Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories (3 page)

Over Flat Mountain

T
HEY DIDN’T USED TO CALL LOUISVILLE
the Mile High City. I know because I was raised there, in the old West End, when the Falls of the Ohio were just dry limestone flats bypassed by a canal, and the river was slow and muddy, and the summer nights were warm.

Not anymore, though.

It was chilly for August when I rolled into Louisville from Indianapolis, heading south and east for Charlotte. The icy mist was rising off the falls where they plunge into the gorge. It was too much trouble to dig a flannel shirt out of the back so I bought a sweatshirt in the truckstop annex, figuring I would give it to Janet or one of the girls later—they wear them like nightgowns—and rolled on out of there without a second piece of pie.

The shirt said “Louisville—Mile High City of the South.”

I bought a CD,
50 Truckin
’
Classics
, forty-nine of which I already had. I have a library of eleven hundred CDs in my cab. Imagine how much space that would have taken in the old days when they were as big as cookies.

I don’t generally pick up hitchhikers, but I must have felt sorry for this kid. I was an hour south and east of Louisville, just under the cloud shadow, when I saw him standing in the rain by the
CRAB ORCHARD COGWAY 40M/64K
sign, wearing a black garbage bag for a raincoat, and I figured, what the hell. He looked more than a little wet. It rains six days out of five south of Louisville since the Uplift.

When we Flat Toppers run, we run. I just barely pulled over and was back in low-two before he was up the ladder and through the inside airlock lens, peeling off his garbage bag like a landlobster molting. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen. He had greasy blond hair tied back with a rubber band under a Delco cap, and under his garbage bag a windbreaker over a T-shirt. Glad to see he had a coat at least. Boots had “hand-me-down” written all over them. Carried his things in a Kmart plastic bag.

He combed the rain off the bill of his cap with one finger and perched on the edge of the seat until I swept the CDs off the seat into my own hat and dumped them into the glove compartment.

“Nice gun,” he said. I had a Brazilian 9 mm in the glove compartment. I closed it.

“Wet out there,” he said.

I nodded and popped Ricky Skaggs into the player. I hadn’t picked him up for conversation. I picked him up because I’d done some hitchhiking myself at his age. Sixteen going on twenty-one.

“Appreciate your stopping,” he said.

“Nice rig,” he said.

I was pulling a two-piece articulated, with a Kobo-Jonni. The KJ is an eight-liter steel diesel with that mighty ring that engines used to have before they went to plastic. A lot of guys fall all over the new plastic mills cause they don’t need oil, but I like oil. I had built the KJ three times, and was just through breaking in the third set of sleeves. Plastic, you just throw away.

The kid told me his name but I forgot it. “They call me CD,” I said. I popped out Ricky and popped in the Hag to show him why.

He had those narrow eyes and sallow skin, like he’d never seen the sun, and if he was from south and east of Louisville he probably hadn’t. And I could tell by his accent he was. Listen, I knew this kid. He was me thirty years ago. You narrow up your shoulders and narrow up your eyes, and since everything in the world is new to you, try to look and act like nothing is.

“I’m going up to Hazard,” he said.

I had figured that from his being by the cogway sign.

“My pa works up there at the robot train,” he said.

“Guess you’re going on over Flat Mountain,” he said.

Anybody could tell that from my airlocks. He said it as if it was the most natural thing in the world, but it wasn’t. Not many trucks go over Flat Mountain. Most just go up the cogway to Hazard and offload for the robot train, and come right back down.

“Well, there it is,” he said.

The bottom part of Flat Mountain is the only part most folks ever see. Since it’s almost always raining under the cloud shadow, you can almost never see it from more than ten miles away. We were rounding the old Winchester bypass just east of where Lexington used to be, and from there it looks like a wall of logs and trash and rock, running almost straight up into the clouds that are always there at 11,500.

I turned off onto the Crab Orchard feeder road, which follows the front twenty miles south and west, then turns in at a ghost town, Berea, where the wall eases off to a little less than 45 degrees. There were about six trucks ahead of me at the cogway, none of them Flat Toppers. I got in line next to a stream choked with old cars and house pieces. It didn’t have a name. Lots of these new rivers don’t have names.

