Hod hands the drill down to the chuck tender, who twists the bar stock and pulls out the old steel, still hot to the touch. The edges of the star-shaped cutting bit have been hammered smooth. Cap jiggers in a new rod of drill steel, twists it to lock.
Grimes, the foreman, calls up through the winze from the level below. “You all right up there?”
“Changing steel, boss,” Cap calls down into the little opening.
“How’s it coming?”
Cap looks up to Hod, who shows him fingers. If he tries to talk it will start the coughing again.
“Three more to go, then you can shoot,” calls Cap.
“Keep on it,” calls the foreman, and then nothing.
Hod starts the tip of the steel into the shoot-hole, then guides the rod as Cap hoists the body of the hammer drill back up to him, unkinking the wire-belted cable that leads back to the compressor at the head of the gallery.
“Need a minute?”
Hod shakes his head, then braces himself again and muscles the heavy drill upward till the bit jams against the unyielding top of the hole. The air is almost clear now and he takes a big gulp of it and squeezes the trigger — shriek of metal cutting rock, vibration filling his body once again.
Maybe he’ll find her tonight.
One of the girls on the Row who recognized him from Skaguay said Addie Lee is in town, staying at the Crysopolis, but the desk jockey said there were no redheads upstairs and nobody going by any of the names Hod recalled her using. Hod drills and thinks how it would be to be with her, to hold her. He searched the town last night and the night before, she’d been there and gone, sure, happy to pass it on, what was his name again? Hod drills and concentrates on a single image, her cheek resting in sleep against his bare breast, the smell of her hair, her breath warm and steady against his skin. He’ll find her tonight, or she will find him.
The shooters are on their way into the drift by the time Hod and Cap come out on the tracks.
“Got some holes need packin,” says Cap to Greek Steve as he passes with a box of blasting powder and a spool of fuse cord. “And you might ought to shore the roof up some before you set anything off.”
“Fockeen guys,” says Greek Steve, his usual greeting and the only English he’s ever been heard to utter. They step out into the gallery to join the others coming off shift, Hod’s arms floating slightly without the bulky widowmaker in them. Flem Hurley is honking into his crumpled bandanna, trying to muffle the echo in the stone chamber. The other men look away. Miners’ con is carried as a dirty secret, something shameful. A weakness in a tough business.
Me in six months, thinks Hod. He only smiles and nods as the others swap reports from their different drives, each ore face a more grievous affront to the human body, darker, narrower, dustier, the timbers bent with stress, the sides unstable and the top threatening to come down.
“Damn roof make more noise than a Chinaman in a fish market,” says old Arlie Bogle through cheeks bulging with tobacco. “The more you wedge it the more it complains.”
“The sides where I’m at is all crumbling,” mutters Dog Dietrich. “Got so many hay bales piled up you got to walk sideways to get through, but it aint but sand holdin the whole deal up.”
“Leastways it’s dry, down this level.”
“Hell, you don’t ever know,” says Cap. “She be dry as a bone and one day some mucker pokes his shovel into the wrong crack—”
“Seen a couple fellas blowed straight out of a hole down Idaho Springs once, long with a half-ton ore car and a quarter-mile of track. Busted through to a whole underground lake—”
“All that pressure built up, waitin there centuries for some dumb hunkie—”
Fell down shaft
Hod was on the Grievance Committee in Butte, had memorized the litany of Cause of Fatality they had stolen from the coroner’s office—
Fall of ore
Crushed in machinery
It was all in the same handwriting, and he imagined the functionary, poker-faced as he listened to the shift boss’s explanation, trying to compress each man’s grisly end into a one-line epitaph—
Rock fall
Suffocated by carbonic-acid gas
Shot of dynamite
Struck by cage
Explosion of powder
Bucket fell down shaft
Hod has been on rescue crews, has helped dig the flattened remains of a half-dozen miners out from a collapse, bodies spread and pressed to the thickness of a floor plank—
Car tipped on man
Returned to blast area too soon
Caught between loaded ore cars
Rope broke on cage
Pinned against post
Cave of dirt while timbering
Fell into ore bin
Caught between trippers, bled to death
Refiring missed hole
Killed by gas in bag house
There were quick deaths and slow deaths, deaths that blew out the lights in the drive and deaths not discovered till the next shift stumbled on the scene—
Picking out missed shot
Caught between timbers and cage
Pinned under a motor
There were deaths caused by stupidity—
Thawing powder in open fire
— greenhorns fed to the mines, men from desperate countries who nodded with incomprehension when instructions were given and marched into the drives armed with every tool they needed to murder themselves and the man next to them. There were deaths caused by the inescapable nature of the job—
Bad air
There were mines that rumbled and growled and warned you not to challenge them, and sneaking mines, mines that invited you deeper and killed you with gases invisible and odorless. The truth was that the air was always bad and the roof always unstable and the laws of gravity without pity. Hod has them all in his head, the jacks and the shooters, the muckers and timbermen, the chute-loaders and motormen and cagers and jigger bosses and whistlepunks, the seasoned miners and the hapless immigrants, and knows they are a scant fraction of those dead or dying from what he already carries in his lungs.
“A mine has got more ways to kill a man than Carter got liver pills,” says Cap as they step into the elevator. “You can’t take it personal.”
Grimes comes then to count heads and the men grow silent. He fired a boy the other day, a little nervous Dago kid, accusing him of high-grading. The boy had turned his pockets inside out, dropped his pants and opened the flap of his long johns and not so much as a lead pebble fell out, but Grimes chased him anyway.
Hod and the shift boss face each other, nose to nose in the press of miners as the man-skip hoists them up through the levels, Grimes chewing tobacco and avoiding Hod’s eyes. Hod is one of the few who passed on shitting in Grimes’s lunchpail this morning when the muckers got hold of it. They had not been short on volunteers.
The cables shriek, cage shuddering as they jolt to a stop. The bar is drawn and the miners crowd out through the split-log shafthouse and into the late sun filtering through the refinery smoke.
The mine dick who pinched Hod and Big Ten stands at the side of the tramway with another company gun, a pimple-faced kid with a worried look on his face. The dick points at Hod.
“You.”
Hod can feel Grimes shifting behind him as he steps away from the others who cross to pull their tags off the shift board, brassing out, and don’t look back.