Power in the Blood

by Greg Matthews

  Shoupe and McCaulay were content to allow Slade exclusive use of the widow-maker. McCaulay had once attempted, out of a sense of fair-mindedness, to relieve Slade from the task of guiding it, and had been pushed away. The lesson was not lost on Shoupe; Slade had some kind of perverse need to feel the drill’s awesome hammering run through his body, and since his partners were not similarly addicted to vibration, Slade commandeered the machine for the duration of its usage each shift, without complaint and without competition. Like the silence each man practiced, the arrangement was part of what allowed them to operate together as a team. Shoupe and McCaulay were sufficiently cognizant of the Grand Mogul’s operation as a whole to understand that the three of them were in a sense unique; Slade reserved that sense for himself alone. If he served on the only three-man team beneath Glory Hole, it was because he did not like to be crowded, and the exclusive trio was made possible solely in order to please him, in acknowledgment of his superiority.

  The rock face required on average five to seven holes to accommodate dynamite. Slade drilled them all, stopping only to change the drill steels, as each one in turn wore out its cutting tip. The dulled steels were taken away for reforging, a new one was inserted into the drill, and the process resumed. When the final hole was completed, the widow-maker was uncoupled from its supporting column and transported back along the tunnel, out of harm’s way, and the supporting column followed it. By then, enough time had passed for the men to sit and eat the lunch each had brought with him in a tin pail.

  Slade ate at a distance from his partners, who sometimes profaned the silence with a word or two expressing approval of the food their wives had packed for them. Slade preferred nothing more intrusive than the distant sounds from other tunnels where men performed identical tasks. The echoing of faraway drills seemed almost to relax him as he ate. Having no wife, he ate a meal prepared for fifty-cents by a woman whose husband had perished in the mines; she made sandwiches for scores of bachelor miners, and eked out a living not much reduced from the time her husband had brought home a wage. Slade always found his fifty-cent sandwich enjoyable. It was generally roast beef, thickly built and well worth the money. He had eaten roast beef sandwiches every day on another job, work he had done somewhere else, aboveground work among trees, but he could not remember the details of it. Certainly there had been no thunderous machines involved, so he doubted that he had liked it as much as mining. He could not quite recall how he had become a miner, but that was not a matter of any importance, since it was the day-to-day operation of the drill that mattered, not the route whereby Slade had found his calling.

  While he ate, he thought of something overheard as he passed a knot of children the previous evening, miners’ brats playing in the snow; they had spoken of giants beneath the earth, slumbering titans on beds of stone, their dreamless sleep centuries old, and they had spoken of the shattering of that sleep by intruding hard-rock miners, and the consequences thereof. Slade pondered his options if he should drill through into the chamber of a giant. If the creature attacked him, he would aim his widow-maker at its heart, impale it as a harpooner kills his whale. It would be a fine thing to kill a giant. Slade had never killed anyone that he could remember, but a giant would be a fine thing to kill. If he could not kill it, the giant would have proved itself superior to Slade, and it would not be shameful to die at the hands of so great a being. He would be content if he killed the giant, or the giant killed him. It made no real difference either way. Slade hardly thought of death at all, even if dying suddenly was commonplace in the mines. No pocket of explosive gas would kill him, no weakened timber supports come down on his head, no thousands of tons of rock collapse and crush him. It would take a giant, and Slade was glad to have overheard the children talking; now he knew what kind of death might possibly await him in the Grand Mogul.

