Sketches of Overlooked America V.7
Coals Mill, WY
Esther Hunsaker lays prone in the dirt. The Coals Mill railyard stretches below her, washed gold by the blend of dusk and dust. Esther inches forward and lowers a squinted eye to the sight of her Daisy air rifle. She does a sweep of the railyard with the rifle’s barrel. Posted fifty yards to her east on the crest of a windswept bluff is her cousin, Ramon. Esther cocks her head sideways and catches a glimpse of the boy, also laid out on his belly, binoculars held to his face. She goes back to the sight of the air rifle. Esther finds her target up the line, moving through the increasing gloom of dusk. A vagrant is moving from one boxcar to another, face and hands blackened by diesel smoke. Esther trains the red dot at the barrel’s end on the backside of the erstwhile traveler, and squeezes the trigger. She hears the faint plink of the BB leaving the gun, and for a second follows it in flight, the silver sphere arcing gently towards it’s victim. She loses sight of the ball. And then the sound of Ramon erupting in a victorious cheer. She sets up on her elbow and sees her cousin in the throes of a celebratory dance. By the time she returns her gaze to the man she’d shot, he is moving in her direction, his careworn face further aggrieved. Esther cradles her rifle and scampers down the backside of the rise, away from the tracks and her pursuer. Ramon meets her in the wash and both head into the culvert that crosses beneath Highway 191, towards her mother’s office.
Coals Mill is a railway town. Initially a postal stop on the transcontinental railway, the town boomed in the wake of the discovery that the rolling hills were rich in coal. Although falling out of favor, coal production and railway-related services still account for two thirds of Coals Mill’s economic production. In the heart of the 20th century, the population reached over 200,000. Today, there are 52,000.
Carol Brackaway is seventy-two years old. She teaches first grade at Coals Mill Elementary, as she has for fifty-one years. Carol’s father moved to Wyoming from West Virginia in 1921 to work in the coal mines. Her mother was a member of the Shoshone tribe, whose ancestors were native to the area for as far back as anyone knew. Ms. Brackaway is in the midst of preparations for the upcoming school year. Her fifty-second. In her time she has seen students come and go, graduate from Yale and be sentenced to prison on murder charges. She has seen her pupils marry and have children, whose children had children that she now has in her class. She has seen former students march as members of US Olympic teams, and she has seen former students drown in the Green River. So many have passed through her doors, each with some glimmer of promise. And despite the array of outcomes, Ms. Brackaway believes, or wants to believe in the innate potential housed in each of her students in a simple, idealistic way that anyone with a spark of cynicism in their bones would be unable to sustain.
Carlo Teixeira owns a textile shop on Center St., adjacent to the railway. The rumble of low-speed locomotives ambling past the back wall mingles with shop noise and the radio. An unremarkable sonic tableaux which contrasts with the sheets of color draped among the 19th century brick walls. Mr. Teixeira has been married twice, and divorced twice. He is thirty-seven. He insists to his mother that his marriages fell victim to a lack of perception on his part, that the women he married had sides to them that were unknowable during courtship, that the latest ex-wife had been controlling, demanding, and so on. He has recently come to an internal acceptance of his homosexuality and is carrying on a clandestine relationship with one of the textile wholesalers he works with in Albuquerque. He has not mentioned this to his mother.
Eve Noriega still dries laundry on a line in her yard. The wind is omnipresent on the steppe and sheets dry quicker outside. Eve’s son, Ramon, complains of dust on days when the wind blows, applying a grey film to his clothing. Ms. Noriega’s husband has been a missing person for eight months. She has mixed feelings about his disappearance. She misses their physical compatibility, but not the attendant emotional volatility. Although Ramon worried for his safety at first, Eve hasn’t hit anyone since her husband has disappeared.
At the eastern end of town is Vera Temi’s photography studio. Its a faux-adobe looking thing that stands alone at the corner of the last block before the road transitions into highway. The “Thanks for Visiting Coals Mill” sign is visible from the east window. Ms. Temi has lived in Coals Mill for four years. She has not mentioned her origin to anyone. The last nine years of her life have been dedicated to lens and film, light and shadow; capturing images of the American West. Ms. Temi’s work in Coals Mill is inspired equal parts by the work of Aaron Huey and Georgia O’Keefe - and the desire to leave behind a murder case in which she was implicated and released after a mistrial. She tries to limit the effect of that experience in her work.
Dusk falls over Coals Mill. The trains grumble across their rails, horns lowing in the dark like landbound ships sounding in a fog. On the western end of town, near the tracks is the home of Darius Montesegovius, a Lithuanian émigré and the wealthiest person in Coals Mill. Mr. Montesegovius controls a majority concern in the local coal mine, and is chairman of the board of the annual Flying W Cowboy Poetry Festival. Although ceremonial in nature, the Chairmanship of the festival board carries social clout, and is a sought after title in the community. Mr. Montesegovius has chaired the festival for three years.
Mr. Montesegovius lives in a two-story Victorian that once belonged to a railway boss. The guy who could get people placed in or out of work and procure favors. The home retains its robin’s egg blue with white gables and dormer windows. Mr. Montesegovius has it repainted biannually. Mr. Montesegovius lives alone, and entertains periodic guests of unknown origin. When a freight train ambles past the walls shake. For this reason, Mr. Montesegovius is known to use exclusively plastic dinnerware.
Dot Hunsaker is the CEO of Coals Mill’s largest non-railway, non-coal related business. Hunsaker Telelogistics is housed in an office park on the north side of the railway. Ms. Hunsaker’s office overlooks the highway, and beyond that, the railyard. She has a view of the culvert through which her daughter and nephew commute to take shots at vagrants along the train tracks. Sometimes Esther and Ramon will pop in and visit as they return from the railyard to buy a bottle of water from the vending machine, Esther’s air rifle stashed in the bushes which surround the parking lot.
Hunsaker Telelogistics employs 103 people, most of whom work in the call center. Dot will never admit it, but she has modeled the configuration of the call center and her elevated office space on the Salt’s Nuts factory layout in the 1971 production of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Ms. Hunsaker has fantasized about yelling at her employees from her interior office window and threatening to put them all out on their ears, but is unlikely to follow through.
City Hall is a fin de siecle structure that was funded in large part by Union Pacific. The railway used their largess to extract favorable treatment from the municipality for the better part of 100 years. As the city’s largest employer and municipal patron, mayors and city councils have been keen to observe the railway’s wishes. It was this tacit agreement that led to the outlawing of private parcel delivery services that were unaffiliated with the railway. This arcane provision persists to this day, where the last branch of Union Pacific’s parcel delivery division is still in operation. Geraldine Gunderson is one of two delivery drivers for the UPPD. Through an agreement struck with UPS and FedEx, Geraldine drives her dust-coated van from the UPPD logistics office to an unaffiliated trucking depot outside town limits, where UPS and FedEx packages are offloaded for local delivery by UPPD. Ms. Gunderson has been a delivery driver for UPPD for three years. She knows each road in Coals Mill by heart. She feels like she knows the town itself by heart, the predilections of each of its residents. The parcels one receives can be telling things. Ms. Gunderson greets the residents of Coals Mill by name, if she knows them, ready with a neighborly compliment and a disarming smile.
Ms. Gunderson is always equipped with a medical grade scalpel which she uses to open and inspect each delivery before re-sealing with surgical precision prior to delivery. In this way Ms. Gunderson has the quiet distinction of Coals Mill’s most knowledgeable citizen, the depository of her secrets and the keeper of her collective character.
