movie theater in addition to the company store. Now, there was only a scarred foundation where the store had been. Some of the small, frame houses had changed hands several times since the company sold them off. Personal touches, an extra room or a bigger porch, had been added here and there. As a result, a stranger might not realize, at least not right away, that all the houses had once been identical.
Benny couldn't remember a time when he hadn't been on a first-name basis with everyone along the row. He had eaten dinner in most of those houses and had slept in a few, some more than once.
Small vegetable plots flanked most of the houses. He had plowed several of those gardens with his old Ford tractor. He usually worked for free, but sometimes could be talked into accepting a chicken dinner, complete with dumplings and gravy.
The gardens were lush now, approaching their mid-summer peak. Benny marked summer's passage by watching the gardens. In the early spring, when the seedlings were pale and thin, the garden plots were brown, muddy rectangles; by midsummer, the fragile seedlings had become thick, green tangles. He especially liked watching the old folks tend their gardens. They would lean on their hoes and wave hello as he drove past. He always pictured his grandmother in the garden, her back stiffly erect, her head bent beneath her bonnet as she chopped weeds with her long-handled hoe. A lot of the older women wore bonnets when he was little but his grandmother was one of the few who still did; she always wore a blue one with paisley patterns.
Ruth also liked paisley. She had lined Billy's crib with a paisley patch quilt a few days before he was born. Benny thought she probably would have dressed Billy in paisley dresses if he'd been a girl. As it was, Billy mostly wore jeans and t-shirts with superheroes imprinted on them. At least, Benny thought, that's what he’d usually worn when he lived on Cabin Creek.
Benny got depressed whenever he thought of Billy. He was down in the dumps for weeks after Billy left for Columbus, but the pain faded with time and now was just a low-level ache.
Even the “Daddy Loves You Billy” sign was now so faded it was barely visible. Benny had scrawled it in big, red letters on the overpass down at the mouth of the hollow that time Ruth had left him and moved in with her mother in the Blue Sulfur house. Billy was six at the time, and Ruth wouldn't let Benny see him for almost a week. He had painted the sign on the overpass so Billy would see it on his way to school.
They had gotten back together, but it didn't last. Ruth had packed up and moved to Columbus a few months later.
It was a lot of things, but mostly the mine closing that had caused her to leave. Things went from bad to 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