The Journey Prize Stories 28 (9 page)

And now tell me how he rapt you away to the realm of darkness and gloom, and by what trick did the strong Host of Many beguile you?

—Demeter to Persephone,
The Homeric Hymn to Demeter

A
t the end of her shift, Roxane sits down on a wooden bench under the shack at 1000 level. She waits for the cage with the rest of the men. Air from the heater warms the side of her face against the frigid drafts that pour down from the surface through the shaft. The shack has a wooden floor, ancient and resinous under a layer of grit; there's a partition beside her that seems oddly out of place, and behind her head there's a round bolt in the wood, just below chest level, with three rusty chain links hanging down from it.

Sixty years ago, the shack housed mules that carted ore through the drifts. They lived beneath the surface; once they'd been brought down they never saw the light of day. Maybe
when they became obsolete the mules were hauled up in the cage. Maybe they were brought to a farm with misty valleys where they could live out their retirement eating all the lush, green grass they wanted, the sun warming their greying withers. Or maybe, Roxane thinks, their bones lie quiet, scattered in the dark, dust blending with the broken rock.

The cage whispers down on the wheels like a promise. When it slides into sight and stops at the level, Roxane gets up and grabs her steel lunch kit. Her arm jars, jerking her back down to the bench. She yanks the lunch kit again but it's stuck.

“What's the holdup?” the shift-boss yells from the gate. There's sniggering in the dark cage behind him. “You need some help with that? Too much heavy lifting today?”

When she flips the locks and opens the lid, she sees nothing at first, but then she lifts the paper towel she wraps her apples in and sees two little black holes like tooth punctures in the centre of the greasy steel underneath. The kit's been nailed down to the bench.

Roxane leaves it there and squeezes into the cage, shoulder-to-quaking-shoulder, trying to laugh with everybody else. As they start the ascent she takes a deep breath and lets gravity push her weight deep into the thick soles of her boots, glad nobody can see her face.

“Don't worry,” says Gloria, the cage-operator. “They're only joking. They love jokes.”

The cage is one of the only places in the mine where it's quiet enough to talk; you can almost hear a whisper over the contented sigh of the conveyance as the cage is guided up the shaft by the line. The cool smooth sound of the wheels and runners against the wooden shaft guides could almost lull you
to sleep. But Roxane has to strain to listen to Gloria because of his English. It's unique to the area and possibly to the mine, where a small subgroup of the language—mostly French mixed with universal miner's lingo—had been patched together by the sixty workers that drove in from Quebec.

“You keep the machines in good order,” Gloria says. “You don't drive too fast or too slow, you help unload the ANFO. You're a good girl. You keep working hard, keep proving yourself, and one day you'll be the one nailing lunch kits to the bench.” He laughs and then coughs, and Roxane can hear the phlegm shift in his throat.

When Roxane first started working underground, Gloria gave her a pair of his old boots and coveralls. It was hard to find the right size because no manufacturer made them small enough for women. Gloria's wife made alterations for him because he was only five-foot-three. Being so small with a name like “Gloria,” Roxane thought he'd know something about jokes, but nobody ever laughed at him—not even when he was trying to be funny.

“If they didn't like you,” Gloria continues, “they'd laugh a different way.”

“Like they laugh at Wycliffe Nichols?” Roxane asks, trying not to sound angry.

Last shift, Wycliffe was driving the locomotive and its floor fell out from underneath him. The locis are made collapsible so they can be folded up and put into the cage, moved to the tracks on different levels. When the loci's floor collapsed, Wycliffe had to run on the tracks in the gap between the frame until he could get the loci stopped. If Wycliffe had stopped running or fallen he would've been cut in half. The
men laughed at the sight of him running for his life. The shift-boss just stood there, laughing with the rest of them. Roxane hadn't known what to do.

Gloria says, “You can't blame them. Wycliffe deserves what he gets.”

Roxane knows he means what he says because she can see his face lit up at intervals when the cage passes the golden lights at each level, shining through the gates. Before she can ask what he means, he calls: “Now listen up, everybody. I'm not supposed to tell you, but the second we get to the surface the Captain's going through everybody's lunch kits.”

“Why?” someone asks.

“Things have been going missing around here. Management thinks the miners might be stealing stuff. I'm sure none of you has anything to worry about.” He elbows Roxane and says to her loudly, “especially you, because you forgot your lunch kit.”

In the seconds after Gloria falls silent there's a nervous shuffling of heavy boots. Then a
clang
of something heavy hitting the cage floor. Another
clang, clang
…
clang
. Roxane jumps when something sharp and hard
thunks
her steel-toe.

The cage doors open suddenly, almost unexpectedly; light floods the cage. It's always a nice feeling, Roxane thinks, when the cage hits the collar and you see sun through the windows. But today she worked the nightshift and the sun won't be up before she finishes her drive home.

The men pile out quicker than usual, leaving just Gloria and Roxane standing there, blinking. The floor is littered with wrenches and ratchet heads and a portable safety line—there's even a roll of toilet paper, a muddy boot tread mashing up the tissue.

“What the hell…?” Roxane mutters.

