The Deep Dark (34 page)

To save the trapped miners in the deepest levels of the Sunshine, Launhardt knew helmet crews were going to have to move deeper down in the mine—down where, he and others hoped, there was a place of refuge from the toxic air. Down there in the smoldering darkness, someone had to be alive. Down on 3100, a helmet crewman stood at the shaft and looked downward. It was impossible to see what was going on down another thousand feet of smoke-clogged passage. For all anyone knew, the fire was raging down there. Someone came up with the idea of loading up the cage with cardboard boxes and other burnables and sending the load to 4000.

Slowly the cage was lowered into darkness. A few minutes later it returned. The boxes were not scorched, so there was no fire below. Next, a ringing phone was lowered to 5200, but no one picked it up. Were the men bulkheaded in and unable to get to it? Or were they dead?

M
IDDAY,
M
AY
4
Osburn

KWAL'
S FREQUENT BROADCASTS FOR FOOD, SUPPLIES, AND VOLUNTEERS
continued to bring overwhelming, and almost unwelcome, response. Mountains of sandwiches were growing stale, and blankets and cartons of smokes were piled up so high their sheer numbers invited both waste and pilfering. The Red Cross started to reduce the quantity of whatever was needed by the rescue crews and the families. If they wanted one hundred sandwiches, they asked for fifty.

People sometimes focus on the smallest things to relieve their pain. When a few at the mine began to grouse about KWAL's music, a pastor stepped in and gave the Wallace radio station some friendly advice.

“Play two country-westerns and a hymn. Alternate them.”

Radio station manager Paul Robinson rearranged the station's playlist—no more of the mishmash of music they played to try to please everybody in the district. He gave the miners and their families what they needed.

A
FTERNOON,
M
AY
4

Sunshine Mine Yard

I
N THE YARD THE SUN SHONE WEAKLY THROUGH PARTING CLOUDS
and a haze of smoke when gyppo miner Buz Bruhn returned to help with the rescue. He was sure his partner, Dewellyn Kitchen, was tough enough to survive, and Bruhn wanted to go in after him. He even had a plan. He went to talk to foreman Jim Bush about the borehole from 3700 and how he saw that as the only place miners could get fresh air. He'd helped drive the drift on 4800, and he knew fresh air poured down like a cold shower. There were coolers on that level, a battery charger, and a water line—water, light, and oxygen—everything a man would need. Bruhn wanted to go down the narrow shaft, with a single caveat.

“I'll put a gun in my pocket,” he said. “When I get down there, those bastards will probably try to take my rebreather away from me.”

Later, when Bruhn was in the toilet across from the double-drum, he heard men outside talking. Someone was boasting that Sunshine was going to come out of the disaster smelling like a rose. Not only did insurance cover the financial losses associated with a closure, but Sunshine was likely to reap profits from an inevitable spike in the metals market when it reopened to higher prices caused by a silver shortage.

“This isn't going to hurt us at all,” the voice said.

The remark, Bruhn learned, came from the lips of New York bigwig Irwin Underweiser, president of the Sunshine Mining Company. He was huddled with a bunch of lawyers and accountants. They were counting money, of course, not bodies. That comment, and others, was heard by reporters, and it made its way into the nation's newspapers.

“Try to buy back the lives lost with higher silver prices. How can they even think about those things when the entire valley is in mourning?” asked a rescue worker.

A
FTERNOON,
M
AY
4
Woodland Park

W
ITH HER HUSBAND
'
S BODY AT THE FUNERAL HOME AND HIS SERVICE
looming
in
two days, Wava Beehner was worried about everything—what Don would wear, what she'd wear, and of course, how she and the children would get by. She marked off items like a grocery list. There was no other way. Frugal though he was, Don Beehner appreciated a decent suit. Not long before the fire, he'd purchased a fine-looking dark blue wool suit—not too heavy, not too light. He'd only worn it a time or two. Because a new suit demanded new shoes, Mrs. Beehner picked out a pair of oxfords. She put the shoes in a paper bag, and carefully walked the suit on its hanger to the car for the funeral home. She caught herself worrying that the shoes would be too heavy on his feet and he might not like that. She began to cry over her foolishness.

