BLACKDAMP, by Shauna Seliy
I was greasing the cookie sheets, watching my grandmother and her sisters do shots of plum brandy and feed each other moonshine cherries, when Zoli came into the house, pressed his hand against my throat, and whispered that he would kill me dead if I didn’t tell him where my mother was.
My grandmother put her drink down, said, “What in the hell are you doing here?”
They both worked at the Plate Glass and he had rough hands like she did, covered with cuts. He pressed hard on my Adam’s apple. I couldn’t swallow.
He nodded, said, “Christmas, Slats. Just having a conversation with Lucas.”
The Plate Glass was closed for the holiday, but he was wearing their deep blue uniform. It was stained and dirty.
My grandmother walked over to the chopping block where she’d been carving the stems out of peppers and picked up a knife.
In my ear, Zoli said, “Tell me where she is, you little fairy boy.” I was still holding the stick of butter. I dropped it.
Slats walked to the sink, turned on the tap, and ran water over the knife. Her sisters were quiet, watched us. They were all in dresses, aprons over them. We were in Great-grandfather’s kitchen looking after dinner. Great-grandmother had passed on and my grandmother was the oldest of the daughters, so she was boss of the kitchen. We’d been there for two days boiling things and cutting things and kneading things. It was a while yet before we would eat, but the place was already swarming with her people. Everyone would eat and drink and go out to the barn at midnight, because at midnight on our Christmas the animals could speak. Neighbors called us “hard Russians,” since we didn’t have the Pope, and we took our Christmas on the sixth of January.
The knife she was cleaning was big, with a wooden handle. She shut off the faucet, turned around, and pointed the business end of it at Zoli. Some of her sisters yelled, some of them scattered.
She said, “You listen, you crazy son of a bitch, get your hands away from him.”
He loosened his grip on my neck, but pulled me closer. “I came to see if Mirjana was here.”
Slats said, “She sure as shit isn’t.”
“Where is she?” he said.
“California.”
“California?” I said.
Zoli took his hand off my neck, moved it to my shoulder, said, “Where in California?”
She said, “What are you gonna do, go there? Might as well be Arabia.”
Five of Slats’s brothers came into the kitchen. They were big. They wore flannel shirts, jeans, farming boots with thick brown soles. Zoli picked me up under my armpits and held me in front of him. My feet were off the ground. I heard the metal click of the screen and then we were outside where it was still bright daytime. We fell back off the concrete block steps and hit the ground. My head knocked on Zoli’s chest bones. His belt buckle dug into my back.
The great-uncles were on us. Zoli crossed his arms over my chest and held on. The uncles couldn’t pry me from him. They kicked him. They got on their knees and landed punches on him. I caught a fist on my arm. Red and black flannel was over my eyes, scratched against my face. Slats yelled after her brothers to be careful of me. Zoli kicked and squirmed, but didn’t punch back. He turned over on me, pressed my face in the cold grass, and said, “I know you know where she is.” His head cracked against mine; he’d taken a boot. He said, “Mirjana, Mirjana,” soft and sad as if he were praying to her or to me or to God. And then I felt his knee on my shoulder and everything got lighter. He was off me, running.
Slats’s brothers ran after him. He got in his green Buick Skylark with the white canvas top and tore away up the drive, disappearing in the tunnel of trees.
* * *
Everyone said my mother looked like Hedy Lamar. The way Zoli looked at her you’d think she was Hedy Lamar. He liked to say it was against the law to be as beautiful as she was, and then he would pick up the phone and pretend to call the police or the fire company. Sometimes he did call the police or the fire company. He thought the two of them should get married, but she always said no. She told him she’d stay a widow until she stopped dreaming about my father, and that she would never stop dreaming about my father. One of the times Zoli proposed, he took her out behind the glass factory and set up a sheet of blue tinted glass between two trees. They watched the sun go down behind it. When she said no, he spread out his arms and walked through it.
My grandmother said he was a gypsy with no sense. My mother said he just didn’t understand some things. Love, she told me, had nothing at all to do with walking through a piece of glass.
