Sid Lore and Janet Hollar drift together because in their tiny, secluded Appalachian community, both are misfits: Sid because he wasn't born there, Janet because she cannot clear the bar set for inclusion in her Pentecostal church, speaking in tongues.

They soon discover that Appalachian life is one of attenuation: family and friends die or move away, steady jobs become impossible to maintain as Sid develops work-related injuries, Janet feels increasingly trapped by the land she comes from. As Sid�s life spirals into a drain hole of odd jobs, bar brawls, and dog fights, Janet discovers new worth--and a hidden talent for destruction.

Just when they�ve taken their lives as far down as they can manage on their own, the world outside of Appalachia encroaches, and it becomes impossible to stay. Even Janet, who has vowed never to abandon the place of her birth, has had enough.

Fourteen years later, city life has destroyed their marriage and cast them back into the mountains. All has changed. Only as they begin to pick through the rubble of their misguided dreams do they rediscover love for each other, and for Appalachia.

This is the story of contemporary Appalachia, from within.

Born in the Appalachian mountains of western Maryland, Roger Alan Skipper received a public-school vocational education, then served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam era. A career in the construction/building supply industry progressed from menial jobs to a top-level management position in a multi-store retail outlet.

In 1999, at the age of forty-seven and shortly after paying his youngest son's final college tuition bill, Skipper resigned his position to pursue companion lifetime goals: his own college education and a career as a novelist. The award of the prestigious Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Scholarship propelled him to a graduate degree in writing. Skipper lives near his birthplace in the mountains, where he writes, hunts wild ginseng, picks the banjo, and builds musical instruments.

