Tell My Sorrows to the Stones (8 page)

The giant mallet seemed to appear from nowhere. Polichinelle gripped it in both hands as he swung, and Benny knew it wouldn’t be made of hollow plastic or rubber. The crowd roared, laughing themselves to death.

God, how they laughed.

There came a time when Tommy Betts thought they’d all have been better off if the mine had collapsed on top of them, crushing them under tons of stone and earth and coal. Better that, by far, than dying a little bit with every breath of poison air. Better that than seeing the fear in the faces of men he’d looked up to all his life, and desperation in his own father’s eyes.

As a boy, Tommy had told his dad to be careful, worried that if they dug too deep, the miners might break through into Hell. His mother had still been making him go to church in Wheeling every Sunday back then, and Hell presented a special terror for him. His father and the other miners would come back with their clothes caked with black dust, faces painted with the same crap that filled their saliva when they’d spit, and Tommy worried they might one day encounter demons down there.

At eighteen, Tommy had gone into the mine for the first time and discovered that the church had a pretty simple vision of Hell, and what waited in Shaft 39 was a different sort of damnation altogether. In the seven years since, he’d learned that even the bravest man discovered claustrophobia in the deep underground, with the walls pressing in and the weight of a mountain hanging above him. The slightest tremor might be the end of days. Two miles into the heart of a mountain, they might as well have been floating in space. That first trip down, Tommy had understood that no matter how many precautions might be taken, the miners were on their own.

Rick Nilsson, one of his father’s drinking buddies, had said the life of a miner was like playing Russian roulette every day for the rest of your life. You could find the chamber with the bullet any time, without warning. For Tommy and his dad, Al, and for Nilsson and Jerry Tolland and Rob McIlveen and Randy Wisialowski and a dozen other guys, it happened on the tenth of April.

It was raining, but no one complained about the black storm clouds or the soaking they got on the walk up from the parking lot. Underground it didn’t matter what the weather was like outside. In fact, as far as Tommy was concerned, the shittier the day the better. It was the beautiful days when he wished he could be at home with Melissa, tossing a ball in the backyard with their boy, Jake, doing a little barbecue. Jakey was only five, but sometimes Tommy let him flip the burgers.

Stormy days, though, he didn’t mind the mine so much. At least it was dry down there.

At the entrance to the mine, they waited for Wisialowski to show up. The guy was always fucking late and almost always hung over when he did show up. But Hanson, the shift supervisor, wouldn’t let them go down until the whole shift had arrived. They were supposed to be there by 7:30. At a quarter to eight, just when Hanson was about to let them go down and dock Wisialowski for the whole day whether he showed up or not, the guy pulled into the lot.

“Standing out here in the rain waiting on this asshole,” Tommy’s dad muttered, standing next to him.

“I’m in no hurry to get down there,” Tommy replied.

His father grunted. “Ain’t the point.”

Tommy didn’t say anything to that. There was never any arguing with the old man. Even his eyes seemed chiselled out of stone, made of the same stuff they were digging into. He had a scar on his left temple from a fight years back when one of his crew had gone stir crazy down in the mine. Al Betts had been the one to finally subdue the head case, but not before the guy tried bashing his skull in. The rest of the crew looked up to Al. He wasn’t the kind of man who started shit, but he’d be the one to put an end to it.

Hanson walked into their midst, hands up to get their attention. “All right, listen up! Wisialowksi, you paying attention?”

With the rain streaming down his slicker and spotting his glasses, the supervisor looked like an alien species standing amongst the miners. Wisialowski nodded, red-rimmed eyes anxious.

“This is the last time you’re late, Randy,” Hanson told him. “I’m saying this in front of everyone, so nobody can complain you weren’t warned. Every time you’re late, you cost us money. You’re all going down twenty-five minutes later than scheduled. Multiply that by eighteen, and you’re looking at seven and a half hours of accumulated time. So the next time you’re late, I’m docking you—and only you—for the total accumulated time you’ve delayed the entire crew. And if there’s a time after that, you’ll be fired.”

