Pops’ room was at the other end of the corridor. The second bed was occupied by a thin, gray-lipped man with sinkhole cheeks and an oxygen tube snapped to his nostrils. The infection had taken a week to fully flush; then the doctors grafted skin from Pops’ posterior to cover the wound.
“I’m wearing my ass on my chest,” he had said and chuckled. “Chester’s gonna have a field day with that.” He would be hospital-bound for one more week to allow the skin to take, then home for a month of recovery. Audy Rae was already planning a party.
“Here’s Cougar Man, come to bust me outta here,” he said when I walked into the room. “I’ll take another bullet before I eat any more of this hospital slop.”
Lo and Paitsel were standing by the bed—they both nodded on my entrance. Pops had yesterday’s copy of the Missiwatchiwie County Register on his lap with my picture filling half the top fold.
Register Exclusive: Kevin Gillooly’s Amazing Journey
Several editions of the Register from previous days were on the side table.
One Dead, Two Critically Injured in Glaston Lake Shooting
Teen Shooter Tied to Pierce Slaying
Fink Out of ICU
“Our run-in with Tilroy is giving Chester a bountiful harvest of news,” he said. “After you read this latest piece, they’re gonna have to move me to a bigger room just to fit your ego.”
“Already read it.” I grinned. “I went into Hivey’s this morning and all the men had it. When they saw me they went all weird, whispering and pointing. Finally Mr. Jensen came up and just shook my hand and said, ‘You done a good thing.’ ”
“Jesper always gets tongue-tied around celebrity,” Paitsel said. He tried to smile, but his face was pulled down from poor sleep, grief still collecting in bags above his cheeks.
“But it’s not just them. Everybody’s been looking at me different, like I’m an alien or something.”
“What you done is big-time, son.”
“Lo’s right, Kevin. What you did is the stuff of legend. People will be talking about it for years.”
“I was just trying to save you. I don’t know what I would have done if you’d died.”
“I know it would have ruined my weekend,” he said, eyes twinkling.
Lo shook out car keys. “We’ll leave you two for private. You ready, Pait?”
Paitsel nodded. “Need to stop by Hivey’s. Wanna thank the boys for everthin.”
Lo patted Pops’ leg. “You take care a yourself, Arthur.”
“I’ll come up Wednesday with Audy Rae,” Paitsel added.
As they went, Lo slapped Paitsel’s back. “We might wanna get a game up with Jesper an Bobby while we’re there.”
“That’d be good.”
“What are you reading, Kevin?” Mom asked through the porch screen.
I showed her. She smiled and came out onto the porch. “One of my favorites. Medgar isn’t so different from Maycomb, is it?”
“At least Maycomb didn’t have a huge strip mine hanging over it.”
She nodded and sat next to me on the wicker sofa. She opened her mouth to speak; then her mind seemed to wander back to familiar black, taking her silent. It was like that with her in the first few weeks after the shooting—bursts of engagement, filaments of conversation, then hours of silence.
The shooting seemed to have reanimated parts of the old Mom that were now desperately trying to climb out of the bleak hole of heartbreak, only to be pulled back into the void by the immensity of loss.
But the bursts still came. Tuesday at dinner she snorted when Audy Rae did a lip-licking Bubba Boyd impression. Thursday she asked me not to slam the front screen door quite so much. Friday she suggested I wipe my muddy feet on the doormat. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for me to construct footings of hope.
Every afternoon we would drive to the hospital to see Pops and Buzzy, who were now sharing a room at Pops’ insistence. They were at cards when we arrived—Pops in a chair by Buzzy’s bed, Buzzy still immobile for leg healing.
“You just missed Paitsel and Chester. They would have liked to see you.”
“Me too. Next time tell them the porch is open for business. They can come by anytime.”
“Ha, that’s a lot of conversation for a fourteen-year-old to hold up. Think you can handle it?”
“I don’t know, let me try. ‘Alexander the Great was no late bloomer… won his first battle at sixteen, you know,’ ” I said in my best Pops imitation.
He laughed and flicked a four of diamonds at me; it whizzed past my head. “You may think life is one long punch line, but Paitsel is heart-attack serious about trying to shut Bubba Boyd down. Guess he sees it as his mission for the honor of Paul’s memory.”
I nodded and Pops continued. “Says he found some documents in Paul’s papers that can prove Bubba’s pumping slurry underground without a permit. Says he’s got a friend outside Washington, D.C., who knows someone who knows someone in the Office of Surface Mining.”
“But it ain’t gonna bring the mountains back,” Buzzy replied.
“It ain’t gonna bring em back, but it might prevent others from being taken. Look, I know it’s a long shot, but at least someone’s doing something.”
We brought Pops home the following week, ambulance lights spinning in a three-car convoy. Paitsel and Lo had built a temporary ramp up the front porch steps, and we installed him and his wheelchair on the porch, with mash on ice in an SWP glass. Mom had painted a welcome-home banner and strung it across the front porch sash. The boys at Hivey’s arrived as a crew, walking up from the woodstove, Grubby Mitchell trailing behind them like an orphaned calf. Then came Lo, Chester, Paitsel, and some neighbors I’d not yet met, filling the porch and spilling into the living room.
“Pait, what’s the latest on the OSM inspector?” Pops asked once the conversation settled.
“Comin in two weeks, he says. Meetin up with Bubba an his site team to see for himself.”
“Who’s he bringin? I heard one a them fancy lawyers is comin,” Jesper asked.
Paitsel shook his head. “He’s a fed boy—them lawyers work for the Appalachian Project. Apparently he’s got the power to slap a CO on Bubba that’ll shut the whole thing down.”
“I thought they gave owners time to fix things. You sure he can issue a CO?”
“The feds got special powers. It’s the state that gotta give abatement.”
“An Bubba gots the state boys bought here to Frankfort. What makes you think he ain’t gonna buy thisn?”
Paitsel shrugged. “I don’t, Bobby. But the state boys is definitely bought, so we ain’t got many other options, do we?”
Everyone nodded and sipped, then went silent. No one tried to find deeper meaning in the horror of Paul’s death and the equal horror of how quickly Tilroy had turned. For the simple empirical was so terribly self-evident for all—a good man was beaten to death by a boy with promise. Trying to parse anything existential out of it or pontificate on the certainties of nurture just left a silent hole in the conversation until the awkward quiet got the better of someone.
“Paitsel, you done real good with this,” Jesper said.
“Umm-hmmm,” Andy Teel agreed.
“This is a top job, Pait,” Bobby Clinch added.
“Tis,” Chester agreed.