KABOOM Read online

  Everyone laughed.

  “So what is American planning on doing with the mountain?” I asked. Ashley and I were holding our breaths.

  “Blow the top off of it!” Coop said, practically spitting with rage.

  “Seriously,” Ashley said. “What are they going to do?”

  Mr. Cooper took his flosser out of his mouth and crossed his heart with it.

  “I kid you not,” he said. “Believe me, I wish I was.”

  “Blow its top off?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Mountaintop removal!” Mr. Cooper scowled, once again flossing furiously. “Clear cut every oak, beech, ash, maple, and cherry. And then blow the top of that mountain to kingdom come! Coal is king and that mountain is a palace of it. And the cheapest way in is to blast through the gates!”

  15

  BACK IN THE DAY there was only one way to mine coal. Dig a hole in the ground, prop the mine open with wooden beams and support structures, and get the coal out. By hand. By mule. By train. By truck. Whatever it took.

  It was dirty. It was dangerous. Sadie’s husband, my Uncle Nelson, died in the collapse of Mine Number 3. It took them two weeks to dig his body out.

  My granddaddy Lewis died of black lung disease. He inhaled so much coal dust that his lungs turned from pink to black. Not a good thing if you’re a lung.

  Uncle Nelson died before I was born. But I remember Granddaddy Lewis, coughing and spitting and barely able to speak a sentence he was so short of breath. He died when I was ten.

  Factors of five are evil. My mother ten years ago, my granddaddy five years ago, and now, Mount Tom.

  Coal mining has always been dangerous and unhealthy but at least the mountain was left above the mine and there were jobs. After all, duh, it takes coal miners to mine coal. A mountain of ’em. The Greenfield American Three Mine had been producing for decades. It reopened after the collapse, and now close to half the town was employed working the mine. As I said before, take the mine away from a mining town and there isn’t a lot left.

  “Bastards!” Mr. Cooper roared. “They’ll stop at nothing to get what they want! They want to blow the mother up!”

  Coop had worked himself into such a furious frenzy that the flosser had flew to the floor and joined the broken beaker in the corner of the room. Spittle was frothing from Coop’s mouth like one of those rabid dogs on Animal Planet, wild and crazed and needing to be put down before they did some serious damage.

  “Sons of bitches!” he hissed.

  We had never seen Mr. Cooper like this before. Pissed? Yes. Annoyed? Most definitely!

  But never anything like this.

  •

  Mountaintop removal.

  It was all the rage here in West Virginia. And, come to find out, had been for years.

  Who knew? Obviously, not Ashley and me.

  Picture this:

  A beautiful mountain, blanketed in green. A West Virginian quilt of trees, trees, and more trees. The who’s who of the forest hopping and scurrying and flying and buzzing and bounding from tree to awesome tree.

  Nature. Awesome nature. A feast for the eyes. A sanctuary for the soul. A temple to the gods.

  Always had been and always would be.

  Until now.

  Until this.

  Mountaintop removal. Blow the top off of the mountain.

  I know. I know. It sounds like some really lame action flick where a bunch of terrorist dudes cross the border and sneak into the country and start blowing shit up before Will Smith or Dwayne Johnson or Vin Diesel come and beat the crap out of them.

  But that’s what the coal companies do. They cut down all the trees on the top of a mountain, lay down tons of dynamite, and then—KABOOM! Hundreds of vertical feet on the summit of a mountain are blown sky high.

  Gone. Just like that. Goodbye, paradise. The top of the mountain blasted apart. And all the rock and debris dumped to the side, burying streams and valleys.

  It’s like taking that forested quilt, that fabric of life, and tearing the middle right out of it. Rip out the heart. Rip out the soul.

  To the company it makes perfect sense. Why hire a bunch of locals to dig, dig, and then dig some more when you can just cut to the quick and blow the whole thing up? It’s much easier that way. Take the miner out of mining. More bucks for the bang.

  Of course, like Comedy Central said, keep it up and they’ll just have to call us ’billies, because there won’t be any more hills left to put us on.

