Trampoline: An Illustrated Novel Page 2

  When time came to start, the man with the bronze helmet of hair leaned forward into a microphone. “Good evening everyone. This hearing is required by law, and pertains to mine 848-1080, amendment 3, a surface-mining permit application in the Drop Creek and Little Drop Creek watersheds in Canard County, Kentucky. Everyone who wishes to speak should have already signed up. All speakers will be limited to three minutes. If anyone has more to say, they may wait until everyone who has signed up to speak has spoken, and then we will go around again. I would remind everyone no decision will be made tonight. Everything said will go into the file and will be taken into consideration as the cabinet makes its decision. We will begin in three minutes.”

  After three minutes, they called the name of the first woman signed up to speak. The state woman brought her a wireless microphone. The first woman said she was proud of her husband, that she had married him because she wanted to be a coal miner’s wife. She said she would not be ashamed of what he did and would not allow her children to be ashamed of what he did.

  The second person to speak was also a woman. She said the state should consider all the trash that was in the creeks, how terrible a shape the road was in. All the dust from the coal trucks flying up and down the road was terrible. She couldn’t even hang her clothes out on the line, she said, and when she said something to one of the drivers he was just rude.

  The third speaker he talked about the ozone layer, how there was holes in it and how we couldn’t go on burning coal forever, that we needed to think about the future, about what we were leaving behind for our children. He talked for a while longer, and the man from the state had to tell him his time was up. The speaker said he had more to say, and the state man said he could give his paper to him and he would attach it to what all else he had.

  Then the man from the state said he wanted to remind everybody that they was only there to consider testimony pertaining to mine permit 848-1080 amendment 3 and that of course people could use their minutes any way they wanted to but that that particular permit application was what they were there for.

  Mamaw sat stone still in her folding chair, and the speeches went on and on. Every speaker tried to talk people into believing what they themselves believed.

  The fluorescent lights flickered. Four different ones needed changing. Out the high windows, the lights of coal trucks streaked past. The state people sat like prizes at a carnival game, eye wide and blank, stuffed pink monkeys, green hippopotamuses piled too close together. Every once in a while they would take a note, but not that often.

  A woman I’d seen at Mamaw’s meetings called the coal company out by name, said they’d told her mother they weren’t going to strip mine her land, that they was just going to build a coal haul road across it and that they wouldn’t be out there even a month. She said they’d promised to build a road out to her family’s cemetery—widen it. And then when her mother signed her rights away they’d strip mined the shit out of it—that’s what the woman said—and they’d mined right up to the cemetery and probably would’ve mined right through it if she—the daughter—hadn’t come back from Georgia. There wadn’t no way, that woman said, that company ought to be allowed to mine coal period, much less on Blue Bear. They ought to be put in jail, that woman said, everyone of them, and especially you, she said, and pointed to a man with a wire-brush moustache standing in the back spitting into a plastic pop bottle, his arms folded across his chest.

  “Especially you, Mickey Mills that lived right here in this community and lied to my mother. You’re a sorry excuse for a man,” that woman said, and started towards him before her husband stopped her.

  Then a woman stood up and said “You aint taking my husband to jail. You’re just a busybody. You don’t live here no more and don’t deserve no say in what goes on here.”

  The man from the state got on the microphone. “All right. Order. Please.”

  The next speaker was a man in a sweater vest and a green plaid shirt I didn’t know. He talked about the Indiana bats and the Turk’s cap lilies and other plants and animals that only lived in Kentucky near the top of Blue Bear Mountain. I didn’t know what difference that would make to anybody. Mamaw told me it did.

  A thick coal company office man stood up and told how many jobs the company made, about their participation in the youth baseball leagues and their big ads in the high school gymnasium. Another company man talked about how that if they didn’t approve these permits that it would likely mean the end of coal mining in Canard County and maybe all of Kentucky. He said people didn’t know how the coal industry could fall apart at any minute, and then where would Canard County be? When he asked that question he spread out his arms and turned to the crowd, and it seemed to me that that was who he was talking to anyway. He finished up by saying that the state should approve the permit and get out of the company’s way and let the good working people of Canard County do what they do best—do better than anyone in America—run coal. When he said that there was all kinds of cheering and whistling as he sat down.

