That Glimpse of Truth

by David Miller

  They were good at their work, so good that they didn’t stop to think for a minute that I was present when they stomped up to Mukherjee and Pandey one evening to ask what was going on. Mukherjee had been slightly moody all day and snapped at them. “What d’you mean what’s going on? You know why you are here.”

  “To catch the fellow who passed the letter to the reporter. Not to wrestle with whatever’s down in your mines.”

  “Explain,” Pandey said calmly. “Try not to get too excited. It’s bad for your blood pressure.”

  The chief gunman, a thick-necked swarthy man shorter than his companions, wiped his forehead and neck with a handkerchief and sat down facing the two officers. “So we found the reporter yesterday when he was going home, near the mining school. We beat it out of him, who he got the letter from.”

  “So where’s the problem?” Mukherjee said. “You know what to do next.”

  “No, we don’t. The reporter didn’t have a name for the person. And I don’t think he was lying by the time we finished working on him.”

  “Of course he wasn’t lying,” the other men said in a chorus, as if their professional competence had been challenged. The chief held up his left hand and they subsided.

  “No, he wasn’t lying. He would have told us how he likes to do his wife if we had asked him.”

  “You know I don’t like those kind of references. I am a religious man,” Pandey said.

  “Beg your pardon, Pandeyji, just habit from hanging around with the low life.” The chief gestured at his partners.

  “Can you continue?” Mukherjee asked loudly. “If he didn’t have a name, you have nothing. Nothing of use at all.”

  “He gave us a description. And it was as detailed a description as he could make, since we helped him describe.”

  One of the men in the back cracked his fingers and the others laughed.

  “He said he was given the letter by a miner, somewhere near the tea stall. He had never seen the miner before and nothing was said, no money exchanged. It was dusk, and the man appeared out of nowhere and handed him the letter and left. Everything happened very quickly, and he didn’t get a good look at the miner except that he was small and had a big beard and that there was something about the way he walked, not like an old man at all.”

  “Mauniya,” Mukherjee mumbled. Then he got up from the chair and began to pace through the room, reminding me of Coelho. The chief gunman watched him keenly, wiping his forehead again.

  “Get that attendance clerk here,” Pandey said on the phone. “So find Mauniya. What is the problem?”

  “We tried,” the chief gunman said. “We went to the miners’ quarters last night. Turned it inside out. Questioned the miners. The police quarters, we didn’t go into. But we told them to look, and they searched. It’s their territory. Why should they hide him?”

  “They’re not hiding him,” Mukherjee said. “You won’t find him.”

  “What are you talking about, Mukherjee?” Pandey said sharply. “He’s old, ancient, half-dead. Where would he go? They’ll find him.”

  Mukherjee drew his breath. “They won’t find him because he’s not a miner.”

  There was a puzzled silence following this remark.

  Mukherjee went on, looking at Pandey, speaking in a low voice. “You and I have known for a long time that there was something different happening here, and we didn’t care because we were making money. So neither of us asked how Coelho kept things going down there, how he kept the normal rate of extraction with shifts less than full strength.”

  “Full strength only on paper,” Pandey said, but Mukherjee cut him off.

  “We have sixty four going below on the night of the accident, sixty four missing on the roster. But did you check with the miners and their families how many of them are actually missing? I did. Forty of them. So where did the others come from?”

  “Mukherjee, you know the numbers are only on paper,” Pandey said placatingly. “Since when has that been a problem?”

  “So if it’s only on paper, why do we have sixty four pieces of equipment checked out? Why does the attendance clerk remember Mauniya going down on that shift? Why do we have Mauniya’s name on the roster of that shift, along with nearly twenty other strange names that I don’t recognise? And why don’t those same names not appear on the wage books we have?”

  “Mukherjee, you’re losing control. We were the ones who arranged for fake names.”

