Bears Discover Fire

I used the lobby phone to call Janet and the girls again. I was already too high for the cab phone and this would be my last chance until I got back from Charlotte, since satellite calls over the mountain are so expensive. One of the guys at the table told me claws were bringing $100 in Charlotte, but they had to be unmarked because nobody eats road kill. I told him I didn’t lobster anymore anyway.

It was just after midnight and I was getting up to go when the kid came in the revolving door, nursing a bloody nose with the sleeve of my shirt. He had run across the lot without any breath spray.

“Find your dad?” I asked, and he shook his head. He sat down, looking at the french fries the other guys had left on their plates. I bought two hamburgers out of the machine, even though I had already eaten, and acted like I didn’t want one of them. That’s the way you have to do it with a kid like that.

But I had to get going. “I guess you better head back to the roundabout and catch a ride back down the mountain,” I said.

The kid shook his head. He said his mother had got married and moved out of Louisville. He claimed his dad had left ten dollars for him back at the roundabout, to catch a ride across to Charlotte where his grandma lived. I didn’t believe that for a minute. He showed me the same folded-up ten I’d seen him looking at on the cogway.

I said, “Insurance won’t allow me to carry you over Flat Mountain.” This was a lie. The fact is, no Flat Topper’s insured. Not because it’s dangerous, although it can be, but because it’s not a part of any state anymore. It’s not actuarily part of the world anymore, my insurance man says.

“I know exactly where she lives,” the kid says, acting like he hadn’t heard me. He took a yellow piece of paper from his watch pocket and started unfolding it. He was doing good at not crying.

When I was his age, and I was hitchhiking, I had a ten-dollar bill in my watch pocket. That was it. This Mexican guy from St. Louis picked me up. He kept a pearl-handled revolver under the car seat. First time we stopped to eat, I tried to unfold my ten so he wouldn’t see what it was, figuring I knew about Mexicans. And he told me to put it in my shoe because everybody knows to look in your watch pocket. He bought my meals all the way across Missouri and Oklahoma.

“One twenty-one Magnolia Street,” the kid read off the paper, but he pronounced it “mangolia” like an aircraft metal. I could tell he’d never been to Charlotte. I wasn’t surprised. Too high to fly over, too thick to tunnel through, Flat Mountain has split up a lot of families. It’s not like an ocean that took a million years to form. They say it’s even making the days longer, at almost an hour a year, because the bulge makes the Earth turn slower, like a skater throwing her arms out.

Slower days, that’s all we need.

The other Flat Toppers had all left, heading down the Crab Orchard to Louisville and points beyond.

What the hell, I figured. “Let’s go,” I said. “And don’t keep your money in your watch pocket. Everybody knows to look there.”

At 34,500, Hazard would be snowy if the vents off the mountain didn’t keep the clouds half steam. Cold steam. I was half frozen by the time I had finished letting all but eight pounds out of my tires and topping off the oxy and fuel in the injection system. You don’t need an oversuit down so low, but you do need to keep a can of breath spray handy.

C-Level gives the cells enough oxygen to get by, and fools your nerves into thinking you’re breathing. I keep a can in my pocket.

“I could have helped,” the kid said when I got into the truck. “I know pretty much about trucks.” I handed him an oversuit and made him slip it on, even if he didn’t want to zip it up. My rig is pressurized at fifty-five hundred and I’ve never had an accident, but you never know. Stuffed with fries, he went to sleep. I popped in old Lyle Lovett and hit the road, the only road east.

For the first two hours out of Hazard it’s nothing but clouds. Flat Mountain’s not flat yet and you’re riding an 8-percent switchback patched together out of old highways.

If you ever saw the original Appalachians from the air, they looked like a rug somebody had kicked, with the ridges like long folds running parallel. The theory was that Africa had bumped into the USA a million years ago and folded them up. The Uplift killed that theory. Now they say that the Appalachians were the wrinkles left when the Cumberland Dome collapsed a million years ago—unwrinkled when it rose up again twenty years ago. They say it’s not stable, and it’s true: if you get out of your truck you can still feel the ground humming through your shoes. Cold fusion, twenty miles down.