by Homer Hickam
“I’ve never liked the way gossip gets going around here,” Cable growled. “Turns out Rhonda added her two potatoes in the pot too. I got on Bashful’s case about it, but he was only repeating what others had said—and it started with you!”
Bossman’s helmet light rocked up and down. “You’re right, Cable. I had no call to say anything about your wife.”
Cable made no reply, lest his anger make him say something he didn’t really mean. He depended on Bossman, and he knew the man was sorry for telling the story of how Song had gotten upset about her blamed mussed-up blouse. Bossman probably only told his wife, but women talked and so did men in Highcoal, and it didn’t take long before everybody knew everybody else’s business.
Cable turned his attention to the face. The spinning teeth of the continuous miner ground into an ebony layer, violently ripping the coal from where it had peacefully lain undisturbed for over three hundred million years. It was similar to the machine that Cable’s father had operated but bigger and more powerful. Shuttle cars trundled in behind the monster digger to receive a load of the ancient treasure, then raced to dump it on a conveyor belt to be carried out of the mine. When the continuous miner backed out, the roof bolt crew moved in to brace the newly exposed roof, using a powerful hydraulic drill to pierce the roof in several strategic places, then inserting slender anchors with retaining plates called roof bolts. Working with the camaraderie and skill of a NASCAR pit crew, they backed out as the continuous miner roared into the seam to rip and tear it anew. It was the choreography of the working face, and Cable thought it as beautiful a thing as there was on the earth.
Cable raised his voice over the machinery. “It’s a good section, Bossman. Real good. Give Vietnam my compliments.”
Charles “Vietnam” Petroski was the foreman of the section. A miner for over thirty years, he’d passed his foreman’s exam only a few months previously and was now proudly wearing his new white helmet, the mark of a mine supervisor. Almost as if he sensed Cable’s comment, Vietnam looked up from where he’d been helping to hang a ventilation curtain and flashed his light across to the two watching bosses. They flashed their lights back.
“Vietnam’s a good foreman, Cable, and he’s got good men. But if one of them gets sick, his section’s pretty much out of business. I got nobody to fill in.”
“I know that,” Cable replied. “I’m working on it.”
“I’m just telling you.” Bossman shrugged.
Cable was working on it, but without much success. He couldn’t find any miners to hire. Coal was suddenly in demand across the world because of rising oil prices coupled with the rapid multiplication of steel mills in China and India. Orders for fuel coal and metallurgical coal had poured in, quickly exceeding the capacity of the coal industry in the United States. The coal from southern West Virginia was especially suitable for making steel, resulting in hot competition between the local coal companies to hire the few veteran miners around. Hiring and training new miners was the answer, but there weren’t enough applicants. It didn’t matter that the starting salary averaged over fifty thousand dollars. Today’s miner’s kids and grandkids, raised on iPods and computer games, just weren’t interested. For the few who were, the drop-out rate was high because of unexpected claustrophobia or an aversion to what they quickly realized was hard and dangerous work. The small number who stuck it out were, as the Marines put it, the few and the proud. But mostly the few.
Cable withdrew a gas monitor from the holster on his belt and held it near the roof. The digital readout told him that the explosive methane gas seeping out of the coal was at a safe level, the oxygen content was normal, and carbon monoxide, the stealthy murderer of coal miners, was undetectable. As a final check, he licked his fingers and held them up within an inch of the stone roof. When they quickly cooled, he knew the air was moving along according to his plan. Satisfied, he turned to leave.
“Keep them safe, Bossman.”
“I’ll do my best, Cable,” Bossman said, his grin wet from his chaw. He added, “I’m awful sorry I started the gossip about your wife.”
Cable gripped his mine foreman’s shoulder. “Forget it,” he said. “When you get to know her, you’ll see she’s a great girl.”
“She’s a good lookin’ one, that’s for sure,” Bossman said.
