The Sky Over Virginia Beach
Leslie Teel
As Davis swung the sledgehammer he made an effort to hang on to his thoughts:
“Drop the goddamn hammer,” said Carl. “They can't hear us. You’re just using up oxygen.”
“They’ll hear us,” Davis croaked, his throat gummed up with coal dust. But he let go of the sledgehammer and slid down the wall to the ground. He’d thought Carl was gone so it was comforting to hear him talk.
“Take some air,” said Carl.
Davis groped along the floor for the rescuer and held it up to his face and breathed. Not much left. Or, wait a minute. Hadn’t he and Carl already ascertained that the oxygen was gone from the tank? Yeah, and they’d kinda laughed about it—an hour of oxygen when you’re trapped 300 feet underground.
“If we get out of this alive I’m writing a strongly worded letter to Munson Energy Company,” he said. Annabeth, his daughter, had been cracking him up for years by threatening to write strongly worded letters. “Hey, this cheese is moldy. I’m writing a strongly worded letter to Kraft.” Or, “If it doesn’t stop raining I’m going to write a strongly worded letter to The Weather.” It was from the end of Titanic, Annabeth’s favorite movie when she was little.
He took another useless breath from the air pack. “Makes you feel nice and safe, doesn’t it?”
Carl didn’t answer but then Davis wasn’t sure he’d said it out loud.
* * *
“Them fans are blowin’ the wrong way,” Carl had said this morning, as they rolled into the mountain. For a second Davis thought Carl was just messing with everyone. The intake fans blew the fresh air in. If they were blowing out it meant some kind of gas buildup had triggered the emergency uptake ventilation and they’d better get the hell back to the surface before they suffocated or they were blown to smithereens. But it was too late—something, maybe a spark from their wheels, hit the methane and a hot gale force chased them as they raced down the tracks. They all pulled on their rescuers and shouted instructions that no one could hear over his own panicked breathing. Davis couldn’t get his oxygen to work so Carl shared his.
At South Left Four they scrambled off the car just as the power went out. They hurried away from the entry tunnel and into the work area, guided by the lamps on their helmets.
“Shit, this sucks,” gasped Davis, dazed by the sudden plunge into another reality. The dingy limestone coated pillars were eerie and unfamiliar, glowing white as far as the helmet lights could reach and disappearing into—what? He knew it was just more white pillars and cubbies and corridors and equipment but it looked like oblivion.
“Like a black hole,” was how he’d describe it to Annabeth and Patty, his wife. He kept this idea in his mind, that it was a horrible adventure to recount for years afterward, like Granddad’s grim tale of being part of the clean-up crew on the beach in France after D-Day. Except of course it wouldn’t be that bad, it wouldn’t be bad at all really. It would be like talking about a creepy movie. There was no thinking about not getting home.
* * *
He must have dozed off because he awakened to the distant sound of someone banging on metal. Finally someone up there had got off his ass and was signaling for them.
“Hey, Carl,” he whispered. “Hear it?”
“You’re just hearing yourself,” said Carl.
“I ain’t doing anything!”
“I know, but you’re hearing things. Like an echo of five minutes ago, when you were pounding that bolt.”
“Five minutes? Come on. It was longer ago than that.”
“Maybe. But even still.”
Davis didn’t hear the clanking anymore, but that didn’t mean Carl was right. He tried to get up and do some more pounding but he was held down by the darkness; funny how heavy it was. Like the entire coal seam had fallen on top of him. He managed to lift his arm straight up—nope, nothing. Nothing to see or feel, except his arm flopping back down to his chest and his burning lungs.
* * *
After escaping into the hall they had barricaded themselves against the toxic fumes by blocking the entry with plastic tarps and concrete blocks. They formed a smaller room further in, behind some pillars, and took turns pounding on the wall bolts to signal the surface. Then Tommy Perrin and a bunch of them had left to find the cache of safety supplies.
Carl sat on an overturned bucket and opened his lunch box. “They won’t find it,” he said. “I was down here in a black out one time. All them corridors look alike. You turn here and there and end up where you started. Never mind when your lamp dies.”
Carl tapped his helmet. The light had already gone out.
“Besides, the place’ll start filling with smoke soon. May as well stick it out in here.”
Davis slumped on the ground and turned off the lamp in his helmet to save the battery. He immediately felt the weight of the darkness and realized what an idiot he was. Turning it back on could cause a spark.
“Shouldn’t of done that,” remarked Carl, who had disappeared, along with his sandwich and the bucket and anything that had once been visible.
“Shit!” Davis hoped Carl didn’t hear the sob that was in his throat but he must’ve because Carl reached over and tapped Davis on the arm with his Hostess cherry pie—the shape and the crinkling of the wrapper was unmistakable—and said, “Here, have one of these. I got two.”
