Collins steps into it. “Now, stop it, boys! Somebody’s gonna get hurt! Please! In the name of Jesus Christ, I ask you to stop!”
But there is too big a sweat up. Collins gets elbowed aside. “Okay, Bill!” grunts Castiglione, “she’s looking at you—ram the tucker in!” Lawson, pale, almost white under the coal dust with hurt and rage, seizes the air hose.
“Hold it!” Oxford Clemens slams his way past the four or five guys in the way, his bare blade flashing in the wavery light of the dull bulbs and gleaming headlamps. “Bill, baby, you make one move with that there hose and I’ll dig me a hole in your fat belly so deep they kin dump six loads in there!” Lawson freezes, stares icily at the knife less than two feet from his face. Clemens’ hand is tense, controlled, inches forward as though hungry to perform. “Okay, you ladies have got your wad off, now git your fat fairy asses off’n my buddy before I gotta dock me a few balls.”
Castiglione and Strelchuk let go their grip, Strelchuk grinning and brushing himself off, but Castiglione stands half crouching, facing Clemens. “You think you’re pretty fucking smart, Ferd, with that blade,” says Castiglione, edging toward him.
Young Rosselli stands, pulls his pants up, buckles his belt. He moves over behind Castiglione.
Clemens smiles. “Jist regulatin’ the odds, fatso. Anytime you wanna go it alone—”
“Hey! What the fuck is going on here?” It is Angelo Moroni. All turn toward him except Clemens, who takes a sideways step to get the faceboss in the corner of his eye, while keeping his gaze locked warily on Lawson and Castiglione. There is a general relaxation. Moroni glances at the knife, at Rosselli, at Lawson, sizing things up. He has been in the mines for twenty-seven years. “Gimme that blade, Ferd,” he says quietly.
Clemens flicks it shut, drops it in his own pocket, turns his back. “C’mon, Rosselli,” he says, and puts his hand on the boy’s shoulder to lead him south, toward the fifteenth.
“Better get your face doctored, Bill,” Moroni is heard saying, and somebody lets a grumbling curse.
Well, shit, Oxford thinks, Moroni is right. He’s got to get out of the mines. He’s not the kind of guy to break his back down here. Better get out as soon as he can, time is running out on him, and if he doesn’t make the move quick, he never will. Figures maybe he ought to get him a car one way or another and go out East or out West and take Dinah, and anybody ask him his name, goddamn it, he’ll tell them it’s Bill or Jack or Danny.
He and Rosselli turn right out of New Main South into the fifteenth crosscut, then right again down the fifth north air course. At the sixth east stub entry, Rosselli sees the other men and starts to turn in, but Clemens nods: “C’mon.”
They angle left a few feet, then right, huddle up behind a pillar of coal. A cutter lies like a long-dead animal up near the abandoned face. Falls betray a slow squeeze. It is 7:32. At the gym, the game has probably begun. Clemens’ fingers itch for the tip. He leans back on the pillar, pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket. Rosselli grins. “Gee, Ox, I wanna thank you for helping me out back there. I was in a bad spot, and, well, shit, I—”
Clemens shrugs it off, offers the pack to Rosselli. “Light up and fergit about it, buddy.”
Rosselli hesitates, looks around, his headlamp slicing through the unfamiliar blackness, bringing timbers and tunnels and strange equipment into momentary view. He accepts a cigarette, fits it in his mouth. His lips are puffy, cracked, and there is blood, crusted with black dust, on his chin and right cheek. The mine is silent except for the distant scrape of machinery and voices, and what seems to be a sound nearby somewhat like that of bees.
2
There was light and
post drill leaped smashed the
turned over whole goddamn car kicking
felt it in his ears, grabbed his bucket, and turned from the face, but then the second
“Hank! Hank Harlowe! I cain’t see nothin’! Hank?”
Vince Bonali knew what it was and knew they had to get out. He told Duncan to keep the boys from jumping the gun and went for the phone in
saw it coming and crouched but it
“Wet a rag there! Git it on your face!”
seemed like it bounced right off the
Red Baxter’s crew had hardly begun loading the first car when the power went off. Supposed the ventilator fan had stopped working, because the phone
“Jesus! Jesus! Help me! Oh dear God!”
came to still holding the shovel but his
looked like a locomotive coming
One of the firebosses was telling the night mine manager a story about a nun who sat on a crucifix, when the phone rang. “Wait a minute,” laughed the night mine manager, reaching for the phone, “I got a new one Lou Jones was telling about — Hello? Yeah, speaking.”
The voice from the tenth east shop stretched up pinched and attenuated and leaked out into his ear a copper whine: “Ain’t no power down here, and they’s a lotta dust. Seems like the air ain’t movin’. Can you check the—?”
“Okay, okay. Hang on.” The night mine manager leaned up from his desk and then again the phone
Mike Strelchuk had just clapped his buddy old Bill Lawson on the shoulders, reminding him it was just a gag, forget it, but Bill was hopping sore and swore he’d even it up with Rosselli and that goddamn hillbilly. Bill had walked over toward where the green light marked the first-aid gear, the gash on his cheek looking pretty mean, and Strelchuk had turned into fourteenth west. He had bumped into old Ely Collins, the holy-roller preacher lately given to seeing white birds winging around down here, and together they’d got right of way into the working area. At the stub entry they had come on Collins’ useless buddy Giovanni Bruno, leaning up next to a pillar mindlessly scratching his ass. “Christ, go play with yourself somewheres else! We got work to do!” Mike had shouted, and had just taken a grip on Bruno’s elbow to jostle him along when all of a sudden it felt like his ears would burst, but he didn’t hear a thing. He still had a grip on Bruno’s bony elbow when the second one hit — hard. Floor seemed to heave, threw him off his feet, top crashed down, chunk batted off his helmet, face bit into the cinders. Still had ahold on something and he cried, “Bruno! Hey — you okay?” But Bruno didn’t answer. Strelchuk was scared maybe he had yanked the guy’s elbow off … or maybe what he held was now just a piece of a dead man. He switched his light back on, didn’t know how it got switched off, maybe it wasn’t on before, and aimed it down on Bruno. His goddamn face was white as the Virgin’s behind with feathery black streaks on his cheekbones, but his eyes were open and blinking — his mouth gaped, but nothing came out. Strelchuk hauled him to his feet, though they both had to crouch because the roof was down aslant. It was hotter and smokier than the griddles of hell.
A ritual buzzer alerts the young athletes on the West Condon court and strikes a blurred roar from the two confronting masses of spectators. In a body, all stand. The mute patterns of run-pass-leap-thrust dissolve, congealing into two tight knots on either extremity of the court, each governed by a taut-faced dark-suited hierarch. Six young novices in black, breasts ablaze with the mark of their confession, discipline the brute roars into pulsing chants with soft loops of arm and skirt, while, at their backs, five acolytes of the invading persuasion pressed immodestly into sleek diabolic red, rattle talismans with red and white paper tails, seeking to neutralize the efficacy of the West Condon locomotive. Young peddlers circulate, selling condiments indiscriminately to all. A light oil of warm-up perspiration anoints the shoulders of the ten athletes chosen as they explode out of their respective rings to confront each other. Some of them cross themselves, some clap and cry oaths, others tweak their genitals.