Chapter 13

Janet lammed Sid in the mouth with a flowerpot, and then she bawled hard little tears that sprinkled her bare feet like it was raining BBs. It was her last flowerpot, and she�d never know what had finally humped the soil and threatened to break free and grow, and the ivory pieces scattered among the terra cotta meant that the money they might have used to get wheels again would go to the dentist instead. Or the doctor. She�d got him good.
She�d dislodged more than teeth; Sid�s determination drained away when the crockery landed in his pie hole. Or maybe he sensed the difference in these tears and those that fell at Janet�s time of the month or when her lotto ticket struck out, and felt sorry for her. Whatever the reason, he comforted her, though he blotted his lips in her hair while he massaged her spine, but she couldn�t really hold that against him. His long fingers touched each vertebra as though he were tuning her, high notes to low, except for where the missing finger should have hit. As reckless with a chopsaw as he was with words.
When he ran out of keys he picked her up by the cheeks and snugged her into him and carried her to the bedroom. Her heel hit the dryer�s doorhandle as he wedged her back the narrow hall, and it thunked onto the swelled particleboard floor like someone had dropped a tangerine, and she wished she had a tangerine. The dryer was broke too, along with her last flowerpot and Sid�s straight pretty teeth, and she�d have to go to the laundromat. She didn�t have a thing fit to carry clothes in, and she wasn�t going to walk along the road carrying Sid�s undershorts.
Then they made love. Sweet love, where she nibbled the ruptured lips and felt the broken tooth stubs with her tongue and sampled his blood as if he were a honeysuckle and she a bee, and fun love, where the trailer rocked until she heard Sidemore�s chain rattle out from underneath the bedroom. He�d sit outside slumped and dejected until they settled down, then he�d rattle back in.
Sid sat on the edge of the bed and cried too, though he didn�t shed tears or let on. �You can�t get away with that.� He didn�t sound like Sid with his mouth rearranged.
�Will you look at the dryer before you leave? Something fell off.�
�Set up,� he said. �You can�t be beating on me. It�s got to halt.� She obeyed, and he hit her in the side of the head, careful as always that his fist landed above the hairline where it wouldn�t screw up the week with paperwork if some busybody happened to notice. Her cheeks flapped and a harl of snot strung from her nose, unraveling from inside her head, and then it slipped loose and was gone, and she wondered if she�d made loops and fancy twirls like the bulls on Professional Bull Riding did, and knew that she�d forgot to try.
That�s what fascinated her, that snot, back when they had a TV. Not whether the bullrider was laying on the spurs with his outside leg, or if his free hand touched, or if the eight-second clock run out before he plowed into the manure and got to throw a fifty-dollar hat away if the bull hadn�t stepped on it until it wouldn�t fly, and after you seen his bare head maybe the hat would fit better if the bull did step on it. Janet watched those shiny ropes of snot that curlicued from the bull, and she imagined the bull watching them too, crosseyed and artistic, moving his head loose and casual but just so, and the man on his back was there to encourage him and give him cause to do his best. Bodacious had been her favorite. He�d jump higher than a man�s head standing up, and then write longhand in snot all the way down. Like Chinese, top to bottom instead of left to right. But Bodacious was hard on the help, and they laid him off.
Except Janet wasn�t sure the good stuff�the tangerine and the honeybee and the waiting dog�had happened. Maybe Sid had just smacked her and she�d hit the dryer door on the way down. Since she�d started taking one pill for depression and then another when she got too un-depressed, things were hard to pin down right, like butterflies she�d tried to put in her collection that weren�t clear dead, and earlier that day she�d been way too un-depressed. She settled on the other way, the first one.
She was in the bed, after all, and naked. She was positive she�d got up that morning, and put clothes on. The pills didn�t make her that far gone.
While Sid worked on the dryer door Janet screwed the bulb into the bedside light and read in the Readers� Digest book section about a woman who lived with gorillas until they became her folks. Janet shivered without meaning to, then tried to and couldn�t. She closed one eye to single her vision. The big black stud gorilla, arm around the woman like he�d won her at a turkey shoot, didn�t take long to look at. Gorillas were all the same.
But the woman wasn�t. Skinny, not enough tit for a cat, half-starved looking. She probly couldn�t find a man that would hug her. Gorillas must be like lawyers: do anything for a nanner.
Sid�s rattling at the dryer door ceased. By the soft crunches, like when you step on a bird that�s knocked itself out against the glass, Janet could tell the door had rusted to where it wouldn�t hold a screw.
�The duct tape�s under the sink, behind the dog can.�
Sid�s footsteps firmed where the floor did, and when he returned she knew she�d remembered right. Lately her memory had been wormy. But if she didn�t hide the tape in a new place each time, it would be gone when she needed it.
Tape peeled from the roll just like a deer hide coming loose from the meat. Janet swallowed twice, and still had a mouthful of saliva. Sid didn�t whittle a hide off an inch at a time; instead he put a rock in the hide and tied a rope around the knot and yanked the skin off with his pickup. How she loved that tenderloin. Not the backstrap, but the sweet little strips up inside that her and Sid ate raw while he cut up the meat. Would summer grass have the laurel worked out of the deer yet, so they�d be fit to eat? Would a riding mower jerk off a hide, did they have one? They had a push mower, but it was missing a wheel. Or something. Sid sold the deer rifle, too, to the same man that took the TV. And without teeth he wouldn�t be able to chew meat, so he wouldn�t be in any hurry to get another gun. A tear landed on the gorilla�s nose.
The gorilla woman�s straight gray hair appeared to have been cut with a steak knife. A face like a splitting maul without looking as mean as one. Gray eyes, gray all over, even her red-looking blouse felt gray. Not sink-drain gray, but kingsnake gray.
And depending on which eye Janet used so the woman wouldn�t have four, the woman�s eyes looked different. Protean. Janet flipped to the �It Pays to Increase Your Word Power� page to make sure she�d thought it with the right enunciation. Had knowing that word predisposed Janet to apprehend the woman�s eyes in a particular manner�had she extrapolated some unassailable meaning from an ephemeral implication? She checked again to make sure she�d got them all right.