Cable nodded agreement, then walked away, bent beneath the roof, until he reached a small battery-powered car called a jeep. He energized the low-slung boxy vehicle and aimed it along the track toward the main line. Wooden support headers passed overhead and the rails clicked below. It was two and a half miles back to the manlift and then a short walk to his office where a mound of paperwork, including the latest MSHA inspection results, awaited him.
Em-Sha, as everyone in the industry called the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, was all-powerful. It could shut down a mine or levy a stiff fine for a thousand and one different violations, big and small. Although many mine superintendents and owners resented the agency, Cable wasn’t among them, even when he thought they were a little heavy-handed. Paying a fine was a way to keep everybody on their toes. Being shut down, however, was another matter. As competitive as it had become in the past year, closing even for a day could prove disastrous, especially since the Highcoal mine was already having difficulty meeting its orders.
There was a new steel mill in India that desperately needed an extremely pure metallurgical coal. Atlas headquarters had first signed a long-term contract to supply this coal, and then installed new equipment in the Highcoal processing plant to provide it. But, to date, the Highcoal mine had failed to meet the demand as specified in the contract. Cable could not figure out why. All the sections were nearly at peak production, and the seam they worked contained what was reputedly the finest metallurgical coal in the world. But when all the raw tonnage was separated into its different grades, he kept coming up short. He feared that the quality of the coal in the mine was decreasing, that they had already dug out most of the good stuff a long time ago. If so, the Indian steel mill would go elsewhere with their orders and Highcoal might be in danger of laying off miners, or even shutting down.
Cable’s mind revolved around this concern for a while, but he was distracted by thoughts of Song, which didn’t cheer him up. It wasn’t just the gossip about her that worried him. After seeing so little of Highcoal, she wasn’t happy, which was more than a little distressing. Highcoal was a beautiful town and the people were purely wonderful, not counting their propensity toward gossip. They gossiped in New York City too, right? He pondered what might make her happy and came up with not much, except he guessed he should spend more time with her while she was visiting. But when would that be, with all this bad coal being run?
Cable kept worrying about Song as the tracks clicked below the jeep. When no answer came, he went back to worrying over his mine. Both problems seemed to have unknowns he couldn’t quite put his finger on. With his wife, she seemed to have a strange lens through which she observed Highcoal. With the mine, it simply made no sense that he couldn’t meet the orders sent down from headquarters. The overall tonnage was good, but the special high-grade tonnage stayed low. Why? And was it a permanent situation? Was there really that much rock mixed in with the coal? Visually it seemed fine, but when it emerged from the preparation plant, it just didn’t add up. He had gone over the numbers with the plant manager, Stan Stanvic. He’d grown up with Stan, was on the football team with him, and he trusted him. Stan also loved Highcoal and would never do anything to hurt it. No, it had to be something else, probably just some bad coal they were passing through. It happened sometimes. But if they didn’t get through it soon, Atlas headquarters was going to go into some kind of spasm that wouldn’t be good for anybody.
He passed phosphorescent safety placards that presented safety messages. Danger High Voltage. Caution Low Roof. Phone One Hundred Yards. He had installed a hard-wired pager system throughout the mine, each station with a telephone and monitor inside a h
ardened, blast-proof box. He’d also had carbon monoxide sensors installed up and down the main escapeway and air return. A coal mine was an inherently dangerous place. Cable’s men worked in the dark beneath hundreds of feet of densely packed earth and rock, much of it unstable, all of it hideously heavy. Methane leaked out of the prehistoric seams, and if the gas was allowed to pool, it only took a single spark to set it off in a massive explosion. Carbon monoxide was the silent killer, the result of a fire, sometimes so low and smoldering no one noticed. The roof, the tight confines of the face, the heavy equipment on the move, all could combine to crush or maim a miner with only a second’s inattention. Every day a miner faced injury or death in too many ways to count.
A little past the midpoint of the main line, Cable caught sight of two lights toward Three West, an old section that had produced consistently for over forty years. In fact, his father had been killed at its face. The lights were flashing around, then one of them seemed to drop. Cable turned into the entry, but stopped when one of the lights flashed in his eyes. He climbed out of the jeep and walked bent beneath the low roof. The light stayed in his eyes. “Look away. You’re blinding me!” he yelled at the miscreant.
