The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [113]
Next morning the squad returned to the bivouac of headquarters and headquarters company. They had been away for seven days and eight nights.
The Time Machine:
RED VALSEN
THE WANDERING MINSTREL
Everything about him was bony and knobbed. He was over six feet tall without weighing one hundred and fifty pounds. In silhouette his profile consisted almost entirely of a large blob of a nose and a long low-slung jaw, a combination which made his face seem boiled and angry. He had an expression of concentrated contempt but behind it his tired eyes, a rather painful blue, were quiet, marooned by themselves in a web of wrinkles and freckles.
The horizon is always close. It never lifts beyond the hills that surround the town, never goes past the warped old wood of the miners' houses or rises above the top of the mine shafts. The pale-brown earth of the Montana hills has settled over the valley. You must understand that The Company owns everything. A long time ago they laid the track into the valley, bored the mine shafts, built the miners' frame houses, threw up the company store, and even gave them a church. Since then, the town is a trough. The wages skid out of the shafts and end up in a company hopper; what with drinking in the company saloon, buying food and clothing, and paying the rent, there is nothing left over. All the horizons end at the mine elevator.
And Red learns that early. What else is there to learn once his father is killed in a mine-shaft explosion? Some things are inflexible and one of them is that in The Company's town, the oldest single son supports the family if the father is killed. In 1925, when Red is thirteen, there are other miners' sons who are younger than him also working in the shafts. The miners shrug. He is the oldest man left in the family and that suffices.
By the time he is fourteen he is able to use a drill. Good money for a kid, but down in the shafts, at the extreme end of the tunnel there isn't room to stand. Even a kid works in a crouch, his feet stumbling in the refuse of the ore that has been left from filling the last cart. It's hot, of course, and damp, and the lights from their helmets are lost quickly in the black corridors. The drill is extremely heavy and a boy has to hold the butt against his chest and clutch the handles with all his strength as the bit vibrates into the rock.
When the hole is drilled, the charge is set up, and the miners retreat around a bend in the tunnel, and explode the dynamite. The loosened ore is shoveled onto a tiny flatcar, and when it is filled they roll it away, stopping to clear the tracks of the earth that has scattered over it. Then they come back with another cart and continue to shovel. Red has ten hours a day, six days a week. In the wintertime he can see the sky on Sundays.
Puberty in the coal dust.
In the late spring evenings he sits with his girl in a little park at the end of the company street. Behind them the town ends, and the brown bare hills, deepening in the twilight, roll away into the west. Long after it is dark in the valley, they can still see the last striations of the sunset beyond the western peaks.
Beautiful scenery, the girl murmurs.
To hell with that, I'm getting out of here. Red at eighteen.
I always wonder what's on the other side of the hills, the girl says quietly.
He grinds his shoes in the grudged sparse grass of the park. I got restless feet, I'm like my old man was, he used to be full of ideas, had a bunch of books, but my mother went and sold them. That's a woman for you.
How can you go, Red? She'll be needing the money