Now on the top and bottom decks of the drilling platform, all the drillers had whirling fangs cutting into the striped rock. One driller, with a large bit, chewed at the four spots that had been painted inside the square in the center of the circle. These holes were to be nine inches in circumference. As the drilling went on, the rest of the tunnel was taken up by the ceaseless work of mining: railroad track being put down, steel arches being brought up, air and electric lines being tugged by men in the dimness. Fuming cherry pickers and payloaders bounced over the wet, rocky floor and soured more of the air.
Sometimes, while Owney drilled, he sang Rolling Stones songs. Or he imagined he was surfing. He stopped a couple of times to change drills as he went deeper into the rock and needed a longer piece of steel. The lengths went up to eighteen feet. Then, with his arms and back feeling the effort of the drilling, he began to think what it was going to be like mucking out after the explosion, with two men missing from his gang and at least one other gang working down here short. See your father, Delaney had said. Owney was surprised at his own docility in accepting evasion as a reply. Meanwhile, you work two hands short. By code and custom, sandhogs always count heads in front of the shaft and if they find a gang does not have a full line-up, the short gang does not go into the hole until one of the bosses goes over to the hog house and hires a shape-up man and brings him back. Promises of sending somebody down to the hole in a few minutes are as acceptable as personal checks. Get us the man we’re short or we sit here and drink beer for the whole shift. That his father would countenance anything like that today was an interference with family lore: miners give the sacrament of work in return for which they are to receive certain small honors of life, and these are to be delivered promptly and undamaged. One of the best moments he ever had in the place was yesterday, when they were going to strike over the showers. Work with a short gang? He better tell his father to count heads. Maybe he’s getting careless. On the rock face in front of Owney, there were only four painted spots left. His drill went into each, stopping to put on extensions so that at the finish he had the longest drill in his kit. When he finished at last, at the end of an hour and forty-five minutes of steady drilling, he put the big hydraulic drill down and waited for the other drills to cease. When Owney saw the last one, somewhere along the bottom, pull away from the rock, he took off his earmuffs and went down the platform steps and walked along the wall until he came to a length of rock that formed a ledge wide enough to sit on. In a small crevice over the ledge, covered by a piece of wood, was a bag of beers that Owney’s father kept hidden there. The beer was warm and it sprayed when the tab came off, but Owney covered the can with his mouth and sucked quickly. Then he started to swallow the can of beer and tasted it only after it was finished, and then he used the taste as a reason for opening another can quickly.
He was almost through with this second can when his father and a surveyor walked past.
“We’re short today,” Owney said to his father.
“Why do you think I’m on the run all morning?” the father said.
When his father kept walking, Owney finished the second can, grabbed another, and walked up the face, where his father stood, reading from a diagram. The father reached into a cardboard box that contained long, yellow electrical wires that had white-numbered tags on each of them.
“What do you think?” Owney said to his father.
“I think you better leave us alone.”
The father held a yellow wire that had the number 18 on it. The father checked this with the diagram, and then stuck the wire into a hole on the perimeter of the rock face. The hole directly above it, the diagram said, was another 18. Owney’s father took another wire with an 18 tag and stuffed it into the hole. He was following the script that would run an explosion just as a playwright moves characters about a stage. Following the diagram, Owney’s father went around the top and bottom arcs of the circle and stuck 18s into most of the holes. He then worked around the outside—or contour—holes and stuck them with 18s and then 17s and down to 16s. After this Owney’s father began to work the maze of holes, placing high numbers on the outer ring and then using lower-numbered wire as he worked toward the center. The diagram called for no wires to be placed in the four nine-inch holes at the center. The numbered wire stood for the sequence in which the explosives would detonate, fractions of seconds apart, with the low numbers on the inside—the 1s, 2s, and 3s—going off first and the others blowing up in numerical order, the explosion rippling across the rock face in a series that actually forms one long explosion that lasts for fully ten seconds. Detonated all at once, the eighteen hundred pounds of explosives could cause the face of the wall to fracture, in large broken ribs, but it would not drive the rock back and create more tunnel. Cumulatively set off, the eighteen hundred pounds of explosives cause the rock to peel like an onion, and the final explosions in the series, the number 18s along the top and bottom parts, cause the rock to lift from the top and be pushed up from the bottom simultaneously and turn into a pile of thick muck and boulders while the rest of the rock disintegrates and fills the tunnel with thick dust.
When Owney’s father was finished wiring the holes, he climbed off the platform, looked at the beer can in Owney’s hand, and muttered, “Where’s mine?”
“What about getting us a man?” Owney said. “We’re two down. Are we going to have to do all this mucking out short-ganged?”
The father looked at the other men crowded in the tunnel and, eyebrows raised, looked back at Owney. Are you trying to make me look bad? his stare said. “I’m going for a beer,” he said, walking away.
Now another squat yellow engine came out of the darkness, horn sounding, and behind it on a flatcar was a red locker plastered with warning signs of explosives. The powder monkey, a white-haired man, opened the locker and began handing out sticks of explosives called Tovex, which is dynamite without the nitroglycerin that has made so many miners so sick over the decades.
