David Baldacci Read online

  “What way is there other than the road?”

  “You really want’a get on down there?” he said.

  Lou took a deep breath. “I really want to, Diamond.”

  “Well, then, we going. I knowed me a shortcut. Shoot, get us there quick as a sneeze.”

  Since the mountains had been formed, water had continued eroding the soft limestone, carving thousand-foot- deep gullies between the harder rocks. The line of finger ridges marched next to the three of them as they walked along. The ravine they finally came to was wide and seemed impassable until Diamond led them over to the tree. The yellow poplars here grew to immense proportion, gauged by a caliper measured in feet instead of inches. Many were thicker than a man was tall, and rose up to a hundred and fifty feet in height. Fifteen thousand board feet of lumber could be gotten from a single poplar. A healthy specimen lay across this gap, forming a bridge.

  “Going ’cross here cuts the trip way down,” Diamond said.

  Oz looked over the edge, saw nothing but rock and water at the end of a long fall, and backed away like a spooked cow. Even Lou looked uncertain. But Diamond walked right up to the log.

  “Ain’t no problem. Thick and wide. Shoot, walk ’cross with your eyes closed. Come on now.”

  He made his way across, never once looking down. Jeb scooted easily after him. Diamond reached safe ground and looked back. “Come on now,” he said again.

  Lou put one foot up on the poplar but didn’t take another step.

  Diamond called out from across the chasm. “Just don’t look down. Easy.”

  Lou turned to her brother. “You stay here, Oz. Let me make sure it’s okay.” Lou clenched her fists, stepped onto the log, and started across. She kept her eyes leveled on nothing but Diamond and soon joined him on the other side. They looked back at Oz. He made no move toward the log, his gaze fixed on the dirt.

  “You go on ahead, Diamond. I’ll go back with him.”

  “No, we ain’t gonna do that. You said you want’a go to town? Well, dang it, we going to town.”

  “I’m not going without Oz.”

  “Ain’t got to.”

  Diamond jogged back across the poplar bridge after telling Jeb to stay put. He got Oz to climb on his back and Lou watched in admiration as Diamond carried him across.

  “You sure are strong, Diamond,” said Oz as he gingerly slid down to the ground with a relieved breath.

  “Shoot, that ain’t nuthin’. Bear chased me ’cross that tree one time and I had Jeb and a sack of flour on my back. And it were nighttime too. And the rain was pouring so hard God must’ve been bawling ’bout somethin’. Couldn’t see a durn thing. Why, I almost fell twice.”

  “Well, good Lord,” said Oz.

  Lou hid her smile well. “What happened to the bear?” she asked in seemingly honest excitement.

  “Missed me and landed in the water, and that durn thing never bothered me no mo’.”

  “Let’s go to town, Diamond,” she said, pulling on his arm, “before that bear comes back.”

  They crossed one more bridge of sorts, a swinging one made from rope and cedar slats with holes bored in them so the hemp could be pulled through and then knotted. Diamond told them that pirates, colonial settlers, and later on, Confederate refugees had made the old bridge and added to it at various points in time. And Diamond said he knew where they were all buried, but had been sworn to secrecy by a person he wouldn’t name.

  They made their way down slopes so steep they had to hang on to trees, vines, and each other to stop from tumbling down head-first. Lou stopped every once in a while to gaze out as she clutched a sapling for support. It was something to stand on steep ground and look out at land of even greater angles. When the land became flatter and Oz grew tired, Lou and Diamond took turns carrying him.

  At the bottom of the mountain, they were confronted with another obstacle. The idling coal train was at least a hundred cars long, and it blocked the way as far as they could see in either direction. Unlike those of a passenger train, the coal train’s cars were too close together to step between. Diamond picked up a rock and hurled it at one of the cars. It struck right at the name emblazoned across it: Southern Valley Coal and Gas.

  “Now what?” said Lou. “Climb over?” She looked at the fully loaded cars and the few handholds, and wondered how that would be possible.

  “Shoot naw,” said Diamond. “Unner.” He stuck his hat in his pocket, dropped to his belly, and slid between the car wheels and under the train. Lou and Oz quickly followed, as did Jeb. They all emerged on the other side and dusted themselves off.

  “Boy got hisself cut in half last year doing that very thing,” said Diamond. “Train start up when he were unner it. Now, I ain’t see it, but I hear it were surely not purty.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us that before we crawled under the train?” demanded a stunned Lou.

  “Well, if I’d done that, you ain’t never crawled unner, now would you?”

  On the main road they caught a ride in a Ramsey Candy truck and each was given a Blue Banner chocolate bar by the chubby, uniformed driver. “Spread the word,” he told them. “Good stuff.”

