I Married a Communist (29 page)

Without looking up from the skull of a muskrat whose loose teeth he was fixing in its jaw with glue, Horace slowly shook his head.

"But this is exactly what people are saying," Ira told him. "'You have to watch out for the Communist threat—they're going to take over this country.' This Truman is showing the Republicans his muscle—that's what he is up to. That's what this is all about. Showing his muscle at the expense of innocent Koreans. We're going in there and all to prop up this fascist bastard Syngman Rhee. We're going to bomb those sons of bitches, y'understand? President Wonderful Truman. General Wonderful MacArthur ..."

And, unable to stop myself from being bored by the tireless harangue that was Ira's primal script, I was thinking, spitefully, "Frank doesn't know how lucky he is to be deaf. That muskrat doesn't know how lucky it is to be dead. That deer..." Et cetera.

Same thing happened—Syngman Rhee, President Wonderful Truman, General Wonderful MacArthur—when we went by the rock dump out on the highway one morning to say hello to Tommy Minarek, a retired miner, a burly, hearty Slovak who had been working in the mines when Ira first showed up in Zinc Town in 1929 and who had taken a fatherly interest in Ira back then. Now Tommy worked for the town, looking after the rock dump—its one tourist attraction—where, along with serious mineral collectors, families sometimes drove out with their kids to go hunting through the vast dump for chunks of rock to take home and put under an ultraviolet light. Under the light, as Tommy explained to me, the minerals "fluoresce"—glow, that is, with fluorescent red, orange, purple, mustard, blue, cream, and green; some look to be made of black velvet.

Tommy sat on a big flat rock at the entrance to the dump, hatless in all weather, a handsome old fellow with a wide, square face, white hair, hazel eyes, and all his teeth. He charged the adults a quarter to go in and, though the town told him to charge the kids a dime, he always let the kids in free. "People come from all over the world to go in there," Tommy told me. "Some through the years that come every Saturday and Sunday, even wintertime. I make fires for certain people and they give me a few bucks for that. They come every Saturday or Sunday, rain or shine."

On the hood of Tommy's jalopy, parked directly beside the large flat rock where Tommy sat, he had samples of minerals from the collection in his own cellar spread out on a towel for sale, chunky specimens selling for as much as five and six dollars, pickle jars full of smaller specimens for a dollar fifty, and small brown paper bags full of bits and pieces of rock, which went for fifty cents. He kept the fifteen-, twenty-, and twenty-five-dollar stuff in the trunk of the car.

"In the back," he told me, "I got the more valuable things. I can't put 'em out here. I go sometimes across the road to Gary's machine shop, to use the toilet or somethin', and the stuff is out here ... I had two specimens last fall, in the back, guy put a black thing over 'em, and he's lookin' with a light, and I had two fifty-dollar specimens in the car and he got 'em both."

The year before, I had sat alone with Tommy outside the rock dump, watching him deal with the tourists and the collectors and listening to his spiel (and later I wrote a radio play about that morning called
The Old Miner).
That was the morning after he'd come to have a hot dog dinner with us at the shack. Ira was at me, educating me, all the time when I was up at the shack, and Tommy was brought in as visiting lecturer, to give me the lowdown on the plight of the miner before the union came in.

"Tell Nathan about your dad, Tom. Tell him what happened to your dad."

"My dad died from workin' in the mine. Him and another guy went in a place where two other guys worked every day, in a raise, a vertical hole. Both of them didn't show up that day. It's a ways up, over a hundred feet up. My dad and another guy the boss sent in there, a young guy, a husky guy—was he a beautiful built guy! I went to the hospital and I seen the guy and he wasn't in bed, and my dad was stretched out, didn't even move. I never seen him move. The second day I come in, this other guy was talkin' to another guy, joking, he wasn't even in bed even. My dad was in bed."

Tommy was born in 1880 and started working in the mines in 1902, "May the twenty-fourth," he told me, "1902. That's about the time Thomas Edison was up here, the famous inventor, experimentin'." Though Tommy, despite his years in the mines, was a robust, upright human specimen who hardly looked to be seventy, he had himself to confess that he was not as alert as he'd once been, and every time he got a little befuddled or got stalled in his story, Ira had to get him on the trail again. "I don't think that quick no more," Tommy told us. "I have to follow myself back, starting with the ABCs, you know, and try to hit into it. Get into it somewhere. I'm still alert, but not as good as I was."