This had freaked Davis out more than anything so far. Carl always had two pies and never, not once, had he offered one to any of the guys, even Davis, whose wife had read a thing about high fructose corn syrup and started forbidding it in the house.
He took the pie and held it to his chest, his hands trembling. It was just like Runt. When Runt was on his last legs, he and Patty had let Annabeth feed him some chocolate covered pretzels because they already had an appointment to have the vet put him down. Runt had spent his final two days on earth with a bad case of the shits but at least the dog died tasting chocolate.
* * *
“Ever see the ocean?” Davis asked Carl. “I never did. Always wanted to. Annabeth used to whine about it all summer long and we never took her.”
It had been so important to send her to WVU and now all she did was work; night classes, temp jobs and summer school.
“Hey, give me that note. I want to add something. I want to tell Annabeth to get her ass down to the ocean before it’s too late.” He tried to reach for Carl’s lunch box but he didn’t have the strength to move closer. He lay back with a frustrated grunt.
“She ain’t missing much.” Carl’s voice sounded loud and tinny, like he was talking into Davis’s ear through a pipe. “It’s okay for some people but some of us get sunburn and sand up our ass and step in seagull shit.”
Right, Carl and his first wife Monica--Monique?--had gone to Virginia Beach and ended up in the emergency room with sun poisoning. But how on earth did Davis know that? They weren’t best buds or anything. Had they already had this conversation while lying here on the mine floor?
“It’s weird, you know,” Carl said. “Standing at the ocean. You feel so, I don’t know. Not tethered. Like you could go floating off into the sky at that very moment.”
“Of all things in the world,” Davis said, staring up at the dark nothing, “I’d love to go floating off into the sky at this very moment.”
What he really wanted most was Patty’s cucumber salad and a bucket of sweet tea from Captain D’s, but the sky over Virginia Beach sounded good, too.
“Yeah,” said Carl, “but if you’re floating into the sky you’re dead.”
That didn’t sounds like something Carl would say. About floating and being untethered. For one thing, it was exactly how Davis had always imagined the ocean. So he must have said it himself and then Carl said the other thing. Or Davis had said all of it, including the part about being dead.
* * *
“Stop that hammering and take some air,” Carl said and Davis dropped the sledgehammer. No, that had happened before.
* * *
“That’s so five minutes ago,” Annabeth used to say when he was slow on the uptake about something. “Pay attention, Dad.”
* * *
Funny how those white pillars glowed in the dark. It reminded Davis of Granddad. Granddad used to play football in high school. Back then, Drumley High didn’t have lights at the field for night games, so they used a white football. Granddad said they always won home games at night ‘cause the other teams couldn’t deal with the ball being the only thing visible on the field.
“Sometimes a disadvantage is an advantage,” said Granddad. If that was supposed to be a message of some sort it was beyond Davis.
“Are you saying I have some advantage right now?”
Granddad cackled in a crazy old man way that he never had when alive. “No! You’re screwed!”
Davis wished his last moments not be spent hallucinating dead people saying shit they’d never say. Granddad, Carl.
Carl? His head rang with pain as he tried to remember. Right. Carl had eaten his sandwich and yelled at Davis about the hammer and Davis had eaten the pie and then they talked about some stuff and wrote notes to their wives and kids. At some point Carl had fallen off his bucket and Davis had felt his breathless nose against his hand.
* * *
He saw Annabeth and Patty huddled together in their pink WVU hoodies, their faces gray against the bare, scrubby trees, talking to that guy from WCHS. The governor was there, and Carl’s wife and stepsons and Tommy Perrin’s parents and all the other families and maybe some protestors. He’d seen it all on CNN the last time.
“If something like that happens to me,” he’d said, hand clenched with the vestigial urge to grab a cigarette out of his shirt pocket, “I hope you-all don’t caterwaul about it on national television and talk about how I was in the Lord’s hands and shit.”
“I’ll try to contain myself,” Annabeth had said in a dry way that irked him. Like, she wouldn’t shed a tear for him, she was too cool and grown-up for that. But then she’d squeezed him extra hard before she went back to school and said, “Now you take care of yourself. Don’t make me have to come caterwaul.”
It was pretty funny to imagine, really.
He tried to slide his leg toward Carl’s overturned bucket.
“I’m going to kick it. Get it?”
Annabeth groaned. “That wasn’t funny the first time.”
He didn’t feel the heaviness anymore. He was moving, past the pillars and roof bolters and trucks, over the conveyor belt and into the jagged, shiny coal face and through the mountain.
