“Hey! You got room?”
“Sure!” shouted the boy with Angie. “Get in!”
Angie slumped forward to let the three squeeze past her into the back seat. Her bruised lips against her knuckles cried
sin!
as her father's loved presence invaded the Dodge.
“Hey, Angie! Was your Dad on tonight?”
“Yes,” she whispered, but she was already crying. Oh, Daddy!
I'm sorry!
Parked at the outer edge of the lot, the advantage was all theirs, but even then they soon found themselves bumper to bumper on the old road out to the coalmine.
The three men jerryrigged a stretcher with brattice canvas and hustled Ely Collins into it. They'd been too long about it. The gas was so dense now, it felt like their goddamn clothes were floating free from their bodies. Strelchuk remembered Bruno, didn't see him anywhere. “Hey Bruno!” he shouted, but got no answer.
“Come on, goddamn you, Strelchuk!” Jinx Pontormo cried, so nervous his old Italian voice squeaked like a boy's. “I have enough of your jackass games!”
“Bruno, we're going!” Mike called, but they were already on the move as he said it, Pontormo leading, fat round shoulders hulled forward in an anxious charge on the void ahead, Strelchuk and Juliano bearing the old mechanic on the cloth between them. With his buddy Collins nailed to the earth and maybe dying, Bruno had cut out to save his own skinâif he got in a hole, he goddamn well deserved it. “Jerk must have gone on,” Strelchuk muttered, covering his vague sense of guilt.
She felt, as in dreams, to be running without gaining ground, willing acts she could not perform. Iron to its metal stand. Plug out. Around the far thrust of the ironing board. Through the wilderness of looming chairs, stirring pamphlets, whipped laundry. Past the pleading eyes stuck on the walls. Over cracked linoleum to the wooden basement stairs. Down half of them, knees feathery. “Ma!” Basement was lit hollowly by unsmoked bulbs. Her Ma was singing and didn't hear her. “Ma!” The washer churned like someone choking.
“Mal”
Her Ma glanced up from the machine, thrust another armload in, and walked over to the stairs. “Cain't hear nothing with that machine going,” she explained. Her arms were scabbed with suds.
“It's the mine, Ma!” Elaine said. She didn't know how to act. She feared what might happen when her Ma knew. “It's blowed up, Ma! I jist heard it on the radio!”
But all her Ma said was, “Git your coat, child,” and turned back to unplug the washer. “And don't fergit your boots!” she called back over her shoulder. But later, as they ran along together toward the Deepwater road, Elaine saw it was her Ma who forgot hers.
Like ravens fly the black messages. By radio, by telephone, by word of mouth. Over and through the night streets of the wooden town. Flitting, fluttering, faster than flight. Crisp January night, but none notice. Out hatless into the streets to ask, to answer, to confirm each other's hearsay. Women shriek and neighbors vulture over them, press them back into shingled houses with solicitous quiverings. Three hundred are dead. They all escaped. God will save the good. All the good men died. Flapping. Flustering. Telephones choke up. Please get off the line! This is an emergency! Below the tangled branches of the gaunt winter elms, coatless they run, confirm each other's presence. No one remains alone. Lights burn multifoldly, doors gape and slap. Radios fill living rooms and kitchens, leak into charged streets, guide cars. The road to the mine is jammed. A policeman tries to turn them back, but now they approach in a double column and there is no route back. Everything stops. All cars hear the heatless music, the urgent appeals, but nothing yet is known. Down roll windows and again the ravens flit.
After supper, Eleanor Norton had performed her usual exercises but received no messages. Wylie was out on a house call. She curled up on the living room sofa to wait for him, catch up on some back readings in the
Phaedrus
myth. She heard noises in the street but was so absorbed in her reading that she barely registered them. “He would like to fly away, but he cannot; he is like a bird fluttering and looking upward and careless of the world below; and he is therefore thought to be mad.” But the noises persisted. They entered and scratched their alarums on her emptying page, scraped on the nerve ends of her living tomb. She looked about her, put the book down, stepped out on the front porch. The temperature had dropped and the hard chill had a dampness to it. Cars were roaring and rumbling out of driveways. Everyone was out in the street, shouting at one another. Something about a shift. The noise of radios at full volume crackled into the restive street. The mine had exploded! Hundreds were dead or trapped!