Nobody said a word. They stood in the rain and waited until Hanson sent them on their way. The whole crew climbed aboard the mantrip—the cable car that lowered the men into the mine and drew them back up again later. Only when they were on their way down into the ground with the lights flickering around them and the mantrip’s wheels squeaking on the metal rails did the miners start to grumble. They cussed out Hanson, now that the supervisor wasn’t there to hear them. Tommy said nothing. Every member of the crew had said much worse about Wisialowski themselves, but now that management had singled him out, the wagons would be circled. The guy was a drunk and a slacker even when he made it to the job on time, but he’d been down there in the tunnels with them and Hanson had probably never had coal dust under his manicured fingernails. At least, that was the way they looked at it.

Tommy thought the warning to Wisialowski had been more than fair, but he wouldn’t dare say so.

Jerry Tolland sat next to him in the mantrip. He scowled and looked at Tommy. “Fucking Hanson.”

Tommy just nodded, rolling his eyes.

“What’d you guys do this weekend?” Jerry asked.

That brought a smile to his face. “I’m building a tree fort for Jake. Ain’t much of a carpenter, but it’s coming out all right. Took Melissa out to dinner Saturday night to that new place, Evergreen. No place to go for beers, but you want to make the wife happy, bring her there.”

“Expensive?”

“Not like you’d think. Shit, they know nobody around here can afford expensive.”

They fell silent after that. Something about the mine had that effect. The deeper they went, the quieter the miners became. It often lasted well into the first hour after work began, until they became acclimated again. Some people might have thought it was fear that made them quiet, but Tommy thought of it as respect. You worked down there in the ground, you had to give the mountain its due.

The mantrip squealed as it slowed, then rocked them a little as it came to a stop.

The crew stepped out of the contraption, cables swaying. There were burned out lights along the length of the shaft, but down here, they were all working perfectly. Not so much as a flicker. When it came to the workspace, they didn’t fuck around. The dim yellow light washed over the stone.

“You smell something?” Jerry asked.

Tommy didn’t. Jerry was always smelling something. Of the entire crew, he was the most paranoid, but nobody thought of it like that. More than once, Al Betts had told his son that paranoia could save his life. So Tommy took another whiff.

“I got nothing.”

Jerry nodded. “Probably just me. McIlveen and I found that methane leak on Friday while we were drilling a bolt hole in the roof. Patched it up ourselves, so I’m not worried about that. But it’s got me on edge.”

“I’m never
not
on edge,” Tommy said.

They fell into line with the rest of the crew, shuffling down the tunnel and into Shaft 39. Tommy’s dad shouted something to Nilsson and the two older guys—closing in on fifty and the senior members of the crew—laughed in such a way that Tommy knew whatever it was had been filthy. The second shift had a few women on the crew, but they’d never had any. Tommy thought maybe the big bosses knew what they were doing, keeping his father and Nilsson away from women miners. What a combination that would be.

They were deep in Shaft 39 when a frown creased Tommy’s forehead. He caught a scent that made his nostrils flare and his upper lip curl. It reminded him of the odour that filled the house every time Melissa ran the self-cleaning program on the oven.

Jerry Tolland moved up beside him. “You sure you don’t smell something.”

“I smell it now,” Tommy replied.

“What the fuck is that
stink
?” someone called from the back of the line, which made Tommy realize that the smell was coming from behind them.

A dull whump echoed along the shaft and the ground shook, just once. A kind of grinding noise reached them, and then only silence. Tommy searched the faces of the miners around him and saw them blanch. He glanced at his father and saw a momentary flicker of fear before Al Betts recovered from the moment.

“Holy shit,” Rob McIlveen said.

Wisialowski put his head into his hands. “We’re screwed.”
Jerry started to cough and then to choke. He covered his mouth and nose, panic in his eyes. Tommy tasted the gas on his tongue and then black smoke started billowing down along the tunnel after them.

“Fuck,” Al said. “All right, this way. Everybody with me, and follow procedure. We’re gonna be fine. We’ve just gotta buy ourselves some time until Hanson gets a team down here to get us out.”

Nobody but Tommy had seen the flicker of fear in his father’s eyes. They all nodded and fell into step behind him. But Tommy couldn’t ignore the fact that they were going deeper into the mountain, farther away from the surface and clean air with every step.

Tommy watched as McIlveen and Jerry Tolland hung a plastic curtain across the shaft. All three of them wore emergency oxygen packs—rescuers, the miners called them—and over the top of Jerry’s rescuer, his eyes were wild. His hands shook as he tucked the curtain up as best he could.

