Gray Mountain: A Novel(41)

“Protection. Get down and come here.” They crouched and walked a few steps to a gap between two boulders. Below them lay the remains of Enid Mountain, which in years past rose to thirty-two hundred feet, but was now reduced to a pockmarked landscape of dust and rock and crawling machinery. The operation was vast, stretching from the remains of the mountain and jutting over the ridges around it. Mining trucks hauling a hundred tons of fresh, unwashed coal bounced along a myriad of switchbacks, descending steadily like ants marching mindlessly in formation. A massive dragline the size of her apartment building swung back and forth, its bucket clawing into the earth and digging out two hundred cubic yards of overburden and dumping it into neat piles. Loaders with smaller buckets worked methodically to scoop it up and dump it into another fleet of trucks that hauled it to an area where bulldozers shoved it down the valley. Lower on the mountain, or the mine site, track shovels dug coal from the exposed seam and dumped it into the mining trucks that slowly inched away when loaded, straining under their cargo as they bounced along. Clouds of dust hung over every phase of the operation.

Donovan, in a low, somber voice as if he might be overheard, said, “Quite a shock, huh?”

“ ‘Shock’ is the right word,” she said. “Mattie showed me three strip mines on the way to Colton on Wednesday, but we were not this close. Kinda makes you sick.”

“Yes, and you never get used to it. It’s an ongoing rape of the land, a new assault every day.”

The violence was slow, methodical, and efficient. After a few minutes, he said, “In two years, they’ve knocked off eight hundred feet of the mountain. They’ve gone through four or five seams, with about that many left to strip. When it’s over, Enid Mountain will yield about three million tons of coal, at an average price of sixty bucks a ton. The math gets easy.”

They huddled close together, careful not to actually touch, and watched the desolation. A bulldozer shoved a load perilously close to the edge, and the larger rocks tumbled down a wall of fill a thousand feet in height. The rocks bounced and fell until they were out of sight far below. He said, “And that’s how it happened. Try and imagine the mountain about five hundred feet higher, where it was nineteen months ago. That’s when one of those dozers pushed the boulder that traveled almost a mile before it hit the trailer where the Tate boys were asleep.” He found his binoculars and began searching, then handed them to her. “Stay low, now,” he said. “Far down in the valley there, beyond the fill, you can barely see a little white building. Used to be a church. Got it?”

After a few seconds she said, “Got it.”

“Just beyond the church there was a tiny settlement of a few houses and trailers. You can’t see it from here. As I said, it’s about a mile away and the trees are blocking the view. At trial, we plan to show a video that reenacts the path of the boulder. It actually flew over the church, probably at about eighty miles an hour, based on its weight, and bounced once or twice, then banged into the Tate trailer.”

“You have the boulder?”

“Yes and no. It weighs six tons, so we will not be hauling it into the courtroom. But it’s still there and we have plenty of photographs. Four days after the accident, the coal company tried to remove it with explosives and machinery, but we were able to stop them. Thugs, nothing but thugs. They actually showed up with a full crew the day after the funeral, entered onto property they had no claim to, and were all set to dismantle the boulder, regardless of how much damage they did to everything else. I called the sheriff and there were some tense moments.”

“You had the case four days after the accident?”

“No, I had the case the day after the accident. Less than twenty-four hours. I got to the mother’s brother. You have to be quick out here.”

“My father would be impressed.”

Donovan glanced at his watch and looked at Enid Mountain. He said, “They’re scheduled to blast at 4:00 p.m., so you’re in for some excitement.”

“Can’t wait.”

“You see that odd-looking truck with a tall boom attached to the rear, over there to the far left?”

“Are you kidding? There are a hundred trucks.”

“It’s not a haul truck; it’s much smaller. All by itself.”

“Okay, yes, I got it. What is it?”

“Don’t know if it has an official name, but it’s known as the blasting truck.” With the binoculars, Samantha zeroed in on the truck and the busy crew around it. “What are they doing?”

“Right now, they’re starting to drill. The regulations allow them to go down sixty feet with a blast hole that’s seven inches in diameter. The holes are ten feet apart, sort of in a grid. The regulations limit them to forty holes per blast. Regs here and regs there, lots of rules on the books. Not surprisingly, they are routinely ignored and companies like Strayhorn are accustomed to doing whatever they want. No one is really watching, except for maybe an environmental group here and there. They’ll take a video, file a complaint, the company gets a nuisance fine, a slap on the wrist, life goes on. The regulators are drawing their checks and sleeping peacefully.”

A large bearded man crept silently behind them and slapped Donovan on the shoulders with a loud “Boom!” Donovan yelled, “Shit!” as Samantha yelped and dropped the binoculars. Stricken, they wheeled about and gasped at the grinning face of a burly man you wouldn’t want to fistfight. “Sonofabitch,” Donovan hissed without reaching for his rifle. Samantha desperately looked for an escape trail.