KABOOM Page 6

  “Double shit!” I seconded.

  “It’s times like these that I could really use a cigarette.”

  “What are you talking about? You don’t even smoke!”

  “Yeah. But if I did, this is exactly the moment when I would.”

  There were times when Ashley imagined her life as a Hollywood movie. Her inner director would ask, “What would my star actress do in a similar situation?” and Ashley would go for it. It was what got her into trouble sometimes. Case in point: her doing the Peeping Tom thing in the boys’ locker room.

  Never a dull moment with Ashley. It was one of the things I loved about her.

  And also one of the things that scared the crap out of me.

  11

  “I SWEAR,” ASHLEY SAID ANGRILY, “if they so much as touch a twig on her branch there’s going to be hell to pay!”

  Keeping our eyes and ears open and looking over our shoulders every millionth of a second, we had gone back to Mount Tom the next day after school. Following the line of trees marked with bright red flags led us straight up to our sacred grove. We stopped dead in our tracks.

  There She was, wrapped tightly, looking like a big ol’ Christmas present. A red flag around her trunk and another one flapping in the breeze on her lowest branch.

  She. Our beloved white ash. A marked tree.

  Cutting down trees on someone else’s mountain had never bothered me. I mean, I had never really thought about it before. It was like, “Yeah, whatever.”

  Auntie Sadie had been right. Coal and trees. Trees and coal. Logging in Greenfield was a way of life, just like mining.

  But there were trees, and there were trees. These were not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill, cut-’em-&-truck-’em trees.

  These were our trees.

  Sugar Daddy.

  Bradley Beech.

  Sadie’s Twin.

  She.

  Ashley was sitting with her arms around the massive furled trunk of the white ash, her cheek pressed against the ridged, diamond-like pattern of her bark. It was like she was hugging her mother, something I had never seen her do in real life.

  I had no idea how to age a tree but I knew that white ash was old. Not just old but ancient. A true sage of the forest. You could feel it. Nothing could grow that enormous, that wrinkled, that ashy gray, and not have seen a lot of years go by. I imagined that She was here when Lincoln really was the president, when West Virginia seceded from its sister state and split off to join the Union.

  Think of all of the stories She had to tell.

  Ashley reached into the backpack she was wearing and brought out a pair of scissors.

  She stood up and with one single motion cut the marker flag that was strangling the white ash.

  The red flag fluttered to the ground.

  “One down” she said, stashing the flag in her pack. “One down and lots more to go.”

  She stood up and held out the scissors.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  I froze. I looked into Ashley’s eyes and I saw that Hollywood director look. A half-squint steely look that made me shudder. A look that was not to be messed with. A look that changed everything.

  My mind raced with all sorts of conflicting thoughts cascading down my brain like the Green River does after a heavy rain.

  What was the wise thing to do here?

  If it’s illegal, does that make it wrong?

  Did I really want to co-star in Ashley’s movie?

  I was Custard, for crying out loud. Not Belinda. This was not my thing.

  “Ready?” Ashley asked again.

  There are times, even when they are happening, that you know are really important. Times that define you.

  Once, when Ashley and I were in middle school, this girl JoJo Phippen had teased Ashley for a week about not having boobs.

  “Flattie!” she taunted. “Boobless!”

  Ashley was furious. We snuck over to the girl’s house late one night with a carton full of eggs to throw at her window.

  “This’ll teach her,” Ashley said. “She’ll see whose boobless now!”

  “Ready?” Ashley asked.

  “No!” I said. “No, I am not.”

  Flat-chested or not, we snuck back home, leaving the windows unegged.

  This time, on Mount Tom, I was still sitting on the ground. The wind had picked up and the ash leaves, so many of them, too many to count, were sashaying in the breeze. I looked at Ashley. She had one arm propped against the tree, and the other one holding out the scissors. I had never seen her so serious.

  “Ready?” Ashley asked for the third time.

