The underdwelling Read online

  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 Boyd was shaping up just fine and that bothered him to no end. Boyd was strong and he was a fast learner and he’d worked under guys like Maki plenty of times. In six months, Boyd would know more than he did and in a year Maki’d be asking him questions. And Maki knew it, too.

  “Real tough guy, eh?” Maki said. “Well, that’s good, tough guy, because I made you a date down on Eight, the new level. You’ll be cutting drift down there, cleaning up after the charging crew. Dangerous work, cookie.”

  Boyd snapped the lid of his lunch bucket closed. “So let’s get to it and quit with the jawing already.”

  Maki liked that even less. He was half-way through his pasty and Boyd was stealing his break time from him. And not only that, Boyd was stealing his stage. He thought working drift would make Boyd piss yellow in his boots, but it wasn’t working. Boyd wanted it.

  “Well?” Boyd said. “Let’s go.”

  Maki threw his half-eaten pasty in his bucket and called Boyd a mouthy little sonofabitch and then they were on their way up the ladder road, making for the main shaft. The whole way, Maki was doing everything in his seriously strained repertoire to intimidate Boyd and put the scare into him.

  But it wasn’t working.

  Boyd was scared, all right. But not of Maki. Not of his stories.

  It was something else and that something didn’t have a name.

  5

  “You never know what’s going to happen in a drift,” Maki was saying. “Sometimes the charges misfire and they blow your arms off. Sometimes you tap into a pocket of gas and it’s Goodnight, Irene. Sometimes there’s cave-ins. Guys get squashed flat, cookie. I seen it once. A guy, friend of mine, crushed between two slabs of rock. All that came running out was something like red jelly. Those cave-ins happen all the time. Probably happen to you. Then I’ll get stuck scraping your ass off the rocks.”

  “No, don’t worry about it, Maki,” Boyd said. “We’ll be working together. If I go, you go. Won’t that be a fucking scream?”

  Maki was getting exasperated. “You think it’s funny, cookie? You think cave-ins are funny?”

  Boyd turned on him. Turned on him fast and made him back right up. “No, dumbass, I don’t think cave-ins are funny,” he said. “My old man died in one over at the Mary B. when I was fifteen. I don’t remember laughing much.”

  Maki just stood there with a dazed and helpless look on his face. He closed up like a flower and didn’t have shit to say after that. His book of underground horror stories was just plain used up. When they got to the cage for the ride down, he had a cramped, uncomfortable look to him like he was constipated.

  Finally, he said, “Listen, Boyd. I was just letting you know that this is dangerous. I wasn’t trying to be an asshole.”

  “Sure you were,” Boyd said.

  Then the door was closed and the cage jerked and plummeted down into the depths of the earth, the air smelling of minerals and standing water.

  When they stepped out, Boyd could taste the dust on his tongue. It was like the dust from a chalkboard, but grittier and thicker. He could feel it settle over his face right away and it made him want to breathe through his nose and sneeze a lot. There was a smell, too, one that he couldn’t quite put his finger on…something like moldy rocks and crumbling masonry, a distinct and unsettling smell of antiquity.

  “How do you like it here?” Maki said, looking down the carved tu
nnels where nothing moved but a pall of shadows.

  “I like it just fine,” Boyd told him.

  But, good God, what a lie that was.

  It was even worse down here than it had been on the other levels. It was like being in a tomb a mile underground and Boyd literally felt the walls closing in on him. This was Level #8 and the majority of it was still being excavated. He could hear the distant sound of hammers and machinery, but it sounded like it was coming from miles away. His heart thudded in his chest and the breath rasped in his lungs.

  And he was getting that feeling again.

  Just like before, that crawling, shivery sense that he was in grave danger. He’d written it off earlier as maybe simple paranoia couched with a healthy dose of claustrophobia given that his old man had been crushed to death years back at the old Mary B.

  But this was something different. A separate species of dread.