When it was time to pick out her outfit, Wava and her sister pored over dresses and suits hanging crisply in Cam's, a Wallace dress shop tucked into an 1890s building off the main drag. After a search, Wava found one that flattered her washed-out complexion and auburn hair. The bodice had chocolate and white stripes; the rest was solid brown. It was a sensible and dignified spring dress, one that didn't shout
funeral
and could be worn again. Best of all, it was a size eleven. She'd dropped weight, more from not eating than from her perpetual dieting.

When Wava emerged from the dressing room, her sister let out a gasp.

“Boy,” she said without thinking, “Don should see you now. You've really lost weight.”

It was the kind of remark one wished could be reeled back in. Her sister meant no harm.

Later that day, Wava and her brother-in-law returned to the funeral home. Music played faintly, and people spoke in muted voices. Tears zigzagged down her cheeks as she stared down at her husband's body, lying in the casket, eyes shut and looking peaceful. But something felt wrong, and her grief snapped into anger. The mortician's cosmetologist had a heavy hand.
Don would never want this.
She opened her purse, pulled out her handkerchief, and started to wipe away the makeup.

Her brother-in-law was horrified. “You can't do that,” he said.

“He wouldn't want that on him in life,” she said. “Why would he have it now? I
will
take every speck of it off.”

The makeup from her husband's forehead and eyelids turned her handkerchief dark as she gently wiped his face.

Don was a man's man,
she thought.
He'll be buried like one.

A
FTERNOON,
M
AY
4
Sunshine Dry

I
T WAS AS IF
G
OD HADN
'
T WANTED ANYONE TO SURVIVE.
N
O ONE
wanted to announce to the media that the rescue effort had been stalemated to the point where, if there were men bulkheaded in somewhere, the passage of time in the hot mine was likely to be fatal even if there was good air. Rescue crewmen found Sunshine's dry the only place they could go to escape the families and the incessant pressure. They sat on benches across from the showers, smoking in silence. The hope they saw in the women's eyes had become a source of embarrassment. They were doing all they could, but nothing was working.

Talky Taylor knew where he'd find Delmar Kitchen. Everyone did. Kitchen had been planted on a bench in the dry for three days. His face was stippled with dark whiskers against pallid skin, and his eyes were bloodshot. He wanted to be there when news came about his brother and father. They had last been seen on 3100 near 10-Shaft.

“Forget it, Delmar,” Taylor said, approaching. “They're gone. That's it.”

Kitchen didn't say anything. He just looked up.

“Both of them. You might as well go home.”

On his way to his car, Kitchen was an easy mark for reporters. He told them he'd never had a fire drill in his two years at Sunshine. Escape routes were never taught, nor were BM-1447 self-rescuers adequate—even though he admitted one had likely saved his life.

Other underground workers felt that death and danger were part and parcel of their industry.

“Working in a mine is like flying in a jet airliner,” one miner said. “You know some jets are going to crash, but you keep on flying anyway.”

T
HROUGHOUT
THE
AFTERNOON,
SOME
FIFTY
CHILDREN
AT
KELLOGG
'
S
Sunnyside Elementary kept transistor radios down low and tuned to KWAL. Many had dads up at the mine. And if not a father, they had a brother, a favorite uncle, or a grandfather. With each news update, little fingers would reach for the volume knob.

E
VENING,
M
AY
4

Big Creek Neighborhood

B
E
TTY
JOHNSON
LOVED
HER
KITCHEN.
T
HE
CABINETS
WERE
NEW
and the walls had been paneled in a warm, honey-colored wood. Places that required paint were a cheery, daffodil yellow. A big picture window faced the road to the mine. She liked to sit with a cup of coffee and a magazine, looking out, waiting for her husband, Gene, to come home. Her brother, Robert Barker, also stopped by nearly every day. As she sat there with her son and daughters, facing the darkened road, those moments were amplified in her memory. The ringing of the kitchen phone ended the forced small talk and speculation around the big round table. Peggy Delange answered the call. It was Jim Farris, Sunshine's personnel director. She handed the receiver to her mother.