  “We did, didn’t we? But if we arranged for fake workers, we also arranged for them to be paid their wages. That was the point of it. So why would we have fake workers going down and being issued equipment but not given wages? And how do you explain Mauniya? He wasn’t a fiction created by us. How is it that we have records of the work he has done, of the shifts he was part of, even an order from Coelho transferring him from the incline to the main pit, but nothing to indicate his wages? What man, fake or real, would work every day in the mines and not get paid?”

  There were mutters of “Ram, Ram,” from the three gunmen. They were visibly uneasy now and their chief waved at them in a gesture of dismissal. They left the room and waited outside, lighting bidis, and in the inky darkness of the evening the glow of their bidis looked like fireflies inscribing slow, small circles in the air.

  The clerk Pandey had sent for was standing near the wall. He had been listening carefully to what Mukherjee was saying and spoke up in a toneless voice. “I remember the bearded one going down before the accident. None of them made it out alive. But now the cage goes up and down by itself at night. Empty. With no one in it. The alarm bell goes off, the telephone rings.” He was going to continue but Pandey got up from his seat, walked up to him, and slapped him hard on the face. “You can go now,” he said in a quiet voice, and the clerk left, head bowed.

  Mukherjee was in some kind of trance. “Who is Mauniya? Who are the others? What have we been playing with out here? I looked at the records we possess, not what was given to the accountant, and I can’t find any explanation for Mauniya or those extra workers Coelho used.”

  There was silence in the room as everyone considered this last bit of information. The chief gunman was the first one to react. He stood up with dignity and addressed Pandey. “This is not what we were sent for,” he said. “We’re professionals, and we know our limitations. Chasing after shadows in the dark is not our job.” With that, he left the room.

  “I feel old, very old,” Pandey said.

  Mukherjee looked at him blankly and then cried out. “And Coelho? What about Coelho?”

  Pandey got up and put a hand on Mukherjee’s broad back. He leaned towards Mukherjee, but his words were drowned out by the sound of the gunmen’s jeep pulling out of the colliery.

  The police post at the gate was empty as I walked out of the colliery. The brown stray which slept near the shops began barking as my feet crunched on the gravel, but it calmed down once it saw me and began following me, sniffing at my ankles. Not a soul in that thin, translucent darkness, nothing visible except for the lumps of the colliery buildings and the figure down in the loading yard, already beginning its unforgiving work. Struck by a whim, I walked down the slope towards the boy. Behind me the stray stopped dead, whining. The boy turned when I came close to him but did not utter a single word in response to my meaningless query, meaningless in any time and place, but especially there and then, with the dawn emerging cautiously behind the main pit.

  “What is your name? How old are you?”

  He looked at me and waited, his right hand in the air. It was an old man’s face, rendered expressionless by time, and only when I began to step back did his hand and body move, stooping to the earth once again. I climbed back to the road and began walking towards Dhanbad.

  THE DEEP

  Anthony Doerr

  Anthony Doerr (b.1973) was raised in Novelty, Ohio, majored in history and was awarded an MFA from Bowling Green State University. He has lived and worked elsewhere, notably in Africa and New Zeala
nd where many of his stories in The Shell Collector are set. He now lives in Boise, Idaho, with his family. His work has been awarded a Rome Prize, the Ohioana Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2011 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award for the story included here. “When you’re falling into a good book,” he told an in-flight magazine, “exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader’s heart and a writer’s, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death … and here’s the magic. You’re different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.”

  Tom is born in 1914 in Detroit, a quarter mile from International Salt. His father is offstage, unaccounted for. His mother operates a six-room, underinsulated boardinghouse populated with locked doors, behind which drowse the grim possessions of itinerant salt workers: coats the colors of mice, tattered mucking boots, aquatints of undressed women, their breasts faded orange. Every six months a miner is laid off, gets drafted, or dies, and is replaced by another, so that very early in his life Tom comes to see how the world continually drains itself of young men, leaving behind only objects – empty tobacco pouches, bladeless jackknives, salt-caked trousers – mute, incapable of memory.

  Tom is four when he starts fainting. He’ll be rounding a corner, breathing hard, and the lights will go out. Mother will carry him indoors, set him on the armchair, and send someone for the doctor.

