Saving Lucas Biggs (3 page)

“When Mr. Theodore Ratliff came from New York,” said Preston, “and promoted you to chief . . . ?”

Elijah Biggs gazed at my little brother with mild interest. I shot a warning glance at Preston, but there was no shutting him up.

“. . . did you wear that costume?” finished Preston.

“I merely wanted to extend the company’s warmest greetings,” said Elijah Biggs to my mother as if Preston didn’t exist.

“Do you make a habit of waltzing into people’s homes without—” began Mom.

“I didn’t waltz,” corrected Elijah Biggs. “I came to discuss your ledger.”

“Our ledger?” asked Mom dubiously.

“Do you know what a
ledger
is?” asked Elijah Biggs, as if he were a kindergarten teacher and she were a five-year-old learning big words.

“Of
course
I know what a ledger is,” snapped Mother.

“She went to college for three whole years,” Preston cheerfully informed Elijah Biggs, “which I bet is three more than you did.”

Biggs tried to pretend he didn’t hear this, but I saw his eyelid twitch, which said to me that Preston probably was right.

“What I
don’t
know is why the chief of the Victory Mine is in my kitchen
talking
about a ledger,” continued my mom.

“This
ledger
,” said Elijah Biggs, producing a black leather notebook from inside his circus clothes, “tells us your husband gets paid today when he comes out of the mine. He’s new. So he won’t send out much coal. But he seems like a fast learner. Let’s say he’ll earn twenty-five whole dollars. Which he will be paid in genuine Victory Fuels Corporation scrip.” Elijah Biggs dug a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket that looked like something cooked up by a four-year-old with a fistful of construction paper and a box of Crayola crayons. “Seventy-Five Cents,” it read. “The Victory Fuels Corporation. Redeemable by Issuer Only.”

“We don’t get real money?” asked my mother.

“This
is
real money.” Elijah Biggs smiled. “You can spend it right down the street at the company store. Where, by the way, you already owe seventy dollars.”

“For what?” gasped Mom.

“Let’s check the
ledger
,” said Elijah Biggs, helpfully waving it in the air so we could connect the word to its meaning. “Eggs, bread, ice for the icebox, a mining helmet, lamp, pick, shovel, boots, miscellaneous furnishings, including your kitchen table—”

“But all that was waiting in our house for us!” protested my mother.

“You didn’t think you got to use it without paying for it, did you?” responded Elijah Biggs. “That certainly would’ve been stupid, especially for someone who went to college. For three whole years.”

“Frederic has been in a hole in the ground for hours working himself almost to death, and we’re further in debt than when he went down!” cried Mom.

“He’ll be blissfully unaware of that,” replied Elijah Biggs nastily, “until he emerges from the ground.”

“Today we’ll begin reading
The Red Pony
,” said my new teacher. “By John Steinbeck.”

“Today I’ll begin reading
The Red Butt
,” whispered a kid sitting behind me, “by Seymour Butts.”

The teacher—who was young, sort of pretty, had only a tiny mustache, and was named Miss Thuringen, according to the nameplate on her desk—didn’t even blink. “You want to avoid using ‘butt’ twice in the same joke, Woodrow,” she advised. She made it sound like a rule of grammar we all should’ve known.

“Yeah,” I said. “How about
The Red Butt
by Seymour Heine?”

The class roared. I even chuckled a little myself until I saw Woodrow glaring at me, and noticed that he was six feet tall, and had very large fists with knuckles sticking out all over them. I hadn’t started a new school since I was five, and I guess I didn’t remember what happens to kids who shoot their mouths off the day they arrive.

I tried to ignore him until Miss Thuringen picked up a bell from her desk and rang it. “Recess!” she called.

I immediately did what any sane guy would do: I ran out the door and hightailed it to the farthest, dustiest, windiest, most cactus-filled corner of the school yard, and I hid behind a rock.