“Mrs. Johnson,” Farris said, “we found Gene's body.”

Betty's face drained of blood. Her free hand fluttered. Peggy knew instantly that her mother had just heard the unthinkable.

“No, you didn't!” Betty screamed into the phone. She slammed down the receiver hard enough to break it. Peggy started screaming, too. Her eyes wild with shock, Betty reached over and slapped her daughter as hard as she could.

“Shut up! He's not dead!”

Betty didn't want any of it to be true, because none of it could be. Farris was wrong. Her legs moved on their own accord and started for the door, taking her into the night and up the hill toward the mine. She felt like one of those wind-up toys that Gene and the kids had loved so much. She was moving and she had no control. No wind-up key. She started to cry.
Gene can't be dead. He can't be.
The screams were echoing from her on the inside, until she collapsed in Peggy's shaking arms.

That Thursday, four other telephones rang from one end of the district to the other. Hoistman Lino Castaneda was at his sister-in-law's tiny Mullan home and took the call from Farris. He'd already prepared Teresa Diaz, forty-three, for the news that her husband was dead. It was good that Castaneda was there. The Guadalajara-born Diaz's English was poor. The confirmation was brief and final:
Roberto esta muerto.

That she had been notified by telephone angered Betty Johnson.
A person who hits somebody's dog will knock on a door to give his or her regrets to the owner. Why didn't they think enough of Gene to come tell us face to face? They owed him that much. How many times did that phone ring in the middle of the night or on a day off with a request that Gene get up to the mine?
Gene Johnson never complained about any of that. He just pulled on a pair of Levi's, got in his truck, and did whatever he was asked.

How come,
she wondered,
those bastards at Sunshine paid him back by not sending someone down to see our children and me?

If ever a seed of hatred could be planted in someone's heart, Jim Farris's call was it. Farris probably even knew he'd screwed up. He wrote that he had notified Johnson by telephone: “She thought this was [an] unkind way.”

T
IME UNKNOWN,
M
AY
4
4800 Level

U
P THE ROAD, AND ALMOST A MILE UNDERGROUND, THE ONLY SURVIVORS
of the 4800 level took turns sleeping, though neither could manage a half hour. Ron Flory and Tom Wilkinson removed their boots, cushioned their bed boards with more burlap, but nothing could make either man feel like sleep was a good idea. The poisoned air might make its way to the Safety Zone and they'd never wake up. Rescue crews finding them would only know that they had been the last on their level to die. Sometimes they'd wake each other up. Neither could stand being awake and alone with nothing but their thoughts circling around, piling doubt upon doubt.

One man always remained awake, watching the gray, hazy smoke as it was sucked into the cross-drift, behind the paper towel. At times it resembled the wispy sheet of cigarette smoke from a district pool hall. At other times the form appeared solid.

“As long as it keeps moving that way,” Flory said, “we'll be okay.”

The pair had faced danger together before. Not long before the fire, in fact, it was Wilkinson who'd been the rescuer. They had shot a round in a back stope, and Flory needed to go over the top of the muck pile to secure the eyebolt so they could slush it out. Flory crawled over the muck into a small pocket. It was stifling hot, an overheated brew of gases, powder smoke, and dust. He could barely breathe, but he inched forward.
Have to get the work done. Have to go another ten feet.
But a little deeper into the pocket, panic seized him. He was shutting down. He couldn't go another foot, forward or back.

“I can't make it!” he called out.

Hearing this, Wilkinson grabbed his pard's legs and pulled, dragging him over the muck pile and back to cooler air—about 90 degrees.

Flory was nearly unhinged. “If you hadn't got me,” he said, “I don't know if I would have made it.”

That drama was nothing, of course, compared with what they were facing on 4800. Off in the distance, somewhere far down the drift, Flory thought he heard the muffled sound of men talking. It sounded like Richard Allison, one of the miners working on their level on May 2. He knew for a fact that Allison was dead. How could be speaking?