Baronland

And now for something completely different

While I do have some essay ideas bouncing around in my noggin, lately I’ve got the fiction bug, and I think sometimes environmental and political issues are best explored through fiction. This is because, in my opinion, environmental politics are often more about feelings than facts, and peoples’ opinions on solar farms or community benefits agreements are sometimes not coherent, they’re contradictory. Which I think makes sense. I can’t say I’ve made many entirely logical decisions in my life. Sometimes I eat Cheerios for breakfast even when I don’t feel like it because I’m worried the box gets lonely if I don’t pour from it. Fiction is about character psychology, working out the internal logic of someone else’s world, getting a peek under the hood. So I write fiction to imagine how people think about issues where the facts are already quite clear; sometimes it’s an exercise in empathy for me, sometimes more of a “know thine enemy” situation. This is the latter. Here’s a little story, part of a longer short story/novella I’m working on called Baronland. Our main character is Hank McCoy, a somewhat disgraced former coal mining executive. If y’all like this maybe I’ll do future installments of it. Let me know your thoughts! Enter Hank:

Baronland, excerpt 1

April 7^th, 2015

When I got the invitation to speak at Delorme, my first thought was: there’s somebody who’s got some sense in their head. A lot of other people turned tail when they saw the way the winds were moving with me, the trial, etc. But let’s be quite honest with ourselves—and I always am—Delorme High never shit out anything of higher value than me, and I’m not sure they’re going to, scholarship money or not. If we’re further being honest, I gave them that money knowing no kid would be able to stay alive, sober, and not-pregnant long enough to cash it in. But I thought if they could see what was just beyond their grubby, blue fingers, they might be inspired to practice what William F. Buckley Jr. once called “industry.” God, the things that have happened to this country while everyone was busy eating Little Debbie’s Oatmeal Creme Pies. But anyway, sitting down to write this thing, I guess I got nothing. I shouldn’t need to say anything all that edifying, because these are the junkie kids of my beloved junkie childhood neighbors and they barely got two brain cells left to rub together. For inspiration I went back and looked at old emails I sent Josie back when she was applying to college and I was doing a lot of fathering via email and LinkedIn because I was in Richmond and she was in Charleston with Ruth. There’s some good stuff in there, but it’s not exactly right.

The first time I ever got invited to do one of these, it was Central High in Charleston, and they were dedicating a magnet engineering program with my name on it. It was 1998, December. The weekend before, I was at a conference in Dallas. American Energy Providers. I’d just gotten promoted to Head of Accounting at Blue Mountain, and it was my first time traveling cross-country with Pfeffer and the board and I was basically a kid in a candy store. It started to dawn on my big gourd that I might actually be making it, might actually be getting out of the labyrinth that is West Virginia. So I wandered down to the hotel bar after all the panels are over and I remember, clear as day, there was this short guy standing at the bar in a navy tailored suit, nice enough that he had to be there for the conference. I asked for a shot of Johnny Walker Blue, still giddy with my first big bonus, and tried to strike up a conversation with this fella cause, well, I’m a friendly guy.

It was him and me and maybe two other folks at the bar and I said, “Where have you traveled from?” in the Queen’s English, because Pfeffer warned me about letting the accent slip too early. After a few drinks, after you get chummy with folks, it becomes endearing, charming, like being left-handed or a cute kind of cripple. But as far as first impressions go, it’s a non-starter. The guy slowly turned to me and I saw he don’t have a nametag on anymore and I realized, okay, this guy’s piss-drunk already. So I decided to move along to another part of the bar but he stopped me like he’d finally registered my question and said, “You’re one of the coal guys.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes I am.”

He said, “You know, it’s all gonna be gone one day. All of it.”

I said, “I don’t know quite what you mean.”

He said coal was nonrenewable (yeah, no shit) but natural gas was “the next frontier” and we got into a tussle about it and I said the process for extracting gas was too labor-intensive and he shook a finger at me in a sloppy sorta way and said, “Two words: hydraulic fracturing.” I guess I looked confused, because he said something about how he knew I wouldn’t understand his “big words.”

“I’m talking about fracking. Fracking is where the money’s at,” he said, and those black marbles for eyes seemed to swim a little in his tiny head.

I said, “Aren’t you digging in the ground same as us and the gas is gonna be gone one day just like the coal?” Because listen, I’m no idiot. I know that all things have a bottom—patience, Johnny Walker, and the inside of those hills. It just doesn’t have to run out quite so fast as they say, because there’s always a little more to be scraped out of there. That’s what I know that other folks don’t seem to get. That’s what brings in the kind of dividends I bring in. In every person, in every tunnel, there’s a little more you can scrape out. But anyway, fancy-suit said no, the gas is “everywhere” and we’ve only found “a tiny percentage” and it's “clean.” He was all up on his high horse about how he’s living in the future and he’s doing it for the sake of our children.