A steady, clanging noise came from behind Tommy. He turned and watched as his dad swung a sledgehammer against the plates and bolts that supported the walls and ceiling of the mine around them. Normally that kind of thing was ill-advised, but right now all they wanted was for someone up above to hear them. By now there would be a rescue attempt going on; folks would be looking for some sign of their location. The hammer on metal might be the only way to signal them.

Nilsson had found the sledgehammer, but now he sat on the floor against the back of the coal rib, his face covered with a bandanna—no rescuer for him. Of the eighteen men, only ten had working oxygen packs. The other rescuers were faulty. The guys who had working oxygen packs were taking turns, just like they were taking turns with the sledgehammer. Tommy felt like puking when he thought about it. These things were supposed to save their lives, give them enough air to last until someone could get to them, but nobody bothered to test them now and again to make sure they were working?

Someone tapped his arm and he turned to see that Jerry and McIlveen had gotten the curtain up.

“What do you think?” Jerry asked. “Cozy, huh?”

“Just like home,” Tommy said.

Home. He’d been trying not to think of home, of Melissa and Jake. Had they heard the news by now? Would Melissa tell Jake that Daddy was trapped down in the mine? No way. She wouldn’t do that to the kid; he was only five years old. But Melissa would be trying to find someone to stay with him so that she could come and stand out there at the mouth of the mine, waiting.

She wouldn’t be there yet. But soon, she’d be out there waiting on him.

Tommy didn’t want to let her down. When he thought about leaving her alone, leaving Jake to grow up without his dad, his heart hurt so much he thought he might scream. No, better not to think of home.

The curtain had created an enclosure about fifty feet square. Not a lot of room for eighteen guys. Not a lot of air, even with the curtain up. The guys without working rescuers would suck up the remaining oxygen in no time.

Tommy watched his father swinging the sledgehammer. Al Betts had come home from the mine every night, black with coal dust and too exhausted to play very much with his son. Tommy had done his damnedest to be different, to make time for Jake whenever he could. But even with the best of intentions, sometimes he just couldn’t.

The tree fort wasn’t finished yet.

Jake had never even asked what would happen if the mine collapsed. At five, the possibility hadn’t even occurred to him. Somehow he’d managed to avoid the fear that lay always beneath the friendly conversation of the entire community. Tommy hadn’t been that lucky. He didn’t remember how old he was when he first asked his father about what would happen in a cave-in. He had seen something about it in an old movie on television.

Watching his father now—still so strong and grim while closing in on fifty—he remembered the way the man had softened. He’d crouched down to get even with Tommy and ruffled his son’s hair.

“You’ve got nothing to worry about, Tom-Tom. Anything goes wrong down there, the Lost Miner will get us out.”

Tommy’s eyes had gone wide. “The Lost Miner?”

That had only been the first time his father told him the story. For years, Tommy had asked for stories of the mysterious, ghostly miner. His father had spun tales, mostly of his own invention, but some of them surely local legend, of a man who had died underground, and who would always appear to save trapped miners who called to him. By the age of eleven, Tommy had realized that they were only stories, but some part of him had still believed. When his father decided he was too old for such stories, he had felt a terrible loss.

Al swung the sledgehammer. He turned to glance at Nilsson and the others who were without oxygen packs, then wiped the sweat from his brow. Al Betts was no ghost, and he wasn’t lost, but Tommy thought his old man might be their best hope.

He went over to his father and reached out to take the sledgehammer. “Have a rest, Dad. Let me take a few whacks.”

His father nodded slowly and bent over, winded.

Tommy stared at him. “You all right?”

“I will be. Give it a go, Tom.”

As he turned to go and sit with the others against the coal rib, Tommy called to him. Al came back and put a hand on his arm, gave it a brief squeeze.

“We’re gonna be all right. Just gotta hunker down, now, try not to suck up any more air than we need. Sip at it, make it last. They’ll be here.”

Tommy studied his face, searching for a crack in his father’s mask of confidence but finding none. Maybe it was for his benefit—his and the rest of the crew’s—but right then he thought his father actually felt confident that, even with so little air for so many of them and with the toxins seeping in around the edges of the curtain, they would be rescued in time. Two miles into the mine, out of contact with the surface, Al Betts believed in salvation. Blind faith.