  I stood up, took the scissors from Ashley, gave the bark of She a playful pinch, bowed to her three companions, and continued up the mountain.

  12

  IN HISTORY CLASS we learned that Rosa Parks wasn’t some tired old woman who, on a whim one day in 1955, refused to give up her seat in the front of the Alabama bus to a white man and sparked the entire civil rights movement. That’s the story the media came up with. The truth was that Rosa Parks had been active in civil rights for years. Her refusal to give up her seat was no random action. She knew what she was doing.

  When Ashley and I cut down every flag on every tree from the road at the bottom of Tom right up to the tippity-top, we didn’t have a clue. I thought that we had gone back to Tom just to check out the flags on the trees, and I didn’t even know that Ashley had brought along a pair of scissors. She had thrown them into her back pack at the last moment, along with some gum, a few candles, and a brand-new bottle of sparkling “Made for Me Pink” nail polish.

  Ours was not exactly a well-planned act of conscience. We were not exactly the Rosa Parks of Mount Tom.

  We just went and did it.

  If we had thought about it, if we had discussed the pros and cons, if we had listened to the advice from Sadie or my father or whomever, those flags would not have come down.

  And everything, everything would be different.

  But there we were, sitting in Tom’s Mine, with the candlelight playing on the walls of coal, painting our toenails and counting the flags from Ashley’s backpack.

  “Seventy-two,” Ashley said. “Not bad for an afternoon’s work.”

  We had cut down one hundred and seventy-two flags on one hundred and seventy-one trees. She was the only one who had the distinction of a twofer. It had been a breezy day but I swear to wild, wonderful West Virginia that every time we cut down one of those flags, each and every tree shook and swayed and bowed to us.

  Even after talking to Sadie, we still didn’t know exactly who had flagged those trees, or why they were flagged. We assumed it was American Coal Company but we didn’t know for sure. We just knew that they had to come down.

  It was as simple as that.

  “You know,” I said, holding Ashley’s big toe still while I polished the edges, “I almost wish those guys had been meth heads. Meth heads don’t go around cutting down trees.”

  “Yeah. They just go around robbing and shooting people.”

  We both sighed, ears open to any sounds from the outside.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “You still have my left little toe to do. And you missed a spot on the middle one.”

  “No,” I said. “I mean what now about this?” I held up the bundle of red flags.

  “I don’t know,” Ashley said. “Something tells me we haven’t seen the last of those guys.”

  I took a deep breath and blew on Ashley’s toes. The smell of the polish and the flickering of the light on the pile of flags made my eyes water. That and knowing that that nice safe cage to crawl into didn’t exist. It never had existed and it never would.

  “Do you think we did the right thing?” I asked.

  “Do you think we had a choice?” Ashley answered.

  I took off my shoes and socks, handed Ashley the bottle of nail polish, and put my toes in her lap.

  13

  “THERE HE IS!” Ashley said, poking
me. We were in between classes and Kevin Malloy was walking down the hall straight toward us.

  “Say something!” Ashley whispered.

  “Shhh!” I whispered back.

  He was getting closer.

  We had been doing the stalk and gawk all week in school, and Ashley and I had Kevin’s schedule down pat. We knew which hallway he’d walk down when. Ashley had convinced me that the time had arrived to get serious.

  I had practiced clever pickup lines all morning.

  “Where’s your yellow jacket?” I could ask him.

  Or: “Back off. I’ve got more wooden legs where that one came from.”

  Or: “Hey there, Private. Still got the zingers from the stingers?”

  And now, here he was, directly in front of me. In the flesh. Ashley gave me one more pinch.

  “Hey!” Kevin said. “It’s the girl who almost killed me! Or was it saved my life? I can’t remember!”

  “S’up,” I managed to say.

  “You doing battle this weekend?” Kevin asked, referring to yet another upcoming reenactment.

  I tried to speak but my mouth was ice and the words froze. I could only nod.

  “Leave the leg at home,” Kevin said. “One concussion is enough!”

