Trampoline: An Illustrated Novel Read online

  Trampoline

  Trampoline

  An Illustrated Novel

  Robert Gipe

  Ohio University Press Athens

  Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

  ohioswallow.com

  © 2015 by Robert Gipe

  All rights reserved

  To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at (740) 593-1154 or (740) 593-4536 (fax).

  Printed in the United States of America

  Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ™

  25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gipe, Robert.

  Trampoline : an illustrated novel / Robert Gipe.

  pages cm

  Summary: “Trampoline, a debut novel by Robert Gipe, is set in the coalfields of Kentucky. Its narrator is Dawn Jewell, a teenager who recounts the turbulent time when her grandmother Cora led her into a fight to stop a mountaintop removal coal mine. Dawn’s father, Delbert, is dead, killed in the mines, leaving her mother, Tricia, a grieving drunk. Trampoline follows Dawn as she decides whether to save a mountain or save herself; be ruled by love or ruled by anger; remain in the land of her birth or run for her life. Trampoline includes more than two hundred drawings that punctuate the narrative in a unique, dramatic, and moving way and amplify Dawn’s telling of her story”— Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-8214-2152-9 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-8214-4524-2 (pdf)

  1. Teenage girls—Fiction. 2. Dysfunctional families—Fiction. 3. Coal mining—Kentucky—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3607.I4688T83 2015

  813’.6—dc23

  2014044397

  Dedicated to the memory of my father

  Robert Leroy Gipe

  1934–1994

  Act 1: Escape Velocity

  1: Driving Lesson

  Mamaw stared through the gray-gold wood smoke curling from a pile of burning brush in the front yard. I set a glass of chocolate milk at her elbow and sat down next to her on the porch glider.

  “That’s where they’re going to strip,” she said, nodding at the crest of Blue Bear Mountain. “They’ll start mining on the Drop Creek side. But they’ll be on this side before you graduate.” She sipped her chocolate milk. “You watch.”

  Mamaw linked her lean arm through mine and told me about growing up on Blue Bear Mountain. Her stories smelled of sassafras and rang with gunfire, and the sound of her voice was warm as railroad gravel in the summer sun, but the stories flitted through my mind and never lit. I was fifteen.

  That August, Mamaw signed her name to a piece of paper, a lands-unsuitable-for-mining-petition, the state calls it. The petition stopped a coal company from strip mining on Blue Bear Mountain. The coal companies told everybody Mamaw’s petition would be the end of coal mining. Halloween, Mamaw got her radio antenna broken off her car. We never even had a trick-or-treater.

  Mamaw didn’t get her antenna fixed until the Saturday before Thanksgiving. That afternoon Mamaw came in my room. I was eating M&M’s straight out of a pound bag, about to make myself sick. They weren’t normal M&M’s. They were the color of the characters in a cartoon movie that hadn’t done any good and the bags ended up at Big Lots, large and cheap and just this side of safe to eat.

  “Put them down if you want to go driving,” Mamaw said.

  I took off running for the carport. I was strapped into Mamaw’s Escort a long time before Mamaw came out. She got in the car and turned to me, the keys closed in her hand.

  “Put your seat belt on,” she said.

  “It is on, Mamaw.”

  “You know you got to keep your eyes moving when you’re driving.”

  “Yes, Mamaw.”

  A pickup truck covered in Bondo pulled up and spit out Momma.

  “Going for a driving lesson?” Momma’s cigarette bounced in her mouth.

  Neither one of us said anything. Momma jumped in the backseat. I closed my eyes and wished her gone. She was still there in the rearview when I opened my eyes. I started the Escort and backed onto the ridge road.

  “Slow down now,” Mamaw said. “You aint in no hurry.”

  My cousin Curtis come flying the other way on his four-wheeler. Mamaw’s Escort side-swiped the wall of rock on the high side of the road. The sound of the scraping metal felt like my own hide tearing off.

  “Daggone,” Momma said. “You’re worser than me.”

