Hailey or Stan accompanied Kenia on her remaining interviews that week. She explained their presence to the respondents by introducing them as her assistants. The residents of Selah Station whom they interviewed did not mind. Some were actually eager to meet young people, and more than a few had heard of their YouTube channel, even if they did not know what exactly YouTube was. Hal Olson, a ninety-two-year-old widower whose gas station had stopped pumping gas in 1997, spent more time asking Stan about the internet and how it worked than he did answering Kenia’s questions. He was in no hurry to do anything else. His days consisted of waking up at 6 a.m. and heading across the street to his station where he put on his mechanic’s hat and read the paper to kill time.
As Kenia and Stan left, walking out to Kermit, Stan was sober. “He just reads the paper all day to pass the time. The same articles over and over. The man doesn’t even have a flip phone. What kind of existence is that?”
“It’s not much of one. But I’ve realized it’s sort of common up here where there are no jobs. It’s good he’s not turning to drugs or alcohol.”
“Coal is not coming back,” Stan said. “People need to stop talking about jobs and start paying attention to workers and their skills,” he said, staring up at the ridge of Manahoac Mountain looming over them.
“But how is he going to learn new skills? How is a MOOC supposed to reach Hal when he doesn’t even have a flip phone, much less dial-up?” she said, pulling on her helmet and buckling the strap beneath her chin.
“I don’t know. I’m not a politician.”
“You are an educator of sorts though,” she said.
“Yeah,” he replied, looking off into space. He put his arms around her waist as she kick-started the engine and they accelerated away.
With most of the interviews finished, Kenia set up a station in the Pennels’ control room. While Hailey edited their latest videos, Shane made calls organizing extras and emailed them scripts, and Stan posted on social media, Kenia transcribed, reliving the dozens of interviews on porches, in dining rooms, and kitchens all over Selah Station and the surrounding hollows. She checked in with her mother multiple times a day. At night, Hailey came home with her to the Corrigans’, sleeping on the couch in the upstairs apartment.
The Fourth of July came and went. There was no grand municipal display of fireworks; the city could not afford it. But under an indigo sky they gathered with the residents of Selah Station to eat barbeque chicken and apple pie, while a Back to the Future marathon played out on an outdoor screen. Neighbors set off fountains and children ran about with sparklers, dazzling in the night air that was already full of laughter and patriotic music pumped from speakers on the gazebo.
Kenia could almost see how present-day Selah Station resembled the old one—families still had children and children still played the way they always had. But it did not take much further reflection to realize the crowds of today were so much smaller and far less diverse than the ones she had seen in the decades before. And even this crowd did not account for many of the residents of the city and its environs. Few of the people she had interviewed were actually there in the downtown square, unable, unwilling, or uninterested in joining in the community spirit.
The days of transcribing wore on. When Kenia needed a break from the dark control room, she would take her laptop and station herself on the porch. Austin had set up two of his sawhorses there and was planing the wood siding he had decided to replace. After transcribing a particularly tedious and depressing session, an interview with a woman who had lost her last job fifteen years before when the last mines had shut down and now made her living scavenging aluminum cans from the side of the road, recycling them for forty-five cents a pound, Kenia looked up at Austin, studying him and his work. She envied the straight-forward nature of his task. He paused to run his hand along a board, closing one eye and studying its face.
“You are quite precise,” Kenia said.
“Yeah, I guess I am,” he said, without looking up from the grain of wood. “Always have been a fan of order, ever since I was little. My mother said I used to stack the soup cans in the grocery cart, even as young as two, labels out, and according to color.”
“A little OCD?”
“Maybe,” he said without a smile. “Got worse after our parents died.”
Kenia waited a moment before she asked, “What happened?”
“Car accident. Drunk driver crossed the center line. They died instantly; he walked away.”
“I’m sorry.”
Austin blew the wood shavings off the face of the board. “Yeah, so were we. They were good people.”
“Who took care of you all growing up?”
“Our Uncle Mike, actually. He lives up in that house on the back of the lot with his wife Rochelle. They didn’t have kids of their own, took us in. Uncle Mike owned this place, but turned it over to us as we got older.”
“Austin, do you think he was the person I saw when, you know, I jumped back last time?”
“I had been thinking that myself,” he said, laconic.
“Could I meet him?”
“Not unless you go to the Florida Keys. He’s down there with Rochelle, brushing up on their scuba diving skills.”
“Scuba diving . . . how old is he?”
“In his eighties, but he’s well preserved, him and Rochelle both. Iron Mike, they call him around here.”
He returned to planing the wood.
“So you’ve done all the renovations here?” Kenia asked.
“Yep. It’s the kids that bring the money in. I sort of work for them.” He brushed shavings from the hair on his forearms. “Not sure what else I would do around here. I’m good with my hands. I’m organized. The Marine Corps taught me how to kill people and disable IEDs, but those are not marketable skills in Selah.”
“All this stuff in the yard must make you a bit crazy.”
“Like you wouldn’t believe,” he said, chuckling for only the second time since she had met him. “But it keeps them out of trouble. There are worse things they could be doing in these parts.” He stopped, balancing the plane on its corner as he spoke. “It’s funny, how folks think this is the real America. I served next to guys from downtown Phoenix, the backwoods of Oregon, suburbs of Indianapolis, New York, Newark, and Miami. All those places are just as real as rural West Virginia. Not as white, but just as real. I don’t know why places like this are such an obsession.”
“Nostalgia?”
“Seems like hooey to me.”
Kenia sighed. “At best that picture of the past is ignorant, at worst it’s racist.”
