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

held on, but there were moments in there when I felt like a spider clinging to her web during a typhoon.
    The address Jonathan gave me was inside something called the Crab Orchard Estates. I wasn’t sure what that was—it sounded like some kind of nineties real estate agent’swet dream—but I had a sense of where it must be. I aimed the bike toward the Crab Orchard wildlife preserve and took the shoreline road until I spied a gated community spreading its way west and north along the edge of the water. There was a check-in box with a black man sitting inside. When I pulled up, he leaned closer to the window and slid back the glass.
    He said, “Little damp today.”
    â€œI don’t know, I’m thinking of building an ark.”
    â€œProbably more practical than, say, a motorcycle.”
    â€œProbably,” I said. Everybody was a comedian. “Let me ask you, you know where I can find Temple Beckett’s place?”
    â€œShe know you’re coming?”
    â€œWhat I’m told.”
    This was getting down to business. He produced a clipboard and looked holes in it. He flipped some pages and put the clipboard back on its hook. He picked up a phone and dialed, but I guess no one answered because after a moment he set it down again, too.
    â€œShe ain’t called down about anyone, and I can’t raise the house. What’d you say your name is?”
    â€œShe’d probably have called me Slim.”
    â€œThat a coal mine thing?”
    â€œHow’d you guess?”
    â€œYou got a bucket tied to your scooter there,” he said. He sighed. “I let you go up and something happens—something ain’t supposed to happen, I mean—I’m the one’s gotta answer for it.”
    â€œWell, maybe I could leave something here with you. You know, some kind of collateral.”
    He lifted an eyebrow.
    â€œLeave something? Like what?”
    â€œMy union card, maybe.”
    â€œYou even got a union card?”
    â€œNope.”
    â€œDidn’t think so. These days, I don’t know anyone’s got one. They’re like unicorns.”
    â€œGetting to be.”
    He waved his hand at me.
    â€œGo on up. Just don’t do anything come back on me,” he said, and gave me some sense of the direction I should go. Then he said, “You know, I used to be in the mines my own self. Worked a scratchback mine up at Olney years ago. My father worked it, and his brother, and some cousins of mine, and I swore I never would but damned if I didn’t. I’ll tell you, that was something like a hell on earth.”
    â€œFive-foot seam?”
    He leaned forward in the window a little. The rain beaded on his short, silver hair and eyebrows.
    â€œLemme tell you, we’d have strangled our mothers for five-foot coal. You ever heard of Kelvin’s Scratch-Ass Mine?”
    â€œCan’t say.”
    â€œWell, that was us. The Scratch-Ass Boys. Four feet in most places. Couple three-and-a-half foot spots. Like that old song, ‘Thirty Inch Coal.’ You know that one?”
    â€œI heard it once or twice.”
    â€œ Ridin’ on a lizard in thirty-inch coal ,” he sang. His voice was soft but deep, and it sounded like history. “It was like that. You raised your eyebrows, you’d hit the ceiling. You got so you had scabs all up and down your back and spine and on your knees and hands. My wife ain’t like those scabson my hands. Calluses, neither. Bought me this cream to use. Smelled like some kind of flower, lilacs, and wouldn’t you know that’s what those other Scratch-Ass sonsofbitches ended up nicknaming me. Lilac. I couldn’t wait to get out of there, and after twenty years I finally did, and it’s nice not being Lilac anymore, but look where I ended up. Sitting in a damn box all day.”
    â€œLeast it’s got a high ceiling,” I said.
    â€œYeah, but it’s dull. Go on up, Slim.