Last Ragged Breath (26 page)

Brenda called me a few times after that, and left messages, but I think her pride must've kicked in because her messages were not desperate or pleading, just sort of curious. I got the feeling she was relieved. Relieved that I was the one who'd taken the step that needed to be taken. I see her from time to time now. She's not the same girl she was—she's kind of lost her sparkle, is how I'd call it. Well, truth is, she'd have lost it a lot quicker if she'd stayed around me for very much longer.

Everything started to change after that. Bessie got sick and she died, and I buried her, and I moved to my cabin. The dogs came down the road, one by one. They joined up with my life. They sort of made a wall between me and the world. Which is how I survived.

For some reason I'd thought it would be gradual. Thought I'd be less and less able to put up with having people around me. Thought I'd pull away from them, inch by inch, piece by piece. But it wasn't like that at all. It was sudden. It happened right there on the porch, on that chilly Sunday afternoon. I can remember the feel of Brenda's hand, when she put it on my leg. It liked to burn me. Even though I was cold.

I guess you could say it happened the way night comes in the mountains: swift, like the fall of something sharp and heavy. One minute you are still in day. The next minute the world is dark. But your eyes adjust to the darkness. You learn to live there. You make do.

*   *   *

I started reading about Buffalo Creek when I was thirty-one, thirty-two years old or thereabouts. Before that, when I was younger, Bessie did not like to see me reading about it. And so I did not. Bessie was the only family I had, and she was real good to me. So I never crossed her.

But in 1999 she got the emphysema. I used some of the money I got from the survivors' settlement to make sure she was comfortable. I bought two pieces of land with the rest of it. One is the little bit of land that I put my cabin on. The other is bigger. That's the part I'm going to put a fence around for my dogs—no matter how much those bastards offer to pay me for it.

Bessie died at home, like she wanted to, with me right there beside her. And after she died, I started reading. The more I read, the madder I got.

An Act of God. That is what the coal company said had caused the flood, caused that sticky black water to go rushing down the seventeen miles of the Buffalo Creek Valley, tearing out houses and railroad tracks, picking up cars and trucks like they were toys, rubbing out roads and schools and lives.

An Act of God.

Now, if I were God, I'd be upset by that. I think I'd be plenty riled up, getting blamed that way. Because that wasn't any Act of God. It was an Act of Greed.

What happened was this: The coal company needed someplace to put the waste material. After coal comes out of the mine, it is washed at the tipple, and then it drops into the railroad cars and off it goes. But the waste material that comes off in the washing is a real problem. It's solid and liquid both—it's rock and slate and coal waste and black water. Some of it sort of burns and smolders, too, because of the coal. At the Buffalo Creek tipple, which started up in 1947, there was about a thousand tons a day of refuse. They'd truck it over to the mouth of the valley and dump it, day after day, year after year, decade after decade, making a dam of liquids and solids. According to what I read, the dam got to be about two thousand feet high and four hundred feet wide. It must've hung over the people in that valley like a bad dream, the worst bad dream in the world. Just a big, awful, oily pile of junk.

And then it started raining.

*   *   *

Male and female: they died. Fat and skinny: they died. Smart and dumb: they died. Generous and stingy: they died. Good people, bad people: they died. Didn't matter who you were, or how you were. If you lived in that valley, chances were, you died or saw somebody close to you die.

A hundred and twenty-five people died that day. More than four thousand people lost their homes and had nowhere to go. A whole community—sixteen coal camps were there in the valley, stretching from Lundale, where we lived, to places like Saunders and Pardee and Latrobe and Robinette and all the rest—wiped out.

Gone. Just gone.

The thing is, the coal company knew it wasn't doing right by that dam. They knew they ought to keep an eye on it, giving that filthy water a way to drain away instead of just letting it build up with all the other crap in there, too, bigger and bigger, higher and higher, more and more dangerous. But they didn't. They didn't because they didn't care. They could make more money if they just let it be. Fixing it, getting rid of that coal waste a different way, would cost money. So they just kept piling up the junk. Who cared about the people of the Buffalo Creek Valley? We were just coal miners and coal miners' wives and coal miners' children. We were refuse, no different from the refuse piled up at the mouth of the valley. The coal company let the black wall rise. Until the day when all hell broke loose.