  When he had finished eating, Slade went a short distance back along the tunnel to relieve his bowels. All the tunnels stank of shit, but he was not offended by it anymore. The smell of the mine was simply a price he had to pay for the privilege of working there and sinking the long steel tooth of the widow-maker deep into rock that might give way at any moment to reveal the sleeping giants. Being a hard-rock miner was the best life there could be, and Slade was living it. The occasional headaches that came to plague him were nothing to do with the mine; he remembered that the pain between his temples had always been a part of him, long before he came to Glory Hole from whichever place he had been before. It was not good, though, when he woke up some mornings and could not remember who he was, or where, or even that he was a miner. He would have to lie very still and concentrate for a while, and it would all come back to him before breakfast, which he ate in the food shack run by the woman who sold him his lunch every day. She was a nice woman and always gave him a big sandwich. He sometimes could see why men married women, but Slade didn’t want to, not when he could get the sandwiches and breakfasts whenever he wanted, for a very reasonable cost. He was married to the widow-maker, even if it spat rock dust at him and shook his bones to pieces and was slowly deafening him. His life was complete as it was. He wouldn’t want to change anything, except maybe the headaches and the forgetting.

  Slade attended to his anus with the greasy paper his lunch had been wrapped in, and returned to the face, where his partners had already resumed work. Shoupe was a master at inserting and tamping red paperbound sticks of dynamite into the holes Slade had drilled, each stick with a fulminate-of-mercury blasting cap inserted into the end. It was painstaking work, and he would not be rushed. Shoupe checked every stick before insertion, unwrapping a section of each to be sure the nitroglycerin had not separated out from the inert stabilizing compound and begun to lace the outside of the stick with dangerously sensitive crystals, as sometimes happened in winter. He worked slowly and methodically, and when he was satisfied, he stepped aside for the wick man.

  McCaulay’s talent lay in being able to estimate exactly how long the black powder fuses he attached to the blasting caps needed to be. He arranged them in a precise pattern and twined their ends together to ensure that they not only would be lit simultaneously but would detonate at precisely the same instant. He, too, would not be hurried through his specialty, and Slade found his attention drifting. Shoupe had carried away the last of the dulled steels for transportation back to the surface for blacksmithing, and had not returned, in all likelihood had stopped somewhere en route to relieve himself.

  Watching McCaulay as he worked with lengths of fuse, Slade experienced one of his very rare moments of insight into the existence of other humans. He usually looked on his fellow men with the same lack of empathy with which he might have viewed a herd of cattle; he accepted that they existed, but did not believe they resembled him, at least not in anything but physical form. McCaulay, Slade saw with a sudden burst of acumen, was a man; he ate and slept and performed his work in much the same fashion as Slade, and very likely had thoughts about the world, as did Slade. McCaulay might even have secret difficulties, like Slade. But that was too much to accept. If McCaulay had troubles, they could not have been like Slade’s. It almost scared Slade to think of another man, mere yards away, who might be anything like himself, deep down inside, where he knew the real man lived. No one, Slade reasoned, could be the same as himself in the deep inside part, because if it were so, then Slade would not be who he had always thought himself to be. If there was someone else like him in the world, Slade would be made smaller because of that man.

  It was not something Slade could accept as being likely or desirable. In his own subversive way, McCaulay was a threat. Slade had not been aware of it until then, and his discovery placed McCaulay in a new light. He would have to be watched carefully, or else he might attempt somehow to remove Slade from existence and take his place without anyone knowing the difference. Now Slade was worried. He could not recall ever having had such thoughts before, so they must be important. He reviewed quickly the points of his revelation, and reached the
same conclusion, but this time was more certain he was correct, even if the thing he had realized was terrible to contemplate: McCaulay was planning to replace him while they were alone. With Shoupe away, it could be done, and when Shoupe returned he would find just one man there at the rock face, and he would be told that Slade was gone, just plain gone from the mine without explanation, and Shoupe would accept what McCaulay told him, because they were friends.