Sid spoke from the kitchen, but the ear he�d beat on was still ringing. She thought he�d left after he taped the handle back on. At least some of the pill�s confusion had slopped out when he whacked her. �Yeah, Babe.� She went naked to sit with him at the table. He didn�t look bad, considering, and she couldn�t help but love him.
Sid couldn�t get words going. No wonder, since she�d rammed him with a flowerpot the last time he�d attempted it. He didn�t have to say it. She knew what he wanted again: to tear down the mountain.
He surprised her. �You know how old I am, Janet?�
She raised her eyebrows, waited.
�I�m asking. I�m not sure anymore.�
Janet realized she�d forgot his birthday, and felt terrible because maybe that�s all he�d been going to say when she�d busted the pot. �Twenty-nine?� Sid didn�t look twenty-nine, not his face and hands or the missing finger or empty mouth that looked a hundred and twenty-nine, or his body that looked nineteen, long hard ropes of muscle stretched tight across a big-boned frame. �Cept for his little potbelly.
Sid nodded. �I was thinking along them lines.�
He said nothing more, but sat solemn and puckered till Janet squirmed on her chair and made that duct-tape sound, and she hoped she hadn�t pulled any finish loose. Hers or the chair�s.
�About what I figgered. We been here a long time,� Sid said, and left.
He would return stinking of beer, which Janet could drink with squirrel gravy but not with shortcake, but she tried to believe that he didn�t really drink. She�d snuck down to Rooster�s Bar one night and looked in the window, and he wasn�t there. When she went inside and asked, folks looked sheepish, and she knew he hadn�t been there at all. Then at midweek prayer meeting, kneeling in the pew not really praying but just getting un-depressed with her head on the rough brown cushions that they�d added to the oak seats when folks complained about the long sermons, she�d caught Sid�s unique smell. She�d know it anywhere, cause she smelled it in their own bed, and on the couch, and anywhere he sat for long.
She�d pieced it all together then, how Sid laid on the church pews in the dark, dreaming about tearing down the mountain. The first time he�d said it, she thought he�d meant dip the top off the mountain and dump it in the holler, like the coal companies did. �If flat ground�s that momentous to you,� she said, �it�d be simpler to just move down off here.� The word didn�t fit quite right, like jeans the proper size but the wrong brand, but if you didn�t put them into use, there wasn�t no reason to learn them.
�That�s exactly what I just suggested we do.�
Then Janet understood he�d meant tear down off of the mountain, not tear the mountain down, and it saddened her that Sid didn�t have a better grasp on language. Sad too that he wanted to leave just because there were no jobs or even a hope of one there, and because they�d lost the truck, and because the dryer had rusted up and was falling through the floor.
Sid believed the things he didn�t have would make him euphoric. But he failed to consider that moving would cost them their friends: Horse and Larry, and Pike, and Pike�s woman, what was her name? Sally, or something just as dumb.
She shouldn�t have laughed at something Sid took so serious.
Serious or not, there�d be no tearing down the mountain while she had any say in it. She was born there, not like Sid, and to do what he wanted, to hurry the hell down off of there, would knock the top off her mountain and bury her in the valley.
Sid was a hypocrite in reverse, pretending to drink but really laying on the quiet, peaceful church pews conceptualizing that he wasn�t on the mountain no more, then gargling with Keystone Light before he come home�the beer he thought Janet didn�t know about, hid in a holler stump just beyond the yard�so Janet would think he was having nice clean alcohol fun, wouldn�t suspect him of anything sinister like thinking about moving away. Sid always tried to act worse than he was, but he got confused about what worse was.
Her heart went out to poor old Sid.
Poor old Sid had made one hell of a mess before he left, she realized when she rediscovered the dirt and broken pottery in the living room. Too dumb to duck. That�s what women were for, to clean up after men�s mistakes.
Janet located the Super Glue in the peanut butter jar and licked it clean, and realized she�d have to find a new hiding place since Sid didn�t have teeth to get gummed up. She sat on the dog food bag they used for a beanbag chair, but the paper stuck to her bare butt, so she slid onto the green shag carpet and worked at restoring her only flowerpot. She sat aside tooth pieces in case Sid would want to fasten them back in. He was a genius with the Bondo.
Sometime during the reconstruction the pot became attached to her left hand, and she delighted in the possibility of pretending to hurl it at Sid again, but it would stay in her hand instead of knocking out his gums. She�d bet a dollar he still wouldn�t duck.
Janet raked the dirt into a pile between her legs, sifting it for missing shards, and among the pottery and teeth she discovered a seed, larger than she�d imagined, the size of a hominy, with a long white sprout that wrapped around it, like a slinking dog�s tail, before it set off in search of water and food. She stared openmouthed for a while, unable to shake the notion that it had fallen from inside her. There on top of the dirt pile, the sprout filled her with a longing so quick and intense that she bawled, a long mournful howl that Sidemore answered, and like their baying had called Sid to come, she heard him scraping his feet on the stoop. So he hadn�t gone to church at all, and she was aggravated at his attempt to fool her.
The last piece of the pot fell into place just as the door opened. Sid sat on the dog food, funny looking with his puffed-out purpled mouth, and she didn�t have the heart to scare him with the flowerpot. �Look.� She shook her hand palm down to show that the flowerpot wasn�t going anywhere, and had the sudden irrational fear that she�d never be rid of it.
Sid looked as though he�d say something, but he couldn�t get it going for a spell. �You got it all back together.� Not sounding too happy, maybe because of the teeth. Strange how something laying on the floor could affect the way you talked.
�If you�re wanting to insinuate the notion of tearing the mountain down into the progression of our discourse, now would be the time,� she said, and shook the pot again to show him just how safe it was for him to feel safe.
Sid shook his head, and she knew she�d got it wrong. �Tear down off the mountain,� she said, feeling as stupid as she ever had. There wasn�t any right way to remember it but his way, but she wasn�t going to. Not then. Not never.