Strange as This Weather Has Been (3 page)

For a couple hundred yards, it was just the same hollow it had always been, except for the flood mess in the creek. It had dammed itself head-high in the elbows and narrows, thrown itself up along the sides. Towers of treetops and logs and brush, spiked all through with tires and metal, then the little stuff gobbed in that, pop bottles,
sticks and plastic, hung up and quivering. The creek water itself still colored like creamed coffee left for weeks on a counter. Then Jimmy Make said, “flyrock,” and I realized the road was roughed up not just from flood damage, but from blast damage, too, and then I started seeing how big trees slid down the hollow side and water poured off the mountain in little runs where runs had never been before.

We got to these big dirt piles right in the middle of the road, and “company,” Jimmy said, and I knew they’d dozed them up to keep out people like Jimmy Make and me. I slunk down in my seat, peered up high through the windowshield into what woods were left. Looking for guards. Now Jimmy Make wasn’t driving the road so much as he was playing it, and when we hit the first dirt roadblock, he just plowed right up on it, the loose tools in the bed rolling and crashing down at the tailgate, and he rammed over, pow. “Hwoo,” Jimmy said to himself.

Then the sediment ponds. I’d seen these before in other hollows, clear back to when me and Grandma were running the woods. They were put in by the company to catch the runoff, but I saw that Lace was right, Lyon Energy wasn’t keeping them up. They were jammed with stuff, and you could see pretty quick how the sides of some were tore through by the flood. I knew Jimmy Make believed it was these busted ponds that had caused the flood, and I saw what he meant. He said the flood came because of the ponds and from the hollow sides being scraped, and I saw that, too. The sides of the hollow, as we got further in, more naked and scalped, more trees coming down, and up above, mostly just scraggly weeds, the ground deep-ribbed with erosion, and I told myself, yes, this is where the floods come from. From the busted ponds and the confused new shape of the land. From how the land has forgot where the water should go, so the water is just running off every which way.
That’s all it is,
I told myself,
Lace is stretching things again.
But after what I’d seen three weeks ago in May, I wondered if it wasn’t as bad as Lace thought.

I hadn’t been home when the cloudburst hit. I’d been on the ridge above Left Fork, and I wasn’t far from a good rock overhang Grandma’d always called the Push-in Place, and I holed up there until it stopped. The rain didn’t last long, although the half hour it did, it came heavy, but pretty soon, I was skidding on down the mountain towards the Ricker Run, thinking nothing of it. The run was moving high and muddy, like it should be after a quick hard storm like that, but it hadn’t left its banks. It had nothing to do with what happened to Yellowroot Creek because, I understood later, the mountaintop removal mine wasn’t draining into the Ricker Run yet. But as I got closer to where the trees opened into the clearing before Yellowroot Creek and then our house, I started hearing something, and for a minute, I couldn’t figure what it was. Then I started running.

Before I even got out of the woods, I saw the footbridge was gone, and how many years of cloudbursts like that one had the footbridge gone through and never washed out? my mind moving fast and blurry, but then I was out of the trees, into the open where I could see, and then I thought,
Tommy. Corey. Dane. Mom.
“Mom!” I shouted. By then the creek was blasting through our yard, torrenting against the house underpinning, terrible bright brown with white chops raging in it, and down its rapids torpedoed trash and metal and logs, logs, logs, them crashing into the upstream end of the house, careening off and spinning around, and as I watched, one tree batter-rammed the fiberglass skirting and just jammed itself stuck, the loose end whip-tailing in current. “Mom!” I screamed, and I was racing up and down my side of the bank like a penned dog, looking for a place to jump across, looking for her or my little brothers in the blank house windows, and how long would the house hold? until, at the downstream end, I slipped in the mud, slammed down on one knee, looked across the creek, and saw Lace.

The water boiled right above her knees, her sopped work uniform clinging to her, and I yelled, but she couldn’t hear me, her plunging her arm under water to the shoulder, and I realized she was looking for something. Only later would I know it was the weedeater, she’d already got the lawnmower up on the porch before the current had gotten this bad, the weedeater and lawnmower were the only work Jimmy Make had now. And I saw a muddy log boring straight down on her, and I screamed, and she could not hear but ducked it anyway.

