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CHAPTER 1
Sol stamps down on the abandoned candle stub that's burning dangerously near one of the timber shorings, squashes it under a heavy boot until he's sure it's out, rubbing his sole against the smoldering patch of timber to smear mud and wet, just in case. Flame and fucking smoke, seven hundred goddamn feet under the goddamn ground. If it isn't one thing, it's something the fuck else.
"Goddamn it, who left this here?" Sol Parker shouts back towards his boys, trying to be heard over the crash of the rocks into the ore car and the ratcheting of the drillers down the other end of the drift. "Who left this fucking candle?" He kicks it towards Michael, who's nearest, liberally spattering him with mud and muck.
"Aw, Sol, it weren't me," the boy yells back.
"Who was it?" He looks around balefully, pointing a gloved finger from man to man, coughing through the dust.
"Aw, Sol." Michael, always the loudmouth.
More mouth than fucking sense, that one. He kicks more muck at him. "I don't care if it's wet in here," he says. "I don't care if there's the goddamn fucking Columbia river running under our goddamn feet. You put out your fucking candles." He gives them another glare. They're a young crew, stupid at times. Sol is old enough to be their grandfather, most of them. He turns back to work, disgusted, knowing they'll follow.
More mouth than sense, some of these boys.
The dust is ever present, even wet as it is, down in the dark. Water seeps down from the drift ceilings, up from the depths as the aquifers battle the pumps; it puffs out from their mouths, damp and steaming in the hot air, with every labored breath. The wet – laden with chemicals, caustic, skin-burning – slops down the dust some, but it's never enough. Every inhale feels thick and sharp in lungs which never seem quite full. The drillers at the widowmakers raise the dust a hole at a time, clouds of pulverized rock billowing out over the racket of the bit against the drift face. When the powder monkey blows the face at shift end, the whole level will fill with yet more fine, particulate silica and whatever else is in the rock. Short break between shifts so the monkeys can double-check any bad blow and the crowfoot boys poke and prod the ceilings to see if they're going to collapse; thirty minutes to give the dust time to settle, but when the muckers start shift, the air will still be thick with the stuff.
Sol hacks, spits between his feet. His teeth feel gritty and there's a pain under his ribs. He's an old fucking man. Some things you just have to admit. Ancient, really, for a miner who's been down the hole more than a few years. It's a job that uses you up quick. Wrings you out, breaks you. He spits again, coughing into the crook of his elbow even as he tosses a rock the size of his head into the cart, slapping Michael on the shoulder with his free hand in passing. Some days Sol's back hurts so bad he can barely stand up in the mornings, the arthritis in his knees and shoulders crying out, badly healed broken fingers gnarled like roots. More than once Quinn has offered him a spot as station tender, but Sol always refuses, out of stiff-necked pride, old fucking man or not. He could damn well use the extra bit of money and, at times like these, which come more and more often, his busted-up body certainly calls out for the break. Feels like giving up, though. Let the other old men and the injured stand there all shift, sending the ore up. Packing the boys when needed into three cages at a time, seven per cage. Pull the bell-cord, send them up and down the shaft, level by level, telling the hoistman up the top of the headframe where to put the cage, ring by ring.
– 2 rings and 2: five hundred level.
– 4 and 2: a thousand feet.
The two long buzzes back from up top: didn't catch that, repeat.
– 4 and 2, slow and sarcastic. Fucking pay attention, you lazy bastard, sat up on your ass up the top of the world. 4 and 2, it ain't hard.
Confirmed from up top and the cage goes down, too fast, stopping too sharp, dropping the boys hard so they're pissed off when next you see them.
– 13 rings, sharp and bitter: you motherfucker. Maybe see you later, after shift.
Let some other brokedown old bastard do that work. Stand there all shift, by yourself during the middle hours more often than not, when most of the boys were where they needed to be, bored and lonesome and to hell with the extra fifty cents an hour. Sol's proud to be a mucker, crew boss of a good goddamn group of boys and he'll be damned if he'll let a bit of soreness and a hack of a cough and lungs that are damn near fucked keep him from it.
They're the lowest of the low, the muckers – barring the crowfoot boys, who are usually just getting started down the hole, auditioning as it were for one crew or another – lowest in the eyes of the miners if not by official ACM policy. The timber boys look down on the muckers and the drillers look down on the timber boys and the powder monkeys look down on them all, because they, the dynamite layers, they're the specialists. And then there are the engineers and geologists and cartographers and every other bastard that helps get metal out of this hill. Over all of them are the bosses and managers and, above all of them, the big-shot fuckers in their gilded offices and the rest of the rich political cunts on the board, lording it up from their mansions, lining their pockets with gold grown from the copper pulled out of the mines.
