The Deep Dark (38 page)

“And our wives are planning on how they're going to spend the insurance money,” he said.

Yet, even as they labored for distraction in the Safety Zone, neither man could ignore hunger gnawing with sharp little teeth at their stomachs. The rotten tuna sandwich had offered no relief. They had tried to trick their stomachs into a false fullness with gulps from the water line. And it had worked for a while; the first four days hadn't been completely unbearable. But by Saturday their stomachs had wised up and would no longer fall for the ruse. Hunger stabbed at them. How much longer could they go without food?

L
ATE EVENING,
M
AY
6
Sunshine Portal

T
HE
K
ELLOGG
E
VENING
N
EWS
STAFF
DISTRIBUTED
FREE
COPIES
AT
THE
mine on Saturday. Papers fluttered in the chilly night air, the front page screaming,
SUNSHINE MINE DEATH TOLL NOW RISES TO 40
. Near a Red Cross tent where they waited, Garnita Keene began to wonder if Myrna had deluded herself to such a degree that if Ron had died, she'd be unable to process it at all. And even after she allowed those thoughts to take root, the words never passed her lips. She couldn't be the one to say them to Myrna. She had been the one to help her kid sister with a slathering of Day-Glo orange Mercurochrome on skinned knees. Garnita had been there when Myrna needed help with her son, Tiger. Myrna had been through a lot in her life and was a young mother, but she still was a kid. She needed hope, not a dose of reality.

“He'll come out,” Garnita said, concealing her doubts.

Myrna's confidence remained steadfast.

“I know,” she said.

The sisters tangled their arms around each other and stayed back from the portal as others learned the bodies of their men had been located. Garnita caught herself with a lump in her throat, over and over, when names were made public.

“I never thought
he'd
die. I thought for sure that he'd make it out.”

Myrna held her ground. “Ron
is
going to make it.”

Garnita saw the faces of women who had told themselves the same thing, but who now knew otherwise.

She put her hand on Myrna's shoulder. She felt so thin, so tiny.
How much longer can she go on?
Garnita thought.

“If anyone comes out, it will be Ron,” she said.

Later that night, Myrna's heart was tested again when a friend came running to her.

“I saw Ron in town! He must have got out!”

“What do you mean, you saw Ron?”

The friend's excitement could barely be contained. “In town. In his truck.”

“No,” Myrna said. “Ron can't be driving around Kellogg. He's in the mine. I'd know if he'd got out. I've never left this spot.”

Myrna learned later that one of her brothers-in-law had taken the keys out of her husband's hanger in the dry. It seemed as if the Florys were acting as though Ron was dead.

Fuck them for that. Damn all of those Florys,
she thought bitterly.

N
IGHTFALL,
M
AY
6
Big Creek Neighborhood

T
HE
B
IG
C
REEK NEIGHBORHOOD WAS QUIET AS THE HOURS MELTED
into Sunday morning. Marvin Chase came home late, huddled with his wife and children, and tried to sleep. Bob Launhardt called his wife, Janet, in Seattle to say he was doing all right, though he clearly wasn't. Betty Johnson silently stared from her place on the davenport. The last of the miners drinking at the Big Creek Store had left for home, drunk, but no wiser as to what had really happened at Sunshine. The Shoshone County coroner said all the men had perished within forty to sixty seconds of exposure to the toxic air, and all at 11:50 a.m. Betty thought the designated time was more convenience than science. She, and many others, refused to accept that all had died at once. Surely the men on the lowest levels had survived longer. Wives wondered if their husbands had suffered, and for how long?

In her empty bed in Big Creek, Joanne Reichert, the common-law wife of welder Jack Reichert, woke up in a panic.
I should be at the mine where I can help Jack if he needs me. Maybe he needs me right now and I'm not there.
Some women are unable to stay away from the men they love. Anyone who knew Joanne knew she was one of those. The long days and empty nights had eroded her already fragile mental state. She threw on some clothes, locked their dogs in the kitchen, and drove up the road toward the mine. A sliver of dark sky revealed a swath of stars beyond the clouds over the Bitterroots; a few windows beamed light across the roadway. Her heart pumped in time with her hurried pace. Out of breath at the portal, Joanne Reichert felt immediate relief. Jack hadn't come out yet.
Good.
She didn't want to miss him when he did.

