The underdwelling

No, Boyd wasn’t a guy who got feelings like that, but he was feeling something. And whatever it was, it wasn’t sitting on him too good. He had the craziest goddamn notion to turn around and run as fast as he could.

But he didn’t, of course.

All he had to do was think of Linda at home, eight months into it, knowing that he was going to be a father and that straightened him right out. Feelings are just feelings, but families need to be fed.

The other miners started to pour in, swearing and smarting off at each other, and he relaxed. Just the jitters. It was going to be okay. That’s what he kept telling himself.

The miners he knew said hi and the ones he didn’t just looked him up and down or ignored him completely. Boyd climbed into his gear and stood around with them, listening to them bitch and insult each other. Finally, a thin wiry guy with a face etched deep as pine bark came up.

“You Boyd?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Okay, you’re with me, cookie. Name’s Maki. This your first trip into the hole?”

“Yeah.”

“Figures. I always get guys like you. Russo must think I’m some kind of fucking Boy Scout.”

A couple of the miners laughed. They looked like they thought it was pretty goddamned funny that Maki got saddled with the Fucking New Guy. Boyd just stood there, not smiling or frowning. He was a FNG. At least for now.

Maki just shook his head. “Well, I’ll hope for the best, Boyd. I’ll make a big wish that you don’t get one of us killed.”

“That’s it, Maki,” one of the other diggers said. “Wish with one hand and shit in the other, see which one fills up faster.”

And then they were all laughing.

But not Boyd. Because what he was feeling was just getting stronger.

3

Ten minutes later, the graveyard crew jumped on the trolley and made the run to the Pit. “Trolley” was a pretty high-stepping word for an electric tram with ore-stained cars, but that’s what they called it. The ride took maybe five minutes and out of the night came the Pit. It was lit up like a football field for a Friday night game: an open pit some 300 acres across and over 900 feet deep, a huge cavern that had been sliced down layer by layer at Hobart for the past sixty years.

During the daytime, Boyd figured, if you flew over it in a plane it would have looked like some massive impact crater from a meteorite, except that it was cut square and even like the sides of a box. The whole thing was fenced in with a walkway encircling it, massive crane booms rising overhead that brought equipment down and hoppers of ore and crushed rock up to the surface. Everything, even the cranes and shacks perched on the edge, were lit up with spots and security lights.

The crew stood by the fence and looked down into the abyss.

A road snaked around its edges, circling slowly downward to the very bottom.

It was night above, but daytime far below. The pit was bright and busy and congested. There were buildings and warm-up shacks, great piles of slag and heavy equipment running back and forth. Lots of men scurrying about. It was like kicking over a rotting stump and exposing an ant colony, all that industrious motion and enterprise. While Iron City slept, the mines went on non-stop.

The crew rode an elevator down to the bottom of the pit. It was little more than a cage with fifty men packed asshole to elbow in it. If you didn’t care for heights, you had no business on it. Boyd watched the lights as they descended. They were set into the rock face every thirty feet until the cage touched bottom. Then he climbed out with the others and Maki steered him around and made sure he didn’t step into a hole. The entire way from the elevator platform to the rock face, he kept his hand on Boyd’s shoulder. Good thing, too, because it was big down there, heaps of rock taller than two story houses scattered around. Shacks and trailers and the booms of cranes swinging overhead. Lots of big machinery-crawler loaders and rippers, scrapers and automated conveyors, 300 ton dump trucks that could have squashed you flat without feeling so much as a bump and immense electric mining shovels with buckets so big you could have parked six or eight full size pickups in them and still had room to walk around.

Maki brought them to a tunnel that had been shot through solid rock. Its mouth was vast; you could have driven a Greyhound bus through it. The rough-hewn ceiling overhead was set with incandescents like a subway tunnel. The lights continued on and on until they were lost in the haze, which was a pretty good indication of how far it went.

“This is the Main Level, cookie. That would be Level Number One,” Maki said. “There are seven of ‘em and an eighth they’re cutting right now, some two hundred feet below Seven. With that one, this mine reaches down over 2500 feet. You’ll want to remember that. It’s a long way down. Any questions?”

“Yeah. Why you keep calling me ‘cookie?’” Boyd said.

Maki turned and looked at him, shook his head, his face plunged in shadow from the brim of his miner’s helmet. “You in the Union?”

“No.”