Feeling the water rising around him, the visions come, too. He sees men crushed under tons of rock and wood, hears the life squeezed out of them. Their bodies become skeletons, crawling toward him, bones clacking, grasping for him, reaching, reaching…
To drown it out, to hide from the hideous din, to run from the blood-soaked bony hands, he bellows into the darkness, the wail of a wounded animal. Time and again, he shrieks at the night, at his own fear and shame.
-18-
Rye Whiskey I Cry
“Would you describe yourself as a leader or a follower?” Dr. Susan Burns asks, looking up from a notepad.
Jack Jericho stretches his neck. Sitting in straight-backed chairs always seemed unnatural. “Don’t your fancy books have any other choices?”
“Like what?”
“Like loner. I just want to be left the hell alone.”
“Would you rather be rich or famous?” she asks.
“Neither one interests me. But if I was rich, I’d buy an Orvis graphite fishing rod.”
“Feared or respected?”
“I just want to go through life without hurting anybody else. Isn’t that enough?”
“I don’t know,” Dr. Burns says, “is it?”
Jericho scowls and doesn’t answer.
“Perhaps we can place these questions in the context of your life.
Tell me what you remember about the mountains,” Dr. Burns gently orders.
“The flowers in the spring. Mountain laurel, azaleas, a bunch of others, I’m not sure of their names. And the birds, hoot owls and whippoorwills, and quail in the pine forests. When they whistle, it sounds like they’re calling out, ‘Bob White.’ You can hunt them in season, but I never did. I laid out seed in the back yard and made friends with a couple of them every year. They were darn near tame.”
The sounds around them are not the calls of birds in the forest but the constant thumpa-thumpa of the launch generator below them in the sump. They are sitting in metal chairs in the Launch Equipment Room, halfway down the tunnel that runs from the launch control capsule to the missile silo. Around them are metal shelves stacked with huge batteries, cables, electrical gear and spare parts. A bare 75-watt bulb illuminates the room, casting shadows across the floor.
Jericho has cleaned up. He’s in the utility uniform of olive coveralls, three stripes on his sleeve, no medals on his chest. Dr. Susan Burns, in her blue business suit, looks at him with the practiced demeanor of detached professionalism. “What first comes to mind when you think of home?”
“Home baked bread slathered with molasses.”
“How did you and your friends spend your time?”
He pulls a package of Zig-Zag cigarette papers from his pocket. “When we weren’t reading Dostoevski, you mean?”
“Sergeant, this is serious.”
Jericho slips into a down-home Appalachian accent. “Hell, doc, us hillbillies kept busy shuckin’ corn, raisin’ barns, and duelin’ banjos. Once we got the cable, everythin’ changed. Movin’ pitchers all the way from New York City.”
“Your use of self-deprecating humor to change the subject is an obvious ploy,” Dr. Burns says, drumming her pencil on a note pad.
“Is it, doctor? Or is it a manifestation of primary anxiety, a response of the ego to increases in instinctual tension?”
Her drumming stops in mid-beat. She opens Jericho’s personnel file and thumbs through it. “You had three years of college.”
“Guilty as charged. All that book learnin’ and look where it got me.”
“Why’d you drop out? Your grades were exemplary.” She looks up from the file and shoots him a quizzical look. “You majored in English, and… ” She smiles at him. “You minored in psychology.”
Jericho doesn’t answer, just tamps some tobacco into a cigarette paper. She resumes reading, then says, “After your junior year at W.V.U., you took a summer job in the coal mines. Your father was a miner, wasn’t he?”
Jericho licks the paper closed and slips the cigarette into the corner of his mouth but doesn’t light it. “My daddy used to take seventy five pounds of corn meal and mix it with three hundred pounds of sugar, a little yeast, some bran and about three hundred gallons of water. In four days, voila, or as we say in the mountains, ‘Holy shit.’ Fifty gallons of mountain dew, or if you prefer, whiskey.”
“Your father was a bootlegger.”
“No, Al Capone was a bootlegger. My daddy was a moonshiner who didn’t give up his day job. ‘Course, in the mines, it’s always night, isn’t it?”
“Tell me about your father.”
“What’s to tell?”
“Were you embarrassed by his illegal activities?”
Jericho laughs. “No, was Richard Nixon’s family? Look, there’s nothing wrong with moonshining. The government lets you bake bread and sell it to your neighbors, but not cook up some rye whiskey. Mountain folk are independent and don’t necessarily listen to the government, which never did much for them anyway. My daddy’s daddy made corn liquor and drove it to his customers down valley. I don’t know what he enjoyed more, sipping the whiskey or driving like a bat out of hell, avoiding the revenuers.”
“So you admired your grandfather?”
“He was his own man, didn’t take orders from anyone.”
“And you do?”
“I take orders from everyone from an E-6 to the President. Hell, I even take orders from a lady shrink.”
“Did your grandfather work in the mines, too?”
“He was a farmer, forty acres of rocks and sandy topsoil. In the winter, he made whiskey. You know why they call them moonshiners?”
“Why?”
“‘They work at night so the revenuers can’t see the smoke from the stills.” Jericho breaks into a song:
Susan Burns looks at him sternly.
“What’d you expect?” he asks. “John Denver?”
“Your father,” Dr. Burns says.
“What about him?”
“When I asked about him, you changed the subject to your grandfather, then to the etymology of moonshining, and finally to a mountain song.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Oh, but you do. You purposely avoid talking about your father.”
“If I did talk, would it bring him back?”
“No. But it might bring you back.”
Jericho shakes his head. “I’ve done this before.”
“Do it again. Tell me about your father.”
“My daddy drove a ‘60 Dodge with the heaviest springs you ever saw. Forty cases in the car, and it wouldn’t sink an inch. No one ever caught him either.”
“What are you leaving out?”
He avoids her gaze. “Leaving out?”
“The day job,” she says, sternly. “Tell me about the mine.”
His eyes harden. “You’ve read my file. You know all about it.”
“If you don’t cooperate, I’m required to report you to the captain.”
“The captain can kiss me where the sun don’t shine.”
“Very colorful. You play the role convincingly.”
The unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth wags at her. “It’s not a role. It’s who I am.”