Disclaimer: Justified ain't mine. Sadly. Comments welcome.
Author Note:This was written for norgbelulah's excellent Summer In Harlan fic meme at LiveJournal. The prompt for this story was: Boyd (optional anyone from Harlan) - why he joined the army.
(Un)Saved
1. Raylan
When the mine reopened after the collapse (a few days off, a little extra in their pay-packet to keep them sweet) it was business as usual. Boyd went down the tunnels with his box of Emulex, laid the wires, cleared the shaft. When he emerged at the end of his shift he performed his usual ritual, raising his face and his hands to the sun - its warmth a benediction after the darkness.
Business as usual, except that when he came up out of that hole in the ground Raylan Givens wasn't waiting for him.
They hadn't been buddies, exactly, when they were growing up - the complexities of Bo's and Arlo's business dealings had precluded such a thing, and in high school they had run with different crowds. But down in the hole it was different. That was neutral ground, common ground.
He hadn't seen Raylan - hadn't seen much of anyone in Harlan - after that day. His daddy had taken him and Bowman and Johnny up country, hunting, and it had been nice. He liked the purity of the air and the peaks of mountains breaking the star-strewn sky.
And he hadn't thought about Raylan, hadn't thought about expecting to see him but the sudden absence was a discordant note.
After a few days with nothing to do and nowhere to go, he figured, there was no way Raylan would still be holed up at home. He got in his truck and drove over to Helen's, smiled to himself, triumphant, when he saw the familiar bean-pole figure making its way from Helen's porch. The slow stride slower than usual, gaze fixed on the ground.
The tyres bit the dirt road, screeching to a halt; he swung himself out. 'Raylan Givens!' The head raised slightly, eyes squinting up at him. 'You been given a day off the rest of us didn't know about?'
He waited until Raylan reached him, leaned carelessly against the paint-stripped hood of his pick-up.
'I ain't going back down the hole,' Raylan said before he reached him. 'I'm out. I'm going.'
Boyd raised his eyebrows. 'It takes money for that.'
'I got money.'
He laughed. 'What did you do, rob a bank?'
In later years, had he remembered saying that, Boyd would have reflected on the irony. As it was, Raylan smiled, tightly, because even then he didn't find that sort of joke funny.
'Helen, my Aunt Helen, she-she gave me the money.' His hands shook when he pulled the envelope out of his pocket. 'She's saved me.'
Boyd's first thought was I saved you, followed almost immediately, and unexpectedly, by Who's going to save me?
He looked at the wad of cash, the worn green bills bundled together. 'Well,' he said after a while, 'that is something.'
There was a feverish light in Raylan's face, words coming faster than Boyd had ever heard him talk before. Raylan wasn't a big talker but now it came out, a tumbling flood of dreams and hope.
And Boyd wished he'd shut the hell up.
Raylan paused, finally, drawing in a breath. 'Why don't you and me go get a drink?' He grinned insanely. 'I'm buying.'
'Well, I would love to, Raylan, but I ain't really thirsty.' They looked at each other and Boyd could see the confusion pushing at the edges of Raylan's euphoria. 'Some other time.'
He got back into his truck, drove back towards town too fast and the last he saw of Raylan Givens was in his rear-view mirror, standing in a cloud of dust.
2. Ava
The thing was, Boyd couldn't honestly say if he really wanted to leave Harlan. Of course, it was more than just Harlan for Raylan, he wanted out of Kentucky entirely. There must be something, some longing that ran deeper than he had imagined to create this sudden ache.
Saved.
He kept revisiting that word, picking at it like a scab over a wound.
To be safe. To be saved. To have a saviour.
There were plenty of things he liked about Harlan. He liked the familiar rhythms of life, the dirt roads twisting down to the creeks and through the hollers, he liked the people. Some of them. Some more than others.
He pulled over, tucking the pick-up behind the three others already lining the street. It was blisteringly hot, and humid. The air felt grubby, dust swirling up from the sidewalk. Everything looked shabby, over-used and then he saw her, Ava, standing on the corner in a yellow dress. It was same dress she'd worn the day of the collapse and that had been a day just like this one, the same heat and humidity. And just like then Ava stood against it all, seemingly untouched. Fresh as a daisy - a hated cliché, and he really hated clichés. But Ava was just that: she was like a flower. She was a meadow, she was spring, and light, and sunshine, and a clean breeze rippling the bluegrass. And then she would smile and his breath would stop, not that she smiled all that often at him. But when she did he saved it up, memories he guarded ferociously. She was young still, too young, only sixteen. There were girls his own age: smart girls, pretty girls, who were after him and made no secret of it. He went with them, because they were smart and pretty and they wanted him to, but that was always the end of it. They weren't Ava.
He watched her and made no secret of the fact. He watched her and then she looked across at him and after a moment she smiled.
She smiled at him and she crossed the road to him and he made a good show of pretending not to care.
'Hey,' she said, breathless.
He nodded. 'Hello, Ava.'
She bit her lip. 'Ain't Raylan with you?'
He felt a breath of laughter that didn't make it past his lips. Of course. Raylan. There was no other reason why she would be seeking him out, why she would be smiling at him.
'No, Raylan ain't with me.' He tilted his head. 'You looking for him?'
'No, no, I-' She shrugged, eyes darting away from him. She tried to look careless, as if seeing Raylan or not made no difference to her. She was terrible at it.
'Well, last I saw Raylan he was leaving his Aunt Helen's place but if you're planning on calling on him you'd best hurry up while you still can.'
Her head came up. 'What does that mean?'
He leaned against the hood, looking down at her and her worried, frowning face. 'Oh, you mean you ain't heard? Why, Raylan Givens is leaving us.'
A breath caught in her throat. 'No he ain't!'