“Don’t you think about the children, Harry?” he said. I wanted to say that I thought about them all the time, that I was missing mine at that moment. I remember thinking I needed to pick up a souvenir from the airport gift shop on the way back, for Ruth, because she was home alone that weekend, the first of many.

I said, “It’s Hank. My name.” He squinted at my nametag, leaned in enough for me to smell the bourbon on his breath and said, “McCoy, why does that sound familiar? Oh, that’s right.” He mimed guns with his fingers and said, “God, no wonder you’re not living in reality, Harry you prolly live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. You prolly don’t even know what this is, ever seen one of these before?” He held up a flip phone.

“That’s a cellular telephone,” I said, thinking it would make him laugh and get him to stop carrying on. I remember thinking okay, I knew it, this guy is some prick from New York or California who enunciates every syllable and hates his neighbors, but as he turned back to the counter to pay his tab, his nametag fell out of his suit jacket pocket and onto the ground and it said he was from Tennessee.

I said, “Well, what have we here? You’re such a jackass I thought you might be from the Bay Area.”

He let out a sharp laugh like a kicked dog and said, “No, no, I’m from a town on the Mississippi you never heard of.” His swimming eyes twinkled in a way that made me feel maybe a little afraid, which was ridiculous because I was twice his size. He got a sort of lopsided grin as he slid his drink back across the bar, half-empty, and paused.

“In fact,” he said, “I’m a local celebrity. They haul me out for career day at the high school to keep kids from snorting what-have-you.” This was like music to my ears because I was nervous as hell about the Central High ribbon-cutting. I’d been thinking about it the whole conference weekend. I was thinking about the people who’d be there, probably people like the ones I’d grown up with, like the ones who had started sending me Facebook messages asking me for a little money thrown their way. Money for back surgery because no health insurance. Money for rehab out of state because back surgery got them hooked on some little white pill. Back then I still wanted them to like me, wanted their snot-nosed, shaved-head kids to like me too. I was nervous about what I could say at the front of their high school gymnasium like every other gymnasium, on a floor that’s probably been sticky for thirty years, to make them, these strangers, remember me. Looking back, I’m not sure why I was desperate for the approval of little people who may very well be on my jury in a few months, who may very well vote to convict, as if they know anything about anything. Everyone’s looking for a scapegoat, and “first corporate executive to be jailed for safety violations” sounds historical, sounds like being a part of something important. People without much else want to be important, it makes them take up pitchforks against big guys. Especially here, they’ve got torches in their eyes when an accident like my accident happens. So this was why, I guess, I wanted the approval. This guy in the navy suit in Dallas in 1999 seemed to have some experience. I couldn’t quite figure him out and I still resented his remarks from earlier, but I had this feeling he knew something I would need to know down the line. So I couldn’t help myself.

“Well, what do you tell them?” I asked, kicking myself because the “well” came out more like “wheel,” and then realized it didn’t matter anymore, because this guy and me, we were two crabs at the bottom of the same barrel.

“Shit,” he slurred gently, “I don’t remember. Why would I remember that?”

I googled him a few years later, found out he went out west, because of course there was money in fracking. He caught the boom, but then again, I made just as much off metallurgical coal by setting my ass down right where it always was. Anyhow, he got stabbed to death in an Indian reservation bar in 2005—everyone involved got life. The pipeline he was managing actually blew up and killed a couple guys a few weeks later. It’s funny, they say he got stabbed because he shoved his tongue down someone’s sister’s throat. Maybe he did worse than that, wouldn’t surprise me. Guys with that kind of money think everyone has a price tag sticking out of their ass pocket. If he’d just kept his hands to himself, he’d have gotten a year in jail tops for evading regulations and might could’ve never ended up with the hilt of a small hatchet sunk in his ribcage.

I guess what I want to say to these kids is that to get what they want in life, they’re going to have to make some sacrifices. There are certain things taken from you before you even go and get yourself born. Me as a case in point: dead dad by the time I was five (very sad), mom running the gas station all by herself (even sadder), had to work underground for a year before going to school to pay for the tuition not covered by the partial ride (saddest. Plus I hated it down there. Not my sort of people). And then there are further things you get taken from you just for living. Like anything I even did to get out the labyrinth, I lost something else. Bagged the chairmanship at Blue Mountain? Ruth walked out. Josie gets through high school with a 4.0 and no STDs? She moves to New Orleans and stops calling. So you just get beat down and beat down. I forget what I was trying to say. I think that’s something like the point. That you don’t find the way out of the jungle—the labyrinth?—you hack at it, you have to totally tear it apart with your machete. And the machete is made of industry. I’m working on it, okay?