Work Song - Ivan Doig [78]
“My partner here is a greenhorn, I’m breaking him in,” Griff confided to them. “He’s got a little case of heebie-jeebies.” That brought knowing laughs and a round of wisecracks about how lucky I’d be if I didn’t get anything worse than that from digging copper.
In a minute came another sickening jolt downward and one more shuddering wait. Then swish! The next thing I knew, the cage was dropping at top speed, so fast that I feared we had been cut loose and were free-falling to our doom. I shut my eyes, not wanting to see death coming. Then, though, I heard the steady whine of the cable, and I cautiously peeped past the darkened outline of Griff and the others. Down and down and down, the shaft walls flew past in a terrifying black blur. My ears popped. I was trying to work my jaw when everything stopped with a hard bounce. The cage yo-yoed for long seconds as the springiness of three thousand feet of cable settled down.
Someone outside flung open the cage gate and I was blinking into a harshly lighted concrete chamber. Hot air rushed into the elevator shaft as the other men clambered out ahead of Griff and myself. A staccato chorus, like invisible riveters, emanated from various tunnels where compressed-air drills were noisily cutting into walls of ore. “Here we are,” Griff announced as if it were a tourist destination, “as deep as it goes in the Muckaroo.”
As I gawked around, the next cage settled to a stop and Jared climbed out. Giving us a thumbs-up, he disappeared off into a timbered tunnel across the way. By now the underground traffic was thick, files of miners passing us by, their talk trailing away as they vanished into various tunnel portals. Griff had been orienting himself. “C’mon, we want to scoot off over here.”
He had picked out what looked to me like an abandoned tunnel, except that steel rails were aligned in the center of it. Our headlamps cast bobbing beams as we hiked deeper into the darkness. Every so often, the light caught a gleam where water dripped down a rock wall. The stammer of drilling followed us at first, gradually dropping to a distant murmur that was simply in the air, like the metallic smell that smarted in my nose. I kept waiting for where this burrow led to, some larger cavern, timbered and more secure, where actual mining was done. Then something occurred to me, from my session of studying the mine model in the library.
“Griff?” I sounded like I was in the bottom of a well. “I believe this is what is called a drift tunnel—”
“Righto. You know more about this than a person might think.”
“—and if I am not mistaken, the only purpose of a drift tunnel is the excavation of ore. It isn’t a passageway to any of the rest of the mine.”
“Right again. You are a whiz.”
“Then where’s the crew that’s supposed to be in here doing that digging? I don’t see or hear anyone.”
“That’s because we’re it.”
I stopped almost in mid-step.
Griff plowed along for a few more paces before noticing I was missing. Turning around, he examined me critically. “I don’t want to worry you, Morrie, but you look kind of milky.”
“Where did this notion come from that you and I are going to dig copper in this crypt?” I burst out. “My understanding was, I came down here to meet with the men from the other mines.”
“Well, yeah, sure,” Griff said, patience and reason combined.
“When meal break rolls around, Jared is gonna see to that. I bet he’s got it worked out slick, don’t worry. But we need to make some kind of showing until then. We get caught loafing around”—the beam of his helmet lamp shined past me as if in search of assailants following us through the tunnel—“and Anaconda will make it rough for us. I don’t know how you feel about it, but getting turned over to their goons doesn’t appeal to me.”
“Lead on,” I said with resignation.
Like tramps on a railroad track, we trudged along the narrow set of rails deeper and deeper into the reaches of the mine. It was hellishly hot; I would not have