He smiled at her, pitying. 'He's got a whole wad of cash and big plans on what to do with it, and those plans don't include you nor nobody else in Harlan County.'
Her eyes narrowed, mistrustful and wary. 'You're lying.'
Boyd shrugged, spread his hands. 'Well, why don't you ask him and see?'
'Well, maybe I will.'
She turned fast, the ends of her hair catching his cheek. There had been a world of hurt in her face and for a moment he thought of calling her back, of apologising, but he shrugged it off. She wanted Raylan, whether he wanted her or not; and like the song went, you can't always get what you want - she'd have to learn that eventually, even if it was the hard way. And maybe, somewhere along the line, she'd learn to appreciate the value of someone who really loved her.
3. Helen
After the blast had cleared and they were digging the lumps out of the rock, Boyd had plenty of time to think. Raylan had been happy, excited, genuinely hopeful for the first time since Boyd had known him, which was pretty much all of his life. Raylan had been hopeful and he had been - he searched for the word - churlish. He turned it over in his head, unpicking it. Churlish: mean, surly, unfriendly. Yes, he had been churlish.
When the shift was over and he'd got the coal dust out of his hair he drove over to the Givens house. The place was in near-darkness, only light from one window spilling out. He was nearly at the bottom of the porch steps when he noticed the red glow of a cigarette. Helen, sitting in the shadows and wreathed in blue smoke.
'Boyd Crowder.' She spoke his name slowly, a hint of curiosity.
'Evening, ma'am.' He stopped halfway up the steps. 'It's mighty dark out here.'
'Porch-light's bust.' She took another drag on her cigarette, pulling the smoke down deep.
The lamp, when he looked at it, was bust, literally. A fine dusting of glass glittered on the ground and the light fixture itself hung, wires exposed, dented and buckled. It looked like someone had taken a baseball-bat to it.
'So,' she said, grinding the butt and the dying embers into the ashtray on the table beside her, 'what brings you out here?'
'Well, I came to see Raylan, ma'am, he invited me for a drink some little time ago and I felt that it was incumbent upon me to take him up on it.'
Her head tilted and amusement coloured her voice. 'You read a lot, don't you?'
He hesitated. Helen had a way of looking at people as though she could see right through them and he disliked being so exposed. He was the one accustomed to doing the reading. That thought caught him and he looked back at her and he wondered if her question was as simple as it had seemed. 'Yes, I like to read.'
She nodded, stood. 'Well, I'm afraid you're out of luck, Boyd. Raylan is gone and I doubt that any of us will be seeing him again.' Dark hair tumbling around her shoulders, chin lifted in pride and defiance. Then, in the stillness, he could hear a soft keening, sobbing, from inside the house. He wondered if Raylan's mama knew it was her sister who had given him the money to go.
'I see.' He hesitated, still halfway on the steps. 'I- If you hear from Raylan, tell him I said hi.'
She nodded.
He was back on the path when she spoke again.
'What about you?'
He turned and looked up at her. She had moved to the front of the porch, leaned against the railings, her arms folded, looking down at him. 'Where are you going?'
'I don't know.'
'There are always places.' Through the gloom he couldn't see her face but he could hear the sympathetic smile in her voice.
'Yes, ma'am; but it's the getting there.'
He didn't go home, not sure he could face it. His daddy and whichever whore it would be. There had always been whores, even before his mama passed and everyone had known it, including her, but at least then Bo had been discreet. Now...
He didn't choose the place, but ended up at the abandoned church. There was no real reason for it and he couldn't have said why he liked it there but it felt like somewhere that was his. He sat on the steps, picked at the paint flaking off the wooden slats. His eyes fell on a flyer that was still stuck to the notice board. Jesus Saves. His lips curled, contemptuous. In his experience, Jesus didn't.
4. Bo
He had once, tentatively, mentioned something to his daddy about going to college, English Literature.
Bo's reaction had not been encouraging.
'You already know how to read, boy; what the hell you want to be going some place where some asshole fag tells you what a metaphor is? You can do all the reading you want in your own time, but you have a job to do right here.'
His job was to be his daddy's son.
He couldn't say he thought of it as a vocation.
But there were two promises he made to himself: he wouldn't work down the mine his whole life, and he wouldn't work for his daddy.
Sometimes he thought it would be nice to have something to believe in, a cause to follow, something that would shape his life. He liked the rhythms of Harlan but sometimes there was an aimlessness to it that drove him wild.
The flyer tucked under the wiper on his truck flapped languidly in the hot breeze. He plucked it off, started to scrunch it up, stopped and smoothed it out, the paper crinkling under his fingers. Army recruitment. He stared at it for a long time. It was order and discipline; it was a purpose, a cause.
It was somewhere that wasn't Harlan.
And there was the sudden perverse joy at the thought of how much it would piss-off Bo.
'The Army?' Bowman stared at him, eyes wide and jaw slack at first, then a look of cunning (as much as he was capable of) and he grinned. 'Hey, you going to go and kill you some Arabs?'
If that was what Bowman liked to think was the reason, he'd let him. It was easier that way. He looked expectantly at Bo and waited for the the low rumble of his displeasure.
'There's a war, son.'
'I know that, Daddy.'
A big bear of a man, Bo Crowder, he pushed himself up out of his easy-chair, stood over his son and looked intently into his face. There was a war, and it was everywhere. Bo's hand landed on his shoulder, heavy.
'If that's what you want- I'm proud of you, Boyd.'
Not expected, but he was grateful. They went up country again, the three of them and Johnny.
When the sergeant at the recruitment office asked him why he wanted to join the glorious institution that was the United States Army, he told him what he wanted to hear: learn a new skill, serve his country. He did not say: because I want someone to save me, because he had realised the thing that he had always known. Nobody was going to.