streets all around him. After the miners had played a quick soccer game with it, its shiny yellow paint looked five years old.
“Now you look like a real min-a,” shouted the black-haired man gleefully, placing the helmet back on Dad’s head like a bishop crowning a prince. Dad laughed. Draping his arm around my father, the man said, “Don’ worry. We gonna take fine care a you!” And with that, they all stepped into the elevator and disappeared into the earth, leaving the rest of us behind in the glow of dawn.
Before Preston and I left for school, I looked up from the breakfast table to see a man standing in our kitchen. He wore expensive clothes and a smile that fooled nobody.
“How’d you get in here?” Preston asked him.
“Allow me to introduce myself,” purred the well-dressed intruder. “Elijah Biggs. Manager of Victory Mine. I used to live in this very house. But I improved myself. Quite a lot. In fact, just last month, Mr. Theodore Ratliff came all the way from New York and promoted me to chief of mining operations.” With that, Elijah Biggs adjusted his yellow straw boating hat, shot the cuffs of his snow-white suit, and made sure his powder-blue bow tie was riding straight.
“When Mr. Theodore Ratliff came from New York,” said Preston, “and promoted you to chief . . . ?”
Elijah Biggs gazed at my little brother with mild interest. I shot a warning glance at Preston, but there was no shutting him up.
“. . . did you wear that costume?” finished Preston.
“I merely wanted to extend the company’s warmest greetings,” said Elijah Biggs to my mother as if Preston didn’t exist.
“Do you make a habit of waltzing into people’s homes without—” began Mom.
“I didn’t waltz,” corrected Elijah Biggs. “I came to discuss your ledger.”
“Our ledger?” asked Mom dubiously.
“Do you know what a ledger is?” asked Elijah Biggs, as if he were a kindergarten teacher and she were a five-year-old learning big words.
“Of course I know what a ledger is,” snapped Mother.
“She went to college for three whole years,” Preston cheerfully informed Elijah Biggs, “which I bet is three more than you did.”
Biggs tried to pretend he didn’t hear this, but I saw his eyelid twitch, which said to me that Preston probably was right.
“What I don’t know is why the chief of the Victory Mine is in my kitchen talking about a ledger,” continued my mom.
“This ledger,” said Elijah Biggs, producing a black leather notebook from inside his circus clothes, “tells us your husband gets paid t
oday when he comes out of the mine. He’s new. So he won’t send out much coal. But he seems like a fast learner. Let’s say he’ll earn twenty-five whole dollars. Which he will be paid in genuine Victory Fuels Corporation scrip.” Elijah Biggs dug a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket that looked like something cooked up by a four-year-old with a fistful of construction paper and a box of Crayola crayons. “Seventy-Five Cents,” it read. “The Victory Fuels Corporation. Redeemable by Issuer Only.”
“We don’t get real money?” asked my mother.
“This is real money.” Elijah Biggs smiled. “You can spend it right down the street at the company store. Where, by the way, you already owe seventy dollars.”
“For what?” gasped Mom.
“Let’s check the ledger,” said Elijah Biggs, helpfully waving it in the air so we could connect the word to its meaning. “Eggs, bread, ice for the icebox, a mining helmet, lamp, pick, shovel, boots, miscellaneous furnishings, including your kitchen table—”
“But all that was waiting in our house for us!” protested my mother.
“You didn’t think you got to use it without paying for it, did you?” responded Elijah Biggs. “That certainly would’ve been stupid, especially for someone who went to college. For three whole years.”
“Frederic has been in a hole in the ground for hours working himself almost to death, and we’re further in debt than when he went down!” cried Mom.
“He’ll be blissfully unaware of that,” replied Elijah Biggs nastily, “until he emerges from the ground.”
“Today we’ll begin reading The Red Pony,” said my new teacher. “By John Steinbeck.”
“Today I’ll begin reading The Red Butt,” whispered a kid sitting behind me, “by Seymour Butts.”
