The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (5 page)

Our small talk ran in short
rounds, punctuated by yawns as the low, wet gurgle of the minnow tank aerators
lulled us all to sleep. Occasionally, one of the group would fall into light
slumber only to be jolted awake as the table shifted on the ancient and uneven planks
of the floor, sending coffee spilling everywhere. Then Snodgrass arrived and we
were caravanning north on Highway 70 to the wide open ridge-top fields of the
county’s fourth district. Zan rode with me in the old Chevy truck I had
resurrected from my yard the summer before. Its front wheels had been scavenged
from a smaller truck, causing it to ride at a pitched-forward angle that made
your butt want to slide off the cracked vinyl bench seat.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this
shit again.” Zan said, as we whipped along the dark, cold, ridge road.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Dozer work. I mean,
Christ-sake, dude. I wasn’t meant for this. I can do so much. Remember all
those ferns and fossil fish your dad used to get from the shale? You know I
learned the name and age of every single species of those things. I was only
eight! I should be a scientist or something.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “You
remember that trip to the Kentucky Museum in the sixth grade? That tour guide
was showing off those worm fossils and you told him they belonged to some other
species and he tried to say you were wrong, but when we went back in the
seventh grade they had changed all the tags on them to what you had said.”

“They were called nautoloids.
Yeah, I remember.” We rode along in silence, then Zan continued, more subdued,
“When I was in Iraq, we had this job where we were looking for hiding places in
some rock outcrops. While I was running some equipment I uncovered some caves.
At the end of the day I got down off the dozer and all of a sudden all these
towel heads who lived nearby came running up to me screaming and waving their
arms and shit. The infantry guys who were with us almost popped ‘em right then
and there. One of them spoke some English and managed to convince the guards to
come and get me. Turns out they wanted me to cover the cave back up. They said
they wouldn’t sleep until the cave was closed. I was shit tired, but they were
practically in tears. Kept saying the
Djinni
will come out.”

“The gin?”

“No,
Djinni
, genies.
Like with the lamps.”

“I thought those were good
luck. Three wishes and all that.”

He was quiet for awhile,
staring off to a bright star rising on the horizon, “No, that’s just Disney
shit. Over there the
Djinni
are terrible things. They’re like spirits of
hate made from the elements. Some of them are just like pranksters, the
Djinni
from the sky. They steal your goats, knock over your piss pot while you sleep.
The ones from underground—” He chuckled. “Well those are the bad ones. They’re
imprisoned underground by the gods, or by God I guess now, and they get loose
and it’s all your asses. They come down from the sky and eat the skin off whole
herds, not one goat, the whole herd. They carry village girls out into the
middle of a field and tear their arms and legs off, then when people come to
help them they tear off their limbs until the whole village is a big pile of
limbless bodies.”

“Well, I know what I would do
with three wishes,” I offered lamely. Zan didn’t reply.

Two semis waited at the site.
The drivers had already unloaded the two dozers and two end-loaders, and
Snodgrass had signed for them. After a brief consultation with a surveyor who
showed up in a shiny new Dodge truck, Snodgrass gave us our orders.

I was put on one of the
end-loaders, a heavy dirt shovel that had seen better days, and dispatched to
the middle of the bowl-shaped expanse that made up the Lindsey mine. Zan
followed me on the E-6, a mammoth dozer, and Eric brought up the tail in a dump
truck. The other crews were dispatched at the back of the five-hundred-acre
mine.

We went straight to it. Zan
peeled back the topsoil and I scooped it up and put it in the dump. When the
truck was full the spoil was packed off to a pile for later use in reclamation.
Zan and I worked well together. I could anticipate his moves, his strategy, and
before noon we had two trucks packing off our spoil. Zan was good. There were
no wasted moves. He seemed able to predict the material under the brown sage
grass of the field. He knew rocks were there before he hit them, and when a
clean run of clay was found he pushed it hard. We worked like that for the rest
of the day, and the day after that, and the day after that. After a week of
prep, we got into the black.