  As he stood there by Maki, next to the shaft house, feeling the great depths they had descended to, he had the weirdest sensation of deja-vu like he had been through something like this before. Maybe not in real life, but perhaps in a dream. One of those cloying, crowded awful nightmares of suffocation that you wake gasping and sweating from at three in the morning. It was like that. As if he was slowly being asphyxiated by this place. It was a numb sort of horror, making him feel utterly helpless like a swimmer going down for the last time.

  “You okay, cookie?” Maki said.

  “Sure, I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look fine.”

  Thing was, the smartass edge was missing from Maki’s voice.

  Boyd didn’t believe for a moment that that prick Maki was actually concerned about his well-being, but he could sense a certain veiled apprehension under his words. Like maybe Maki didn’t exactly care for it down here either. All Boyd knew for sure is that what he had been feeling was getting stronger. It was in his guts and crawling right up his spine.

  C’mon already, he told himself. Get a fucking grip.

  “You pussying out, cookie?” Maki said.

  “Not me,” Boyd told him. “You’re looking a little green, though.”

  “Shit.”

  A few men in raincoats and miner’s helmets came walking out of a passage. Two of them were just diggers, but the other guy was Jurgens, the mining engineer who pretty much ran the place. He was the guy who located the ore, instructed the men where to dig and where to tunnel.

  “Hey, Maki,” he said. “This Boyd?”

  “Yeah. I got him under my wing, Mr. Jurgens. I’m showing him the ropes and all. I’m taking good care of him.”

  “Good. We can use the help. We’re cutting a series of drifts down here,” he said to Boyd as they walked off down the tunnel and the sound of machinery began to get louder. “There’s no good quality ore where we’re at now, so we need to tunnel to it. You ever done any drift work?”

  “No.”

  “But he’s a fast learner, Mr. Jurgens. You got my word on that. I’ll teach him everything I know and make a first class miner out of him. Yes, sir.”

  “Good, good.”

  Christ, Boyd thought. Maki was kissing this guy’s ass big time. Wasn’t that just special? You had to love Maki.

  They followed the tunnel for maybe fifteen minutes, turning off through a series of crosscuts, on and on. The whole way Maki kept trying to stroke Jurgens, doing everything but getting down on his knees for the guy. How’s your wife, Mr. Jurgens? Heard you went down to Mexico…was that nice, Mr. Jurgens? Is your daughter still in law school, Mr. Jurgens? It was fucking sickening. Finally they reached the stope, which was essentially a huge cavern cut by drilling and blasting. It was lit up by floodlights. It stank of sulfur and dankness. The ceiling was sloping and the walls set with jagged fault lines which Jurgens pointed out were from prehistoric volcanic eruptions.

  “The rocks are different here,” Boyd said.

  “Of course they’re different,” Maki said like he was some kind of idiot. “We’re deeper.”

  “No, this is all limestone. Different from the shale above.”

  “That’s right,” Jurgens said, looking at Boyd like maybe he was wondering what a guy with a head on his shoulders was doing with a booger-picking moron like Maki. “It is limestone and I don’t like limestone.”

  “Me neither,” Maki said.

  Jurgens ignored him. “And I don’t like it because where there’s limestone, there’s water. Or there once was. That means subsidence, limestone caves. I don’t like the idea of us blasting into one.”

  “No, that wouldn’t be good,” Maki said.

  “See, Boyd, the ore is here, we just have to get through this goddamn limestone first.” He led Boyd over to the wall and knocked on the striated rock there. “This is all limestone laid down during the Permian.”

  “Sure,” Boyd said. “Sedimentary rock. Layers of mud and sediment.”

  Jurgens nodded. “That’s right. Thing is, it just doesn’t belong here. I mean, from a geologic standpoint, this is the first Permian rock ever found in Michigan. So that’s something, but there’s no goddamn ore in it. See, this part of Michigan is all old, very old Precambrian rock. Anywhere from 500 million to three or four billion years old. And this Permian strata is fairly new, roughly 250 million years old. It just doesn’t belong here.”

