The Deep Dark (42 page)

“Two so far!”

A
FTER
7:00
P.M.,
M
AY
9
3700 Level

W
HILE
R
ON
F
LORY WAITED FOR HIS PARTNER ON 3700, SOMEONE
handed him a can of Gatorade. He poured it down his throat, and a USBM photographer recorded the moment. As a Wallace doctor checked his pulse, Flory was lost in the thoughts of a hardworking man. He only wanted two things: for Tom Wilkinson to get up the borehole, and to get out of Sunshine. While it was true his wife and boy had been on his mind, there was nothing more important than breathing the fresh air of a world not shut in darkness.

Flory asked for a cigarette and messed with his lighter. It hadn't worked since he'd been trapped. A miner struck a match. He mentioned that he was going to quit smoking.

“How you holding up?” the doctor asked.

“Oh, I feel great,” Flory said, though the ordeal's toll on his body and mind was obvious.

“Don't keel over, here,” the doctor said. “You'll embarrass the whole goddamn outfit.”

The other guys laughed. This was the moment all of the men had dreamed about as they'd battled day upon day of disappointment and the unbelievably cruel fire.

“Did it seem like seven days down there? Longer or shorter?” a Sunshine rescue man asked.

Flory didn't have to think. “It seemed like seven years,” he said.

When he arrived to take his place with his buddy, Wilkinson had considerably less patience, and no taped voice recording was made. Someone offered him a coat, and he took it for the walk out into cool, fresh air. But when the doctor attempted to take his pulse, Wilkinson jerked his arm away.

What the hell's he doing?
Wilkinson thought.
Let's get out of here.

Two stretchers were set to the side of the station. Wilkinson refused to have anything to do with them.

“We walked in,” he said. “We're going to walk out.”

The survivors were told their wives would be waiting for them outside the portal, as well as a couple of hundred well-wishers, along with television cameras and correspondents from the news magazines and major East Coast dailies.

“Before we go out there, you want us to run them off?” one of the rescue men asked.

Neither did. They were focused on getting outside. No delays.
Just get going.

And up the Jewell Shaft and out of the portal, they walked to the most blinding lights they'd ever seen. A Sunshine shift boss followed behind in case either slumped over. Ron Flory had felt okay before the light, noise, and chilly air from the outside blasted at him with almost overwhelming force. There were so many people there, cheering and clapping, his legs went weak. He fought hard to keep from hitting the ground.

“Thank God,” he said, stepping into air moved by wind, not by a compressor. He looked astonishingly fit, his blue T-shirt stretched over a leaner frame. His beard, no longer neatly trimmed, was the only hint that he'd been away for more than a week. A cap lamp borrowed from another miner and affixed to a dirty yellow hardhat sent a beam into the crowd of three hundred. Hand after hand reached out to greet him. Disoriented by the commotion, he walked right past Myrna. She lunged for his arm. He turned and hugged her so hard the breath was squeezed out of her. For the first time in more than a week, his muscles relaxed and he just let go and cried.

Right behind Flory, Sonny Becker held on to Wilkinson's arm, steadying him for the walk out. Wilkinson, squinting back the glare of the movie lights, looked for Frances's coat to pick her out of the crowd. He didn't see her. In truth, he couldn't see much at all. He needed his glasses. Also, he didn't know that Frances had borrowed her sister's navy peacoat. Not a very big man to begin with, Wilkinson looked small standing next to Flory. In many ways he had been the stronger of the two underground, but he appeared frail in the light of the TV cameras. The crowd parted to let Frances through, and she held her husband and sobbed. A smile broke out on his heavily whiskered face. He thought that he and his buddy were just going to get into their cars and go home. He had no clue they'd need to go to the hospital. Wilkinson had no idea how extraordinary his survival had been.

The cheers were deafening, and suddenly the world was big again. As the survivors and their wives climbed into the front seats of the ambulances, a pastor near the portal led the families in a hymn, “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.”