After the dynamite blows, twice a day, the lowly muckers are the ones who bring that copper-thick rock out, though, fill cart after cart, roll it down drift rails and into the cages to be pulled up out the hole to the headframe – 2 and 1: rock coming up – and loaded on railcars. The drillers and dynamite boys think themselves swells, the timber boys fancy themselves as keeping the whole place together, but that ore isn't going fucking nowhere without crews like Sol and his men pulling that rock out. To Sol's mind, that's something to be proud of, no matter how hard the work is, no matter the dirt and mud seamed deeper into your face every day and the constant, hacking cough that's going to kill you before too long.
Silicosis. Everyone – everyone but the Company, that is – everyone knows that miner's consumption, the miner's con, is caused by that ever-present dust settling in your lungs, hollowing you out as it fills you. The big drills are called widowmakers not because they're dangerous in and of themselves but because they raise so much fucking dust. If a man saw fifty years, after a few down the hole, he was elderly. At sixty-two, Sol is as old as Methuselah.
For a miner, if a cage doesn't cut loose and drop you into a wet squidge from a thousand feet, a fire burn you out, or a blast accident bring a drift down on you, the dust will kill you. It's that simple. That your job will kill you, sure enough, slow or quick: that's the real miner's con.
Later, crammed into the cage at shift end with six other men, Sol rolls his head on his neck, trying not to cough at the same time. He's so tired he can barely stand upright; the fact that they're packed in so tight is a help. He's able to subtly lean on Big Nancy to one side, using the boy's bulk as a bulwark of sorts. Sol runs his hand down the greasy wet metal of the cage wall, scrapes his boots on the grating to cut loose some of the mud and muck, ignoring the cursing from the car below. The car drops down to allow the one above to load, the three cages hung like beads on a chain, each dripping grime and wet down on the men in the car beneath, swaying on the cable.
– 3 and 1: run slowly, men to be hoisted.
The buzzer loud in the tunnel: ack-ack-ack, ACK. Up top, at the headframe, it's a sharply ringing bell, the better to cut through the racket of ore clattering into railcars and the whine of spinning machinery. Down here, though, in the dim, the buzzer's always startling to Sol, even after long familiarity. The red light affixed to the tender's station winks in and out in time with the signal.
– 1 and 2: up and out.
Per usual, there's that first quick jerk when the cage gets started and Sol's heart falls into his belly, wondering if this will be the time when the cable will break, drop them to the bottom of the shaft, splash them down hard into the seeping water, the car above crushing them into the one below, down into the sump.
– 7 and repeat.
– 7 and repeat.
Accident. Accident.
But no, not this time, and they slowly make their way up from the 700 level, out into the cold, clear, February air. The wind is whipping across the hill, as it usually does, scraping across Sol's wet, muddy face as he and his boys make their way to the lockers to wipe down and change into clothes more resembling clean. Michael is running his mouth about something or other, as he generally does, speech more akin to the function of breathing for the boy; the two Dans, Young and Old, are pretending to listen to him although, really, it doesn't matter if he has an audience or not, as far as Michael Conroy is concerned. Big Nancy and Flynn plod along silently, no doubt thinking of the first drink of the night. Owen, Sol's boy, new to the crew and otherwise wet about the ears, sticks close to Sol. He's young at sixteen and the newest member of the crew so, his parentage notwithstanding, Owen is already something of a mascot. This enables Young Dan, at eighteen, to assume an air of fatherly wisdom, seasoned old salt that he is. Old Dan, nineteen, watches the youngsters with the tolerant amusement of the aged.
Billy Morgan brings up the rear and Sol gives him a wink. He and Billy have been friends for fifteen years but Billy looks like he hasn't aged a day, to Sol's eye. Maybe, like a lot of his kind, he'll look young and a little weathered until one day he just looks weathered, going to ancient overnight, face seamed and shrunken like a winter apple. Sol knows that he himself looks about eighty, or at least feels that way now, at the end of twelve hours mucking ore down the hole.
Without the press of rock overhead, it's easier to stand upright, easier to breathe without the clouds of dust and the drip of burning water. As they walk from Finntown towards the East Side, though, the press of worry pushes upward from the depths of Sol's thoughts like the steam rising off of his body and his wet clothes, which threaten to freeze him in the winter air. One thing about working down the hole is that it's easy not to think, or fret and mull and pick at the problems a stupid, reckless man – like Sol – has brought down onto himself. The kind of problems that can get a man killed just as fast as a dropped hoist cage, but not likely as cleanly. The kinds of problems that live, as he does, not far from the East Side.
