The Deep Dark (40 page)

Just past the raise, they hit a blast of fresh air before entering smoke once more. Condensation had collected on overhead pipes, and a scalding rain fell on their heads and bare arms. A little farther on, they stepped over bodies as they moved in on the hoist room and the electrical panel. A row of oil switches faced Clapp like five guys giving him the finger. He had to pull down the primary switch, and then reset it to reenergize the hoist. Adrenaline was a river through his veins. This had to be quick, and they had to get the hell out of there. Smoke, embers, and toxic gases filled the space. He pulled down. Too fast. The switch didn't trip. He did it again with the same result. His heart raced. He was pulling on the switch with force and haste, and though he knew better, he couldn't pull himself together to slow it down. He tripped the switch just fine, but resetting took some finesse, and in his nervousness, that was eluding him.

Johnny Austin kept barking at the electrician to get on with it.

“Hurry!
Hurry!”

Clapp returned an irritated look. “I am!” he said, his remark muffled somewhat by his face mask. He stopped for a split second and slowly pulled the switch until it reset and latched.

“Got it,” Clapp said, facing down the drift. Embers lit up the trackline by the raise. They were past the fire zone, and had to go back through it to get out. “Let's go,” he said.

Clapp knew no man should find himself on the other side of a fire.
Always hit the fire from one side, and push it away.
Linked together again, Clapp, Austin, and the rest of the crew passed the 08 pipe shop. There, just days before, Greg Dionne had machined coupling threads and stacked finished pipe for delivery. Austin stopped. All around were bodies, bloated and black. Clapp didn't want to look. But Austin jabbed his finger in the air and started counting.

“Seven here,” he said.

It was the first time Clapp had really seen any of the dead. He'd heard body counts and names, but communication between those who knew and those who might have wanted to know was almost nonexistent. The smoke was a veil. But even if it was clear, he couldn't have named those men scattered around. There was no story to tell about what might have happened, except that it had been quick.

“Hurry, let's go!”

It was Austin again, and the link line stretched taut as the five began to retreat. Clapp felt someone take hold of his line, and he nearly jumped off the track.

“What the—?” he said. “Who grabbed me?”

No one had. His tag line, the tail of the rope, had caught on the track. Clapp was spooked. He unhooked the line and off they went. This was no place to be. He looked up at the raise from where, only moments before, the smoke had boiled. For the first time he could see what the crews had been doing. Three-quarter-inch plywood had been hammered into place, and yards of burlap had been stapled along the edges where the panels met timbers. Foam had been sprayed.

After a second or two, Austin let out his familiar refrain: “We gotta get out of here.” And the link line grew taut once more. A moment later they were on a motor heading back to the Jewell station. When they arrived, the phone was ringing.

“You guys okay?” a shifter topside asked.

“We're fine,” Austin answered.

“Something tripped the main breaker up here.”

A little while later, the answer came. The raise that the crew had passed under just minutes before had collapsed. Carbon monoxide levels dropped in the mine, and some incorrectly assumed that the cave-in had put out the fire. No one knew that the cave-in had also crushed the compressed-air line feeding 4800.

T
IME UNKNOWN,
M
AY
8
4800 Level

“J
ESUS!
I
T AIN
'
T MOVING!
”
TOM
W
ILKINSON SAID, LOOKING UP,
his mouth agape. The grimy paper towel on the fan line, the one that functioned like a ribbon on an air conditioner and confirmed that bad air was moving away from the Safety Zone, paused. It hung limp, no longer fluttering at a thirty-degree angle. Both men sat up and strained to make sure what they were seeing in the dim light was real and not another bad dream. Not only had it stopped, but the paper towel then did the unthinkable: it curled in their direction.

“We need to get the hell out of here.”

“Get what you can and let's go.”