A rabid caravan of reporters followed Shoshone County Sheriff cruisers and the two ambulances down the gulch to the highway, and on to Kellogg and West Shoshone Hospital. Driver, wife, and survivor all rode in the front seat, talking on the radio to the other ambulance. The survivors talked about food and drink and the crowd outside the portal, but mostly about food. Ron Flory wanted a steak and a cold beer, and that sounded damn good to Wilkinson, too. As Myrna gripped him, her big bear of a husband cried.

Robert Flory drove his mother and sister, riding the accelerator with such a heavy foot that it passed through his mind that he was going to crash. If others at the mine were buoyed by the discovery of his older brother and partner, Robert's feelings were somewhat dark and mixed. He had been told by the rescue crew that there were no others alive on 4800, and probably none in the deeper levels. There were others who were desperately needed by their families. Many others. He loved his brother, but Myrna, young as she was, was a fighter. She would have been able to get by. He wondered about others with households full of children and no man to bring home a paycheck.

Myrna's sister, Garnita, stood at the hospital entrance crying as the ambulances pulled up. Her brother-in-law was a big man, but he'd shrunk down to mortal size. Flory had dropped nearly twenty pounds and Wilkinson had lost around fifteen. But with a wool blanket draped over his shoulders, Flory looked especially small. Garnita's concern shifted to Myrna. She held on to her husband and they walked in lockstep toward the door. Myrna had also withered over the week, existing on nothing but coffee and cigarettes.

Which one is thinne
r
?
she asked herself.

A reporter called out a question about the survivors' need for treatment and rest.

“They aren't about to lie on a cot,” an ambulance driver with a broad smile shot back. “I'll tell you that. No cots for these boys.”

Flory wasted no time announcing that his days underground were over.

“I won't be a miner again,” he said, “if I have anything to say about it.”

Myrna nodded. “No, no way.”

Wilkinson, however, was less committal. “I don't know,” he said, “I couldn't say. I might go back in the mines. If I find something else, I might go to it.”

Frances Wilkinson let her tears go. “If he wants to go back, he can,” she said. Inside her purse she carried a piece of the braided blasting wire. She'd make it into a key chain and would keep it with her forever—as if she needed anything to remind her of what happened at Sunshine.

M
AY
9
Pinehurst

M
EANWHILE, THINGS WERE QUIET AT THE
F
IRKINS PLACE IN
P
INEHURST
. Lou Ella dressed to go to the mine. Days of hope and anguish had melted her small frame; the Jaycee's wife had lost at least fifteen pounds. Nerves had bunched up her intestines like a clenched fist. The children urged their mother to eat, but even with the renewed hope that came with finding Flory and Wilkinson, food stayed on her plate, congealing. She still had no idea that Don Firkins had fallen on the concrete floor of the hoist room, feverishly trying to activate his BM-1447. No one told her how Don's life had sputtered from his body as Byron Schulz looked on, frightened out of his mind and unable to do anything. In the end, Lou Ella didn't make it to Big Creek that day. She didn't have to. A brother-in-law gave her the news that Don's body had been identified. Tears, always at the edge of her eyelids, fell down her hollowed cheeks, and her voice was a soundless scream. The sky had finally fallen.

M
ORNING,
M
AY
10

Coeur d'Alene Mining District

W
EDNESDAY
'
S MORNING NEWS DEFINED THE TIMES.
A
N
IRA sniper had killed a British soldier; the prosecution was nearing the end of its case against radical activist Angela Davis; and a U.S. blockade of North Vietnamese ports had begun. But amid all of that, there was good news from northern Idaho. The
Los Angeles Times
trumpeted it with two-inch letters on the front page:
TWO FOUND ALIVE IN BURNING MINE
. Nearly every paper in the country ran the story on page one.