While we were in line for the cogway I called Janet and the girls from my cab phone and the kid got out. Maybe he was embarrassed by all the family stuff. I watched him walking up and down under the long board shed trying all the candy bar machines. I moved the truck up ten feet at a time and other trucks pulled in behind me. Gravy Pugh came by in his yellow slicker to clip my ticket. “Going up top?” he asked. “Watch out, CD, lobsters got Sanders yesterday.”

This is his standard joke. I don’t lobster anymore and he knows it.

“Snapped his pecker off,” he said, and clipped another corner off my violet Crab Orchard Cogway pass.

The kid climbed back into the truck just as I was flagged to the approach grade. He was shivering. He had left his garbage bag in the truck and it rains about as hard under the board shed as outside of it. When I was his age I had hitchhiked a thousand miles, but this was out west where it never rained in those days. I let the flagman wait while I leaned up over the seat and fished a dry flannel shirt out from under the tools and spare parts. The kid pulled off his T-shirt and wrapped my flannel shirt around him. He could have fit in it twice.

“I hope your pa’s expecting you,” I said. “You know, you can’t go around outside up at Hazard.”

“I been up there,” was all he said.

The guy behind me was honking but Gravy didn’t let him around. The cogway never stops, and there is a certain trick to magging on. The ramp is concrete but it’s cracked and crazy tilted, and there’s only one stretch where you can make enough speed for a hitch. If you miss, you have to turn down the cutoff and get back in line. I always make it, but I’ve been doing this run for twelve years.

“Piece of candy?” The kid held out a Collie Bar but since it looked like his entire supper I turned him down. It was getting dark. Magged on, I let the big old KJ idle. With the truck tipped almost straight up, it’s better to have the pumps running to keep the air out of the lines.

It’s a long ride up the western front. The Crab Orchard Cogway is slow and noisy, fourteen miles of squeaking, rattling chain. It’s powered by steam generated from the coal and trash that rolled off the lower slopes when the mountain uplifted, helped by the weight of the trucks coming down. Even in the dark I could see them through the rain twenty yards away. I know most of the drivers, even the up-and-backs, or yoyos as we Flat Toppers call them. The mountainside looked junky in the headlights. The lower slopes, from 7,200 to the clouds at 11,500 are overgrown with weeds and weird new ferns and what’s left of the trees—plus whatever else rolled down when the land rolled up. Some say they see giant volunteer tomatoes back in the weeds but I never see them.

The first hundred trips or so, it’s a scary ride. The kid tried to act cool but I knew exactly how he felt. Your truck is tipped back at forty-five degrees, you’re wondering if the mag and the safety under it will hold, and even if it does, what about that clattery old chain? Then every once in a while the chain hauls up short—maybe a truck had trouble unhooking at the Hazard end, or maybe the world is coming apart—and the boards under your tires creak and the leaf springs sway, and the wind howls across the splinters of the trees, because we’re still low enough on Flat Mountain for there to be wind, and you realize you’re just hanging there like a wet pair of jeans on a line.

I popped in some Carl Perkins, the early stuff where he sings like George Jones, and managed to mostly close my eyes.

Then here come the clouds, above 11,500. The clouds make it easier. Thinking I wasn’t looking, the kid unfolded a ten-dollar bill from his watch pocket, folded it up again, and put it away. I remembered hitchhiking and feeling the same way: checking it every hour or so to make sure it hadn’t turned into a five.

At Hazard, you’re still in the clouds but they loosen up as the mountain levels off a little and the cogway ends. All of a sudden there’s noise and lights all around. For most of the trucks, the robot train roundabout is the end of the line. It’s a big semicircular modular building—hauled up since the Uplift, naturally, since nothing of the old town survived. The yoyos unhitch and snake in and unload, load up whatever’s contracted down, and get back in line for the cogway down. No deadheads in this business. Of course there are some loads that can’t wait three weeks for a backed-up robot train, and that’s where me and the other Flat Toppers come in—trucks that go all the way over Flat Mountain.

I figured the roundabout was where the kid’s dad worked, since there’s a lot of hand labor involved loading and unloading, not to mention the guys who jockey the trucks through the line for a few bucks while the drivers are sitting in the Bellew Belle. This is barely a living. They sleep in a pressure shed behind the roundabout.

“This must be the place,” I said.

“Appreciate the ride, mister.”

“CD,” I said. He started to open the airlock and I said, “Whoa. Aren’t you forgetting something?”