  The next person to speak was the woman with the pulled-back hair who had been at Mamaw’s meeting, the one I’d swore would never have spoke. She was on the other side of Mamaw from me, her paper shaking in her hands. She put her other hand on the back of the folding chair in front of her, barely able to see over the frosted blonde head of the miner’s wife sitting in front of her.

  “My name is Agnes Therapin. I live on Little Drop Creek.” Her back straightened when she said the name of the creek. “I am against this here permit. They’s people that lives beneath these strip jobs. It aint out in a desert somewheres. It’s up the creek from me. This here is the third time you have let them add on to this strip job. I wish you’d never let them start, but I don’t know why you didn’t just let them mine the whole thing to begin with. Then we wouldn’t always have been a-hoping that maybe we might have a decent place to stay.” Her hands beat restlessly on the back of the chair in front of her. The miner’s wife leaned forward, turned to look at Agnes. “My mommy lives with us,” Agnes went on. “She has a bad leg, and this dynamite has knocked her out of bed more than once. We thought you fellers—you come up here from Frankfort or wherever—and I guess I thought you was there to protect us. To protect our homes and our property. I thought that was what the law was supposed to be there for. To keep the peace. Well, you fellers need to know, and I don’t know if you all have been up there or not, but let me tell you. There aint no peace on Little Drop Creek.”

  Agnes’s neck was stiff. She arched her back like it hurt.

  She stared at the state people. People were quiet, but the seconds passed and people started to rustle.

  “Thank you, Ms. Therapin.” The state man said her name wrong.

  “You are supposed to protect us,” Agnes shouted. “Surely they’s laws against blowing up people’s houses. People aint setting off dynamite at your house, are they? Don’t reckon they come blowing yore people up do they? Where do you live?”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” the state man said.

  “Where’s your house at?” The state woman came to take the microphone from Agnes. Agnes jerked it away.

  “Sit down, Ms. Therapin,” the state man said.

  “Maybe we ought to come set a couple shots off at your place.” Agnes’s neck was red as blood. “See how you like it.”

  “Agnes,” Mamaw said, and covered Agnes’s hand on the back of the chair with her own. Agnes sat down. Another woman across the room with “I heart coal” on her T-shirt stood up and faced Mamaw.

  “Cora Redding, this wouldn’t be happening if you weren’t stirring everybody up. You don’t live on Drop Creek. You moved to town. You wouldn’t have no business, you wouldn’t be sitting on your little pile of money, if it wasn’t for the working people around here, people mining coal. You need to mind your own damn business.”

  “Anyone who cannot remain civil,” the state man said, “will be removed from the meeting.”

  The wo
man stuck her finger out at Mamaw. “You need to keep your big fat nose out of things don’t concern you.”

  I stood up. I pointed back at the woman.

  I said, “You don’t need to be telling my mamaw what her business is. You don’t know my mamaw. You aint got no right to talk to my mamaw.”

  “Young lady,” the state man said, “you are speaking out of turn.”

  I wadn’t done. “What do you want us to say? ‘Go ahead and tear up the world. We’ll just get out of the way while you destroy ever thing our friends ever had? Here, take my house; I’ll just live here in this hole in the ground. Yeah, go ahead and set that big yellow rock on our heads. We’ll be fine.’”

  “If I could ask the deputy sheriff—” the state man started.

  “Dawn, sit down,” Mamaw said. “Sir, she don’t mean it . . .”

  I sat down. A buzzing in my head kept me from hearing what was said after that. I wished I hadn’t spoken. I wished I hadn’t said a word.

  Someone held up a jar of dirty water. Somebody brought in a bunch of kids carrying a banner. I’m not sure what side they were on. When it was over Mamaw had to shake me to get me to move. I dreaded walking out. I wasn’t invisible anymore.