- How old was this bolt he was pounding, and if it cracked would there be a collapse?
- Cracked bolt or no, was he slowly releasing yet more gas into the area?
- Which was worse?
“Drop the goddamn hammer,” said Carl. “They can't hear us. You’re just using up oxygen.”
“They’ll hear us,” Davis croaked, his throat gummed up with coal dust. But he let go of the sledgehammer and slid down the wall to the ground. He’d thought Carl was gone so it was comforting to hear him talk.
“Take some air,” said Carl.
Davis groped along the floor for the rescuer and held it up to his face and breathed. Not much left. Or, wait a minute. Hadn’t he and Carl already ascertained that the oxygen was gone from the tank? Yeah, and they’d kinda laughed about it—an hour of oxygen when you’re trapped 300 feet underground.
“If we get out of this alive I’m writing a strongly worded letter to Munson Energy Company,” he said. Annabeth, his daughter, had been cracking him up for years by threatening to write strongly worded letters. “Hey, this cheese is moldy. I’m writing a strongly worded letter to Kraft.” Or, “If it doesn’t stop raining I’m going to write a strongly worded letter to The Weather.” It was from the end of Titanic, Annabeth’s favorite movie when she was little.
He took another useless breath from the air pack. “Makes you feel nice and safe, doesn’t it?”
Carl didn’t answer but then Davis wasn’t sure he’d said it out loud.
* * *
“Them fans are blowin’ the wrong way,” Carl had said this morning, as they rolled into the mountain. For a second Davis thought Carl was just messing with everyone. The intake fans blew the fresh air in. If they were blowing out it meant some kind of gas buildup had triggered the emergency uptake ventilation and they’d better get the hell back to the surface before they suffocated or they were blown to smithereens. But it was too late—something, maybe a spark from their wheels, hit the methane and a hot gale force chased them as they raced down the tracks. They all pulled on their rescuers and shouted instructions that no one could hear over his own panicked breathing. Davis couldn’t get his oxygen to work so Carl shared his.
At South Left Four they scrambled off the car just as the power went out. They hurried away from the entry tunnel and into the work area, guided by the lamps on their helmets.
“Shit, this sucks,” gasped Davis, dazed by the sudden plunge into another reality. The dingy limestone coated pillars were eerie and unfamiliar, glowing white as far as the helmet lights could reach and disappearing into—what? He knew it was just more white pillars and cubbies and corridors and equipment but it looked like oblivion.
“Like a black hole,” was how he’d describe it to Annabeth and Patty, his wife. He kept this idea in his mind, that it was a horrible adventure to recount for years afterward, like Granddad’s grim tale of being part of the clean-up crew on the beach in France after D-Day. Except of course it wouldn’t be that bad, it wouldn’t be bad at all really. It would be like talking about a creepy movie. There was no thinking about not getting home.
* * *
He must have dozed off because he awakened to the distant sound of someone banging on metal. Finally someone up there had got off his ass and was signaling for them.
“Hey, Carl,” he whispered. “Hear it?”
“You’re just hearing yourself,” said Carl.
“I ain’t doing anything!”
“I know, but you’re hearing things. Like an echo of five minutes ago, when you were pounding that bolt.”
“Five minutes? Come on. It was longer ago than that.”
“Maybe. But even still.”
Davis didn’t hear the clanking anymore, but that didn’t mean Carl was right. He tried to get up and do some more pounding but he was held down by the darkness; funny how heavy it was. Like the entire coal seam had fallen on top of him. He managed to lift his arm straight up—nope, nothing. Nothing to see or feel, except his arm flopping back down to his chest and his burning lungs.
* * *
After escaping into the hall they had barricaded themselves against the toxic fumes by blocking the entry with plastic tarps and concrete blocks. They formed a smaller room further in, behind some pillars, and took turns pounding on the wall bolts to signal the surface. Then Tommy Perrin and a bunch of them had left to find the cache of safety supplies.
Carl sat on an overturned bucket and opened his lunch box. “They won’t find it,” he said. “I was down here in a black out one time. All them corridors look alike. You turn here and there and end up where you started. Never mind when your lamp dies.”
Carl tapped his helmet. The light had already gone out.
“Besides, the place’ll start filling with smoke soon. May as well stick it out in here.”
Davis slumped on the ground and turned off the lamp in his helmet to save the battery. He immediately felt the weight of the darkness and realized what an idiot he was. Turning it back on could cause a spark.
“Shouldn’t of done that,” remarked Carl, who had disappeared, along with his sandwich and the bucket and anything that had once been visible.
