The Deadheart Shelters (7 page)

Inside the coal mine I immediately lost my breath. We got there through a tunnel descending underground and the walls and ceilings were a black that nothing could lighten, and each rock that broke plumed out more dust than I knew rocks could hold to black the air too. It was something you got used to, Felt said. And sometimes when a piece of coal came off a bluebird flew out from behind it, but by the time it left the mines its wings were also black.

It took me half an hour every day to wash the black from my face. Often I’d think it was all gone but when I’d wake up my pillow had black on it.

And my fingers, too, would leave prints in black on everything. I began to dream in black. The dreams are hard to think of much because they were formless; different spots of dampness, pressure applied.

The men all began different colors, moon-pale or dark like new mulch, but came up black.

When we came out of the mines, coal dust was blooming into the sky like an airbag, obscuring the day’s relaxation into evening. When the sun is sugar spun into cotton candy and the jellyfish float beside the lampshade. Dirt and I were coughing more than the others, sitting on overturned milk crates to catch our breath in the oxygenless field.

“It’s harder to do this than I expected,” he said, leaning over to spit black saliva on the ground.

“It’s not the work that’s so hard,” I said.

“No, it’s not the work.”

Felt came over to us, undaunted by the dirty air, and flipped over another milk crate to sit down. “Can you do this?”

“We can do it,” I said.

“It’s easy. Most of us can do with our eyes closed, there’s little to it. You’ll find you could almost do it in your sleep.”

“I can imagine.”

“Well you two should get up before the submarine closes. You miss out on that you’ll be stiff as a bridge tomorrow; all of us know this.”

“The submarine?”

“It’s where we relax.” The miners were walking toward a distant lump, through the dust they looked like buzzards on a beached fish. We followed them. A hundred footsteps out the dust cleared and the air began to smell like cilantro again; then we could see it.

The submarine lay on a bed of dead grass and you could hear it, like the sound of a muted television I’ve come to know so well since, by the time you got close enough to see it. One after another the miners went in, watching those before us come out with orgiastic sighs and dazed walks limping away. The sky turned the color of blueberries and then it was time for Dirt, Felt and I to go in.

Inside, an old man took our pulse and put menthol on our foreheads with blush pads. Then he sat us down, walking across the room to a record player with its arm up. “I’ve never seen these two men before, Felt.” Piano with muffled bass and drums like hammered nails recorded on tin can microphones.

“They just started today. I found ‘em off to the side, trying to catch their breath— they didn’t even know about the submarine.”

“Oh, don’t skip the submarine.” I started getting that kind of restless that only happens when you know you need to keep still. It made me think of nights with the other slaves, when I would lie in bed and try to force sleep in anticipation of the soon-blooming dawn. “I catch your breath for you. I do it all for you just so you’ll feel better tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” Dirt said. “I’ve never heard music before. I have never heard music before.”

“You haven’t?”

“But I know what it is.”

“A man as old as yourself never heard music before? How is that possible?”

“Don’t ask him that,” Felt said. “I don’t want him to talk about that. Less he talks about it less I’ll think about it.”

“I’m only a few days old.”

“There he goes,” Felt said, breaking the rigidity of the chairs. “Goddamn it, I said—”

“Shhh,” the old man said, holding up a single finger. “You are all coal miners, so you are all family. Let no one make you forget how much it means to be a coal miner.”

“I never do.”

The old man got three water buckets and started to wash our feet. I was still restless, and his hands were unfamiliar. It reminded me of a different time when we spent the whole day walking barefoot on pinecones to pull bird nests out of trees. By the afternoon my feet were bloody and by evening each step sent shocks like hornet stings up my body to ring in my skull. I sat down on a log to cradle them and the small dogs found me there.

No matter how much I pleaded or showed them my cuts, they kept barking. “But look,” I said, “I can’t stand up, I’m going to faint!” One of them bit into the new wounds and I could see my flesh quiver automatically around his teeth like a poked earthworm. Then I stood, and walked to the nearest nest.

