The Underdwelling (2 page)

Finally, Corey, the shift boss, called out names and checked them off on a clipboard. He was a heavy guy who looked pretty soft from sitting on his ass eight hours a day. But Boyd figured he was okay…as far as foremen went.

Corey came over and said, “You’re Boyd?”

“Yeah.”

“Good deal. We can use you. It’s not so bad once you get the swing of it. You’ll do all right. Maki’ll show you the ropes.”

“Yeah, just don’t turn yer back on him or you won’t be a virgin come morning,” Breed said.

A bunch of the miners burst out laughing. Boyd wanted to, too, but he had to work with Maki. No sense pissing him off this early on.

Maki slapped his lunch bucket against his leg. “What’s with you, Breed? Why you got to start that queer business all the time? You like that kind of stuff? Is that it?”

Breed elbowed the guy next to him. “Hell no, Maki. I like girls just fine. Just ask your wife.”

“You better watch it,” Maki warned him.

“No, Maki,” he said, “I think Boyd there better watch it. We all saw the way you been looking at him. Callin’ him ‘Cookie’ and all.”

“Sure,” said another guy. “You’re his type, Boyd. A big vanilla cookie that he can take a bite out of.”

They all burst out laughing, even Corey.

In fact, Corey laughed so hard he started to cough. It was just the typical working class ribbing. These guys always made with the gay stuff to see how thick your skin was. Maki couldn’t take it, that’s why they rode him. You work in a mine or a foundry or any blue collar situation, you had better be able to take it. Maki couldn’t. He was thin-skinned and because of that, he went around with a target stuck to his back, spent his free time yanking arrows out of his spine. And once guys like these found your soft white underbelly, they’d never stop hitting you.

Maki, true to form, waded in like he was going to take a swing at Breed. Breed just laughed. Corey got in-between them and told them to quit clowning around. Breed just smiled, then blew Maki a kiss when Corey wasn’t looking.

“Okay, that’s enough,” Corey said. “Jesus Christ, Maki, he’s just riding you. Lighten up. That goes for both of you. Especially you, Breed, you fucking degenerate.”

“I can’t help it, Mr. Corey, sir. Maki just turns me on. Lookit that mouth on him, will ya? That mouth was made for loving.”

“All right, Breed,” Corey laughed.

“You better shut up,” Maki said, his cheeks red as cherry tomatoes.

Breed laughed. “You gotta love his mouth,” he said to the other miners. “He’s got the whitest teeth I ever came across.”

More laughter and jibes.

Maki, however, did not see the humor in any of it. “Do I have to put up with this? You better do something about him, Corey, or I will.”

“Ooooo,” said a couple of the men.

“You don’t think I’m doing my job, Maki?” Corey said, his eyes hard. “Then you just go over my head. Go talk to Russo. You know how he feels for you. Call the Union or the Women’s Defense League.”

Boyd laughed with the rest this time. It was hard not to.

The cage came back up, bringing the diggers from the three-to-eleven shift. They were filthy from head to toe from another day working drift and scraping ore and cutting stope. They wore rain jackets and rubber boots, pants tucked into them. They were stained red with ore dust. Even their faces were pink. Only their eyes were white and a circle around their mouths where their gas masks had been. They coughed and spit out gobs of phlegm, joked with the night crew and made jibes about each other’s wives and girlfriends.

Boyd and the others crowded into the cage and Corey locked it shut.

A siren sounded and down they went.

The cage moved slowly at first, but then it picked up speed, making a sort of metallic whine that pierced Boyd’s skull. His heart started to race and his lungs didn’t seem to want to pull in air. In a rushing moment of panic, he thought maybe the cable had snapped and they were plunging to their deaths. Fifty men crammed in a cage would make one ugly splat 2500 feet down. But the cable was fine. The car rode down and down, sometimes smoothly and sometimes with unpleasant snaps and jerks, plunging into the blackness. The only lights were from the car itself and Boyd watched the rock walls of the shaft speed by. The car dropped some men off at Level #2 and some at #4, #3 was abandoned, but most disembarked at #5.

