Chapter 41
THE CALLING IN
Bubba Boyd’s black Cadillac came slowly up the access road, as it always did when the demo team set up for a big blast. The car parked next to another new haul truck, three days deployed, and seemed remoralike against the massive yellow beast.
Bubba fingered the slurry pond report from Silas McCherry, his chief engineer, and pondered options. Paitsel’s mischief-making was an unwelcome complication, but manageable. This new protest group he organized was going to fizzle just like the others. But now, with the petition logged, the Mitchell farm permit would have to go through regular channels. Could be months. “Goddamn Paitsel,” he breathed.
“Yes, Mr. Boyd?” his driver said.
“Nuthin, Harlan.”
For two years, now, Silas had been naysaying the Cheek Mountain dig—telling him the void underneath was too unstable; complaining they should have used a centerline dam for containment. And now he said they couldn’t keep pumping into the Hogsback on the risk of a catastrophic collapse. Said the only option was to shut down until the permit came through and they could build more containment down mountain. But Wednesday shipped 270 tons—best day tally ever. Shut down, my ass.
It was Billy come up with the answer, he laughed to himself—simple, cheap, problem solved: make the dang crest ten, twelve foot higher with overburden. But Silas tried to kill that one too, until Bubba put his foot down.
McCherry was conferring with another hard hat when Bubba exited his car and walked toward them.
“Hey, Silas. Blaine. How you boys doin today?”
“Been better, Mr. Boyd,” Silas said and glanced over at the digger truck piling gravel and riprap on the dam crest. “Did you read my report?”
“I did. Seems like a jumble a mights an maybes.”
“Well, one thing I know for certain, just riprapping the crest ain’t gonna work. Every foot of slurry is gonna add about two thousand tons pushing down on the upstream toe. I didn’t build it for that kind of pressure. It may not fail right way, but it’s gonna fail.”
“In your opinion.”
“Yes, sir.”
Bubba smiled, patted him on the back. “Silas, let’s walk on up an watch this big-ass blow. I swear I never get tired a seein it.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Mr. Boyd. All the new crest rock is too unstable.”
Bubba blew a breath out his nose. “Up the dam’s the best place to watch a blow, son. You know that.” He started on the berm and after a few steps turned to Silas. “You comin?”
Together they slowly made their way up the dam face, Bubba pushing off his knees to facilitate each laborious step. At the crest, Silas stood hands on hips, assessing the overfilled lake of slurry. He pointed to where the black water lapped at the crest rock. “You see, sir. We’ve got no freeboard left. You just can’t add height to the wall without reinforcing the downstream face and toe. And we got no room to bolster downstream. All the weight of the new slurry is going to push on the base of the dam.”
“In your opinion.”
“Gravity ain’t my opinion, Mr. Boyd.”
The digger crew went off to gather more overburden and Bubba regarded the twelve feet of rock and gravel they had just added to the southern crest of the dam. “We jus need it to hold for a few months while we get Mitchell’s permitted.”
A piercing horn clanged across the site, silencing the tractors, idling the draglines, and stilling the haul trucks. Men exited their vehicles and turned to a vast shelf of carved-out mountain a hundred yards across and fifty yards high—the last shoulder of what had been Cheek Mountain. A single stand of orphaned trees stood at the top of the hill, their understory bushwacked away so that now they seemed like naked prisoners paraded out for public humiliation.
“Looks like the boys have set the blow,” Bubba said. “Gonna be our biggest one yet.” He rubbed his hands together excitedly. “Come on, Silas. Let’s climb on up an watch from the new top.” He was giddy now, like a boy readying to launch his first model rocket.
“Sir, I wouldn’t test the stability of the new riprap just yet. Give it a few days to settle.”
“I always like watchin from the top—where we’re at ain’t the top no more.”
“And, sir, blast this big, you really need to get your hard hat.”
He ignored Silas and started up the newly laid gravel to reach the upper crest of the dam, and once so achieved he stood, legs wide for the steady, and overlooked his domain. Two hundred and seventy thousand square feet of the black lake—seventy million gallons of slurry—then the wide, gray guts of Cheek Mountain.
The blast holes had been drilled at twenty-foot intervals in four lines across the top of the ridge, charged with ammonium nitrate, filled with number four fuel oil, then capped and wired.
Every time Bubba watched a blow, it brought him back to his youth, to the Fourth of July celebrations his daddy used to orchestrate in town. He’d bring in massive fireworks from New York and a few Italians to dig and set the mortars. Daddy always let him light the fuse in those days, and that initial feeling of dominion, peculiar and comforting, spread its warmth within him like first liquor.
The trigger man looked up at the lone figure, high atop the riprap, to make sure he was ready, for he knew better than to detonate when Mr. Boyd was distracted. A flag man gave Bubba the signal, and the trigger man focused his binoculars on the crest. Bubba raised a hand from his side languidly, then slowly, purposefully turned his thumb up. A second horn sounded.
“I named it Mountain Heritage Action Network to attract all them former hippies an radicals up north.” Paitsel chuckled. “It worked. We got a busload comin in for the rally.” He passed Pops the flyer he had mailed to Jonathan Pendrick at the Appalachian Project in Washington, D.C.
We were on the porch at Chisold with him and Chester just as the sun started to fall. “This is good work, Pait,” Pops said, clearly impressed. “You’re doing Paul proud.”
Paitsel nodded sadly. “Yeah, I think so.”
“I’m running it free for the next week in the Register, plus doing a feature,” Chester said.
Pops pointed his pipe end to Paitsel. “How the heck you get Ralph Stanley and the Osborne Brothers to play?”
“Baseball buddy knows their manager. They’ll draw some folks.”
“You got that right. What kind of pushback are you getting from Bubba?”
“Nuthin yet. Other than he made sure we couldn’t have it in town. Jesper’s place is better anyway. The Company is organizing a counterrally in town, so having it on private land means less potential for trouble.”
“You watch yourself, Paitsel. Bubba Boyd is a ruthless son of a bitch with money and power behind him. You are nothing to him.”
“Yeah, but sometimes nuthin ain’t a bad hand.”