Down Don't Bother Me (9780062362209)

For LMC

Envy's a coal comes hissing hot from hell.

—P
HILIP
J
AMES
B
AILEY

I
'd been demoted and was shoveling slide-back and minding my own business when they found Dwayne Mays's body in a pile of gob. This was up in Coulterville at a coal mine called Knight Hawk, last of the great old Randolph County mines and one of the few remaining great collieries in the Illinois downstate. A young guy called Ham Body—you guess why—tripped over Mays in the dark and went down, headfirst and hard, into a Sandvik dual-boom roof bolter and a half an hour or so worth of what I'm sure were uneasy dreams. When Ham Body finally came to, he raised the alarm and soon a great and calamitous ruckus was spreading its way through the work area: Ham Body to Plodder, Plodder to Bunny, Bunny to a guy called Neil (despite that his name wasn't Neil), and from there outward until Insane Wayne called it up to the surface with his characteristic restraint. Miners are dramatic sorts, you see, and sometimes the difference between a coal mine and an opera house seems not very much. Adding to it, this was shortly after that bad union business in Wolf Creek, where in the heat of a picket somebody (Neil, maybe) got his asshole in a knot and threatened to strangle a local reporter. When they discovered that Dwayne Mays had a mini-recorder wrapped round his neck and a notepad stuffed in his mouth, someone said, “Well, they got one.” And then the cops came.

It'll sound heartless, maybe, but I didn't dwell on it overmuch or stay to catch the show. Like with most days, I had
plenty on my mind. I was raising a daughter basically on my own and there were mountains of bills to pay and trouble to stay out of. The bills never ebbed, and trouble was everywhere and mostly the same, but the daughter was always changing and keeping me on my toes. Mostly, though, I never wanted to hang around the mine longer than necessary. The Knight Hawk paid okay, I guess, but the work bit the big one and I hated it like poison. Coal mining is terrible work generally, but the Knight Hawk had driven the union out twenty years earlier and the mine had gone from a reasonably decent place to make a living to like something out of a nightmare. The leash was off, and as long as everyone met their load requirements, they were free to do all kinds of malevolent and stupid shit down there. There wasn't anybody left to spank their behinds or say boo. The result was a kind of industrial slapstick. Hands were lopped off wrists, bodies fried by electrical currents. Heads were crushed like melons under falling rock. A couple years back, I had the misfortune of seeing a miner killed by his own trench digger. The rig's cable got hung up in a trolley-wire gap, and this guy—we called him Putzy—climbed down to move his nip across the gap and restart the digger. And restart it he did, but he was standing in front of it now, and the machine lurched forward suddenly and ran him over and cut off his leg. That's coal mine work these days.

Shoveling slide-back is maybe the worst job in the mine, but I'd mouthed off once or twice too often to one of the less-forgiving shift bosses and lost my roof bolter. Slide-back is what they give you when they want you to quit. It's a punishment.

The Knight Hawk was what's called a longwall mine,
and in a longwall mine what you have is basically a giant shearing machine that bites apart the coal seam and sends the pieces up a conveyor belt into daylight. Problem is, as the coal is traveling up, water is rushing down from the surface—water is almost always rushing into a coal mine from some place—and it washes the coal off the belt and into the empty space beneath the system. Your job, when you're shoveling slide-back, is to scoop out that wet muck and throw it back on the belt. At which point, it comes down again. It's a little like being one of those characters in Hades from Greek myth, but without the fun or glamour.

I shoveled out my shift until the cops and bosses came through and hustled us from the work area. The cop in charge was a big guy with graying hair and . . . soft eyes, I guess you'd say. I don't know how else to describe them. The rest of him didn't look so soft, but he was a rural cop and that was to be expected. He took my name and asked what I'd seen, which was nothing, really, and then he let me go. I went out and rode the thousand feet to the surface and hurried across the colliery to the shower house. You had to hurry or you ended up waiting in a line that stretched to China and back. I hung my pit clothes on the meat hook above the stall and turned on the stream. I'd made it just in time, and in another moment there was a line out the door of miners waiting with their towels and pumice soaps and shakers of Comet. Once coal mine grit gets in you, it doesn't come out easy. You have to fight it, but eventually the grit wins.

