Apex Book Company

There isn’t much time. If I am going to tell this story, I’m going to tell it now. It’s late, I know, but the dogs are spooked and that means it’s on the way. The skin on my face is peeling. The backs of my hands are raw meat. If I hadn’t found Annie’s old tape recorder, then I wouldn’t have been able to document the facts. I can press record. I can pull a trigger. I’m going to tell the whole story because I know that when they find what’s left of me, or what isn’t, they’re going to ask questions, and I don’t want them…you, whoever you are, to think this was a murder. This was a feeding. You’d better just put down the cause of death as “mauled by animal.” You’ll probably have another name for it soon.

This all started out in the fourth district a year ago when we got bogged down in the war with Iraq. Gas prices jumped a dollar fifty and as any coal man in Kentucky would tell you, expensive Arab oil meant it was time to clean off the dozers. Sixty dollars a ton, that was what did it. Who in western Kentucky had ever heard of that? Those East Kentucky mines got that, sure, but they pulled it out of mountains. That wasn’t cheap. Here we just peeled back the top soil and there it was: money.

After the price went up, every old coal baron got into his equipment barn and started calling back the miners he’d laid off in ‘79. Course, most of them were dead or enjoying black lung settlements so they sent their kids. That’s how I came into this. I was on a road crew running a backhoe when Snodgrass called.

“Pheps,” he said, shortening Phelps like every Butler County septuagenarian does, “your daddy worked for me. Now I got a golden opportunity for you. What’s Scott paying you to run that hoe?”

“Pretty good, Mr. Snodgrass.” I didn’t want to ruin any offer with the truth.

“Would you come work for me for twenty-two an hour?”

“Can I get overtime?”

He laughed at me. “Boy, you’re gonna be begging me for a Sunday morning off. We’ll get going at Aberdeen Grocery at four-thirty tomorrow morning.”

We talked for awhile about the old days, my father, his purchase of the Lindsey land back when everyone thought coal was dead. I was almost off the phone when he asked if I knew a good dozer operator. Two more seconds and I would have been off the phone. Two more seconds and I might not be sitting on my porch with a loaded shotgun and a tape recorder. I’m not saying that all this wouldn’t have still come down eventually had I not recommended Zan. It was in the seam after all, and somebody would have run across it before too long, but maybe, just maybe, if I had gotten off that phone, I wouldn’t be the one waiting to die.

Zan had come back from Iraq six months before. He’d joined the army after high school, encouraged by his recruiter and the possibilities opened up by his unusually high ASVAB scores. His daddy was a dozer operator and so was his older brother. The army would get him out of that terrible inevitability. That was what the recruiter had said. Two months after signing up, Zan was in Felujah, running a dozer in the grand task of pushing down neighborhoods deemed “lost to the insurgency.” It turned out he was genetically predisposed to being a top notch dozer operator. ASVAB stands for “Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery.”

I found Zan that very night, lying in his underwear on his blue couch in the den of his pink trailer, smoking pot.

“Come in!” he hollered when I knocked, not bothering to find out who it was.

“Zan, it’s me, Andy.” I called out as a precaution.

“I know, I could hear Annie’s car from a mile away. What’s new? You want to hit this?” He extended the three-foot red plastic bong toward me.

“No, I’m fine. I got you a job.” He pulled a long, gurgling lung-full of smoke as I talked, then held it in, his upper body poised awkwardly upright by the tension of maintaining his expanded chest cavity. Curling fingers of blue-white smoke trailed out of his nostrils and the corners of his mouth, drifting in the stale dead air of the living room and into the cone of light emanating from the television. It was the History Channel showing a documentary called “The Battle for Felujah.”

“They drug test?” I told him they didn’t, and he agreed to meet up with us at four-thirty in the morning.

He was on time. Everyone was; the money Snodgrass had promised was too good. I left the house at four; the stars were bright and cold, as I warmed up the truck and my breath fogged heavily in the pre-dawn November air. Aberdeen grocery was ten minutes drive from the house, but I planned on getting a sausage biscuit down while I was there and buying a bologna sandwich for lunch. Aberdeen grocery would slice off the bologna as thick as three slices at other places, and they steadfastly used real mayonnaise. I came into the grocery and immediately found the crew. Surrounded by the haze of a dozen cigarettes, twelve men sat around the picnic table that occupied the middle of the fishing tackle room. I sat down beside a bleary eyed Zan and ordered a coffee while we waited for Snodgrass to arrive. It was a good crew. I knew three of them well. The rest I knew fairly well. I had played ball with Curtis Ward; he would be a mechanic. Owen Kelley and B.J. Smith would be on equipment. Eric Ingram and his brother, Jay, would be running the trucks. We were all about the same age. Only Johnny Lindsey had experience from the days before the ‘79 bust and, as Johnny was a mute, he wouldn’t be telling any stories. He would be another mechanic.

