Steven Havill - Bitter Recoil

I looked down into the shaft, skeptical. The rope had to let me down right along the ladder so I could keep my feet planted and be able to use my one good arm. Otherwise, I’d just dangle and spin in the shaft, nothing more than a target on a string. The two deputies repositioned one of the trucks and were confident. I wasn’t.

“Sir?” The deputy, Gareth Burns, gestured for me. “Can you step into this?” He held up a bright blue nylon harness that looked like a big athletic supporter.

With several sets of hands assisting, I was trussed up tight enough to choke. Then two big steel rings were clipped into the nylon loops in front.

“Can you work these with one hand?” the deputy asked. He gave me a demonstration of how the carabiner worked and then watched me diddle with the lock ring. I pressed in the release and the ring came off. “Good. Although you might just want to leave it hooked up. We can pay out all the rope you’ll need.”

“Terrific.”

He nodded, mistaking my grimace for enthusiasm. “And I’ll just clip these two other harnesses to the belt here, so when it comes time to bring everybody up, we can do it right.” He had different plans than I did.

They pushed a plastic hard hat with a miner’s light on my head and pulled the chinstrap tight.

At one point during the preparations, Pat Tate handed me a tiny Colt.380 automatic. The silencer looked like a six-ounce juice can. I handed it back to him. “Put a round in the chamber.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.” After he did so, I pointed the muzzle of the gun off into the desert. The tiny safety catch was awkward to use with my left hand. I practiced snapping it on and off, then slid the little pistol inside my shirt, sticking its snout under the bandages that bound my right shoulder, arm, and ribs.

“Is that going to work?” Pat Tate asked.

“It’s going to have to,” I said. Pat didn’t ask what my plans were. The deputy snapped another large flashlight to my belt. It hung from a nylon loop.

“Slide this in your hip pocket,” Tate said and held out a slender black penlight.

The deputy saw my expression at the third light. “Rule of threes,” he said. “It’s dark down there.” I didn’t argue. Tate adjusted the hand-held radio in its holster and made sure the microphone cord was free. The mike was clipped to my collar. I felt like a goddamned hardware store, but we were as ready as we could be.

Sterns jerked a thumb in the direction of the crowd. “The television station sure would like to be able to bring their cameras on over,” he said.

“Sure,” I said. He looked hopeful. “On one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“That you be the one to go down there.”

He didn’t like that much, but he didn’t mention the news hounds again.

I picked up the hailer. “Finn! I coming down now.”

“Take…your…time.”

I handed the hailer to Tate. “Polite bastard, isn’t he?”

The deputies handled me like glass. The iron mesh and its frame had been pulled completely off the shaft opening, and the hole gaped ominously. I stood with my back to the hole, the ladder’s top rung behind me.

“Now just lean a little against the rope so your weight is diggin’ in your heels,” the deputy said. “And remember with this Z-haul, you’re goin’ down in five- or six-foot bites. We’ll keep ’er just as smooth as we can. Now just edge on back until you got your feet on the ladder.”

The deputy had his hand on my left elbow while another adjusted a set of heavy edge rollers to guide the rope. I waited patiently, my pulse pounding in my ears.

“Just trust the rope,” Burns said.

“Do I have a choice?” I replied.

“Really, it works easy as can be. Now, just step down. Real easy. Leave it up to the rope.” I did so while he orchestrated. The ladder flexed and I stopped. “Go on down until you can hang onto the top rung,” he said.

One awkward step at a time, I backed down the ladder. After four rungs, I grabbed the ancient rust of the top rung in my hand.

“Now just relax for a minute and sit in the sling.”

He switched his light back and forth, checking ropes. The weight was off my feet, and with a twitch of the hand I could have spun around like a kid on one of those swings made out of an old tire. I kept my feet on the ladder rungs and my hand in place.

I twisted my head and looked down. The pencil beam from my helmet light shot down into the darkness. I looked up and squinted against the glare of the spotlights. Pat Tate was standing close by, as was Sterns. Both of them had that look on their faces that said, “Better you than me, kid.”

I took a deep breath. “All right,” I said. “Let’s get this over with.”

Six feet at a time, I sank into the earth. I kept my feet free of the ladder, learning to trust the sit-harness. The ladder’s iron side rail slid through my left hand. That small contact was my anchor.

The vertical sides of the shaft were timbered, and in more than one spot water dripped down the face of the wood. The timbers smelled musty. I wondered what pockets of gases waited down below, trapped by the years of stagnation. I’d heard stories about miners walking into shafts where they took a breath and keeled over before they had time to turn around. That couldn’t be the case here…Finn had no shortage of breath.

As the bright light of the entrance drifted up and away, the shaft seemed to narrow with me at its focus. My mind played games with the perspective. When I was fifty feet down, the deputy touched me with the beam of his flashlight.

“Any problems?” he asked. He didn’t bother with the radio.

“No,” I said. The rope played out again. The next time I looked up, I flinched. I could have covered the opening of the mine with the palm of my hand. Looking down, I saw the beam from my helmet light stab into nothing. No bottom. Just wooden timbers and old iron.

I avoided looking at the rope. What on the surface had looked stout and unbreakable in its coil now stretched out above me thin and gossamer. Every time the deputies reached the end of a pulley bite and the drop stopped, the rope twanged from side to side slightly.

On impulse I reached up and turned off my helmet light. The blackness of the mine was complete, the entrance above nothing but an insignificant postage stamp of artificial light. I caught my breath as the rope descended again. The light had been my lifeline to equilibrium and I turned it back on.

The side tunnel, what Stubby Begay had called a drift, took me by surprise. The side of the shaft had been passing by my left shoulder as I descended, a steady, unchanging parade of old wood timbers, dripping water, and abandoned iron fittings. I hadn’t used the side of the shaft for support. Nevertheless, when it suddenly shelved inward, away from me, my stomach tightened. The rope dropped me far enough that my light shot into the tunnel.

The drift was nearly as large as the main shaft. I breathed in relief at seeing something substantial and horizontal.

I turned my head slightly, keyed with my left hand, and spoke into the hand-held radio’s mike that was clipped to my shirt collar.

“Stop,” I said. “I’m at the drift.”

“Affirmative.”

I pushed away from the ladder, rotating to face the drift. The floor of the tunnel was littered with junk-old sections of pipe, fittings, various lengths of wire and cable. The light illuminated heavy timbers and a series of three small concrete pads, each two feet high. Rusted bolts thrust up from the concrete where at one time machines had been secured.

Stubby Begay had called it a pump station. The miners hadn’t left much behind…just enough scars and litter to puzzle archaeologists in another thousand years.