The light moved off him and he saw, with a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach, that it belonged to Bum Wilkes, who only yesterday had gleefully given him and Song the finger. He was crouched next to a power plant that fed electricity to the machines working the face. “What are you doing, Bum?” Cable asked.
Bum didn’t answer, but then another helmet light came on. Cable saw it belonged to a miner sitting in the gob and recognized him—Pinky Wilson, a young man who’d recently completed his red cap training. Pinky had a bloody nose.
“What’s going on here?” Cable demanded.
“Nothing, Cable,” Bum said. “Ain’t that right, Pinky-winky?”
Pinky ran his arm across his nose, leaving a scarlet trail on his shirt sleeve. “That’s right, Mr. Jordan,” he said in a shaky voice. “Nothing going on here, no, sir.”
Cable knew the answer already, but he had to ask it. “Did Bum hit you?”
“No, sir. I tripped.”
Cable turned back to Bum. “I asked you what you’re doing.”
Bum held up a screwdriver. “Foreman said for us to check the power plant. Circuit breaker keeps tripping. I’m fixing it.”
Cable inspected the substation. “You’ve disconnected the ground.”
Bum grinned his gap-toothed grin. “Sure did. That circuit breaker ain’t gonna trip no more.”
“Are you crazy, Bum? You could electrocute somebody with a stunt like that!”
Bum’s grin vanished. “It’s been done before, ain’t nobody got hurt. You pushing everybody around here to load coal, what do you expect us to do?”
“I told him it was wrong, Mr. Jordan,” Pinky said. He had his hand over his nose. “That’s why he hit me.”
“You shut your mouth or you gonna swallow some teeth,” Bum growled.
Cable turned to Bum. “Bum, I’m fining you one hundred dollars for this stunt. Pinky, you’re fined fifty for not going after the foreman. As for your foreman, you tell him to come see me. Move! ”
Pinky instantly started walking toward the section, but Bum stayed put and put his light in Cable’s eyes. “Aw, Cable. I’m your old teammate, ain’t I?” he said. “We got to stick together, right?”
“We were teammates awhile ago, Bum. Now I have a job to do. And get your light out of my eyes.”
Bum looked away. “It ain’t right, you fining me,” he rumbled. “It ain’t right at all.”
“Just get back to work, Bum. I’ll think about the fine, but this brawling has got to stop. I’ve been fielding complaints on you ever since I took over. You’re either fighting or sleeping on the job. I’ve taken up for you a lot more than I should.”
“Yeah, right,” Bum said. “Big man now, ain’tcha? How’d you get up so high, anyway?”
“I got an education, Bum. You could have too.”
“And how was that going to happen, with my daddy all busted up and my ma so sick all the time? I had to go to work.”
Cable didn’t bother to remind Bum that his own father had been killed in the mine, and his mom also had to struggle until she married her plumber in Florida. Bum knew all that. He was just baiting him.
“Go back to work, Bum,” he said. “And stay out of trouble. That’s all I’m asking.”
Bum’s light flashed insolently into his eyes again, then the big miner turned and stomped off, passing the foreman, Harry “Poker” Williams, who was actually running bent beneath the low roof.
“Sorry, Cable,” he panted as he arrived. “I was up to my neck in alligators. The coal’s getting mighty low and the roof ’s working something fierce.”
Cable was not impressed with the excuse. “Poker, you sent Bum with an inexperienced man to look at a power plant. What were you thinking? You should have called an electrician.”
Poker’s mouth opened to answer, then closed as he took another moment to think. “You’re right, Cable,” he concluded. “It was stupid.”
“I know you’re undermanned and I’m pushing you to mine coal, but you’ve got to use some common sense. Now, go call that electrician.”
“You going to fine me?”
“I’m not going to fine anybody if you do your job for a change.”
Poker hastily withdrew, heading toward one of the hardened telephones to make the call for an outside electrician. Disgusted, Cable aimed his jeep back down the track to the bottom and the manlift, which would carry him back to where the sky wasn’t made of stone.