Flory grabbed his boots and belt; Wilkinson followed. They had to move closer to the borehole and the good air. But moving from the crosscut meant leaving the motor and their best source of reliable light. Wilkinson's lamp still worked, but it wasn't going to last much longer. As the smoke crawled at them, the paper towel reversed itself again. Something was happening somewhere in the mine. Someone was doing something. It was possible that pressure had built up down on 5000 where the smoke had been fed down through the crosscut. The guys set their stuff down. They could stay. Dripping from the heat and the blast of panic, Flory pulled out his powder knife and a piece of wood and proceeded to whittle a toothpick. They both needed thinking time. It was getting close to do-or-die. The only two alive on 4800 sat on their bed boards in the dim light of the motor's headlamp, a single eye staring them down. Conversation had dwindled not only because they were weak from hunger, but because they'd exhausted every subject for discussion ten times over: girls, mining, and—a favorite—how their wives would spend their life insurance money. But other things were making the situation more desperate. Wilkinson wondered about Flory's mental state after his insistence that he could climb out of the mine, a half-crazed and determined effort that was wholly out of character. Flory had never acted with such stupid recklessness. The only thing left to eat was the Hunt's pudding, but for some reason neither could quite understand, food wasn't as appealing as it had been. They were shutting down, in both body and spirit. And they were probably going to die. They'd be found there, God knows when, and it would be obvious, by the little home they'd created in the Safety Zone, that they'd survived the initial poisoning of the mine's air.

A
LL DAY,
M
AY
8
Sunshine Mine Yard

S
UNSHINE
'
S MINE YARD WAS SWARMING WITH GOOD INTENTIONS
and dismal failures. The capsules from the AEC were deemed too small to ferry back survivors, and the smaller of Sunshine's own capsules was put on a flatcar and brought from the topside machine shop down the Jewell to 3700. Once in the borehole, it took more than half a day to get the walls barred down. Some wondered if the air pressure would be enough to haul the men up and down. It was asking a lot of a hoist designed to lift small machines, supplies, and heavy tools. And then there was the cable from which the capsule would be suspended. At a half inch thick, was it really strong enough?

But there was something worse. It was the sudden and unexpected rekindling of the original fire that had caused the cave-in. Crews working their way down 3700 were forced to turn back; increased heat and skyrocketing carbon monoxide readings made it too dangerous there. The men working that section reported that the heat was so brutal that their packs became too hot to touch. All were ordered out.

Despite the setback, Marvin Chase still held hope they could get the hoist going.

“I can't say I am as optimistic as I was before,” he told the press. He also quietly amended the figures the papers had been reporting since the first day. There were ninety-three men trapped, not eighty-two, which meant with thirty-five known dead, fifty-eight, not forty-seven, were missing.

Jerry McGinn, the reporter who doubted Sunshine's figures, heard a voice call out across the yard. “That guy's the reporter!”

McGinn had been identified, and in an instant the mine yard turned into the angry villagers scene from an old horror movie. The faces of those he'd been writing about surrounded him—union men, wives, and shifters. All were pissed off. He'd betrayed them all. One guy kicked him hard where it counted. McGinn went down and doubled up. His red face matched his hair.

One of the reservists grabbed him by the shoulders. “Is that good enough for you?”

Another shouted, “You won't make it out of town alive!”

McGinn was escorted from the yard by a guardsman and some miners, knowing who'd probably fingered him.
Damn AP,
he thought.

Charlie Clapp's brother, Dennis—the young miner who'd alerted Flory and Wilkinson—completed a shift on body detail and went straight home. He'd bagged Ace Riley's partner, Joe Armijo—also the first guy with whom Clapp had mined. He'd recognized Armijo by his diggers and his boots—not his face, which was cracked and bloated. He and another miner spread a body bag over the body, flipped it over, and struggled to zip it up. Fingers slipped and stumbled, and the zipper pull snagged. Clapp almost vomited. When he got home, he knocked back some whiskey. The hideous odor of the day rooted itself in his nose and throat, and only booze seemed to lessen it. The trunk of a body-detail buddy's prized Chevelle was another matter. Clapp had made the mistake of stashing his stinking diggers there. Despite hours of crazed scrubbing, the stench had an astonishingly enduring staying power.
Never again,
he thought.

