Upheaval: Stories by Chris Holbrook

Author:Chris Holbrook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky

On his first haul, Haskell watches his truck's rear end in the side mirror, lining it up with the berm as he backs toward the highwall edge. His eyes and skin feel gritty. His feet and knees and his lower back all ache as if they'd not been rested even a single night. His neck feels tight, and already there is a dull pressure in his temples that throbs with each shriek of the truck's backing alarm. He feels his shirt pocket for the aspirin tin. Then suddenly the muscles in his back and legs and arms all clench at once, and he hits his service brakes. He leans out the window and looks hard at the ground before the berm.

The truck's engine throbs through his chest, and for a moment it is as if his heartbeat rises and falls with the idle speed. He tastes diesel at the back of his throat, feels the sting of it high in his nostrils. His head swims like he is drunk. He fumbles for the seat-belt catch, and then he realizes if it was going to go it would have gone already. He sucks deep breaths. It was not the ground giving way, he'd seen. It was heat shimmers. Or it was the shadow of a cloud passing. Or it was light on his mirror.

For a while he watches Joe Calhoun working his D-9 on the adjacent hill seam, the dozer's blade cutting into the overburden, loosing boulders and small trees toward the valley floor. It seems a marvel almost, the way the huge dozer clings to the contour of the hillside, the way the tracks sidle and shift on the near-vertical incline.

He watches as Joe Calhoun goes about leveling a large beech, first ditching the ground on the downslope and then above. In a short time the tree begins to topple of its own weight, its branches catching and snapping against the still-standing timber, its roots tearing slowly free of the ground. Joe Calhoun moves the dozer to and fro, nudging with the blade in a gentle-seeming way.

Haskell has run a dozer himself. It is as familiar as any piece of machinery on the site, but he watches it now like a man seeing something he never has before. He feels strangely like he is about to see something or know something he never has, that all he has to do is sit still long enough and watch close enough and it will come to him.

But as the beech begins to skid down the hill slope, its broken limbs shining whitely in the bright sun, clods of black dirt dripping from its tangle of upturned roots, he feels again the sensation of loose soil sliding beneath his wheels. He presses his foot even harder onto the brake pedal.

From the corner of his eye he sees Ray Sturgill sitting in his truck, waiting his time to dump. Haskell wonders how long a while he's been sitting idle just watching another man work, if it's long enough for Ray to have thought something.

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