Our small talk ran in short rounds, punctuated by yawns as the low, wet gurgle of the minnow tank aerators lulled us all to sleep. Occasionally, one of the group would fall into light slumber only to be jolted awake as the table shifted on the ancient and uneven planks of the floor, sending coffee spilling everywhere. Then Snodgrass arrived and we were caravanning north on Highway 70 to the wide open ridge-top fields of the county’s fourth district. Zan rode with me in the old Chevy truck I had resurrected from my yard the summer before. Its front wheels had been scavenged from a smaller truck, causing it to ride at a pitched-forward angle that made your butt want to slide off the cracked vinyl bench seat.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this shit again.” Zan said, as we whipped along the dark, cold, ridge road.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Dozer work. I mean, Christ-sake, dude. I wasn’t meant for this. I can do so much. Remember all those ferns and fossil fish your dad used to get from the shale? You know I learned the name and age of every single species of those things. I was only eight! I should be a scientist or something.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “You remember that trip to the Kentucky Museum in the sixth grade? That tour guide was showing off those worm fossils and you told him they belonged to some other species and he tried to say you were wrong, but when we went back in the seventh grade they had changed all the tags on them to what you had said.”

“They were called nautoloids. Yeah, I remember.” We rode along in silence, then Zan continued, more subdued, “When I was in Iraq, we had this job where we were looking for hiding places in some rock outcrops. While I was running some equipment I uncovered some caves. At the end of the day I got down off the dozer and all of a sudden all these towel heads who lived nearby came running up to me screaming and waving their arms and shit. The infantry guys who were with us almost popped ‘em right then and there. One of them spoke some English and managed to convince the guards to come and get me. Turns out they wanted me to cover the cave back up. They said they wouldn’t sleep until the cave was closed. I was shit tired, but they were practically in tears. Kept saying the Djinni will come out.”

“The gin?”

“No, Djinni, genies. Like with the lamps.”

“I thought those were good luck. Three wishes and all that.”

He was quiet for awhile, staring off to a bright star rising on the horizon, “No, that’s just Disney shit. Over there the Djinni are terrible things. They’re like spirits of hate made from the elements. Some of them are just like pranksters, the Djinni from the sky. They steal your goats, knock over your piss pot while you sleep. The ones from underground–” He chuckled. “Well those are the bad ones. They’re imprisoned underground by the gods, or by God I guess now, and they get loose and it’s all your asses. They come down from the sky and eat the skin off whole herds, not one goat, the whole herd. They carry village girls out into the middle of a field and tear their arms and legs off, then when people come to help them they tear off their limbs until the whole village is a big pile of limbless bodies.”

“Well, I know what I would do with three wishes,” I offered lamely. Zan didn’t reply.

Two semis waited at the site. The drivers had already unloaded the two dozers and two end-loaders, and Snodgrass had signed for them. After a brief consultation with a surveyor who showed up in a shiny new dodge truck, Snodgrass gave us our orders.

I was put on one of the end-loaders, a heavy dirt shovel that had seen better days, and dispatched to the middle of the bowl-shaped expanse that made up the Lindsey mine. Zan followed me on the E-6, a mammoth dozer, and Eric brought up the tail in a dump truck. The other crews were dispatched at the back of the five-hundred-acre mine.

We went straight to it. Zan peeled back the topsoil and I scooped it up and put it in the dump. When the truck was full the spoil was packed off to a pile for later use in reclamation. Zan and I worked well together. I could anticipate his moves, his strategy, and before noon we had two trucks packing off our spoil. Zan was good. There were no wasted moves. He seemed able to predict the material under the brown sage grass of the field. He knew rocks were there before he hit them, and when a clean run of clay was found he pushed it hard. We worked like that for the rest of the day, and the day after that, and the day after that. After a week of prep, we got into the black.

The seam was not deep. We cut through a layer of clay, then shale, and that was it. The run of coal was around two feet thick and looked good. The crew on top of the ridge had been pulling coal for two days so we were both anxious to get it out of the ground, and get it out we did. We had a smaller crew, thinner seam, and older equipment but, by the second day, Zan and I had already matched the others ton for ton.

When we kicked off at dark we busted on the other crews. “How two dozers and two loaders on a four foot seam can’t keep up with me and Zan can only mean one thing!” I yelled at the ridge crew.

“What does it mean?” Zan called out from the truck bed, shot gunning a beer as he did.

“Pussyitis!” I cried to a reply of ‘fuck-yous’ and the high-pitched throat squeals of mute Johnny’s damaged laughter.