He looked back at me, scared, and started to unbutton the shirt.

I had to laugh. “Keep the shirt, kid,” I said. “But you can’t go around up here without breath spray. You’re a mile higher than Everest. Open your mouth.” I sprayed his throat with C-Level and told him to run before it wore off.

Carrying his plastic bag, he hurried out the airlock and into the roundabout.

I drove across the lot to the Bellew Belle. It’s the only diner in Hazard and the drivers call it the Blue Balls. It isn’t airlocked and the revolving door spins on its own from the pressure inside, easing out a continual little cloud of coffee and hamburger steam. Hazard can use it. It’s a cold, dark, nasty place where nobody would live unless they worked there, or work unless they couldn’t work anywhere else.

I wondered if the kid’s dad knew he was coming. Or if he even existed. When I was his age I told folks I was hitching to Dallas to see my dad, who was a police officer. If you don’t lie people will figure you’re a runaway.

Flat Toppers tend to sit together. “How’s the weather down under, CD?” they ask. “How’s the weather up top?” I ask back. That’s our standard joke, because the weather below the western front is always the same—always raining. And of course there’s no weather on top of Flat Mountain. You can’t have weather without atmosphere.

I used the lobby phone to call Janet and the girls again. I was already too high for the cab phone and this would be my last chance until I got back from Charlotte, since satellite calls over the mountain are so expensive. One of the guys at the table told me claws were bringing $100 in Charlotte, but they had to be unmarked because nobody eats road kill. I told him I didn’t lobster anymore anyway.

It was just after midnight and I was getting up to go when the kid came in the revolving door, nursing a bloody nose with the sleeve of my shirt. He had run across the lot without any breath spray.

“Find your dad?” I asked, and he shook his head. He sat down, looking at the french fries the other guys had left on their plates. I bought two hamburgers out of the machine, even though I had already eaten, and acted like I didn’t want one of them. That’s the way you have to do it with a kid like that.

But I had to get going. “I guess you better head back to the roundabout and catch a ride back down the mountain,” I said.

The kid shook his head. He said his mother had got married and moved out of Louisville. He claimed his dad had left ten dollars for him back at the roundabout, to catch a ride across to Charlotte where his grandma lived. I didn’t believe that for a minute. He showed me the same folded-up ten I’d seen him looking at on the cogway.

I said, “Insurance won’t allow me to carry you over Flat Mountain.” This was a lie. The fact is, no Flat Topper’s insured. Not because it’s dangerous, although it can be, but because it’s not a part of any state anymore. It’s not
actuarially
part of the world anymore, my insurance man says.

“I know exactly where she lives,” the kid says, acting like he hadn’t heard me. He took a yellow piece of paper from his watch pocket and started unfolding it. He was doing good at not crying.

When I was his age, and I was hitchhiking, I had a ten-dollar bill in my watch pocket. That was it. This Mexican guy from St. Louis picked me up. He kept a pearl-handled revolver under the car seat. First time we stopped to eat, I tried to unfold my ten so he wouldn’t see what it was, figuring I knew about Mexicans. And he told me to put it in my shoe because everybody knows to look in your watch pocket. He bought my meals all the way across Missouri and Oklahoma.

“One twenty-one Magnolia Street,” the kid read off the paper, but he pronounced it “mangolia” like an aircraft metal. I could tell he’d never been to Charlotte. I wasn’t surprised. Too high to fly over, too thick to tunnel through, Flat Mountain has split up a lot of families. It’s not like an ocean that took a million years to form. They say it’s even making the days longer, at almost an hour a year, because the bulge makes the Earth turn slower, like a skater throwing her arms out.

Slower days, that’s all we need.

The other Flat Toppers had all left, heading down the Crab Orchard to Louisville and points beyond.

What the hell, I figured. “Let’s go,” I said. “And don’t keep your money in your watch pocket. Everybody knows to look there.”

At 34,500, Hazard would be snowy if the vents off the mountain didn’t keep the clouds half steam. Cold steam. I was half frozen by the time I had finished letting all but eight pounds out of my tires and topping off the oxy and fuel in the injection system. You don’t need an oversuit down so low, but you do need to keep a can of breath spray handy. C-Level gives the cells enough oxygen to get by, and fools your nerves into thinking you’re breathing. I keep a can in my pocket.