“Really? I thought it was pretty fair, Barney—”
“Well, I’m exaggerating. But I just wanted you to know — and it didn’t exactly paint the mine as the prettiest place in the country to work, either, if you know what I mean.”
“Well,” Miller laughed, “it isn’t.”
They stood, and while they were shaking hands, Vince Bonali walked in. Greetings were exchanged. Bonali wallowed a cheap fat cigar around in his mouth. “You got a real parade today, Miller,” Davis said.
“Hell, you can’t hog it all,” Bonali said.
Davis laughed unconvincingly and, with good-byes, left.
Miller took down Bonali’s account of the night of the disaster. Bonali was faceboss over eighteen men in twelfth west off old Main South, not too distant from where Bruno and the other six had entombed themselves up in fourteenth east; he had been in the zone of impact and only yards out of the sections where the fire had reached. With the habit of all facebosses Miller had ever known, he provided an extensive preamble on his own merits as a miner, punctuating with stabs of his mutilated cigar. As he talked he grew excited, nearly shouting. No longer looking at Miller, he seemed to be concentrating on some point about five or six feet out in front of him. Big barrel-chested guy with a voice that filled the office. Impressive man. Probably a good faceboss, all right. “So I run back and already the shit’s so thick you can’t see. I find out there’s four guys have bugged out. Two of them, Lucci and Brevnik, they got out okay, though I gave them a royal chewing afterwards for jumping the goddamn gun. The other two who left was Cravens and Minicucci. They must have gone the wrong way.” He paused to consider them, then went on to describe enthusiastically exactly how they had used the ninth east air course, crossed over on the overcast to the New Main South air course, running into Abner Baxter’s section, and exited the mine about two and a half hours after the explosion.
“What kind of guy is Baxter, by the way?” Miller asked. “I called him for a routine interview and he flapped into a rage on the wealth of the wicked and the sanctity of the poor, but refused to come down for an interview and wouldn’t let me quote him.”
Bonali hesitated, bit down on his cigar. “To tell you the truth, Tiger, that guy’s been a pain in my ass since the day I was born. Nothing was ever enough for him. He and his buddies nearly wrecked the union movement through these parts. Every time we organized, he’d disorganize, and then holler at us for lack of guts. Stirred up a lot of bad feeling toward … toward our people, too. For awhile, it was like one union for Italians, one for Americans. And he made a lot of noise but he was scared of fighting himself and he always packed a gun. Guys got killed in those days, and it wasn’t only the scabs. Of course, I don’t need to tell you that, Tiger. Your Dad was a great guy. A buddy of mine got it, right in the brains, one of the toughest union men we ever had, and just about everybody knows it was Baxter shot him, but there was no way of proving it. Back then, we blamed it on the operators because we needed evidence against them, and we was afraid of busting up our own ranks, but everybody knew. Now he’s grown him a fat belly and has got religion and lets his steam off on the holy rollers. We brought our sections out together Thursday night, and this is just between you and me, but he wanted to drag Davis out of his office and lynch him. He’s a nut.”
Miller asked him what he thought caused the blast.
“Gas, Tiger. Only thing that can cause one like that. Damn mine is full of it.” Bonali squashed his cigar murderously into an ashtray, thick dark brows crossed into an angry frown. “Needed better control, better ventilation. All those abandoned workings up in fifteenth and sixteenth were full of caves, pumping out methane by the tankfuls. Should have either ventilated better in there, or closed it off. Spark off some motor, maybe even just the goddamn friction of one piece of machinery rubbing up against some other one — and then, there wasn’t any rock dust down in that firetrap, Tiger. It’s a wonder we didn’t all of us get killed.”
“Barney said they’d passed all inspections.”
“I don’t give a shit what Barney Davis says, there wasn’t any goddamn dusting done. Listen, sometimes those inspectors don’t even trouble their asses to come down into the mine. They just have them a big fancy dinner somewhere and lots of drinks with Davis and the rest of those bastards, and the next day they file their report, hell, I’ve seen it!”
“Pretty serious charges, Vince.”
“Yeah, and there’s ninety-seven dead buddies of mine to make then more serious, Tiger, including one of the greatest facebosses that mine ever saw.” A tear came to that strong man’s eye, and he brushed it away. “But, hell, don’t quote me, I’d never get another job in this country.”
“Say, somebody said something about some horseplay in the washhouse Thursday night, something that had to do with Bruno.”
Bonali flushed. “Well, there wasn’t nothing, it was — no, there wasn’t any horseplay.”
Miller laughed. “Hell, I’m not running court, Vince. What I want to find out is about that poem.”
“Oh, that.” Bonali grinned, shifted heavily in his chair. He rubbed his jaw with his hand, the little finger of which was missing. “Yeah. Bruno wrote a poem.”
“Do you still have it?”
“The poem? Naw, I gave it back to him. What would I want with the goddamn thing? Poem about his Mother.” Bonali laughed loosely. “That silly bastard!”
Rosalia brings Mama. The veil she wears to funerals she is wearing and her feet are compressed into the old black shoes too small for her. Sia fatta la vostra volontà. Stands so darkly singular, small hurt blemish in this sterile white. Tears glinting like prisms tumble out and wet with light her crinkly brown cheeks. “My boy!” she says to the nurses who enter. “My boy! my Chonny!” Her Mama, whom English frightens, is the only person to Marcella’s knowledge who has called Giovanni by the English equivalent of his name. Mumbles, rootlike fingers rattling the rosary. Curved light ekes out of radiators, bending perception. Adesso e nell’ ora della nostra morte. Marcella repeats the words. Giovanni, the tall boy whose shy protective love has brought her safely to womanhood, lies suspended in a mechanism of light and steel, generated by his own indecisive pulse. “My boy! povero Chonny!” The old black shoes melt into the marble floor. Boots, really, with hooks instead of holes for the laces. Brittle and black and cracked. Reflecting the white room, condensing it into a minute pattern of glitter deep in the hard black polish. Nonna’s shoes. Cosí sia. Her Mama thinks Giovanni is already dead.
Shaved and lightly barbered, the Monday edition sandbagged with everything short of leftover Christmas carols and put to bed, Miller drove to the hospital. Over the phone, Lewis had told him Bruno was still in a coma, no change in his condition, but that Miller could speak this afternoon with the man’s sister if he wished. Bright cold day — prinked faintly with a widely scattered dazzle of frost crystals — chiseled the town’s usual tumble of casual boxes into planes of rare precision. He drove through these hard streets feeling himself peculiarly distinct, as though watching the processes of animation that slid him, white outlined cartoon figure, past the fixed drop of white outlined cartoon town. The speedgraphic lay, as always, on the seat beside him, but it was unlikely he would use it. Formulated questions, but images of her fragmented them. He was surprised to discover that his hands were sweating on the wheel.
The hospital, usually a dead white inside, was today somehow blurred and hopeful, a contrast to the frozen clarity he had just driven through. Uncommonly, neither the blood of birth nor the knock of death jolted his mind this afternoon as he entered, but rather a flush of pleasure in visible human progress warmed him. We move on. Things can be better. There are goals.