  Atrial septal defect. Hole in the heart. The doctor says blood sloshes from the left side to the right side. His heart will have to do three times the work. Lifespan of sixteen. Eighteen if he’s lucky. Best if he doesn’t get excited.

  Mother trains her voice into a whisper. Here you go, there you are, sweet little Tomcat. She moves Tom’s cot into an upstairs closet – no bright lights, no loud noises. Mornings she serves him a glass of buttermilk, then points him to the brooms or steel wool. Go slow, she’ll murmur. He scrubs the coal stove, sweeps the marble stoop. Every so often he peers up from his work and watches the face of the oldest boarder, Mr. Weems, as he troops downstairs, a fifty-year-old man hooded against the cold, off to descend in an elevator a thousand feet underground. Tom imagines his descent, sporadic and dim lights passing and receding, cables rattling, a half dozen other miners squeezed into the cage beside him, each thinking his own thoughts, men’s thoughts, sinking down into that city beneath the city where mules stand waiting and oil lamps burn in the walls and glittering rooms of salt recede into vast arcades beyond the farthest reaches of the light.

  Sixteen, thinks Tom. Eighteen if I’m lucky.

  School is a three-room shed aswarm with the offspring of salt workers, coal workers, ironworkers. Irish kids, Polish kids, Armenian kids. To Mother the school yard seems a thousand acres of sizzling pandemonium. Don’t run, don’t fight, she whispers. No games. His first day, she pulls him out of class after an hour. Shhh, she says, and wraps her arms around his like ropes.

  Tom seesaws in and out of the early grades. Sometimes she keeps him out of school for whole weeks at a time. By the time he’s ten, he’s in remedial everything. I’m trying, he stammers, but letters spin off pages and dash against the windows like snow. Dunce, the other boys declare, and to Tom that seems about right.

  Tom sweeps, scrubs, scours the stoop with pumice one square inch at a time. Slow as molasses in January, says Mr. Weems, but he winks at Tom when he says it.

  Every day, all day, the salt finds its way in. It encrusts washbasins, settles on the rims of baseboards. It spills out of the boarders, too: from ears, boots, handkerchiefs. Furrows of glitter gather in the bedsheets: a daily lesson in insidiousness.

  Start at the edges, then scrub out the center. Linens on Thursdays. Toilets on Fridays.

  He’s twelve when Ms. Fredericks asks the children to give reports. Ruby Hornaday goes sixth. Ruby has flames for hair, Christmas for a birthday, and a drunk for a daddy. She’s one of two girls to make it to fourth grade.

  She reads from notes in controlled terror. If you think the lake is big you should see the sea. It’s three-quarters of Earth. And that’s just the surface. Someone throws a pencil. The creases on Ruby’s forehead sharpen. Land animals live on ground or in trees rats and worms and gulls and such. But sea animals they live everywhere they live in the waves and they live in mid water and they live in canyons six and a half miles down.

  She passes around a red book. Inside are blocks of text and full-color photographic plates that make Tom’s heart boom in his ears. A blizzard of toothy minnows. A kingdom of purple corals. Five orange starfish cemented to a rock.

  Ruby says, Detroit used to have palm trees and corals and seashells. Detroit used to be a sea three miles deep.

  Ms. Fredericks asks, Ruby, where did you get that book? but by then Tom is hardly breathing. See-through flowers with poison tentacles and fields of clams and pink spheres with a thousand needles on their backs. He tries to ask, Are these real? but quicksilver bubbles rise from his mouth and float up to the ceiling. When he goes over, the desk goes over with him.

  The doctor says it’s best if Tom stays out of school and Mother agrees. Keep indoors, the doctor says. If you get excited, think of something blue. Mother lets him come downstairs for meals and chores only. Otherwise he’s to stay in his closet. We have to be more careful, Tomcat, she whispers, and sets her palm on his forehead.

