Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

They inched. And finally they stopped. Between gospel songs and Andre Kostelanetz, the radio told them there had been 307 men on the night shift and that the cause and extent of the disaster were unknown. Angela Bonali prayed fervently, counting on her fingers. The others in the car respected her private ceremony; they talked only to each other.

Then two woman ran past them, panting like horses. Angie recognized the girl, Elaine Collins from her freshman class at high school. Angie jumped out of the car, called out: “Elaine!” But the girl, whether she heard or not, did not turn around. Then, for the first time, it occurred to Angie that her Daddy might not be dead after all, that he might yet be saved. But she had to hurry. Ahead of her, the two women set the pace, but it was tempered by the longer distance they had had to cover. Angie could still pass them. She had to, to save her Daddy. She broke into a dead run.

While men heaped oxygen tanks, timber, shovels, and canvas alongside the cages, mine supervisor Barney Davis led the first crew down. Night mine manager Dave Osborne, two firebosses, and miners Pete Chigi, Sal Ferrero, Ben Wosznik, and Carlo Juliano. Juliano and Wosznik had brothers on the night shift, Ferrero was Angelo Moroni’s brother-in-law, and Big Pete Chigi was an old standby in emergencies. Pressed soaked rags against their faces. They had to get fresh air into the hit workings.

Mario Juliano said he thought he saw another light flick off a near wall. Strelchuk said that carrying the old preacher was turning him batty, referring of course to the birds. It was a trick the bounce of lights often played, but nobody ever expected an old vet like Ely Collins would ever be bugged by it. Juliano swore he’d seen it. And then, a couple minutes later, they all three saw it: a pair of headlamps bobbing toward them in the dark. Didn’t realize how dusty it was until they saw what was between them and those lights. “Hey!” they cried out. “Hey! Who’s there?” They lowered Collins and ran to meet the two coming. It was Lee Cravens and his triprider Pooch Minicucci. Jesus, was Mike glad to see those guys!

“Where you’uns headed?” Lee asked, soft Southern slide tilting his voice, though he was a West Condoner by birth. Little guy, angular, goodnatured, but not the brightest lad in the county.

“We thought we’d try to reach the old number one portal, or otherwise go south to the fifteenth and take Old Main out,” Strelchuk explained. It began crowding in on him then that these guys were coming from the way they were going.

“Ain’t no good thetaway,” said Lee, whipping his lamp momentarily back over his shoulder, then pausing to spit through his teeth. “We jist come from there. All fulla gas and we seen they was a lotta flame down toward the fifteenth. Doors all busted out and guys dead. Me’n Pooch is lucky even to be here.”

“It was a wough sonuvabitch,” confirmed Pooch.

“Well, we can’t go back neither,” said Mario Juliano. “It’s all caved in back there, and the gas is washing in in buckets.”

“It musta wipped out the whole mine!” whined Pooch.

“Where’s the rest of your outfit?” Juliano asked. “Bonali and the other guys?”

“I dunno,” said Cravens. “They was foolin’ around. I don’t reckon they made it.”

“If you damn bastards have only hurried!” Pontormo cried bitterly, and then he calmed down and said, “Well, it don’ make no difference.”

They led Cravens and Minicucci back to show them Ely Collins, and explained how they had lopped the leg and all. Cravens was pretty upset by it. He examined Collins’ leg carefully, eased the tourniquet, fussed with the bratticecloth. “I know you done what you could,” he said, as though apologizing.

“There wasn’t nothing else to do,” Strelchuk said. “I didn’t want to leave him back there.”

“No, you done good,” Cravens said softly. Seemed like he might be crying a little.

Air blast at the door into the main air course was so stiff, they had to shove and tug each other through it. Like crossing some terrible threshold. Even Tub Puller needed help. But from there on, they knew, it was a coast home. Cokie Duncan even thought his knobbed rheumatic knees felt better. Bonali informed him with mock sarcasm that there never was anything wrong with them, all they had needed all along was exercise.

Old Red Baxter, gravelly voice rumbling acidly out of his deep belly, agitated in the old style, waxing blistery on the lousy mine management, the absentee swindlers in the East who fattened themselves on the flesh of the workers, and that criminal Barney Davis — Baxter said they ought to march out in a body and straight into the offices, grab the first one of them they found, if it was that traitor Davis so much the better, and lynch the devil. Jowls atrernble, long red hair curling under the back of his helmet, small eyes lit with wrath. Antiquated fans, no dust down, not one piece of equipment that might not set the mine off, worse lighting and stupider timbering than they had thirty years ago.

Excited the young boys, and one of them even came on a piece of rope, threw it over his shoulder, but Duncan knew Baxter’s wind was nothing but gobpile oratory that blew feeble in the cleaner air topside. Anyway, Duncan hated the hot-eyed bastard since the day a quarter of a century ago, during the IWW riots, when Baxter punched his ribs with a rifle barrel and tried to make him kiss the ass of an old mule. In later years, Baxter tended to muddle his old political vocabulary with the saints-and-demons gloss of the local holy rollers, but the message was still fermented in the same tortured bowels. Duncan was glad when Bonali, cool for once, brought them down off that angry mountain by changing the topic to how they should celebrate getting out.

As Barney Davis and his rescue crew pushed deeper, they ran into worse damage and bad air. Where they could, they closed the blown-open airlock doors, adjusted the regulators. But they were bareface and it was getting too much for them. Ben Wosznik was getting sick. So they brought out the first two bodies they found. One was Lawson, the other looked like Moroni; check his battery number when they got him topside, if it was still readable. Both were burnt black and had suffered from impact.

The five men sat there around Ely Collins feeling pretty rotten. “Well, boys, I guess that’s about it,” Mike said. He felt very weak and tired. He thought about just stretching out there and dropping off, forget the whole fucking mess. Several times already he had thought it might only be a nightmare, and now the idea crept into him again. The sleepier he got, the more convinced he became that he was in the process of waking up.

Collins came to long enough to ask them if they had burlap up. “Yeah,” said Lee Cravens, standing, “we gotta string us up a brattice, boys. Keep the bad air from gittin’ to us an hour or two anyways, and maybe somebody’ll git through by then.”

The project enlivened them. They hunted around, found burlap, nailed it up on the timbers. They began taking turns burning their headlamps. They guessed they had between forty and fifty more battery hours among them, using one at a time, and that was ten times what they supposed they’d need. They sat around Collins as though sheltering him, or maybe it was they who were seeking shelter. He was awake more of the time now and was feeling the pain more. Strelchuk gave him all the aspirin he had, and the other boys chipped theirs in, too. Collins recognized Cravens now, and he asked Lee to help him sing religious songs to keep his mind off the leg.

Angela Bonali arrived alone, breathless, surprised to find so many she knew. She had never caught up with Elaine Collins and her mother. The closer she had got, the faster they had seemed to run. Now her chest hurt, and a troubling lonesome fear gnawed at her. People asked her about her Dad. She didn’t know. They didn’t know. She walked among the intent people, under strings of yellow lights. Her brother Charlie was there, acting bored and chewing a toothpick, but worry told on him because he couldn’t keep still. Snapped his fingers like always, but there was no rhythm in it.