They filed out and assembled over near the bell shack. Boyd noticed with unease the huge red cross on the wall, the stretchers stacked up like cordwood. Lots of safety signs were strung up with cute little sayings on them like, WATCH YOUR STEP, IT COULD BE YOUR LAST. There was an electronic display which listed the number of accidents this month. Only two, thus far.

Corey called out the assignments and the men grumbled.

Boyd just stood there with his lunch bucket. Level #5 stretched out in both directions as far as the eye could see. There were tunnels snaking off it from all over the place, airshafts running through the ceiling and floor with hoses and lines running through them. The air was thick and damp and hard to breathe at first. Although Boyd had never been claustrophobic, he was very aware of the mountain of rock overhead. Michigan was sitting right on top of them and anytime it decided to move, some of them wouldn’t be coming back up.

All in all, it made his palms sweat and his heart race.

And that was Boyd’s introduction to the underground.

4

Maki led him away through a serpentine maze of tunnels, this way, then that, and Boyd knew there was no way in hell he’d ever find his way out on his own. There were lights set into the tunnel ceiling every twenty feet or so, but they did little to cancel the gloom. It was just the two of them and everything echoed. Water dripped and shadows crawled, things scurried in the darkness and bats flew around. Maki didn’t pay any of it any attention. They passed a massive hoist shaft and stopped at a ladder road, which was essentially a cribbed shaft with a ladder set into its face for climbing from the main level to the various sublevels. He went down first and Boyd followed. It was maybe twenty feet down. When they touched bottom, everything was so silent their voices echoed like rolling thunder.

The sublevel they were on was maybe big enough for three men to walk abreast in, but no more. There was a set of little railroad tracks on the floor that, Maki explained, were used by the tram that hauled cars filled with ore to the main shafts where it was brought up to the Pit. In the Pit, the ore was loaded by those big mining shovels onto massive dump trucks for the ride up to the surface. The ore was then dumped only to be loaded again by mining shovels into railroad hopper cars that took it up to the refinery to be processed into taconite pellets. Its ultimate destination were ore freighters that took it through the Great Lakes to steel mills in Gary and Toledo, Cleveland and Buffalo, all points east.

“You got all that, cookie?” Maki said. “There’s gonna be a test later.”

“I got it.”

“I knew you would, ‘cause yer a bright fucking boy, ain’t you?”

There were a couple loose cars on the tracks, red from ore dust like everything else. In the process of ferrying the ore down the tracks, lots of it spilled off to the sides. And that was Boyd’s job. Cleaning up the spilled ore. It was no better and no worse than working the rockpile topside. He pushed the cars along and scrambled around on his hands and knees tossing chunks of ore into them. The whole while, of course, Maki leaned up against the wall or sat on a shelf of rock, bitching at him.

“Let’s put some muscle into it, cookie,” he’d say. “C’mon, use yer back, you fucking pussy. I ain’t got all night.”

He was a real sweetheart, that Maki, running Boyd down and telling him how lazy he was and how he just wouldn’t last, the whole time chewing on a sandwich and laughing. It didn’t bother Boyd, though. He laughed right along with him and that pissed Maki off to no end. Once again, Boyd was showing no respect for the game and how it was played.

But Boyd didn’t care about any of that nonsense, he was just glad to be busy, glad to be straining and sweating and getting dirty. It beat the hell out of standing around, feeling the rock above him and all those endless, snaking tunnels below. He couldn’t shake that feeling he’d had in the Dry Room, like maybe this was the worst thing he’d ever, ever done. He was simply too aware of the dripping water and the creeping shadows, the darkness pushing in, the grim subterranean aura of the place.

It all reminded him about his old man.