Then she gave up looking and started fighting current towards the front door, crouched over, her arms spread for balance, the debris barreling at her, tires, Styrofoam pieces, a pallet, I saw her twisting and swerving like in a dodgeball game. But she was hardly gaining ground, so she gave up on that, too, turned downstream now, looking over her shoulder always for what was coming behind, the flood force pushing her ahead of herself until she fell down, caught herself, stumbled back up, a clot of plastic jugs glancing off her back, then she dropped into water on purpose this time, I could tell she meant it, and started half-swimming, half-crawling, towards the stand of sumac and other little trees that marked the end of our yard. She fell forward into the thicket, pulled herself upright with each hand around a small trunk, and the trees stood close enough together to make like a cage around her, and although the water could breach the cage, the big pieces of debris and logs could not.

The water dropped quick after that. The roar sunk to where she could hear me hollering. She struggled out of the sumac, limping a little, her uniform muddy and torn. She waved at me.Then she pushed down on the air with that hand, like telling a kid to quiet, and I could read her lips: “It’s okay. It’s okay.” But I knew better than that.

 

Another dike was looming ahead, and this time Jimmy went around it, jerked the truck onto the grassy outside bank of the pond, and
made a road that way. Then we were riding smoother, but it felt like we were going to tip, and I locked the door with my elbow. I thought again of the guards, how they must leave a few nosing around even when the mine wasn’t working, and surely they would hear the truck. The ponds stairstepped all the way up the hollow, and as the hollow rose, narrowed, those top ponds no longer even pretended at grass, nothing but flood trash and rock. And then it got to where not even Jimmy Make could drive a truck any farther.

He idled it there a second, no doubt considering just crashing on through, but then he switched off the ignition, stomped the brake, and swung out. I followed him. Hit ground, my bones still humming off the jar of the ride, and soon as I left the inside of the truck—sudden silence, clawed-up earth, sky shifting towards rain—even though I was fifteen years old, how small I felt. Like anything could get me. I craned my neck a little around the bend, and I saw for the first time the mine rim, just a piece of it was all I could see from that angle. A prickle moved under my hair. I recognized it from the others I’d seen from highways, sudden dead spots in what should be green, but then, in the car, you’d swing on by and not see it anymore. Jimmy Make didn’t even notice. He was just swaggering on up towards the turn, and I knew why. Still preening in what he’d just done, the fuck-the-company pride of it. But when we got around that bend, even Jimmy Make’s cockiness drained away.

The edge of the mine top towered several hundred feet right over our heads, a straight gray line that started at the east flank of Cherryboy, then ran as far to the right as my head could swivel. Lace had said they hadn’t got Cherryboy yet, and she was right, but not even all those late-night listenings had got me ready for how the top of Yellowroot was just plain gone.Where ridgetop used to be, nothing but sky. Under that sky, what looked from this distance like raw colorless gravel but must have been piled-up rock. And beyond that, nothing at all.

Jimmy’d stopped too when we first caught sight of that full edge, but we had to walk a little farther around the turn to check what Lace had sent us for.When Jimmy started off again, I followed right behind, my head down, me closer to him than I’d been in some time. He wore a black T-shirt faded to a plum color, and I watched his back, not ready to see the fill, and telling myself, it couldn’t be as high, as bad, as it already looked like it was going to be. But then Jimmy stopped, and I stopped, too, and there the fill was. And I couldn’t pretend anymore.

The closest thing I’d ever seen to it was the Summersville Dam, but this was bigger, darker, and looser. I hauled back my head and looked up its whole height, and it seemed to me it must be as tall as the highest buildings in Charleston, but who knew for sure. There was just no way to gauge how tall the thing was because there was nothing natural about it, nothing you could compare it to, and then it dawned on me exactly what I was standing under—Yellowroot Mountain, dead. I knew from Lace and Uncle Mogey that after they blasted the top off the mountain to get the coal, they had no place to put the mountain’s body except dump it in the head of the hollow. So there it loomed. Pure mountain guts. Hundreds of feet high, hundreds of feet wide. Yellowroot Mountain blasted into bits, turned inside out, then dumped into Yellowroot Creek.

