“Hey, listen, you guys!” Bonali bellows in his deep-chested baritone. He waves a scrap of yellow paper. “I gotta give you bums a little cool-chur! Boys, I got a poem!” Bruno claws for the paper, but Bonali shoves him away.
Clemens pauses, returns to his locker, fishes in the pockets of his pants hanging inside, as Bonali reads: “My Mother!”
Now everybody is laughing and shouting. “Give me that!” Bruno cries, his voice strained like a child hurt in play, but three grinning miners hold him back, Johnson grabbing him around the middle, Mario Juliano and Bill Lawson pinning his arms back.
“From out of thy immortal womb—”
There is a roar of hooting and laughter, and all the men crowd around to see and hear. Bruno, encircled, is crying. Johnson pumps his fist in front of Bruno as though masturbating him. Clemens gives no least damn about Bruno, but he can appreciate his position. He lights a small firecracker and tucks it into Bonali’s hip pocket, exits for the lamphouse, tag in hand.
The tag is brass. Stamped on its face is a small 9, a much larger 1213, and at the bottom the letters G.D.C.Co. All the tags have the 9 and the letters, but only Oxford Clemens’ bears 1213. Like the numbers on basketball jerseys, it tells you who the players are. At 6:03, he hands it over to old Pop Hendricks and receives in exchange his lamp and battery, similarly numbered. Pop hooks the brass tag on a large board which schematically describes the mine workings.
As Clemens is fitting the lamp into the groove in his helmet his faceboss, Angelo Moroni, stomps into the lamphouse, steel-toed boots sounding off the dry wooden floor. Moroni is laughing still about Bruno’s poem, but when he sees Clemens, he wipes away the laugh with a bunched flicker of his thick grimy fist, growls something about the cracker. “I oughta take away your fucking butts, Clemens,” he says, but low, not loud enough for Pop to hear. Moroni and Bonali are old wop buddies.
Oxford grins, exhibiting a missing eyetooth, changes the subject. “Ain’t seen Willie Hall?” Hall is Clemens’ assigned buddy in the mine.
“No. Whatsa matter? Ain’t he here?”
“Ain’t seen him.”
“Trouble is, he can’t stand working with you, Ferd.”
Clemens shrugs, grins again. Moroni hands his tag to Pop Hendricks. “Want me to wait for him, or—?’’
“No, wait a minute,” says Moroni. “There’s a new kid here tonight.” He takes his lamp and battery, clumps with them to the door of the lamphouse, cranes his head out. “Hey, Rosselli! C’mere!”
Unwanted dead or alive, that’s how it always was with Oxford Clemens. They called him Ferd, Ferd the Turd, and either let him alone or let him have it. He didn’t know his old man and his old lady wanted him croaked, wanted his Aunt Marge to kill him soon as he came out, but Aunt Marge never killed anything, not even cockroaches or chickens, for she believed in the peace everlasting and God’s infinite mercy and eating the bread. And the teachers cracked his head with rulers and the kids at school, all younger than he, called him Bully and Ferd and Hayseed and threw rocks at him, ganged up on him. Only way they’d ever beat him. And they threw iceballs at him and tore up his books and threw spitballs at him and busted his tooth once with a bottle. That’s how it was. He learned to take it easy and keep his eyes open. He stole himself a good gun, did a lot of hunting, caught squirrels on the run, then stomped their heads to stop them flopping around in the brush, but left them lie: people don’t eat squirrels anymore. And he stole him some good line and a couple hooks, used grasshoppers, worms, plain old houseflies, and pulled bluegills out of the fat muddy streams on humid afternoons, setting world records till his arms got tired, and he strung them up on a piece of wire hanger, stuck them back in the water to stop them flopping around in the weeds, and left them there: nobody likes to clean bluegills. And he stole him a basketball from the high school one night after a ball game and, being tall and rough, he could bully the young boys at Lincoln School of an evening. He got fancy with his hands and hooked them in from thirty feet, but nobody would stick around long with Ferd Clemens hogging the game, so he’d say to hell with them and go on popping long ones by himself, setting world records until the sun was long since gone, and then he’d have him a smoke and drop by the poolhall, shoot him some snooker, an ace from the age of eleven, and cuss like crazy, making those old guys split their sides.
Tony Rosselli introduces himself, and Oxford grunts in reply. They board the cage together, take hold of the rings. Clemens now wears gloves, but Rosselli, without, flinches, not having realized the rings would be cold. Joe Castiglione, Mike Strelchuk, and a couple greasers named Cooley and Wosznik get on with them. They switch their lamps on and Castiglione trains his on Rosselli’s new blue denims. “Hey, boys, who’s the dude?” he shouts, and the others put their lamps on him too as the cage hurtles through blackness some five or six hundred feet to the bottom.
There, a half dozen miners are waiting for the mantrip, sitting idly on their buckets, and the arrival of the new man enlivens them. Foregoing their usual accounts of the arts of Ferd Clemens’ sister, they turn instead on young Rosselli. Somebody suggests they maybe ought to initiate him. Rosselli grins awkwardly, full-faced brown-eyed boy of eighteen, maybe nineteen. Rare to see a young fellow like Rosselli starting in the mines these days: the assumption is that someone must have pulled strings to get him the job. Bill Lawson stares at the boy and stuffs a wad of tobacco in his cheeks. “Old Willie get fired, Ferd?” he asks, and spits through his teeth. Lawson pitches semipro ball in his off hours, and the tobacco is part of his style.
“Make room for the dude,” says Juliano.
Oxford Clemens sits on his bucket and gazes dully at a far wall, nibbling a matchstick.
“Hey, kid, whose ass did you suck?” asks Joe Castiglione, whose brother has been out of work almost two years. “Who’d your little buddy suck, Ferd?”
At the gym, they’ll be coming through the doors, filling it up with noise and color, waving, shaking hands, shouting at each other. Boys in aprons will be selling Cokes, and the cheerleaders, orange WCs on their black sweaters, will be bouncing up and down and clapping their hands, no matter what. Oxford can hear the buzzer and it makes his hands sweat and tingle. In that gym, one day his sophomore year, he was fooling around with a basketball when the team came in to practice. He was feeling hot, so he said to hell with them and just kept on shooting. A tall rangy kid with dark brows jogged up and caught the ball under the basket and pitched it back out to him. He popped another and the tall kid grinned and flipped the ball out to him again. It reached him going like ninety — that guy could really let go that ball. Oxford aimed and popped another. The kid pulled it out of the nets and walked out and said his name was Justin Miller, and he said his name was Oxford Clemens. Then Justin — well, his real name was Tiger, of course — Tiger introduced Oxford to Coach Bayles and he worked out every night with them after that. Tiger showed him how to rebound and tip in and jump shoot and bounce pass and they gave him a suit, and one day Tiger said, “Come on, Ox baby, pop one!” And after that they all called him Ox, he was skinny as a rail, but they called him Ox, Big Ox, and all year long he and Tiger Miller threw basketballs at each other and into nets. There was one night against Tucker City when Big Ox laid in 34 points and tied what was then Tiger Miller’s high school record. It was the last minutes of the game and he and Tiger broke away with the ball and ended up a mile in front of everybody under the basket all alone. Tiger passed the ball to shoot, but that meant the new all-time record, so Ox grinned and handed it back to Tiger, and Tiger grinned right back and said, “You tip, Ox!” and he laid it up on the rim and, everybody pounding down on them. Ox arched up like a tall bird and lifted the ball light as an egg into the hoop. And it was a new all-time record and they carried him around on their shoulders after and wrote him up in all the papers, and his sister Dinah, even though she couldn’t come, she read all about it.