The Hollow

Part Two: Electric Boogaloo

As the other men crawled out toward the coal-waste pile, a whisper of laughter seeped back through the mine to the face, and Buddy dropped to his belly to slink outside, unhurried. Even a clam crawl had winded him, and he waited by the chute for Estep and Curtis as the cold air-dried his sweat, sealing the dirt to his skin. Beneath the whining low gears of the coal truck, he could hear a dog barking up from the hollow. He sat down hard, and leaned against the chute.

From the entrance to the hilltop was wold of twenty yards where the dead stalks of broom sedge rippled in the wind. Buddy figured the overburden of dirt could be moved in a month, the coal harvested in less than a year. He knew Sally would not wait, was not sure he wanted her.

He remembered a time when the price of her makeup and fancy habits would have fed his mother and sisters something besides the mauve bags of commodities the state handed out.

Estep emerged, and Buddy offered him a smoke as they watched the truck shimmy under the bin, leveling its load.

"Goddamned cherry picker," Estep grunted.

"Gonna be lots more cherry—all that goddamned coal." Buddy looked to the western ridges, where the sunset a cold strip of fire.

Curtis came up behind them, smiling. "I'm gon' home an' get all drunked up."

"Last time I done that," Estep said, "got me a new baby. Gonna watch ol' Mad Man here so's he don't tear up Tiny's."

"That's where I'll be, by God," Buddy said.

"Just leave 'nough of Fuller to crawl in that doghole on Monday," Curtis said, taking off his cap. Buddy stared at the lines of gray in his hair where the coal dust had not settled.

"I ain't makin' no promises," Buddy said as he started down the path toward the road.

"Pick ya up about eight tonight," Estep yelled, watching Buddy wave his lunch bucket from the trail.

Night rose up from the hollow, and as he came to the dusty access road, Buddy could feel the cold air washing up around him, bringing back the cough. Patches of clouds gathered over the hollow and glowed pink. He turned onto the blacktop road, banging his lunch box against his leg as he walked, and remembered hating Fuller as a boy because Fuller had called him a ridge-runner.

He laughed again at the thought of the coal. He would have a car by fall, and a new trailer—maybe even a double-wide. He tried to think of ways to get Curtis to give up dog howling, and for a moment thought of asking Sally to go into Chelyan with him to look at trailers, but remembered all her talk of leaving.

Through the half-light, he could make out the rotting tipple where his father was crushed only ten days before they shut it down, leaving the miners to scab-work and welfare. The tipple crackled in the cold as the sun's heat left it, and on a pole beside it an unused transformer still hummed. No more coal, the engineers had said, but Buddy had always laughed at engineers—even when he was in an engineering company in the Army. At the foot of the smoldering bone pile where the shale waste had been dumped, Estep's little boy wandered, searching.

"What ya doin' there, Andy?"

"Rocks," the boy said. "They's pitchers on 'em." He handed Buddy a piece of shale.

"Fossils. Ol' dead stuff."

"I'm collectin' 'em."

"What ya wanna save ol' dead stuff for?" he said, handing the shale back.

The boy looked down and shrugged.

"You get on home, hear?" Buddy said, watching as Andy disappeared down the secondary road, leaving him to the hum of the transformer. He wondered why the boy looked so old.

As he started up the road, he could hear the dogs packing up, their howls echoing from the slopes, funneling through the empty tipple. The clouds had thickened, and Buddy felt the first fine drops of a misty rain soak through the dirt on his face. When the trees thinned, he saw his trailer, rust from the bolts already streaking the white paint of last summer. The dogs were just up the road, and he wondered if they could smell Lindy, his bluetick bitch, in the trailer. Sally sat by the window, looking, waiting, but he knew it was not for him.