The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine Read Online Free PDF Page A

that left. Maybe.
     

In the Seams
    Andrew C. Porter
     
    There isn’t much time. If I am
going to tell this story, I’m going to tell it now. It’s late, I know, but the
dogs are spooked and that means it’s on the way. The skin on my face is
peeling. The backs of my hands are raw meat. If I hadn’t found Annie’s old tape
recorder, then I wouldn’t have been able to document the facts. I can press
record. I can pull a trigger. I’m going to tell the whole story because I know
that when they find what’s left of me, or what isn’t, they’re going to ask
questions, and I don’t want them...you, whoever you are, to think this was a
murder. This was a feeding. You’d better just put down the cause of death as
“mauled by animal.” You’ll probably have another name for it soon.
    This all started out in the
fourth district a year ago when we got bogged down in the war with Iraq. Gas
prices jumped a dollar fifty and as any coal man in Kentucky would tell you,
expensive Arab oil meant it was time to clean off the dozers. Sixty dollars a
ton, that was what did it. Who in western Kentucky had ever heard of that?
Those East Kentucky mines got that, sure, but they pulled it out of mountains.
That wasn’t cheap. Here we just peeled back the top soil and there it was:
money.
    After the price went up, every
old coal baron got into his equipment barn and started calling back the miners
he’d laid off in ‘79. Course, most of them were dead or enjoying black lung
settlements so they sent their kids. That’s how I came into this. I was on a
road crew running a backhoe when Snodgrass called.
    “Phe’ps,” he said, shortening
Phelps like every Butler County septuagenarian does, “your daddy worked for me.
Now I got a golden opportunity for you. What’s Scott paying you to run that
hoe?”
    “Pretty good, Mr. Snodgrass.” I
didn’t want to ruin any offer with the truth.
    “Would you come work for me for
twenty-two an hour?”
    “Can I get overtime?”
    He laughed at me. “Boy, you’re
gonna be begging me for a Sunday morning off. We’ll get going at Aberdeen
Grocery at four-thirty tomorrow morning.”
    We talked
for awhile about the old days, my father, his purchase of the Lindsey land back
when everyone thought coal was dead. I was almost off the phone when he asked
if I knew a good dozer operator. Two more seconds and I would have been off the
phone. Two more seconds and I might not be sitting on my porch with a loaded
shotgun and a tape recorder. I’m not saying that all this wouldn’t have still
come down eventually had I not recommended Zan. It was in the seam after all,
and somebody would have run across it before too long, but maybe, just maybe,
if I had gotten off that phone, I wouldn’t be the one waiting to die.
    Zan had come back from Iraq six
months before. He’d joined the army after high school, encouraged by his
recruiter and the possibilities opened up by his unusually high ASVAB scores.
His daddy was a dozer operator and so was his older brother. The army would get
him out of that terrible inevitability. That was what the recruiter had said.
Two months after signing up, Zan was in Felujah, running a dozer in the grand
task of pushing down neighborhoods deemed “lost to the insurgency.” It turned
out he was genetically predisposed to being a top notch dozer operator.
    I found Zan that very night,
lying in his underwear on his blue couch in the den of his pink trailer,
smoking pot.
    “Come in!” he hollered when I
knocked, not bothering to find out who it was.
    “Zan, it’s me, Andy,” I called
out as a precaution.
    “I know, I could hear Annie’s
car from a mile away. What’s new? You want to hit this?” He extended the
three-foot red plastic bong toward me.
    “No, I’m fine. I got you a
job.” He pulled a long, gurgling lung-full of smoke as I talked, then held it
in, his upper body poised awkwardly upright by the tension of maintaining his
expanded chest cavity. Curling