Raylan (9 page)
Y
ou don’t think of your manners and let the woman go first,” Art Mullen said, “not when she’s pointing a gun at you.”
They were having breakfast at A Touch of Country in downtown Cumberland. Raylan back from Lexington poking at his bowl of grits, burying the pieces of bacon.
“You keep looking at it,” Art said, “asking yourself were you too quick. The woman jabbed a hypo in you and took your gun. Finally you come to a showdown. She’s aiming at you and you’re still drugged out. You wonder if you might’ve been too quick on the trigger?”
“She was surprised I shot her,” Raylan said.
“Why? She thought you were a gentleman? Tell me what else you could’ve done.”
“I was surprised too,” Raylan said, “I did it.”
“Cause you never shot a woman before?”
“I guess.”
“Why you think you had a choice?” Art said, trying to get Raylan settled in his mind about shooting the transplant nurse, Layla.
“She was standing by her things on the bed. I could see her okay but I was wobbly. She’d made up her face, put lipstick on, did her eyes . . .”
Art said, “I don’t see that makes any difference.”
“She’s gonna take out my kidneys and—I don’t know—wanted to look her best? I woke up naked, in the bathtub.”
“You crawled out,” Art said, prompting him.
“I had to move Cuba Franks off me. I still don’t know why she shot Cuba.”
“She’s trying to hit
you,
” Art said. “Police have the rounds she fired from your piece.”
“See, but once we’re in the bedroom, I don’t remember if she shot at me.”
“You had Cuba’s piece now, the Sig.”
“I did. I got him off me and went in the bedroom. I see her holding my Glock. She’s in her kimona.”
“You remember that,” Art said.
“I may never forget it,” Raylan said, “the kimona hangin open.”
“You told the police she had your piece in both hands, holding it up above her head, and asked, you said, in a flirty way, ‘Would you like to pat me down?’ ”
“She did,” Raylan said, “and I’m thinkin she’s having fun with me.”
“Till she put the gun on you, your gun,” Art said, “and you shot her right here”—Art touchin the center of his chest—“in the solar plexus.”
Raylan shook his head. “I didn’t think I was aimin.”
“You reacted,” Art said, “like they taught you at Glynco. Shoot first, some dink’s ready to put you down.”
“I’m still not sure what I think of Layla,” Raylan said, “except I wouldn’t call her a dink.”
Art said, “She look like fun to you?”
“If I didn’t already know her game. Yeah, I could have hung out with her.”
“You ever did,” Art said, “I believe I told you, you’d be lying somewhere without your kidneys.”
“Even knowing who she was,” Raylan said, “I came close to losing ’em. I go to arrest her and end up in a bathtub out cold. I was lucky to wake up, you know it?”
“But you aren’t surprised,” Art said. “You’re the law, you expect what you say goes. You’re like an old-time marshal, tells some guy he doesn’t like to get out of Dodge by sundown.”
Raylan was grinning. “You’re talking about that mob guy, the Zip.”
“You think that situation was funny?”
“See, I was to tell him, get out of Miami Beach by sundown? It isn’t like saying get out of Dodge. I gave the Zip twenty-four hours,” Raylan said, “to pack up and hit the road. The next day he’s at the Cardozo havin crab cakes, only a few minutes left of his time, so I know he’s armed. It’s what the man does for a living, brought here from Sicily to shoot some guy and stayed. Bought himself a double-breasted pinstriped suit like Joe Columbo’s . . . Did you know that?”
“He went for the gun,” Art said, “you took it on yourself to shoot him, and got sent to your old Kentucky home most likely for life.”
“Yeah, but I went up two grades,” Raylan said, “after being stuck for seven years. I think somebody upstairs liked me closin the Zip’s file.”
O
tis came out of his house and crossed the yard to where Boyd Crowder and some coal company man in a suit of clothes were looking at Otis’s fishpond: the pond down to barely a foot of water, fish floating dead in a scum of coal dust.
