Power in the Blood (74 page)

Another shot passed him as Clay flung himself around the corner, out of the alley, and began sprinting along the sidewalk toward the livery stable, his feet hurting in their new high-heeled boots. And there was his horse, tethered to the hitching rail outside the livery’s big double doors. He knew, as he mounted, that any man who ran from his wife in full view of the public was finished, a laughingstock, even if the wife was armed and angry.

Clay dug in his heels and rode hard for the office, where he paused only as long as it took to snatch up his sawed-off and a few dollars in cash, then he ran down the side stairs three at a time and mounted again. Clay rode through an alley to another street, then kicked his horse into a gallop. He was clear of Dry Wash minutes later.

32

The sensation of feeling the world drop away beneath him always brought a smile to Slade’s face. As his stomach pressed up against his lungs the smile broadened. No one ever saw the smile, since the elevator cage’s descent was undertaken in complete darkness. Vertical distance from the top of the shaft to its bottom was seventeen hundred feet. Slade was packed into the cage shoulder-to-shoulder with a dozen or so miners, the gate was slammed; the abrupt descent began, and that was when Slade always smiled. He wondered why he felt the need to do so, and decided it was the sense of dizziness inside his head as he and his coworkers plummeted down the shaft. He had heard drinkers describe a similar sensation that overtook them gradually as they drank, but Slade felt no need for alcohol. If the pleasantness could be given to his head for nothing once each day, that was preferable to spending cash on whiskey and sharing the company of drunken men he preferred not to know. Standing among them during the cage’s controlled falling was bad enough, but the dizziness made that bearable.

The descent was filled with noise as guide wheels at each corner of the cage spun and hummed along rails holding it away from the shaft’s rock walls. As each of the mine’s working levels was passed, a wan golden light burst briefly upon the descending cage, and was gone again. The temperature began to rise. Newcomers to the mine were told the shaft was so deep it encroached upon the cavernous and brimstone-filled regions of hell. At the surface, snow was falling, but in the shaft each man felt himself begin to sweat as the cage rumbled and rattled deeper still. The air itself began to change, becoming thicker, laced with a sickly humidity ripe with the smell of oil and nitroglycerin fumes, and the more pungent odor of mule and human excrement. It was a sinking from brightness to darkness, from a world of sun to a stygian hole pricked by carbide lamps and candlelight.

The cage neared the bottom of the shaft and began to slow through a series of jerkings, eventually coming to a halt at the lowest level. The gate was opened and the cage emptied quickly, each man knowing his task and the place appointed for it. The tunnel they walked through begat a maze of similar tunnels branching in all directions. The Grand Mogul mine was one of the most complex in Glory Hole, and currently extended eleven miles along forty-seven individual tunnels on seven different levels. Narrow-gauge ore-cart rails ran through the tunnels, and alongside these ran the compressed-air hoses that powered each tunnel face’s mechanical drill.

Slade worked with Shoupe and McCaulay, these being the only two men capable of enduring the silences Slade was known to maintain for days at a time. He had been thought mute by some until he spoke, and his unwillingness to hold even the simplest conversation with anyone made him an unpopular figure. Shoupe and McCaulay were nontalkers also, and it was arranged by the pit boss that the three of them should become a team. The arrangement had withstood their mutual silences for almost a month now, and their output equaled that of any four-man team.

The foul-smelling pipeway through rock these three tramped, pushing an empty ore cart before them, was recorded on the mining director’s chart seventeen hundred feet above them as Southwest Seven Nine, indicating its direction, tunnel number and level. It was currently one hundred twenty-nine feet long, but the blasting set off at the end of the preceding shift should have lengthened it by another three or four feet. The first task of Slade, Shoupe and McCaulay was to clear away the rubble of ore the blast had left behind.

They began without consultation, each man an expert at the lifting of jagged chunks big as their chest, heavy as a small man, and they quickly loaded most of it into the cart. While Shoupe went to fetch a mule, McCaulay and Slade began setting up the thick metal column that would support the mechanical drill for its next assault on the new rock face exposed at the tunnel’s end. The column was jacked and wedged between floor and ceiling, then kicked several times to ensure that it was solid. The universal joint was coupled to it midway, and the two-hundred-twenty-pound drill lifted by both men to fit into its receiving slot. By the time Shoupe returned with a mule, the air hoses had been coupled and tightened. The mule, blinded by a lifetime spent in darkness, was hitched to the ore cart. The last chunks of ore were stacked on top of the load, and the mule was led away, straining against its harness.

