Sister Mine (22 page)

INTERVIEWER:
Are you thinking about the danger?

LIB:
You know there's danger in this job. You're conscious of it but you don't think about it. If you think about it, you can't do your job.

DUSTY:
There's danger everywhere. You can get killed in your bathtub. You can have a totally safe job and end up dead. You can be a secretary for an insurance company and a terrorist can fly an airplane into your building and you're dead. It's fate. It's your personal fate. You can't pick your job that way.

RAY:
You know what they say, eagles may soar but groundhogs don't get sucked into jet engines.

(laughter)

INTERVIEWER:
What do you wear for protection? What kind of gear?

LIB:
Wear? Well, some guys wear coveralls. Others wear jeans and flannel shirts. Whatever you're comfortable in but you gotta wear long johns cause you're gonna be cold.

E.J.:
Knee pads, rain gear, rubber boots—steel-toed. Ear protection. Our helmets.

JIMMY:
Our tool belts.

DUSTY:
They have our ID tags on them.

INTERVIEWER:
Let me ask this. Can each of you try and remember one thing you were thinking before you went off to your individual jobs?

DUSTY:
I remember looking over at Jimmy, who'd already set off toward the bolters, and I saw his shadow against the wall, all stooped over the way we all walk and he was using his hammer as a walking stick and I thought he looked sort of like a gorilla using a little cane.

(loud laughter)

JIMMY:
Such deep thoughts from one so young.

RAY:
To tell the truth, I was thinking about the bonus money, too. My oldest daughter, Autumn, was having her birthday in a couple days and my wife, Vonda, was throwing this big party for her and I was worried about what she was spending.

INTERVIEWER:
Lib, what were you thinking about?

LIB:
I was thinking about the broken shuttle car. I decided I'd send Sam and Andy to take a look at it during our lunch break. Andy has a knack for electronics and jury-rigging that comes in real handy in a J&P mine, since Cam Jack never pays to have anything properly repaired or replaced.

(silence)

LIB:
Allegedly.

INTERVIEWER:
What do you mean?

LIB:
We're not supposed to talk about what we think caused the explosion.

INTERVIEWER:
Who told you that?

E.J.:
Some lawyer.

LIB:
Ray's wife, Vonda, had a lawyer waiting for us when they brought us out.

RAY:
She had potato salad waiting for us, too.

INTERVIEWER:
What about you, Jimmy?

JIMMY:
Nothing sticks out in my mind about that particular morning. I was probably thinking what I usually think. There's a certain state of mind we all have to reach in order to do this job. Not necessarily because we're afraid but because it's a different world than what we live in. We might not even be conscious that we're doing it. I do it by thinking of Jojo as a lady, someone who will give us what we want if we treat her well.

(laughter)

DUSTY:
I like to think we're like astronauts.

LIB:
Astronauts?

DUSTY:
We're going where no men have gone before us, just like them. We're space explorers, only we're exploring an inside confined space instead of an outside endless space.

JIMMY:
Now that is deep, Dusty. I like that.

INTERVIEWER:
That's very interesting. What were you thinking about, E.J.?

E.J.:
Lunch.

(laughter)

INTERVIEWER:
So everyone has gone off to do their jobs.

LIB:
We were about to break for lunch. I handed the controls of the miner over to E.J. and told him to finish one last cut. I wanted one more car full before moving onto the new room. Ray was still on the scoop. Jimmy and Dusty were settling down to eat. I was gonna drive the last load to the belt.

E.J.:
All of a sudden, the miner shut down.

LIB:
We went and took a look at the methane monitor in back.

E.J.:
I'll never forget that. I'd never seen such a high reading. That was a helluva lot of damp.

INTERVIEWER:
You mentioned firedamp before. Now damp. What are you referring to?

LIB:
Damp's a term for any gasses found in the mines. There's black-damp, that's carbon dioxide mostly, nitrogen mixed with it sometimes. It also means any time when there's not enough oxygen to breathe. Afterdamp's what you call all the gasses mixed together after an explosion. The air's highly poisonous then because of the amount of carbon monoxide. That's what our self-rescuers are for. They provide protection from the carbon monoxide.

JIMMY:
Firedamp is methane mixed with air. It's highly explosive.

INTERVIEWER:
Where does the methane come from?

JIMMY:
Everywhere. Methane comes from the decomposition of coal.

INTERVIEWER:
Is that what caused this explosion?

RAY:
Probably.

INTERVIEWER:
So there's no way to eliminate this problem?

LIB:
If you're going to put men in a coal mine, you're going to have firedamp.

INTERVIEWER:
What were you thinking when you saw the reading?

E.J.:
I'm thinking about what would happen if the tiniest spark got ignited. Even a spark from two particles of coal dust colliding. We'd all be dead.

LIB:
I'm thinking we're going to have to shut down this room, maybe the whole crosscut. I was seriously pissed.

I called Ray and Jimmy and Dusty over. We checked out the area with our personal monitors. The gas was everywhere. Then I smelled it.

INTERVIEWER:
Smelled what? The gas?

LIB:
No, firedamp has no smell.

I didn't know at first. I just knew it was something we weren't supposed to be smelling. The first thing I did was walk over to the mine phone and call Andy and Sam, who were still fixing the broken shuttle car. I explained the situation and told them to get out. I figured better safe than sorry.

RAY:
Lib saved our lives by doing that.