Gloria's laughing so hard he can barely say “There was no check! The stupid asses!”

Roxane hates driving the loci alone on 4000 level because it's where the fire started. It had been more than twenty years, but there were miners still working who remembered the two dead men's faces, what they were like at The Miner's Inn on Friday nights. There's a plaque on the drift with the names and the date of the fire. The plaque always glints in Roxane's headlamp when she drives the loci past, winking at her in the dark. Gloria told her a fire's the worst thing that can happen in a mine. The smoke has nowhere to go when the power's out and the fans aren't working. This whole place breathes through a tiny little hole in the surface, he said, just like how you breathe out of tiny holes in your face. If the hole gets clogged, the whole body dies. There was nothing left of those two boys but their shadows on the rock.

“What do you mean?” she had asked.

“Branded into the rock,” he'd said again, “like at Hiroshima.”

She still didn't understand, but didn't want to ask him again because he might have thought she didn't believe him—or worse, that she was afraid.

When she drives the loci by an intersection at a subdrift, the loci's headlight shines down and carves the tunnel as deep as the light goes, but no farther. The darkness collapses behind her. Usually there's always buzzing in the mine, the hissing of pneumatics and the hard tinny vibration of diesel
engines rebounding off the walls, filling up the dark with sound. But the loci's battery-powered and quiet except for the sound of the gliding wheels on the rails.

Roxane sees a light up ahead, down the drift. It's faint but too big to be a headlamp. She blows the horn. The light doesn't move. She tries the horn again. She can't stand the way the sound expands and fleshes out the drift, turning it into the ribbed gut of a bloated worm.

Before she can break, the loci starts slowing on its own. Something underneath her feet feels different, the pull of the wheels gone slack. Then the loci's headlights go out. The loci glides to a complete stop and Roxane's left staring down the drift at the light in the distance—she's sure they're headlights now, a Kubota, probably.

Son of a bitch
. Roxane switches on her headlamp and turns off the loci's motor in case the battery kicks in again while she's out looking for the Femco phone so she can call a mechanic. It's the third time this month that the battery's died on her. The last time she had to spend five hours waiting in the dark. When it happened to the other guys they just stretched back in the driver's seat and slept like the dead, but Roxane had never been able to sleep underground.

She jumps down onto the track, water spattering from her boots, and starts toward the light in the distance. The Kubota is empty but still running. Farther down the drift she sees the steel rails of a grizzly sitting overtop a dark patch on the ground that her headlamp won't light up—it's the chute where trainloads of ore are dumped. The grizzly stops all the really big muck from going down the hole and plugging the chute below. A fifteen-pound sledge is sitting near the hole. Somebody
must have been working on the grizzly with the hammer to break up the big muck so it could fall down the chute.

“Hello?” she calls. “Hello?”

Nobody answers.

Whoever's been working on the grizzly must still be there because of the Kubota.
Maybe he's broken down too
, she thinks.
Maybe I'll meet whoever it is on my way to the Femco
. As she starts to walk on, she sees a glint of blue-silver reflecting on the bottom of the drift. A safety lanyard, lying in a puddle that mirrors her shady self back up at her when her lamp light glints off its surface.
But why wouldn't he drive the Kubota to the Femco?
she wonders.

Roxane sweeps her lamplight across the ground, checking to see if someone's fallen; then she squats down and checks under the Kubota. But there's nobody. She follows the lanyard, walking slow at first, then quicker. The line cuts off suddenly, disappearing into darkness underneath the grizzly. It's hanging down into the chute.

The chute is dark and still and quiet but she can feel, or she imagines she feels, stirring in the air. She climbs up onto the grizzly and shines her light down.

There's a body dangling ten feet below. It's attached to the lanyard, twisting slightly against the chute like a fly on a spider's strand. Otherwise, unmoving.

“Shit,” Roxane says, “shit shit
shit.”

It's Wycliffe Nichols. His head is lolling downward, lipless mouth hanging open under his wide, blunt nose. He looks dead.

“Shit,” Roxane says again. Wycliffe jerks.

Roxane leaps back, boot tread catching on the rail so she feels the darkness below her teeter and then ascend, reaching up to grab her like a widespread palm.

Wycliffe's voice sounds up through the chute like he's yelling from the bottom of a well, so loud in the quiet.

“Help me! God, help me. Jesus, help me!”

“It's okay,” Roxane calls, trying for a steady voice. “It's going to be okay.”

“Jesus, help me. Jesus, help me.”

He's looking up at her, eyes wide with naked fear.

“I don't have a radio,” she calls. “I'll go find a Femco. I'll be right back—”

“Don't leave! I can't get down. You need to cut me down.”

It's a hundred feet down to the next level. If Roxane cuts him down, he'll fall to his death. There's something funny about the way he's talking, and his eyes are too big and too black. He might be concussed. He might be in shock. His back might be broken. That's why he's jerking like a worm on a hook in the gaping maw of the chute.

“I'll get help—”

“He's coming back!” Wycliffe says, his voice taking on a different kind of panic. “Don't leave me. Dear God, don't leave me alone down here with him!”