Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

“Smoking, Tiger. I’d bet my last buck on it. We located two or three possible areas where it might have been touched off. Trouble is, the first blast set off secondary ones, so you can’t always be sure which is the first one. But we’re pretty convinced one of those guys or more was smoking.”

“Who’s ‘we,’ Barney? You mean the operators?”

“Well,” said Davis with a loose laugh, touching the bridge of his rimless glasses, “you don’t figure the union’s gonna volunteer that, do you? Anyhow, we already found some cigarettes.”

“Whose were they?”

“I don’t want you to print any of this now, Miller, it would only prejudice the inspections, but we found them next to a new kid, his first night down there, kid named Tony Rosselli, by him and a timberman, Oxford Clemens.” Clemens was out of Miller’s own generation, and his violent death, like a breath of his own approaching doom, had preyed on Miller more than any of the other ninety-six. Ox had been his adolescent effort at rehabilitation of the downtrodden, and though Clemens as hero had disconcerted him, the emotions and indistinct yearnings of that sophomoric time had their claws in him yet. “We didn’t find any matches, but they may have got blown up or maybe one of the rescuers snuck them out.”

“Why was there so much fire, Barney?”

“You’re getting at we didn’t have enough rock dust down,” Davis said defensively, adjusting again the glasses on his small sharp nose. “I know, that’s what the union propaganda’s trying to establish. Sure, it could have been better, it always could have been better, it’s one of those things you can never do enough. But we passed all the inspections, Miller, and we’d just ordered some more, figured to lay it down in February, but, well, it just didn’t work out the best possible way — we didn’t want those guys to die, Miller.”

“No, I know, Barney, but—”

“I wish to hell we had had more rock dust down, I can tell you that, I’m goddamn sorry how it has turned out. But that’s a small thing, you don’t need any rock dust at all if you don’t have fire in the first place. Why, we hold safety meetings every month, and do you think it does one goddamn bit of good? Those bastards go right on smoking — what can you do? — and not taking care of their machinery, just asking for trouble. Sometimes, it’s just like they’re daring the goddamn mines to fall on their heads and half hoping it will, like that’s gonna prove something or something.”

Miller asked the question he supposed he’d be asking for weeks to come: “What about it, Barney: think you’ll reopen?”

“Can’t say yet, Miller. I hope so. It’s my job, too, after all. After the official inspections, we’ll survey the mine, consider its potential, and if there’s any goddamn chance at all it can be profitably reopened, why, we’ll do it. There’s too many people around here depend on that mine, Miller, and we don’t want to let them down. We’re not a charity, but we’re not pigs either. If you’re gonna print anything, I’d suggest you say that at this time the company has no intention of closing the mine. I think you can say that.” Davis got up to go. “And, say, I just want to mention, we didn’t think too much of that story by Chigi. He was just one guy of hundreds out there working their asses off and it seemed like his story made it out he went down there single-handed and carried Bruno out on his goddamn back.”

“Really? I thought it was pretty fair, Barney—”

“Well, I’m exaggerating. But I just wanted you to know — and it didn’t exactly paint the mine as the prettiest place in the country to work, either, if you know what I mean.”

“Well,” Miller laughed, “it isn’t.”

They stood, and while they were shaking hands, Vince Bonali walked in. Greetings were exchanged. Bonali wallowed a cheap fat cigar around in his mouth. “You got a real parade today, Miller,” Davis said.

“Hell, you can’t hog it all,” Bonali said.

Davis laughed unconvincingly and, with good-byes, left.

Miller took down Bonali’s account of the night of the disaster. Bonali was faceboss over eighteen men in twelfth west off old Main South, not too distant from where Bruno and the other six had entombed themselves up in fourteenth east; he had been in the zone of impact and only yards out of the sections where the fire had reached. With the habit of all facebosses Miller had ever known, he provided an extensive preamble on his own merits as a miner, punctuating with stabs of his mutilated cigar. As he talked he grew excited, nearly shouting. No longer looking at Miller, he seemed to be concentrating on some point about five or six feet out in front of him. Big barrel-chested guy with a voice that filled the office. Impressive man. Probably a good faceboss, all right. “So I run back and already the shit’s so thick you can’t see. I find out there’s four guys have bugged out. Two of them, Lucci and Brevnik, they got out okay, though I gave them a royal chewing afterwards for jumping the goddamn gun. The other two who left was Cravens and Minicucci. They must have gone the wrong way.” He paused to consider them, then went on to describe enthusiastically exactly how they had used the ninth east air course, crossed over on the overcast to the New Main South air course, running into Abner Baxter’s section, and exited the mine about two and a half hours after the explosion.

“What kind of guy is Baxter, by the way?” Miller asked. “I called him for a routine interview and he flapped into a rage on the wealth of the wicked and the sanctity of the poor, but refused to come down for an interview and wouldn’t let me quote him.”

Bonali hesitated, bit down on his cigar. “To tell you the truth, Tiger, that guy’s been a pain in my ass since the day I was born. Nothing was ever enough for him. He and his buddies nearly wrecked the union movement through these parts. Every time we organized, he’d disorganize, and then holler at us for lack of guts. Stirred up a lot of bad feeling toward … toward our people, too. For awhile, it was like one union for Italians, one for Americans. And he made a lot of noise but he was scared of fighting himself and he always packed a gun. Guys got killed in those days, and it wasn’t only the scabs. Of course, I don’t need to tell you that, Tiger. Your Dad was a great guy. A buddy of mine got it, right in the brains, one of the toughest union men we ever had, and just about everybody knows it was Baxter shot him, but there was no way of proving it. Back then, we blamed it on the operators because we needed evidence against them, and we was afraid of busting up our own ranks, but everybody knew. Now he’s grown him a fat belly and has got religion and lets his steam off on the holy rollers. We brought our sections out together Thursday night, and this is just between you and me, but he wanted to drag Davis out of his office and lynch him. He’s a nut.”

Miller asked him what he thought caused the blast.

“Gas, Tiger. Only thing that can cause one like that. Damn mine is full of it.” Bonali squashed his cigar murderously into an ashtray, thick dark brows crossed into an angry frown. “Needed better control, better ventilation. All those abandoned workings up in fifteenth and sixteenth were full of caves, pumping out methane by the tankfuls. Should have either ventilated better in there, or closed it off. Spark off some motor, maybe even just the goddamn friction of one piece of machinery rubbing up against some other one — and then, there wasn’t any rock dust down in that firetrap, Tiger. It’s a wonder we didn’t all of us get killed.”

“Barney said they’d passed all inspections.”

“I don’t give a shit what Barney Davis says, there wasn’t any goddamn dusting done. Listen, sometimes those inspectors don’t even trouble their asses to come down into the mine. They just have them a big fancy dinner somewhere and lots of drinks with Davis and the rest of those bastards, and the next day they file their report, hell, I’ve seen it!”