A
LL DAY,
M
AY
8
Osburn

T
HE WORLD WAS PAYING ATTENTION.
P
AUL
R
OBINSON
'
S
DESK AT
KWAL was covered in a two-inch-deep shower of confetti from heaven. Most of the letters sent to the station had a dollar or two tucked inside, along with notes wishing the best for “the children of the miners of the Kellogg disaster.” Robinson was flabbergasted by the response from the Salt Lake City radio station. The missives were from all parts of the country. The Long Valley Forkettes, a 4-H club in McCall, Idaho, planned a fund-raiser; the children and faculty of Highlands Elementary School in Boise collected $376.73. Also from Boise came $90 from the French and Spanish classes at West Junior High. A lawyer from Libby, Montana, sent $25; a Spokane florist sent $100; the ladies' auxiliary of a transit union in Seattle collected almost $30. A widow from Meadow Vista, California, whose son-in-law had just died and left a ten-year-old girl fatherless, cleaned out the man's change box and sent it to KWAL. With an official relief account open and growing at the bank in Wallace, JCPenney astounded Robinson with generosity that none could have imagined—a check for $10,000.

L
ATE AFTERNOON,
M
AY
8

Sunshine Mine Yard

T
OPSIDE, A CREW MEMBER CAUGHT UP WITH
B
OB
F
OLLETTE AND
confirmed that his son, Bill, had been found among some barrels and benches near 10-Shaft on 3100. The basketball player's frame was contorted in a crouching position as if he had been fighting for fresh air along the drift floor. His partner, Louis Goos, was just a few yards away. They had come up in the cage seconds after partners Bob Follette and Howard Markve jumped onto the motor for the Jewell and fresh air.

Maybe he was there, but in the smoke I couldn't see him?
Follette asked himself.

Bob Launhardt stayed away from the body detail, but no one had to tell him how gruesome it was. He'd heard stories of coal-dust explosions where bodies had sat for days, and had bloated like dead cattle on a sun-soaked pasture. He'd heard, too, how miners used their picks to poke holes in a body before stepping on it with their boots to deflate the corpse like an air mattress.

Outside Launhardt's safety office window, light rain had fallen. The chill it brought made the masses of people in the yard constrict as a defense against the shivers. It was a devastating scene.

When would it end? How would it be resolved?

Launhardt scribbled a short note for personnel director Jim Farris.

“Mr. Chase says we should contact Mrs. Beehner and tell her it is OK with us if she wants to interview with
Life
magazine.”

He hesitated a moment and added a postscript: “I will meet with her and tell her exactly what happened to Don if she wants this info.”

The stress of the week had been taking its toll, day by day, hour by hour. It was so subtle that someone might have missed it. But Bob Launhardt was so pressed, so crisp, when he first faced the TV cameras. His words, even in the shocking hours just following Beehner's death, were sharp and clear. He was the picture of a safety man in whom any miner could entrust his life. A man in charge. But as the days of the tragedy wore on, the tall, lanky man seemed to shrink as though he were fading away, just a little at a time, until he'd just blow away.

E
VENING,
M
AY
8
4800 Level

F
LORY AND
W
ILKINSON HAD BEAT ON PIPES, CALLED FOR HELP
UNTIL
they were hoarse, and braided a mile of blasting wire. Neither could understand what would keep the rescue crew from coming after them. Every day since they were trapped, they'd made an attempt to get to the station, but the smoke had been too caustic. Nothing was going to stop them Monday afternoon. To wait any longer was to concede right then and there that they would die. They were without food. Digestive juices in search of something to dissolve were consuming their insides. The pain rolled and passed in waves of agony.
This is what it feels like to starve to death.
Making it worse was that there was no end in sight. It seemed that no one was coming for them. They doused their shirts with water and took off. The smoke was a whisper by then, but they could still taste its acrid tang. Passing the men on the tracks was always the worst of their hurried walk. They had swollen like balloons. Shirt buttons had popped. Wilkinson doubted that their identities could be matched with photographs anymore. They looked nothing like they had in life. Stepping past them was like maneuvering through the most difficult obstacle course.