Black Diamond City

Prologue

Though “The Godfather” beat out the lesser known horror movie “Carnage” at the movies that summer of 1972 in downtown Wilkes-Barre, on the night of Thursday, June 22, only 12 brave souls ventured out to see the mafia hit. It had been a grim week of uncertainty in the Wyoming Valley. All the local weather stations offered up was a forecast of rain, rain that would be light but would continue for days due to Hurricane Agnes making her way up the coast. She was the first hurricane of the season, smashing into the Florida panhandle and reeling ahead, downgraded to a tropical storm but still making trouble up the Gulf Coast.

Agnes caused her first flooding in Northeastern Pennsylvania Thursday evening. Flooding didn’t scare the community—they’d experienced it many times before, built larger dikes to barricade the Susquehanna River. Even when the sandbaggers came out that night, most of the town was ignoring the warning signs, ignoring the rising river. The Wilkes-Barre Record ran a front page story in its evening edition about a possible flooding of the valley due to Hurricane Agnes. The building itself, on the corner of the Square in downtown Wilkes-Barre, had already experienced the beginnings of flooding problems in its press room, but it wouldn’t be until two days later that the paper shut down because of the water.

That night, if you had gone outside on your porch and listened, you would’ve been surprised by the silence. Even the crickets were quiet, an eerie, ominous silence that blanketed the entire Valley. While the Susquehanna, which snaked around the valley in a hefty “S” shape, bellied up and swelled, residents tuned in to the local news, foregoing their nightly viewing of The Avengers. They worried, but not really. They pulled out photographs, birth certificates, stocks and bonds, and put them in boxes just in case. They fell asleep on the couch with the Tonight Show on and the box fan on high, blowing their hair off their necks. They drank six packs, drained bottles of vodka, passed around joints. They unclogged drain pipes. They talked about past floods, past rains. The past. Ralph Kerchak drove his family home from dinner Thursday across the bridge in Pittston. They had gone for dinner at Iorios—the place was offering a dinner special for $3.99—a rare mid-week treat in celebration of his wife’s birthday. He dismissed the rising river as “a whole lotta nothin’” and pulled out his cigarette lighter, waving it around as he told his two daughters Clarice and Sophie stories about rain storms he’d seen that could never compare to this.

In the back seat, Clarice, the oldest at 16, felt herself getting wet from the rainwater coming through the open window, but she didn’t say anything to her father, preferring the mist to a smoke-filled car from her dad’s nasty Camels. Next to her, her sister Sophie pressed her nose against the glass like a little kid (rather than the teenager who’d just completed her freshman year of high school) and saw the water lapping nearly at the top of the concrete pillars over Pierce Street Bridge, higher than she’d ever seen it. Sophie didn’t understand how it was possible for a few days of rain to make such a big difference.

When they got home, Ralph grabbed six Budweisers from the refrigerator and retreated down to the basement. He pressed every button on his 120-song 1952 AMI Inc. jukebox and sat behind the bar, drinking beer after beer and singing along. He had tried earlier that day to haul the heavy machine up the basement stairs to no avail. The clunker was too heavy to move, and too old to take apart.

Ralph’s record collection consisted of the hits of the 1950s, with a little of the early 1960s thrown in there. He liked the crooners—Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Sam Cooke—but mostly he liked Elvis, the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, the glory days. He liked to relive his teenage years and early 20s by cranking up the volume. The juke box was a 1951 AMI Inc. chrome model, the only frivolous purchase Ralph Kerchak ever made in his entire life, and the best thing he’d ever done for himself. He got it used from Bob Colchack in 1958 after Colchack’s pizza joint went out of business. Colchack sold it to Ralph for a good price—$50—with the understanding that the right speaker needed to be replaced (the result of a drunken slick-haired teenage boy’s late night attempt to impress his date by kicking the side of the machine to demonstrate his hatred of the song “A White Sport Coat”) and that the machine would be removed, at Ralph’s expense, from the pizza place as soon as possible. Colchack also sold Ralph a bunch of 45s for a nickel a piece.

Those 45s played one by one that night as Ralph packed up things from his bar into one of his wife Linda’s old Avon cardboard boxes. While “Fly Me to the Moon” played, he found the Father’s Day cards his girls Sophie and Clarice had made for him. He listened to “Green Door” while packing up his honeymoon martini glass from the Poconos and the coasters and drink stirrers they’d gotten as a wedding present. When all that was done, he sat back, put his feet up, lit a cigarette, and let the music play.