Every shift began in this fashion, with a clearing away of the preceding shift’s displaced rock. Blasting was always carried out at the end of a shift, since the dust and explosive vapors made air in the vicinity unfit to breathe for some time afterward. For the miners, though, their true work began when the task of hauling away the rubble had been completed; that was when they could begin preparing the rock face for their own blast; that was when the drill’s control valves were opened and it came alive.

Slade’s delight was to manipulate the machine they called the widow-maker. Its power and noise and the startling ease with which it rammed holes through solid rock had impressed him the moment he first saw one in operation. He loved the powerful vibrations it sent through his body when the piston and drill bit began their crazed hammering. All three men had their ears plugged with cotton against the deafening sound as its jarring, Gatling-gun delivery of power drove the drill into rock like a toothpick into cheese, its staccato hammering like some colossal woodpecker of the netherworld. Slade felt his body thrumming in a kind of ecstasy. The drill was a part of him, linked by an umbilical of air hoses to the distant steam-driven compressor. He was the machine’s guiding eye, its brain, the thing that determined where it should enter virgin rock, at what angle and to what depth, and Slade became even more a part of the drill as he was forced to close his eyes against the fine particles spitting from the hole he bored. Blinded by his own device, he leaned against the trembling heart of it, felt its concussions set his teeth clicking, and willed the turning bit to bite deeper still, penetrating an endless, depthless wall set in place at the beginning of time.

Shoupe and McCaulay were content to allow Slade exclusive use of the widow-maker. McCaulay had once attempted, out of a sense of fair-mindedness, to relieve Slade from the task of guiding it, and had been pushed away. The lesson was not lost on Shoupe; Slade had some kind of perverse need to feel the drill’s awesome hammering run through his body, and since his partners were not similarly addicted to vibration, Slade commandeered the machine for the duration of its usage each shift, without complaint and without competition. Like the silence each man practiced, the arrangement was part of what allowed them to operate together as a team. Shoupe and McCaulay were sufficiently cognizant of the Grand Mogul’s operation as a whole to understand that the three of them were in a sense unique; Slade reserved that sense for himself alone. If he served on the only three-man team beneath Glory Hole, it was because he did not like to be crowded, and the exclusive trio was made possible solely in order to please him, in acknowledgment of his superiority.

The rock face required on average five to seven holes to accommodate dynamite. Slade drilled them all, stopping only to change the drill steels, as each one in turn wore out its cutting tip. The dulled steels were taken away for reforging, a new one was inserted into the drill, and the process resumed. When the final hole was completed, the widow-maker was uncoupled from its supporting column and transported back along the tunnel, out of harm’s way, and the supporting column followed it. By then, enough time had passed for the men to sit and eat the lunch each had brought with him in a tin pail.

Slade ate at a distance from his partners, who sometimes profaned the silence with a word or two expressing approval of the food their wives had packed for them. Slade preferred nothing more intrusive than the distant sounds from other tunnels where men performed identical tasks. The echoing of faraway drills seemed almost to relax him as he ate. Having no wife, he ate a meal prepared for fifty-cents by a woman whose husband had perished in the mines; she made sandwiches for scores of bachelor miners, and eked out a living not much reduced from the time her husband had brought home a wage. Slade always found his fifty-cent sandwich enjoyable. It was generally roast beef, thickly built and well worth the money. He had eaten roast beef sandwiches every day on another job, work he had done somewhere else, aboveground work among trees, but he could not remember the details of it. Certainly there had been no thunderous machines involved, so he doubted that he had liked it as much as mining. He could not quite recall how he had become a miner, but that was not a matter of any importance, since it was the day-to-day operation of the drill that mattered, not the route whereby Slade had found his calling.