  This had been going on for years throughout Appalachia. Years. Mount Tom wasn’t going to be the first to lose his head. Coal was king and the emperor had a fierce appetite for beheadings.

  How could I not have known this?

  Sadie had told us that you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

  But what about the hand that holds the sword that chops off the head?

  •

  You know the ads you see on TV where there’s this happy little family sitting on the couch, reading or playing games or just plain snuggling together? I know it’s just an ad. I know it’s setting the mood to get us all gooey and mushy inside so we’ll rush off and buy some worthless piece of crap that we don’t need and we don’t even want and we clearly can’t afford.

  But those ads work for me. I like them.

  I remember sitting on the couch just like that happy little family. Sitting on the couch with my mom and my dad and little Britt thinking that nothing bad could ever happen to us. Nothing. That grown-ups would take care of everything and the world was a safe and wonderful place where only princesses and unicorns and cute little puppies played, happy as a catfish in Green River muck, not a care in the world.

  And then my mom died. I was five. I didn’t have a clue as to what death was and I remember, night after night, waiting for her to come back home from wherever she was and tuck me in and kiss my forehead and read me a story or sing me this lullaby by Deanna Coleman:

  Well I love my baby

  sweet and fair

  you’ve got the sky in your eye

  the sun in your hair

  I rock you to sleep most every night

  and sing you this song

  while I hold you tight.

  There are nights where I still lie awake, waiting for my mom. Waiting for my bedroom door to open. Waiting for the hallway light to illuminate the shadows of her jet-black hair and her face and her smile. Waiting for her to kneel by my bed and pull the covers up tight under my chin and kiss me lightly on my forehead.

  The night after Mr. Cooper told us what they were planning to do to Mount Tom was one of those nights.

  I lay awake and waited. All night long. And Mom never came.

  I’d have to say that up until that very moment I’d really thought that grown-ups had it more or less figured out. That they had it together. That I was safe in their hands.

  Even growing up with a dead mom and a slightly crazed dad and a twit of a sister, I was happy. I didn’t worry about the world. Call me silly. Call me naïve. Call me whatever you want, but that’s how I felt.

  What a difference a week makes.

  Watching the news with Britt and being force-fed the terrifying images of the world as it was had been bad enough.

  And now this.

  They were going to cut a road to the top of Tom and then clear-cut the rest. Cut down every tree on the top of the mountain. Every tree. And then blow the top off of the mountain to get at the coal inside!

  This was definitely not having it together. This was definitely not figuring it out.

  This. Was. Horrible.

  16

  WE WERE BACK IN OUR MINE on Mount Tom. I was brushing Ashley’s hair and totally failing once again to pull off a decent French braid.

  “So,” I asked. “What are we going to do?”

  “Give up, I guess,” Ashley said.

  “Give up? Are you kidding me? Just like that? Give up?”

  I was stunned. This wasn’t like Ashley. She was more stubborn than a
drunken mule. Once she got an idea in her head, no matter how outrageous or ridiculous it was or what a potential shit-show, talking her down was next to impossible.

  “I can’t believe you, Ashley!” I said, incredulous.

  “What’s not to believe?” she replied. “Ouch. You’re pulling my hair!”

  “Sorry.” I eased up on the braid. “I mean quitting right now. It’s so not you!”

  “What’s it have to do with me?” Ashley asked. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, Cyndie, but this wasn’t even my idea. You’re the one who saw it in Teen Vogue.”

  “Teen Vogue? What are you talking about?”

  “Seriously, I appreciate the effort and all. I really do. And please, please, don’t you ever stop brushing my hair. But after the thousandth time I just don’t think the French braid thing is going to fly. It just isn’t. No offense, but a hair braider you’re not. Harebrained, yes. Hair braider, no.”

  Relieved, I let out a laugh that echoed through the mini-mine.

  “Wow!” I said. “I thought you meant . . .”

  “Saving Mount Tom? Give up on that? Puh-lease! Who do you think I am? Who do you think we are!”

