Like ravens fly the black messages. By radio, by telephone, by word of mouth. Over and through the night streets of the wooden town. Flitting, fluttering, faster than flight. Crisp January night, but none notice. Out hatless into the streets to ask, to answer, to confirm each other’s hearsay. Women shriek and neighbors vulture over them, press them back into shingled houses with solicitous quiverings. Three hundred are dead. They all escaped. God will save the good. All the good men died. Flapping. Flustering. Telephones choke up. Please get off the line! This is an emergency! Below the tangled branches of the gaunt winter elms, coatless they run, confirm each other’s presence. No one remains alone. Lights burn multifoldly, doors gape and slap. Radios fill living rooms and kitchens, leak into charged streets, guide cars. The road to the mine is jammed. A policeman tries to turn them back, but now they approach in a double column and there is no route back. Everything stops. All cars hear the heatless music, the urgent appeals, but nothing yet is known. Down roll windows and again the ravens flit.
After supper, Eleanor Norton had performed her usual exercises but received no messages. Wylie was out on a house call. She curled up on the living room sofa to wait for him, catch up on some back readings in the Phaedrus myth. She heard noises in the street but was so absorbed in her reading that she barely registered them. “He would like to fly away, but he cannot; he is like a bird fluttering and looking upward and careless of the world below; and he is therefore thought to be mad.” But the noises persisted. They entered and scratched their alarums on her emptying page, scraped on the nerve ends of her living tomb. She looked about her, put the book down, stepped out on the front porch. The temperature had dropped and the hard chill had a dampness to it. Cars were roaring and rumbling out of driveways. Everyone was out in the street, shouting at one another. Something about a shift. The noise of radios at full volume crackled into the restive street. The mine had exploded! Hundreds were dead or trapped!
Trembling, Eleanor groped behind her for the front door, fearful for one freezing moment it might not even be there, spun herself back into the house, pressed the door shut behind her. Even there, her shoulders to the door, the street havoc reached her, menacing. The radio! She turned it on. Boyish voice, taut and urgent. It was true! She felt weak, adrift, beset with a terrifying thought from some dark and uncleansed corner … betrayal! She had not been told! Oh no! no! she cried over and over, striking blows at her suddenly willful ego, a misunderstanding, must be! She turned on all the lights in the house, then took her journals to the kitchen. One essence! she cried, but was not reassured.
Strelchuk, taking the rear grip, had Collins in front of him, and each time his ducking headlamp grazed the stretcher, he was shaken afresh by the pulled gray face, scratched and sooted, of the old preacher, by the gaunt stretched knuckles of his fists and the white plastic gleam of brutalized thigh. Collins murmured ceaselessly, and stared moronically into the darkness behind Mike’s shoulder. That darkness, hot, rubbery, breathed like a ravening mouth on Mike’s back, and each time Collins’ awed face leaped up in front of him to stare at it, it damn near swallowed Mike up. Although he could almost touch Juliano’s broad young back ahead, and though Pontormo was no more than another four or five feet beyond, still the beams of their headlamps, licking ahead into the tunneled dark, seemed to spring them forward suddenly, leaving Strelchuk stranded, alone with the mutilated Collins, too far behind ever to catch up.
Strelchuk knew he was close to breaking, and he knew, too, that if he broke, they would go on without him. He tried to force his thoughts topside. But each attempt struck on a face that pitched him down in the mine again. Old Joe Castiglione literally spitted. And Tuck Filbert, that good old guy! Jesus! Lem and his Dad would take it rough. They had been trying for months to get Tuck to quit. And Strelchuk’s own buddy Bill Lawson: what had happened out there in the main haulageway? Not minutes before, he had clapped old Bill on the shoulders, and now—
Suddenly Collins said, “Wait, boys!” and Strelchuk started so violently he nearly lost his grip on the stretcher. His hands were awash with sweat.
“What did you say, Preach?” he asked, his voice strangled and raw. Realized he was getting winded, too.
“Smoke, Mike. Dust.”
“Yeah, I know, Preach. But nothing we can do.”
“Mike …” He was trying like hell to say something.
As Strelchuk dragged, Juliano and Pontormo spun on him irritably, their lamps batting fiercely into his eyes. “What the Jesus you waiting for now?” Pontormo demanded.
“If you don’t like it, Pontormo, take a grip,” snapped Juliano.
“It’s Preach,” Mike said weakly.
“So what?” growled Pontormo, and turned to move on.
“What is it, Ely?” Juliano asked. They eased him to the ground to rest their shoulders.
“Intake air,” Collins whispered.
“Hell, he’s right!” said Juliano. “Where’s our damn heads? We ought to be in the intake air course!”
So they located a trapdoor into the north air course, and, sure as hell, the air seemed cleaner, not much, but some — enough any way to lift the sodden weight of nameless fear off Strelchuk’s shoulders. “Thanks, Preach,” he said.
Vince Bonali kept his crew talking to make the long walk out seem shorter. For Duncan’s sake, and Duncan knew it and loved the sonuvabitch for it, Bonali called frequent halts. They sprawled around, drank water from their buckets, and Duncan took the weight off his swollen miner’s knees. They pushed forward, rested, pushed, rested, Bonali quarterbacking. It was going to be a long tough night, but, to keep cool, Duncan drew imaginary poker hands. When he felt threatened, he drew a pair of aces in the hole, with a loner showing, and goosed the ante with a frigid bluff, making old Lou Jones squint his beebee eyes. About a mile on, they crossed paths with Abner Baxter’s section, and that loosened them all up some. They numbered forty now, including Tub Puller, the biggest bastard in the mine, and they figured not much could stand between them and topside that they couldn’t push over.
The mayor of West Condon, pinned in traffic, fumed. All the way from the ball game he had cursed his cops and tried to believe the jam would work itself out. But they were stopped dead. In front of him, a carload of kids raised hell. Had half a mind to haul them out of there and throw them all in the jug. But he recognized one of them as Tommy Cavanaugh, the banker’s son, so he got out and slogged up to them. Ground was frozen, but the heavy traffic had warmed the dirt on the road to mud. He batted the window with a pudgy knuckle, and the kid driving was about to give him the finger when Tommy’s broad ball-playing hand swatted the guy on the back of the head and stretched over the seat to roll down the window. “H’lo, Mayor!” Tommy said.
“Tommy, would you do me a favor and drive my car the rest of the way out? I’m going on ahead to see what’s holding up the circus.”
“Sure, Mr. Whimple!” Tommy pushed out, still wearing his basketball suit and sweatshirt. A girl followed him. Goddamn, that’s all he’d need now. Mayor Pimps for Banker’s Boy. He didn’t tell them not to, though.
The mayor found he wasn’t the only one walking. It was like a damned parade. Some cars were locked up and standing square in the middle of traffic. Both lanes were full, so nothing could leave the mine if it wanted to. The farther he walked, the madder he got. At the end of it, he found Monk Wallace all by himself. “Where’s Romano and Willie?”
“I dunno, Mort,” said the cop. “Probably sitting at the other end of that shit.”