Every morning, when my dad was getting ready to go into the mine, my mother would lodge a piece of cotton between his pinky toe and the one next to it. This way if there was an accident we could know him from his piece of cotton. But the real reason she did it was to make sure nothing would happen in the first place. To her mind, if she spent the morning preparing for a disaster, there wouldn’t be one.
The fireshot that exploded next to my father was so strong that pieces of his bones got scattered through the long wall. They had to mine those parts of him out with picks.
My mother never dreamt about my father, even when he was alive. That bit about the dreaming was just something she thought up to say to Zoli, because it was hard to argue with the widow of an exploded miner when she said something like that.
* * *
In the kitchen, Great-grandfather passed a bottle of plum brandy around to Slats’s brothers. He raised his little fist in the air, smiled, and said, “Such unkind boys I have made!”
He had a visitor with white hair and a nice long black coat. The man took the plum brandy and passed it to me.
Slats said to him, “He’s just thirteen, Eli. Maybe next year.”
“Let’s see the young mister’s chest,” he said. He had the same accent as Great-grandfather.
“No one’s looking at his chest,” Slats said.
But all of them were staring at me. I unbuttoned the top button, the second button.
Eli inspected my skin. He said, “Look young mister, if you drink this it will make your hair here.” He pointed to his own chest. He said, “Like this,” and opened his collar. There were big white tufts of hair. “And you’ll grow very fast, faster than the regular boy.”
Slats kissed my forehead, said to them, “I have food to cook. Don’t destroy him.”
I took a drink from the bottle. I didn’t like what I tasted, but I didn’t say anything or cough or spit. Eli made a big circle with his arms and took a deep bow, as if he’d just done a magic trick. Everyone clapped. I felt a fire up and down my chest, and when they turned away from me, I touched the skin over my heart; it was still smooth like the skin of a pebble.
* * *
I helped Slats set up card tables in the kitchen and drag in a picnic table from outside so that there would be enough room for everyone to sit at a table. She didn’t want people in chairs eating over their knees like gypsies.
She set down plates and I followed her with silverware. While I was organizing a knife and a spoon, I said, “How’d she get all the way out there?”
“What? Out where?”
“California.”
“Oh that,” she said and set down the stack of plates. She picked the top one up, and polished it with her apron. Then she kept going around the table setting places.
When we were through, she took my hand and pulled me outside. It was getting dark. She walked ahead of me toward the barn, her heels wobbling on the mud and stones. We weren’t wearing coats. She let go of my hand and rubbed her arms to keep warm.
Since my mom had left, I’d been staying with Slats in her place in Banning, across the road from the Plate Glass. Slats knew everything about Banning. I sometimes forgot that she grew up on Great-grandfather’s farm and that she knew everything about that place too. I followed her into a part of the barn I’d never been to, a floor up above the cows and the set of goats. It was dark up there. I could hear her feeling around on the wall for something, then she opened a kind of hatch and suddenly we had this nice view of the whole farm. The house and the barn were on the rim of a cupped valley. I could see over Great-grandfather’s pond at the bottom of the valley, his hay field up on the other side, and the old cornfield where he had an idea once to dig for oil, and then to dig for water; it was all pocked with holes and craters, like the front of the moon.
We stood there for a while looking at all of it. Slats said, “California is more like something to say when you don’t know the answer to a question. It’s not so much a real place, like this here.”
* * *
There was hay under the dinner table so that we would think about Jesus in his manger while we ate. I thought about how Zoli used to say he would string me up if my mother kept denying him. I thought about the three miners who got killed by the blackdamp from the explosion that took my dad. They didn’t get cut up or burned; they died from the inside out. When there’s a fire or something blows up in a closed place like that, the air isn’t any good for breathing. If you’re down in there and you hear a big booming noise, or smell burning, you could make a run. And if you can get out with only a little of it in your lungs, you’ll probably be okay, maybe come down with some pneumonia. But the mouth of the mine is usually too far away, sometimes a mile or two, and the blackdamp gets all through you, chokes you.
