The Deep Dark

by Gregg Olsen

  “People in the mine told me how Greg went down and helped them on and off the cage on 3100. Schulz just sat up there doing nothing! He’d thought only of himself. He left Greg there to die,” the family member said.

  Byron Schulz was written up as a hero. Greg Dionne died being one.

  Those feeling the emotion can’t always see it, but resentment is like a leaky faucet that never stops. Drop by drop, it builds from a puddle to an ocean. Many of the Sunshine miners had it in for the state and federal men. Sunshine wasn’t some hole in the ground. To the men who worked there, and those who loved it, it was home. Some thought the state mine inspector was the most annoying of the lot. He’d been there just a week or two before the fire, and now he was prancing around as if the Sunshine folks were incompetent and only he knew best. And, worse, he was itching to prove it. Randy Peterson, the cager who’d taken his crew from the smoke of the station through the black of a drift and on to safety, sat with his shifter and a USBM employee at the Jewell station on 3100. While waiting for rescue orders to come down from topside, a beam from the USBM man’s lamp hit his eyes. Peterson blinked back the light. Most miners understood one of the first rules of the underground: Never blind your buddy. When a man sits across from another on a motor or lagging, he turns off his lamp.

  “Turn your light out.”

  The man flatly refused. “You don’t turn your light off in a mine,” he said. “It’s a safety rule.”

  “Hey, turn your light out!” Peterson repeated, his voice increasing in anger with each syllable.

  “You don’t turn your light out underground,” the outsider said. It was as if he were reading from some stupid procedure manual and didn’t know how things were down in the subterranean world. Peterson was seconds from taking his pipe wrench and smashing the man’s lamp.

  “You’re not my boss,” Peterson said. “And you’re not gonna fire me. Now turn your fuckin’ light out!”

  MIDDAY, MAY 5

  Topside, Portal

  WHENEVER THE FAMILIAR SOUND OF THE DOUBLE-DRUM CLATTERED through the yard, hopes rose. Someone’s coming up. Someone’s getting out. Marvin Chase allowed access to some of the surface working areas to give the waiting families something to do, and an opportunity for each to see that everything possible was being done to get their men from the mine. It was a short-lived public relations move. A woman came into the Jewell double-drum hoist room and told George Moore, who was in the midst of lowering a rescue team, that her husband had been working on the 1900 level at 10-Shaft when the fire broke out.

  She asked how the hoistman knew where the skip was as it descended down the shaft.

  “Right now,” Moore said, indicating a gauge, “they’re about twelve hundred feet down.” He told her that a rescue team was on its way to 3700, traveling at about a thousand feet a minute.

  “Where’s it now?” she asked.

  “About fifteen hundred.”

  She leaned closer. “And now?”

  “Eighteen hundred.”

  Without warning, the woman lunged for the controls.

  Moore was in shock. “Hey, what are you doing?”

  She tried to push him out of the way, but he managed to thwart her. But she jumped him a second time. The cage kept moving downward. Moore balled up a fist and slugged her hard enough to knock her away. The lives of the men on the skip were literally dangling on the cable. Moore clutched out the hoist and stopped it just past the 3700 station. Another eighty feet, and the skip would collide with the bottom of the shaft with the force of a head-on wreck. The woman had convinced herself that if she could get the hoist to stop at 1900, her husband could get on the skip and come back to her. Security kept visitors out of the hoist room after that, which hoistman Moore thought was a good idea. He didn’t want to deck another woman.

  Forty-one

  TIME UNKNOWN, MAY 5

  4800 Level Station

  RON FLORY FELT UNEASY ABOUT PILFERING THE DINNER BUCKETS of the dead men on the tracks. It wasn’t grave-robbing, of course, but it sure didn’t feel right. He and Wilkinson knew there was no guarantee that anything would be edible anyway. Several days of 80- to 90-degree heat surely hastened spoilage. But the pair had lived on nothing but water and cigarettes for days. Water fills a man’s stomach, but it doesn’t really slake desire for food. Hunger is at once mental and physical. When a man’s stomach aches and his bowels constrict and writhe like a sack of snakes, he thinks not of the pain but of finding something to eat. Flory and Wilkinson talked about food as much as anything. What they would eat when they got out of the mine. What they wished they’d had right that minute.