His wife and daughters eventually found their way downstairs, unwilling to listen to any more TV reports. Ralph smiled at all of them and grabbed the nearest bottle. “Who wants a shot?”

Linda glanced at her watch. It was not even eight o’clock in the evening. The two teenagers were already seating themselves on the bar stools, watching as their father poured peach schnapps into four shot glasses. When he finished, her replaced the cap and licked his fingers. Then he held out a shot to Linda. “Come on, Babe. It’s sweet like you like.”

She took the last barstool next to her daughters and held the shot glass. “Just this one,” she said, eyeing her daughters. They nodded. Ralph held his shot glass high, his eyes shaded by the lighting above him.

“To the jukebox,” he said. “Better get your songs in while you can.” They clanged their shots together. Sophie downed hers quickly and wiped her mouth. Clarice took half and coughed, and finished the rest in two quick sips.

“It’s not going to come here anyway, right Dad? Didn’t you say that last time the river flooded it only ruined a few houses right by the dike?” Sophie stared at her father, looking for some kind of sign from him.

“Yeah, Soph. We’ll probably be fine.” He poured himself another shot. “But it’s good to be prepared, right?”

Linda played “The Way You Look Tonight,” her favorite Frank Sinatra song. When it was over, she slid off the stool. “I’m going to turn in,” she told them. “No more alcohol.”

Ralph and his daughters did two more shots each of peach schnapps to finish off the bottle. They listened to Dean Martin, the Everly Brothers, Debby Reynolds and Bobby Darrin before the girls excused themselves and went upstairs to their respective rooms, enraptured by their buzzes.

Laying across a tie-dyed blanket in her bedroom upstairs on the second floor, Sophie listened to the distant bass thrumming through the floorboards and thought for the first time just how small they seemed, how helpless to something as big as a hurricane. What if the water came upstairs to her room? Ruin the carpet, damage the furniture. She twitched a little and curled her toes up into the comforter. It felt so dry and soft—nothing like that could possibly happen. Her father’s music thumped through her thin chest, pounding in her, and then like a puppy it curled up inside her belly and fell asleep.

Around 4 a.m. the music stopped, waking Sophie. She heard him moving around and knew what was happening, could see it as clearly as if she were standing in the basement—her father unplugging the jukebox, curling the cord carefully around his elbow and then tucking it inside. From when she was a little girl she could remember him singing the songs to her, coaxing her to learn them, dancing around in a silly way to make her laugh. She knew he was lifting the records one by one out of the jukebox and stacking them in a milk crate. He wouldn’t leave those. Even if the rest of the machine had to stay, something would be salvaged. The music would be saved.

She heard the familiar creak of his steps as he ascended the stairs, carrying the milk crate in his arms. Outside, it continued to pour. The Susquehanna River was nearly 40 feet high and continuing to rise as Sophie’s father shuffled past her door, stopping to look in on her like he did every single night since she was born. Sophie held her breath and kept her eyes closed tight, not wanting her dad to know she was still awake and worrying. After a short pause, she heard him continue on to his bedroom, where he crawled into bed with his wife, not knowing in just three hours time they would all awake to the first of many sirens wailing for the evacuation of Swoyersville.

Part One — The Flood

One

The day the river broke through the dike, barreled across River Street into Forty Fort and Swoyersville, swept through downtown Wilkes-Barre, and flooded Ralph’s 1962 Chevy so it would never start again, Sophie sat with her father in the kitchen playing rummy. She scrutinized his face carefully, not looking for tells on what kind of hand he had, but rather if he was worried about the river or not. A few police cars had already patrolled by, blaring sirens, warning people of the rising water, but still her father sat, tapping his cards on the end of the table, playing maddeningly slow. She wanted to believe him.

“Linda, don’t worry. We’re not getting anything down here,” he kept saying, shaking his head whenever his wife turned on the television. They’d watched the news reports all day long, but Ralph Kerchak had an ingrained distrust of television news. He’d probably inherited it from his own father and grandfather, who’d worked in the coal mines and relied on frail canaries for predictions in situations more life threatening than a flood—and he wasn’t about to trust blabbering news reporters with fake smiles to tell him his fate. To Sophie’s dad, the reporters in bright yellow slickers, standing on the bank of the Susquehanna clutching microphones in the wind and rain, looked a little like canaries. And they weren’t dead yet.