  “Hush, Patricia,” Mamaw said. “Dawn, are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, my hands shaking.

  “Get on home, then,” Mamaw said.

  When I pulled into the carport and shut off the motor, Mamaw and Momma got out and looked at the side of the car.

  “Whoo-eee,” Momma said.

  They went in the house, left me sitting there breathing hard, all flustered. I turned on the radio. It was tuned to a station Mamaw liked. Most of the time they played old country music, but that night they had some kind of rock show on. “I’m about to have a nervous breakdown,” a boy sang. “My head really hurts.” The guitars sounded like power tools being run too hard. I’d never heard such before. I turned it up til the speakers buzzed. The next song was a country song, all slow and twangy. I was about to turn it off when the singer sang, “My head really hurts.” The country song had the same words as the one before. At the end of the song, there was the sound of a throat clearing. The voice that spoke sounded like spent brake pads.

  “That was Whiskeytown doing the Black Flag song ‘Nervous Breakdown.’ Before that we had the Black Flag original. You’re listening to Bilson Mountain Community Radio. I’m Willett Bilson. This here next one is another record I got from my brother Kenny, by the band Mission of Burma.”

  Willett Bilson sounded about my age. He sounded like someone I would like to talk to. The power tool guitars started again. Willett played five angry, reckless songs in a row. My head got light. I started the engine and slipped the shift into reverse. The bands came on one right after another, rough and mad, and they carried me through curve after curve. It felt good, like riding a truck inner tube down a snowy hill curled up in my dad’s lap. When I pulled into Mamaw’s, rain pecked the carport roof, bending the last of the mint beside the patio. Inside, Momma was gone, and Mamaw set a bowl of vegetable soup in front of me. She didn’t say anything about me taking the car back out.

  The next day after school, Mamaw asked me if I wanted to ride with her to Drop Creek, the place where she grew up, to look at a man’s house. I ran out of the house and started the Escort.

  “You aint ready to drive to Drop Creek,” she said. “You need more practice.”

  “Well then, I aint going.”

  “Yes, you are. Scoot over.”

  The house we went to had vinyl siding and set on blocks. The yard was neat and the gravel thick on the driveway. A little boy with a head like a toasted marshmallow bounced a pink rubber ball against the wall under the carport. When he saw us he hollered in the house. A stout silver-haired man came out.

  “How yall doing?” he said. He told me how tall I was getting like everybody does. “Want a piece of pound cake?” People always fix pound cake when Mamaw comes to talk about their troubles with the coal company. We went inside. It was quiet and neat in there too.

  “Look at that Christmas cactus,” Mamaw said. “So beautiful.”

  “Thank you,” the man’s wife said. “It likes that spot.”

  The wife had a northern accent. She moved through the room making things straight. Mamaw and the silver-haired man set dow
n at a table in the kitchen next to the wall. I stood at Mamaw’s shoulder. The man showed Mamaw pictures he pulled from a drugstore one-hour photo folder.

  “These was done before they started blasting.” The man pointed at a picture of the block at the base of the house. “I took these the other day.” He showed Mamaw a picture of a crack running up through the same block. Then he showed her a closeup picture with a thumb stuck up in the crack.

  Mamaw said, “Did the state inspect?”

  “Yeah,” the man said, “they did.”

  “What did they say?”

  “I keep notebooks where I write down when the blasts happen and how long they last. They looked at them said they’d look into it.”

  “That all they said?”

  The man’s wife set down a plate of sliced pound cake, a bowl of strawberries, and a tub of Cool Whip. Mamaw looked at the pound cake, then she looked into the man’s eyes.

  “They said subsidence was natural, could have caused those cracks,” the man said.

  “Oh, bullshit,” Mamaw said. “When was this house built?” Mamaw put a piece of pound cake on a paper napkin, took a big bite out of it.

  “Daddy built it with Granddaddy. Right after him and Mommy got married. Finished it a year before they went to Michigan. So, 1958, 1959. Something like that.”