  “Sure will,” said Diamond as he bit into the candy. He chewed slowly, methodically, as though suddenly a connoisseur of fine chocolate testing a fresh batch. “You give me ’nuther one and I get the word out twice as fast, mister.”

  After a long, bumpy ride the truck dropped them off in the middle of Dickens proper. Diamond’s bare toes had hardly touched asphalt when he quickly lifted first one foot and then the other. “Feels funny,” he said. “Ain’t liking it none.”

  “Diamond, I swear, you’d walk on nails without a word,” Lou said as she looked around. Dickens wasn’t even a bump in the road compared to what she was used to, but after their time on the mountain it seemed like the most sophisticated metropolis she had ever seen. The sidewalks were filled with people on this fine Saturday morning, and small pockets of them spilled onto the streets. Most were dressed in nice clothes, but the miners were easy enough to spot, lumbering along with their wrecked backs and the loud, hacking coughs coming from their ruined lungs.

  A huge banner had been stretched across the street. It read “Coal Is King” in letters black as the mineral. Directly under where the banner had been tied off to a beam jutting from one of the buildings was a Southern Valley Coal and Gas office. There was a line of men going in, and a line of them coming out, all with smiles on their faces, clutching either cash, or, presumably, promises of a good job.

  Smartly dressed men in fedoras and three-piece suits chucked silver coins to eager children in the streets. The automobile dealership was doing a brisk business, and the shops were filled with both quality goods and folks clamoring to purchase them. Prosperity was clearly alive and well at the foot of this Virginia mountain. It was a happy, energetic scene, and it made Lou homesick for the city.

  “How come your parents have never brought you down here?” Lou asked Diamond as they walked along.

  “Ain’t never had no reason to come here, that’s why.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets and stared up at a telephone pole with wires sprouting from it and smacking into one building. Then he eyed a droop-shouldered man in a suit and a little boy in dark slacks and a dress shirt as they came out of a store with a big paper bag of something. The two went over to one of the slant-parked cars that lined both sides of the street, and the man opened the car door. The boy stared over at Diamond and asked him where he was from.

  “How you know I ain’t from right here, son?” said Diamond, glaring at the town boy.

  The child looked at Diamond’s dirty clothes and face, his bare feet and wild hair, then jumped in the car and locked the door.

  They kept walking and passed the Esso gas station with its twin pumps and a smiling man in crisp company uniform standing out front as rigidly as a cigar store Indian. Next they peered through the glass of a Rexall drugstore. The store was running an “all-in-the-window”
sale. The two dozen or so varied items could be had for the sum of three dollars.

  “Shoot, why? You can make all that stuff yourself. Ain’t got to buy it,” Diamond pointed out, apparently sensing that Lou was tempted to go inside and clean out the display.

  “Diamond, we’re here to spend money. Have fun.”

  “I’m having fun,” he said with a scowl. “Don’t be telling me I ain’t having no fun.”

  They headed past the Dominion Café with its Chero Cola and “Ice Cream Here” signs, and then Lou stopped.

  “Let’s go in,” she said. Lou gripped the door, pulled it open, setting a bell to tinkling, and stepped inside. Oz followed her. Diamond stayed outside for a long enough time to show his displeasure with this decision and then hurried in after them.

  The place smelled of coffee, wood smoke, and baking fruit pies. Umbrellas for sale hung from the ceiling. There was a bench down one wall, and three swivel chrome barstools with padded green seats were bolted to the floor in front of a waist-high counter. Glass containers filled with candy rested on the display cabinets. There was a modest soda and ice cream fountain machine, and through a pair of saloon doors they could hear the clatter of dishes and smell the aromas of food cooking. In one corner was a potbellied stove, its smoke pipe supported by wire and cutting through one wall.

  A man dressed in a white shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbows, a short wide tie, and wearing an apron passed through the saloon doors and stood behind the counter. He had a smooth face and hair parted equally to either side, held down with what appeared to Lou to be a slop bucket of grease.

  He looked at them as though they were a brigade of Union troops sent directly from General Grant to rub the good Virginians’ noses in it a little more. He edged back a bit as they moved forward. Lou got up on one of the stools and looked at the menu neatly written in loopy cursive on a blackboard. The man moved back. farther. His hand glided out and one of his knuckles rapped against a glass cabinet set against the wall. The words “No Credit” had been written in thick white strokes on the glass.