“Everyone’s overreacting. It’s the same thing with snowstorms. We get one dusting on the ground, and they clear out the grocery shelves.”

Still, his certainty seemed to be fading each time a siren blared outside their house. The neighbors had already packed up and gone, their brown and white terrier yapping its head out the back window. Sophie’s dad had tried to go to work that morning, but Buddy Lowton had told all the mechanics to turn around and go right back home, closing shop for the day. It seemed like everyone else was taking it seriously, and despite his casual comments, Sophie saw her dad glance more frequently out the window, a distant look in his eye.

It was warm in the kitchen, especially with Sophie’s mother rushing around the house like she’d been for days, fluttering garbage bags behind her back. She was wrapping things in plastic and packing up books and papers. The humidity made the papers stick together and wilt where they were stacked by the door waiting to be taken away. On one hurried trip through the kitchen, Sophie’s mom inadvertently bumped her husband’s elbow, causing the cards he was shuffling to go flying across the table and onto the floor. The seven of diamonds coasted under the radiator, unseen by any of them, and would be found days later, muddy and torn from the water that would seep in and stop just below the second floor.

“Watch it, Linda. You’re ruining my mojo.” Ralph winked at Sophie as her mother passed by again, muttering to herself.

Ralph dropped the cards on the table in a messy pile and stood up, stretching. He smiled at Sophie and grazed the ends of his mustache with his fingertips. “You girls want some sandwiches?”

“Are you kidding?” Sophie’s mother, her hair flying all about her face, dropped the garbage bag she’d been holding and put her hands on her hips. “Don’t you think we ought to find somewhere to go, Ralph?”

“Ah, don’t worry about that. I’ve always got a back-up plan, right Soph?”

Sophie’s sister Clarice slapped up the porch steps in her flip flops, chewing on her fingernails. She had been outside packing up the car and the hair at the top of her head was flat with rainwater. She spit out whatever she had peeled off from her fingernail and adjusted her glasses. “Dad’s idea of a back-up plan is to call the fire department when the house catches on fire,” she said, gaining a smirk from her father. “Or to go buy groceries when we have no groceries left. Or to get new shoes when the soles of his old ones fall off.”

“Ok, ok, we get it,” Ralph said, holding up his hands. The three women all stared at him. Sophie thought about the water under the bridge the night before, so high and swift and powerful. She felt dread creeping up in the pit of her stomach. Her father suddenly seemed helpless and silly.

“This isn’t a time to joke,” her mother spit out.

Ralph moved to hug his wife, but she brushed him off.

“Take it easy, Linda. I’ve got it under control. I’m going to call James Cannon.”

Sophie glanced at Clarice, but her sister wasn’t paying attention. James Cannon was one of her father’s poker friends who lived on the back hill in Swoyersville. He owned Cannon’s Jewelers, where her father had bought her mother’s engagement ring (and was still paying it off). And he had a son, James Jr., who was a junior with Clarice at Valley West. Sophie hadn’t been expecting this.

“I don’t want to go there,” she said.

“Ah, it’ll probably be just a few hours. We’ll park our car up there in their driveway and hang out a little. No problem. Then we’ll come back once this all settles.” Her dad wrapped his arm around her shoulder and ruffled her hair with his knuckles. She ducked out from his grasp, still sulking, and ran upstairs to her room. She wasn’t buying it. Her father’s eyes worried her. He looked scared. The sense of dread grew as she entered her quiet bedroom, and she felt a fierce anger for her family—why did they live here and not up higher? Why hadn’t her father taken it seriously before?

She pulled open the shade on her window and shut the door. The room had just become hers and hers alone a few months ago and it still all seemed new to her—the Beatles poster (the one where Paul looked like he was about to wink at her, just her); her tie-dyed tapestry hanging on the wall; the wooden four poster bed, on which hung her favorite belt with the clasp that looked like two hands were shaking and the rosary her grandmother had given her; and the piles of clothes strewn about the floor and in her closet. She imagined her whole room filling with water, her bed floating around like a fish, the bedspread waving lazily around like a tentacle. What would happen to everything? She flung herself in the middle of the bed and fished out her journal.

Lying on her stomach in the quiet room, she felt very romantic and tragic. She felt a little like Anne Frank, whose diary she was reading in English class. Her stomach was flat and smooth; she’d been working on her tan all summer, before the rain came and clouded over the sun. This was supposed to be a lazy summer—concerts and late nights, drinking in the cemetery across the street with her best friend Jo Brunges and their other friends. There couldn’t be a flood. It was ridiculous and unfair.