The seam was not deep. We cut
through a layer of clay, then shale, and that was it. The run of coal was
around two feet thick and looked good. The crew on top of the ridge had been
pulling coal for two days so we were both anxious to get it out of the ground,
and get it out we did. We had a smaller crew, thinner seam, and older equipment
but, by the second day, Zan and I had already matched the others ton for ton.

When we kicked off at dark we
busted on the other crews. “How two dozers and two loaders on a four foot seam
can’t keep up with me and Zan can only mean one thing!” I yelled at the ridge
crew.

“What does it mean?” Zan called
out from the truck bed, shot gunning a beer as he did.

“Pussyitis!” I cried to a reply
of ‘fuck-yous’ and the high-pitched throat squeals of mute Johnny’s damaged
laughter.

That’s how it went. For a week,
a month, all the way to spring we cut and busted the ground. Hundreds of tons
became thousands, tens of thousands. The Lindsey mine was rich, unusually rich,
and now so was Mr. Snodgrass. We all got raises. Zan and me both got up to
forty dollars an hour, and I knew we were the highest paid. Zan moved into a
house not far from mine on Green River. I got a new truck. Zan got a
motorcycle. Annie started talking about us having kids. That’s how it goes when
times are good. Slow changes. Nothing good happens fast. It may seem good, but
it’s really just difference playing tricks on you. Abrupt things are hateful to
life. I could not appreciate that until recently, so when Zan and me were on my
porch drinking beer and half watching the grill on a warm March Sunday and he
suggested that we try a new strategy at work, I didn’t have the sense to say
no.

“That seam we’ve been chasing,
it’s been the same thickness since we started,” Zan said.

“Yeah it has. Nice and regular.
No hide and seek.”

“Well I think we’re missing
something. We been peeling that thing north to south from day one. It’s time we
take a sharp turn to the west.”

“Boss won’t like that. Anyway,
he has test drills all over that mine and they don’t show shit where you’re
talking about,” I said, taking a pull from my beer.

“Boss don’t know what I know.”
He leaned over to me, speaking in a low, conspiratorial voice, “Due west from
the strip we’re mining is a seam thirty feet thick.”

“Now how do you figure that?”
How indeed.

Strike is the angle a layer of
strata takes in its journey through the crust. Most layers of strata pitch at a
shallow angle that, not counting faults, crustal deformities, or such
contortions as kimberlite pipes, run from the place the strata hits the surface
to the point where they meet the gluey depths of hell thousands of feet
underground. It’s the little deformities that make the money, and as Zan
explained it, just to the west of where our equipment was working six days a
week, was a vast pit of coal, deep as hell and thick.

Monday morning we ran the idea
by Snodgrass. I did most of the talking, selling Snodgrass on the strike of the
seam and fossil unconformities while Zan backed me up on the finer points of
geology. I finished off our argument with the “gut feeling” approach.
Snodgrass, eyes narrowed, looked at the two of us without speaking. I liked to
think he saw a streak of the old wildcatter he used to see in himself. It was
the kind of thinking that drove his generation to make dynamite out of
fertilizer and blast away at hills while hiding under pickup trucks.

“We’ll see,” was all he said,
but while Zan and I worked nearby, he and Johnny did a test bore to the depth
Zan had suggested. Thirty feet was an understatement.

It was deep, it was thick, and
it was perfect. We had to go and rent a longer bore bit to find out how thick
it really was. The coal was high sulphur, as was all west Kentucky coal, but
also high BTU. In fact, this coal was so high in heat output that the Paradise
power plant bought every ton we could produce on spec. We got new equipment. Me
and Zan got bonuses. We thought things could only get better. That’s rapid
change for you.