Owney went up onto the drilling platform and shoved two sticks into one of the holes he had drilled. Then he took the yellow wire in the hole, the tip of which carried a silver blasting cap, and stuffed the blasting cap into the second stick of Tovex. Owney then took a long wooden pole and shoved it into the hole, crushing the Tovex sticks against each other, sending them deep into the hole until they reached the end. The long yellow cord hung out of the hole like a rat’s tail. Owney then put in two more sticks, pounded them in with the pole, and went into his pockets for two more sticks. Each hole took sixteen sticks of the Tovex.
When they were all packed, the surveyor grabbed the yellow cords dangling from the holes and attached them to a long coil of yellow-and-blue-striped wire that ran into the darkness of the tunnel and up to the spot where the explosion was to be touched off.
As they were short-handed, it took nearly two hours for the holes to have their throats stuffed. The powder monkey and a surveyor handed out lighter charges, a water-jelly composition for the contour holes, which had to blow up, but not crack, the outside rock walls.
In the center, the four large holes were not loaded. The holes directly around them, the ones with number 1 and 2 and 3 wire in them, were filled with heavier charges than those used anywhere else in the rock. As each hole was stuffed, a surveyor grabbed the yellow cord sticking out and attached it to the long coil of yellow-and-blue-striped wire.
When all the holes were stuffed and the wires connected, the miners stepped off the platform. A motor coughed and the platform was drawn away from the rock face, leaving it with yellow cords hanging from its striped mouth. A victim about to be executed. But then Owney’s eyes went upward and here was the same striped rock, with a slash of ugly white running through it, and he knew that somewhere deep in the rock, the woman strolled on the road through the fields and whimpered for her children.
The blaster, who had learned his trade in the mines, stood at the face, and his eyes counted the yellow wires connected to the coils of yellow-and-b
lue-striped wire. When he saw that nothing was loose, he stood for one long moment, pondered the rock face, and then started walking up the tunnel, with everyone ahead of him. The blaster connected the yellow-and-blue line to a short blue wire, the shooting line. The blue wire was attached to a small metal object that looked like a doorknob. When the blaster was a thousand feet away from the wall, he unscrewed the metal doorknob. He put a .22 cartridge into a bracket inside the doorknob. Horns sounded. Then he clapped the two halves of the doorknob together. The .22 cartridge inside the doorknob popped. And down the tunnel there were flashes in the darkness as the characters rushed about the stage. The first low numbers exploded in their holes and the dynamite headed for the weakest point in the rock face and found it in the nine-inch holes left unloaded in the center of the face. Rock from these initial charges blew to the center, relieving itself of pressure by collapsing into the empty holes. Rapid-fire, the holes blew up in their pattern, headed out, three-four-five-six, but they headed out only in time, for the explosions were caving to the center and the center was opening, opening, opening, as the holes exploded, and finally, there was a pinwheel of 18s along the perimeter, the contour line, top and bottom arcs, explosion going into explosion and the rock in the darkness suddenly became thick gravel in the air.
Now rolling up the tunnel toward the men one thousand feet away there came a dark rush of air, air carrying concussion: dark, heavy air that at first was like the rush of wind when a subway train pulls into a station, but in the subway, when the train stops the wind ceases. Here in the tunnel the wind rolled on its own, uncontrolled, and the concussion rolled along the rock walls of the cave and for a moment there was the thought that the air never would be controlled again. Owney’s hard hat blew off his head.
The day she knew she was pregnant, when she stayed in bed unable to move from nerves and an upset stomach, she also felt guilty that she had not made dinner for him. When he did not arrive home until nine-thirty, with his breath carrying the smell of a suddenly thrown open cellar, she accepted his “I’m sorry” and allowed the lost hours to pass into the small history of their marriage.
She completed her second year in college exactly four days before she entered the maternity wing of St. John’s Hospital and gave birth to a baby girl, whom they named Christine. When the baby arrived, there were long nights with an infant who shrieked endlessly for food because of stomach muscles that were not yet formed enough to provide the sensation of fullness. Fed until the stomach was overfull, the baby simply threw up and, upon stopping this, immediately began screaming for more food. As this kept Dolores awake through the nights, through long hours when she took the baby into the living room so that Owney could sleep, she found that she had only one part of a day, at the start of the afternoon, when she could try to live for herself. She thought of going to the library for a book, but found she could concentrate only on soap operas. She watched a succession of husbands suddenly disappear and leave their wives alone forever on The Guiding Light, and she believed in the stories so much that the disappearances pained her. She made fun of herself for this. One day, you’re going to be like one of these women doctors, and the next you’re another housewife on the block afraid of your husband, she told herself. Yet often, when Owney came home late and was annoyed to hear the baby crying as he walked in, Dolores knew she should be angry, but here with the baby she suddenly was too susceptible to her past, to her own story of a mother and father who had left her. Except for a magnificent coincidence, she would have been raised in the bare walls of an orphanage. She knew the fear was unreasonable and that it was changing her, but it was her baby and her fear.
