Aw, Bonehead
[p. 395]:
I asked him how he got the nickname Foot.
“The first day I went into the coal mine, a guy looked down and said, ‘Damn, how big are your feet?’ I said, ‘Fifteen.’ He said, ‘You’re a big-footed son of a bitch.’ And that was it. One guy had a huge head, so of course we called him Pumpkin. One guy had a big red birthmark on his face, so of course we called him Spot. They don’t cut you any slack. They’ll get right on you. A coal miner will get right on you.”
I shined my light on his boots and he wagged them, like puppets.
It was tough getting used to identifying people, in the darkness, just as feet, shoulders, chin, teeth. As for Foot, he was a truck of a man, forty-nine years old, a wide load in both girth and spirit. He had a messy mop of gray hair and a rugged, intelligent face that often wore one expression: “You gotta be kidding me.” He was proud of a lot of what he’d done with his life — his three kids, his stint as a county commissioner, his coal-mining expertise — but his heart, he said, belonged to his fifty-two head of beef cattle: Pork Chop, Frick and Frack, and, aw, Bonehead, with the amazing white eyelashes.
– Jeanne Marie Laskas, “Underworld,” originally published in GQ
from The Best American Magazine Writing 2008