“You know how many years,” Otis said, “it took me to dig this pond, get it to look how I wanted? Stock it with channel cat, bluegill, some shiners? My grandkids used to come over and fish for the fun of it. Hook ’em and throw ’em back.”
Boyd said, “I bet less anybody was hungry. Otis, me and Mr. Gracie here are with M-T Mining? We go out to hear there any complaints. Folks in the hollers bitchin about debris coming down where we been stripping coal.”
Mr. Gracie said, still looking at the dead pond, “All the rocks and soil once the coal’s washed out, it’s got to go somewheres.”
“You don’t care it’s full of acid,” Otis said. “It kilt the stream fed my pond and now all my fish are belly up.”
He watched Mr. Gracie squat down at the edge of the pool, Mr. Gracie saying, “Hey, I believe one of ’em’s still alive. Look at the little fella flippin around in there wondering where the pond went.”
Otis stepped up behind him, planted his boot against the back of Mr. Gracie’s suitcoat and pushed him to throw out his arms and go facedown in the scum-covered pond.
Otis said, “Hard to breathe in there, huh?”
Boyd stopped grinning as Otis turned to him, Boyd saying, “I don’t think you shoulda done that.”
“Forty years in mines,” Otis said, “the whole time yes-sirin these company pimps. Well, not no more.”
I
n the evening Otis put supper on to boil—potatoes, turnips with greens—but first he sat with Marion while she held her robe closed tight to her chest breathing through her mouth. He gave her a couple of her OxyContins and a jelly glass of clear whiskey she’d sip on for a while. She had black lung from breathing the air, not ever having gone down a mine shaft.
He heard a bulldozer start up, a big diesel, knowing the sounds of the equipment, the dozers and draglines. The wolfhound heard it and got up off the floor. They’d blow charges and push the debris over the side from the strip job up on Looney Ridge. But this sounded close. Who was working in the dead of night?
By the time Otis heard branches breaking, rocks flying through the trees—knowing it was too late to grab Marion and run—a boulder the size of his Ford pickup came down on his house like the end of the world and the frame house gave up furniture, the walls, no way to stop the hunk of mountain crushing the floor, blowing out the front wall taking the door and windows, slowed some plowing through the flower beds, on flat ground now, and rolled into Otis’s pond to end its trip.
Marion, in her rocker holding her drink, coasting through clouds on oxy and shine, her back to the path of destruction, said to Otis, “What in the world was that?”
Otis said, “I’m gonna take you over to sister’s while I go up and see the mine company, all right? I come back, we may as well stay the night there.”
Marion watched Otis put on his worn-out suit coat over bib overalls and stuff the pockets with shotgun shells. In this moment her mind sounding clear, she said, “You finally had enough of mine companies, haven’t you?”
T
he M-T Mining office stood on a flat ridge shorn of trees and brush, carved away in the company’s hunger for coal. Boyd had been hosing the pond stink out of his SUV while Mr. Gracie told him what he wanted done.
“Lemme get this straight,” Boyd had said. “You want me to tip a boulder over the side and see if I can hit Otis’s house with it?”
“You can’t,” Mr. Gracie said, “I’ll get a man knows how.”
“Cause Otis shoved you in the muck,” Boyd said, “you want me to kill him?”
“I said bust up his house,” Mr. Gracie told him. “You don’t want to work Disagreements,” the most disagreeable man Boyd had ever known said, “you can hit the road.”
“I’m kidding with you,” Boyd said. “I don’t mind hearin people complain. They know they never gonna get what they want. They vent their ire, so to speak, and feel like they took it to the edge.”
Mr. Gracie had Boyd spread newspaper on the seat of his car, got in with his smell of muck and took off home.
Boyd said, “Pee-yew,” and went in the office trailer, a big double-wide all desks and drawing boards, no alcohol on the premises—half a pint of cheap vodka in a desk drawer, no naked girl on the calendar, nothing to make you want to work here.
