worse after the mine shut down. Benny had to admit he was mostly to blame. He'd always had the big job in the family. Then, one day, with no warning, everything was turned upside down.
Benny's cheeks would sometimes burn, as he recalled how he had acted after the mine closed. He had taken to staying out late, sleeping late and wouldn’t help around the house. He'd almost slapped Ruth, once, when she'd come home from work and complained about having to fix dinner for a drunk. It was a sad, confusing time, but he wasn't the only man on Cabin Creek who'd acted like a fool after the mine shut down.
He made the sharp right turn into his grandmother's driveway and sat in the car for a moment, admiring the pink hollyhocks bordering her garden. She had planted her pole beans just behind the hollyhocks, staking them so the runners formed teepees as they snaked up the poles. Everybody along the creek planted their pole beans that way, with four poles set at angles so they came together at the top. Benny had played Indians in beanpole teepees while growing up and so had Billy. He'd made Billy a war bonnet out of chicken feathers when he was three. Billy had gone around all that summer calling himself Chief Chicken Feathers.
By the time he was five, Billy had changed his name to Chief Big Fighter. Benny made him a little bow from a hickory sapling and had fashioned a half-dozen arrows from sassafras branches. Billy was pretty accurate with his bow by the time he left for Ohio. The bow and cloth quiver now hung on a nail in his grandmother’s woodshed.
Marvin’s eyes opened as Benny stepped onto the porch. He had been dozing in his rocker, his fingers holding a dead cigarette. The aluminum oxygen tank sat beside his knee.
“Thought you was junkin' today,” his father rasped.
“Too hot. I'm going back later,” Benny said, sitting down in his grandmother's rocker. She always sat on the porch on warm summer evenings, after the cooling shadows had crept across the lawn. She'd sit there, sipping sweet tea and listening to the whippoorwills calling back and forth across the hollow.
His father relit the cigarette and followed it with a deep drag from the oxygen tank, then chased the oxygen with another pull from the cigarette. “Alice Miller called the house for you,” he said, letting out the smoke as he spoke. “She's Bobby Miller's wife, ain't she?”
Benny sat and rocked, saying nothing.
“You gonna answer me? Benny, I'm talking to you, goddamnit.”
SIX
Russell had been driving for almost two hours and still hadn't gotten a handle on how things had gone so wrong up in the hollow.
Dumb motherfucker, he thought. The dumb motherfucker doesn't ever think about anybody but hisself.
He reached under the front seat and pulled out the snub-nosed .38 Special he kept in the car. I should of shot the asshole, he thought, imagining the look on Benny's face. He replayed the scene several times, shooting Benny in the balls and then between the eyes. He finally settled on a version in which Benny squealed and turned to run, but never got more than two feet, before Russell shot him in the ass, making him jump like a jack rabbit.
“A new asshole for the asshole,” he said aloud.
He was crossing the Ohio River at Huntington, leaving West Virginia, when he glanced into the rearview mirror and snorted derisively. There, behind him on the bridge was a big, gold and blue sign proclaiming: NEVAEH TSOMLA.
Almost Hell would be more like it, Russell thought, shoving the .38 back beneath the seat.
He drove westward on Route 52, paralleling the river. It was mid-afternoon when he reached Portsmouth, an old steel town 80 miles due south of Columbus. He stopped for gas and then drove on for a block before deciding to grab some lunch at a drive-in restaurant across from a sprawling, rusted steel mill. The mill had been closed for more than 20 years and the intricate maze of huge, rusted pipes gave its superstructure an orange hue, as if the plant had been painted with automobile primer.
Portsmouth, Russell knew, once had been a bustling place. It had even boasted a semipro football team back during the ‘20s and ‘30s, when the mill was going full blast. The Portsmouth Tanks, he thought it was. The team had played in an industrial league with other cities up and down the river, back before the start of the National Football League. Some of the league teams, like the Pittsburgh Steelers, went on to be part of the big leagues, but the Tanks had tanked as Portsmouth's economy cooled off.
He paused at the restaurant entrance and looked across the road at the mill. Its towering superstructure and stacks were crammed onto a narrow strip of land between the highway and the river. The rusting complex somehow reminded Russell of Cabin Creek, and he grinned as he thought of Benny's junking operation. That asshole Benny would love to get his hands on this place.
It was going on 4 o'clock when he paid his check. He decided call Ruth and leave a message on her answering machine, letting her know that he'd stop by later in the evening. Russell could hardly wait to tell her about finding Benny up there in the hollow.
Although he was only a year older than his cousin, Russell's prematurely gray hair and prominent paunch made him look almost old enough to be Benny's father. They'd never gotten along, especially when they were little and were vying for Grandma Early's favor.
“He always was a prick,” Russell told the dashboard as he turned the car northward, away from the broad river and began following Route 23 toward Columbus.
The highway was famous in the southern West Virginia coalfields, where high school kids said the three R’s really stood for “Reading, `Riting and Route 23.” In the years after World War II, when the coal companies were rapidly replacing miners with machines, hundreds of Appalachian families followed Route 23 to Columbus and other Midwest cities, looking for industrial jobs.
Russell was twenty minutes outside Portsmouth when he reached the village of Lucasville, a place that held nothing but miserable memories for him. He had spent five years in Lucasville after leaving Cabin Creek, working as a guard in the new maximum security prison built on a cornfield that had been owned by a local politician with connections in Columbus.
The prison was overcrowded from the beginning, and so dangerous that nearly a third of the inmates almost never left their cells, for fear of being assaulted or killed.
As he drove past the prison, Russell could make out the top of a glass-enclosed guard tower. The tower, its base obscured by the trees, seemed to float in the air, reminding Russell of a flying saucer.
It's for sure that most of those bastards belong in outer space, he thought, shuddering inwardly as he remembered what it was like being locked up with an army of killers and rapists who would as soon cut your throat as look at you.
The first couple of years were pure hell. Russell was assigned to the most violent cellblock, the “Kingdom of the Wild.” It was a place where an inmate might beat a man to death for a candy bar, or which TV channel they were going to watch. He had seen it happen.
It was the jack-off artists that bothered him most, however. Whenever a female guard was assigned to the monitor booth, the artists would whip out their tools and go to work, sitting directly in front of the monitor's window, where the guard had a clear view and vice versa. Russell couldn't believe his eyes the first time he saw it, but the other guard, a woman with two kids, didn't pay any attention. “I've seen a lot worse, and you will, too, if you stay here long enough,” she'd said.
Some of the female guards reportedly got off on it, at least that's
