Snapper Read Free Page B

didn’t share this with Gerald, either.
    In any case, she would have fed Virgil.
    “She didn’t plan to be away,” I said.
    “How do you know that?” he said.
    “I mean you’re right. She would have asked me to feed the cat.” I didn’t mean to be a bitch. It just happened.
    The front door opened, and Lola appeared there with one arm around an embroidered silk shirt and lavender corduroys flared above the pointiest black boots I had ever seen. I didn’t recognize the man inside them, but that was unimportant. We were all interchangeable anyway. He could be Nashville or he could be Memphis or he could be Hamamatsu, Japan. Let X = job, let Y = hairstyle, let Z = favorite film. Lola’s whim was axiomatic, verging on proof. Lola stared at me, her mouth a perfect O. She hates to be discovered. I searched for something caustic to say, but Gerald spoke first.
    “We were just feeding the cat,” he said.
    Lola launched into an unbearable display of gratitude and pleasant surprise, and she chirped introductions as though none of us had the least thing in common (his name was Darian, almost as pretentious as those jester boots. I decided he was someplace scummy and dull like Indianapolis). Virgil began to insult us by rubbing his sides on those corduroys.
    “Wasn’t that storm just thrilling?” said Lola.
    “Awesome,” said Darian.
    “Nathan was out in it,” said Gerald.
    “Awesome,” said Darian.
    “We watched through the window of the Square Knot Café,” said Lola. That was an extremely stupid thing to do,and I nearly said so. Instead I said, “Awesome,” but she missed my point entirely. She was adroit like that, and this charade could have gone on indefinitely without some decisive action on my part. Her laughter, which usually had for me a quality of an elixir escaping a vial, seemed abruptly like an aerosol can aimed at my face.
    “Gerald,” I said. “Let’s go to your place. I have a question about square roots.” He followed me out and back to his front porch, where we sat for a half hour without speaking. He was the more forlorn, because at least I should have seen it coming. I stood up to go but had a second, better thought.
    “Gerald,” I said. “When was the last time you went out and got blind drunk?”
    He peered at me as though he had just spotted a Lesser Mississippi Mud Thrush, last verified nearby in 1936. I would need to coach him on technique.

II

Snapper
    I doubt anyone outside Southern Indiana knows what a stripper pit is. They don’t exist anywhere else. This is sometimes embarrassing for me in conversation, if I say I spent many happy adolescent hours there. People think I’m talking about Thong Thursdays at Fast Eddie’s. The British Broadcasting Corporation once sent a reporter by boat to Evansville to investigate the wild ways of the inhabitants—the kind of thing they used to do in “deepest Africa,” I think. We are Hoosiers after all.
    On a technical level a stripper pit is what remains of a bituminous coal mine, but strip mining is not like other mining. Picture vast granite cliffs topped with coniferous trees, deep lakes of calm cerulean blue—imagine a majestic Norwegian fjord somehow misplaced among rolling cornfields—that is what a stripper pit looks like. At the bottom of those lakesyou’ll find old refrigerators and stolen cars and bags of kittens. It is Southern Indiana.
    Before the mining company got to it, it was woodland or farmland or, in some cases, small towns. The beauty of strip mining, if you’re a mining company, is that you don’t have to dig for your coal: you just scrape everything off the top for several surrounding square miles. Then you scrape yourself a lucrative pit where the bituminous is piled deepest. Some people will tell you it’s anthracite, but they’re wrong: even the coal around there is second-rate.
    The only downside to this kind of operation is that even Hoosiers won’t tolerate the total obliteration of the landscape