This was before Otis came up the mountain.
F
irst, headlights swept the trailer and a black stretch limo pulled up next to the office. Boyd watched a woman get out and he stepped to the door and opened it. He saw her talking to her driver, giving him a few words, and the limo took off. Now she turned to the trailer, in the light from the open door, and Boyd was looking at Carol Conlan, the one person everybody saw in the newspaper or on TV when the mine company had something to say. Jesus Christ, Carol Conlan coming in smiling at him, saying, “You’re Boyd, aren’t you? The one dropped the rock on the guy’s house.”
How’d she know that already? Boyd started to ask her, but Carol Conlan was talking on her cell now, telling somebody, “I’m not going to hear that, Bob. Start over and give me a report I’m sure to love, okay?” She said, “I have to go to the bathroom,” and set down her phone.
She said to Boyd, “Where is it?” Boyd pointed and watched her go in and raise her skirt as she sat down, leaving the door open. Man, Carol Conlan.
She said, “You did a job on that house.”
“Only took me the one boulder,” Boyd said. He picked up her cell from the desk and sniffed to see if it had her scent.
“I thought it was cool,” Carol said, “flip the bucket and take out the entire house. What’s the guy doing about it?”
“Otis? Nothin,” Boyd said, “he’s an old man.”
“That Mick fairy Gracie—you always call him mister?”
“It’s what he told me,” Boyd said.
“He took it much too far,” Carol said, “destroying the home when we have a public hearing coming up.”
Boyd heard the toilet flush and Carol came out straightening her skirt. She said, “Now we’re the bad guys. That pond sounded like it was nice before we fucked it up.” She said, “I never liked Gracie much. I’ll have your jobs switched around and make you the boss. We have anything to drink?”
“Half a pint of vodka and all kinds of water,” Boyd said and saw the good-looking company Disagreements woman make a face and pick up her phone.
“I’ll call Brian, have him get a bottle of scotch. I hate vodka.”
O
tis had shot an elk up near the summit of Big Black, the mountain covered in a forest of old pine and aspen: came on the stag so close they both jumped at the sight of each other. Otis put him down with one shot, bled him out and they had meat the whole winter. This time he followed switchbacks up the grade to what was left of Looney Ridge, the side of the mountain carved into contoured benches. They drilled holes in the rock above the veins, and blew charges to get the coal out. Otis’s house—still a thousand feet down the mountain—would shake and pictures of his dad and Marion’s kin would fall off the wall. He’d told her, “By the war, they was a hundred and thirty thousand miners diggin coal in Kentucky. Now they’s a few dozen up there scrapin it out with Cats. It ain’t like coal mining no more.”
Marion asked him what it was like and Otis said, “Livin on the goddamn moon.”
He saw the bulldozer standing at the edge of the fall line, he saw lights on inside the double-wide they used for their office, didn’t care somebody was inside counting beans, Otis stepped out of his truck racking the twelve-gauge and began blowing out the trailer’s glass. Paused and looked around at the earthmoving machines standing idle, shut down for the night. Good, he wouldn’t have to shoot anybody come yellin at him.
Otis circled the double-wide blowing out windows, reloading twice on the way. He couldn’t see was anybody inside till Boyd Crowder stuck his head out the door.
O
tis, you done?”
“I’m on come in there next,” Otis said, “shoot up the office and put you out of business for an hour.”
“Otis,” Boyd said, “I had the key to the dynamite locker I’d give it to you. I feel I owe you for the damage done your house, even though it was Mr. Gracie said to do it.”
“I don’t
have
a house,” Otis said. “It’s gone.”
“All right,” Boyd said, keeping his tone down, “but you got it totaled account of your fishpond.”
“What’d you tell Mr. Gracie,” Otis said, “you gonna knock my house down soon as you get done kissin his ass? I remember you, Boyd, standin up like a man the time we struck Duke Power. But tell me what we got out of it.”
“Not much that time,” Boyd said.
