Grimes, shrinking back from the flame, seemed even more repellent to Hank than ever.
“You stupid fucker, you want to blow us all up?”
“You can blow me. .”
“Shut up!” roared Hank. He got the door open a crack, and Grimes was through it like a roach under a baseboard. “Anybody else want out?”
“Yeah,” grumbled a man-Dayton-“I gotta breathe better air or I’m gonna die.”
Three or four others joined them, crowding and pushing from the back of the group while others cursed or muttered. Hank doggedly cranked the vent door shut, then cranked open the next set, and so shut and open to the next, all the while wondering why the hell he got suckered into doing work like this for assholes. He’d been eating aspirin until he was nearly sick to his stomach, for all the good it did him, it was as if the part that hurt wasn’t a part that any medication could touch.
He itched, too. The conversation in the tiny room had gotten on his nerves, and in his heart of hearts he was annoyed that Sonny and the others had had the idea of going outside before he did. Damned if he was going to sit out there in pitch darkness in that company.
He cranked the doors shut, but it was a long time before he opened the next set to rejoin Ryan and Llewellyn and the others in the vestibule before the elevator doors.
Until Ryan had spoken, Hank had been half-dreaming about Wilma. Dreaming about the sixties: the summer before she left for college, the summer when it had seemed, for a time, that they really would get married. The Summer of Love, people called it later. And he’d been so sure of her love. The last time he’d been really sure about anything. Maybe the last time he’d been dumb enough to think he knew what was going on in another person’s head, just because he wanted so badly for her to be thinking the way he was thinking.
Dreaming about the tunnels. About being alone in the cool darkness with the tommy-knockers. When Hank dreamed about being in the mine-really dreamed-more often than not it was the old Green Mountain pit he dreamed about and going down the steep-slanting galleries with the skip cars heaving and rattling on their narrow-gauge track to the top.
Crouching in the darkness between one set of doors and the next, Hank realized that there was a part of him that didn’t really want to leave the mines. That didn’t want to go back and deal with whatever was happening above the ground.
Let’s not go there, he told himself grimly. When Wilma had gone away to college-when he’d faced the fact that she’d been trying to tell him, most of that summer, that she didn’t really want to settle into the life of a miner’s wife- he’d gone through a bad time, a time when it had been hard to even get himself out of bed in the morning.
At intervals in the ensuing years he’d gone through similar times. Times when all the people in the town had seemed to him distant and trivial; when he drank a lot, watched a lot of TV. Only the concerns and conversations of those idiots in the 4077th or the Hill Street police station had proven equally unreal and unimportant, equally unable to pierce the darkness inside. The staff therapist, after Applby Mining had gotten a staff therapist, had pointed out to him that it was during such times that he signed on for a lot of overtime. But she’d connected this fact with a desire to lose himself in the only work he knew.
What he’d sought, he understood now, was being in the mine itself. Being in the darkness. Not having to deal with anything but the dark, and the rock, and the silence.
With a sensation like waking up, he realized he’d been dreaming again. He cranked the door open and wormed through to the warm room that smelled rankly of his friends and fellows.
“I think I can get us through the old part of the mine to where it connects up with the Green Mountain works,” he said. “The air here’s bad, and we’ve got, what, three or four SCSRs apiece? That’s three or four hours, and I’m willing to bet there’s not gonna be anybody coming down that shaft. Gene,” he said to the engineer, “what’s the gas situation in the old part of the mine? Do you know?”
“Pretty good, as far as I know, there’s been no seepage reported,” Llewellyn’s voice came through the close darkness. “But we’re talking about miles of tunnel down there.”
“Then we take turns being canary,” Hank said quietly. “We use the respirators as long as we can and work our way in the dark as long as we can. I’m pretty sure I know the way: there’s only a couple of long mains, since they robbed out the last of the rooms and brought the ceilings down. If our canary passes out, we backpedal like hell. If he doesn’t, we light up every now and then and see where we are.”
Greg Grant said, “You’re shittin’ us. You know your way around in the dark like that?”
“Kid,” Hank said softly, “I was born in the mine.”
“Besides,” said Ryan, “you want to end up like those cats you read about, where somebody dies and they starve to death in the apartment or wherever because nobody’s remembered they’re there?”
Of course Ryan would think about cats, Hank thought resentfully, his bitterness surprisingly strong, even after all these years. Sneaky little vermin. And with the bitterness, the old sense of angry bafflement, that Wilma would rather be a sour spinster living in a houseful of cats than have a real marriage and a real husband.
Who has days and weeks when he can’t get out of bed, he thought. And who doesn’t want to put two words together to talk to anyone he hasn’t known since he was a kid.
Llewellyn asked wonderingly, “You think you can do it?”
Hank considered for a moment, tracing his memories of all those years underground. In spite of his feeling of fever, they were clearer in his mind than ever before. Each area opening into each older area. What mains had been collapsed, what mains only abandoned when the digging had moved on. Even the really nasty areas they’d worked back in the seventies, where there’d been three feet or less of seam, where they’d dug those god-awful tiny rooms and scraped coal bent nearly double-they were all as vivid to him as the rooms in his apartment, in the trailer he’d occupied before that, in his dad’s cheap little company-built shack.
“Yeah,” he said, amazed a little at himself. “Yeah, I think I can.”
Hank had a drink of water, the thermoses were low again and would have to be refilled before they started their hike. Most of the men took a final pee into the elevator shaft (“Hey, you shoulda thought of that before you left the house!” joked Gordy), and Hank turned his attention to the tedium of cranking the manual controls on the doors once more. The air in the vestibule was sour and stale, and there seemed little point in conserving air that wasn’t moving anyway, but the locks that prevented air loss were still in place: crank open, through, crank shut, crank open, through, crank shut. .
It had been at least an hour since he’d put Grimes and his like-minded pals out into the tunnel. They’d gripe, almost certainly, about the long trudge ahead of them, and Hank found himself looking forward to knocking Sonny’s head against the nearest wall.
The third door opened, and Hank thought, Just say anything, Sonny. Anything at all.
But there was only silence as the doors opened. Hank stood, trembling, wondering if they were dead of methane gas and then wondering, as he lit the spill again, whether he’d go up in a bellowing blast of flame.
But there was no gas. And there were no bodies. In the light of the single flickering flare, the tunnel outside was empty. Sonny Grimes and his five companions were gone.