CHAPTER 2
Marked Face squats with the rabbit under the little overhang of rock, trying to get himself farther out of the wind. His fire, a small and feeble thing, snaps and dances, whipping over from side to side in the gusts and threatening to blow itself out. He pauses in his skinning to feed it more sticks, trying to coax more life out of it, build up enough heat so he can cook the scrawny jack that found his snare earlier. He cuts around the back feet, works his fingers under the hide and, with smooth tugs, the rabbit's fur comes off like a wet glove, hanging loose from the neck and dangling head. He cuts the head and feet off, wraps them in the hide and throws it all as far away from his camp as he can manage. Stepping farther away from the fire, Marked Face opens the belly and guts the animal, hurling the offal after the head. He rubs his bloody hands clean in the snow and returns to hunker under the rock, spitting the carcass on a stick and waiting on the fire. Even though he's hungry and cold, there's a pleasure in these simple tasks, done so many thousands of times during his long life, and pleasures are few and far between in this world.
He leans back against the rock, pulling his old blanket tighter around him. The wind is bitter, his breath steaming and puffing in the fire's dim light. Marked Face wishes he had some tobacco, something better than cold air to smoke. But he does not, and he long ago learned to live with disappointment. He is a patient man.
Even though the hour is late, the moon high, the hill on the horizon to the east of him glows with electric lights. It never stops, that place, rattling loud, steaming the air with foul smoke and sickening the earth. All day and all night the whites burrow and scrape and dig under that hill, searching for whatever it is they search for. They say it is metal they dig but Marked Face knows that really it is only greed, that those people are simply trying to fill the aching hunger in their bellies. More, more, always more. He has seen those people for a long time, watched them. He understands them, in a way, though he wishes he did not. He knows that what they find there under that hill will not stop the gnawing in their guts.
The boy is there, somewhere.
Marked Face does not like to get too close to that place but, soon enough, he will have to. For now, where he camps tonight is plenty near. He has camped here many times over the years; it is a good place to stop and sit while traveling. Not the best, of course but, so near to the city, good places for a man to stay have become few. Even as far away as he is now, he can smell the stink of that town.
The fire heats up and Marked Face cooks his rabbit, listening to the flesh sizzle until his hunger becomes too great and he takes it from the spit, still half-raw. The meat is stringy and has an odd, unpleasant flavor, perhaps because of this sick land so near the city, all the spoiled things the animal had to eat during its short life. Marked Face himself has eaten much worse over the years, though, in times of famine, of which there were plenty. It's hard for him, sometimes, to even recall the better times, the taste of other flesh. Red and glistening, rich with fat, giving his body its power with every morsel. Perhaps that is the way of old men, though; the before times were always better, eh. While he knows not to call himself wise, he has learned a thing or two about himself over all these years.
He picks the rabbit to its bones, sucking every bit of meat, and then hurls the leavings away toward the head and guts. Warm food in his belly, Marked Face feels a little better now, still cold but better. All day he has felt low, off. It is because he is so close to what he must do; that is no mystery. The ache in his gut is no longer only hunger, but fear.
Pah, he tells himself, this is not me. He knows who he is. This is only a small feeling, no more than the icy, nervous, twinge in the balls before jumping off a high rock into cold water. It is normal, after all. Starting a thing is sometimes more difficult than finishing it.
He closes his eyes and sings, trying to calm himself. The Above Ones watch him as they watch all of the world. Let them see him sing, let them know that Marked Face listens and has no fear. He is their instrument. The boy will learn, soon enough, he will learn to open his eyes and see the world as it truly is. He will see and he will choose his path and the world will go the way it goes, ever pitiless. As in the old tales, the Above Ones have spoken.
The boy, and the old man who moves him, are on that burning hill, somewhere. Soon, he, Marked Face, will come to them, pouring dreams into their ears. He will come bringing stories and lies. He will come bringing chaos. He will come bringing fear.
He is the twining root that cracks the rock.
He is the one who pushes the stone that starts the slide.
He is the instrument of the Above Ones.
CHAPTER 3
Billy Morgan comes back from wherever his mind has wandered off to and takes a sip of his beer. Even in the raucous din of the Stope, it's easy to drift one's thoughts away when Michael Conroy is chattering – which, to be fair, is most of the time.
"I don't know why we gotta come all the way down here, every night," Michael is saying, now, pausing to wipe beer foam off his lips. "If there's one thing this damn town don't lack, it's places to get a fuckin drink. There's a hundred thousand people in this town, and places to drink for every last one of them, but me and Nancy and Flynn still gotta walk back up to the Gulch after this to get home. Plenty of places to drink in Dublin Gulch, is all I'm saying."
"Drank in the Gulch last week," Young Dan mutters.
"Surrounded by all you fuckin Micks," Old Dan adds.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Trials of Solomon Parker"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Eric Scott Fischl.
Excerpted by permission of Watkins Media Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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