Raylan Read online

  Raylan said, “I’m sorry about your boys.”

  Pervis held up his hand. “I let ’em become nitwits. They had plenty time to straighten out, so I’m not takin blame. I swear I couldn’t stand to have ’em around.”

  “I get Pervis here for the day,” Casper said. “Tomorrow he has to be home—Rita’s coming. She visits every two weeks—set your watch by it.”

  Raylan glanced at Pervis listening, not seeming to mind.

  “She puts on her maid’s outfit,” Casper said, “and her and Pervis play house all day.”

  Raylan looked at Pervis. “You mind him tellin your business?”

  “He talks, he sounds like a woman. Everybody knows she lived with me for years. I set her up.” Pervis said, “Rita’s the smartest dealer in the state.”

  “All I’m tryin to do,” Casper said to Raylan, “is show my good buddy how to get rich.”

  “I got enough,” Pervis said, “without sellin any my properties.”

  Carol was getting out of the car now.

  Raylan watched her come out telling Casper, “I’m not here to make Mr. Crowe an offer. I’ve told you that. My job is to hear complaints and work out disagreements. Listen to what miners have against the company that’s giving them jobs.”

  Casper was grinning. “Honey, we know each other, we been across the table. You’re gonna set all your girlish devices on poor Mr. Crowe and get him to sell.”

  “You mind my asking,” Raylan said, “what you all are talking about?”

  “Big Black Mountain,” Casper said, “the highest peak in the state of Kentucky, and Pervis owns it.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Once they were inside the school, people in the hall turning to look at them, Raylan leaned close to her saying, “I wondered what you were doing in the car. You changed your pants.”

  Carol said, “You’re the only one noticed.”

  “I know the difference between linen slacks and forty-nine-dollar Levi’s.”

  The folded pair she’d brought along; they fit her snug. Raylan kept this observation to himself, but then the Devil made him say, “A tear across one of the knees is popular.”

  “You can be annoying,” Carol said, “but I’m not letting you go. I want you at the side of the stage where I can see you. I’m going to use you, Raylan, the most popular guy here with all your celebrity. I’m going to make a point that comes close to home.”

  “I was a miner at one time,” Raylan said, “and live to tell about it?”

  “Wait for my questions,” Carol said.

  In the gym, Carol got up from her chair next to Casper Mott’s, gave his shoulder a pat and walked up to the mike, its stand in the middle of the movable stage at the far end of the Redskin gym. She looked out at three hundred folding chairs all occupied, signs sticking up in the crowd; unemployed miners in clean shirts and dirty baseball caps outnumbering the ones with jobs three to one, maybe more, their wives waiting to have a say.

  She glanced to her right, where Winona sat at her stenotype machine. Carol had listened to Casper reading the names of court reporters. He came to Winona’s, mentioning she was Raylan’s ex, and Carol said get her for the meeting, whatever she wants. Casper asked should he bill M-T, and Carol said, “I would.”

  To Carol’s left, Raylan stood where he’d mount the stage if he had to. While she was still seated Carol had watched him looking at Winona, trying to catch her eye. But she couldn’t tell if he did without turning around.

  Beyond Raylan, off to the side of the crowd, Boyd was talking a mile a minute to a girl Carol saw as a babe, in heels and a showy yellow dress, the neck cut just low enough. She had to be Ava, attractive but still a babe, the one who’d shot her husband while he was having supper. Boyd’s brother. Ava was living with Boyd now—he’d mentioned it—as brother and sister. Carol asked him why.

  Boyd said, “We’re seein can we trust each other enough to fall in love and make it work.” Whatever that meant.

  Carol didn’t ask.

  She took the mike from the stand now and said, “Good afternoon. I’m Carol Conlan, a vice president of M-T Mining.”

  She got a wave of boos, a few whistles she believed had nothing to do with her job, and questions fired at her:

  “When’s M-T gonna do right by us?”

  “Lady, we miss a day sick we’re laid off.”

  Carol said, “My dad mined coal in West Virginia. I grew up in coal camps, so I know what you all are talkin about,” her accent taking her closer to West Virginia as she spoke.