  I smiled. At least I think I smiled. It may have been more of an awkward grimace. It’s hard to smile with a frozen face.

  “Later,” Kevin said.

  “S’up,” I said.

  •

  “Well,” Ashley said, trying to be supportive. “That went well.”

  “Stop, Ashley. That was a total disaster and you know it. ‘S’up’? That’s all I could say. ‘S’up’? He probably thinks I’m a special-needs student.”

  Ashley put her arm around me. “Chill, Cyndie. It went great! He, like, asked you out!”

  “He did not ask me out!”

  “Sure he did! He asked if you were going to the Civil War thingy!”

  “That was not an ask! And ‘s’up’ was definitely not an answer!”

  “Well, look on the bright side,” she said. “At least you didn’t beat the crap out of him!”

  “S’up,” I said. “I mean, stop. I mean, whatever!”

  14

  “COOP—I mean, Mr. Cooper?”

  Ashley and I had stayed after school to help him clean up after a particularly messy water-quality lab.

  “To what do I owe the distinguished honor and profound pleasure of the presence of my two star students on this beautiful Tuesday afternoon?” Mr. Cooper asked. “Clearly, cleaning up this hazardous-waste dump, this Superfund site, this orgy of scientific chaos is not, I imagine, high on your list of pleasurable activities. And I don’t quite recall giving you a detention.”

  Mr. Cooper had never given detention to anyone. Ever. It was not in his repertoire.

  And what he said about us being his star students was not exactly the truth.

  I was doing well in his class. Really well. I enjoyed science, just like I enjoyed math. And, also like math, there was something comforting in the way the natural world worked. Comforting and beautiful. There were patterns and relationships, form and function that all made sense to me. Everything was connected to everything else and it all fit together like the squares on the old quilts my mother had inherited from her parents and her grandparents.

  Unlike the rest of the world. If you looked at what went on in the rest of the world, it sucked. Totally sucked. If you paid attention to the news, the rest of the world seemed to be spiraling out of control, without direction or meaning.

  I had never been one to pay attention to life outside Greenfield. I didn’t watch TV news. I didn’t read the paper. I didn’t even glance at the headlines as I scrolled down Yahoo. I went online for the latest in celebrity gossip, music videos, and fashion advice, but that was about it. The rest of the world seemed distant and irrelevant, nothing that had anything to do with me. So why bother?

  But this last week Britt had become obsessed with the story of terrorists beheading an American hostage in the Middle East. She was making me watch the evening TV news with her night after night. It was tortuous. Terrifying. Drone strikes in Pakistan. Genocide in Syria. Starvation and poverty and climate change and endless war. And now, icing on the cake, terrorists go and behead this do-gooder aid worker. I mean, the dude goes all the way across the world to try to do the right thing and he gets his head lopped off. Down comes the sword. BAM! Off with his head. The entire thing was recorded on video for the whole world to watch.

  We were learning about metaphors in English, and the hostage-beheading thing seemed to me a perfect one for the screwy state of the world. I wrote about it in English class for an assignment, leaving out the obvious connection to Mount Tom, and Diaper Lady had actually seemed to like it. She had written “Well done. Interesting,” on the top. Who would have thought?

  Anyway, while I did well in class, Ashley . . . well . . . let’s just say Ashley struggled. While she could be thick sometimes, she sure wasn’t stupid. Far from it. She was absolutely the most brilliant person I knew. Let’s put it this way. She just didn’t see school as a high priority.

  As feisty as she was, she seemed dangerously close to plummeting into the West Virginia sexist stereotype. The one that demoted us girls to second-class citizens, good for going up the stripper’s pole and down on guys, but not much else.

  You didn’t need school for those things.

  Ashley rarely handed in work. She never cracked a book. She just didn’t seem to think that school mattered. If it weren’t for me forcing her to occasionally study for an exam she’d still be languishing in the seventh grade.

