Inheritances: Stories

By William Black

William Black's debut short story collection looks closely at lives lived in the heart of coal country-now fracking country-in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Two miners battered by a cave-in try to wrestle down the river that altered the course of their lives. A suicide pact leaves a family and its town bewildered and struggling for words. A fracking crew confronts the vast mysteriousness of things hidden in the depths of the earth and the lives that take place on its surface.In these starkly beautiful, incandescent stories, characters struggle with the grip that their locale and its past have on them, and they are consumed by searching-for love, for escape, for brief moments of clarity that give them the courage to continue.William Black's stories have appeared in The Sun, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, the Florida Review, and many other journals and magazines. He lives in Scranton, Pennsylvania and teaches at Johns Hopkins University. "Black is at his best as a social realist in a blue-collar milieu."--Kirkus Reviews Feb. 15, 2014

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dufour Editions
• Release date: Apr 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9780802360304

William Black

William Black has many years experience of the precious metals industry. From 1988 to 1997 he worked for Impala Platinum in South Africa on a number of projects, including the development and commissioning of extraction processes. He was also the manager of a joint venture between Impala Platinum and a technology company from the United States. In 1997 he was appointed to set up a gold mining agency for the government of the United Republic of Tanzania of which he was subsequently appointed director. He now consults on various projects in the mining industry. William Black has an MBA from the University of Witwatersrand.

Book preview

Inheritances

by William Black

Published by Dufour Editions

First published in the United States of America, 2015

by Dufour Editions Inc., Chester Springs, Pennsylvania 19425

© William Black, 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Except for public figures, all characters in this story are fictional, and any resemblance to anyone else living or dead is purely coincidental.

Cover photo by Andrew Bacha

E-Book ISBN 978-0-8023-6029-8 (MOBI)

E-Book ISBN 978-0-8023-6030-4 (EPUB)

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to those who helped shape these stories, including Margot Douaihy, Mark Meier, Mischelle Anthony, Dawn Leas, Andrew Snee, and especially Tim Parrish.

The following stories appeared, sometimes in slightly different form, in: The Pleasure Dome, Baltimore Review; Fires, Slushpile; Wildcats, Ontario Review; The Lion in the Hills, The Good Men Project; Leaving, JMWW; Tuscarora, Tupelo Review; It Burns, The Sun; Ad Astra Per Aspera, Superstition Review; Inheritances, Florida Review.

For SMG

Contents

The Pleasure Dome

Susquehanna, 1960

Fires

Wildcats

The Lion in the Hills

It Burns

Leaving

Architecture

Tuscarora

Intruder

Ad Astra Per Aspera

Inheritances

THE PLEASURE DOME

Our father came home grumbling and smelling of motor oil, axle grease, and beer. He pushed past my brother and me as we tried to fit our fingers through his belt loops and wrap ourselves around his legs. We followed him to the bedroom, where he fell back onto the bed like a timber, and we each took a boot, unlaced it, and struggled to pull it off, our father saying, Come on now, boys. Come on and pull like a couple of mules. When we finally yanked them off, stumbling backward from the sudden release, there were his toes, dirty and unclipped, peeking through the holes in his socks, and we jumped on him, crashing down on his arms and chest, pinning him with everything we had, only to find ourselves somehow aloft, balanced in his huge hands, and then brought down on our backs, forefingers pressed fast to our sternums, both of us immobilized at once, held helpless and ticklish beyond belief. We half-laughed and half-screamed for our lives.

So, he said, his beery breath warm and close. Have I earned a moment’s peace and quiet?

Yes yes yes! Though we would have said anything to win our release.

He let us go and we stood. Our clothes, the bedspread, all smeared with his sweat and black grease, and our mother appeared in the doorway to usher us out, redirecting our attention to our chores.

I took the meat scraps our mother had set aside and fed the hound dogs in their chain-linked pen. My brother laid out clean clothes for our father when he was finished his shower. Together we set the table and then took our seats to wait quietly, as we had been taught, for supper to be served.  

When our father reappeared, he was clean-shaven and changed into the t-shirt and shorts my brother had laid out for him. His hair was wet and combed back off his face. He looked relaxed and restless at once, inspecting the table. When he saw no beer by his plate, he got one from the fridge. Our mother said she could not stop him from drinking, but she would not serve him either.