Nobody that day was too interested in grit. There was a corpse in the coal mine, so they wanted to talk about that, and so they did. They were buzzing. It was almost like
Christmas, but with murder. Mays, someone said his name was. Dwayne Mays, a journalist. I'd never heard of him. I finished my shower and got out of the way for the next guy. I dressed and went out to my bike and rode south to meet my daughter and Peggy.

I was working the day shift then, but my trip home through rural southern Illinois was across country distances, and by the time I roared down Shake-a-Rag Road the sun was smearing its lazy self across the line of foothills to the west. The sky darkened and the first stars bit through the sky like broken silver teeth. The air turned cool and the restless late-autumn stir calmed to a distant rustle. It's a poetic kind of country, Little Egypt, and it makes you think like that.

I lived way out in a place called Indian Vale. Probably no Indians ever lived there, so who exactly it was named after was a mystery and subject of frequent speculation between my daughter, Anci, and me. Influenced by some recent movies, Anci said it was probably pirates.

“Pirates?” I said. “But there's no ocean.”

“So?”

“So pirates need an ocean. Otherwise, what's it all for?”

“Lost pirates then.”

I said more likely it was backwoods gangsters or shine smugglers. Anci said I lacked imagination. She added that I'd have made a terrible pirate, which as an insult felt like overkill to me. Whatever the case, the only anyone living there now was Anci and me and a couple of house cats, Morris and Anthony. The house was my father's, or had been once upon a time—a raised-ranch dwelling roughly the size of a large hatbox, situated off a lonely county road where our only neighbors were a den of foxes in a patch of mockernut
hickories and Johnson grass and, farther distant, a big truck farm up the hill west of the valley.

As I pulled in the drive, I could just make out the
inmigrante
working beneath the lights to bring in the last of the spinach harvest before the promise of an early snow turned into more than just promise. As I climbed off the bike and walked up the lane, the phone buzzed in my pocket. I thought maybe it was Anci or Peggy calling to check in on me, as they sometimes did, but the little screen said
Matthew Luster
, a name I didn't recognize. I don't know technology, really, so how it knew his name was something of a mystery, but not an interesting one, to me anyway. I was tired from work, and that evening in a particular hurry, so I just turned off the cell and put it away. Probably it was a wrong number. Or a creditor. Still, something worryingly familiar tickled at the back of my brain.

Just then a voice ahead of me said, “Hey there, Slim.”

I looked up and forgot all about it, tickles and brains and whoever on earth Matthew Luster might be. Peggy was leaning in the doorway, grinning. She was gorgeous—what the old folks would have called a looker, forty-one and fit, with a figure that would have made Jesus punch a mule. She had bourbon-colored eyes and a mane of silver hair that settled around a pretty face. On her chin was the specter of a scar, a childhood accident from her first and only rough-stock riding competition. She'd slipped off ineptly girthed tack into the Z-brace of a bull gate and nearly bitten off the tip of her tongue, leaving her forever after with a slight lisp. Even then, she climbed on again and won the day. So the story went, anyway. And I believed it. She was tough like that, with tough left over.

She said, “You're running late. We were starting to worry.”

“There was a bit of a dustup.”

“There usually is,” she said, “Anyway, you just made it, darlin'. Anci's been eyeing that ice cream cake like a wolf eyes the wild turkey.”

“She's a little wolf, all right. What about you?”

“I've been eyeing it, too, but I've got to keep one eye on the little wolf, so I'm pulling double duty.”

“I'll see there's a little something extra in your next paycheck maybe.”

“Thanks. What was the dustup about?”

I told her what I knew, about the body in the gob pile. Her face blanched and she took a step backward, into the shadow of the doorway.

I said, “Whoa there, you okay?”

“Sure, sure,” she said, but she didn't look it. “It's just shocking, is all.”

“It is that.”

“Killing like that. A murder. It's shocking. What do you think it's all about?”

“No idea,” I said. “Someone stepped on someone else's dick, probably. That's usually it. Right now, though, better let me inside before all that's left in this cake box is two quarts of cream and a cold memory.”