"What was the accident?" Ira asked Tommy. "What happened to your dad? Tell Nathan what happened to him."

"The station broke. See, we put a timber in the back of this four-by-four hole at a certain degree—we put one back there, have to dig it out with a pick to make it slantlike, so I wedge this in and I cut it at an angle. One in the front and one over here. And then we put a two-inch plank on there."

Ira interrupted to try to push him ahead, to the good stuff. "So what happened? Tell him how your dad died."

"It collapsed. The vibration collapsed it. The machine and everything went down. Over a hundred feet. He never recovered. His bones were all broke. He died about a year after. We had this old-fashioned stove, and he had his feet right in there, trying to stay warm. Couldn't keep warm."

"Did they have any workmen's compensation? You ask, Nathan, ask the questions. That's what you do if you want to be a writer. Don't be shy. Ask Tommy if he had workmen's compensation."

But I
was
shy. Here, eating hot dogs with me, was a real miner, thirty years in the zinc mines. I couldn't have been any more shy if Tommy Minarek had been Albert Einstein. "Did they?" I asked.

"Give you anything? The company? He didn't get a penny," Tommy said bitterly. "The company was the trouble and the bosses was the trouble. The bosses down there didn't seem to care for their house. You know what I mean? For their territory that they worked in every day. Like me, if I was a boss down there, I would check these planks goin' over where the people walk over the holes. I don't know how deep them holes are, but certain people got killed down there, walkin' on these planks, and the plank broke. Rotten. They never took care of them to check them darn planks. They never did it."

"Didn't you have a union then?" I asked.

"We had no union. My father didn't even get a penny."

I tried to think of what else I ought to know as a writer. "Didn't you have the United Mine Workers down here?" I asked.

"We had it later. In the forties already. It was too late by then," he said, outrage again in his voice. "He was dead, I was retired—and the union didn't help that much anyway. How could they? We had one leader, our local president—he was good, but what could he do? You couldn't do nothin' with a power like that. Look, years before we had a guy tried to organize us. This person went to get water for his house from a spring down the road. Never come back. Nobody ever heard of him anymore. Tryin' to organize the union."

"Ask about the company, Nathan."

"The company store," Tommy said. "I seen people get a white slip."

"Tell him, Tom, what a white slip is."

"You didn't get no pay. The company store got all his money. A white slip. I seen that."

"Owners make a lot of money?" Ira asked.

"The president of the zinc company, the main guy, he's got a big mansion over here, up on the hill alone. Big house up there. I heard one of his friends say, when he died, that he had nine and a half million dollars. That's what he owned."

"And what'd you get to start?" Ira asked him.

"Thirty-two cents an hour. First job I worked in the boiler house. I was twenty-some years old. Then I went down in the mines. Highest I could get was ninety cents because I was like a boss. A headman like. Next to the boss. I did everything."

"Pensions?"

"Nothin. My father-in-law got a pension. He got eight dollars. Thirty-some years he worked. Eight dollars a month, that's what he got. I didn't see no pension."

"Tell Nathan how you eat down there."

"We have to eat underground."

"Everybody?" Ira asked.

"The bosses are the only ones who come up twelve o'clock and eat in their washroom. The rest of us, underground."

The next morning, Ira drove me out to the rock dump to sit there with Tommy and learn from him on my own all I could about the evil consequences of the profit motive as it functioned in Zinc Town. "Here's my boy, Tom. Tom's a good man and a good teacher, Nathan."

"I try to be the best," Tommy said.

"He was my teacher down in the mines. Weren't you, Tom?"

"That I was, Gil."

Tommy called Ira Gil. When I had asked, at breakfast that morning, why Tommy called him Gil, Ira laughed and said, "That's what they called me down there. Gil. Never really knew why. Somebody called me that one day, and it just stuck. Mexicans, Russians, Slovaks, all called me Gil."

In 1997, I learned from Murray that Ira had not been telling me the truth. They had called him Gil because up in Zinc Town he had called himself Gil. Gil Stephens.

"I taught Gil how to set the explosives when he was a kid. By then I was a runner, I was the one that drills and sets up everything, the explosives, the timbers and everything. Taught Gil here to drill, and in every one of them you put a stick of dynamite in there, and put a circuit wire through."

