Janice Coates, also present for Celia’s retelling, had a brief verdict on the prison. “That place. Nasty.”
The Head, as it was called by the men imprisoned there, had been in the media a great deal before Aurora, a rare story of successful land reclamation on the site of a mountaintop removal. After Ulysses Energy Solutions finished deforesting and blasting away the top of the mountain to mine the coal beneath, it “restored” the land by pulling debris up and flattening it out. The oft-promoted idea was that, instead of viewing the mountaintops as “destroyed,” the public ought to see them as having been “opened up.” Newly flattened land was newly buildable land. Although the majority of the state’s population supported the coal industry, few failed to recognize this for the bunkum it was. These wonderfully useful new plateaus were generally situated in the middle of nowhere and often came attended by impoundments of slurry waste or chemical containment ponds, which were not the sort of neighbors anyone wanted.
But a prison was uniquely suitable for backwoods reclamation. And no one had been particularly concerned about the possible environmental dangers that its residents might face. That was how Lion Head Mountain had become the setting for Lion Head Maximum Security Prison.
The prison gate, Celia said, had been open, and the front doors, too. She, Millie, Nell Seeger, and the others had gone in. Most of the exploration party from Our Place consisted of recently released prison inmates and personnel, and they were curious about how the other half had lived. All things being equal, it was pretty comfortable. As much as it reeked from being shut up, and although there were some fissures in the floors and walls, it was dry; and the gear in every cell looked new. “Some déjà vu,” conceded Celia, “but kind of funny, too, you know.”
Their last night had been calm. In the morning, Celia had trekked down the mountain a ways, searching for a trail that might cut off some of the hike and save them having to go all the way down the longer, circuitous route to Eagle. To Celia’s surprise, she’d received a call on her toy walkie-talkie.
“Celia! We think we see someone!” It was Nell.
“What?” Celia had replied. “Say again?”
“We’re inside! Inside the prison! The windows at the end of their version of Broadway are all fogged, but there’s a woman in one of the solitary confinement cells! She’s lying under a yellow blanket! It looks like she’s moving! Millie’s trying to find a way to get the door to release without the power so—” That’s where the transmission ended.
A vast rumble in the earth startled Celia. She held out her hands, trying to balance. The toy walkie flew out of her hand and shattered on the ground.
Returning to the top of the road, lungs burning and legs shaking, Celia went through the prison gate. Powder sifted through the air like snow; she had to cover her mouth to keep from choking. What she saw was hard to process, and even harder to accept. The terrain was shattered, heaved up in clefts as if in the aftermath of an earthquake. Displaced dirt hung in the air. Celia stumbled to her knees several times, eyes slitted almost shut, reaching for anything solid. Gradually, the rectangular shape of the Lion Head intake unit, two stories high, emerged, and then nothing else. There was no more land behind the intake unit, and no more prison. The plateau had crumbled and given way. The new max security facility had gone down the back of the mountain like a great stone child down a slide. Intake was now no more than a film prop, all front and no back.
Celia didn’t dare go all the way to the edge to look down, but she glimpsed a few pieces of wreckage far below: massive cement blocks jumbled at the foot, amid a swamp of dust particles.
“So I came back by myself,” said Celia, “as fast as I could.”
She inhaled and scratched a clean place in the mud on her cheek. The listeners, a dozen women who had hurried to their meeting place at the Shopwell when word spread that she was back, were silent. The others weren’t going to return.
“I recall reading that there was some controversy about the fill under that overgrown jailhouse,” said Janice. “Something about how the ground was too soft for the weight. People saying the coal company cut corners when they were packing it down. State engineers were looking into it . . .”
Celia let her breath go, a long sigh, and continued absently. “Nell and I always kept it casual. I didn’t expect it to last outside of prison.” She sniffed—just once. “So I probably shouldn’t feel so blue, but there it is: I feel blue as hell.”
There was silence. Then Lila said, “I need to go there.”
Tiffany Jones said, “Want company?”
7
What they were doing was foolish, Coates said.
“Fucking foolish, Lila. To go off and play around in an avalanche.” She had walked with Lila and Tiffany Jones as far as Ball’s Hill Road. The two expeditionaries were leading a pair of horses.
“We’re not going to play around in an avalanche,” Lila said. “We’re going to play around in the wreckage from an avalanche.”
“And see if someone is still alive in there,” Tiffany added.
“Are you kidding?” Janice’s nose was beet-red in the cold. She appeared ever more oracular, her white hair floating out behind her, the color in her rawboned cheeks as bright as road flares. All that was missing was the gnarled staff and a bird of prey to perch on her shoulder. “They went down the side of a mountain, and the prison landed on top of them. They’re dead. And if they saw a woman in there, she’s dead, too.”
“I know that,” said Lila. “But if they did see a woman in Lion Head, it means there are other women outside of Dooling. Knowing we’re not alone in this world, Janice . . . that would be huge.”
“Don’t die,” the warden called after them as they rode up Ball’s Hill. Lila said, “That’s the plan,” and beside her, Tiffany Jones chimed in, more conclusively, “We won’t.”
8
Tiffany had ridden all through her girlhood. Her family had run an apple orchard with a playground, goats to feed, a hotdog stand, and a pony ride. “I used to ride all the time, but . . . there was some other stuff with the family—downsides, you could say. It wasn’t all ponies. I started to run into some trouble and got out of the habit.”
This trouble was no mystery to Lila, who had personally arrested Tiff more than once. That Tiffany Jones bore startlingly little resemblance to this one. The woman who rode astride the massive roan beside Lila’s smaller white mare was a full-faced, auburn-haired woman in a white cowboy hat that would have suited any John Ford rancher. She had a self-possession about her that was utterly unlike the wretched drug addict Truman Mayweather had regularly tuned up on in the trailer next to his meth lab so long ago, and so far away.