“I feel like a lot of these folks around here, they have never seen New York City, Miami, San Francisco. They need to. Otherwise they’ll keep thinking that America is supposed to look like the cast of the Brady Bunch. They need to get out, meet some people like yourself, shake hands with a middle-aged lesbian, have coffee with a Muslim. See that America is a place where all these people can be at home . . . freedom of faith, respect for all, malice towards none, and all that.”
Kenia thought back to Joel Andersen and the wall of the cost of living he had described surrounding cities. “Sometimes travel itself is a privilege.”
“So are ignorance and indifference, but they shouldn’t be. I don’t know, seems to be that everyone at once is more lucky than they deserve and more worse off than you can imagine. If we could just realize that about everyone, maybe we could get out of each other’s hair.”
Austin grew silent after that and lost himself again in his work, Kenia in hers. But it was a companionable silence they shared. Later in the afternoon, when it was too hot to work, Austin went inside, changed shirts, and returned with iced tea lemonades for both of them. He settled into a rocking chair and drifted in and out of sleep, an Ernest J. Gaines novel in his lap.
Stan took over for Austin before dinner, keeping an eye on Kenia while Austin cooked. They set themselves up at the kitchen table. It was late in the day and Kenia was having trouble concentrating. When news broke that a white man had rammed a car into a crowd of anti-white-supremacists marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia everyone’s phone started to buzz with updates and posts at once. Kenia and Stan stopped all their work and began reading, watching, and listening to reports online. Kenia felt sick, like something putrid was roiling in her gut. Her vision was blurred with tears of outrage.
“This country can’t seem to make it through a summer without racial violence,” she heard Hailey say from the studio. Apparently she was not getting much work done editing new videos either.
Can’t make it through a day is more like it, Kenia thought, bitter.
“The president has notably not condemned the white supremacist protestors. Instead he is calling for the “bigotry, hatred, and violence on many sides, to stop,” Stan said, his eyes scanning his laptop screen back and forth, a note of disbelief in his voice.
“Seems to me, there’s a side that wants peace and justice and a side that doesn’t,” Austin growled from where he was at the stove. He shook his head. “We all know which side he is on.” He knocked a spoon against the side of one of the cooking pots. “You all sure you want to keep reading that stuff?”
Not really, Kenia thought to herself, closing her laptop and putting her phone on silent. She found herself staring at the Decepticon sticker on the back of Stan’s laptop. She needed something superfluous to distract herself.
“You really like the transformers,” she said.
Stan shrugged. He seemed to understand she needed a change in conversation and obliged her. They all were feeling the frustration and fury of being far away and powerless. He closed his laptop. “It’s a bit absurd, but they are my favorite. And in the end our civilization may be one perpetuated by artificially intelligent machines. I get tired of the same mainline Marvel and DC plotlines anyway.”
“Yeah, so does my brother,” suddenly deeply grateful for Stan and his willingness to indulge her. “Don’t get him started on how superior Dark Horse is.”
“He’s right, you know.”
Kenia, trying to avoid a lecture similar to ones she had heard before from Chiazam, shifted. “I noticed you had a lot of the classic toys from the ’80s at your workstation.”
“Yeah, Austin had a bunch and I got the others from collectors on the internet.”
“My older sister had lots.”
“Really, she wasn’t playing with Barbies, My Little Ponies, or Strawberry Shortcake back in the ’80s?”
“No . . . Chinemere wasn’t really the type who was into dolls.”
“I like her already.”
“She passed them down to my brother. He was into the comics too, but I couldn’t get into them and how they kept going back with different series and making the origins of the Autobots and Decepticons different.”
“I know what you mean,” he said, sitting up. “But they were all variations on the same themes, some better than others. They got more interesting the more Megatron’s principles of freedom, equality, and revolution evolved and with how they informed Optimus Prime’s own ethics. Tied together more closely, learning from one another, it made the story better.”
“Did you like the new variations, post Michael Bay?”
“Hated them!” he said, putting his hands up over his head. “Oversimplified it. Just all good versus all evil.”
“So how do you know what storyline to invest in?” she asked, as Austin began to set the table around them.
“Well, it happens all the time, doesn’t it, with rebooted origin stories,” Stan said with a shrug. “But all the best myths get recycled, and nothing is new under the sun, right? Shakespeare was right and so was Joseph Campbell when he said it again. Even the Gospels had four versions.”
It was Kenia’s turn to shrug. “I guess you’re right.”
Austin served dinner. They tried to avoid talking about the news. Afterwards Kenia headed back to the Corrigans’ with Hailey on the back of Kermit. Colton came by the apartment and they read to him until Sandra retrieved him to put him to bed. It was a calming relief to lose herself in a children’s book. As she and Hailey got ready for bed Kenia was starting to wonder if all the precautions they were taking to observe her were necessary. Had they overreacted? She worried the Pennels might even begin to doubt her story, the longer they went without an incident. She had to admit, however, she slept better knowing Hailey was there. Hailey, for her part, relished the time away from her brothers. Together they painted their nails and flipped through issues of Ebony. It was the first time Hailey had looked at a “black” magazine.
“I never realized hair was so complicated,” she said. “I mean, this classification system with letters and numbers, it’s surreal.”
Kenia drifted off, Hailey still flipping through back issues. It was not until 1:12 a.m. that Kenia sat up in bed, the sensation growing in the space just behind her eyes. She pressed the pads of her fingers to her forehead and reached to shake Hailey, but she was already awake, clicking on the lights and flipping on her phone’s camera.
“It’s happening, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Kenia said.
“Here.” Hailey tossed Kenia a pair of jeans and a button-down plaid shirt. “You don’t want to show up pre-sexual revolution in your Victoria’s Secret shorts. Everyone will be wondering why your ass says ‘I love pink.’”
“Or why my ass says anything at all,” Kenia said, changing quickly, sliding into the jeans and pulling on shoes. She looked up to thank Hailey, but she was already gone.