Trembling, Eleanor groped behind her for the front door, fearful for one freezing moment it might not even be there, spun herself back into the house, pressed the door shut behind her. Even there, her shoulders to the door, the street havoc reached her, menacing. The radio! She turned it on. Boyish voice, taut and urgent. It was true! She felt weak, adrift, beset with a terrifying thought from some dark and uncleansed corner â¦
betrayal!
She had not been told! Oh no! no! she cried over and over, striking blows at her suddenly willful ego, a misunderstanding, must be! She turned on all the lights in the house, then took her journals to the kitchen. One essence! she cried, but was not reassured.
Strelchuk, taking the rear grip, had Collins in front of him, and each time his ducking headlamp grazed the stretcher, he was shaken afresh by the pulled gray face, scratched and sooted, of the old preacher, by the gaunt stretched knuckles of his fists and the white plastic gleam of brutalized thigh. Collins murmured ceaselessly, and stared moronically into the darkness behind Mike's shoulder. That darkness, hot, rubbery, breathed like a ravening mouth on Mike's back, and each time Collins' awed face leaped up in front of him to stare at it, it damn near swallowed Mike up. Although he could almost touch Juliano's broad young back ahead, and though Pontormo was no more than another four or five feet beyond, still the beams of their headlamps, licking ahead into the tunneled dark, seemed to spring them forward suddenly, leaving Strelchuk stranded, alone with the mutilated Collins, too far behind ever to catch up.
Strelchuk knew he was close to breaking, and he knew, too, that if he broke, they would go on without him. He tried to force his thoughts topside. But each attempt struck on a face that pitched him down in the mine again. Old Joe Castiglione literally spitted. And Tuck Filbert, that good old guy! Jesus! Lem and his Dad would take it rough. They had been trying for months to get Tuck to quit. And Strelchuk's own buddy Bill Lawson: what had happened out there in the main haulageway? Not minutes before, he had clapped old Bill on the shoulders, and nowâ
Suddenly Collins said, “Wait, boys!” and Strelchuk started so violently he nearly lost his grip on the stretcher. His hands were awash with sweat.
“What did you say, Preach?” he asked, his voice strangled and raw. Realized he was getting winded, too.
“Smoke, Mike. Dust.”
“Yeah, I know, Preach. But nothing we can do.”
“Mike ⦔ He was trying like hell to say something.
As Strelchuk dragged, Juliano and Pontormo spun on him irritably, their lamps batting fiercely into his eyes. “What the Jesus you waiting for now?” Pontormo demanded.
“If you don't like it, Pontormo, take a grip,” snapped Juliano.
“It's Preach,” Mike said weakly.
“So what?” growled Pontormo, and turned to move on.
“What is it, Ely?” Juliano asked. They eased him to the ground to rest their shoulders.
“Intake air,” Collins whispered.
“Hell, he's right!” said Juliano. “Where's our damn heads? We ought to be in the intake air course!”
So they located a trapdoor into the north air course, and, sure as hell, the air seemed cleaner, not much, but someâenough any way to lift the sodden weight of nameless fear off Strelchuk's shoulders. “Thanks, Preach,” he said.
Vince Bonali kept his crew talking to make the long walk out seem shorter. For Duncan's sake, and Duncan knew it and loved the sonuvabitch for it, Bonali called frequent halts. They sprawled around, drank water from their buckets, and Duncan took the weight off his swollen miner's knees. They pushed forward, rested, pushed, rested, Bonali quarterbacking. It was going to be a long tough night, but, to keep cool, Duncan drew imaginary poker hands. When he felt threatened, he drew a pair of aces in the hole, with a loner showing, and goosed the ante with a frigid bluff, making old Lou Jones squint his beebee eyes. About a mile on, they crossed paths with Abner Baxter's section, and that loosened them all up some. They numbered forty now, including Tub Puller, the biggest bastard in the mine, and they figured not much could stand between them and topside that they couldn't push over.
The mayor of West Condon, pinned in traffic, fumed. All the way from the ball game he had cursed his cops and tried to believe the jam would work itself out. But they were stopped dead. In front of him, a carload of kids raised hell. Had half a mind to haul them out of there and throw them all in the jug. But he recognized one of them as Tommy Cavanaugh, the banker's son, so he got out and slogged up to them. Ground was frozen, but the heavy traffic had warmed the dirt on the road to mud. He batted the window with a pudgy knuckle, and the kid driving was about to give him the finger when Tommy's broad ball-playing hand swatted the guy on the back of the head and stretched over the seat to roll down the window. “H'lo, Mayor!” Tommy said.