On the surface, Mole Phillips, his clerk and dispatcher, was waiting for him. Mole looked worried, and for good reason. “Einstein’s in your office, Cable,” he announced even before Cable stepped off the lift.
“Einstein” was Ian Stein, the meticulous and ruthless MSHA inspector who apparently thought the Highcoal mine was his personal project. When you talked to Einstein, about the only words he wanted to hear out of your mouth were, “Yes, sir!” That was mostly what he got.
“What’s he doing?” Cable demanded.
“Studying your mine map.”
“Trouble on top of trouble,” Cable groaned, and headed for his office.
Seven
When Song awoke, she lay in bed for a while to think about the situation. She’d come all this way, taken a week out of her busy schedule to be with her husband, and now he was somewhere else. She contemplated his empty pillow, then reached over and tossed it off the bed.
“Thanks, Cable,” she muttered.
She was angry and hurt, and she was also not used to being ignored. “Reality has sharp teeth,” her father always told her. “If you turn away from it, it’ll bite you in the butt.” Crudely put, but it reminded Song that her father was, after all, famous for his ruthlessness in business, and devoted to his only child. She knew he liked Cable, but she also knew he’d bury the man if she wanted him to. But Song didn’t want to bury Cable. She loved him, even if she wasn’t absolutely sure, based on his performance yesterday, if he loved her anymore.
Song needed to talk to her father. She tried her cell, receiving the same message she’d gotten the day before: “No service.” Shaking her head, she went into the bathroom, only to remember she had no makeup, except what she had carried in her purse, which wasn’t much. She did a few things, some light powder, some lipstick, then put on jeans, a chambray shirt, and running shoes. She headed downstairs to try the kitchen telephone. When she dialed her father’s number, the recording told her the circuits were still down. The squirrels were apparently still in charge at the local telephone company.
After looking in various cabinets for something she could eat, she discovered some cereal in the pantry. With the milk in the refrigerator—unhappily not low-fat—breakfast was solved. She also made a pot of strong coffee. Carrying a cup outside, she walked to the edge of the yard, which ended abruptly at a cliff that had a v
ertical drop of about a hundred feet. With all the trees lower than the yard, the result was an unimpeded view of the town and the mine. From that elevation, she could see every house. They were almost all uniformly gray in color, which made the white church stand out all the more. Its steeple seemed to reach for the sunlit sky. Its bell began to toll, and Song wondered what it was announcing on a Tuesday morning.
She recalled Rhonda’s advice, that the church was the place to “meet and greet,” but Song knew she’d never go there. As far as she was concerned, religion and superstition were one and the same. There had to be other ways to meet people, not that she was particularly interested. Cable was the only person in Highcoal she cared anything about. Well, maybe Young Henry. He seemed like a nice kid.
She turned her attention to the ugly black scar of the mine. She studied its layout and tried to figure out what its various structures were for. The wheels atop the black tower were turning. She recalled there were cables attached to it, so perhaps it was lifting or lowering something. Maybe, she divined, the tower was just an elevator. But what did it lift and lower? Miners? Coal? Equipment? Her intellect was stirred.
She saw a big truck crawling along until it reached three silolike structures on stilts. When it stopped at one of the silos, the acoustics of the valley were such that she clearly heard what sounded like a rumble of rocks down a metal chute. She suspected the truck was probably receiving a load of coal from the silo. But why were there three of them? Did they hold different kinds of coal? Were there different kinds of coal? The mine complex was mysterious, but she was confident it would all make perfect sense if she studied it long enough. As the property and acquisitions manager for her father, she was required to understand what companies did, sometimes even better than their own employees. Now she wondered what it would take to learn about coal mining, even to know as much as Cable knew. This made her smile, though it was somewhat grim. That would surprise him, wouldn’t it?
But she didn’t want to learn about coal mining. What she wanted to do, what she had to do, was to get Cable out of Highcoal. It was not possible for her to live in the grimy little town. She had already seen enough to convince her of that.