In a shared room at West Shoshone Hospital, it was a nonstop celebration. Flory and Wilkinson started their day with New York strip steaks and interviews from media outlets across the globe. The men had shaved and their wives had freshened up. Myrna Flory had put on a short skirt, and Frances Wilkinson had curled the ends of her hair in a flip. Idaho senator Frank Church sent his best wishes by Western Union:
REJOICE WITH ALL IDAHOANS AND THE NATION AT NEWS OF YOUR SAFE RECOVERY FROM SUNSHINE MINE
,
AND PRAY THAT OTHERS WILL FOLLOW YOU TO SAFETY
. Idaho governor Cecil Andrus arrived with a six-pack of Lucky Lager, and photographers snapped images that wire services dispatched across the country. The nurses wouldn't let the guys smoke in their room, but when Andrus showed up, all rules went out the window. It was the best beer Wilkinson had ever tasted. The governor promised that if they didn't want to go back into mining, the state would retrain them for new jobs. He'd personally see to it.

Flory credited his survival to a guardian angel. “I'm not a praying man,” he told a reporter, “but I prayed a lot down there.”

Later that day the survivors were discharged, and the world beat a path to their doors. The
London Express
phoned Flory. So did the
National Enquirer.
A life insurance company offered sales positions within hours of their exodus from 4800: “Relating your experience to our customers would be worth thousands of dollars to you in sales.” A flurry of mail crammed their mailboxes. Many praised God for sparing their lives: “I'm sure you and your families have thanked the Lord many times for your narrow escape, but I'm wondering if you have asked the dear Lord for what purpose he spared you two. . . .” Others, from across America, from England, and from South Africa, shared the joy: “Our oldest daughter was in her room in the basement doing homework when she came running up the stairs and said she had just heard on the radio that two survivors had been found. I don't mind telling you, Tom, that there was not a dry eye in this house as we thanked God for your safety. . . .”

But throughout the mining district the joy was tempered with grief, blame, and bitterness. At the Big Creek Store, conspiracy theorists insisted Flory and Wilkinson hadn't been survivors at all, but that the company had planted them on 4800 as a public relations ploy.

“How else could they have survived and the others die?”

“Yeah, and did you see that they didn't look as bedraggled as they should have?”

In disasters like the Sunshine fire, truth frequently yields to emotion. Sour grapes taste sweet when pain becomes impossible to bear. Garnita Keene put up with nasty remarks from women who thought their husbands and boyfriends should have been the ones to survive.
Flory was a drug addict and Wilkinson was a drunkard. They were lazy sons of bitches who didn't know a whiz-bang from their own assholes.
She knew the bitterness came from sudden, unbearable grief and an overwhelming sense of unfairness, so she said nothing.

Yeah, both boys drank their share,
she thought to herself.
But so did everyone else. And drug addict? I doubt Ron ever used drugs in his entire life. He's too damn cheap. For God's sake, Myrna went to the Laundromat because Ron didn't want to open his wallet to buy a washer and dryer.

“Why did God save them and not the others?” one woman asked.

“I don't have the answers,” Myrna's sister said. “Only God knows.”

Among those who questioned God's choice was Don Beehner's widow, Wava. Others had told her that neither of the survivors was any good; they were druggies or lazy or any number of things her husband had never been. She'd heard they were sleeping behind an air door.
They weren't even working like the rest of the men.
For a time, bitterness supplanted the sadness she felt for her own loss.

“It is unfair,” she told her pastor. “What right do they have to live when so many good guys died?”

“Wava, it
is
fair,” he said. “Don was ready to meet God. He gave his life for another man. These men have been given a second chance. If they don't do something with it, they'll be condemned to hell.”

“I don't like them,” Wava said. “If not Don, then why not another man? There were so many good men that could have done so much.”

“I don't want you to hate them,” he said. “It's okay not to like them, but don't hate them.”

She promised to try.

Meanwhile, Garnita didn't tell Myrna, but sometimes she believed it would have been better if Ron and Tom had died. She knew Ron was having nightmares, and she expected that it hadn't been easy for Tom, either. Everybody wants to live, but living after something so terrible, after something that took so many others . . . what a dreadful gift it was. And each camera flash or congratulations card only served to remind Flory and Wilkinson of their good fortune and the immeasurable grief that had overtaken the mining district. Although the pair had been alone together for eight days, they wanted to get away from the hordes of people, the media, the letters, and the funerals. They needed to get away from the whole damn thing. They planned a camping trip.