  The full extent of McCaulay’s deviousness was fast becoming apparent. Slade was outraged that someone should even think of doing such a thing, let alone be planning it in detail, as McCaulay clearly was. The man’s back was kept turned to Slade to shield his guilt. McCaulay knew that if he allowed Slade a good long look into his eyes, the plan would fail, so he was pretending to concentrate on his fuses with more than his usual intensity. Shoupe was still gone. Slade could not recall now just how long a time it had been since Shoupe shouldered the steels and walked away into the darkness. Was there some kind of collusion between the two? It was possible. They had talked in low tones while eating their lunches, the words they exchanged garbled by the echo that persisted in so restricted an area as a mine face. Sometimes it was possible to hear things at a distance more clearly than a conversation taking place just around a bend in the tunnel. They had known that, and not objected when Slade went away on his own to eat. He should have sneaked back and listened to them, but he hadn’t known at the time what they were planning for him.

  Suddenly he hated them both. He would allow no one to replace him, least of all two fools like Shoupe and McCaulay. They had underestimated Slade if they thought replacing him would be easy. He was ready for them now, and could not be taken by surprise. Slade could not remember how long he had worked alongside the two traitors, but it was long enough for him to feel angry that they had turned against him this way. It was betrayal of the lowest order, and it would not succeed.

  A detonation from another mine face distracted him. It was followed quickly by another. The shift was ending, the teams finally done with preparation, lighting their fuses and retiring with the cry “Fire in the hole!” Slade hadn’t heard the familiar warning before either blast. Could that be linked somehow with the plot to replace him? Could all the miners in the Grand Mogul be part of the plan? Another detonation shook the rock wall he leaned against. “Pretty near done,” McCaulay said over his shoulder. Slade didn’t believe him. There was something going on he was not supposed to be aware of, but he was. With sudden insight, he realized he did not know the meaning of the name Grand Mogul. Could it mean some kind of big plan? Had they been preparing it for him even before he came to Glory Hole and began working under the earth? Slade saw no reason to doubt it. They had seen him coming, and made arrangements, and those arrangements were about to be implemented. The explosions in other tunnels were intended to make him believe the usual routine was being followed, but Slade was too smart to be fooled by any of it. He should have known that sooner or later he would be hunted like this. They would not be content to kill him, not someone like himself; they wanted to replace him with McCaulay, so they could all feel comfortable again. They had probably been causing the headaches too, and the moments of forgetfulness … and he saw that even the nice woman who made his sandwiches was part of the plan, because it was she who fed him, and the food had been poisoned with bad things to make him hurt, make him forget, but not strong enough to kill him, so now they were preparing something else, something more powerful to bring about his death … no, something worse than that: they wanted him gone completely, swallowed up into the body of McCaulay like a fly inside a toad. Well, he wouldn’t let it happen. He knew he was able to withstand anything they cared to throw at him, be it poisoned sandwiches or this planned aloneness with McCaulay. He was ready and, in a strange way, glad to have learned of the plan to wipe him from existence. It was exciting to know that he was under siege by inferior men. He would show them, and show them good.

  The rock beneath Slade’s shoulder quivered as another blast, in one of the nearer tunnels, sent shock waves through the ground. The miners responsible would be gathered at the cage, readying themselves for the long ride to the upper world, where the sun was gone beyond the western slope of the valley filled by Glory Hole, and the snow continued to fall. They did not want him to see any of that again, but they would fail, because they understood nothing. Now there was more vibration feeding itself into him, not from any dynamite explosion but from the rock itself, and Slade knew the next part of the plan had been made to occur. He did not know what shape it would assume, but he was ready.

  The tunnel itself began to speak, a throat choked of air, made hoarse by sudden constriction, the words reduced to crackings and splinterings and a rumbling from the heart of the mine that set the hairs on Slade’s head quivering. The tunnel was collapsing, pushing air and sound toward him. He caught the briefest glimpse of light from Shoupe’s returning lamp before the ceiling descended in chunks the size of wagons and crushed it. Shoupe’s scream, lasting only a second, could barely be heard above the groaning of timbers and thudding of displaced rock. A cloud of stinking dust was blasted into Slade’s eyes. He stepped backward to the rock face and stumbled over McCaulay. Both men were on the ground when the final descent of rock from the tunnel ceiling fell just yards away, and the noise began to subside.