Sophie got up and stood by her window. Clarice and her mother were loading bags into the Volare. In front of it, looking forlorn, sat the Chevy, its blue paint stripped in places. Her father was working on it. When she was able to drive, he told her, the car would be hers. She already had a bumper sticker to slap on the back, a peace sign filled in like the American flag. He’d taken her out driving a few times already, once to Frances Slocum State Park, where, practicing how to park, she’d accidentally run over a curbstone and caused her dad to spill his beer all over himself. “This is why they say ‘don’t drink and drive,’” he’d said, his mustache dripping. While laughing at him, she’d let go of the brake again and drove the car further into a bush. It took her dad a good twenty minutes to back out. He hadn’t taken her driving since.

From the window, Sophie had a view of the cemetery across the street. It looked even bleaker than usual, the gray headstones blending into gray sky, dull and dark except for the tiny American flags on the veteran’s graves. Her brother wasn’t buried there. He was buried on the back road in their church’s cemetery, St. Mary’s. At least the flood, if it came, wouldn’t reach him.

Clarice had moved into Johnny’s bedroom back in April--more than a year and a half after Johnny died in the war. All his stuff had still been there from when he left it to go to Vietnam—his posters, his stereo player, his clothes. Sophie sometimes still resented Clarice a little for finally caving in and moving into it. She felt like she had somehow erased Johnny for real—as if they had just let his stuff there as it had been, he might one day come home. He might show up on their doorstep, his blue eyes mischievous and sneaky, ruffle her hair and say, “Hey Soap, where’s my kiss?”

The room Sophie now had to herself was a tiny addition that her father and her uncles built into the house when her mom had been pregnant with Clarice. They’d expanded a closet that had adjoined the master bedroom, but there wasn’t a vent. In the winter, she had a kerosene heater by her door to keep warm. In the summer, she suffered with box fans like the rest of the house.

If she pressed her face to the glass and looked to the right, she could see up Owen Street to the back road, where the Cannons lived. The water cascaded down the road like a gigantic wet slide. Sophie could see it already pooling up at the edge of their driveway. Her sister and her mother splashed around in it loading the car. When her sister wiped her wet bangs away she glanced up at Sophie’s window and Sophie backed up quickly, not wanting to be seen.

Clarice liked to pride herself on being the good one. Sophie could hear her talking to their mother. “I can drive a load up there and then come back for more if you want,” she said, helpful and hopeful, always making Sophie feel guilty. Sophie could just picture it, Clarice showing up at the Cannon house with a carload of boxes. As if those people had room for it. Clarice would say something embarrassing to James Cannon—something so completely uncool the guy might cringe in embarrassment for her—and she probably wouldn’t even realize what she had done.

Johnny had been the one Sophie had looked up to. Even Clarice had tried to gain Johnny’s approval, she and Sophie always fighting for his attention. Since he’d been gone, she and Clarice had retreated into their own spaces, barely talking. For most of Sophie’s life, she’d had to share a bedroom with Clarice, and now that she had it to herself, she couldn’t imagine how they’d ever done that.

