Gray Mountain

“Oh, they know it’s me. They’ll run to the judge Monday morning and cry like babies. I’ll deny it all and tell them to stop whining. Let’s pick a jury.”

They passed the courthouse on Center Street in Colton. Donovan nodded in its direction and said, “There it is. Ground zero. The ugliest courthouse in Virginia.”

“I was there Wednesday, with Mattie.”

“Did you like the courtroom?”

“It’s kind of weird, but I’m not much of an expert on courtrooms. I’ve always tried to avoid them.”

“I love them. It’s the only place where the little guy can go toe-to-toe on a level field with a big, crooked corporation. A person with nothing—no money, no power—nothing but a set of facts can file a lawsuit and force a billion-dollar company to show up for a fair fight.”

“It’s not always fair, is it?”

“Sure it is. If they cheat, then I cheat. They play dirty, I get even dirtier. You gotta love justice.”

“You sound like my father. It’s frightening.”

“And you sound like my wife. She has no stomach for the work I do.”

“Let’s talk about something else.”

“Okay, do you have plans for tomorrow?”

“Saturday in Brady. The clinic is closed, so what are my options?”

“How about another adventure?”

“Does it involve guns?”

“No, I promise I will not carry a gun.”

“Will we trespass on someone’s property? Is there a chance of getting arrested?”

“No, I promise.”

“Sounds pretty dull. I’m in.”





13


Blythe called bright and early on Saturday morning with the incredible news that she had the day off, a rarity in her world. Her employment situation had stabilized; her firm had apparently stopped its bloodletting. No one had been shown the door in the past five days and promises were finally trickling down from above. A gorgeous fall day in the city with nothing to do but shop and worry about lunch and enjoy being young and single. She missed her roommate, and at that moment Samantha was painfully homesick. She had been away now for only two weeks, but given the distance it seemed like a year. They talked for half an hour before both needed to get on with their day.

Samantha showered and dressed quickly, eager to ease out of the driveway before Kim and Adam came bouncing out of the house with a list of things to do. So far, it seemed as though Annette and her children allowed their guest to come and go without notice. She lived as quietly as possible, and had yet to see them peeking through screens and around curtains. But, she was also quite aware that most of Brady was curious about the alien from New York.

For that reason, and because his marital situation was unstable, Donovan had suggested that she meet him at the county airport, eleven miles east of town. They would rendezvous there and begin the next adventure, the details of which he kept to himself. She was surprised to learn there was an airport within a hundred miles of Brady. Late Friday night, she searched it online and found nothing. How can an airport not have a Web site?

Not only was it missing a Web site, it also lacked aircraft, or at least none that she could see as the gravel road came to an end at the Noland County Airfield. Donovan’s Jeep was parked next to a small, metal building, and was the only vehicle in sight. She walked through the only door she saw and crossed through what appeared to be the lobby, with folding chairs and metal tables strewn with flying magazines. The walls were covered with fading photos of planes and aerial shots. The other door opened onto the ramp, and there was Donovan puttering around a very small airplane. She walked outside and said, “What’s that?”

“Good morning,” he said with a big smile. “Did you sleep well?”

“Eight hours. Are you a pilot?”

“I am, and this is a Cessna 172, better known as a Skyhawk. I practice law in five states and this little dude helps me get around. Plus, it’s a valuable tool when it comes to spying on coal companies.”

“Of course. And we’re going spying?”

“Something like that.” He gently folded down and locked a cowling that covered the engine. “Preflight is finished and she’s ready to go. Your door is on the other side.”

She didn’t move. “I’m not so sure about this. I’ve never flown in anything that small.”

“It’s the safest airplane ever built. I have three thousand hours and I’m highly skilled, especially on a perfect day like this. Not a cloud in the sky, ideal temperature, and the trees are alive with the colors of autumn. Today is a pilot’s dream.”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, where’s your sense of adventure?”

“But it only has one engine.”

“That’s all it needs. And if the engine quits it’ll glide forever and we’ll find a nice pasture somewhere.”

“In these mountains?”

“Let’s go Samantha.” She slowly walked around the tail and to the right-side door under the wing. He helped her into the seat and gently secured the seat belt and shoulder harness. He closed the door, locked it, and went around to the left side. She looked behind her at the cramped rear seat, and she looked in front of her at the wall of instruments and gauges.

“Are you claustrophobic?” he asked as he snapped his seat belt and harness into place. Their shoulders were about an inch apart.

“I am now.”

“You’re gonna love it. You’ll be flying it before the day is over.” He handed her a headset and said, “Stick this on. It’s pretty loud in here and we’ll talk through these.” They arranged their headsets. “Say something,” he said.

“Something.” Thumbs-up, the headsets were working. He grabbed a checklist and ran through the items, carefully touching each instrument and gauge as he went. He pulled the yoke back and forth. An identical one on her side moved in tandem. “Please don’t touch that,” he said.

