But this was West Virginia, and coal provided the bulk of the good-paying jobs. So Reed didn’t make a fuss about his home being flooded by a fly ash sludge storage pond giving way. Or about well water that turned black and smelled like rotten eggs. Or about air that was routinely full of things that did not mix well with human beings. He didn’t complain about his remaining kidney or his damaged liver and lungs from living around such toxic elements. He would be viewed as anti-coal and thus anti-jobs. Reed just didn’t need the added grief.

He turned down the road to make his last delivery of the day. It was a package that had to be signed for. He had cursed when he’d picked up his load of mail and seen it. A signature meant he had to actually interact with another human being. All he wanted right now was to scoot over to the Dollar Bar where every mug of beer on Monday cost a quarter. He would sit on his little worn-down perch at the end of the mahogany slab and try not to think about going home to his wife who would smell the alcohol on his breath and spend the next four hours lecturing him about it.

He pulled into the gravel drive. This neighborhood had once been fairly nice-well, if one went back to the 1950s. Now it was not so nice. There wasn’t a soul around. The yards were empty of kids as though it were two in the morning instead of two in the afternoon. On a hot summer’s day the kids should be out running under the sprinkler or playing hide-and-seek. But kids didn’t do that anymore, Reed knew. They sat inside in the AC and played video games so violent and gory that Reed had forbidden his grandchildren to bring them into his house.

Now the yards were filled with trash and dirty plastic toys.