  In response to this not-so-subtle gesture, Lou pulled out five one-dollar bills and aligned them neatly on the counter. The man’s eyes went to the folding cash and he smiled, showing off a gold front tooth. He came forward, now their good friend for all time. Oz scooted up on another of the barstools, leaned on the counter, and sniffed the wonderful smells coming through those saloon doors. Diamond hung back, as though wanting to be nearest the door when they had to make a run for it.

  “How much for a slice of pie?” Lou asked.

  “Nickel,” the man said, his gaze locked on the five Washingtons on his counter.

  “How about a whole pie?”

  “Fifty cents.”

  “So I could buy ten pies with this money?”

  “Ten pies?” exclaimed Diamond. “God dog!”

  “That’s right,” the man said quickly. “And we can make ’em for you too.” He glanced over at Diamond, his gaze descending from the boy’s explosion of cowlicks to his bare toes. “He with you?”

  “Naw, they with me,” said Diamond, ambling over to the counter, fingers tucked around his overall straps.

  Oz was staring at another sign on the wall. “Only Whites Served,” he read out loud, and then glanced in confusion at the man. “Well, our hair’s blond, and Diamond’s is red. Does that mean only old people can get pie?”

  The fellow looked at Oz like the boy was “special” in the head, stuck a toothpick between his teeth, and eyed Diamond. “Shoes are required in my establishment. Where you from, boy? Mountain?”

  “Naw, the moon.” Diamond leaned forward and flashed an exaggerated smile. “Want’a see my green teeth?”

  As though brandishing a tiny sword, the man waved the toothpick in front of Diamond’s face. “You smart mouth. Just march yourself right outta here. Go on. Git back up that mountain where you belong and stay there!”

  Instead, Diamond went up on his toes, grabbed an umbrella off the ceiling rack, and opened it.

  The man came around from behind the counter.

  “Don’t you do that now. That’s bad luck.”

  “Why, I doing it. Mebbe a chunk of rock’ll fall off the mountain and squash you to poultice!”

  Before the man reached him, Diamond tossed the opened umbrella into the air and it landed on the soda machine. A stream of goo shot out and painted one cabinet a nice shade of brown.

  “Hey!” the man yelled, but Diamond had already fled.

  Lou scooped up her money, and she and Oz stood to leave.

  “Where y’all going?” the man said.

  “I decided I didn’t want pie,” Lou said amiably and shut the door quietly behind her and Oz.

  They heard the man yell out, “Hicks!”

  They caught up with Diamond, and all three bent over laughing while people walked around them, staring curiously.

  “Nice to see you having a good time,” a voice said.

  They turned and saw Cotton standing there, wearing vest, tie, and coat, briefcase in hand, yet with a clear look of mirth in his eyes.

  “Cotton,” Lou said, “what are you doing here?”

  He pointed across the street. “Well, I happen to work here, Lou.”

  They all stared at where he was pointing. The courthouse loomed large before them, beautiful brick over ugly concrete.

  “Now, what are y’all doing here?” he asked.

  “Louisa gave us the day off. Been working pretty hard,” said Lou.

  Cotton nodded. “So I’ve seen.”

  Lou looked at the bustle of people. “It surprised me when I first saw this place. Really prosperous.”

  Cotton glanced around. “Well, looks can be deceiving. Thing about this part of the state, we’re generally one industry-moving-on from total collapse. Lumber folks did it, and now most jobs are tied to the coal and not just the miners. And most of the businesses here rely on those people spending those mining dollars. If that goes away, then it might not seem so prosperous anymore. A house of cards falls swiftly. Who knows, in five years’ time this place might not even be here.” He eyed Diamond and grinned. “But the mountain folk will. They always get by.” He looked around. “I tell you what, I’ve got some things to do over to the courthouse. Court’s not in session today of course, but always some work to be done. Suppose you meet me there in two hours. Then I’d be proud to buy you some lunch.”

  Lou looked around. “Where?”

  “A place I think you’d like, Lou. Called the New York Restaurant. Open twenty-four hours, breakfast, lunch, or supper any time of the day or night. Now, there aren’t many folk in Dickens who stay up past nine o’clock, but I suppose it’s comforting to have the option of eggs, grits, and bacon at midnight.”

  “Two hours,” repeated Oz, “but we don’t have anything to tell time with.”

  “Well, the courthouse has a clock tower, but it tends to run a little slow. I tell you what, Oz, here.” Cotton took off his pocket watch and handed it to him. “You use this. Take good care of it. My father gave it to me.”

  “When you left to come here?” Lou asked.

  “That’s right. He said I’d have plenty of time on my hands, and I guess he wanted me to keep good track of it.” He tipped his hat to them. “Two hours.” And then he walked away.

  “So what we gonna do for two hours?” said Diamond.

  Lou looked around and her eyes lit up.