And another, just the two of them, hand in hand.
“I have to get her to a hospital,” said Cal. “She’s burning up.”
Colleen glanced back at him. Voices carried up to the fourth-floor window. Looters had returned to Patel’s, picking over the goods scattered on the sidewalk and on the street.
“Roosevelt’s the closest.” Not knowing how to speak of comfort, Colleen took refuge in the practical, which was always the best course anyway, she thought. “Fifty-ninth and Tenth. You got something to carry her in?”
She saw the young man flip through half a dozen possibilities in a second, picking them up and discarding them like her dad checking out bolts of different sizes, looking for one that fit.
“There’s grocery carts at Patel’s,” he said.
Colleen nodded. Close, and the looters wouldn’t be fighting over them-not yet, anyway.
Cal drew a deep breath, made a smile and held out his hand to her. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you more than I can say.” And there was that brisk lawyer tone in his voice that added, We’re done here.
I won’t ask you for anything else.
“I’ll get the cart,” said Colleen, ignoring him. “Can you get her down the stairs?”
Cal closed his eyes briefly. Colleen could see the relief on his face, that he wouldn’t have to do this alone. He said, “Thank you,” again, the voice of a friend.
WEST VIRGINIA
“There is nothing unsafe about those tunnels!” Norman Mullein pitched his voice to carry over the voices of the men and women crowding the wet gravel yard between the office and the pithead. “There hasn’t been a flood, there wasn’t a cave-in. . ”
“How would you know?” yelled Anne Flue, in tones at least an octave lower than the mine supervisor’s.
“And destroying the elevators in attempting to clear the downcasts would only halt production and put everybody out of work for weeks.”
“Like them dying down there wouldn’t put ’em out of work for longer?”
Wilma stood back from the crowd, arms folded, watching the faces of her friends and neighbors and feeling oddly detached. The sky still held its light-drenched blue brilliance, but, with the setting of the sun behind the green spine of Pigeon Ridge the valley that held Boone’s Gap was beginning to fill with shadow, and twilight was, she found, having a curious effect on her.
With the coming of dusk the world seemed to take on different colors. The company compound, with its clutter of green-painted buildings, its tall angular pithead, its cyclone fences strung as though to keep the crowding woods at bay, looked strange to her now. Over the scents of coal and mud and machine-oil other scents tickled and whispered and murmured in her brain. Scents of the woods. Scents of the night.
“. . wait another few hours and everything will be all right. We’re overdue to hear from the power company. . ”
“Overdue?” hooted Ulee Grant. “My nephew just got back from biking down to Beckley, and he tells me every-thing’s out there as well. And he says you can see smoke in the sky, off from Charlestown and way off in the north towards Wheeling, and you know what else? He says the whole day, he didn’t see one airplane, one helicopter; he didn’t see one working car on the road.”
“To hell with this!” Hazel Noyes, Wilma’s next-younger sister, planted a booted foot on the edge of the porch and hoisted herself up to stand at the same level as Mullein. “So we can’t get the elevators out of the shaft? I guess that means we’ve got to go in some other way.”
“Now, wait a minute!” protested the supervisor, looking as if he might shove her off the porch in sheer irritation.
“Everybody, get food, get water, get blankets, and get all the candles and lamps you can,” Hazel went on. “Meet me over at the old Green Mountain pithead.”
“That’s company property!”
Hazel raised her eyebrows and mimed a moment of stunned surprise. “Gosh, and here I thought all these years you’d turned it into a state park when you were done with it!” Hazel had had her nose broken by Applby’s goons on a picket line when she was fifteen: Norman Mullein did not impress her. She turned back to her friends. “It’s a slant mine, not a shaft. Candy, can you meet us there with maps?”
“Those maps are company property!” protested Mullein. “Miss Leary, I forbid you. . ”
“Oh, button it,” snapped Candace, springing up the steps and pushing past him. “I quit, okay?” She went into the office.
“Get water,” Hazel was repeating. “Get lamps. . Blankets. .”
Wilma slipped away into the shadows, dusk swallowing her up as the crowd scattered.
Dusk did strange things to her thoughts. She was conscious of movement everywhere, of wildness in her heart and in her veins. As she passed the cars and pickups, stopped wherever they’d been at 9:15 this morning, she felt an odd indifference, as though such things meant nothing to her anymore. It was the time of night when she’d ordinarily have started thinking about getting a flashlight, but she knew there weren’t any and it didn’t bother her. She had no trouble making out shapes-in some ways they were clearer.
In all the shabby little houses along Front Street, people were lighting candles, waiting for moms and dads, husbands and wives, to get back from the pithead with news. Half of those houses had only had electricity for fifteen or twenty years anyway, and many of them still had wood stoves: the company had built those houses back in the forties, then sold them in the seventies to the miners who’d rented them for decades.
She turned the corner, climbed the long hill of Applby Street.
And slowed her steps at the sight of the big white house on the corner amid the honeysuckle.
Or at the non-sight of it. For a moment it seemed to her that all that was there was a kind of shadowy vacancy. Then she saw it again, but she saw, too, Boone’s Gap’s single patrolman, Glen Abate, making his methodical way down the street. Checking on houses, knocking on doors.
He walked past the Wishart house as if he didn’t see it. Didn’t remember it was there.
Didn’t remember that there were people in it who hadn’t been accounted for, that a man he’d gone to school with lay in a coma in the downstairs bedroom, dependent on machines that had to have failed when everything else did.
And for some reason, Wilma wasn’t surprised.
She climbed her own front steps, the cats curling and rubbing against her ankles as she came into the porch; walked down the hall to the kitchen and opened cans. Some-body-probably Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was a savage little huntress-had brought a dead mole in as a present, and for some reason the smell of the blood touched a chord in Wilma, not of disgust but of intent and savage eagerness.
I’m not feeling like myself, she thought.
But that was a lie.
She felt more like herself than she’d felt since childhood. She felt light and springy, dazzlingly aware of small noises that she could identify with a weird clarity as tree mice, lizards, cicadas. And with each identification, she felt a strange delight and a dizzying impulse to go and catch them in her hands.
Perhaps what had happened wasn’t entirely bad, if it freed the spirit like this?
Across the yard, the white house appeared and disappeared in the dusk.
Wilma sat on the back porch steps for a time and watched it. She could hear the birds whistling and calling their territories in every bush and tree of the vast thick-growing yards, and knew they were absent from the Wishart yard. The fireflies, which prickled the cobalt velvet of the summer dusk more thickly than they had in years, came nowhere near that house.