  A voice in the crowd asked her: “How’d you escape the life?”

  “I got out on a scholarship to college, worked my tail off studying about industry, supply and demand and the coal business. I went on to get a law degree and was hired by the company that’s given you fellas your jobs.”

  A man’s voice said, “They’s way less jobs workin mountaintop. What are all us miners sittin around the house suppose to do?”

  Carol said, “Times change, don’t they? You’re drivin a car now stead of a team of mules. The blacksmith used to shoe your mules, what’s he doin? He’s gone, workin at something else now. Most coal mines are still underground, but you know it’s changing. There more and more surface operations workin today.”

  From the crowd: “You mean desecratin the mountains.”

  Carol said, “We restore the mountains, don’t we?”

  The same voice: “Wait a hunnert years for the trees to grow? I doubt we’ll be around.”

  She had something to say about future generations, but saved it. A man in the front row was standing now. He said: “My name’s Hazen Culpepper from over by Mayfield? I like to know why one of your gun thugs shot and killed my brother Otis for breakin a few windows.”

  Carol softened her voice saying, “Hazen, I can’t tell you how sorry we are. But it wasn’t a gun thug shot your brother. We don’t hire gun thugs.” She said, “Otis lost his home because of someone carelessly dumping debris from a work site. I don’t blame Otis for gettin mad, but—and I hate to say this—your brother fired a shotgun at me. He was ready to fire again and one of our employees intervened.”

  “You mean Boyd Crowder,” Hazen said, “standin over there against the wall?” He said, “Boyd, you tell her Otis missed?”

  “Ms. Conlan was there,” Boyd said. “She saw him.”

  “Then you’re both liars,” Hazen said. “Otis don’t miss with a twelve-gauge. You shot him when he wasn’t lookin.”

  Raylan watched Hazen walk over to Boyd and say something to him, a few words, on his way through the crowd, having hands put on him, patting his shoulder. Raylan caught a whiff of Carol’s scent and turned his head to her standing next to him.

  She said, “You’re not going to arrest him?”

  Raylan said, “Which one?”

  Now a woman in the front row stood up and said to Carol, “You don’t live anywheres near a mine, do you? You know what it does for people livin below? It covers everything you own in coal dirt. It’s all over the house on every surface. Is that why they call it surface coal? It’s in your bathtub, your well—you can’t drink the water no more. Every mornin a coat of coal dirt coverin my car. I have to wash my car before I can go to work.”

  “Wait now,” Carol said. “You’re surprised it gets things dirty? Ma’am, it’s coal. You live in the heart of coal country. A boy comes home from playin, his mom says, ‘Junebug, your hands are black as coal. Wash ’em before grampa gets after you.’ This old man with fifty years of coal dust you’re complainin about, embedded in his pores. Ma’am, coal powers more than half the electricity in the U.S. Do we quit minin coal cause it’s dirty? My dad use to come home so filthy all you could see were his eyes. The coal industry mines forty million tons of coal a year. Half of it’s taken from the surface.”

  A woman’s voice said, “You people dig it all up, what’s future generations gonna do?”

  “What have future generations ever done for us?” Carol said.
“I’m kiddin. You know who said that? Groucho Marx. Listen, I don’t think we should worry our heads about running out of coal. I know we’ve got enough in the ground for the next two hundred and fifty years.”

  A man’s voice piped up: “We can have windmill power right now, like in Holland. Clean wind, no soot blowin on us.”

  “If the wind lovers ever get it right,” Carol said. “The trouble is, wind turbines can cause health problems, headaches and sleep disorders, kids having nightmares.”

  Man’s voice: “All this strippin goin on, your company gets rich while we’re the poorest county in the state, most of us laid off.”

  “It tells me,” Carol said, “we got to do more strippin, get more work for you fellas.”

  A miner’s voice: “We work for a time, the company digs while the price of coal is high. The price dips, the coal company files bankruptcy, forfeits its bond, and slips away in the night.”