They found two of the miners in a dinner hole sitting with their lunch pails on their laps, sandwiches still in their hands. I thought mostly about the other one though, the one they found on his knees holding his hands together in a prayer. I always thought my dad had it the worst of them, but I was starting to think that the guy who was praying had it worse than he did. That guy knew what was coming and he knew he couldn’t do anything to stop it from coming.
* * *
After dinner, Great-grandfather told me to walk Eli home.
Eli said, “No. No. I don’t need an ambassador.”
Great-grandfather said, “Lucas will see you to the place. It’s late. Cold. He is company for you.”
In the hallway, Great-grandfather buttoned my coat up to the top, kissed me on both cheeks, and said to take care of his friend. I looked for Slats but she was deep in with the sisters doing dishes. Maybe I seemed nervous because one of the brothers said to me, “Don’t worry, that Zoli won’t fuss with you no more.”
I nodded.
Outside, I looked at the parked cars and then up at the road. I was glad for not seeing the Skylark. I followed behind Eli. He moved leaning over as if he had a cane, but he didn’t have a cane. His bones poked through his coat. He walked off the road and up onto a grazing field, then across it to a wall of trees. There was nothing around, no houses or cars, just woods and grass.
I said, “Where’s your place?”
He pointed into the woods, then stepped over through the tree line. The trees were close together. The ground was thick with bushes and twisted vines, but after a few minutes of picking through them we got on a skinny path that led to a little shingle brick shack with one window. He opened the door with a big skeleton key, and turned on a light switch. The walls were covered with hand drawn maps of coal mines. He saw me looking, said, “I was engineer. I have to understand if we dig here,” and he put his long fingernail on one of the drawings, “what will happen to over here?” and he moved his hand to a different part of the drawing. “Maybe rocks is falling down, or ceiling, or whole place. Always something come apart.”
He started to take off his coat. He had a map of Pennsylvania tacked over the fireplace with the Pittsburgh coal seam colored in yellow and red, like a gash. He had stacks of papers on his chairs and tables; some of them were drawings, some of them had numbers scratched over them. And there were just regular maps of places, of the county, of other states – Colorado, Ohio, one of the long stretch of California in light yellow. While he was hanging up his coat, I shoved the California picture in my jacket.
He said, “If you make so giant a hole in the ground, there is a big pressure, Lucas.” He lifted up his arms and pretended to be pushing down hard on something with both hands, “Everything will make some movement, you know, try to make hole go away.”
* * *
I found the path out of the woods and back to the field. I heard something move behind me, a click, and then there was a bright flashlight shining at me. Zoli’s hands were on my collar. He pulled me across the field to his car. There was a strong smell of gasoline coming from him. He opened the driver’s door and pushed me across the wide vinyl front seat. He pressed the boxy orange flashlight against the side of my head. “You ready to tell me where she ran off to?”
I pressed my teeth together hard to keep from crying. I shoved my hands under my legs and leaned forward so he wouldn’t see that I was shaking.
He said, “You couldn’t live without her for two seconds. You know where she is.”
He turned and leaned his back against the window, rested one hand on the steering wheel and the other on top of the seat. He looked at me for a long time, then he said, “So are you gonna say something, pussy?”
I said, “Smells like gas around here.”
He nodded toward the back. I turned and looked. There were two metal containers of gasoline on the back seat.
“What’s all that for?”
“Gasoline’s for burning.”
“Burning what?”
He shrugged, “None of your beeswax.” He leaned over, opened the glove compartment in front of me, took out a pack of cigarettes. Taped inside the glove compartment door was a picture of my mother holding a bushel of tomatoes. She wasn’t looking at the camera. She smiled to herself, like she was keeping secrets.
He closed the glove compartment and started taking the wrapper off his cigarettes, but before he finished opening them he breathed out a long sigh and put them on the seat between us. He said, “You’re gonna have to tell me where she is. I miss her too goddamn much.” I said, “I don’t miss her.”
