Free Down Don't Bother Me (9780062362209) by Jason Miller Page A

ain’t right, is it?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. Your name gets to be Bug Nuts—and this is underground coal miners calling you this—a bad end is more or less in the cards. “What happened?”
    â€œWell, you know, that little guy was loony as a Turkishhermaphrodite. He pissed on the man-trip rail, set himself on fire through a stream of his own piss.”
    â€œWhy in God’s name did he do that?”
    â€œOn a dare,” Cooper said.
    That rang true. Ignorant idiots at coal mines were always daring one another to do lethally dangerous shit. And not just the inby men, either. I once saw a mine owner “prove” that filter masks were unnecessary by shoving his face into the longwall pan and sucking in heaping lungfuls of coal fine. When he died—and he would—he was going to die hard.
    Cooper said, “That’s the guess, anyway. Ain’t no one took responsibility yet, and probably no one will. Hell, it’s practically murder.”
    He picked up the cotton and alcohol and finished cleaning me up. He plucked a piece of gravel out of my ear the nurse had overlooked. He shined his light in my eyes and put his thumbs on either side of my nose. “This here don’t look so bad. Eyes are working okay, and your face ain’t broke. Maybe we’ll just chalk this one up to household clumsiness.”
    â€œThanks, Doc.”
    He accepted my gratitude with another grunt and gave me a shot. I don’t know that there was any medicinal value in it. I sort of got the feeling he liked giving shots to assholes who dragged him into the office on his free time. He gave me another little lecture about motorcycles and forced me to take the pamphlet he’d mentioned with the guy cut up like a weenie. Then he shook my hand and let me go.
    I hopped down from the table and went out into the waiting room, where they were waiting on me like a pack of hyenas. As soon as I was in sight, they jumped on mewith armloads of paperwork and insurance forms. I was still working my way through it when, something like three or four years later, the office door opened and Jeep Mabry appeared.
    Lemme tell you a thing or two about Jeep. This was a friend of mine from way back. Friend’s maybe not the word, exactly. More like the brother I never had, the kind of brother who’d kill for you, or die. We came up together, dated the same girls, flunked the same classes, haunted the same haunts. Mostly, though, we raised all manner of hell together for so long that a lot of folks got to thinking of us as brothers. Which, like I said, in a way we were.
    Jeep went six-eight or nine, four inches taller than me, and weighed in at 275 at least, not a bit of it fat. His head was as big and hard as one of those cast-iron tourist binocular stands, but his face was movie-star handsome and his eyes flashed with something might have been backcountry meanness, or cunning. We went back so far neither of could remember a time when we weren’t attached at the hip, and we had a long-running agreement to ruin the funeral of whichever of us went first. We were pals, fellow coal miners, comrades in arms, and best buds.
    â€œJesus, Slick, you look like shit,” he said.
    â€œThanks.”
    He said, “Correction: You look like shit took a shit.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI’m trying out some new lines.”
    â€œKeep trying.”
    â€œMotorcycle?”
    â€œI’ve already done this routine with Cooper,” I said. “You don’t have a pamphlet, do you?”
    â€œNo. What?”
    â€œNever mind.”
    â€œCoffee?”
    â€œBuckets.”
    I rode into town and met him at the little restaurant on the corner of North Park and Poplar. Little place called Hardee’s. I checked in by phone with Peggy at school—neglecting to mention my trip to the doctor’s office—and then Jeep and I sat in a booth and ate a late breakfast of