Aaron M. Hellem

All the Ways Out of Centralia

Delia:  permanently imbued black because of her daddy’s years in the mine.  Burnt black to mark her as a miner’s kin.  Long black hair like braids of licorice.  Solid black eyes as though chocolate covered.  Black skin smooth as syrup.  Stands out in a crowd because she stands a head taller than the rest of her peers, huddled in the brake lights of a football player’s muscle car, waiting for someone of age to get them a case of Rainer in a can.  Too young to buy beer or cigarettes for themselves, too young to know they can fly away from Centralia by simply closing their eyes and tracing the feathers along their bare arms.  Delia with a careless laugh, the envy of her friends because all the boys want her and want to take her to the homecoming dance.  Because of her laugh, they forget where she comes from, and because of her long legs and straight spine they forget she’s a miner’s daughter.

In Centralia, the coal’s all gone, but that doesn’t stop them from digging.  Her daddy in overalls and stained gloves, goggles squeezed onto a marred visage, potted from gravel and bloated from booze, his nose has been broken more times than there are bones to break.  His hands are crooked from putting them through doors and walls and car windows.  From breaking them on other men’s heads, from beating himself up for years underground, from beating his wife and daughter because those years underground turned them all black as soot.  At night when he’s not home pushing down his wife and slapping his daughter across her mouth, he’s at one of three bars, sometimes at three bars all at once, singing his epitaphs with those who dug, too.  They are each other’s pallbearers when they can no longer stand to walk home.  I’ve seen him through the windows:  at him wavering on stools, at him asleep in a corner booth with his face pressed against the cool glass, at him in his living room in the blue light of the television, at him in his dining room throwing plates of beef roast and mashed potatoes against the wall, at him in the kitchen pushing his wife against the refrigerator, at him at the base of the stairs screaming up a long line of derisive profanities meant to cut like barbed wire, at him in Delia’s bedroom with the back of his hand because her skin wouldn’t wash off, was black, born black, knowing because her skin was black that nobody would ever notice the bruises.  I noticed them:  the way her eyes never linger on anyone else for very long.  The way she slouches sometimes to make herself smaller. 

I see Delia’s daddy in the living room late in the night without any lights, fists turned on himself.  At him alone crying in a part of the house where his wife and daughter won’t hear.  At him at the front door, opening it wide open to see who it is come calling so late.  When he wonders who I am, I’ll tell him I’m his guardian angel.  He will wonder why I don’t have any wings, and I’ll tell him to look beyond my arms.  I’ll tell him to close his eyes.

Delia looks perfect and perfectly fine in her own skin surrounded by her friends, three of them sharing the same cigarette.  In a tight top and short skirt, she doesn’t even have to try to get the boys to notice her.  They’ll fight like wild dogs for the attention of her affection.  Three of them in their football jerseys, asking everyone going in to buy them a case of Rainer in a can.  Everyone telling them the same thing:  go somewhere else.  Back home.  To the movies instead.  To the 7-11 where the turbaned fellow never asks for I.D.  Delia recognizes me as a friendly face, a neighbor three doors down.  We know each other’s secret, have seen each other late at night:  her sneaking back in from sneaking out, and me on one of my sleepless strolls chain smoking up and down the blocks, from one end of the street to the Shell station.  One night she was sitting on the curb crying and waiting for her ride.  Are you all right? I asked her.

She rubbed at her eyes with the meaty part of her palm.  Do you got a cigarette? she said.  I shook one out for her.  Held the lighter out for her.  Hunkered next to her.  I’ve see you out here before, she said.  The tip of your cigarette in the darkness.  Like Rudolph’s nose. 

I have a hard time sleeping at night, I said.

Me, too.  She inhaled and left lipstick on the filter in the form of a soft kiss.  What do you think about out here when you’re walking? she asked.

Ways out, I said.

Me, too.

If only I kept walking.

I want to go to college, she said. 

I’d reach an ocean sooner or later.

Headlights came up the street and stopped at the corner.  Delia flicked the cigarette away.  I offered her a hand to get up.  Thanks, she said.  I watched her all the way to the car, floating like something not of this world, beyond it where bodies are extensions instead of limitations.  We knew each other’s secrets and dreams, the secret that we dreamed.

Hey, she says to me.  Out for a stroll?

Something like that, I say. 

These are my friends, she says.  The two girls smile.  He lives next door to me, she tells them.  Stands like she’s made of metal and nothing can ever move her.  We’re trying to score some beer, she says. 

What do you need? I ask.

Rainer’s cool. 

Sure, I say.

She calls the football players over.  He’ll do it, she says.

One of the guys hands me a sweaty wad of bills.  A case, he tells me. 

Inside the clerk asks to see my I.D., and glances at the birth date, the picture, then at me and the picture to make sure they match.  It’s me, I tell him, but he’s without humor; graveyard shift at the Shell doesn’t allow for any.  I give him the cash and he counts it twice.  I don’t need a bag, I tell him.  He hands me the torn receipt. 

The football players have a cooler in the trunk.  They ask me if I want one for buying it.  I tell them no thanks.  Delia reaches out and squeezes my arm.  It’s cool of you to do that, she says.

They pile into the Impala and peel out of the parking lot.  They’ll take it out to the woods somewhere where they’ll dance to the radio and split off in couples to go make out.  With a head full of beer in the middle of a clearing, under the soft light of a slivered moon, her shirt off and skirt bunched up above her hips, Delia will discover the ways that boys can touch her to make her feel alive again.

Back down the street, I stop in front of Delia’s house.  Her father sits slumped in front of the television.  There are ways out of Centralia for all of us.  Delia’s will be college, and mine will be the heated barrel of a discharged pistol.  It’s my fate to free Delia from her father by freeing her father from his body.  First his head and then his chest to make sure he doesn’t think about coming back.  The doorbell echoes throughout the dormant house.  When he wonders who I am and what in the hell do I want, he’ll be met with a final goodbye.  As he undoes the chain and throws back the bolt, on the other side of the door I pull back the hammer, silently convincing a shell from the clip into the chamber where the truth of things is reckoned and rendered.