fortune
Jacob – For advice about being a kid
PROLOGUE
“Did it come?”
Sal had thrashed through the woods from his place to mine, stood in front of me at the deck picnic table, hopping from foot to foot. Hopping might be a bad word to use. Sal is 299 pounds and 5-foot-eleven and a half inches tall. Big guys can’t hop.
“Inside.”
He continued bouncing. “So why are you sitting here?”
“Thinking about it.”
“Take it out of the box yet?”
I can tell when Sal is excited.
“Nope.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“Come on, Nick. We gotta unpack it. We’ve been waiting for days.”
“Another couple of minutes won’t hurt. We have to make sure we don’t ruin the day by doing anything rash.”
“How can we do anything rash?”
“What if we don’t like the result because we didn’t do something correctly?”
“Nuts to that. Let’s go, Nicky.”
We didn’t have a chance. Cookie came out the slider, hands on her hips. “Is that box in the kitchen from who I think it is?”
“Hi, cutie. The name’s on the box.”
“You bought a donut machine?”
Sal sputtered, “Not just any donut machine. A Lil’ Orbits donut machine.”
“We’ll save a bundle,” I added.
“Define a bundle.” Cookie my lovely wife of many years is pretty patient about my excursions into odd places, but a donut machine might be pushing it.
“Last month, Sal and I spent $141.62 on donuts. I got the figures all penciled out to show you if you’d like.”
“No, I believe you.”
“So, these mini-donuts cost about a half-buck for six.”
“Nick, they’re tiny. I looked at the box.”
“Yes, but let’s say six little orbits equal a single regular sized donut. We eat twelve each per day. Well, maybe more. But that’s still only two bucks a day or 60 bucks a month. We’ve saved more than $80.”
“Money you guys will spend on pizzas.”
Sal grinned. “We could buy a pizza oven.”
Cookie spun on her heels, made the sign of the cross (something I’d never seen her do before) and returned to the kitchen.
I looked at Sal, “Cinnamon?”
“Powdered sugar.”
“We’ll do batches of both, how’s that?”
“Maybe a chocolate frosting.”
“Let’s not overdo it. We want to spread out the joy.”
CHAPTER ONE
Jolly Davis was known around Coquille as a rambunctious kid. Not ADD rambunctious, just, well, active. A schosh more scrappy than most rural 12 year olds, a tad over 5-foot-five with a mess of red hair befitting his Irish ancestry and with feet the size of Oklahoma. “Lots of growin’ left in that boy,” his dad would say.
Jolly sat on the Coquille River bank, thumbing through the pages of a history book about the Indians in these parts and the industries that sprung up because of the area’s abundant natural resources. Fish, game, timber, coal, gold, to name just a few.
His dad fished and hunted and could brandish a chain saw with the best. Mikey Slaughter’s dad still had a small gold mine up on Seven Devils Road. Didn’t produce much, but Jolly thought owning a gold mine would be the coolest of the cool.
But no one talked much about coal. What’s to talk about? Dirty black stuff that didn’t burn as good as wood. Needed to go underground to get it. At least Douglas fir was on top of the earth where anyone with a chainsaw and a log splitter could get hold of it.
Maybe it was coal’s nearly invisible history in Coos County that attracted Jolly to it. Maybe it was the history book’s story of Patrick Flannigan, an Irish immigrant who made a fortune mining and transporting it. Maybe it was the notion of dropping 3,000 feet below the surface – 1,400 feet below sea level -- to get at it. Didn’t matter, really. Jolly just liked the idea of coal. Kinda like the way hoarders like the idea of salt and pepper shakers.
With a nub of a No. 2 pencil, Jolly wrote a one then 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.
He looked at the scribble. “Them’s a lot of zeros,” he said to himself.
He re-read the passage in the history book. “A 1902 government assessment of the amount of mineable coal in Coos County was put at 1 billion tons.”
Jolly looked at the passage then at his penciled number. In a whisper, “Holy catfish. A billion tons of coal. Them’s a lot of coal.”
The air was cooling and the Coquille River began rippling as the north wind scurried across its surface and tree tops began the low hum that comes with a stiffening breeze and the sun began its slow dip into the west behind the hills to Jolly’s back between him and the Oregon coast.
“Time to go, Jolly,” he said aloud. “Pops will tan me good if I linger.”
Standing, stretching his legs and stuffing the history book under his arm, the 12-year-old began trekking along the bank, taking a second or two to step on a twig just to hear it snap or another second or two to kick a stone out of his way or another second or two to lift a small rock and toss it into the river.
Twirling through his head he wondered, “How many steps is a billion?” He began counting as he walked, but stopped at 100. Jolly was a kid and numbers couldn’t hold his attention as fastly as kicking stones or throwing rocks or snapping twigs under his worn black tennis shoes.
Passing the open hay fields that spread to the east between North Bank Road and the Coquille River, Jolly pulled in a big breath of air. “Cow,” he said aloud. And sure enough, around the next bend, a small herd of cattle, bellies distended with a full feeding of new hay, pushed against the wire fence that separated them from the rare passing vehicle.
“Hi, cow.” Jolly smiled and touched a white and tan Hereford’s nose through the wire. “Can’t linger. Gotta get home.”
The black top road was warm from a summertime sun and