We were standing at the edge of a big field of rocks that jumbled the space between the last pond and the bottom of the fill. Strange rocks that pushed me away when I looked, the rawness of them, no weather to them yet, despite all the rain. Jimmy had spread his legs and jammed his hands on his hips, and when he reared back to look up, the shirt jerked loose of his jeans. I watched him watching. He was all the time bragging about how he’d worked in the industry for years. He was supposed to be able to tell something about this. “Fuck,” he said. The sky was making to rain again, pushing breeze ahead of it. Jimmy Make tightened one bootlace and started across.

I swallowed. He was picking his way, his arms winged out for balance, his chin tipped down. The breeze pimpled me along my arms and in the small of my back, even though there wasn’t enough chill in the breeze to do that. Then I shut down my mind and plunged after him, taking the rocks like a bear would, bent all the way over so I was walking on my feet and my hands. I didn’t want to touch those rocks with my hands, but I figured it would be worse to walk upright, then slip and skin an ankle, let it get in your blood. No. In the cracks between the rocks, gooey liquid stuff. Dark greens and blacks that turned blue when light hit them.

I reached the base of the fill on all fours before Jimmy did on his feet. I pushed my neck back to see to the top again, and now I noticed how it looked like it maybe had two tops, one in front, one behind. But I couldn’t be sure. It was like I’d see two, but then my eyes would bend, and it would look like just one top again. And this close up to the fill, it was even harder to take it all as real. It was like my mind didn’t want to make a place for this here.

By now, the sun had started dropping behind the blasted-off ridge, but we could still see easy the leaks in the bottom of the fill, water drooling out here and there even though it hadn’t rained in a couple days. I watched Jimmy Make. He just stood there. All I could read on his face was mad.

“Maybe Lace is right,” I said.

Jimmy spat into one of the leaks. Lifted his eyes off that and upswept them the height of the valley fill. I asked him again, “Do you think she’s right? There’s water standing up behind it?”

Jimmy Make still didn’t look at me. But he usually didn’t. “That ain’t no dam,” he finally said.

“I know it’s not no dam. Do you think there’s an impoundment behind it?”

“Well,” said Jimmy, “I doubt that.”

I looked at him. His belly paunching out under the untucked shirt. His brown eyes narrowed under the camouflage cap. Then I understood that he wasn’t exactly bullshitting me because he was bullshitting himself first. And right there I knew for sure what I’d suspected all along—Jimmy Make couldn’t tell any more about what was going on than I could.

It was me was going to have to climb up that fill and see what was behind it.

IF I HAD
me a four-wheeler. If I did, now. Seth has a four-wheeler, and Seth’s only nine. And Seth hardly ever rides his four-wheeler, just goes to waste in the shed, why should Seth have a four-wheeler? If I had me a four-wheeler . . .

But Corey has to make do with his bike. Dad says they can’t get an ATV because it’s too dangerous, but Corey knows it’s because it’s too expensive. So he makes do with his bike. Which he can ride better and do more tricks on than anybody up and down Yellowroot, and probably better than anybody in town, too. If town would have some kind of bike contest, like Corey has seen on TV, but not their town.
Some town.

Last day of school, early dismissal, and now Corey and Tommy sit under the house, each holding one foot turned up in one hand. Since the flood rammed loose some of the underpinning, they can get up in there easier, and with the flood-ripped insulation dangling around, it’s like a spookhouse.The flood knocked loose the washer’s drainpipe, too, and Dad won’t fix it, says Lyon Energy can, so now when Mom runs the washer, the water gushes straight into a runnel it has worn
under the house, so you can pretend it’s an underground river. Gold in it. Corey and Tommy sit up under there, and also Chancey, the outside dog, flopped on his side in a dirt hollow he’s dug. Corey has an old steak knife he keeps hidden in the tape that Dad wrapped around some of the pipe joints, and him and Tommy are testing how tough their feet are. Corey drills the dull point of the old steak knife, slow, into the calluses on their feet, and he counts until the person being stabbed yelps, cries, or winces.Tommy, who is six, tends to yelp or cry. Corey, ten, tends to wince or cuss. You can cuss and keep counting numbers. Then Corey writes the number of seconds with a ballpoint pen on the inside of his arm after each of their initials: C and T. There are four numbers total because they drill four times: ball of the left foot, ball of the right, heel of the left foot, heel of the right.