She shook her head quickly; she wasn’t touching anything. He said, “Clear,” and turned the key. The engine jumped to life as the propeller began spinning. The airplane shook as he pushed the throttle. He announced his intentions over the radio, and they began taxiing down the runway, which seemed short and narrow, to her anyway. “Is anyone listening?” she asked.

“I doubt it. It’s very quiet this morning.”

“Do you have the only airplane in Noland County?”

He pointed to some small hangars ahead, along the runway. “There are a few more down there. Not many.” At the end of the runway, he revved the engine again and rechecked the controls and instruments. “Hang on.” He pushed the throttle forward, gently released the brakes, and they were rolling. As they picked up speed he calmly counted, “Eighty miles an hour, ninety, a hundred,” then he pulled the yoke back and they left the asphalt. For a moment, she felt weightless and her stomach flipped. “You okay?” he asked without looking at her.

“Fine,” she said with clenched jaws. As they were climbing, he began banking to the left and completed a 180-degree turn. They were low, not far above the trees, and he picked up the main highway. “See that green truck parked down there in front of that store?” he asked. She nodded. “That’s the asshole who followed me this morning. Hang on.” He jiggled the yoke and the wings dipped and rose, a salute to the asshole in the green truck. When it was out of sight, he began climbing again.

“Why would they follow you on a Saturday morning?” she asked, her white knuckles digging into her knees.

“You’ll have to ask them. Maybe because of what happened yesterday. Maybe because we show up in court Monday for a big trial. Who knows. They follow me all the time.” Suddenly she felt a bit safer in the air. By the time they reached Brady she was relaxed and taking in the scenery not far below. He buzzed the town at five hundred feet and gave her a bird’s view of where she lived and worked. Except for a ride in a hot air balloon in the Catskills, she had never seen the earth from such a low altitude, and it was fascinating, even thrilling. He climbed to a thousand feet and leveled off as they skipped across the hills. The radio was as silent as the one in Romey’s old fake patrol car, and she asked, “What about radar and air traffic controllers and stuff like that? Is anybody out there?”

“Probably not. We’re flying VFR—visual flight rules—so we’re not required to check in with air control. On a business trip, I would file a flight plan and get plugged into the air traffic system, but not today. We’re just joyriding.” He pointed to a screen and explained, “That’s my radar. If we get close to another plane, it’ll show up there. Relax, I’ve never had a crash.”

“A close call?”

“None. I take it very seriously, like most pilots.”

“That’s nice. Where are we going?”

“I don’t know. Where do you want to go?”

“You’re the pilot, and you don’t know where we’re going?”

He smiled, banked to the left, and pointed to an instrument. “This is the altimeter; it monitors the altitude, which is pretty important when you’re in the mountains.” They were inching up to fifteen hundred feet, where they leveled off. He pointed outside and said, “That’s Cat Mountain, or what’s left of it. A big operation.” Ahead and to her right was the strip mine, which looked like all the rest: a barren landscape of rock and dirt in the midst of beautiful mountains, with overfill shoved far below into the valleys. She thought of Francine Crump, the client in search of a free will, and the land she wanted to preserve. It was somewhere down there, somewhere close to Cat Mountain. There were small homes along the creeks, a settlement here and there. The Skyhawk banked steeply to the right, and as it did a perfect 360, Samantha looked straight down at the mining trucks and loaders and other machinery. A blasting truck, front-end loaders, a dragline, mining trucks and haul trucks, track shovels, track loaders. Her knowledge was expanding. She spotted a supervisor who was standing beside an office, straining to watch the airplane.

“They work on Saturday, huh?” she asked.

He nodded and said, “Seven days a week, sometimes. All the unions are gone.”

They climbed to three thousand feet and leveled off. “We’re over Kentucky now, heading west and north,” he said. If not for the headsets, he would have been yelling into the roar of the engine. “Just look. Too many to count.” The strip mines dotted the mountains like ugly scars, dozens of them as far as she could see. They flew directly over several. Between them she noticed vast open areas covered with patches of grass and a few small trees. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing just ahead. “That flat spot with no woods?”

“A casualty, a reclaimed site that was once a strip mine. That one in particular used to be Persimmon Mountain, elevation twenty-five hundred feet. They took off the top, got the coal, then set about to reclaim it. The law requires it to have the ‘approximate original contour’—that’s the key language—but how do you replace a mountain once it’s gone?”

“I’ve read about that. The land must be equal to or better than it was before the mining.”

“What a joke. The coal companies will tell you that reclaimed land is great for development—shopping centers, condos, and the like. They built a prison on one in Virginia. And they built a golf course on another. Problem is, nobody plays golf around here. Reclamation is a joke.”

They flew over another strip mine, then another. After a while they all looked the same. “How many are active, as of today?” she asked.

“Dozens. We’ve lost about six hundred mountains in the last thirty years to strip-mining, and at the rate we’re going there won’t be many left. Demand for coal is rising, the price is up, so the companies are aggressively seeking permits to start stripping.” He banked to the right and said, “Now we’re going north, into West Virginia.”

“And you’re licensed to practice there?” she asked.

“Yes, and in Virginia and Kentucky.”