“Shit!” Davis hoped Carl didn’t hear the sob that was in his throat but he must’ve because Carl reached over and tapped Davis on the arm with his Hostess cherry pie—the shape and the crinkling of the wrapper was unmistakable—and said, “Here, have one of these. I got two.”
This had freaked Davis out more than anything so far. Carl always had two pies and never, not once, had he offered one to any of the guys, even Davis, whose wife had read a thing about high fructose corn syrup and started forbidding it in the house.
He took the pie and held it to his chest, his hands trembling. It was just like Runt. When Runt was on his last legs, he and Patty had let Annabeth feed him some chocolate covered pretzels because they already had an appointment to have the vet put him down. Runt had spent his final two days on earth with a bad case of the shits but at least the dog died tasting chocolate.
* * *
“Ever see the ocean?” Davis asked Carl. “I never did. Always wanted to. Annabeth used to whine about it all summer long and we never took her.”
It had been so important to send her to WVU and now all she did was work; night classes, temp jobs and summer school.
“Hey, give me that note. I want to add something. I want to tell Annabeth to get her ass down to the ocean before it’s too late.” He tried to reach for Carl’s lunch box but he didn’t have the strength to move closer. He lay back with a frustrated grunt.
“She ain’t missing much.” Carl’s voice sounded loud and tinny, like he was talking into Davis’s ear through a pipe. “It’s okay for some people but some of us get sunburn and sand up our ass and step in seagull shit.”
Right, Carl and his first wife Monica--Monique?--had gone to Virginia Beach and ended up in the emergency room with sun poisoning. But how on earth did Davis know that? They weren’t best buds or anything. Had they already had this conversation while lying here on the mine floor?
“It’s weird, you know,” Carl said. “Standing at the ocean. You feel so, I don’t know. Not tethered. Like you could go floating off into the sky at that very moment.”
“Of all things in the world,” Davis said, staring up at the dark nothing, “I’d love to go floating off into the sky at this very moment.”
What he really wanted most was Patty’s cucumber salad and a bucket of sweet tea from Captain D’s, but the sky over Virginia Beach sounded good, too.
“Yeah,” said Carl, “but if you’re floating into the sky you’re dead.”
That didn’t sounds like something Carl would say. About floating and being untethered. For one thing, it was exactly how Davis had always imagined the ocean. So he must have said it himself and then Carl said the other thing. Or Davis had said all of it, including the part about being dead.
* * *
“Stop that hammering and take some air,” Carl said and Davis dropped the sledgehammer. No, that had happened before.
* * *
“That’s so five minutes ago,” Annabeth used to say when he was slow on the uptake about something. “Pay attention, Dad.”
* * *
Funny how those white pillars glowed in the dark. It reminded Davis of Granddad. Granddad used to play football in high school. Back then, Drumley High didn’t have lights at the field for night games, so they used a white football. Granddad said they always won home games at night ‘cause the other teams couldn’t deal with the ball being the only thing visible on the field.
“Sometimes a disadvantage is an advantage,” said Granddad. If that was supposed to be a message of some sort it was beyond Davis.
“Are you saying I have some advantage right now?”
Granddad cackled in a crazy old man way that he never had when alive. “No! You’re screwed!”
Davis wished his last moments not be spent hallucinating dead people saying shit they’d never say. Granddad, Carl.
Carl? His head rang with pain as he tried to remember. Right. Carl had eaten his sandwich and yelled at Davis about the hammer and Davis had eaten the pie and then they talked about some stuff and wrote notes to their wives and kids. At some point Carl had fallen off his bucket and Davis had felt his breathless nose against his hand.
* * *
He saw Annabeth and Patty huddled together in their pink WVU hoodies, their faces gray against the bare, scrubby trees, talking to that guy from WCHS. The governor was there, and Carl’s wife and stepsons and Tommy Perrin’s parents and all the other families and maybe some protestors. He’d seen it all on CNN the last time.
“If something like that happens to me,” he’d said, hand clenched with the vestigial urge to grab a cigarette out of his shirt pocket, “I hope you-all don’t caterwaul about it on national television and talk about how I was in the Lord’s hands and shit.”
“I’ll try to contain myself,” Annabeth had said in a dry way that irked him. Like, she wouldn’t shed a tear for him, she was too cool and grown-up for that. But then she’d squeezed him extra hard before she went back to school and said, “Now you take care of yourself. Don’t make me have to come caterwaul.”
It was pretty funny to imagine, really.
He tried to slide his leg toward Carl’s overturned bucket.
“I’m going to kick it. Get it?”
Annabeth groaned. “That wasn’t funny the first time.”
He didn’t feel the heaviness anymore. He was moving, past the pillars and roof bolters and trucks, over the conveyor belt and into the jagged, shiny coal face and through the mountain.