After supper, when our plates had been scraped clean and set in the dishwasher, our father poured bourbon over ice, and we were sent to our room. There, we could do anything we wanted until lights out. Mostly, we turned on the TV and waited for dark, and as it came, we leaned on our window sill, looking out on the backyard, where our father sat in his folding chair, parked in the middle of the lawn, with a long view across the wooded valley and distant hills. Our father surveying the land. What would have been his land. Once his grandfather’s land, bought because someone someday would want the anthracite still buried under the valley floor. Then his father’s land, parceled out and sold before he left our father’s mother, cash being easier to hide from her lawyers.

Darkfall obliterated the view, and the lights of the Pleasure Dome came up. From the deepest spot in the valley, a pastel glow that lit the hazy air, coral pink, aquamarine, other worldly colors hanging like aurora borealis above the black trees. Spotlights cut through the colors, sending white beams into the sky, illuminating the undersides of clouds, swiveling, crossing each other, separating again.

The fall of man, our father had told us about the Pleasure Dome, because he knew how we loved the lights. The beginning of the end of things, he said. Or in a different kind of mood, The end of the end of things, and the hound dogs started up, like warning sirens; sending their mournful sounds across the nighttime valley to come back as echoes. Soon it would be lights out.

Once, our father took us there. Want to see what those lights are all about? he asked. We were all three crammed across the bench seat of his truck, and my brother and I bounced up and down with joy. Our father nodded and turned off the road home. He drove down the steep hills, along narrow two-lane roads we’d never seen before, all of it crowded by tall trees. The air smelled of the paper mill nearby. The river came into view, and along it, a stretch of three or four abandoned houses. Then woods again.

When we got there, the building was cinderblock, painted midnight blue and speckled with glittery stars. Across the front wall, THE PLEASURE DOME was written at an upward angle; behind the words, a comet-like tail stretching away into the cosmos. The door was huge and metal and red. And then we were inside. Five or six men sitting alone at their tables, wet-looking bottles of beer before them. Cigarette smoke hanging in the air. We knew what kind of men these were. Men who used to work in the mines, now men without jobs. We saw them everywhere in those days. Their hands were hard and heavy as stones and useless. They watched the woman doing her slow, sad dance. Above and below her, colored lights pulsed. Red, yellow, blue. Until someone told my father we weren’t allowed.

We waited outside, stretching ourselves to make human rocket ships that launched along the trajectory of THE PLEASURE DOME, traveling among the painted stars, making the sonic noises of spaceflight. Then growing bored and throwing pebbles from the driveway at the parking lot lights. Then throwing them at each other. Until our father appeared, ruddy-faced and a little unsteady.

We climbed into his truck. He asked, Are you happy you saw it?

Yes! we said, with enthusiasm, as though we hadn’t seen what we’d seen.

Back up the switchbacking roads, watching for glimpses of The Pleasure Dome through the trees, until we couldn’t see it anymore, and then it was dark and the lights came on. From here, they were even more awe-inspiring than from our bedroom window, the fuzzy pastel glow reaching through trees, until we were above it looking down, a spaceship landed in our valley. The spotlights like laser beams piercing the sky. We leaned our heads all the way back to see how high they went.

We pulled in the driveway at home, and the dogs went crazy with barking, their sounds urgent rather than mournful. Watch out, watch out! they cried. Danger is near!

Our mother was furious. She had fixed supper but had no one to feed the dogs or set the table or eat what she had made, and now it was ruined.

Where have you been? she wanted to know. Where the hell have you been?

We told her what our father had instructed us to tell her. We have been to the end of the universe, we said. We have seen the end of everything.

SUSQUEHANA, 1960

When the guys asked about it, Rora said with a nod, She’ll float, as that much no longer seemed in doubt. He preferred, however, that they didn’t know enough to ask. For one thing, the boat never looked quite right to him. It lay overturned across makeshift sawhorses in Pete Mulkowsky’s garage, and every time Rora stopped by—to tinker some more with the engine or check the caulking on the hull—he had to examine it anew, walking all the way around the thing, taking it in from every angle. It was wide and flat, almost as a raft would be, though it was four or five times the size of any raft, with seats and an engine and a helm set back toward the stern. The hull ought to be more pronounced was his main thought. Shouldn’t it cut into the water? And what passed for a keel was barely a seam, swelling from the smooth, broad surface like something left unsanded.