“People ought to get to die one by one,” Bessie said to me. This was right before she passed. Lying in her bed, desperate to breathe, every breath a rasp and a gurgle, her eyes all blurred up from the painkillers that didn't really kill the pain but just put it on a high shelf for a while, where she could still see it. “Matter of dignity. People getting to die one by one. Dying in a big gang like that—it ain't right. Not what the Lord intended.”

It wasn't an Act of God. It was a crime. It was mass murder—but nobody went to jail.

So you can see, can't you, how I got this darkness in me? This angry part of me, that won't leave? You can see why I do things sometimes and don't know why I do them.

These companies, they want to say that they're like people. I read about this. They want to say they're citizens, too, so they can make all these political contributions. Just like people can. Well, fine. But you show me the person who can pay money and stay out of jail for murder. If a company wants to be like a person, then that company ought to be punished just like a person is punished. The president of that coal company, the head of mining operations, the board of directors—they should have been sent to jail for murder.

They say I killed a man. That is what they say. Well, if I did, then why can't I just pay a fine like the one the coal company paid, and then be on my way? Tell me. You tell me.

The coal company paid some money, but nobody went to jail. That's a crime, too, and maybe a worse one.

 

PART TWO

 

Chapter Twenty-four

She was going to be sick. Bell felt the sour acid leap up into her throat, felt her stomach start to lurch and churn, and only through an intense and focused effort was she able to keep from throwing up, right then and there.

First had come the ringtone. She'd grabbed for the cell with one hand, rubbing her eye with the other. Pulled herself up into a sitting position. Black room. She swung her legs over the edge of her bed. Jesus—why were people always calling her
in the middle of the freakin' night?
Daytime was nice, too. Daytime was a perfectly fine time to conduct business. The bedroom floor felt slick and cold under her bare feet; it was like a sidewalk, but not really. Different from that. Was she still dreaming?

She had listened to the voice on her cell. Heard the words. Absorbed the information, whereupon the bottom fell out of her life.

The fact that she was sitting meant that she could thrust her head between her knees, fighting the heavy pull of nausea, fighting not to faint. Her body was turning inside out, trying to empty itself. The shock was so tremendous—the initial hit and its reverberations, spiraling out like the frantic arms of a pinwheel—that she was dizzy, unstable. Disbelieving. The floor under her feet was still cold but now it was moving, too; it was wavy, it was undulating, it started to shift and buckle.

Nick Fogelsong was in critical condition. Gunshot wound to the chest. Not expected to survive.

*   *   *

In the aftermath, Bell would have no clear memory of this day. Other people would tell her that she had done fine in court, that the judge was satisfied, that the trial had gotten off to a solid start, but she would have no independent recollection of any of it. She would only know that she had done her job—and then had gotten the hell out of there. Somehow she had propelled her way through the time, plowed headlong through the hours, until court was recessed for the day and she was able to go to the hospital.

Mary Sue Fogelsong had reached her on her cell just after three that morning. She delivered the impossible, unbelievable news: Nick, interrupting a drug deal in the parking lot of the Highway Haven, had been shot in the heart. He'd lost a massive amount of blood. He was still in surgery. “Bell,” Mary Sue said, “they don't think—they won't say if—They won't look me in the eye, Bell, and you know what that means. My God—my God, Bell, what're we going to do if—”

Bell was groggy, sleep-webbed, when she answered the call, but suddenly she was as alert as she'd ever been in her life. She was grateful for the cold floor beneath her bare feet, glad for its stark bracing hardness. She fought the nausea. Beat it back, thrashed at it.
Go away. Not now
. She cut off Mary Sue's last sentence. “Don't say it. Don't you say that.” She fumbled for the switch on the lamp, pushing back against the sickness that tried to tilt her sideways. “I'll be right there.”