The teacher—who was young, sort of pretty, had only a tiny mustache, and was named Miss Thuringen, according to the nameplate on her desk—didn’t even blink. “You want to avoid using ‘butt’ twice in the same joke, Woodrow,” she advised. She made it sound like a rule of grammar we all should’ve known.
“Yeah,” I said. “How about The Red Butt by Seymour Heine?”
The class roared. I even chuckled a little myself until I saw Woodrow glaring at me, and noticed that he was six feet tall, and had very large fists with knuckles sticking out all over them. I hadn’t started a new school since I was five, and I guess I didn’t remember what happens to kids who shoot their mouths off the day they arrive.
I tried to ignore him until Miss Thuringen picked up a bell from her desk and rang it. “Recess!” she called.
I immediately did what any sane guy would do: I ran out the door and hightailed it to the farthest, dustiest, windiest, most cactus-filled corner of the school yard, and I hid behind a rock.
Peeking cautiously around my rock, I saw a kid who looked just like the guy who’d stomped on my dad’s helmet before work that morning stalking my way across the skittery rock shards of the school yard. Same curly black hair. Same ridiculously wide shoulders, like a door inside a flannel shirt. Same legs, same toes. Even the same voice when he shouted at me, “Hey, kid!” only he didn’t have his dad’s accent. He balled up his fists, running straight my way, sporting a look you might wear to spar with a grizzly bear, so I gritted my teeth and balled up my fists, too.
“No!” he said, pointing behind me. “I’m not—”
I heard a thunk like a watermelon falling out a second-floor window. Fireworks exploded in front of me. My head felt like it was full of bees. The rocky ground rushed up to meet my face. Turned out that thunking sound was somebody sucker punching me. Woodrow. Assisted by three of his closest friends.
Lying on the gravel, I could easily see that Woodrow and his pals wore spotless white basketball shoes. With that fresh-out-of-the-box sparkle. My guess was these sneakers meant they all had dads who were doctors, lawyers, store owners, mine managers, or something else that made them rich, so they got to spend their time enjoying activities that didn’t get their shoes dirty.
In the midst of the fog circulating around my brain, I also happened to notice that the kid with black hair wore scuffed, old, hand-me-down work boots like my own. I didn’t have time to think about the deeper significance of this before he pasted Woodrow so hard across the bridge of the nose that Woodrow did a half a backflip and collapsed into a little heap.
Just like that, I had a new problem on my hands. The kid with black hair sat down across Woodrow’s chest with his knees on either side and proceeded to punch him over and over in the head, howling, “You can’t do that! You can’t do that!” Woodrow’s alleged friends vamoosed.
“Stop, Luke! Please! Stop!” begged Woodrow.
I grabbed this kid Luke under the arms and hauled like a twenty-mule team. I managed to drag him off Woodrow long enough for Woodrow to scram. Once Woodrow was gone, Luke blinked, and shivered, and managed to get control of himself. He laughed a short laugh. “Score one for the good guys,” he said.
“Right,” I replied cautiously.
He held out his hand. “What’s your name again?” he asked, smiling a wide white smile.
“Josh Garrett,” I told him. “I guess you must be . . . Luke?”
“Luke Agrippa,” he replied, and we shook.
And then, standing there, not moving a muscle, I stumbled.
Luke’s face turned white and I heard screams from up and down the streets of Victory.
“The mine!” whispered Luke. The second he said it, a siren wailed, and it seemed like the whole town materialized on Main Street and began a stampede toward the base of the Victory sign, where the mine’s entrance huddled under the skirt of the mountain.
“Presto! Presto!” I screamed, searching for my brother as the little kids streamed out of the school. I spotted him, and breathed a sigh of relief.
“What’s wrong?” I asked Luke as I took Preston’s hand.
“Collapse,” said Luke, as we rode on the human wave all the way to the mine entrance. “That was the jolt in the ground.”
“Two down!” shouted a man holding a telephone receiver at the gate to the mine elevator as we skidded to a halt in front of him. “Achilles Alexandropoulos. Back is broke. And they say that new fella. The one that started this morning. Tried to reach Achilles while the roof was still falling. Garrett? Garrett? What?”
