Sister Mine (4 page)

“No.”

“A plaque?”

He shakes his head.

“Well, there should be,” she says indignantly.

He doesn't bother telling her that everyone around here agrees that there should be something to mark the spot but no one can agree on what it should be or who should pay for it; while everyone else argued, Nature immediately reclaimed it with grass and weeds.

“Can we walk out there?” she asks.

“Sure.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Only during hunting season.”

She gives him a questioning tilt of her head.

“You might get shot,” he explains.

“Oh,” she says.

Before she can ask him anything else, he mutters something about being expected somewhere and jumps into my car.

We leave her in our dust.

         

E.J. LIVES IN A SMALL
white ranch house set back from the road at the top of a steep gravel driveway. Structurally the house is well cared for but the premises lack any decorative touches. No landscaping to speak of. No flowers. No lawn ornaments. No curtains on the windows.

A detached garage invisible from the road sits behind the house. His old brown Dodge Ram pickup is parked in front of it with the hood open. A few tools are scattered about. He must have been working on it again before he went on his walk.

I park behind the truck.

He gets out and heads straight to the garage.

Before I follow him, I open my glove compartment and take out a bottle of Advil and dry-swallow a couple capsules. I'm starting to hurt after my fight with Choker.

I find him bent over with his head and torso hidden behind an open refrigerator door and one dirty hand clutching the door handle. The mother in me wants to scold him for wasting electricity and letting all the cold air out. I also want to tell him he needs to do a better job of washing his hands, but I don't say anything.

His decision made—the choices are beer, beer, and beer—he steps back, holding a beer in one hand, and closes the door with a slam, leaving a set of motor oil fingerprints behind to mark his territory.

When he remembers me, he reaches back into the fridge and tosses me a can, too.

I snap it open and beer gushes all over my hand. I look around for a roll of paper towels or something to wipe it off with. I don't see anything.

“Use the finger,” he says, gesturing toward a giant yellow foam
WE ARE NUMBER ONE
finger from a Steelers game.

It's covered in fingerprints, too, and dotted with hardened stains and flecks of dried foodstuffs. A few chunks of foam are missing, like someone has taken a couple bites out of it.

“I'll pass,” I tell him.

I pull up a lawn chair and take a seat. The garage is his pride and joy and much homier than the house. He built it himself and has pictures of it in various stages of construction tacked to the back of his workbench the same way my dad used to display baby pictures of me and Shannon.

He has an old couch out here and a small TV. His J&P baseball team cap and jersey hang on a nail and a deodorant stick sits on a shelf between a pair of jumper cables and a flashlight. In amongst a couple Ball jars of random nails and screws is a pair of photos in attached frames that close like a book. His mom just gave them to him: one is his parents' original wedding photo and the other was taken at their fortieth anniversary celebration last month.

Reading material consists of copies of
Field & Stream,
a few Victoria's Secret catalogs he's snagged from a girlfriend's place, and a few hardcover novels in cracked, discolored, plastic library dust jackets, which I'm willing to bet are several years overdue.

He has a makeshift kitchen set up on a card table next to the fridge that consists of a few mismatched plates and bowls, a battered coffee maker, and a George Foreman grill I got him for Christmas. He loves the grill so much he named it. He calls it George.

He keeps his dinner bucket and thermos on the table, too, and I can't stop looking at them.

I have no idea how he's been able to go back into the mines after what happened to him, but I guess car crash survivors get back into cars, and injured soldiers go back into battle, and abused women sleep with their abusers.

I know how hard it would be for him to quit. I know how much he loves running the continuous miner, the sixty-ton cutting machine that's replaced the manual jobs of undercutting and blasting that the miners of the past used to do. The machine is a wonder, according to E.J., but like most miners who have been around for awhile, he had mixed feelings about it when the company first started using it because it did the work of at least fifty men, which meant those fifty men lost their jobs.