He reached out his arm, picked me up off the seat by my shoulder and pressed me against the window. “Don’t disrespect her, you little shit. Think you’re something else huh, like Slats and her brothers? They’ll learn their places too.”
I could feel his fingernails through my jacket and shirt. After a little while I couldn’t feel anything under my elbow, it all went numb. I said, “She’s staying in an old hunting camp around here.”
He opened his hand. I dropped back on the seat. He turned on the car, said “All right then.”
I pointed through the front window, showed him around the farmhouse and the barn, and over to the hayfield next to the place where Great-grandfather had tried digging for oil. There were woods on two sides. I wasn’t sure there was a hunting camp, but I thought there might be some little place like Eli had. He parked the car at the tree line, turned it off, and then pulled me across the seat and out his door. He had me hold up the flashlight on his face, so that he could fix his hair in the window reflection. All the windows were lit in Great-grandfather’s house and sounds came up from it, not separate voices, but a kind of hum of people talking and laughing.
Zoli took the flashlight and I showed him into the woods. They were just as much a mess as the ones where Eli lived, vines and brush everyplace. I kept saying, “There’s a path around here somewhere,” and picking through the bushes pretending I was looking.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Lucas, hurry up,” Zoli said.
“I think we went into the wrong place. It’s down a ways, we have to go back out.”
We picked our way back out of the woods, and stood at the edge the old cornfield. I said, “I don’t think I can find it without the flashlight.”
“How long has she been staying back there?”
“A couple of weeks now.”
He handed me the flashlight. I aimed it in front of me and bolted across the field, dodging craters, jumping over the deep holes. He yelled after me. I kept on running. Then I heard a kind of thud behind me and his voice got muffled. I stopped running and listened for him. A high-pitched bird noise came up out of where he was. He’d fallen into one of the craters.
I dropped the flashlight and walked the rest of the way back to the house.
Inside, the great-aunts and uncles were lit up like lampposts, singing and talking too loud. Great-grandfather was asleep under the dining room table, hay stuck to his sweater. One of the great-uncles was standing alone in the kitchen singing some sad Russian song. His wife stood in the door watching him, translating it into English for no one in particular. Slats wasn’t lit. She said she’d been worrying after me. She was having a coffee, and when she put her hands on my face they were still warm from holding the cup.
I could feel the map in my pocket that I’d taken from Eli. I wanted to look at it, so I went upstairs and found an empty room. The bed was piled high with everyone’s winter coats. I unbuttoned my jacket and started to take it off. I smelled gasoline on it and remembered the canisters in Zoli’s car. I looked out the window up at the field. I didn’t see the Skylark, but there was something metal flashing down by the barn. I opened the window and saw him with one of his containers of gasoline. He was swinging it back and forth, throwing gas all along the walls of the barn.
I ran downstairs and yelled for everyone to go outside and stop him from lighting the barn up. They stopped their singing and eating and drinking and everything turned quiet and it was just my voice ringing through the rooms. By the end of my yelling I wasn’t saying anything about Zoli or the barn or gasoline – I was shouting my mother’s name over and over.
Slats ran for the door. We all followed behind her into the cold and stood together on the lawn. Zoli was in front of the barn, facing us, holding a match. He threw it behind him and the whole place went up in red and blue and purple.
* * *
Two years later, when the mine my dad had worked in was all mined out they took out the stump that held up the roof. The coal people told us when it would be happening. I sat up in Slats’s vegetable garden. I didn’t want to be in the house in case the shaking made her ceiling come down. They said that it was about 150 feet of earth caving in on itself. I had a hope that my mother was close enough to hear it or feel it, and that she would think of us. I thought of the last time I saw her. She was using a washrag on the kitchen counter, holding her hand open alongside to catch crumbs.
When they blew out the stump, the ground shook so hard and loud and for so long a time that I was sure there was no place far enough to get away from the sound of it, not even California.
Shauna Seliy’s recent stories have appeared in Other Voices, Hawaii Pacific Review, Meridian, and The New Orleans Review. “Backdamp” was the 2003 winner of the Mary Roberts Rhinehart Award for fiction.