  Tom Wilkinson insisted they had no choice. They needed food.

  “I don’t know,” Flory said.

  “If it was the other way around,” Wilkinson said, “I’d want them to eat whatever I left behind to survive.”

  Flory’s sensibilities gave in to his empty stomach.

  The pair doused their T-shirt face masks and hustled down the drift, dodging bodies and keeping their eyes on the goal—black dinner buckets left by fallen friends. They had already lost weight by then, and both could feel the difference, a waning physical strength. Just before the station, they saw the buckets sitting where they’d been left. With their free hands, they grabbed three and instantaneously spun around to return to the Safety Zone. The air seemed breathable, but neither had a self-rescuer. Flory doubted a T-shirt was really enough protection. Hunger had driven him and his partner to take the risk.

  It turned out they had risked a lot for very little. A can of Hunt’s chocolate pudding, an Idaho Spud candy bar, and a tuna sandwich were all that could be had. If the smoke had passed through the mine a half hour earlier, the buckets would have been full.

  The tuna sandwich was the rankest thing Flory ever smelled. Nearly gagging from its odor, both men ate small bites because desperation and a kind of manic hunger had taken over. At that moment they’d have eaten anything. They decided to save the remainder for the morning, just so their stomachs would have something to grab hold of, and settle down. The rest of the day would be gulps upon gulps of water.

  Wilkinson regarded the pudding and made a suggestion that was half a joke.

  “Let’s save it for the end,” he said.

  Flory grinned and put the little can back in the bucket and fastened the hasp. When it got really bad, when there was no more hope they’d get out alive, they’d toast their last moments alive with chocolate pudding. The day held one more major event. The hum of the mammoth chiller on 4600 went silent, and the refrigerated air it had pushed toward the survivors went stagnant. It wasn’t as if the chiller was really making things all that much cooler—Wilkinson thought the air was somewhere between 90 and 100 degrees in their pocket. But the men wondered why. The water line still flowed, but for how much longer?

  AFTERNOON, MAY 5

  Big Creek Neighborhood

  TO LOSE HER DAD IN THE SUDDENNESS OF THE FIRE WAS A HORROR unto itself, but to see her mother fading before her eyes was killing Peggy Delange. Betty Johnson always carried a kind of fragility about her, but she was also very pretty. She reminded Peggy of one of those movie actresses from the thirties and forties, Joan Crawford without the pencil-line eyebrows. After the disturbingly cruel call from Farris, her mother’s energy drained from her, moment by moment. She stopped eating. She drank only coffee. She occupied every moment smoking by the phone, waiting for a call from Farris that he’d been wrong, that God had made a miracle. When small sores appeared around her mother’s mouth, Peggy took her to a doctor. He prescribed sedatives, and told Peggy that her mother had to eat something.

  “She won’t touch anything,” Peggy said. “We’ve tried.”

  “At the very least,” he said, “get her to put milk and sugar in her coffee.”

  Her eyes hollow and her lips beginning to crack, Betty promised she would. But it was a lie. She didn’t want to eat because she didn’t want to live.

  All she could thi
nk about was Gene and how he’d done everything for her and how much she missed him. He had been her strength. I don’t want to be here no more without him, she thought one night, curled in a fetal position on the davenport. She went into the bathroom and retrieved some pills to end her life. She sat back down in the living room and examined the bottle. She felt she was so weak, so undeserving. She wanted to die.

  “Betty!” She heard a voice call out. “Betty?” It sounded like a neighbor.

  She dragged herself to the back door, but no one was there. It came to her that it was Gene telling her not to die. She started to weep.

  I will raise the kids for him, she thought. But I’ll do that more for him than for me.