“Tommy, would you do me a favor and drive my car the rest of the way out? I'm going on ahead to see what's holding up the circus.”
“Sure, Mr. Whimple!” Tommy pushed out, still wearing his basketball suit and sweatshirt. A girl followed him. Goddamn, that's all he'd need now. Mayor Pimps for Banker's Boy. He didn't tell them not to, though.
The mayor found he wasn't the only one walking. It was like a damned parade. Some cars were locked up and standing square in the middle of traffic. Both lanes were full, so nothing could leave the mine if it wanted to. The farther he walked, the madder he got. At the end of it, he found Monk Wallace all by himself. “Where's Romano and Willie?”
“I dunno, Mort,” said the cop. “Probably sitting at the other end of that shit.”
Whimple noticed Justin Miller, the
Chronicle
editor, shinnied halfway up the goddamn watertower shooting photographs of the jam. Oh man! Mayor Muffs It. Historic Mess Muddles Mayor. “I'll go get a buncha guys to help.”
The air course was not a straight track; the four men kept running into falls, would have to backtrack, sometimes as much as a hundred or hundred fifty feet, locate another course, and travel down that one as far as they could before they struck another fall. No markings, no light, air laden with a torpid calm that argued with their own urgencyâthey kept flashing into stupid arguments about which way they were going, got confused, swore at each other. Strelchuk didn't mind the blood or the thigh stub so much now, but carrying Ely Collins was hard work, and old Pontormo refused to help, said he'd wrenched his shoulder when the thing went off. “We better loosen the tourniquet again,” Juliano gasped, and Mike didn't argue. They set him down, not so gently as at first. Didn't matter. He was completely out. Strelchuk felt for Collins' pulse: still there.
“He ain't gonna make it.” Juliano sighed, breath husky.
Strelchuk knew what was on Juliano's mind. It was on his mind, too. But they wrapped the corners of the batticecloth around their wrists again, hefted the old man up between them, and started off. “Come on, Pontormo!” Strelchuk cracked through his teeth. “We're getting goddamn tired of always waiting around for you!”
* * *
By the washhouse, Mayor Whimple found three men and sent them back to help Wallace. The grounds were swarming with miners, women, kids. In the offices, he commandeered the phone and called the state highway police and the National Guard. Took him nearly a quarter of an hour just to get the operator. When he swore at her, he could hear her break down and cry. He told her he was sorry and to relax, but no matter what to keep this line open at all times. In the Iamphouse, he borrowed lights to guide the traffic. They told him about a hundred guys had come up already, so there were less than two hundred down there now. Pop Hendricks showed him the board full of tags. Most of the ones who had come up were waiting to go back down on rescue crews. One group was going down bareface now. Another hundred from the day shift had shown up. They said that mine rescue teams from five or six towns around were on the way, but they'd never make it through the traffic on time. One ambulance had arrived, beating the pack, bringing a doctor and some nurses. Then a Salvation Army woman in a uniform that reeked of mothballs got his ear and complained that they had a tent set up and food was on the way, but it was stalled somewhere in the jam. Miller's assistant, Lou Jones, overheard a nurse tell him that the hospital panel bringing bandages and medications had not arrived, and the guy nodded significantly, asked him what he was doing about it. Whimple felt like telling that fat snoop to go to hell, he didn't like him anyway because Jones always called him Pimple, but instead he replied, “Everything we can.”
They inched. And finally they stopped. Between gospel songs and Andre Kostelanetz, the radio told them there had been 307 men on the night shift and that the cause and extent of the disaster were unknown. Angela Bonali prayed fervently, counting on her fingers. The others in the car respected her private ceremony; they talked only to each other.
Then two woman ran past them, panting like horses. Angie recognized the girl, Elaine Collins from her freshman class at high school. Angie jumped out of the car, called out: “Elaine!” But the girl, whether she heard or not, did not turn around. Then, for the first time, it occurred to Angie that her Daddy might not be dead after all, that he might yet be saved. But she had to hurry. Ahead of her, the two women set the pace, but it was tempered by the longer distance they had had to cover. Angie could still pass them. She had to, to save her Daddy. She broke into a dead run.