He’d died when Boyd was fifteen years old over in the old Mary B. mine across town. They were cutting a drift and the passage caved in, crushing him and three others to death. Boyd’s old man loved the mines. It was his thing. He’d worked at three or four different ones. And when he wasn’t underground, that’s all he talked about. When he was laid off, he worked in the woods, on commercial fishing boats, even sold cars, but all he thought about was getting back underground.

It was just in his blood and that was that.

His own father, Boyd’s grandfather, had worked this very mine back in the days of carbide lamps. He died when Boyd was six or seven. But the mines were all he talked about, too. Back then, they didn’t use water and steam to cut down on the dust from the rock drills and they didn’t have gas masks. The result being that Grandpappy Boyd was barrel-chested from silicosis and it was a great effort for him to breathe. He had to put his whole body into it to draw a single breath. He died in a hospital bed when he was eighty gasping for air like a trout on a riverbank. An ugly, awful way to die.

But Boyd didn’t tell Maki about any of that. He was the old hand, the tough guy. And for the time being Boyd was okay with that. For the time being.

After about three hours, Maki called for a break.

They sat there staring at each other, chewing on pasties, the traditional Cornish meat-and-potato pies which had been brought over in the 19th century by miners from Cornwall, England and had become something of a local staple in Upper Michigan through the years. In the old days, the miners down in the shafts used to put their pasties on shovels and heat them with candles. But they were just as good cold.

Boyd was grimy and sore, but it didn’t bother him a bit. The food tasted great and he felt very good, every muscle in his body perked up and randy.

“This the life for you, cookie?” Maki said. “No, I don’t think so. You ain’t got the balls or the brains for this line of work.”

“If you say so.”

“And I do. You won’t make it.”

Boyd looked him dead in the eye. “Sure, I will.”

“You’ll fold.”

“You can’t throw anything at me I can’t take.”

Maki didn’t like that. He didn’t like that at all. Because, see, he knew it was true. He knew damn well that Boyd was shaping up just fine and that bothered him to no end. Boyd was strong and he was a fast learner and he’d worked under guys like Maki plenty of times. In six months, Boyd would know more than he did and in a year Maki’d be asking
him
questions. And Maki knew it, too.

“Real tough guy, eh?” Maki said. “Well, that’s good, tough guy, because I made you a date down on Eight, the new level. You’ll be cutting drift down there, cleaning up after the charging crew. Dangerous work, cookie.”

Boyd snapped the lid of his lunch bucket closed. “So let’s get to it and quit with the jawing already.”

Maki liked that even less. He was half-way through his pasty and Boyd was stealing his break time from him. And not only that, Boyd was stealing his stage. He thought working drift would make Boyd piss yellow in his boots, but it wasn’t working. Boyd wanted it.

“Well?” Boyd said. “Let’s go.”

Maki threw his half-eaten pasty in his bucket and called Boyd a mouthy little sonofabitch and then they were on their way up the ladder road, making for the main shaft. The whole way, Maki was doing everything in his seriously strained repertoire to intimidate Boyd and put the scare into him.

But it wasn’t working.

Boyd was scared, all right. But not of Maki. Not of his stories.

It was something else and that something didn’t have a name.

5

“You never know what’s going to happen in a drift,” Maki was saying. “Sometimes the charges misfire and they blow your arms off. Sometimes you tap into a pocket of gas and it’s Goodnight, Irene. Sometimes there’s cave-ins. Guys get squashed flat, cookie. I seen it once. A guy, friend of mine, crushed between two slabs of rock. All that came running out was something like red jelly. Those cave-ins happen all the time. Probably happen to you. Then I’ll get stuck scraping your ass off the rocks.”

“No, don’t worry about it, Maki,” Boyd said. “We’ll be working together. If I go,
you
go. Won’t that be a fucking scream?”

Maki was getting exasperated. “You think it’s funny, cookie? You think cave-ins are funny?”

Boyd turned on him. Turned on him fast and made him back right up. “No, dumbass, I don’t think cave-ins are funny,” he said. “My old man died in one over at the Mary B. when I was fifteen. I don’t remember laughing much.”