While he ate, he thought of something overheard as he passed a knot of children the previous evening, miners’ brats playing in the snow; they had spoken of giants beneath the earth, slumbering titans on beds of stone, their dreamless sleep centuries old, and they had spoken of the shattering of that sleep by intruding hard-rock miners, and the consequences thereof. Slade pondered his options if he should drill through into the chamber of a giant. If the creature attacked him, he would aim his widow-maker at its heart, impale it as a harpooner kills his whale. It would be a fine thing to kill a giant. Slade had never killed anyone that he could remember, but a giant would be a fine thing to kill. If he could not kill it, the giant would have proved itself superior to Slade, and it would not be shameful to die at the hands of so great a being. He would be content if he killed the giant, or the giant killed him. It made no real difference either way. Slade hardly thought of death at all, even if dying suddenly was commonplace in the mines. No pocket of explosive gas would kill him, no weakened timber supports come down on his head, no thousands of tons of rock collapse and crush him. It would take a giant, and Slade was glad to have overheard the children talking; now he knew what kind of death might possibly await him in the Grand Mogul.

When he had finished eating, Slade went a short distance back along the tunnel to relieve his bowels. All the tunnels stank of shit, but he was not offended by it anymore. The smell of the mine was simply a price he had to pay for the privilege of working there and sinking the long steel tooth of the widow-maker deep into rock that might give way at any moment to reveal the sleeping giants. Being a hard-rock miner was the best life there could be, and Slade was living it. The occasional headaches that came to plague him were nothing to do with the mine; he remembered that the pain between his temples had always been a part of him, long before he came to Glory Hole from whichever place he had been before. It was not good, though, when he woke up some mornings and could not remember who he was, or where, or even that he was a miner. He would have to lie very still and concentrate for a while, and it would all come back to him before breakfast, which he ate in the food shack run by the woman who sold him his lunch every day. She was a nice woman and always gave him a big sandwich. He sometimes could see why men married women, but Slade didn’t want to, not when he could get the sandwiches and breakfasts whenever he wanted, for a very reasonable cost. He was married to the widow-maker, even if it spat rock dust at him and shook his bones to pieces and was slowly deafening him. His life was complete as it was. He wouldn’t want to change anything, except maybe the headaches and the forgetting.

Slade attended to his anus with the greasy paper his lunch had been wrapped in, and returned to the face, where his partners had already resumed work. Shoupe was a master at inserting and tamping red paperbound sticks of dynamite into the holes Slade had drilled, each stick with a fulminate-of-mercury blasting cap inserted into the end. It was painstaking work, and he would not be rushed. Shoupe checked every stick before insertion, unwrapping a section of each to be sure the nitroglycerin had not separated out from the inert stabilizing compound and begun to lace the outside of the stick with dangerously sensitive crystals, as sometimes happened in winter. He worked slowly and methodically, and when he was satisfied, he stepped aside for the wick man.

McCaulay’s talent lay in being able to estimate exactly how long the black powder fuses he attached to the blasting caps needed to be. He arranged them in a precise pattern and twined their ends together to ensure that they not only would be lit simultaneously but would detonate at precisely the same instant. He, too, would not be hurried through his specialty, and Slade found his attention drifting. Shoupe had carried away the last of the dulled steels for transportation back to the surface for blacksmithing, and had not returned, in all likelihood had stopped somewhere en route to relieve himself.

Watching McCaulay as he worked with lengths of fuse, Slade experienced one of his very rare moments of insight into the existence of other humans. He usually looked on his fellow men with the same lack of empathy with which he might have viewed a herd of cattle; he accepted that they existed, but did not believe they resembled him, at least not in anything but physical form. McCaulay, Slade saw with a sudden burst of acumen, was a man; he ate and slept and performed his work in much the same fashion as Slade, and very likely had thoughts about the world, as did Slade. McCaulay might even have secret difficulties, like Slade. But that was too much to accept. If McCaulay had troubles, they could not have been like Slade’s. It almost scared Slade to think of another man, mere yards away, who might be anything like himself, deep down inside, where he knew the real man lived. No one, Slade reasoned, could be the same as himself in the deep inside part, because if it were so, then Slade would not be who he had always thought himself to be. If there was someone else like him in the world, Slade would be made smaller because of that man.