That night most got in bed immediately to give their wounds as much sleep as possible to recover. But Lilly stayed up to wash my feet. And it was like all the hurt in them rinsed out into the bucket where we could see it on the surface like pond scum. I loved her then. I love her now, but have forgotten. The master came down and beat her for doing this and I just sat there, with my feet numbing in the bucket, and watched.

The old man led us into the next compartment of the submarine and told us to disrobe; there were already two men in there naked under the gas showers, leaning back and gripping the showerhead like breastfed infants. “Get out!” the old man shouted. “I told you to get out ten minutes ago!”

“I don’t wanna go…”

“That’s too much! Get out!” and I was still thinking about Lilly, how she tried to keep her shouts muffled so the ones that escaped hurt even more to hear, and all I did when I got in bed was sleep and pretend things happened differently.

Once he was able to get the others out we each had our own showerhead to be under. The gas on us felt like radiator steam and smelled like clean clothes and soon I forgot. Soon the tiles on the opposite wall resembled dislocated teeth and I dreamt of building a home inside a still-living polar bear so its heartbeat could rest over my head like headphones and I could see the colder world, where I was not, through the un-shuttered windows of its eyes.

It came to be that I got used to ending days like this.

The next day things repeated themselves; the dull thud of work building up like a migraine and released in the gas showers and the old man washing my feet. Like filling a glass box with pigeons and breaking the box before it gets so tight inside none of them can breathe. Then sitting down, and watching their wings silhouette in the sky. Each day it felt like this; there are many men who could explain to you who they are by recounting one day’s worth of events; because they repeat.

We walked away from the submarine and all of us were soundproofed to each other. The sun was like a lime in the distance as it began its hiding behind the mountains’ ice cubes; my teeth were chattering loud enough that I held my hand over my mouth to shut them up. I was fooled by the chemicals decompressing my mind—I believed I bit into my finger accidentally and felt all the pain rush through my body like an immediately growing seed and then it all retracted back, all the pain like a gone splinter and my finger newly healed or never injured. It took time to understand what I could believe and took less time to figure out it didn’t matter, that what you see is what you saw.

When I looked at Felt and Dirt and my undamaged hands they were all made out of vaseline; this is what we were. For whether we were made of flesh or cement I saw us as I saw us, fooled by the chemicals decompressing my mind, or nudged into different belief. Our faces continued to be true. I saw Dirt as the newborn he was, a naked mollusk rasping for the womb we never forget in the computer of memory. And I saw Felt as a lump of vaseline dried in the sun, rasping for nothing but continued abstinence from evaporation.

I started hearing a ringing in my head like microphone feedback which meant the feelings we got from the showers were leaving. We didn’t miss them when they left; their departure left amnesia in its wake which meant to the fooled mind that the day had never happened, except to register on a paycheck. “Where are we walking?” I asked.

“Huh,” said Felt. “You’re right, we’re going the wrong way. I lost track. Look at that beautiful sunset; I think I was trying to walk into it.”

“It looks like turtles swimming,” said Dirt.

“You idiot. It looks nothing like that.”

“To me it does.”

“It looks like seaweed that floats,” I said.

“It doesn’t look like that either. When I was young we used to sit on the cliff, where you could see the tops of all the trees come together so tight you’d think you could walk right across them. It looks more like that.”

“It doesn’t look like that,” Dirt said.

“You wouldn’t know, you were born a week ago. You’ve never seen anything that beautiful.”

“I was born in a tree!”

“You were born in a laboratory. Now hang on, we’re still going the wrong way. Let’s turn around.”

When we got to the truck, Felt asked if we wanted to go where they go at night. I thought of returning home where I pull the covers up to my nose and pretend I’m talking to someone. “Where do you go?”

“There are two places we sometimes go. You know the first, and I know how Dirt would feel, watching that. I tell you he’s lucky he met you—”

“Where’s the second place?”

“We go to the pond, to splash rocks.”

“Okay. We’ll go there.”