“We got nothin. The whole country watchin, the company says they gonna play square with us. The country stops watchin. The company tells us it takes time to change ways of getting the coal out. They take twenty years thinking about it. It’s how it is and always been. The company builds a slurry pool gonna hold all the mess they make washing coal. The wall busts and poisons dump in the stream feeds my pond. I work for those people or ones like ’em forty years underground. They kill my fish and don’t think nothin of it.”
Close behind him Carol Conlan said, “He’s a threat.”
Boyd turned his head to the side.
“He broke some windows.”
He felt the company lady pull out the waist of his Levi’s and shove something hard against his spine. Boyd knew it was a gun, he’d packed guns stuck in there before. Now she was telling him, “I know all about you, Mr. Crowder, how you become different people whenever you feel the need.”
“I follow my instincts,” Boyd said. “Do the first thing comes to mind like my Higher Power is slippin me the word and I go with it. I’ve learned to think without arguing with myself.”
“Well, I’ve slipped you a Glock nine,” Carol said. “A loose cannon’s a high risk. He raises the shotgun, shoot him.”
“Otis? I told you, he broke some window’s all.”
“I’m not going to court on this,” Carol said, “while we’re the bad guys, and I won’t take risks with nothing at stake. We handle this right now. He raises his shotgun, shoot him.”
Otis, standing no more than twenty feet away, said to Boyd, “Who you talkin to?”
“Tell him,” Carol said.
“I got a lady visitin,” Boyd said. “One of the coal company high-ups come by to see how we’re doin up here. I told her well, the mountain keeps gettin lower, don’t it?”
Carol stepped into the doorway, gave Boyd a shove and he had to step outside. She said to Otis, “I’m the one looks into whatever we disagree on.”
“You want,” Otis said, “I’ll disagree on what you done to my pond, my home. How do you like being disagreed with?”
Carol began with a pleasant tone saying, “In a couple of days I’m coming back to put on a big open meeting and hear from both sides, friends of coal and complainers.” Carol changed her tone to a whine, pretending to rub her finger over a flat surface as she said, “They’s soot all over my organ I play at Sunday worship.” Herself again, Carol said, “You know that old coal song? ‘We have to dig the coal from wherever mother nature puts it.’ That’s what coal mining is all about.”
“It don’t mention the mess,” Otis said, “strip-minin makes of your home. You ever live in coal country you know that.”
“I was born and raised in Wise, West Virginia,” Carol said, “till I went away to law school.”
“Was any soot on you,” Otis said, “it’s gone now. My wife’s never been belowground, but she’s dyin of black lung, sleepin next to me forty-seven years breathin my snores.”
“That’s sweet,” Carol said, “but I think you have revenge in your mean old heart, you say the company destroyed your home—”
“And his fish pond,” Boyd said.
“Blames the company,” Carol said, “for his wife coming to the end of a miserable life.” She said to him, “Otis, you’re here to pay us back, aren’t you? Looking at me thinking I’m the goddamn company. All you have to do is raise the shotgun.”
Otis stared at Carol, his face working into a frown. He said, “The hell you doin to me?”
“I’ll show you,” Carol said, put the phone to her face and said, “Brian . . . where are you?” She said, “Call the Harlan County sheriff. Tell him there’s been a shooting up on Looney Ridge.” She turned to Otis. “Some old man with a shotgun’s gone crazy. That’s it and hang up.”
“I ain’t crazy,” Otis said, “you are,” but didn’t sound sure of himself, saying again, “The hell you doin to me?”
She was close to Boyd as he finally reached behind him for the Glock, fitting his hand to the grip.
Carol said, “What are you waiting for? Will you please shoot him?”
Boyd turned his head, raising his hands in kind of a helpless gesture, saying, “I don’t see the need, he can’t hurt us none.”
Carol took a step and yanked the Glock out of Boyd’s pants, shoved him out of the way, extending the Glock in one hand and shot Otis twice in the chest.
