You Can't Be Careful On A Skateboard (standard:adventure, 2655 words)
Author: G.H. Hadden	Added: Nov 25 2007	Views/Reads: 3439/2190	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
A 13-year-old bright eyed and bushy haired marvel of energy named Burke has never felt so alive in his whole life until now that he realizes he’s in fact hurtling headlong down Oak Hill Street to his own death—-suicide by skateboard!

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County, far to the south.” 

They're all uniform Sears Roebuck & Co. kit houses, all single story
with standard 45 degree pitched shingle roofs and the same rectangular 
picture windows divided into six squares.  They all have rail-framed 
porches and three steps down to a sloping front yard, all with 
identical whitewashed picket fences facing the narrow street.  It's one 
hell of a steep hill, with a rural sidewalk that now sprouts weeds in 
the cracks.  Telephone poles line one side and sagging wires crisscross 
to the other. 

In fact, looking down on Oak Hill from the mountain was like looking at
a worker's laced up boot.  It's the typical “worker bee” street in a 
company town too big for just a single company store any more, but too 
small for anything more than high school football on a Friday night.  
The kind of street lined with all old dusty Dodge and Ford pickup 
trucks with Democratic bumper stickers...a union street, if ever there 
was one. 

In short, the “Management Kids” (and they know EXACTLY who they are) are
NOT welcome at any of these front doors any more than the bill 
collector or the repo-man. 

Burke imagines a rap on any of their doors from him would go something
like this: 

Knock, knock... 

“Who's there?” 

“Burke!” 

“Burke who?” 

“Burke Bronsen!” he'd pant plaintively, “Please, they're after me!” 

“Burke Bronsen! “ She'd answer, the lady of the house: with a
schoolteacher's scold in her voice and a hard and angry look in her 
eyes—-one of these low class minor's wives—-with the kind of voice and 
looks that could freeze a kid cold in his tracks.   Like seeing Medusa 
in house-cleaning clothes and curlers.  And he'd have his answer: “Keep 
to your own kind on Park View, if you please!” 

SLAM!!! 

And then they'd have him.  Nosiree, no one on this street'll lift a
finger to save his bacon from the fryer. 

Everyone knows who Burke Bronsen is.  Everyone knows whom his father
Kurt Bronsen is...shift personnel manager for V&A's most important 
mine--Isabelle...the one who decides who gets overtime and who gets cut 
from the rosters in The Company's interest. 

“It ain't always easy reconciling the profitability of the company and
the productivity of the workers.” he'll gladly tell anyone who asks, 
even Burke, who's getting to be at an age to ask such questions.  His 
dad's cool that way.  He thinks his own son deserves a strait answer.  
“In lean times, layoffs are inevitable.” 

His dad's not the heartless mid-level lackey the “Union Men” always make
him out to be.  He's always genuinely sorry to let people go, 
especially the ones with real seniority, who've given years of their 
lives in those tunnels and cough up black phlegm every night despite 
the mandatory use of respirators.  But facts are facts: and these are 
lean times.  Even for the Management Kids on the View, allowance hasn't 
kept pace with inflation and Christmas was just a bit less Christmassy 
this year.  “Fact is son: Reaganomics sucks.”  And the Grinch had his 
way with the tree. 

Burke's still running, and THEY'RE STILL GAINING! 

‘What sucks is not having my bike', Burke thought, ‘or my board...' 

But of course—-this from the daredevil kid who once dreamt of sailing
down the hill on his skateboard like Evel Knievel, with a crowd of 
people on the scabby front lawns of their houses watching—-those women 
with faces that looked like the Soviet proletariat hags in line for 
toilet paper he sees on the CBS Evening News every night.  Their 
husbands were there too, brawny human hunch-backs from years of 
crushing economic hardship, and their barefoot kids shouting with teeth 
bared and eyes alight, all wildly cheering his (imminent demise?) 
triumphant run.  They're all wearing the red neckerchief of the union, 
just as his granddaddy did all those years ago. 

Except in his dream, it didn't quite go as expected...or did it?  All he
knows is that after he wrote it up as a composition next day in English 
class, he got a weird look from Mrs. Eldridge and a grave talking-to 
from Principle Wiggins.  Seems that grownups are afraid of a little 
creativity and the power of a kid's imagination.  Like he would 
actually DO IT!  He knows full well it would be suicide. 

“Now you go on.” Mr. Wiggins said as he dismissed him, “And you be
careful on that skateboard now.” 

And Burke, being the sharp little whip that all kids are at his age,
came back with “You can't be careful on a skateboard, Sir.” 

It drew a bit of a laugh from Mr. Wiggins now that he'd made his point
clear.  “Bye, Burke.” He said, shrugging it off as he bent back over 
the paperwork strewn about his desk. 

That had been back in April, with the snow gone and the trees budding,
and the smell of spring in the air, when he could once again skate 
around town and trick around with his friends in he schoolyard. 

NOW, It's a hot and hazy afternoon with thin steamy cloud-cover slowly
building over The Valley.  There's no one on the front lawns of these 
houses cheering him on.  The boys are all sweating in their shorts and 
tees; all except for Colton—-the one with the red neckerchief; his 
naked sun burnt chest shines with sweat. 

But Burke is sweating it most of all.  He's the one sweating bullets in
fact.  He can smell his own fear and he feels sticky all over, with the 
sticky cowlick of his hair pasted to his forehead.  His Converse 
high-tops beat metronome time down on the pavement.  He's the middle 
school poster boy for Chariots of Fire—-or maybe just a shaken up kid 
with scraped up knees, just runnin' from the hounds-o'-hell. 