  “You know they’re always risks,” Carol said. “It costs a fortune to set up a mine operation. They don’t find as much coal as expected, they have to try again someplace else. Mister, it’s the price of coal on the market keeps us in business.”

  “You clear out,” a voice said, “without cleanin up the mess you always leave behind. A ’poundment breaks loose where you’re holdin three hundred million gallons of slurry, fulla poison, toxic chemicals, and it pours down in the holler and contaminates the water. You know what your boss, the CEO of M-T Mining, called it?”

  “An Act of God,” Carol said. “I believe my boss, bless his heart, is sincere when he says that. He’s a churchgoer, he believes the Lord moves in mysterious ways we don’t always understand. Why couldn’t it be an Act of God? The Lord tellin us, if you gonna build impoundments to catch slurry, then God damn it, try buildin one that holds.” Carol said, “Sometimes we have to learn the hard way.”

  She was getting sounds of approval, whistles, a woman saying, “A-men” and Carol felt closer to the crowd.

  She said, “I know the pay’s decent for surface-mine work. I believe it comes to eleven hundred and twenty dollars a week,” and said right away, “Raylan Givens,” extending her hand in his direction, “I bet most of you know him. A judge assigned Raylan as my personal bodyguard. I asked His Honor, ‘What do I need protection for? Aren’t we all friends?’ ” That drew some noise. “Raylan works for Uncle Sam, he’s a federal marshal and has been decorated a number of times, I understand, for drawing down on outlaws.”

  She let the miners hoot and whistle, then turned to Raylan saying, “Marshal, may I ask if your salary as a law enforcement officer is in the neighborhood of eleven hundred a week?”

  It surprised him and he hesitated, taking his boot from the first step to the stage. Raylan said, “Base pay startin out? It’s around there.”

  “About the same as a surface miner’s.”

  “Well, there’s overtime . . .”

  “But you start out with a weekly salary not much different than if you were diggin coal. Isn’t that right?”

  “It’s pretty close,” Raylan said. “Except marshals are paid fifty-two weeks a year. I’ve put ten years in, that’s five hundred weeks I’ve been paid without a miss. I take a day off—sometimes I have to—I come down with a ferocious hangover . . .”

  Raylan paused, letting the miners come alive yelling remarks at him, “Tell it like it is,” shouting, “Day off’s a day of pain!”

  “I take a sick day,” Raylan said, “I don’t get fired.” He waited a beat and said, “Even get paid for it.”

  Carol saw it coming. Raylan finished and the gym erupted in applause, those piercing whistles, miners yelling his name—“You tell her, Raylan!”—and Carol realized she’d blown it. She’d let Raylan in, let him go on when he said, “Except”—and nailed it in a few words—“there’s a big difference between my pay and a coal miner’s working for a company that shuts down when they feel like it,” Raylan giving them something to cheer about, the crowd applauding and yelling remarks.

  Carol announced to the crowd, most of them standing now, “Let’s take a break, all right? We have refreshments waiting in the front hall. Then we’ll come back and have at it again, okay? Meanwhile I’ll have a talk with Raylan, let him know he’s supposed to protect me, not step on my lines.”

  The hill folk probably wouldn’t get it. They weren’t listening anyway.

  She saw Raylan talking to miners gathering around him and turned to Winona sitting by her steno machine. Carol walked across the stage toward her.

  “Winona? Hi, I’m Carol. We’re so pleased we could get you for this meeting.”

  “I wasn’t sure why you wanted me,” Winona said. “Other than I was married to Raylan at one time and you’re curious about him.”

  “My,” Carol said, “you speak right up, don’t you?”

  “I wondered why you wanted a court reporter for this. Because it’s what I do and you can ask me about Raylan? Or because you like reading transcripts?”

  Carol walked away, got her chair from the middle of the stage and dragged it over. She sat down saying, “Which do you think?”

  “You’ve heard all the complaints before. I think you’d like to know about Raylan. From a woman once married to him.”

  Carol said, “Did he fool around?”

  “Not once in six years.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “He’d walk in the house and if he had, it would be on his face, but never was.”

  “He left you, didn’t he?”