  Tom spends long hours on the floor beside his cot, assembling and reassembling the same jigsaw puzzle: a Swiss village. Five hundred pieces, nine of them missing. Sometimes Mr. Weems reads to Tom from adventure novels. They’re blasting a new vein down in the mines and in the lulls between Mr. Weems’s words, Tom can feel explosions reverberate up through a thousand feet of rock and shake the fragile pump in his chest.

  He misses school. He misses the sky. He misses everything. When Mr. Weems is in the mine and Mother is downstairs, Tom often slips to the end of the hall and lifts aside the curtains and presses his forehead to the glass. Children run the snowy lanes and lights glow in the foundry windows and train cars trundle beneath elevated conduits. First-shift miners emerge from the mouth of the hauling elevator in groups of six and bring out cigarette cases from their overalls and strike matches and spill like little salt-dusted insects out into the night, while the darker figures of the second-shift miners stamp their feet in the cold, waiting outside the cages for their turn in the pit.

  In dreams he sees waving sea fans and milling schools of grouper and underwater shafts of light. He sees Ruby Hornaday push open the door of his closet. She’s wearing a copper diving helmet; she leans over his cot and puts the window of her helmet an inch from his face.

  He wakes with a shock. Heat pools in his groin. He thinks, Blue, blue, blue.

  One drizzly Saturday, the bell rings. When Tom opens the door, Ruby Hornaday is standing on the stoop in the rain.

  Hello. Tom blinks a dozen times. Raindrops set a thousand intersecting circles upon the puddles in the road. Ruby holds up a jar: six black tadpoles squirm in an inch of water.

  Seemed like you might be interested in water creatures.

  Tom tries to answer, but the whole sky is rushing through the open door into his mouth.

  You’re not going to faint again, are you?

  Mr. Weems stumps into the foyer. Jesus, boy, she’s damp as a church, you got to invite a lady in.

  Ruby stands on the tiles and drips. Mr. Weems grins. Tom mumbles, My heart.

  Ruby holds out the jar. Keep ’em if you want. They’ll be frogs before long. Drops shine in her eyelashes. Rain glues her shirt to her clavicles. Well, that’s something, says Mr. Weems. He nudges Tom in the back. Isn’t it, Tom?

  Tom is opening his mouth. He’s saying, Maybe I could – when Mother comes down the stairs in her big, black shoes. Trouble, hisses Mr. Weems.

  Mother dumps the tadpoles in a ditch. Her face says she’s composing herself but her eyes say she’s going to wipe all this away. Mr. Weems l
eans over the dominoes and whispers, Mother’s as hard as a cobblestone but we’ll crack her, Tom, you wait.

  Tom whispers, Ruby Hornaday, into the space above his cot. Ruby Hornaday. Ruby Hornaday. A strange and uncontainable joy inflates dangerously in his chest.

  Mr. Weems initiates long conversations with Mother in the kitchen. Tom overhears scraps: Boy needs to move his legs. Boy should get some air.

  Mother’s voice is a whip. He’s sick.

  He’s alive! What’re you saving him for?

  Mother consents to let Tom retrieve coal from the depot and tinned goods from the commissary. Tuesdays he’ll be allowed to walk to the butcher’s in Dearborn. Careful, Tomcat, don’t hurry.

  Tom moves through the colony that first Tuesday with something close to rapture in his veins. Down the long gravel lanes, past pit cottages and surface mountains of blue and white salt, the warehouses like dark cathedrals, the hauling machines like demonic armatures. All around him the monumental industry of Detroit pounds and clangs. The boy tells himself he is a treasure hunter, a hero from one of Mr. Weems’s adventure stories, a knight on important errands, a spy behind enemy lines. He keeps his hands in his pockets and his head down and his gait slow, but his soul charges ahead, weightless, jubilant, sparking through the gloom.

  In May of that year, 1929, fourteen-year-old Tom is walking along the lane thinking spring happens whether you’re paying attention or not; it happens beneath the snow, beyond the walls – spring happens in the dark while you dream – when Ruby Hornaday steps out of the weeds. She has a shriveled rubber hose coiled over her shoulder and a swim mask in one hand and a tire pump in the other. Need your help. Tom’s pulse soars.