“Ooooo,” said a couple of the men.
“You don’t think I’m doing my job, Maki?” Corey said, his eyes hard. “Then you just go over my head. Go talk to Russo. You know how he feels for you. Call the Union or the Women’s Defense League.”
Boyd laughed with the rest this time. It was hard not to.
The cage came back up, bringing the diggers from the three-to-eleven shift. They were filthy from head to toe from another day working drift and scraping ore and cutting stope. They wore rain jackets and rubber boots, pants tucked into them. They were stained red with ore dust. Even their faces were pink. Only their eyes were white and a circle around their mouths where their gas masks had been. They coughed and spit out gobs of phlegm, joked with the night crew and made jibes about each other’s wives and girlfriends.
Boyd and the others crowded into the cage and Corey locked it shut.
A siren sounded and down they went.
The cage moved slowly at first, but then it picked up speed, making a sort of metallic whine that pierced Boyd’s skull. His heart started to race and his lungs didn’t seem to want to pull in air. In a rushing moment of panic, he thought maybe the cable had snapped and they were plunging to their deaths. Fifty men crammed in a cage would make one ugly splat 2500 feet down. But the cable was fine. The car rode down and down, sometimes smoothly and sometimes with unpleasant snaps and jerks, plunging into the blackness. The only lights were from the car itself and Boyd watched the rock walls of the shaft speed by. The car dropped some men off at Level #2 and some at #4, #3 was abandoned, but most disembarked at #5.
They filed out and assembled over near the bell shack. Boyd noticed with unease the huge red cross on the wall, the stretchers stacked up like cordwood. Lots of safety signs were strung up with cute little sayings on them like, WATCH YOUR STEP, IT COULD BE YOUR LAST. There was an electronic display which listed the number of accidents this month. Only two, thus far.
Corey called out the assignments and the men grumbled.
Boyd just stood there with his lunch bucket. Level #5 stretched out in both directions as far as the eye could see. There were tunnels snaking off it from all over the place, airshafts running through the ceiling and floor with hoses and lines running through them. The air was thick and damp and hard to breathe at first. Although Boyd had never been claustrophobic, he was very aware of the mountain of rock overhead. Michigan was sitting right on top of them and anytime it decided to move, some of them wouldn’t be coming back up.
All in all, it made his palms sweat and his heart race.
And that was Boyd’s introduction to the underground.
4
Maki led him away through a serpentine maze of tunnels, this way, then that, and Boyd knew there was no way in hell he’d ever find his way out on his own. There were lights set into the tunnel ceiling every twenty feet or so, but they did little to cancel the gloom. It was just the two of them and everything echoed. Water dripped and shadows crawled, things scurried in the darkness and bats flew around. Maki didn’t pay any of it any attention. They passed a massive hoist shaft and stopped at a ladder road, which was essentially a cribbed shaft with a ladder set into its face for climbing from the main level to the various sublevels. He went down first and Boyd followed. It was maybe twenty feet down. When they touched bottom, everything was so silent their voices echoed like rolling thunder.
The sublevel they were on was maybe big enough for three men to walk abreast in, but no more. There was a set of little railroad tracks on the floor that, Maki explained, were used by the tram that hauled cars filled with ore to the main shafts where it was brought up to the Pit. In the Pit, the ore was loaded by those big mining shovels onto massive dump trucks for the ride up to the surface. The ore was then dumped only to be loaded again by mining shovels into railroad hopper cars that took it up to the refinery to be processed into taconite pellets. Its ultimate destination were ore freighters that took it through the Great Lakes to steel mills in Gary and Toledo, Cleveland and Buffalo, all points east.
“You got all that, cookie?” Maki said. “There’s gonna be a test later.”
“I got it.”
“I knew you would, ‘cause yer a bright fucking boy, ain’t you?”
There were a couple loose cars on the tracks, red from ore dust like everything else. In the process of ferrying the ore down the tracks, lots of it spilled off to the sides. And that was Boyd’s job. Cleaning up the spilled ore. It was no better and no worse than working the rockpile topside. He pushed the cars along and scrambled around on his hands and knees tossing chunks of ore into them. The whole while, of course, Maki leaned up against the wall or sat on a shelf of rock, bitching at him.
“Let’s put some muscle into it, cookie,” he’d say. “C’mon, use yer back, you fucking pussy. I ain’t got all night.”
He was a real sweetheart, that Maki, running Boyd down and telling him how lazy he was and how he just wouldn’t last, the whole time chewing on a sandwich and laughing. It didn’t bother Boyd, though. He laughed right along with him and that pissed Maki off to no end. Once again, Boyd was showing no respect for the game and how it was played.
But Boyd didn’t care about any of that nonsense, he was just glad to be busy, glad to be straining and sweating and getting dirty. It beat the hell out of standing around, feeling the rock above him and all those endless, snaking tunnels below. He couldn’t shake that feeling he’d had in the Dry Room, like maybe this was the worst thing he’d ever, ever done. He was simply too aware of the dripping water and the creeping shadows, the darkness pushing in, the grim subterranean aura of the place.
It all reminded him about his old man.
He’d died when Boyd was fifteen years old over in the old Mary B. mine across town. They were cutting a drift and the passage caved in, crushing him and three others to death. Boyd’s old man loved the mines. It was his thing. He’d worked at three or four different ones. And when he wasn’t underground, that’s all he talked about. When he was laid off, he worked in the woods, on commercial fishing boats, even sold cars, but all he thought about was getting back underground.
It was just in his blood and that was that.
His own father, Boyd’s grandfather, had worked this very mine back in the days of carbide lamps. He died when Boyd was six or seven. But the mines were all he talked about, too. Back then, they didn’t use water and steam to cut down on the dust from the rock drills and they didn’t have gas masks. The result being that Grandpappy Boyd was barrel-chested from silicosis and it was a great effort for him to breathe. He had to put his whole body into it to draw a single breath. He died in a hospital bed when he was eighty gasping for air like a trout on a riverbank. An ugly, awful way to die.
But Boyd didn’t tell Maki about any of that. He was the old hand, the tough guy. And for the time being Boyd was okay with that. For the time being.
After about three hours, Maki called for a break.
They sat there staring at each other, chewing on pasties, the traditional Cornish meat-and-potato pies which had been brought over in the 19th century by miners from Cornwall, England and had become something of a local staple in Upper Michigan through the years. In the old days, the miners down in the shafts used to put their pasties on shovels and heat them with candles. But they were just as good cold.
Boyd was grimy and sore, but it didn’t bother him a bit. The food tasted great and he felt very good, every muscle in his body perked up and randy.
“This the life for you, cookie?” Maki said. “No, I don’t think so. You ain’t got the balls or the brains for this line of work.”
“If you say so.”
“And I do. You won’t make it.”
Boyd looked him dead in the eye. “Sure, I will.”
“You’ll fold.”
“You can’t throw anything at me I can’t take.”
Maki didn’t like that. He didn’t like that at all. Because, see, he knew it was true. He knew damn well that