He's told me there's nothing in life that thrills him as much as the sight and feel of the miner's gigantic steel cutter head ripping into the coal face, its dozens of carbide teeth chewing up the wall of rock with the same ease as an electric knife carving through a rump roast.

Part of the rush comes purely from the power he feels while guiding it, but I'm sure another part comes from pride. He's one of the best operators in the business. With him at the controls, the massive machine moves cleanly and efficiently. No one—including Lib—can match his speed or get as much coal out of a cut with as little movement.

But even knowing how much he loves it, I still don't understand how he went back.

I still have the occasional nightmare where I wake up clammy and cotton-mouthed thinking I'm still standing numbly and helplessly on the hillside overlooking the rescue site wondering if I should be praying that he's still alive or that he died instantly.

I can't imagine what kind of nightmares he has.

I take a gulp of my beer.

“You want George to make you a burger?” he asks as he pulls up his own lawn chair.

“Not right now. Maybe later.”

I look around for a diversion. I want to talk to him. I need to talk. But I'm not anxious to begin.

I spot yesterday's newspaper sitting on top of a stack of papers in his bright orange recycle bin.

“So you guys actually went through with it,” I comment, referring to the front-page story about the Jolly Mount Five suing J&P Coal. “It's all anybody's talking about.”

He glances over at the paper too, and his face puckers like he's just heard a bad joke.

“We filed the papers. Whatever the hell that means. Now we're waiting to see what he does next.”

The way he says “he” I know he can only be referring to God or Cam Jack.

My mind flashes to the visit he paid the miners in the hospital the day after their rescue. It was unannounced and a complete surprise since he had never bothered to show up while they were trapped.

He went to their rooms one after the other. Suddenly there he'd be standing in a hospital room doorway: Cam Jack himself in a fine dark suit with a pristine white shirt, a steel-gray tie the same color as his slicked-back hair, and an American flag tie clip, looking hale and hearty despite his own recent hospitalizations and the rumors flying around about his failing health.

He proclaimed that he didn't give a good goddamn about hospital policy and being politically correct and gave them all boxes of cigars and bottles of whiskey.

He called them “my boys” and even though that term would have caused all of them to bristle if he had used it a week earlier or a month later, at the time they didn't seem to mind. There was nothing like a successful rescue mission to soothe the tensions between the foot soldiers and the top brass, especially when the big man himself showed up brimming with praise and bearing gifts.

He pulled up a chair, settled his bulk into it, and talked to them about their grandfathers and their dads and their uncles. How his own dad always said those boys up in Jolly Mount were the toughest, most dependable miners on God's green earth. He used to say he'd give four of his Marvella miners for just one working Josephine.

He knew the old man watched the whole rescue from his seat up there in heaven. He may have even had something to do with them getting out alive. And you can be sure he was damn proud of them. Lesser men would have given up. Lesser men would have gone nuts.

Personally, he never doubted that they were going to come out of it alive, either. He understood them. They were cut from the same cloth. They were from the same place. They were in the same business, and they were proud of what they did. Outsiders didn't always understand. Hell, he couldn't tell them how many times he had to defend himself and his family to other rich people because the Jacks made their first fortune in coal. Like that made him dirty or something. Like money made from owning hotels or selling wrinkle cream was somehow superior. Money was money and he had enough to live anywhere he wanted to but he lived in Centresburg, PA, goddammit. This was his home, too.

I was visiting E.J. when I heard him coming down the hall to his room. I ran and hid in the john. I hadn't seen Cam Jack in the flesh for over twenty years.

“You don't sound too excited about it,” I tell E.J.

“Dusty and Lib and Ray all want to do it,” he answers, hoping I won't notice that he's avoiding telling me what he thinks about it. “Dusty's desperate for the money since his restaurant went belly-up. He doesn't care where the hell it comes from or why he's getting it. Ray's got a family. He needs the money too, plus he'll go along with anything Lib says, and Lib says if a jury of our peers thinks we should have some of Cam Jack's billions then why shouldn't we?”