She slipped between the clumps of people, thinking of how Jack was probably standing around somewhere in the darkness, waiting for the smoke to clear so he could come up, go home, and eat dinner. She pulled herself up on the platform backed with the huge safety sign and looked at the crowd. Their mouths were moving, like cattle chewing, with nothing intelligible emanating. Her hair was an unkempt mess, and dark circles dominated her weary, pale face like mascara smudges on a white pillowcase. She was erratic and emotional. She told people that she'd kill herself if Jack didn't make it out of the mine. Several reported their concerns about her, and Jim Farris tapped out a note for Jack Reichert's file: “Common-law wife stated she will commit suicide if Jack is pronounced dead. This threat should not be taken lightly in this case. . . . Her name is Mary Joanne and she has been seen in the yard constantly since the accident. She uses the last name Reichert.”

M
ORNING,
M
AY
7

Sunshine Mine Offices

C
ARLOADS OF MEN CLOAKED IN SUPERIORITY AND THREE-PIECE
suits arrived on Sunday in search of motel rooms. Some were lawyers. They had briefcases, and secretaries they could dial to type their notes. Their hands had likely never seen really hard work. They were softer versions of those who mined, and they were concerned more with ensuring that the interests of their clients were preserved than with saving any lives. Others had an agenda that, at least on the surface, appeared to represent the miners. This was the union contingency, made up of men who were supposedly on the side of the miners who'd escaped, and those who were still underground.

Not everyone was happy with the United Steelworkers of America—locally
or
nationally. Ace Riley was among many who had long contended that hardrock miners were the bastard children of the Pittsburgh-headquartered Steelworkers. It wasn't called, for Christ's sake, the Hardrock Miners Union. It was named for men who worked on the surface, who hadn't a clue about the dangers of the underground. Riley stewed. Not only had the father of five narrowly escaped a fire that killed dozens, but also, just two years prior, he'd seen a partner fall down a chute to a mangled death. As the smoke continued to pour from Sunshine Tunnel and the shortened blue steel stack, hope was ebbing toward resignation. Riley was pushed to the brink. When he was called to give a deposition, he went because he wanted to get some things off his chest.

By the time a Steelworkers representative introduced himself, the man from Butte was ready to blow.

“Let me tell you,” Riley said, standing tall and extending his index finger to punch out each word, “you sons of bitches, you sat on your asses and let things happen.” He railed against the inspection process. It was a sham, because warnings were always given that inspectors were on the way to the mine. A little clean-up here, move the powder from the station, check the cables of the hoist for any sign of wear, and sit back and follow the damn guy with a clipboard as he goes from topside to each working level. Don't tell him that you gob with rags, old boxes, and other combustible trash that should be hoisted out.

Topside, standing in the yard, physician Keith Dahlberg was still hopeful. Once men were rescued, they would be in need of medical attention—beyond smoke inhalation or any burns. One of his greatest concerns was starvation. Rescue crews carried Gatorade in ten-ounce cans and were admonished to give survivors the sugary liquid in very small amounts. The doctor distributed a memo:

“I suggest a quarter of a can every twenty to thirty minutes. Do not leave the [Gatorade] with the patient because he might not be able to use good judgment and would drink the whole can at once.”

He also worried about the impact of days of total darkness on a man's mental state. He expected a form of hysteria. He wrote: “We don't know how five or six days alone in darkness will affect a man. Morphine injection may be supplied to the first-aid man on the crew to administer if necessary. . . .”

The absence of light could send a man to the loony bin, or even to his grave, but there were tales of men surviving after lengthy periods of darkness. Speaking with reporters out in the yard, Marvin Chase pointed out that a Virginia coal miner had once survived an astounding three weeks without any light.

“The man was mentally and physically in fine shape when found by rescuers,” Chase said.