The deal was that Joe Kovalesky would keep quiet about it. That was the price of partnering. But the various fittings and engine parts had come one at a time, sometimes with months sprawling on between deliveries, and each time a package arrived the questions started up again. It was worst when the hollowed out shell of the body showed up, weather-worn and rotted through in spots, brought down the river from Cooperstown, New York, on a beat-up old barge. To get it from the water’s edge to Pete Mulkowsky’s garage, Rora required a crew of three men plus Frank Rossi’s flatbed truck and Frank to drive it. But the curious did not bother asking Rora their questions even then. It was Joe, all of twenty-four years old, with a boy’s eagerness to talk, that they recognized as the easy mark.

So what’s all this about? they wanted to know, and the boy glanced at Rora, as though to steady himself, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. It ain’t nothing but a secret, is what he decided on telling them while Rora was standing there. A secret that I know and you don’t. Still, his eyes shone with the need to say more.

In truth, it was unfair to call him a boy. He had been a dues-paying union member for going on six years, and he was large, standing once and half again Rora’s sinewy build. The boy, this Joe Kovalesky, was old enough to find himself trapped beneath the rock like the rest of them. In January of the year before, the river blasted through the roof at the deep north end of the mine. The onrush of water swept up the men working closest to the break and pounded them against the tunnel walls, then brought rock down upon almost a hundred others. Nine were brought out dead. Another seventeen were still down there, in passageways that had become a subterranean extension of the river, and forty more were hurt severely enough that they would never go back to work.  

Joe Kovalesky was one of those battered and useless, the weight of coal and shale having crushed his left leg. The major bones had healed, more or less, but the knee was ruined. Now Joe wore a heavy metal brace that kept the leg crowbar-straight, and he walked in the hobbled way of certain old war veterans.

Rora had served in The War but come out unscathed. Because his fingers were small and nimble, he was trained in explosives, and he proved a quick study in the logic of wiring, in the flow of electrical current and the things required to disrupt it. He spent the hot months between the cessation in Europe and the Japanese surrender defusing unexploded mines in the sun-bright Tuscan farmland. Then that fall he was sent to cold Berlin. There, he disarmed more than eighty bombs that sat live but undetonated among the rubble, several of them in and around the famous zoo, where Rora worked silently alongside a Russian Serb who shared his first name but not his language.

He did not return home until the summer of ‘46, long after the fanfare and parades, and found he had nowhere to go but back to the mines. The hiring manager, for his part, took one look at Rora’s size and saw a miner who could climb into the narrowest chutes and wire up the dynamite and blasting caps. He did not ask what Rora had done in the war.

Rora was crammed into one of those chutes, preparing to extend the Number 4 tunnel to the west, when the roof of the Number 11 gave way. Even from a distance of three hundred yards, the sound of the cave-in was thunderous. He paused, arrested not by fear but by the uncanny, dislocated feeling the sound had given him. He thought of B-29 bombers taking off from landing strips outside of Berlin. He thought of the earthquakes that sometimes shook Gubbio and Assisi. Then, just as he understood what was happening, loosened rock came down—a slab big and heavy enough to kill him were it not for his helmet and a fair bit of luck. He was knocked to the tunnel floor and the world went black. Had he been seventy, eighty feet closer to the break, he would have lain unconscious as the water covered him. But the rescuers reached him before the water did, finding him in a pocket with a roof made of fallen rock propped by crisscrossed timbers.

Back above ground, the doctors found four broken ribs, a sprained wrist, and plenty of bruises and abrasions that could have been much worse. But the hairline fractures in his skull were the main thing, the doctors told him. On their account he was kept for two weeks in a hospital bed.

Rora, if he felt like talking about it, would tell you that the boat was the boy’s idea, though that was not the whole story. Many of the injured mended over a month or so, but when they were up and at ‘em, there was no work waiting for them. The water had risen throughout the mine. Ten billion gallons of it, according to the U.S. government. No one would ever work down there again.