“No,” Mary Sue said. “That trial starts today, doesn't it? Royce Dillard's trial.”

“Screw the trial. I'm coming.”

“No, Bell—no. He's likely to be in surgery for a long time. That's what they told me. There's no point—you won't even be able to see him. Nobody can.” Mary Sue had recovered her poise. It was as if, by hearing Bell's voice, she had found the ground again. “You do what you need to do. Come over later. When you can. If anything happens before then, if it turns out that he—” She stopped herself. “I'll call you. I will. If I can't reach you, I'll tell Lee Ann.”

“Your word on that.”

“Yes. Yes. Of course.”

“Mary Sue,” Bell said, needing to ask one more question. The prosecutor in her was now wide awake, too. “Did they catch the bastard who shot him? Tell me they got him.”

“No. They didn't. They're still looking. It's Collier County, which is good.” Mary Sue was—had been—a sheriff's wife, and she knew that Collier County had seven deputies to Raythune County's two. It made a difference.

Dammit,
Bell thought, wishing the shooter was in custody, wishing she could have a crack at him. Her anger temporarily displaced her anguish. Then the anguish came surging back, overwhelming her. All at once she wasn't sure she could stand up. Or speak. Or take her next breath. Breathing seemed beyond her right now, its simple mechanics lost in the blur of the incomprehensible thought that Nick Fogelsong might die.

My God—he can't—

But he could. Of course he could. On or off the job, it was always there, the possibility that this was how it would end. Just as it was for anybody. Nothing guaranteed that our ends would be commensurate with the way we ran our lives, that good people would go with dignity and peace, bad people with chaos and pain. Nothing. And so, Bell realized with sick dread, there was nothing to prevent Nick Fogelsong from dying in the parking lot of a gas station in the middle of the night, and not in a place reminiscent of those noble battlefields that he so loved reading about—San Juan Hill, Little Round Top, the beach at Normandy. He could perish just as easily on a patch of oil-stained concrete, amidst trash pushed around by the wind. Cigarette butts. Beer cans, crushed double.

“Belfa,” Mary Sue said. Had she sensed Bell's distress? Did she realize that Bell wasn't breathing, that she was sitting on the edge of her bed frozen with fear?

“Belfa,” Mary Sue repeated, and that was the key, somehow, to the unlocking of Bell's limbs. And her breathing, too. Mary Sue, saying her name. Her real name.

“Yes?”

“I've got to go,” Mary Sue said. “And—listen. Listen to me. You know that he'd want you to do your job. You
know
that. If Nick ever found out that you put a personal tie ahead of your job, why he'd—”

“He'd skin me alive,” Bell said, and they both had a brief restorative bit of laughter, the kind that skims just enough tension off the top to allow life to go on, even in the wake of catastrophe.

After Mary Sue hung up, Bell still sat on the bed, holding her cell. She heard a noise. Goldie padded into the room and stood there, looking at her. Bell had completely forgotten she had a dog in her house. Goldie moved closer. Closer still. There was a brief, interrogative tail-wag.

Before Bell was really aware of what she was doing, she slid down onto the floor, wrapping her arms around Goldie's torso, burying her face in the thick warm fur of the dog's side. Then Bell did something that was so unusual for her that she knew the exact number of times—three—that she had done it before, and never in front of another living creature.

She wept.

*   *   *

Judge Ronnie Barbour was a tall, rangy man who might have been Daniel Boone in a previous life. The first time Bell had handled a case in his courtroom, she'd thought: Switch out the black robe for a fringed buckskin jacket, plop a coonskin cap on his head, and jam a rifle in his hands, and you'd swear you were in the presence of the frontier legend. Barbour had a lean, hard face separated into strips by vertical wrinkles. His eyes were the color of cast iron, his nose was as straight as a sheared-off side of rock ledge. His gray hair was a little too long, and a little too scraggly. He wore it swept back from his forehead and hooked behind his ears. A small scruff of curls crowded up along his collar.