I remember it as a staccato rumble, down the hill from Main Street, rattling the glass in Biddle’s window, then the plates and the coffee cups as the throttle unwound. We had just finished breakfast and pushed outside to the curb corner as it edged onto Green Street and up the hill to Main. It was massive, obstructing everything it passed, blocking everything behind as it crept slowly to hillcrest—and once so achieved it shrouded the sun like some errant thunderhead sidling in from the North.
Its front bumper was six feet high and spanned sidewalk to sidewalk across Green, with four enormous headlights that looked to be the giant dead eyes of a birth-defected leviathan. The top of the haul bed overhung the tiny cab, and the driver, twenty-five feet above us, seemed like a monkey riding herd on a blue-ribbon bull. The monstrosity cleared the stoplight at Green and Main by two inches and turned slowly to nurse itself into position.
It had arrived in twenty-seven pieces, laid down in the train offload parking lot at the bottom of Green Street. The six wheels came first, each on its own train car, chains crisscrossed to keep them upright. The engine appeared next, on a wide-load semi from the plant in Peoria, and the dump bed came in five trailered sections, butt welded together in the north corner of the parking lot. The frame arrived on two side-by-side semis with state police escort that had to let air out of the semis’ tires to clear the 402 underpass outside of Lexington. The assembly men came soon after and took up the SleepEZ Motel in Glassville and the Woodsman Bar on the way to Big Spoon. It all amassed in ten days and nights of welding, craning, bolting, pounding industry—cinders arcing out like sparklers on a Fourth of July evening.
The spec sheet for the 650H 1-Q talked of a ladder frame with omnidirectional bolsters and a duo-max canopy. Rear-wheel rock ejectors and variable-rate hydropneumatic suspension with accumulator-assisted twin double-acting cylinders to provide constant-rate steering. A sophisticated operator environment with integral four-post ROPS/FOPS structure and an adjustable air-float seat w/lumbar support and retractable armrests. But to me, it was simply the biggest truck I had ever seen—twenty-one feet tall, twenty-eight feet wide, and forty-five feet long, with a bed capacity of 195 tons.
As it rumbled to a stop in front of Miss Janey’s, the shops along Main Street seemed inconsequential next to the colossus. I could see Mr. Paul in his front window, eyes like dinner plates. He rushed out of the salon, arms waving, mouth jawing. He kicked a ten-foot tire, then came to the front, shouting up to the driver, voice blanketed by the bass-drum rumble of the truck’s engine.
The state police had blockaded traffic into town since the truck took up both sides of the street. The Company had arranged a ceremony on Main with the mayor and Bubba Boyd at court. The driver cut the engine and folks closed in around the front. Bubba climbed the four steps to the top of the bumper. He put one foot on the red railing and both hands on his knee and said absolutely nothing. It was the kind of thirty-second silence that made some men rub at stubble, made others examine palm creases. Petunia Wickle fanned herself faster, and even children stopped pushing, everyone silent in weary resignation.
Bubba Boyd smiled, then cleared his throat. “Friends,” he said, “we’ve a fine town here. A fine town.” Mr. Paul’s arms were crossed, hands jammed hard under opposite arms. Jesper Jensen looked down and kicked at a stone.
It’s the eyes you notice first.
Deep-sunk sockets ringed gray against candle-wax skin. Skin like the grass that labors thin and white under a freshly turned rock, wincing in the unfamiliar sunlight. Thick hands, a ready cough, and fingers like great stubs carved from sallow stone; nails cracked, with black coal lines tattooed under them.
But this new way sets a different mien. Same hands, same cough. But now ruddy paint has replaced candle-wax skin, dragline callouses instead of tattooed coal lines, deep sockets traded for tan crow’s-feet.
The sun is their burden now as it drums down on them, sourcing the gray sweat and warming the dust to float long and high in the noon stifle.
But if you look, some of the old muckmen are still around. You see them stalled in an aisle at the Pic-n-Pay. Or on a slow traverse of the Main Street crosswalk. The light turns and they are there still. One foot forward, then the other. You inch, they look up, and it’s the eyes you notice first.
Miner’s eyes.
Chapter 9
THE DEAD MULE
Kevin, out of bed,” Pops yelled that Friday from the bottom step. “We’ve got two calls today and only half a morning to do them.” I rolled onto the worn pine floor Pops had laid himself years ago; washed, dressed, and hustled down the hall, stopping quietly at my mother’s door. We had been in Medgar exactly four weeks and she had made no progress, standing, as she was, alone in the room, in her robe, mulling over the faded Glassville Rotary Club banner on the wall and the ballerina music box that had belonged to her mother, the hair ribbon holder and the ribbons washed by the years into a sepia rainbow, the ceramic bowl she made in pottery class and the three dried rose heads it held. These, and the many other favors and trifles a girl keeps to hand, all of it suspended in the room like a box of time. She reached for one of her old charcoals of Main Street, then pulled back as if it was electrified. I couldn’t look at her anymore and continued to the kitchen.
“We’ve got a full schedule, so eat some cereal quick and meet me in the truck,” Pops said and disappeared out the kitchen door and into the vet shed. I gulped my Cheerios and was in the cab before him.
For three weeks Pops had been taking me on calls around the county, and I was beginning to feel a confidence that only comes from doing—a familiarity of task that allowed me to assist without being asked.
I knew to hand him the pick instead of the nippers when examining pony hoof; I instinctively reached for the antiseptic spray after suture tie-off; I automatically locked my legs around a goat head when he was checking for blowfly. It seemed Pops was actually starting to depend on me, actually starting to need me.
“First stop, Beaver Hollow,” he said as he backed carefully into the deserted street. We drove through town, then after a few miles, turned left on Route 27, then onto a dirt road that snaked through a thick hollow.
