Above the Waterfall. Ron Rash

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      At the Sierra Club meeting, some left while Richard still spoke. Others fell silent, and made quick exits after he finished. A coal company bulldozer had shoved a thousand-pound boulder off a mountain and killed a child. After two years of delays by coal company lawyers, the state court ruled the company had been negligent. Punishment: a five-thousand-dollar fine. Can’t you people see this is a bare-knuckle fight, Richard had told us. A three-year-old is crushed to death and you talk about fund drives? You don’t think it will happen again to another child? After the meeting, I alone stayed. Let me guess, he’d said. You work at a library or a bookstore. You want to save the world if it doesn’t take more than one evening every two weeks. You love “nature” but never camped more than a quarter mile from asphalt.

      I’m a park ranger, at Shenandoah, I’d answered. I camp where I see no humans for days. What happened to that child, I don’t want that to happen again, ever.

      Four months together. I worked at the park while Richard, who was good with his hands, made money as a handyman and from the honey harvested from his bee hives. Most of our food came from his garden. On days and nights we had free, Richard and I camped in places where no one else went. We attended biweekly meetings where no one spoke of donations and land easements. Not quite Earth First! but close. Confrontation but not physical violence, we all agreed, including Richard, though the words par tous les moyens nécessaires were tattooed on his forearm. It was Richard who had planned a demonstration on the anniversary of the child’s death. Not at the mine site but at the company’s headquarters. We may do some riverbank cleanup afterward, Richard told me that morning, and handed me my steel-toed work boots. He hefted a backpack onto his shoulder as we were leaving. Snacks and water, he said.

      Locals joined us that day, some whose tap water was slurried with coal, but most, like us, outraged by both the child’s death and the verdict. In front of the office, two policemen and a company security officer stood on the sidewalk. Outside the yellow tape with us, two newspaper reporters, one with a camera draped around her neck. Richard held no sign. He watched and waited, the backpack in his hand. Coiled, I realized later.

      “Child killer,” a local woman shouted when a man in a suit came out of the building. She raised a jar filled with gray water. “And now you’re going to kill the rest of us with this.”

      The man walked toward the parking lot, head down, until the woman threw the jar. Glass shattered and the water soaked his pants.

      “Fucking bitch,” he said.

      The woman surged forward and the yellow tape snapped. Then she stepped back, as if the tape were dangerous, like a downed power line. No one else crossed, until Richard’s tear-gas canister clanked on the concrete, spun once, and detonated. Then smoke and coughs and curses, thicker sounds of struck flesh. A hand slapped me and the taste of rusty iron filled my mouth. As the gray lessened, I saw Richard and, between us on the ground, the man in the suit. Richard swung his boot and a rib cracked, audible as a rifle shot. Richard kicked again and the steel toe drove the man’s front teeth into his throat. Then a camera flashed and sirens wailed. A few moments later a policeman shoved me aside, kept his gun on Richard while another officer handcuffed him.

      He got out on bail the next day. As I’d packed my last belongings, he’d offered me the newspaper photograph. You’re looking at me, but who were you really angry at, Becky? Richard had said. I think you might have started in on that bastard yourself if we’d had another few seconds.

      I sit up in bed, unable to sleep. Too many echoes of the past, Gerald on the ground, the guard’s gun, the school shooting. I try to follow the dream that sometimes leads me into sleep: the iron ring that opens the concrete door, then the descent into the low cave where the lost animals wait. But tonight I can’t grasp that ring. I pull on a T-shirt and go out on the cabin’s porch, try to turn my thoughts to what I will show the schoolchildren tomorrow. But memory nags. After my grandparents’ deaths, I let no one get close, not in college or grad school, twelve years at the Shenandoah park.

      Until Richard. When the FBI said he was responsible, I didn’t believe them, despite what Richard had told me two weeks earlier. This was an office with a dozen workers, not an empty vacation house. Even when the news reported that part of his boot matched a pair worn at a rally, I told myself it was coincidence. But then the jawbone with four back teeth, two fillings a dental X-ray confirmed. How could I have been so wrong about someone? Perhaps my father was correct: I should have gotten over it like the other children. If I had known more people, really known them, learned from them . . .

      A nighthawk is near, its call electric, brief: a cicada’s first syllable. Farther off a barred owl calls. Such sounds may soothe me into sleep, into the dream of where the iron ring yields to my grasp. But as I go back inside, I also take my grandfather’s watch from the mantel, free the gold chain from its fob, and place the chain around my neck.

      PART TWO

       Ten

      Trey Yarbrough opened his pawnshop at 9:00 A.M. except Fridays and weekends, so on Tuesday morning I had time to stop in after confirming with Jarvis that the raid was on. Trey sat on a stool behind the counter, a silver trumpet in one hand and a rag dabbed with polish in the other. The windowless cinder-block walls, coated thick with white paint, were bare and bright as an interrogation room. Which seemed a smart move on Trey’s part. Plenty of his customers had bad memories of such rooms, as well as a desire to conduct business in places not so well lit, so were probably less likely to haggle.

      On the shelf behind Trey, a twenty-gallon aquarium held a timber rattlesnake thick as a man’s wrist. Wrapped behind its wedged head was a necklace of copper wire, attached to the wire a small ring. A message taped above the tank said THIS FELLOW IS LET OUT EVERY NIGHT. I CUT THE POWER TO THE LIGHTS BECAUSE HE LIKES CRAWLING AROUND IN THE DARK. BREAK IN IF YOU FEEL REAL LUCKY.

      “Interested in a trumpet, Sheriff?” Trey asked. “One of your deputies could play the cavalry charge when you take on the bad guys, like in that Apocalypse Now movie.”

      “Taps would be more like it, since I’ve got less than three weeks left, though I wouldn’t mind borrowing your snake to pitch inside a trailer later today. Keep us from having to go inside.”

      “Another meth bust?”

      “Yeah.”

      Trey stepped back and tapped the aquarium, triggering a sound like a maraca. When the tail stilled, I counted nine buttons.

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