Velva Jean Learns to Drive by Jennifer Niven

Author:Jennifer Niven
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-02-26T05:00:00+00:00

One of the rescue workers found Harley lying on the banks of Terrible Creek, pinned there by an upper berth. At first, he said later, he thought Harley was dead—he was lying so still, just like a corpse, his chest and stomach burned from the fire, his right leg bent like a pretzel, his shirt melted away from the heat—but then he blinked his eyes open and stared up at the man and said, “My leg is gone, ain’t it?”

The rescue worker—whose name was Scott Benjamin Jefferson Davis Redbone III, but who everybody called Big Ben—ran away from the creek and grabbed two men, the nearest men he could find, and they went back to the creek bed and pulled the berth off Harley and put their arms around him as careful as they could and picked him up and carried him out of the smoking, burning wetness to dry land. I couldn’t tell at first what they had when they came out of the darkness, three grown men bent over the weight of another. Then I saw two boots and two hands hanging down, fingers dragging the ground, and a mess of dark hair.

I picked up my skirt and I started climbing through the steel and glass and downed wires to get to him. I couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive. My throat had gone so dry that I couldn’t swallow. Someone was shouting my name, but I couldn’t tell from where. I just wanted to get to Harley.

“Back away, Velva Jean,” Linc said when he saw me coming. He had come up from nowhere, out of the smoke and the steel. His face was red from the heat. Trickles of black ran down his forehead and cheeks. “Some of those may be live wires.” Big Ben and his men carried Harley to a flat patch of ground, covered in scrubby grass, and laid him down on top of it.

“We need a doctor over here!” Big Ben yelled. Then he got to his feet and ran for one himself.

When I moved in toward Harley, Linc grabbed my arm. “You let the doctors do their work. He’s bad off, Velva Jean. He was near that boiler when it burst, standing right there beside it. That explosion knocked him clean out of the engine and into Terrible Creek. It’s a miracle he survived.”

“Go get Daddy Hoyt,” I said. “Daddy Hoyt can fix him.”

“He can’t fix everybody,” Linc said. I thought it was mean of him to say so at a time like this.

“Find him,” I said.

He ran off into the night.

I sat down by Harley. His eyes were closed. His arms and face were black with coal dust. His chest and neck and stomach were burned raw, scraped pink and red practically down to the muscle. He looked like an animal that had been skinned. I made a move to touch him, then pulled my hand away, letting it hang there in the air over him. His shirt was burned away so that here and there only tiny spots of blue held on to him.

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