  “I left him. We’re in bed he’d start talkin about offenders. I had different moves I’d have to put on him.”

  “You’re married to a real estate man now.”

  “Sorta. I can’t say the marriage was made in heaven. I thought I needed security.”

  “It’s obvious you don’t,” Carol said. “You want a job?”

  “I’ll never in my life go to work for a coal company,” Winona said. “I’m surprised you did, your dad a miner.”

  “He died,” Carol said. “I was at Columbia and switched my major from English lit to mining management and joined the company.”

  “And save your love for your dog?”

  “I have a cat. That’s what I call her, Cat. ‘Hey, Cat, whatcha doin, huh?’ She never purrs.”

  “I don’t blame her.”

  Carol said, “What kind of moves worked best?”

  “On Raylan? All of them. Being seductive wore me out.”

  Carol said, “You’re after him again, aren’t you?”

  “I’ll bet what you owe me,” Winona said, “you don’t get him in bed.”

  Carol said, “What about in the limo?”

  Raylan got away from the miners grinning at him, telling him he ought to run for judge, and walked over to Boyd and Ava by the wall.

  Boyd straightened. He said to Raylan, “I believe with hope in my heart you’re gonna arrest that Mayfield hick. You’re standing there, you heard him threaten me. Tell me you are so I can go sit down.”

  “He didn’t threaten you,” Raylan said, “he called you a liar.” He turned to Ava saying, “Ms. Crowder,” with that hint of a grin he put on, “you’re a double-dip ice-cream cone in that yella dress.”

  Ava said, “Raylan, I’d let you have a lick, but I’m with Boyd. We’re seein how it goes right now before our relationship becomes serious. If you know what I mean.”

  “Well, you’ve had a taste of Crowders,” Raylan said. “Married Bowman and had to shoot him. I’m not criticizing you. You believed he had it coming.”

  Ava said, “Thank you.”

  Boyd said, “Hey, leave us alone, all right?”

  “I’ll tell you,” Raylan said, “I’m lookin at ways to bring you up for shootin Otis, Carol telling you to do it. Bring her into it, you might get your plea down to second degree. Only have to do twenty years.”

  Ava took Boyd by the arm saying, “I don’t want to hear this.”

  “He’s lyin,” Boyd said, “
accusing me of a premeditated act, so he can get at you when I’m gone. Force himself on you.”

  Ava seemed to hesitate, losing a step, dragging Boyd toward the door now. She turned her head past his shoulder to look back at Raylan.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The morning of the day of the meeting, God told Pervis he ought to use Dewey Crowe as honey to attract the insects.

  Pervis had sat almost bolt upright in bed. God’s message was in his head, so he knew who the bugs were: Casper Mott and others who wanted his mountain, Big Black. He phoned Rita, Rita having everybody’s number.

  She said, “It’s tomorrow I’m coming, not today.”

  “I know,” Pervis said, “I want to make sure I’m home from Cumberland and hear you come in the door sayin, ‘I’m ho-ome.’ I get that tug in my groin. What I’d like you to do, locate Dewey Crowe and let me know where he’s at.”

  Rita said, “What is it you need fucked up?”

  See how smart she was?

  Rita was back in a minute. “He left word he’s in Harlan. Will be at the Dairy Queen from noon on, takin orders.”

  “Oh yeah, he’s sellin whiskey.”

  Noon on the dot Pervis called Dewey’s cell. Dewey, no life in his voice, said, “Yeah?”

  Pervis said, “That’s how you answer a phone?”

  There was a pause. Dewey came back on showing life.

  “Is this Uncle Pervis I’m speakin to?”

  “You recognize my voice.”

  “Yes sir, and pleased to hear it.”

  “You goin to Cumberland tomorrow for the meeting?”

  “What meeting’s that?”

  Pervis said to the nitwit, “The one at the high school. Am I gonna see you there?”

  “Yes sir, I was thinkin of goin.”

  “Boy, what’re you doin in Harlan?”

  “Sellin hooch I get in Cumberland and mark up.”

  “You doin all right?”

  “I clear least two bucks a fifth.”

  The boy needed help, bad.