  2: Smother

  When we were walking out of the hearing, a bald man in a hoodie and long shorts came up to me and said, “That was awesome.” His face was right up in my face. His eyes swirled in his head like two Sasquatches penned up in a dog lot. I don’t know where he was from, but it wasn’t here. “You are one awesome chick,” he said, stabbing his meat cigar finger right at me.

  He had canvas bags hung over both shoulders. “Can I do a quick interview?” he said. “Just a quick one.”

  A miner’s kid bumped into me and the bald man took me by the shoulder.

  “I’m with a radio station. Bilson Radio. I don’t know if you ever heard of it.” His voice seemed to come from his crazy Sasquatch eyes.

  “Mamaw listens to it all the time,” I said.

  “OK, OK. All right,” he said, his head bobbing. “Is that you?” he asked sticking out a hand for Mamaw to shake. “I’m Kenny Bilson.”

  “Yes, that’s me,” Mamaw said.

  “Now what is your name?” he said to Mamaw. She told him and he said, “Oh wow. Yes. You call my uncle’s show all the time. Yeah,” he said, bobbing his head, “I know yall. Yeah. Hey. Let me do an interview with yall. About this here tonight. Cause you and what you said. Yeah. It was right. Cataclysmic. Our listeners need to hear it. Yeah. And you, ma’am”—he pointed again at Mamaw—“they told me that I had to talk to you. That you are the main one”—people were starting to look back at us as they walked past—“the straw that stirs the drink for real.”

  Mamaw said, “It’s getting late. I need to get this youngun home.”

  “Oh yeah, me too. Me too. I got the baby. Yeah.” He thumbed back over his head. A baby in a black onesie sat in a carrier on a folding table two women were standing wanting to take down.

  He took us in a little room off the big room. Dented folding chairs were stacked against a junk popcorn machine. There were broken lighting fixtures and moldy ceiling tiles piled everywhere. He set the baby down beside him in a folding chair with a bent leg. He got out a tape recorder, a microphone, a tangled cord and hooked them up. He put a cassette with no label in the recorder and asked us to tell him what happened, tell him how we felt about it, what we hoped would happen. He draped his arm across the baby carrier.

  “Oh yeah, that’s good. That’s good,” he said as I spoke. Mostly he said nothing, just sat smiling while we talked, like we were saying what he wanted us to say. When he finished, he closed up his recorder, tucked it back in his canvas bag.

  “Yeah, we’ll put you right on the radio. Hell yeah. Sorry, ma’am, but yeah. They’s a little dude on the mountain he is so going to dig this, he’s the one who edits all this stuff. My little brother. Willett.”

  “Yeah, you got to listen to it.”

  We walked out into the parking lot.

  “Probably be around seven minutes, unh-hunh. Yeah. Have yall had supper? They say that dairy bar there has badass shakes, yeah.”

  “We had supper.”

  “OK. Yeah. But Dawn, man, you are awesome. Cataclysmic. Yeah. We’ll call you when the show is gonna be on.”

  The baby started to stir. Bald Sasquatch Kenny waved a pirate rattle in the baby’s face.

  “Well,” Mamaw said, “it was real nice meeting you.”

  Kenny said, “Yeah,” and popped the hatch on his dented no-front-bumper Subaru. He put his equipment in. “Yeah. So do yall think you’ll hear anything before Christmas?” He closed the hatchback.

  “Honey, you don’t want to leave that baby back there, do you?”

  “SHIT! No. No. Yeah. Thank you all.” Kenny opened the hatch and took the baby out. “OK. Well. Bye now.”

  Mamaw was in the car. She rolled down the window. “Dawn honey, do you want to drive?”

  “Goodbye,” Kenny said. “Great. Great to meet you. Yeah. Great.”

  I nodded. Kenny kept standing there. I got in the Escort. I sat there with my hands in my lap.

  “Let’s go, sweetheart,” Mamaw said.

  I started the car. We left the meeting.