By the end of March the Lindsey
mine looked like a crater on the moon, as we bore into the giant orb of coal
that hid at the bottom. Long, hastily constructed, earthen ramps spider-webbed
the grey shale walls where endless streams of dump trucks carried overburden to
the rim that now made up the horizon line in all directions. On the lip of the
pit a whole army of yellow earth moving equipment waited, looking like
dinosaurs posed into a strange tableau. Snodgrass had not revealed the true
dimensions of the seam to anyone, and asked us to keep quiet as he signed over
our bonuses. “I don’t want to get a bunch of Frankfort busybodies down here.
Regulators ran me out the first time around. Longer we can pull this out of the
ground without anybody getting too interested the better.”

Nobody came to see it. Nobody
came to study it, and we just kept on digging.

The spring thaw held off until
April, then came a kind of half-assed spring that doesn’t clean the winter out
of your pipes and leaves you feeling stung until August. It was the first chill
week of April that we found the bones. I was on the loader trying to dump a
shovel load into the dump truck. I knew Zan had kicked the dozer engine off
because the endless, bone jarring vibration that surrounded me shifted pitch,
causing a tickling in my inner ear and nostrils. I dumped the load and locked
the break, turning to see what had happened. I thought it would be a split
hydraulic hose, maybe empty of diesel. Instead I saw Zan crouched down in front
of the dozer pouring out his soft drink and
wiping
the liquid around with a blue grease rag. I radioed the driver of the dump
truck to hold on, and climbed down from the end-loader to go and see what was
going on. As I got close I saw what had stopped him
.

In a long arc, running at a
shallow radius across the entire layer of coal we had just exposed were
hundreds of fossils. Not ferns, nor small lung fish that miners saw with
regularity, but giant four-legged monstrosities, eight- and ten-feet long.
Their legs were short, a foot long or so. The rear legs had elongated toes and
on many of the skeletons I could discern the faint trace of webbing between
them. The front legs had shorter, more rotund feet that were tipped in tiny
sharp nails. The tail was also short with large protrusions on the individual
vertebrae. The heads were shark-like, torpedo shaped with rows of jagged,
needle-like teeth turned back at an angle.

“What the hell are these?” I
asked Zan.

“I have no clue. I have never
seen anything like this. Not in here, not in the upper carboniferous.”

“Are fossils usually laid out
in circles?” I asked.

“No.” He looked at the arc of
bones that disappeared into the cut and his eyes continued to move around the
crater of the mine. “This circle goes around the entire seam. I bet there are
more of them further in too.”

“We should stop and call up to
Western. I bet they’ll send a scientist down. You’ll be famous.”

He turned to me. His face
serious and pale. “No I won’t. When some guy uncovers a bone in his backyard
the history books don’t give him credit. They give credit to the scientist who
first identified the bone. They say ‘so and so’ discovered ‘such and such’
after some bumpkin found it. I’ll be known as ‘the coal miner,’ that’s all.” He
crouched back over the skeletons. “No, I’m going to do this. There ain’t no
reason to call Western. We’ll work the higher seam for awhile then after work
I’ll come back here and dig some of these out. Promise you won’t tell nobody.”

I promised. Now that I think
back on it, that is when my life really ended.

We worked the higher seams
during the day. The ultra rich coal coming out by the hundred-ton load to go to
the Paradise furnace. In the evening, after everyone knocked off, Zan would go
to the lower seam and excavate bones.

“It’s a perfect circle of
remains,” he told me one evening while having a beer on my porch, “Every
skeleton is facing the same direction too. They are all pointing to the middle
of the coal deposit. It’s like nothing anybody’s ever seen. It’s like thousands
of animals came to this one place and died, one on top of the other. I don’t
know what kind of animals they were. I can’t find any examples of anything like
them online.”

As the days wore on, Zan began
to look worse and worse. I noticed that the lower excavation was also growing.
One night I swung down by the mine and saw the lights of Zan’s dozer in the pit
as he cut further into the seam. It was one in the morning.

“You’re going to get your ass
fired.” I said the next day.

“No way.” he replied, “I
discovered the damn seam. Snodgrass wouldn’t do shit to me. Ten minutes
stripping pays for the diesel I use. Anyway, I’ve discovered something you
should see.”