  Slade couldn’t breathe; the air was filled with dust, McCaulay’s lamp a blur even at arm’s length, and the sounds of coughing that came from beneath it were muffled, as if heard from the far side of a wall. Slade’s own lungs burned with the particles he had inhaled, and his eyelids squeezed shut again. He covered his face with both hands and attempted to breathe slowly through his nose, but could not get enough air into himself; he was obliged to gasp and suck through his opened mouth, which produced a fit of coughing to equal McCaulay’s.

  The men huddled where they had fallen, pressed against the rock face Slade had drilled for Shoupe to load with dynamite and McCaulay to prime. There were more distant rumblings, then silence. They continued to cough until the dust began to settle.

  “Was that Shoupe I heard?” McCaulay asked.

  Slade nodded, tasting the airborne grime that filled his mouth and coated his teeth.

  “Jesus God a’mighty, we’re dead men sure.… Oh Jesus God a’mighty we are.…”

  Slade found McCaulay’s words insincere. The cave-in was staged in order to confine the two men in a closed-off space, to let McCaulay replace Slade by whatever method had been agreed upon. Slade would have to be on guard for the least indication that violence was about to be used against him. The cave-in had been impressively staged, but he was not fooled.

  “Too many fires in the hole …,” sobbed McCaulay. “It shouldn’t all be set off around the same time like they tell us to.… Now we’re in here till they find us.…”

  Slade had never heard so many words spill from McCaulay at one time. McCaulay was pretending to be frightened, but again, Slade could see through the ruse. He didn’t believe that Shoupe was dead either; it was another piece of deception. He wondered how long it would be before McCaulay began the process of replacing him. Slade’s one fear was that he would fall asleep and allow it to happen then. He would have to remain awake whenever McCaulay was, and sleep when he slept. There was the danger that McCaulay would waken first, but every sound within the irregular cell they occupied was magnified; McCaulay would have to be silent as a cat to make any move toward a sleeping man without waking him, and Slade had always had the ability to come awake instantly. He would prepare for that possibility by napping with his clasp knife opened and ready, but hidden from sight.

  “Too many fellers doin’ it at the same time,” McCaulay repeated. “They should do it different, space ’em out more. By God, think if I hadda lit ours and then we never had time to get out. Shoupe, his missus had a baby.… They won’t ever see him again in this life. You seen him get buried under it all?”

  Slade nodded. McCaulay’s make-believe sorrow
was interesting to watch. Slade could hardly credit his luck at having realized what was being plotted just minutes before the performance began. Without his foreknowledge of the plan, it might well have succeeded, but it never would now. He despised McCaulay for his part in it, and for the shallow insincerity of his tears. McCaulay’s face was hidden by his hands. Slade wished he hadn’t already eaten his sandwich; he was hungry again. Then he remembered that the woman who made it for him was also trying to replace him with McCaulay. There might even have been something in the roast beef to make him think the cave-in had occurred, when in fact it hadn’t. Slade had heard of drunkards seeing things that weren’t actually there, and for all he knew, it was possible to put the same stuff contained in drink into a sandwich. He leaned over and touched a massive chunk of fallen rock. It felt very real, but there existed the possibility that it was not. Slade would have to act as if he thought it was, just to fool McCaulay.

  “They’ll be diggin’, start right to it directly, they will. Shoupe, though, poor feller. There’s likely others. Might not just be ours that fell. Might be tunnels aplenty need diggin’ out, you think?”

  Slade shrugged. He was inside only one tunnel, so it would have made no sense for the plotters to cause others to fall. McCaulay was trying to sound like a worried man, that was all, and doing a poor job of it.

  “What you got to be smilin’ at, hey?”

  Slade frowned. He didn’t like to be spoken to in that tone of voice, even if the rudeness was just a sham. He said nothing, did nothing, waiting to see if McCaulay might apologize, but the man turned away and began extracting his carefully laid fuses from the blasting caps beside them.