LIB:
I didn't save our lives. The rescue crew saved our lives.

JIMMY:
Because he made that call, Andy and Sam got out. They were able to tell the rescue crews our exact location.

DUSTY:
We all started to smell it.

RAY:
It kind of smelled like rubber burning, but it was so faint it was hard to tell.

LIB:
I left them and started checking out the machinery. Then I started checking the dozens of cables all over the floor. Then I saw it, or at least I thought I saw it. I couldn't be sure. From underneath one of the pieces of duct tape we use to patch cables, I thought I saw a wisp of smoke.

I turned around and screamed, “Get the fuck out! Get the fuck out now!”(silence)

INTERVIEWER:
What's the next thing you remember?

DUSTY:
I never heard the explosion. I heard this loud, whistling wind that picked me up and carried me along, bashing me against the walls. I felt like I was burning up and I could feel all these pieces of coal hitting me in the face. Then all of a sudden the noise stopped all at once. It kind of reminded me of the way people stop clapping at a concert. When the noise stopped, the wind stopped, too, and dropped me.

RAY:
I saw this blue flame streak past me, followed by millions of little glittering stars. I guess they were coal dust lit on fire. It was the bluest blue I've ever seen. I can't even describe it. It was beautiful. The whole thing was pretty like fireworks except I couldn't enjoy it since I was pretty sure I was dead.

E.J.:
I got thrown around, too. And dropped. Pretty much the way Dusty described it. The light on my helmet stayed lit, but it didn't help me to see once I stopped moving. The beam couldn't cut through the twister of coal dust.

RAY:
That's what it was like. A twister.

E.J.:
The lamp only lit up the haze from the inside like car headlights in a bad fog. I turned it off. I felt better in the dark than I did in the middle of all these glowing gray swirls. I knew it was gas and dust and all of it was poisonous and combustible. I didn't want to see it. I could move better in the dark.

INTERVIEWER:
Were any of you together when you came to?

RAY:
Not at first.

DUSTY:
It takes a couple minutes to realize what happened. Then you panic. I raised my hand up and hit rock and realized the ceiling was only a foot or two from my face. I started to lose it. I thought I'd been buried alive. The gas was real bad but I was able to get my rescuer on my face. Then I just started screaming. Screaming into a gas mask. How stupid is that? It's like being an astronaut who's been ejected from his rocket in deep space and I'm just floating around out there in all that black shit. All alone. I'm dead. I'm dead but I'm not dead yet. I just got to lie here and wait to die. Wait to suffocate. I'm gonna suffocate.

(silence)

DUSTY:
I was gonna suffocate.

E.J.:
Hey, it's okay.

(murmured assurances)

E.J.:
I think Dusty had it worse than any of us. He really thought he'd been buried alive at first. I had some space. Once the wind died down and stopped stirring up the coal dust, I could see around me. I was in the room where we'd all finally end up.

INTERVIEWER:
What kind of space are we talking about?

E.J.:
About ten by fifteen feet. Four feet high.

INTERVIEWER:
That's not much space.

E.J.:
I was thankful for it. Believe me. I looked around and found

Ray. He was buried up to his neck in coal. At first I thought I only found his head.

DUSTY:
I did only find Jimmy's head.

(laughter)

INTERVIEWER:
Well, you must have found the rest of him eventually…

DUSTY:
Once I calmed down I decided to see how bad things were. It turned out there was solid rock all around me except there was an opening to my right. Not much bigger than a garbage can lid. I turned over and crawled into it. It started to get a little wider.

Then I felt something soft brush against my hand, and I freaked. All I could think of was mine rats. I'd never seen one myself but my granddad used to tell stories of him and the other miners and how they used to feed them. I thought, what if I've stumbled on a nest of them? What if they were going to swarm on top of me and eat me alive?

(silence)

DUSTY:
Then I thought, what if I'd just touched the leg of a gigantic spider?

(laughter)

DUSTY:
Who knows what all lives down there? Just because we've never seen one doesn't mean they can't exist. Maybe they sleep for hundreds of years but the explosion could have woken one up.

(more laughter then it begins to subside)

DUSTY:
I couldn't stand the tension so I stuck my hand out and touched it again and I realized it was hair. It was a head. Then I started thinking about all the stories I'd ever heard about mine explosions. Men in pieces. Heads and arms and feet blown everywhere.

So I reached out again, and I closed my eyes. I remember doing that. I closed my eyes even though I'm in the darkest place in the world where you can't see anything. And I grabbed the hair and yanked with all my might.

(he starts to laugh)

DUSTY:
And the head says…

(he laughs harder, the others join in)

DUSTY:
“What are you trying to do, man? Rip my head off my shoulders?”

And I said, “Jimmy it's you. Are you all right?”

And he said, “Fuck, no.”

(laughter)

DUSTY:
It turned out Jimmy was pinned beneath one of the bolters. And it was wedged beneath a pile of coal. It took awhile to get him free.

JIMMY:
This is where I leave the narrative, gentlemen.

I don't remember anything after Dusty here tried to rip my head off my shoulders, although they've told me that I drifted in and out of consciousness. I guess that's the mind's way of dealing with an injury like this so you can maintain your sanity if you survive. I don't remember anything.

E.J.:
His leg was bad. We weren't sure he was going to make it. He was burning up with fever by the end.

RAY:
You could smell the gangrene.