  Whew! If Ashley had bowed out of the battle there’d be no fight. There was no way I could do this alone. Without her—no me.

  And without us—no Tom.

  I felt the pull of Belinda the Brave. Not a-barrelful-of-bears brave, not even a bucketful, but at least I could feel her presence.

  French braid or not, we were not going to let Tom go down without a fight.

  •

  We both agreed that we needed allies. There was strength in numbers. It was like the old saying, “It takes a village to save a mountain,” or something like that.

  “The meth heads,” Ashley said. “That’s who we need on our side. If they’re cooking meth on the mountain then they probably care as much about Tom as we do! If we had them in our camp, American would back the hell off in an instant. Nobody messes with those dudes!”

  As previously noted, methamphetamines were as common in Greenfield as Confederate flags on pickup trucks. Kids would even do stand-up comedy about it in the lunchroom.

  “How many meth heads does it take to change a light-bulb?” one joke went. “Four. One to hold the bulb and three to smoke until the room spins.”

  Very funny.

  Not.

  I mean, don’t get me wrong; Ashley and I had certainly done our share of putting the S in Stupid when it came to alcohol. Like the last time we raided her parents’ stash of booze. The results were not pretty.

  “Arggg!” Ashley moaned, hugging the toilet bowl and blurfing up the last of the Cheetos along with an unhealthy amount of Southern Comfort (from that day forward known as Southern Discomfort). “Somebody shoot me!”

  “Remind me why we thought this was fun?” I slurred, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, both feet on the floor, desperately battling the spins while I held her head as she heaved and heaved again.

  Another piece of paper for the ridiculous jar. Although that was way more stupid than ridiculous.

  Half the kids at school get trashed every Friday and Saturday night. The bottle heads brag endlessly about how much they drink and how totally wasted they get. They even have a party spot down near the river they call “Heaver’s Holler.” On weekends you can do the Jesus thing and walk on water, it’s so thick with puke there.

  Between the meth heads, the bottle heads, and the be-headers, it’s enough to make you lose your head.

  “I’m not so sure about the meth-head strategy,” I said to Ashley. “I can’t see it bringing a whole lot of people over to our side.”

  “We might be surprised,” Ashley said. “Half the town seems to be in on the action. Those folks probably have their own lobbyists down at the statehouse!”

  “How about we put them in the maybe column?” I said. “To be revisited at a later date. As in never.”

  “Humph!” Ashley said. “Okay. How about Shannon Sullivan’s two brothers who just got back from Afghanistan? Maybe we could get them to place land mines all around Mount Tom. I heard they did that kind of stuff over there. They could mine Tom so American can’t!”

  “Awesome!” I said. “That’s a fab idea. We’ll blow up the effin mountain so the mining company doesn’t! Destroy Tom in order to save it! Works for me!”

  Ashley humphed again. “Okay, Miss Smarty Pants. If my ideas suck so bad, why don’t you come up with something?”

  “I think we should tell Mr. Cooper about what we did. With the flags and stuff. See what he thinks the next steps are.”

  “Are you kidding?” Ashley said. “Favorite teacher or not, he’ll turn us in. He’ll go straight to the police. We’ll be in jail by sundown.”

  “No way. Coop won’t tell.”

  “He will.”

  “He won’t.”

  “He will,” Ashley said. “He has to. He’s like a mandated reporter or something.”

  “That’s for child abuse, not for saving trees.”

  “This is abuse. Worse than abuse. It’s like rape. It really is. They’re going to cut down all the trees on Mount Tom. Our mountain. That would be bad enough. But then they’re going to blow it up! Can you believe it? Blow it up!”

  An article had just come out in the local paper detailing American’s mountaintop removal plans. The reporter who had interviewed the mine owners hadn’t thrown one hardball question at them. Instead, the article read like a glowing review of a Taylor Swift album, for God’s sake, giving the impression that somehow after Tom had lost his head he’d be even more handsome than before.