A
FTERNOON,
M
AY
7
Sunshine Mine Yard

T
HE ASTRINGENT ODOR OF
P
INE-
S
OL AND
L
YSOL WAFTED THROUGH
the floorboards of Sunshine administration offices. In the basement below the office was the shifter's dry, and the men down there who'd been on body recovery were dousing everything that had to be cleaned—hardhats, rubber boots, slickers. Clothing was bagged and burned, with a new supply being issued by a mini–JCPenney store set up in the timekeeping office. The concern about contamination was genuine. At least four rescuers had been treated for rashes on their necks and backs. Whenever a whiff of fetid pine passed through the air, those who smelled it figured it was probably what death smelled like. Some would never be able to use pine-scented cleaning products at home again.

Word had gotten out through miners drinking at the Big Creek Store that the mine's hostile environment was exceedingly cruel to the dead, and because of that, few bureau or district men had the stomach for the recovery detail. Miner Johnny Lang volunteered because he didn't have any kin among the missing. Lang had seen dead bodies before, too. As a nineteen-year-old merchant marine in Algiers, he'd followed the sound of machine-gun fire wanting to see what a war looked like. He had climbed a hill and looked out over the scene of death. A row of dead men, bloated and bleeding, lined a stone-paved lane; the smell of their rotting flesh pummeled the sea breeze.

Lang drew on that experience as he kept his eye on one of the mine supervisors who'd been called to work in his crew. They met on 3100 to inspect breathing equipment before retrieving bodies. The supervisor looked green.

“You think you're gonna be able to handle this?”

The man said he wasn't sure, and Lang pushed him.

“You know what?” Lang asked. “If you throw up in your mask, you got to eat it. If you take the mask off in there, you're dead. If you don't think you can handle that, go back up there. There's nothing to be ashamed of. If we go back there and you panic, you'll endanger all of us,” Lang went on. “And you know what? I'm not gonna give you my air. None of it.”

The green-faced man turned around and departed. That astounded Lang. A real miner would have pressed on rather than look like a coward.

It took balls and a lead-lined stomach to do the job that no one wanted. Their buddies had ceased to look like men, their features exaggerated far beyond the bounds of recognition. Eyes bulged grotesquely. Teeth seemed to push forward, as if they were wrong-side-out. Ears had swollen to twice normal size. The steel grommets on tool belts pinched so tight that a couple of guys were nearly cut in half. When Lang tried to position a corpse into a bag, the flesh gave a little. It shocked him.
This fella's arm might come off,
he thought, and slid his hands under the torso to loosen the suction that held it to the floor of the drift. Wherever the leather of his gloves touched the dead man's skin, wide strips of darkened flesh peeled off. Lang's mind messed with him as he worked. He could smell the putrid odor of the decomposing flaps of skin, yet he was breathing contained air.
It wasn't possible to smell anything.
It took him back to Algeria and the dead soldiers he'd seen there when he was nineteen. A phantom stench recirculated through his face mask.

The corpses were packed into two-handled zippered black bags with whatever had been scattered around—lamps, dinner buckets, or equipment. A few still had BM-1447s stuck in their mouths—one last breath before falling. Self-rescuers were within arm's reach of many. Some could have fallen as they staggered across the drift, but Lang recalled what some of the mine escapees had told him on Tuesday.
The thing got so hot, I sucked a little cool air from the side.

It was that cool air that had killed them.

One crewman had to puncture a corpse with a pick to drain the gases and fluids so it could be put into the bag. The body hissed like a leaking tire.

Lang somehow found a way to do his work without allowing emotion to creep in. He looked at the placement of the bodies and imagined their last moments. He studied three fallen miners on 3100 and imagined a courageous, then desperate scenario. One was separated from the others by a few feet. It appeared the first two had been walking together with the third, and the smoke got so bad that the strongest of the three had to let the others fall to the ground because he couldn't help them anymore. In some movies, men ran off and left their comrades behind.
Every man for himself.
It wasn't like that at Sunshine on May 2.