  On the east end of the district, Wava Beehner was beside herself. She paced the floor trying to remember. She knew that Don wanted “Red Sails in the Sunset” sung at his funeral service. He’d told her so. But there was another song and she couldn’t think of it. Just the week before, Don had mentioned a second tune that he found particularly meaningful. Why can’t I remember? Her inability to bring it to mind was killing her. He asked this of me. She broke down and cried as hard as she ever had. What was that song? On top of that, something more compounded her swelling grief. Don had never been baptized. Wava worried that her husband wouldn’t get into heaven; or, worse, that he’d go to hell. And if he didn’t make it to heaven, they’d never see each other again.

  “Don’t worry,” her pastor told her, “Don was baptized by fire.”

  LATE EVENING, MAY 5

  Pinehurst

  SMUDGE POTS GLOWED AROUND THE RESOLUTE AND THE DISTRESSED throughout Friday night at the portal. And every once in a while, absolute silence set in, only to be broken by a child’s whine or a woman’s cry. Late that night, just before Bob Launhardt went home to Pinehurst, rescue men lowered a ringing telephone down the borehole to 4800. It rang and rang, but no one answered. It was just another disappointment in what Launhardt and those closest to the rescue effort considered a doomed operation. Before trying to sleep, he unfolded the pages of the day’s edition of the Kellogg Evening News. His eyes fixed on a photograph of Duwain Crow with his funeral notice. He stood against a paneled wall, his muscled arms folded across his chest. His smile was slight. He was a man at his peak, strappingly built, tough as any man. And yet he was gone. Launhardt inspected the black-and-white image. Duwain had been one of the reasons he’d come to Kellogg and ended up at Sunshine. They had mined together at Talache. They’d roomed together at his folks’ place in Kellogg. He passed Duwain’s Big Creek house every day on his way to work. Launhardt was struck by the tragic irony of Crow’s demise. He’d escaped death once before. Having finished serving his country in Korea, Crow and three dozen other enlisted men had boarded a small Army charter plane from Washington, D.C., to Spokane. The plane ran out of gas over southwest Pennsylvania, and the plane crashed into the waters of the Monongahela River. Crow was one of fifteen to survive.

  When Crow and Launhardt reconnected in Kellogg, he recounted how he’d slung his boots around his neck, stripped off his woolen coat, and fought his way from the sinking aircraft through the frigid water.

  “I was getting so cold so fast,” Crow said, “I didn’t think I would make it. Some guy was on the shore and waded out in the water and put out his hand. He dragged me out.”

  There had been no one to haul him out of the mine Tuesday.

  Launhardt’s father-in-law, Bill Noyen, logged his May 5 entry in his house in Smelterville: “All sorts of rumors persist. Such as there has been audible contact with the men. Bob said they did have vocal contact right after the fire started, but not since. And that thirty-five bodies were at the bottom of the shaft and rumors of different guys down there. . . . We’re all hoping yet—but as time goes on, the hopes are getting more and more remote.”

  SUNSHINE MIGHT HAVE HAD A HOT DEVIL’S BREATH, BUT OUTSIDE the portal it was cold. Although Red Cross volunteers distributed blankets and coats, in reality they did little to stave off shivering, especially among the growing number of children accompanying their mothers and grandparents. It was fear as much as icy weather. Not only were miners’ kids unsure what was happening underground with their dads, but they were frightened that their moms would break into pieces and disintegrate before their eyes. Frances Phillips, an eighth-grader named for her father, Francis, pulled a blanket around her shoulders and fell suddenly, and inexplicably, to sleep only to wake in a panic. Her little brother, whom she had been watching—the one thing she could do for her mother—was missing. A few frantic moments later she found the four-year-old curled up on a cot under a mountain of coats. His face was pink. She let him sleep, safe and unaware just how bad things were. A song her father, a forty-two-year-old repairman who’d been working 5200, had written could not escape the girls’ troubled mind. “When my earthly days are over, please heed my last request. Take me back to Butte, Montana, when you lay me down to rest. Where the river shines like silver.”

  In addition to handling the main office phones, Red Cross worker Oradell Triplett, thirty-five, was given another responsibility at night. One of the Sunshine managers informed her that a handful of prostitutes had come over from Spokane to work the crowd. Triplett could scarcely believe her ears.