  Ashley paused and wiped her face on my shirt. I was feeling a little teary-eyed myself.

  “I mean, if you cut down the trees they grow back, right?” Ashley continued. “But if you blow the top off of the mountain where are they going to grow? Huh? Where? If that’s not abuse, if that’s not rape, then I don’t know what is! Mr. Cooper should be turning them in, not us.”

  We grew quiet, listening to the soft rustle of a light rain on the rhododendrons outside our mini-mine and thinking about how unfair it all was.

  I just wanted to go back to painting Ashley’s toenails and talking about boys. I wanted to finally figure out how to French braid her hair. I wanted to know that our mountain and our trees and our sanctuary would always be safe and that there was nothing that could ever come and screw it all up and turn it into such a colossal mess. I wanted to not know what I now knew and go back to how it all was before.

  But that wasn’t going to happen. Once you know, you know. There was no unlearning the truth. There was no turning back.

  But seriously, who were we kidding? We were fifteen, for goodness sake! And girls! Given how folks down here felt about females, what could we possibly do to stop American from blasting Mount Tom into oblivion? Did we actually think we had a chance in a bazillion years of stopping them? I mean, really. Why even try if we were doomed to fail?

  It was like going after a Number Two: an Untouchable. What was the point?

  “Changing the subject,” Ashley said. “Any new ideas on how we’re going to snag you Kevin Malloy?”

  17

  Saving the world or not, life does go on. There were other things equally worthy of obsession.

  Namely (duh!) boys. One specific boy to be exact.

  Civil War reenactments had abruptly ceased to be a PITA. What with Kevin Malloy proudly marching with the Army of Northern Virginia, I was counting down the seconds to the next battle.

  “What’s up with you?” Britt asked. “You actually want to go?”

  It was Saturday and we were heading up to Maryland to annihilate the Army of the Potomac.

  “Well,” I said. “You know how it makes Dad happy to have us there. And Auntie Sadie needs my help again.”

  “Since when did you ever care about making Dad happy?” Britt asked.

  “Well, you know ... I mean ... like ...” It was hard to speak in the grip of a full
-body blush.

  Britt stared hard at me.

  “Wait a minute!” she said. “You can’t fool me! There’s something else going on here. It’s that boy, isn’t it? The one you attacked! Kevin Malloy!”

  Ouch! Outed by the little sister! And this from a twelve year-old?

  And all of it was true. Unintentional or not, I had touched an Untouchable. Since the moment he had fallen on top of me at the Haunted Lunatic Asylum and I had whacked him half to death with the peg leg, I was having a hard time getting that boy out of my head.

  If Mr. Cooper had, with all of his scientific know-how, at that very moment dissected my head and computed the percentage of my brainpower devoted to matters of critical importance, he would have come up with the following statistics:

  2 percent to the English essay due Monday, a character analysis of Hester Prynne in The Scarlett Letter, a book I hadn’t yet cracked a page of.

  3 percent to breathing, blood circulation, eating, drinking, peeing, pooping, and all other essential bodily functions.

  21 percent to my personal appearance, with particular emphasis on the terrifying nest of zits that circled my chin. Ashley told me about some pill she saw advertised on the ’Net that boasted a lifetime guarantee of no more acne after you used it. Imagine that! Joy of joys! A pimple-free life! The only drawback was that your kids would get birth defects and your liver would fail and you’d get a bunch of other unpleasant and potentially catastrophic medical conditions that all pretty much sucked. As tempting as the offer was, I decided to stick with my Clear Proof Acne Treatment Gel, which not only promised to unclog my pores and remove excess oil but also swore to prevent embarrassing breakouts and future flare-ups, and to leave my skin feeling sexier. Not that you’d know it from looking at my zit goatee.

  31 percent to Satan and Company and the destruction of Mount Tom.

  43 percent to Kevin Malloy.

  “I don’t understand why the English essay ranks so high?” Ashley asked me. “It seems to me that all of that valuable mental energy could be much better spent focusing on Kevin.”

  •