  “And you aint never had no cracks before, have you?”

  “No ma’am,” the man said. “Not that I know of.”

  “Pure sorry,” Mamaw said, spooning out strawberries and Cool Whip into a bowl. She crumbled the rest of her pound cake down on top of the strawberries and Cool Whip and mashed it all up with a spoon. Then Mamaw said, “What do you want to do about it, Duane?”

  “Well,” the man said, “I hate to see people get run over.”

  “You coming to the meeting Tuesday?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I got a doctor’s appointment in Corbin. But I should be back.”

  “Well,” Mamaw said, “we could use you. You coming tonight to the planning meeting?”

  “I’ll be there,” Duane said.

  I went outside. Marshmallow boy threw his ball into a pile of leaves. A little black dog leapt in the leaves and disappeared. The rustling leaves looked like Bugs Bunny moving underground.

  Mamaw and the boy’s daddy come outside, and the man showed Mamaw the cracks.

  “The blast shook the whole house, throwed her china plates out on the floor,” the man said. “They was stood up in a cabinet and they busted all over the place.” The man shook his head.

  Mamaw toed a weed in the gravel. The little dog ran up to me and the boy, dropped the ball, and backed off, its tail wagging. Mamaw told the man to thank his wife for the pound cake, that it was real good. Mamaw drove us back to Long Ridge.

  The state scheduled a meeting the Tuesday before Thanksgiving for people to come and give their testimony about whether or not the company’s permit to mine should be approved. Monday night Mamaw’s group had a meeting in town at the library to talk about what they were going to say at the meeting on Tuesday. That’s the way it was that fall. Meetings about meetings, and then a meeting on top of that. Again she made me go, and again she wouldn’t let me drive.

  I sat at the back of the room in the basement of the public library and looked at pictures of the USS Canard County in a glass case. It was a navy ship that hauled tanks and trucks to Haiti and the Persian Gulf and Argentina til the navy sold it to Spain.

  The organizers that the statewide group sent came in carrying rolled-up maps and armloads of flyers and information sheets. The one named April wore a homemade sweater of purple yarn that hung big on her. The one named Portia had leather patches across the shoulders of her sweater, like she was on a submarine. They both had big wild hair. Mamaw said they looked like woolyboogers.

  April and Portia talked awhile, and then different ones in the group said things. A man with a receding hairline stood up and said that they would use the same explosives on that strip job that blew up the building in Oklahoma City. A woman with short hair and a sticky-faced little boy said they used to eat fish out of the creek.

  “You see what it is now,” the woman said. “Yellow mud.” She put spit on her thumb and used it to wipe her boy’s face.

  Mamaw said, “Duane, why don’t you say what happened to yall.”

  Duane told what had happened to him, to his house.

  April told them they had to practice what they were going to say, have their facts straight, if their petition was to stop any new strip mines on Blue Bear Mountain. They had to have goals, April said. She put paper on the glass case that held the sugar-cube battleship and made people make a list of goals. Portia put big maps on the case and showed them what lands would be protected.

  When they took a break, a woman with a gray ponytail and trembling hands out smoking said the dust from the coal trucks was so bad she couldn’t let her grandbabies play outside. April tried to get her to say she would talk at the meeting.

  On the way home, Mamaw stopped at the Kolonel Krispy dairy bar and got a double fudge shake with brownies swirled up in it. We sat in the parking lot and watched the red light, and Mamaw said all strip mining ought to be outlawed. I asked her if I could drive home. She said I needed to practice more.

  When we got home, Mamaw looked at a pile of mail on the kitchen counter. “Where’s my check?” she said. Three of Momma’s cigarettes were in the ashtray. Mamaw called my uncle Hubert’s house and asked where Momma was. They said she’d gone to Walmart. When Mamaw caught up to Momma in the Walmart parking lot, Mamaw’s face was solid red.

  “You come here,” Mamaw said, hard as a broomstick to the back of the legs.

  Momma kept walking towards the store. I guess Momma didn’t think Mamaw would do anything in the Walmart parking lot.

