Read Down Don't Bother Me (9780062362209) for Free Online

take someone else months to cultivate. That’s time I don’t have, son.”
    â€œI wouldn’t know where to start.”
    â€œJust start anywhere. Hell, it’s what the police do. Pull on some thread, see where it leads. You think they’ve got a team of Sherlock Holmeses stashed away in the Randolph County sheriff’s station? Goddamn, boy, it used to be a Pizza Hut.”
    â€œPizza Palace.” Jonathan.
    â€œPizza Palace. Just jump in anywhere. Ask a few questions. See what you turn up. You might get lucky. If not, well, we can at least say we tried.” He fixed me with his frosted eyes. “Like I said, we can do things for you.”
    â€œYou already got me off the worst shift-duty of them all,” I said. “That’s probably enough.”
    â€œOh, hell, Slim, that was just for openers. I’m talking about something more substantial. And permanent.”
    Jonathan said, “Your job, one. As long as Mr. Luster owns this mine, it’s guaranteed.”
    â€œYour pension, too.”
    The bit about the job was nice, but that last thing knocked me asshole-over-teakettle. Jonathan produced a glass of water. I drank it. The glass went away. He really was a magician. I waited for him to fart out a platinum coin.
    Luster said, “Times are tough, Slim. You know how it is. Lot of pensions guaranteed at one point are disappearing today. And that’s health coverage, too. Security for you and your family. You got a family?”
    â€œA daughter.”
    Luster nodded. “Security for your daughter. I sell thisplace eventually, it gets bought up, and suddenly those pensions aren’t worth the promises they’re printed on. You’ve seen it happen before. But yours goes into a special account. Starting today. This afternoon.”
    Jonathan said, “It’s a generous offer, Slim.”
    â€œThis is southern Illinois, son,” Luster said. “Coal country. The best friends to have around here are friends in low places.”
    This was the case and I said so to Luster, but I wasn’t really listening to me. I was thinking about that pension and all that it meant. For a coal miner—or any working person, really—a pension means just about everything. Luster was right: a pension was health insurance into your dotage and financial security after you retired. It was a monthly paycheck and food in your tummy and a roof to keep the sun off your bald spot. But more than that, it was a promise kept. That pension was the reason a lot of miners went into the mines in the first place, and it was the reason a lot of them stayed longer than they should. It was, in a very real sense, the light at the end of a very long, very dark night.
    Luster picked up my thoughts and carried them forward. “So do it for that. Do it for your daughter,” Luster said. “Hell, Slim, do it for Beckett’s wife.”
    â€œBeckett’s wife?”
    Luster cleared his throat. “You told me you have a soft spot for family, Slim,” he said. “Well, this woman, her name’s Temple.”
    Jonathan said, “Temple Luster Beckett.”
    Luster said, “She’s my daughter. This Beckett who’s gone missing is my son-in-law.”

THREE
    I t was a Saturday afternoon in the springtime, and my mother was crying in the kitchen with a gun in her hand. My sisters were huddled on the floor away from the windows with their backs to the stove and they were crying, too. I was crying. I was six years old. The door opened. My sisters screamed and my mother screamed with them and discharged the gun into the floor, and then my father walked in.
    Like I’d be one day, my father was a coal man, but unlike me he was an important one. Maybe the most important in the downstate. He was a union leader and strike organizer and an inspiration to every other coal miner in the area. His name opened doors, or closed them, sometimes slammed them. He