Sophie turned away from the window and pulled her duffle bag out from under the bed. She packed quickly and randomly, stuffing things inside as she saw them. She took her photo album, a stuffed animal, her bank, and the letters Johnny had written her while overseas. She zipped up the bag, threw it over her shoulder and went downstairs, not looking back at her room.

~~~

Years later, Sophie would swear she fell in love with James Cannon the first time she met him. But, in fact, she was really quite rude to him, a minor detail that was erased from her memory as years passed. If ever it came up again later, she would tell the story very differently than he.

Sophie’s father had always told her that everything was, in the end, about sex. The first time she remembered him saying it she was only 12 years old, shoulders shaking from sobbing because the boy she had liked and she had thought liked her—the boy who had gone out of his way to steal a hood ornament from a car and present it to her in a Christmas card with a snowman on the front—had been seen holding hands with Megan Tonshak outside of the Edwardsville movie theater.

“It has nothing to do with you,” her father, never very good with advice when it came to such matters, said. “Boys are after one thing, Kiddo. It’s all about sex. Everything, at its core, is about sex.”

She thought back to all the strange encounters she’d had-- walking in on Johnny making out with a girl on the couch so that he jumped up, embarrassed, zipping up his pants while the girl under him, arms crossed over her, just giggled and giggled. Or the time she’d seen her father pinch a saleswoman’s ass in a crowded department store. Instead of being mad, the woman gave him a smile and a wink and continued on her way, swinging her hips in her short, tight skirt. If it was all about sex, she didn’t really understand it. The signals always seemed mixed up. The results always seemed different that she expected, and mostly seemed much more trouble than it was worth.

The first time she made out with someone—in the cemetery across the street from home, against a headstone while Jo drank the rest of a six-pack with Jim Strutten a few yards away—she’d been frightened, embarrassed, and had bitten the guy’s tongue accidentally. His name was Paul Westerfield and she’d wanted to kiss him for months, but when it finally happened, his breath had smelled of onions and he’d burned a hole in her favorite sweater with his cigarette. He’d wanted to go all the way, right there on the dirty ground, with the Dave Clark Five singing “Bits and Pieces” faintly on the portable radio his friend had brought into the cemetery with them (Paul Westerfield was a big Dave Clark Five fan and loved to carry on conversations about how they were better than the Beatles—that, along with the onion breath convinced her without a doubt to dump him flat). When she stopped, he got all moody and snotty and told Jo later that Sophie was a stuffy bitch.

It’s all about sex. She always remembered that.

It’s what she thought about when she stood, both hands clutching suitcases, at the edge of the Cannons’ front yard looking up at the guy coming out of the front door. He had the hood of his basketball sweatshirt pulled tight over his face so she could only see the hint of sideburns and for some reason he reminded her of Paul Westerfield, even though she knew who he was. Instantly, she wished him gone. She knew what she must look like, standing there like a refugee, her hair damp and wavy from the rain. She was smart enough to recognize her anger at him not for the cocky way he loped down their steep front sidewalk toward her, but for the instant attraction she felt when she saw him. It was all about sex, she thought. She hated that.

The Cannons’ front yard was a hill and muddy from the days of rain, but Sophie decided to attempt cutting through the grass to avoid talking to James Cannon. She saw him in the halls at school, where he was a junior and she a freshman, but she’d never spoken to him. It didn’t work that way. He was Clarice’s age but he didn’t talk to her either. He ran in a different circle, with his basketball friends, and they all drove their cars around Public Square and smoked behind the hotel on Main Street. She’d seen him with Cathy Richards, who people said once stripped naked for the whole football team after they won against Berwick. Still, Sophie wanted to be one of those girls, driving around with their hair whipping around their faces as they laughed, waving red-nailed fingers that clutched cans of beer out the window.

Sophie tried to move quickly, but it didn’t occur to her how slippery the rain had made the grass. She took two steps and started to slide. She heard a grunt come from James Cannon that sounded like a warning, but it was too late. The weight of the suitcases kept her from readjusting her balance. She fell back, sliding along the grass on her rear end. Her jeans were soaked. Very graceful.

“Whoa! You alright?” He sounded amused and it was all she could do to not bite the hand he held out to her. She looked up at him, glaring, and saw that he was smirking at her. A strand of wavy brown hair escaped from under his hood and hooked in a backwards “J” under his eye.

“I was just testing your lawn. It’s slippery. You shouldn’t walk on it.” Sophie picked herself up off the sidewalk and wiped her hands off on her jeans, leaving little streaks. She smiled widely at him to keep from crying and tossed her hair behind her shoulder.

James laughed. “Thanks for the warning.” He picked up the suitcases she’d been carrying. Across the street, an old woman stared at them, rocking back and forth on a swing on the porch. Down the street, doors slammed, people shouted.

“No, I can get them. Please.” James was a good six inches taller than her and she had to look up into the rain to meet his eyes, which infuriated her further. Who was this boy and what was he doing? She leaned forward and took them from him, her fingers touching his as she pulled on the small handle. He resisted, drawing them back toward him and her head bumped into his chest.

“I’ve got it. Let me help you. Really.”

“I’m not helpless.”

He laughed, harder now, and turned, walking away from her and disappearing inside the house with the suitcases. She sighed, waving her hand in front of her face. It was hopeless, she thought, looking around at the long line of cars parked along the streets. The whole thing was hopeless—her house, her things, and now her dignity. She felt sick, her stomach churning as she looked around her, at the people milling about, looking lost, at the large, strange house that she had to go into—the house where he was—and wished she had kicked James Cannon right in the shin.

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