  Mamaw caught up to Momma and got her by the arm and smacked her in the face. She stuck her hand in Momma’s front pocket and pulled out a wad of money.

  “You don’t do me that way,” Momma yelled.

  “Watch me,” Mamaw said.

  Then they both went to yelling at the same time. I went in the store, looked dead in the eye of the people coming out, the ones who didn’t know yet Cora Redding and her wasted daughter were having it out in the yellow stripes of the crossing zone. I went back to jewelry and asked my dad’s niece who worked there to take me home. She said it would be an hour. I wandered through the store, through the Christmas candy and blow-up snowmen and stupid dancing Santas playing the electric slide and stupid reindeer socks. My cousin took me to the snack bar and bought me everything I wanted to eat. Pizza sticks. Two slushies. Then we went to the Chinese restaurant. I ate every fried egg noodle they had in there.

  When my cousin dropped me off at Mamaw’s, Momma and Mamaw sat at the kitchen table, hundreds of envelopes and flyers saying write the governor to protect Blue Bear on the table between them. Momma helped Mamaw stuff the envelopes like nothing had happened. I was so sick on cookies and pop and hot dogs and Chinese food.

  But I didn’t. I went to my bed panting like a black dog in August and swore to the ceiling I wouldn’t never have a child. When I slept, I dreamed I was playing music on the radio with Willett the DJ.

  The next day in biology, a girl from up the river sat behind me and talked to her cousin the whole class about whose chicken nuggets had better crust. “They got too much pepper on theirs.” “Them others is too mushy.” I was ready to kill her. I turned around and said, “There’s more to life than chicken nuggets, you know.” She looked at me like I wasn’t there.

  I told my friend Evie about the chicken nugget girl when we were out in the parking lot drinking beer at lunchtime.

  “I whipped that girl one time,” Evie said. “It wasn’t fun at all.”

  I asked her why not.

  “She’s too stupid,” Evie said. “It was like stomping a baby bird.”

  I told Evie about the band that played the nervous breakdown song. Black Flag. She said she never hea
rd of them. She only listened to what was new. I told Evie about the radio station on Bilson Mountain. She said only old people and hippies listened to that station.

  Mamaw picked me up after school. “I need to stop by Duane’s,” Mamaw said.

  The sun peeped over the ridgeline and lifted steam off Duane’s roof. In the shadows there was still frost on the yard. A dark pile of something lay in the carport. I thought it was a wadded-up shirt. It was the little black dog frozen solid. Mamaw knocked at the kitchen door and went in before anyone answered. I stood in the carport looking at the dead dog. It was going flat. Its tongue was out. There was no sign of the boy. The pink ball was up against the back wheel of Duane’s truck. Mamaw came out of the house. “Let’s go,” she said.

  “What happened, Mamaw?”

  “Duane aint coming to the meeting.”

  “Why not?”

  “Somebody fed his dog broken glass mashed up in hamburger.”

  The meeting was in a stone community building the VISTAs built on Blue Bear Creek back in the sixties. There must have been two hundred people there. Where Blue Bear had the state’s highest peak on it, people all over were excited about protecting it. It wasn’t just an ordinary mountain with ordinary people living on it. It belonged to the whole state.

  Three people from the state—two men and a woman—sat in front of the stage at a table. Their powder-blue shirts had button-down collars and an embroidered patch of the state seal on the sleeve. Hair striped the top of one man’s head. The other had a thick bronze helmet of hair. The woman’s eyes were wide behind clear-framed glasses, cheap like they gave us for free at school. The three of them sat behind their table. They stacked and restacked their papers, took folders out of file boxes and then put them back in.

  People filed in in clots of three and four. There were painted signs saying stuff like “SAVE BLUE BEAR,” and “COAL KEEPS THE LIGHTS ON” strung out along the walls of the community center. People settled in, talking low to them they came with, leaning forward and greeting the people on their side with pats on the back and handshakes, smiling.