Luke looked at me in horror. “Your dad,” he breathed.
Margaret
2014
I RODE HOME FROM THE COURTHOUSE in what I guess was a state of shock, my brain numb and slow, my senses dulled, my eyelids heavy as lead. It wasn’t so bad really, to feel so cut off and out of it, kind of like being a turtle dozing on a rock in a terrarium. But as soon as we turned into our driveway and I saw our house, the one my dad would never be coming back to, the glass walls of my terrarium fell right down.
Once we were inside, Dr. AJ led my mom upstairs, got her to lie down, and tried to give her a pill to help her relax and sleep.
“I can’t,” my mom said, shaking her head. “Margaret needs me.”
Dr. AJ and I exchanged a look.
“You know what would help me, Mom?” I said gently. “If I could lie here next to you while you fell asleep. That would be perfect.”
I could see my mom trying to muster up the energy to protest again, but finally, she sighed, nodded, and held out her palm for the pill.
My mom wasn’t a weak woman, but we all hit our breaking points, and my mom had hit hers kind of gradually. The first cracks appeared right after my dad’s arrest—little hair-thin things, hardly cracks at all—and she got more and more broken as the weeks dragged on. By the time he was convicted, she wasn’t eating enough to keep a bird alive and was sleeping so little that she’d gotten to a weird place in her mind, a twitchy, broken, manic place where she cried all the time and couldn’t put thoughts together right. I’d been more or less mothering her for weeks, which felt strange, but I really didn’t mind. It gave me a reason to stay steady, and anyway, after all those years of her
taking care of me, I guessed it was the least I could do.
She went to sleep fast after her pill, and, after a few minutes of shifty restlessness, she looked as peaceful as she had in way too long. I almost cried then, at the sight of her, because she’d have to wake up sometime and everything would still be awful, but Dr. AJ was right beside me, and I knew that if I broke down, she’d insist on staying. What I wanted more than anything was to be alone, to sit in my own pocket of space and just breathe and feel, feel whatever there was to feel without worrying about anyone seeing me.
Dr. AJ seemed to get it. She called Mr. Wise and asked if he could postpone his visit until the following day. She reminded me of her cell and home numbers, even though she knew I knew them as well as I knew my own, and reminded me that she was just around the corner, which I also knew, having been to her house a bazillion times, at least. Then she wrapped me in one of her good, big-woman hugs (Dr. AJ was six feet tall and hugged like a linebacker, or like I imagined linebackers hugged), and for a few seconds I just plain clung.
“You will get through this, my girl,” she said. “I have no doubt of that. Just keep the faith, you hear me?”
I nodded, even though I didn’t have one scrap of faith left to keep.
As soon as she left, I realized I was starving. I opened the refrigerator, which was busting at the seams with casseroles; there must have been five or six of them, foil-covered, labeled, and stacked—and these were just from today. For months, when we weren’t home, people had taken to dropping food off with our neighbor Mrs. Darley, who had a key to our house and would periodically stick them in her red wagon and wheel them on over. They gave us way more than two people could ever eat, but I knew what the casseroles meant. Every dish was someone saying, “We’ve got your back.”
I got as far as carving out and heating up a slab of Mrs. Alexandropoulos’s famous pastitsio, which is this awesome Greek lasagna, pouring myself a glass of milk, and sitting down at the kitchen table. But as I chewed the first bite, I remembered the first time I’d eaten Mrs. Alexandropoulos’s pastitsio. I was six and had just gone to my first funeral. I’m not even sure whose it was. It’s what people do in Victory: there’s a wedding or a funeral and the whole town shows up. Anyway, I was at the lunch afterward—there’s always a lunch afterward—and I was eating the pastitsio and thinking that it was the best food ever invented, and I heard what I thought was this booming laughter. It turned out to be crying. The woman’s back quaked and heaved inside the black fabric of her dress. Bobby Fitzgerald, who was sitting next to me, whispered, “It’s because she’s a widow. Her husband is never coming home because he’s dead.”