  “Them state people are just going through the motions,” Mamaw said as we crossed the bridge at the mouth of Blue Bear Creek. “They know what their job is. They have their orders, and they don’t come from us.” Mamaw faced me as she spoke. Her eyes glittered like stones in a stream. “You got to change their orders. You got to change the people telling them what to do. You got to make those people feel the pinch.” I liked to see Mamaw’s eyes glitter, but I didn’t know how she was going to do what she was talking about.

  “Who gives the orders, Mamaw?”

  “Really? The companies. But the governor,” Mamaw said. “He can do some.”

  Mamaw twirled a toothpick on her tongue.

  “About what you said up there.”

  “I don’t guess I should have called that woman a heifer.”

  “No. Probably not.”

  “But she is.”

  “I don’t like meetings,” Mamaw said. “They just tear people apart. Our fight aint with nobody who lives here.”

  That didn’t make sense to me and I told Mamaw so.

  Mamaw bit down on the toothpick over and over. “They’re being put up to it,” she said.

  We drove the rest of the way home without talking. Snowflakes twisted in the headlights.

  That night I lay awake a long time. I thought about people who patted me on the back as I came out of the meeting. I thought I would get my ass whipped before I got to the car, but I didn’t. I felt like Evie said it did when you got baptized.

  Mamaw was stacking something in the kitchen. I heard the clink clink clink from my narrow bed in the front bedroom. It sounded like she was sorting bullets, shells, some kind of ammunition. Ghosts in bedsheets ran bulldozers through my dreams. I woke Wednesday morning wishing I could turn on the radio and hear my voice come out of it. I could smell the coffeemaker spit out Mamaw’s thin coffee. I got up.

  ***

  I walked out to the end of the ridge road to catch the school bus. The bus came up the back side of the mountain against a skim-milk sky. The bus was full of little kids,

  They were afraid of spit in their ears, gum in their hair, knuckles to the base of their skulls. The bus stank of middle school B.O. and cooking grease. I sat down next to a little boy who wiped his nose with an infected finger. Hardly any of the kids who rode the bus had parents working at the coal mines. The ride was quiet.

  When I got off the bus, Evie grabbed my arm and headed me out into the parking lot towards her car. “Did you say something at that meeting last night?”

  “Yeah, I said something.”

  “Why?”

  “Cause they talked bad about Mamaw.”

  Evie stood looking at me over the hood of her tan Cavalier.

&n
bsp; “You don’t think your mamaw can take care of herself?”

  “I guess.”

  “You don’t think she knows what’s she’s getting into?”

  “Shut up, Evie. You’re retarded.”

  Evie got in the car. So did I.

  “You’re the one who’s retarded,” she said.

  I fooled with everything loose in that car. The lighter. The black rubber butterfly hanging from the rearview. The Missy Elliott air freshener. I was scared but wouldn’t tell Evie. I wiped my eyes.

  “We need to go,” Evie said. “Get out of here.”

  “I have a French test.”

  “God Almighty,” Evie said. “Yall have a test in there every day.”

  I opened the car door.

  “Don’t, Dawn.”

  “Aint nothing gonna happen,” I said, not really believing.

  “When’s your test?”

  “Second period.”

  “Don’t go in til second period.”

  “You stay with me, Evie.”

  “I caint. Donnie’s got a court date.”

  “What time?”

  “Right now,” Evie said. “You should just take a zero on that test.”

  A bell played over the loudspeakers. I got out of the car and started walking towards school. Evie’s horn honked. She waved me towards her. I went to her window.

  “You want a beer?”

  I shook my head.

  “You want a Xanax?”

  “No.”

  She got a pint bottle out from under the seat. I drank an orange capful.

  “Hope it comes out OK with Donnie,” I said.

  “It won’t.”

  When I turned at the door of the school, Evie was still sitting there. I walked through the lobby and buzzed to be let in. My first-period class was at the far end of the building on the third floor, the longest possible walk. Two nerdy girls passed me on the steps, looking at a clothes catalog. The hallway to my history class was two hundred yards long. At every window in every door people rolled their eyes, lay with their heads on their desks, leaned into one another, threw punches into arms, tossed paper wads. Teachers peeped out doors as they spoke.