These were quiet, uncertain days.  Men accustomed to grueling hours now shifted about in bars, on street corners, smoking silently in each other’s company. Someone somewhere suggested they pair off and pay visits to those still laid up in their beds, and Pete Mulkowsky roused Rora, bringing his father’s old walking stick and assurances that should Rora go dizzy and weak, he would be there to catch him.  

This was how he met the boy.

Joe Kovalesky in his mother’s house, a timber-long man-child laid out flat in his boyhood bed, his hair dirty, his left leg encased in plaster, his eyes cloudy with morphine. And yet there was a pluck to him, a vivid good nature that sliced through the pain and fog to say, I’ll get that river back, that son of a bitch. I’ll show that river who’s boss.

Atta boy, Pete Mulkowsky said.

Some time later, when Joe was learning to walk with the aid of his brace and wooden crutches, Rora stopped him on the street and said, I’d like to talk to you about a boat.

Eleven months from idea to riverworthy.

Rora had managed a little bit of savings. Joe had no money at all. Everything he had earned he gave to his mother, the least he could do. So they were guided by prudence and worked to keep their eagerness in check.

Rora knew some people in Hazleton, and without divulging his secret, he asked them to send the daily paper. Joe had cousins in Freeland who did the same, though he urged them to spread the word that he was looking for a boat. The papers came a week’s worth a time, rolled tight and bound by rubber bands and wrapped in brown shipping paper. On Mondays and Thursdays, Rora and Joe sat at Joe’s mother’s table, drinking the coffee she had made for them and circling leads in the classifieds.

It was slow going at first. They didn’t know what they were looking for.

Then one day Rora answered a knock at his door, and there was Joe, waving an ink-smeared scrap of paper. On it was a phone number. A man in New York had called. He had heard from a relation that they were looking for a boat, and he happened to have one he was eager to be rid of. The thing was in rough shape. It would need holes plugged, an engine, a new rudder, a steering wheel—hell, a whole steerage assembly. What he was giving them, really, was nothing more than an empty shell, but it came cheap and would set them on their way. Ought to varnish it, too, the man said, and upholster the bench seats if they cared of such things. But he would give it to them free so long as they paid to have it sent down the river.

We need a name for it, the boy said that evening in Giardi’s bar. Three beers, and he was blathering about the boat around all these out of work miners. It should sound like something you’d go over Niagara Falls in.

That would be the opposite of the point, Rora said.

Then you come up with a name.

It hasn’t even arrived yet. We haven’t even seen the thing.

I’m telling you, it has to have a really good name.

Months of hunting for parts and awaiting their arrival. Months of sawing, sanding, nailing, gluing, caulking.

The engine came from a ‘37 Chrysler they bought for fifteen bucks. An old straight-4 Flathead, thirty-eight horsepower when new but maybe twenty now, driving two three-bladed propellers mounted directly beneath it. The steering assembly they welded themselves. They covered the wheel with scraps of leather to keep the sun-heated steel from burning their fingers; at the rear, a rudder blade of walnut that was bigger than they needed, but Rora insisted on something, at least something, that cut its way through the water.

Unnamed, she was twenty-two feet long, nine feet six inches abeam, standing a foot and four inches out of the water.

The Barge, Rora suggested.

Joe was offended by his cynicism.

He had his mother teach him the rudiments of sewing. He bought pillows and wrapped them in burlap, added four foot-long strips to each, and arrived at the garage one morning with seat cushions.

Doesn’t nothing ever piss you off? Joe said.

It was after midnight. A brief trial run proved the engine was burning through gasoline and leaking oil. The hull had taken on two inches of water. Pete Mulkowsky helped them haul the boat up from the river, drain it, and then drag it back to his garage on the trailer they had made for it. There, Rora went straight for the tool kit. He uncovered the engine and got to work while the boy, his face warped into a scowl, threw a sledge hammer-sized fist at anything in reach.

You can go on home if you want, Rora said.

I ain’t going home, but come on. Doesn’t nothing get under your skin?

These, Rora thought, were the things that got under his skin:

  1) The boy would not stop talking.

  2) This violence committed by the river against the mines did not just mean the end of his job or his working life or even his days of self-sufficiency. It did not just mean the end of the town or of mining in this valley or the destruction of the economy for fifty miles in every direction. Though it meant those things for certain. What it signaled most of all was bigger than that. Vaster. Men who had fought through rock and dark