Guy Vanderhaeghe - Man Descending

Dad hoisted himself out of the chair and steamed off for the kitchen. He can move pretty quick for a big guy when he wants to. Me, I was in hot pursuit. I don’t like to miss much.

Old Gene was hammered, and grinning from ass-hole to earlobes. The boy’s got a great smile. Even when he grins at old ladies my mother’s age you can tell they like it.

“Come here and blow in my face,” said my father.

“Go on with you,” said Gene. All of a sudden the smile was gone and he was irritated. He pushed past Pop, took the milk out of the fridge and started to drink out of the container.

“Use a glass.”

Gene burped. He’s a slob.

“You stink of beer,” said the old man. “Who buys beer for a kid your age?”

“I ain’t drunk,” said Gene.

“Not much. Your eyes look like two piss-holes in the snow.”

“Sure, sure,” said Gene. He lounged, he swivelled over to me and lifted my Players out of my shirt pocket. “I’ll pay you back tomorrow,” he said, taking out a smoke. I heard that one before.

“I don’t want to lose my temper,” said Dad, being patient with him as usual, “so don’t push your luck, sunshine.” The two of them eyeballed it, hard. Finally Gene backed down, looked away and fiddled with his matches. “I don’t ride that son of a bitch of a cage up and down for my health. I do it for you two,” Dad said. “But I swear to God, Gene, if you blow this year of school there’ll be a pair of new work boots for you on the back step, come July 1. Both of you know my rules. Go to school, work, or pack up. I’m not having bums put their feet under my table.”

“I ain’t scared of work,” said Gene. “Anyways, school’s a pain in the ass.”

“Well, you climb in the cage at midnight with three hours of sleep and see if that ain’t a pain in the ass. Out there nobody says, please do this, please do that. It ain’t school out there, it’s life.”

“Ah, I wouldn’t go to the mine. The mine sucks.”

“Just what the hell do you think you’d do?”

“He’d open up shop as a brain surgeon,” I said. Of course, Gene took a slap at me and grabbed at my shirt. He’s a tough guy. He wasn’t really mad, but he likes to prevent uppityness.

“You go to bed!” the old man hollered. “You ain’t helping matters.”

So off I went. I could hear them wrangling away even after I closed my door. You’d wonder how my mother does it, but she sleeps through it all. I think she’s just so goddamn tired of the three of us she’s gone permanently deaf to the sound of our voices. She just don’t hear us any more.

The last thing I heard before I dropped off was Pop saying: “I’ve rode that cage all my life, and take it from me, there wasn’t a day I didn’t wish I’d gone to school and could sit in an office in a clean white shirt.” Sometimes he can’t remember what he wants to be, a farmer or a pencil-pusher.

The cage. He’s always going on about the cage. It’s what the men at the mine call the elevator car they ride down the shaft. They call it that because it’s all heavy reinforced-steel mesh. The old man has this cage on the brain. Ever since we were little kids he’s been threatening us with it. Make something of yourself , he’d warn us, or you’ll end up like your old man, a monkey in the cage! Or: What’s this, Gene? Failed arithmetic? Just remember dunces don’t end up in the corner. Hell no, they end up in the cage! Look at me! My old man really hates that cage and the mine. He figures it’s the worst thing you can threaten anybody with.

I was in the cage, once. A few years ago, when I was fourteen, the company decided they’d open the mine up for tours. It was likely the brainstorm of some public relations tit sitting in head office in Chicago. In my book it was kind of like taking people into the slaughterhouse to prove you’re kind to the cows. Anyway, Pop offered to take us on one of his days off. As usual, he was about four years behind schedule. When we were maybe eleven we might have been nuts about the idea, but just then it didn’t thrill us too badly. Gene, who is about as subtle as a bag of hammers, said flat out he wasn’t interested. I could see right away the old man was hurt by that. It isn’t often he plays the buddy to his boys, and he probably had the idea he could whiz us about the machines and stuff. Impress the hell out of us. So it was up to me to slobber and grin like some kind of half-wit over the idea, to perk him up, see? Everybody suffers when the old man gets into one of his moods.

Of course, like always when I get sucked into this good-turn business, I shaft myself. I’d sort of forgotten how much I don’t like tight places and being closed in. When we were younger, Gene used to make me go berserk by holding me under the covers, or stuffing a pillow in my face, or locking me in the garage whenever he got the chance. The jerk.

To start with, they packed us in the cage with twelve other people, which didn’t help matters any. Right away my chest got tight and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Then the old cables started groaning and grinding and this fine red dust like chili powder sprinkled down through the mesh and dusted our hard hats with the word GUEST stencilled on them. It was rust. Kind of makes you think.

“Here we go,” said Pop.

We went. It was like all of a sudden the floor fell away from under my boots. That cage just dropped in the shaft like a stone down a well. It rattled and creaked and banged. The bare light bulb in the roof started to flicker, and all the faces around me started to dance and shake up and down in the dark. A wind twisted up my pant-legs and I could hear the cables squeak and squeal. It made me think of big fat fucking rats.

“She needs new brake shoes,” said this guy beside me and he laughed. He couldn’t fool me. He was scared shitless too, in his own way.

“It’s not the fall that kills you,” his neighbour replied. “It’s the sudden stop.” There’s a couple of horses’ patoots in every crowd.

We seemed to drop forever. Everybody got quieter and quieter. They even stopped shuffling and coughing. Down. Down. Down. Then the cage started to slow, I felt a pressure build in my knees and my crotch and my ears. The wire box started to shiver and clatter and shake. Bang! We stopped. The cage bobbed a little up and down like a yo-yo on the end of a string. Not much though, just enough to make you queasy.

“Last stop, Hooterville!” said the guide, who thought he was funny, and threw back the door. Straight ahead I could see a low-roofed big open space with tunnels running from it into the ore. Every once in a while I could see the light from a miner’s helmet jump around in the blackness of one of those tunnels like a firefly flitting in the night.

First thing I thought was: What if I get lost? What if I lose the group? There’s miles and miles and miles of tunnel under here . I caught a whiff of the air. It didn’t smell like air up top. It smelled used. You could taste the salt. I’m suffocating , I thought. I can’t breathe this shit .

I hadn’t much liked the cage but this was worse. When I was in the shaft I knew there was a patch of sky over my head with a few stars in it and clouds and stuff. But all of a sudden I realized how deep we were. How we were sort of like worms crawling in the guts of some dead animal. Over us were billions, no, trillions, of tons of rock and dirt and mud pressing down. I could imagine it caving in and falling on me, crushing my chest, squeezing the air out slowly, dust fine as flour trickling into my eyes and nostrils, or mud plugging my mouth so I couldn’t even scream. And then just lying there in the dark, my legs and arms pinned so I couldn’t even twitch them. For a long time maybe. Crazy, lunatic stuff was what I started to think right on the spot.