  Even if I had to become a coal miner, her sorry ass was going to pass, damn it. There was no effin way I was going to move up a grade without her.

  “I don’t see the point!” Ashley would say, exasperated when I told her she had to memorize the chemical equation for photosynthesis.

  “I mean, seriously, who really gives a crap? I’m not saying photosynthesis isn’t awesome. It’s totally awesome! If She does it then it must be way cool. But really, why bother regurgitating back the CO2 and the H2O and whatever comes next in the correct order? Isn’t it enough just to know that plants and trees do it? I mean, doesn’t it take away from the great mystery of life if you understand too many of the details? I don’t want to lose sight of the trees for the forest!”

  “Think of all the advances civilization would have made with logic like that,” I said to Ashley, although, after watching the news for a week, advances and civilization did not exactly seem like words that fit together. It reminded me of the quote that we learned in history class from the great leader of Indian independence, Mahatma Gandhi. When asked what he thought of Western civilization, Gandhi replied, “I think it would be a good idea.”

  Anyway, you get the point. Mr. Cooper calling us his “two star students” was not exactly the God’s truth.

  Of course, if you asked Ashley who Jay-Z was dating or what color Taylor Swift’s favorite panties were, her mouth would be stuck in overdrive for hours.

  School smart or not, I did love my Ashley.

  •

  “We were wondering what you know about Mount Tom?” Ashley asked Mr. Cooper.

  Mr. Cooper knew everything about the natural world. From A to Z, aardvarks to zooplankton, Mr. Cooper knew it all.

  And he knew everything about Greenfield as well. He was born and bred here.

  “Inbred,” he liked to say. “It’s what gives me my outstanding good looks and my peculiar sense of humor.”

  He was not only our go-to science guy but the town historian as well. Unlike Mr. O’Shansky, our tenth-grade history teacher, who I seriously doubt even knew that West Virginia was actually a state.

  “Mount Tom.” Mr. Cooper sat down on the top of his disaster of a desk and immediately knocked a random beaker onto the floor. He kicked the broken glass to the side with his shoe.

  “Nice example of an igneous intrusion,” h
e said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out one his disposable flossers and began flossing his teeth, that bizarre habit we had grown fondly accustomed to.

  Mr. Cooper always looked like crap except for his teeth, which were impeccable.

  “What about the forest there?” I asked.

  “Oaks, oaks, and more oaks, as I recall,” he said.

  “With a few beeches, maples, cherries, and ashes thrown in,” Ashley added.

  Mr. Cooper stopped in mid-floss, his eyebrows arched, and he stared at Ashley.

  “Very good, young lady. Very good.”

  “So why would they flag the trees there?” I asked.

  “Why would who flag the trees?”

  “The mining company. American Mines.”

  Mr. Cooper’s eyebrows arched again.

  “What the hell!” he said, flossing furiously. “American Mining Company? Marking trees on Mount Tom?”

  “Yup,” we said in unison.

  “Bastards! Sons of bitches! I didn’t expect this for another year or two.”

  “Expect what for another year?” Ashley asked.

  Mr. Cooper scowled and extended the flosser into the depths of his cavernous mouth. We waited while he diligently worked on the bottom left row of teeth.

  “Two years ago Ian McGreggor sold Mount Tom to American. He didn’t want to do it, but that man was deeper in debt than a one-legged miner. Mount Tom had been in his family since before Christ. He once told me that Tom was his great-great-granddaddy, though if you gave Ian McGreggor a drink or two he was liable to tell you just about anything. With that man it was hard to separate the beef from the bullshit.”

  That was one thing we loved about Mr. Cooper. His inability to self-edit. Words would flow from behind his flosser that had no business in a high school classroom.

  Once, on Mr. Cooper’s birthday, the principal had presented him with a roll of duct tape.

  “What’s this for?” Mr. Cooper asked.

  “To seal your lips,” the principal answered. “It will keep you employed and me off the phone with irate parents.”

  “Shall I leave the flosser in or out?” Coop asked.