Peeking cautiously around my rock, I saw a kid who looked just like the guy who’d stomped on my dad’s helmet before work that morning stalking my way across the skittery rock shards of the school yard. Same curly black hair. Same ridiculously wide shoulders, like a door inside a flannel shirt. Same legs, same toes. Even the same voice when he shouted at me, “Hey, kid!” only he didn’t have his dad’s accent. He balled up his fists, running straight my way, sporting a look you might wear to spar with a grizzly bear, so I gritted my teeth and balled up my fists, too.

“No!” he said, pointing behind me. “I’m not—”

I heard a
thunk
like a watermelon falling out a second-floor window. Fireworks exploded in front of me. My head felt like it was full of bees. The rocky ground rushed up to meet my face. Turned out that
thunk
ing sound was somebody sucker punching me. Woodrow. Assisted by three of his closest friends.

Lying on the gravel, I could easily see that Woodrow and his pals wore spotless white basketball shoes. With that fresh-out-of-the-box sparkle. My guess was these sneakers meant they all had dads who were doctors, lawyers, store owners, mine managers, or something else that made them rich, so they got to spend their time enjoying activities that didn’t get their shoes dirty.

In the midst of the fog circulating around my brain, I also happened to notice that the kid with black hair wore scuffed, old, hand-me-down work boots like my own. I didn’t have time to think about the deeper significance of this before he pasted Woodrow so hard across the bridge of the nose that Woodrow did a half a backflip and collapsed into a little heap.

Just like that, I had a new problem on my hands. The kid with black hair sat down across Woodrow’s chest with his knees on either side and proceeded to punch him over and over in the head, howling, “You can’t
do
that! You can’t
do
that!” Woodrow’s alleged friends vamoosed.

“Stop, Luke! Please! Stop!” begged Woodrow.

I grabbed this kid Luke under the arms and hauled like a twenty-mule team. I managed to drag him off Woodrow long enough for Woodrow to scram. Once Woodrow was gone, Luke blinked, and shivered, and managed to get control of himself. He laughed a short laugh. “Score one for the good guys,” he said.

“Right,” I replied cautiously.

He held out his hand. “What’s your name again?” he asked, smiling a wide white smile.

“Josh Garrett,” I told him. “I guess you must be . . . Luke?”

“Luke Agrippa,” he replied, and we shook.

And then, standing there, not moving a muscle, I stumbled.

Luke’s face turned white and I heard screams from up and down the streets of Victory.

“The mine!” whispered Luke. The second he said it, a siren wailed, and it seemed like the whole town materialized on Main Street and began a stampede toward the base of the Victory sign, where the mine’s entrance huddled under the skirt of the mountain.

“Presto! Presto!” I screamed, searching for my brother as the little kids streamed out of the school. I spotted him, and breathed a sigh of relief.

“What’s wrong?” I asked Luke as I took Preston’s hand.

“Collapse,” said Luke, as we rode on the human wave all the way to the mine entrance. “That was the jolt in the ground.”

“Two down!” shouted a man holding a telephone receiver at the gate to the mine elevator as we skidded to a halt in front of him. “Achilles Alexandropoulos. Back is broke. And they say that new fella. The one that started this morning. Tried to reach Achilles while the roof was still falling. Garrett? Garrett? What?”

Luke looked at me in horror. “Your dad,” he breathed.

Margaret

2014

I RODE HOME FROM THE COURTHOUSE in what I guess was a state of shock, my brain numb and slow, my senses dulled, my eyelids heavy as lead. It wasn’t so bad really, to feel so cut off and out of it, kind of like being a turtle dozing on a rock in a terrarium. But as soon as we turned into our driveway and I saw our house, the one my dad would never be coming back to, the glass walls of my terrarium fell right down.

Once we were inside, Dr. AJ led my mom upstairs, got her to lie down, and tried to give her a pill to help her relax and sleep.

“I can’t,” my mom said, shaking her head. “Margaret needs me.”

Dr. AJ and I exchanged a look.

“You know what would help me, Mom?” I said gently. “If I could lie here next to you while you fell asleep. That would be perfect.”