The woods were empty for the first mile, until we began passing disturbing signs of life: the hood of an ancient truck, holes buckshot through it; sculptures of rusted metal tubes from an old swing set; a naked baby doll with an arm missing; a discarded washer with the wringers still attached; an old four-footed tub filled with rusted chains; kitchen trash everywhere; someone’s dirty underwear.
“Who are we seeing up here?”
“Senator Budget’s lame mule.”
The road suddenly became a cul-de-sac servicing seven houses in competing degrees of disrepair. Chickens guarded the apron to the first three houses and skittered a safe distance as we rolled past. Dogs and goats ambled about, eyeing us and offering lackadaisical barks and bleats. The houses were a throw of mobile homes, trailers, double-wides, and prefabs. Dotted between them was a collection of cars and tractors that seemed arrayed in order of breakdown. Rusted burn barrels smoldered with yesterday’s garbage. Four satellite dishes, like giant meadow spoor, brought the world to Beaver Hollow. A mob of dirty, half-naked children ran shoeless into the road.
“It doesn’t look like a senator lives here.”
Pops laughed. “Senator is only his first name. One of his brothers is named Governor. I guess I can’t fault his father for having high expectations.”
We pulled into the driveway of a blockish, one-story prefab, too square to be called a mobile home, too simple to be called anything else. Broken wrought-iron rail around the front porch. Rusted chain-link fence, fencing nothing in particular. Behind his house by the barn were two decayed cars from the sixties. An engine rusted on the ground; milkweed and a sapling grew through one of the engine voids. A huge sycamore tree shaded most of the backyard. A brown wirehaired hound was tied to a poplar out front.
Pops put his arm on the seat top and turned to me. “One thing you have to understand about the Budgets; they aren’t like the rest of us. Most people in Missi County are simple country folk—hardworking, some education, God-fearing. The Budget clan is different.”
“How are they different? Don’t they work hard?”
“How can I explain this?” Pops thought for a moment. “The Budgets generally don’t go to school past the tenth grade; they live off the land, get handouts, and work the mines and odd jobs to make up the rest. They’ve been living in this hollow for almost one hundred years, marrying each other and having each other’s babies. The gene pool is getting a bit shallow.”
We exited the truck and walked up to the house. An obese woman in a dirty pink tank top and light blue stretch polyester shorts sat shoeless on the front porch reading the Weekly World News and straining an aluminum lawn chair to its absolute limits. Her upper arms were the size of salted hams, her head like a pumpkin on a stump.
The porch was choked with old appliances: a broken air-conditioning unit; the shell of an old TV; a cracked cooler; a refrigerator without a door, everything stacked inside it.
“Morning, Lucille,” Pops said on the second step. “Sen asked me to come by and look at your mule.”
She considered us for a moment and turned to the open front window as much as her considerable neck would allow, cigarette clenched safely in the right side of her mouth. “Sen,” she yelled, “Dr. Peebles’s here,” and went back to her magazine. No response from the house. She pulled the cigarette out of her mouth, turned even farther. “Sen! Git out here.” Still no response. “Damn him,” she said to herself and threw the magazine on the floor, slowly pushing up from the chair. It rose with her, sticking to her skin for the first ten inches, then clattered back to the porch. She turned and waddled into the house mumbling, the back of her cordwood thighs crosshatched in red welts from the chair. Knees rubbing soundlessly together with each step, lubricated by sweat. Pops leaned against the wrought-iron rail as I looked over at the dog under the tree.
“I’m comin, woman… you watch your lip,” came a menacing aside from Sen Budget before he burst through the screen door and into the morning sunshine, closing one eye to the light.
He was small. A head shorter than Pops, with pallid skin, highlighted by black, greasy hair, freshly combed for company. His high pockmarked cheeks and hard-cut chin dissolved into dingy gray from relentless stubble. A jutting Adam’s apple. Pops said Sen’s older brothers had bullied the humor from him long ago, leaving runt bones covered in thin skin. Eyes as warm as the black glass in a stuffed buck head.
“Mornin, Dr. Peebles.”
“Morning, Sen, how’s your mule?”
“Poorly. Broke her leg in a gopher hole haulin trees over Hintons Creek. Almost had to shoot her right there.”
“Well, let’s see what we can do.” We walked around to the back of the house near a squat barn where the mule was sitting forlornly on its hindquarters, broken foot held slightly off the ground. Two naked girls no older than four were playing in the dirty water of an inflatable wading pool under the sycamore. Pops felt the break. The mule jerked its foot away.
“Mr. Budget, may I use your bathroom?” I said, suddenly realizing I had forgotten to pee in the morning’s rush.
His black eyes considered me for the first time. “Down the hall past the livin room,” he said. I ran up the back steps and into the filthy kitchen. Stacks of dishes competed for sink space. The overflow covered the faded Formica countertop, crisscrossed with knife cuts. A ring of garbage spilled around a fifty-gallon trash can.
I hurried through the brown-paneled living room, down the brown-paneled hall, and pushed into the first brown door on the left.
It was the smell that hit me first. Even before I realized that I was in the wrong room, it was the smell. Old. Unwashed and unwanted as dog-pissed newspaper brought up from a damp basement.
An emaciated man with sunken cheeks and chiseled eyes lay on the narrow bed in the room, a patchwork throw pulled up to his chest, arms pinned beneath, edges tucked tight under the mattress. A tube ran from each nostril. Oxygen bottle and a soiled bedpan on the floor by the bed. His eyes were closed, mouth half-open in a terrible gape. Chest laboring infantlike breaths, quiet and quick. He opened his eyes slowly and turned to me, mouth still ajar.
He was tired. I could tell just breathing made him tired. His collarbones competed with his Adam’s apple for unnatural distinction. Sen Budget’s Adam’s apple.