“He's got a point,” I reply. “But I don't get how this works. The investigation's been over for almost a year now and J&P's in the clear.”

E.J.'s pucker becomes more pucked.

“According to our lawyer,” he begins to explain, “the results of the investigation don't matter in civil court. We don't have to prove anything. All that matters is everybody knows what an asshole Cam Jack is. How bad his mines are. How many safety violations have been cited against him. How everybody knows the explosion in Beverly was his fault too, even though nobody could hang it on him. He says we don't need any proof at all. All we need to do is get up on the stand and tell what it was like to be buried alive for four days. All we need is a sympathetic jury.”

I nod my understanding.

“I know your dad's against it,” I add.

He smiles.

“He really got into it the other night with Lib. My dad said”—here he breaks into a perfect impression of Jimmy's brogue—“‘You're a grown man, Lib. No one put a gun to your head and chose your job for you. It was your choice, and every day you went to work you knew there was a chance you'd die. So I say it's your fault. Sue your bloody self.'”

“And you agree with him?”

“All I know is miners don't sue coal companies.”

“Why not? Everybody sues everybody nowadays. Why shouldn't you?”

“Everybody's looking to get something for nothing.”

“This wouldn't be for nothing. The money would be for—”

“For what?” he interrupts me. “Waiting to die? How much is that worth in dollars?”

He gets up from his seat and heads to the fridge for another beer.

“I don't want his money,” he says. “I work for my money. Plus I got enough money from the book deal and that idiotic TV movie.”

I know he's sincere. I also know he wouldn't get any personal satisfaction from beating Cam Jack in a courtroom. To a guy like E.J., there's something innately cowardly about hiding behind checkbooks and lawyers and legalese. Beating Cam Jack on the ball field or in a game of pool would be appealing, but court means nothing to him.

He realizes a judge and jury can't fix what he considers to be wrong with the man. His stinginess, his carelessness, his lack of appreciation for the company his dad gave him almost led to the destruction of the mine where E.J. worked. I think this bothers E.J. even more than the fact that he almost died. The threats to his physical well-being are a hazard of the profession that he accepted when he took the job, but the treatment of the mine and the equipment he can't forgive. What kind of man doesn't take care of his own stuff?

“What do you want?” I ask him.

I hear the refrigerator door slam behind me and the snap of a beer can being opened.

“I want my old life back.”

I glance around his garage. Anyone who didn't know him the way I do would find his comment funny. The surface of his life now compared to his life before the accident is exactly the same. He has the same job. Lives in the same house. Goes to the same bar. He didn't buy a new truck or a bigger TV or a better mower. He didn't get a new wardrobe or a new philosophy on life or start eating new foods and drinking new beer.

He told me it would have been an affront to the life he had prayed so hard to keep if he changed anything about it after he was allowed to keep it. But something did change that was beyond his control. Something inside himself. I know the feeling. Survival is a great thing, but the knowledge of what you survived never goes away; you can't escape from yourself.

“I think Shannon's alive,” I blurt out.

“What?” he says and comes walking back to his lawn chair. “Are you serious?”

I nod. I can't say anything more at first and E.J. doesn't pry.

When I feel properly composed, I tell him all about Gerald Kozlowski.

He doesn't say anything at first. He just stares at a grease stain on the cement floor.

“Have you told my mom?” is the first thing he asks.

“No. You're the first one I've told.”

“You've got to tell her. Shannon was like her own kid. So were you.”

I know he's right. Isabel took care of Shannon during the years before she was old enough for a full day of school. She quit her job teaching and sacrificed a second income that her own family could have used in order to babysit for the child of a man who never showed any gratitude. When I was a child myself, I simply regarded all of this as some more nice stuff these nice people felt compelled to do for us because of a combination of their niceness and our desperate situation.