After blasting, there usually are ten minutes of waiting for the heavy rock dust to leave the air, and also for any delayed explosions. But this time, right after the shot, a boss somewhere called out, “Let’s go.” And another voice followed and soon Delaney, the foreman, would be telling them to hustle the big jumbo drilling platform back up to the face of the tunnel.
For some reason, they were using up old dynamite instead of the Tovex. A few men had long poles, which they poked as a precaution at the rock roof and Delaney made them work quickly and he suddenly pronounced it safe and had crews and machines up to the face to move the piles of rubble. Owney noticed that nobody had washed the rock face. Usually, after each shot, a man hoses down the tunnel face in order to wash out any explosives that failed to go off on the previous shot. A hole might be stuffed with explosives. He noticed that there had been no washing, but he had enough whiskey in him from the night before on Katonah Avenue to drown the sense of danger.
When Owney got up on the platform and placed his drill bit onto the first spot, he tried to watch the water pour out of the bit; if the water stopped, then his move was to shut off the drill before it burned itself out in dry heat. Drilling, drilling, with the water from his drill bit spilling down the face of the rock, taking rock dust with it. His eyes closed for a moment and he forced them to open and saw, three inches below the drill at the most, the water splash rock dust off the wall, and there, shining in the water and light from the chuck tender’s flashlight, the hot drill head chewing rock only inches over it, the yellow-and-blue wire attached to a blasting cap and a stick of dynamite stuck in the last traces of an old drilled hole.
Owney turned the drill off. He signaled for a plastic water pipe. He aimed a stream of water at the hole and the blasting cap and dynamite washed away. All harmless now. A few moments before, he had been drilling three inches away from the end of his life.
He put the drill down, walked off the platform, and went up to the tracks to wait for a motor.
“Owney!”
Hearing Delaney’s voice made Owney walk faster. While he waited for the motor, he picked up a piece of pink rock, feldspar, prehistoric pink untouched by any other hand except perhaps God’s. He put the rock in his pocket and climbed aboard the motor.
In the hog house, he dressed alone. He let his body give one shake as he thought of the explosives left in the hole. Then he walked up the wet floor from his locker and he was going directly home, with the pink rock in the pocket of his yellow shirt, and then his father was standing at the picnic table in the hog house. The father had a bottle of Jim Beam in one hand and a paper cup in the other. He raised the cup. “That tastes good. Want one?”
”I have to go home. I can’t get in trouble.”
“What’s trouble? What can happen to you with a drink?”
“I near got killed,” Owney said.
“The fact is, you didn’t.”
“I said I nearly got killed.”
“So say you. And so you walk off.”
“I might stay off.”
“What for?”
“Until we stop working short-handed.”
“I don’t know that you are.”
“You’re telling me I can’t count?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You’re telling me that I don’t know what I’m doing?”
“I’m telling you that I don’t know what you’re saying. What I’m going to do is go over this whole thing tonight. I’ll do it without walking off the job, either.”
As the father and Owney left the hog house, an engineer came out of a trailer and waved to the father. Noticing Owney, the engineer said, “Family conference?”
“He claims we got ghosts working,” the father said.
The engineer smiled and he and Owney’s father walked to the lift.
When Owney was on the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, with the sun high in a hot sky over the buildings of Manhattan off to the right, and splashing on the water below and sending sunstreaks across the surface from shore to shore, he thought for the first time about his father’s remark. Who the fuck mentioned ghosts?
He was going right home, of course, and he stopped at Fritz’s on Myrtle Avenue only because the place was just a few blocks from his house. Inside the barroom, which was a place that begged for a broom and dreamed of soap, a woman
sitting in a wheelchair in the dimness reached up to the bar for her glass of whiskey and ice. She drank it quickly and looked at the empty glass in her hand and then looked at Owney. As she was in a wheelchair, she expected people to buy drinks for her.
Owney ordered a beer for himself and told the bartender to include the woman in. She cackled as she got the drink. “This is how I do it every day,” she said. “I start out here, I’m history after that.”
Owney found the first taste of beer bitter, then he swallowed it all, ordered a shot of Fleischmann’s, and threw the shot down and had another beer. He took that in two swallows and wiped his mouth and stepped away from the bar. He went to the juke box and let his eyes run down the rows of homemade cards: “Kevin Barry” /The Clancy Brothers. And then, “Sean South of Garryowen” /The Dubliners. There was no Rolling Stones song to make the walls pound and his body throb. Most bars in Queens are run with the idea that all customers are over fifty. As the hand reaches for the first drink, youth is supposed to slip out the door.
It was late in the afternoon when he decided to drive home. He went up Myrtle Avenue but passed 74th Street without looking, and when he got over to Queens Boulevard he put his car in the parking lot of the Hamburg Savings Bank. The rear door to Pep McGuire’s was at one end of the parking lot. Inside, there was only one other person at the bar, a court clerk from across the street who drank beer and mumbled to himself.
Table Money Page 17