The cake was more or less intact, but it was a close thing. The big “12” in the middle was conspicuously missing part of its “1,” but I pretended not to notice, and Anci let me get away with it. She tossed down whatever book she was reading, and we kicked off her birthday party. I braved the slight chill to grill burgers and some corn on the cob I'd put away
earlier in the season. The food must have been good. We scraped holes in our plates. Now and then Peggy lapsed into an uncharacteristic silence, but I guessed I knew what that was about: I'd recently asked her a pretty big question, and I figured she was mulling it over. Anyway, I hoped she was.

“Hey, guess what?” Anci said.

“Chicken butt?”

“Be serious.”

“Okay, what?”

“One more year and I'll be a teenager.”

“So you've reminded me.”

“Might remind you again once or twice,” she said.

I said, “Okay. One more year. But remember, getting older's not always what it's cracked up to be.”

“That's what you say. From where I sit, it looks okay.”

“I remember feeling the same way,” I said. “But there's always a downside. For one thing, about the time you're ready to start paying bills, they take away your allowance.”

“Who's
they
?”

I panned my hands in the air. “Unjust forces in the world.”

“That'd be your daddy,” Peggy put in.

“Not helpful,” I said.

“Sorry.”

Anci said, “You can try.” And I knew the challenge was genuine. Fathers without daughters will never understand the fearful influence they wield over you. But let me tell you, it is real. I've had fights with Anci where I woke up later wondering how I managed to get hit by more than one train.

Peggy said, “Anci, I think your daddy is asking you not to be in such a hurry to grow up.”

“I don't get it.”

“We big people don't always get it either, darlin'. It's just something we worry about.”

Anci shrugged at this, the mysteries of the big people. If we didn't understand it, why should she try? She didn't try. She cleared our dishes, then kissed Peggy on the cheek, scowled a threat at me, and went inside. Every time she walked out the door, any door, my heart ached for her to come back, even if she was occasionally a royal pain in my behind. Probably sooner than later, she'd go away to college or meet someone and fall in love or want to live somewhere else on account of a job that didn't involve shoveling anything, and my ache would move in for good, and live with me for the rest of my lonesome days.

I stopped thinking about it. Thinking about the dead body in the Knight Hawk was more pleasant, so I gave my brain to that. I wondered who this Dwayne Mays really was, whether he'd left behind any precocious tweens of his own. I wondered whether anyone was missing him tonight or was lonely because of his loss. Mostly, though, I wondered what he'd done to make someone hate him so bad they dragged him all the way down into the mine just to kill him and stuff his notepad in his mouth. It was hard to guess a reason, little as I knew, but then nothing on earth was more inventive and surprising than the wickedness of people.

Besides being dangerous, coal mines could be violent places, especially since the methamphetamine trade had moved in and put out its shingle. And this was one of those double-edged sword situations, too, because with the meth business you got it from both angles. Dealers inside the mine moved their evil product and did battle with their competitors.
Meth gangs outside the mine laid siege to the colliery itself. Just recently, in fact, the Knight Hawk had undergone a rash of break-ins targeting its supply of anhydrous ammonia.

Let me tell you a thing or two about that. This can get a bit technical, but to start simple: a coal mine is just a giant hole in the ground. It's a complicated hole, but a hole just the same, and, as with any hole, water will find its way in. But when water gets in
this
hole, it comes into contact with rocks the miners have cut, and through a chemical process it turns itself into acid. If it stayed down there, maybe that'd be okay, but just as water inevitably finds its way into the hole, it inevitably finds it way back out into the world, where it tends to make its way into rivers and streams and lakes. All the places you don't want it to be. Once there, it poisons the water and kills the fish and birds and raises all kinds of hell with local ecosystems. Acid mine drainage, we call it. That's a bad deal for everyone, so the state and federal regulatory agencies force coal mine operations to clean it up. It's an ongoing and expensive treatment process, and the mine owners hate it like hot death and grumble about environmental extremists and the crushing weight of government regulation and all the other grievances they nurse while they're blowing the tops off our mountains and raking in the cash. Anyway, a lot of coal mines use anhydrous ammonia to neutralize the acid drainage.