“Keep up that breathin', forget the flies.”  A voice...a stray thought
within...thoughts of an overactive imagination. 

A little imagination goes a long way.  And if these big kids hated him
before when his dad still had some kind of sway over their lives, well 
then, imagine what'll happen now that their daddies have been laid off 
and the money will be extra tight this month with school coming, and 
beating him up might even be like a little goin' away present before 
the boys chasing him have to pack their bags and leave The Valley 
behind for good.  Imagine leaving behind your kin and the graves of 
your loved ones, home for three or four generations of your family; and 
then imagine their daddies taking it all out on them for a wrong slip 
of the tongue or not taking out the trash on Tuesday night.  Now 
imagine these boys taking it out on him, the pain of their kicking and 
beating and them laughing and breaking his arms and legs...lynching him 
in the street like a spook or a kike come to call for a date with one 
of their sisters. 

There's a voice within his head...His imagination. “Imagine the pain,”
it says to him, “and then keep runnin' boy, runnin' like yer life 
depends on it.  Cause it jus' might!”  That's why he's flying downhill 
now at break-neck speed, can't stop, even if he wants to, even if a car 
or one of the big coal trucks should come along the Ol' Jezer Mine Road 
and he knows he'll be tossed like a rag-doll over the grille and down 
onto the gravelly rough pavement to his crumpled bloody death... 

”Can't think ‘bout that.”  It's the soothing rational voice of the
mountain.  It's the voice of reason and truth.  “Concentrate on 
breathin' boy, concentrate on one long stride after n'other, 
concentrate on not trippin' over yer own two feet an' tumbling down the 
hill t'yer end!” 

He concentrates...but he can't help thinking back to his dream again. 
It's somehow comforting, flying down the hill with the wind in his 
hair, hips swiveling to balance the board perfectly underfoot; arms 
slightly out to keep from tipping over.  It feels like he's going a 
hundred miles an hour with the wind hitting his face, feeling so alive 
he can taste the breeze.  It's a smooth ride on old weather-beaten 
asphalt...and WHOOO-HOOOO!!!!   What a RUSH!  He's never been so alive 
in his whole life until now that he realizes he's in fact hurtling to 
his death.  Suicide by skateboard!   There are no cars to jump at the 
old Jezebel Mine Road, but there is a ditch, and those train tracks.  
And there's that wall, the high vertical cut into the scraggly 
hillside.  Then as now, no breaks! 

But fear strikes him from out of nowhere, a shock down his spine and a
weight in his stomach.  A thought that rattled around his head in a 
voice that called up all authority figures he'd ever known, all 
self-doubt he's ever had.  “Boy, what the HELL was you thinkin' in the 
first place?” 

“OH SHIT!!!“ 

He panics. 

End of pavement, and the board shoots out from under him; and now he's
flying high in the air like Superman O.D'ed on some kind of kryptonite 
cocaine, certain he'll fly strait through solid rock!   He sees it 
coming, and he opens his mouth as if to scream, but it's too late, 
cause in a split second he hits...except he doesn't hit.  In such 
dreams death is always the welcome wake up call.  He wakes up safe and 
sound in his bed, heart racing a million miles an hour and on the verge 
of screaming.  But the nerves in his face are all prickly.  He hit the 
wall so hard it sent him back to... 

REALITY--the big kids are gainin', back four houses now, and it'll be
three by the time he hits the intersection.  It's a dead end up ahead.  
There used to be a crooked yellow sign with checkerboard black to warn 
everyone, but that got taken out in a car crash last winter after an 
ice storm and it was never replaced.  Mad Max and Colt are in high 
school, and Nick's on the track team.  Nick's big brother Jamie's on 
the wrestling team; if they catch him they'll beet him down for sure!  
His only hope is the mountain, to loose them in the train tunnel.  He 
knows this instinctively, as if telepathically gifted this solution by 
the colossal spinal ridge itself. 

“Don't even look back, cause they'll be there.  Jus' cross over the
road, turn down the tracks an' head for the tunnel!  The darkness hides 
all.” 

He headed for the rusty track peppered with weeds, blackened with dust
and littered with spilt chunks of coal from the V&A No. 9 tipple, which 
Shawn says is lucky to see a couple of grimy Chessie System U-boats a 
day haulin' empties in and loads out.  No, these U-boats ain't 
submarines, but what Shawn's dad the railwayman calls those big 
six-axel diesels made by General Electric in Erie, PA.  Shawn even 
joked: “Sometimes Chessie the cat looks and sounds like he's dying of 
black lung on those engines!” 

Those engines always haul a long string of black coal hoppers behind on
the Green Valley Turn, which makes its way up to the mine empty and 
back down from the mine full, with a caboose on the end.  Those coal 
drags are the only trains left on the Green Valley branch.  He can hide 
in the dark.  He can get away from them there. The mountain will save 
his skinny little ass this afternoon, and he'll be sure to thank it 
kindly. 

END OF SEGMENT 

--Author's note.  This story is part of a work in progress tentatively
entitled “Haunted By The Devil's Spine”, which chronicles the “great 
shame” of Burke's disappearance, and of a legacy of labor strife in a 
small West Virginia coal town, where the Redneck Wars of the 1920s were 
never quite settled between Union and Management.   COPYWRIGHT 2007  
Grant H Hadden.   All rights reserved. 


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