The Underdwelling

2

That first night on the skeleton crew, Boyd showed twenty minutes early with his lunch bucket in hand. He parked his rusty Bonneville out in C lot, grabbed a smoke and looked up at all the buildings and huts dotting the rising hills above, the looming headframes and derricks and hoists that were lit up with blinking lights so low-flying planes wouldn’t crash into them. Some of them went up five-, six-hundred feet, lattices of iron and steel that looked like the skeletons of dinosaurs against the night sky.

The stars were out and blinking and he wondered, somehow, if that was a sign.

But that was strictly bullshit, so he slipped into the Dry Room where the diggers changed out of street clothes and into working duds, showered up at the end of their shifts. Nobody was in there. Just Boyd facing those rows of battered green lockers and wooden benches, the cement floor stained pink from iron ore dust. It was hosed down every day, but ore dust is tenacious stuff. Boyd was aware of the silence in there, the dust hanging in the beams of the fluorescents overhead. On the day shift, the place was bustling, guys laughing and joking and swearing, talking football and hockey, tossing wet towels around.

But not at night.

The silence was thick and almost unnatural.

Like being in a morgue, a place where things did not move and voices did not sound, where only the ticking of a clock marked the passage of time. It all gave Boyd the goddamn creeps. He wasn’t one of these crazy jack hoo-hahs who believed in premonitions or any of that Mickey Mouse shit, but right then, he was getting bad vibes. Like currents of electricity were running from his balls right up into his chest. It made him feel funny inside, like something in there wanted to curl up and cover its head. He wondered if that was how people sometimes felt when they were certain disaster was looming. Refusing to get on planes because they got a bad feeling or how sailors and fishermen sometimes wouldn’t get aboard a boat because they had the distinct feeling that she was cursed, that she was going straight to the bottom this trip.

No, Boyd wasn’t a guy who got feelings like that, but he was feeling something. And whatever it was, it wasn’t sitting on him too good. He had the craziest goddamn notion to turn around and run as fast as he could.

But he didn’t, of course.

All he had to do was think of Linda at home, eight months into it, knowing that he was going to be a father and that straightened him right out. Feelings are just feelings, but families need to be fed.

The other miners started to pour in, swearing and smarting off at each other, and he relaxed. Just the jitters. It was going to be okay. That’s what he kept telling himself.

The miners he knew said hi and the ones he didn’t just looked him up and down or ignored him completely. Boyd climbed into his gear and stood around with them, listening to them bitch and insult each other. Finally, a thin wiry guy with a face etched deep as pine bark came up.

“You Boyd?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Okay, you’re with me, cookie. Name’s Maki. This your first trip into the hole?”

“Yeah.”

“Figures. I always get guys like you. Russo must think I’m some kind of fucking Boy Scout.”

A couple of the miners laughed. They looked like they thought it was pretty goddamned funny that Maki got saddled with the Fucking New Guy. Boyd just stood there, not smiling or frowning. He was a FNG. At least for now.

Maki just shook his head. “Well, I’ll hope for the best, Boyd. I’ll make a big wish that you don’t get one of us killed.”

“That’s it, Maki,” one of the other diggers said. “Wish with one hand and shit in the other, see which one fills up faster.”

And then they were all laughing.

But not Boyd. Because what he was feeling was just getting stronger.