"I'm going, Tom. I'll pick him up later. Tell him about the explosives. Educate this city slicker, Mr. Minarek. Tell Nathan about the smell from the explosives and what that does to a man's insides."

Ira drove off, and Tommy said, "The smell? You have to get used to that. I had it once, bad. I was mucking out a pillar, not a pillar, an entrance, a four-by-four entrance. And we drilled and fired it, and we put water on it all night, on that muck, we call it muck, and the next day it smelled like hell. I got a whiff of that good. It bothered me for a while. I was sick. Not as sick as some of the guys, but sick enough."

It was summertime, already hot at nine
A.M.,
but even out at the ugly rock dump, with the big machine shop across the highway where they had the not-so-hygienic toilet Tommy used, it was blue overhead and beautiful, and pretty soon families started driving up in cars to visit. One guy stuck his head out the car window and asked me, "Is this the one where the kids can go in and pick rocks and stuff?"

"Yep," I said, instead of "Yes."

"You got kids here?" Tommy asked him.

He pointed to two in the back seat.

"Right here, sir," Tommy said. "Go in and look around. And when you go out, right here, half a buck a bag here for a miner who mined 'em for thirty years, special rocks for the kids."

An elderly woman drove up in a car full of kids, her grandchildren probably, and when she got out, Tommy politely saluted her. "Lady, when you're going out, and you want a nice bag of rocks for the little ones from a miner who mined 'em for thirty years, stop here. Fifty cents a bag. Special rocks for the kids. They fluoresce beautifully."

Getting in the swing of things—getting in the swing of the
joys
of the profit motive as it functioned in Zinc Town—I told her, "He's got the good stuff, lady."

"I'm the only one," he told her, "who makes these bags. These bags are from the good mine. The other is completely different. I don't put no junk in there. There's
real
stuff in there. If you see 'em under light, you'll enjoy what's in there. There's pieces in there only comes from this mine, nowhere else in the world."

"You're in the sun without a hat," she told Tommy. "You don't get hot sitting there like that?"

"Been doing this many years," he told her. "See these ones on my car? These fluoresce different colors. They look ugly but they're nice under light, they got different things in 'em. It's got a lot of different mixtures in."

"This is a fella"—"fella," not "fellow," said I—"who really knows rocks. Thirty years in the mines," I said.

Then a couple pulled up who looked more like city people than any of the other tourists. As soon as they got out of their car, they began to examine Tommy's higher-priced specimens on the hood of the car and to consult together quietly. Tommy whispered to me, "They want my rocks in the worst way. I got a collection, nobody can touch it. This here's the most extraordinary mineral deposit on this planet—and I got the best of 'em."

Here I piped up. "This guy's got the best stuff. Thirty years in the mines. He's got beautiful rocks here. Beautiful rocks." And they bought four pieces, for a sale totaling fifty-five dollars, and I thought, I'm helpin'. I'm helpin' a real miner.

"If you want any minerals again," I said as they got back with their purchase into their car, "you come here. This here's the most extraordinary mineral deposit on this planet."

I was having a fine time of it until, close to noon, Brownie arrived and the silly gratuitousness of the role I was so enthusiastically playing was revealed even to me.

Brownie—Lloyd Brown—was a couple of years older than me, a skinny, crewcutted, sharp-nosed boy, pale and harmless-looking in the extreme, particularly in the white shopkeeper's apron that he wore over a clean white shirt and a clip-on black bow tie and a pair of fresh dungarees. Because his relation to himself was so transparently simple, his chagrin when he saw me with Tommy was plastered all over him and pitiable. Compared with Brownie, I felt like a kid with the most abundant and frenzied existence, even just sitting quietly beside Tommy Minarek; compared with Brownie, that's what I
was.

But if something about my complexity mocked him, something about his simplicity also mocked me. I turned everything into an adventure, looking always to be altered, while Brownie lived with a sense of nothing other than hard necessity, had been so shaped and tamed by constraint as to be able to play only the role of himself. He was without any craving that wasn't brewed in Zinc Town. The only thoughts he ever wanted to think were the thoughts that everybody else in Zinc Town thought. He wanted life to repeat and repeat itself, and I wanted to break out. I felt like a freak wanting to be other than Brownie—perhaps for the very first time but not for the last. What would it be like to have that passion to break out vanish from my life? What must it be like to be Brownie? Wasn't that what the fascination with "the people" was really all about?
What is it like to be them?