I could see my mom trying to muster up the energy to protest again, but finally, she sighed, nodded, and held out her palm for the pill.

My mom wasn’t a weak woman, but we all hit our breaking points, and my mom had hit hers kind of gradually. The first cracks appeared right after my dad’s arrest—little hair-thin things, hardly cracks at all—and she got more and more broken as the weeks dragged on. By the time he was convicted, she wasn’t eating enough to keep a bird alive and was sleeping so little that she’d gotten to a weird place in her mind, a twitchy, broken, manic place where she cried all the time and couldn’t put thoughts together right. I’d been more or less mothering her for weeks, which felt strange, but I really didn’t mind. It gave me a reason to stay steady, and anyway, after all those years of her taking care of me, I guessed it was the least I could do.

She went to sleep fast after her pill, and, after a few minutes of shifty restlessness, she looked as peaceful as she had in way too long. I almost cried then, at the sight of her, because she’d have to wake up sometime and everything would still be awful, but Dr. AJ was right beside me, and I knew that if I broke down, she’d insist on staying. What I wanted more than anything was to be alone, to sit in my own pocket of space and just breathe and
feel
, feel whatever there was to feel without worrying about anyone seeing me.

Dr. AJ seemed to get it. She called Mr. Wise and asked if he could postpone his visit until the following day. She reminded me of her cell and home numbers, even though she knew I knew them as well as I knew my own, and reminded me that she was just around the corner, which I also knew, having been to her house a bazillion times, at least. Then she wrapped me in one of her good, big-woman hugs (Dr. AJ was six feet tall and hugged like a linebacker, or like I imagined linebackers hugged), and for a few seconds I just plain clung.

“You will get through this, my girl,” she said. “I have no doubt of that. Just keep the faith, you hear me?”

I nodded, even though I didn’t have one scrap of faith left to keep.

As soon as she left, I realized I was starving. I opened the refrigerator, which was busting at the seams with casseroles; there must have been five or six of them, foil-covered, labeled, and stacked—and these were just from today. For months, when we weren’t home, people had taken to dropping food off with our neighbor Mrs. Darley, who had a key to our house and would periodically stick them in her red wagon and wheel them on over. They gave us way more than two people could ever eat, but I knew what the casseroles meant. Every dish was someone saying, “We’ve got your back.”

I got as far as carving out and heating up a slab of Mrs. Alexandropoulos’s famous pastitsio, which is this awesome Greek lasagna, pouring myself a glass of milk, and sitting down at the kitchen table. But as I chewed the first bite, I remembered the first time I’d eaten Mrs. Alexandropoulos’s pastitsio. I was six and had just gone to my first funeral. I’m not even sure whose it was. It’s what people do in Victory: there’s a wedding or a funeral and the whole town shows up. Anyway, I was at the lunch afterward—there’s always a lunch afterward—and I was eating the pastitsio and thinking that it was the best food ever invented, and I heard what I thought was this booming laughter. It turned out to be crying. The woman’s back quaked and heaved inside the black fabric of her dress. Bobby Fitzgerald, who was sitting next to me, whispered, “It’s because she’s a widow. Her husband is never coming home because he’s dead.”

With that bite of pastitsio, the rock-solid knowledge that my father was never coming home ran up and punched me in the stomach, and that was it. I dropped my fork and cried like a baby, or more like a toddler in a fit, did the whole falling down and screeching thing I’d been teetering on the edge of since the jacaranda flowers had refused to turn black and fall off their branches.

After a long time, I got up and half crawled up the stairs, using my hands the way I used to do when it was summer and I was a little kid, wrung out like a sponge from playing all day in the hot sun. Then I fell down onto my bed and into despair, where I stuck like a bug in tar.

I wasn’t usually so hopeless. When I was in third grade, I discovered the word “equilibrium” in some book my parents left lying around. I happen to be a person who collects words the way other people collect rocks or Beanie Babies. I keep the words in notebooks, the black marbled kind, and keep the notebooks, years’ and years’ worth, stacked inside my closet.