“You mentioned five states before we took off.”

“Sometimes I go into Tennessee and North Carolina, but not that often. We’re litigating a coal ash dump in North Carolina, a lot of lawyers involved. Big case.”

He loved his big cases. The lost mountains in West Virginia looked the same as those in Kentucky. The Cessna zigzagged right and left, banking steeply so she could take another look at the devastation, then leveling off to check out another one. “That’s the Bull Forge Mine, straight ahead,” he said. “You saw it yesterday from the ground.”

“Oh yes. The ecoterrorists. Those guys are really pissing off the coal companies.”

“That seems to be their intention.”

“Too bad you didn’t bring a rifle. We could blow out a few tires from the air.”

“I’ve thought about it.”

After an hour in the air, Donovan began a slow descent. By then, she was familiar with the altimeter, the airspeed indicator, and the compass. At two thousand feet, she asked, “Do we have a destination?”

“Yes, but first I want to show you something else. Coming up on your side is an area known as Hammer Valley.” He waited a minute for them to clear a ridge; a long, steep valley appeared. “We’re gonna start down here at the end of it, near the town of Rockville, population three hundred.” Two church steeples rose through the trees, then the town came into view, a picturesque little village hugging a creek and surrounded by mountains. They flew over the town and followed the creek. Dozens of homes, mainly trailers, were scattered along narrow county roads.

“This is what’s known as a cancer cluster. Hammer Valley has the highest rate of cancer in North America, almost twenty times the national average. Bad cancers—liver, kidney, stomach, uterine, and lots of leukemia.” He gently pulled back on the yoke and the plane ascended as a large hump rose before them. They cleared it by two hundred feet and were suddenly over a reclaimed mine site. “And this is why,” he said. “The Peck Mountain strip mine.” The mountain was gone, replaced by small hills smoothed by bulldozers and covered in brown grass. Behind an earthen dam, a large body of black liquid sat ominously. “That’s the slurry pond. A company called Starke Energy came in here about thirty years ago and stripped out all the coal, one of the first big removal sites in Appalachia. They washed it right here and dumped the waste into a small lake that was once pristine. Then they built that dam and made the lake a lot bigger.”

They were circling the slurry pond at one thousand feet. “Starke eventually sold out to Krull Mining, another faceless ape of a company that’s really owned by a Russian oligarch, a thug with his finger in a bunch of mines around the world.”

“A Russian?”

“Oh yeah. We got Russians, Ukrainians, Chinese, Indians, Canadians, as well as the usual lineup of Wall Street cowboys and local turncoats. There are a lot of absentee owners here in the coalfields, and you can imagine how much they care about the land and the people.”

He banked again and Samantha was staring straight down at the slurry, which, from a thousand feet, appeared to have the texture of crude oil. “That’s pretty ugly,” she said. “Another lawsuit?”

“The biggest ever.”





They landed on a runway even smaller than Noland County’s, with no hint that a town was anywhere close. As they taxied to the ramp, she saw Vic Canzarro leaning on a fence, waiting. They stopped near the terminal; there was not another aircraft in sight. Donovan killed the engine, ran through his postflight checklist, and they crawled out of the Skyhawk.

As expected, Vic drove an all-wheel-drive muscle truck, suitable for off-road encounters with security guards. Samantha sat in the rear seat with a cooler, some backpacks, and, of course, a couple of rifles.

Vic was a smoker, not of the chain variety, but an enthusiastic one nonetheless. He cracked the window on his driver’s side about an inch, just enough for half of his exhaust to escape while the other half whirled around the club cab. After the second cigarette, Samantha was gagging and lowered the rear window behind Donovan. He asked her what she was doing. She told him in plain language, and this touched off a tense conversation between Donovan and Vic about his habits. He swore he was trying to quit, had in fact quit on numerous occasions, and freely admitted that he fretted over the likelihood of an awful death from lung cancer. Donovan hammered away, leaving Samantha with the clear impression that these two had been bickering over the same issue for some time. Nothing got resolved and Vic fired up another.

The hills and trails led them deep into Hammer Valley, and finally to the crumbling home of one Jesse McKeever. “Who is Mr. McKeever, and why are we visiting him?” she asked from the rear seat as they turned in to the driveway.

“A potential client,” Donovan said. “He’s lost his wife, one son, one daughter, one brother, and two cousins to cancer. Kidney, liver, lung, brain, pretty much entire body.” The truck stopped, and they waited a second for the dog. An angry pit bull flew off the porch and raced at them, ready to eat the tires. Vic honked and Jesse finally emerged. He called the dog, struck him with his cane, cursed him, and ordered him into the backyard. The stricken dog obeyed and disappeared.

They sat on crates and battered lawn chairs under a tree in the front yard. Samantha was not introduced to Jesse, who completely ignored her. He was a rugged old cuss who looked much older than sixty, with few teeth and thick wrinkles made permanent by a hard life and a harsh scowl that never left his face. Vic had tested the water from the McKeever well, and the results, while predictable, were grim. The water was polluted with VOCs—volatile organic