Matthew Null - Allegheny Front

It’s been a decade, at least, since any of the researchers have eaten trout.

Afterward, they fire off leftover Roman candles, taking care to stomp out loose fires that flare in the grass. Balls of light skitter and douse themselves in the river. Gary pulls out his gas-station harmonica and plays the four songs he knows. The wind begins to blow.

A clean linen moon rises over the mountain’s worn crest. Swaying a bit, Michael leaves to piss and wash his hands at the river. He’s gone a long time. The music manages to be rude, brassy, and sweet. They hear Michael out in the weeds. The world is raucous with tree frogs.

On a night like this, with music and chill summer air, Kathryn loves West Virginia. There are places on the map called Tennant Run, and a Tennant Cemetery in a hollow back of Circleville. Tuscarora County, where people are old-time Republicans and German stock, like her mother, a Propst. The boulderfields, the spaces empty of people — a lonesomeness city-dwellers could never comprehend. Sometimes it seems you know animals more intimately than people. Beaver heads cutting wake in the water, bear shit jeweled with seeds, deer quenching themselves in the river’s cool. Her family has lived here for three hundred years. But the place is wretchedly poor and backward and may never be right. She’s thirty-one, unmarried and maybe doesn’t want to be, with a little tuck in her smile. In a way, Nedermeyer is more correct for her — at least, that’s what her home tells her she deserves. Her relatives call her one of those professional students, with a touch of teasing, a touch of scorn, a frost-core of jealousy. Even her mother. You got any men following you around? No? I can’t believe that.

Michael returns, carrying an empty jug he found in the weeds. Clorox. He throws it and hits Nedermeyer square in the chest. In a second, they are standing face to face.

“You dumped bleach in the river. Under the railroad trestle. Come on!”

“Hold on now, I caught that fish, you saw me.”

“I didn’t see shit! You killed that fish with bleach.”

“Shelly saw.”

Don’t look at her, Kathryn tells herself. This is happening too fast. Everyone knows this county has a grand tradition of fishing with bleach, quarter sticks of dynamite, bottles of carbide.

“There’s probably more dead ones. Probably ours.”

“Oh my God,” Kathryn says.

Nedermeyer begins to blush, and it’s hard to tell if it’s from anger or embarrassment. “I caught it legal. I been fishing all my life. It’s no trick.”

“A gallon of bleach. Do you have any idea how bad this is?”

Shelly has her hands over her ears. She’s crying.

“You can’t prove that.”

Gary smirks and Nedermeyer tells him, “Shut your mouth, fat ass.”

Michael lights into him. He calls him a redneck, calls him nine types of motherfucker. “People like you have ruined this place,” he says. “Ruined it.”

In a book or a movie, this would be the hinge of Shelly’s life. The public shaming. Lightheaded now, Kathryn tries to remember a time like this with her dad. All she can recall is a day they went fishing the Elk, and when they returned, a redheaded man with a crooked jaw was leaning against their truck. Thought he was my buddy’s. I was fixing to leave a note. He left, walking fast. They found scratches on the paint where he’d tried to pry open the lock with a penknife. Her dad said, Well, you just never know what to expect from people.

Nedermeyer says, “You finished your speech? You’re awful proud of it.” He looks to Kathryn and asks her, “Can’t you talk some sense into these people?”

She realizes this was supposed to happen, that she would be called upon. When nothing comes, he cries out, “I knew your dad!”

She doesn’t know what to say.

“Come on,” Nedermeyer says to his daughter. “I’m not about to expose you to this kind of shit.”

Nedermeyer takes her by the hand. Crossing the field, they leave the researchers to the ruins of their party, to a sudden nip on the wind. Rain. When it comes, the researchers listen to it hissing in the fire.

No one wants to be first to slink off to the tents. They stand in silence, till a cracking summer downpour drives them inside, after three weeks of dry, to listen to the wet and deafening roar.

The sun comes up white and indistinct, shining through a gauze of humid sky. The researchers drift from sleep at the same time into a sodden camp. Across the field, the rain-crushed tent shines in the sun. The man and the girl must be miserable.

Then they realize the tent has been abandoned, and the doors of Kathryn’s truck are hanging open.

What they see stuns them.

Their clothes scattered across the field like dead men. The shotgun buried to its chamber in the mud. Their logbooks heavy with rain. A lantern smashed like a melon on a rock. Their laptops flung in the river. Their research wrecked. Nedermeyer and his daughter long gone.

The researchers are numb. Michael says they should take an inventory, so they unload the truck, reckoning up the damage. With a quizzical look, Michael holds up an unopened jug of bleach he finds in the back. The one they thought Shelly stole. He found it under the seat.

By the dead fire, Gary picks up the Clorox from the night before and examines it.

“Oh no.”

“What?”

He tips it over and shows them 06/1995 embossed on the bottom. “It was trash,” he says in a small voice. “It wasn’t his. It’s been here forever.”

Back at the state university, the people at computing manage, somehow, to salvage the hard drive from one of the laptops. A minor miracle. Their summer, Kathryn tells everyone, is saved. Then she regrets telling anyone about it at all.

Her paper shows that brook trout, Salvelinus fontinalis, in the Shavers Fork of the Cheat River, travel an incredible amount — as far as fifty meters a day, and nearly six kilometers up- and downriver — though the ones residing in tributaries keep still, more or less.

Everyone calls it a very fine piece of work. She presents at conferences around North America. The people at Arizona State send her congratulatory notes.

But on that awful morning on the mountain, the project was doomed. Kathryn sprawled on the flat rock, sluggish with guilt and dew-heavy clothes, believing death to be easier than life. In the grand scheme, did it matter? A fish no longer than a salad fork, and botched research, and what a girl thinks of her father. Small things, really. The small geography of their lives.

But it would set her back a year, she thought, another year lost when she felt, rightly or wrongly, that she didn’t have many to spare. Kathryn felt sun on her wrists, her neck. She hadn’t felt this way since she saw the spidery blue tipple and knew her father was dying underfoot, somewhere, somehow, in that hug of stone. Was she standing on him? Drills, ambulances, mine executives giving their press conference — they meant nothing.

The private road was too muddy to drive on without tearing it up. That was the worst. The researchers had to wait another day to leave the mountain. Again the clouds rolled in.

Rain smacking nylon, the only sound in the world, and not a smudge of light, not even from the tower. Michael didn’t come to Kathryn’s tent that night. She was disappointed. She hoped he would, so she could turn him back. She had decided to leave this place for good.

IN SEPTEMBER OF 1890, THE COUNTY sent the dying to the island. This scrap of ground, ten or twelve acres, would have been unremarkable if not for the fact that it was surrounded by water. The island was in the gorge of a brute river, the New, so unruly that the coal had to be hauled out by rail. The track had taken four years to lay, including tunnels.