  “Watch out for these women,” he said. “Let us know when you see one.”

  “What will they look like?” she asked, finding her nerve.

  “You can tell more by their actions than anything,” he said. He also said some of the women were wearing Red Cross armbands.

  Later on, Triplett notified security. A redhead out in the mine yard seemed a little too friendly consoling some men. With attack speed, a couple of guys from Company A escorted the woman across the creek bridge.

  A person can’t be that money-hungry, Triplett thought.

  Forty-two

  DAWN, MAY 6

  3100 Level

  WHEN THE GRAVEYARD-SHIFT RESCUE CREW ARRIVED AT THE 3100 hoist room, the air was strange, a kind of translucent, smoky fog that hung like moving drapes. The scene reminded Lucky Friday’s Art Brown of the old movie Phantom of the Opera. All around was a surreal and frozen scene of the horrific moment when everything stopped at once. Lifeless faces looked up into the beams of light from the cap lamps of each member of Brown’s rescue team.

  “He doesn’t look real,” said a miner, looking closer at one of the dead.

  “He looks like he’s made of plastic,” Brown agreed, wishing it were so.

  Some of the crewmen jerked their lights away whenever they met the gaze of a dead man. Flesh had puffed up and lips had split. Ears seemed to have melted. Brown radioed topside what they’d found. Somehow, despite what he was feeling, his words were matter-of-fact. He was all business.

  A few yards from the station, it appeared that one man had used the air compressor to live a bit longer. How much time the man had bought, or what terrifying things he’d witnessed, no one could guess. Art Brown knew even a minute was too long. He bent down and picked up a muck-dusted dinner bucket. It had been packed four days before by some woman who now was wondering if her man would ever come home. Inside, he found a wallet. It held a few dollars and pictures of the miner’s family. Those faces were the other side of the tragedy. Although Brown could have taken the wallet topside and told the woman her husband was gone, Marvin Chase insisted all names be kept confidential. He wanted the women to know the rescue effort was the primary focus, and no one was wasting precious time allocating correct names to dead men. Their air supply halfway depleted, the crew returned to the surface. No one was disappointed to leave. They brought with them the news of more dead, more unbelievably disfigured men. Men who no longer looked as they had in life. It was a problem no one could have imagined.

  Putting names to bodies fell on those who had the most contact with the crew. Marvin Chase and Al Walkup, bosses at the top, didn’t know everyone working underground. Launhardt knew many, but he was caught up assisting the USBM with the continui
ng ventilation problems. The initial identification team included accountant George Gieser, union man George Gipson, hiring agent Bill Steele, and the dry man, Dick Terrill. A three-man FBI identification team was on its way from Washington, D.C.

  The group assembled in the back of a Kellogg funeral home and was briefed by the Shoshone County coroner, another town doctor, and a pair of volunteer morticians. It was grisly and startling. Steele expected stiff bodies, but rigor mortis had come and gone.

  “They’ll smell bad,” a mortician said. Though the bodies had been zipped inside bags, there was some seepage of the acrid odor of death. No one used a mask or air freshener to allay the putrid odor.

  The coroner offered another word of warning, telling the others that the bodies should be considered remains, not the men themselves.

  “Think of it as just a body and we need to put a name to it.”

  Steele could barely bring himself to pull the zipper on the first corpse. One of the morticians stepped in and peeled back the black pupa-like casing that had molded like a vacuum seal to the corpse. An appalling stench burst forth and flowed across the room. The smell was as acrid as a mix of battery acid and roadkill, multiplied a million times. The room constricted and everyone breathed in shallowly. Steele peered at the body. It was blackened and featureless. The shirt looked as if it had been soaked in the darkest wine. He couldn’t make out a face, and said so.

  “He’s on his stomach,” the coroner said.

  A couple of men reached under the slippery corpse and rolled it over.

  Even right side up, this doesn’t look human. The face had flattened to fit the level plane of the floor on which it had settled. A closer look revealed elements of a human face, but it sure didn’t look as though it could ever have been a real man.