  “There’s no Permian rocks at all in Michigan?”

  “None that I’ve ever heard of. No sediments or fossils. Erosion is partly to blame, but the real culprit was the Quaternary glaciation that raged right through the Pleistocene. The advance and retreat of the glaciers also stripped away eons of sediment. Just about anything after the Silurian is gone in Upper Michigan. So, obviously, this Permian strata does not belong.”

  “Then why is it here?”

  “Some type of singularity, I should imagine.”

  “That’s gotta be it,” Maki said.

  Boyd felt like slapping him. He had no idea what Jurgens was talking about and Boyd barely understood himself, but at least he was keeping his mouth shut. But Jurgens simply ignored Maki. Something, Boyd figured, that most people at the Hobart Mine learned to do very quickly. Jurgens went on, explaining that the Permian Period occurred at the tail end of the Paleozoic Era, right before the Mesozoic…which brought us all the dinosaurs and made guys like Steven Spielberg a lot of money. The Permian ended the Paleozoic with a mass extinction that wiped out like 90 % of the life forms on the planet. It was a much more massive extinction than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs much later on. These Permian rocks were from that time period.

  “We’ve got a guy here studying this strata, a paleobiologist from the U of M, guy named McNair. He theorized that, perhaps at the time of the extinction itself, volcanic action or seismic activity caused this seam of Permian strata to be submerged, engulfed by the much older Precambrian shelves. Thus, preserving it here for us when the rest of the Permian strata was scraped and washed away long ago.”

  “So, it’s a pretty significant find?”

  “Oh yes. But there’s no ore in it, Boyd, and they pay me to find ore.”

  On that note, Jurgens led them away through the stope.

  It angled off to the left and things started to get very, very loud. Up ahead, the crews were cutting drift, some three separate tunnels through solid rock to reach the ore-bearing strata. It was quite an operation. There were tram tracks leading from the drifts to other tunnels, the cars coming and going, filled with rock that would end up topside in the Pit. There were dozens of men moving around beneath the dead glare of arc lights and incandescents lining the walls. The smell of sulfur was eclipsed by diesel fumes and clouds of rock dust. Water dripped and ran in little streams. Engines hummed and rumbled. Air compressors hissed and generators whined. There were pipes and hoses and high voltage lines snaking all over the place. The thunder of jackhammers and pneumatic rock drills. Red mud splashing underfoot.

  It was unbelievable.

  Jurgens assigned them to a crew cutting
drift far to the right. Maki and Boyd put on their gas masks and safety goggles, put in their ear plugs. It was a loud and dangerous place with the clouds of dust and chips of rock flying all over the place.

  The drift was called a “dog drift” because it was just barely large enough to work in. The drillers would sink a pattern of holes and then the charge crew would pack them with dynamite and everybody would get the hell out of there. The blast would clear maybe ten feet of tunnel and right away the diggers would rush in when the dust settled and go at it with picks and shovels, clearing away rock and debris. The only way to do it was to form sort of a fireman’s chain and pass the rock back out of the drift to the waiting tram cars. Even so, the dust was so thick you could barely see in there. Boyd knew there were men in there with him, but all he could see were the lights of their helmets bobbing in the murk. The claustrophobia he felt was a real, physical thing. They went at it nearly three hours, cutting the drift deeper into the rock a good twenty feet.

  When break time came, they retreated far back into the stope where things were a bit quieter. Boyd’s boots were thick with red mud and he was stained head to toe with ore pigment, covered in a good half-inch of pulverized rock dust. When he took off his helmet, it was in his hair. It was down his back and up his sleeves. He could taste it on his tongue. It was nasty stuff.

  Maki and he sat around with a couple miners named Izzy and Johnson who didn’t say much. Boyd was glad when Breed came over. Maki wasn’t happy to see him, of course.

  He poured Boyd a cup of coffee from his Thermos and Boyd washed the dust from his mouth. “Thanks,” he said.

  “You still a virgin, kid?”

  “So far.”