Diane Davidson - The Main Corpse

We came to a fork in the mine passageway. The drift with the track went off to the left, into what seemed to me to be utter blackness. To the right, when Arch swept his cap lamp over it, the passageway narrowed sharply, and the rock surrounding the drift became much more rough-hewn. An unfinished corridor? Perhaps. Almost certainly another dead end. Arch’s hand tugged me left.

One step at a time, one railroad tie after another. The rock was so rough, the darkness so total, and Arch’s light so feeble, that I was afraid he would miss an escape route, if indeed there was one. When your eyes become accustomed to dark, I’d always believed, it is because your visual sensors learn to utilize the tiny amounts of light available to see. But when no outside light is available, then what? Then you watch your son flash his cap lamp, left to right, right to left. And breathe. Feel your lungs fight the smoking air. And breathe.

We’re dying, I thought suddenly. I felt oddly light-headed. Poor Arch. He should have had a better mother. Not someone who went tearing off at every opportunity to solve crimes. A mother who stayed in her kitchen where she belonged and left police work to the police… I bit hard onto the flaming-hot lug of the respirator. And kept walking into the fetid darkness with my son.

Suddenly, Arch clenched my hand and tugged me forward. His light had picked out a metal rod set in the wall. No – not a rod. His lamplight swung crazily over the stone. Not a rod-a metal chair. No.

Arch placed my palm around one of the rods. His nose-clipped ‘voice rasped with triumph: “Ladder, Mom! It’s a raise. Climb up!”

I pulled the respirator from my mouth. “No,” I told, him. “You first. Then if you fall, you’ll fall on me instead of straight down. Use both hands. Clamp the self-rescuer in your mouth.”

He groaned, but quickly acquiesced. I moved out of the way, listened to the weight of my son moving onto the metal ladder, and watched as his cap lamp lurched higher. He was ascending. I clamped my mouth back on the self-rescuer, and awkwardly started up behind him.

In the darkness, I had to grope for each new metal rung, tapping it like a blind person, moving my hand across its corrugated surface to assure myself it was really there. The one time I looked up, dust from Arch’s sneakers fell into my eyes, and I resolved not to do that again. I breathed in and thought instead about Tony Royce. Up, up, I went, keeping myself sane by replaying all the incidents with Tony Royce that I could remember, vowing all sorts of nasty revenge. I even had a gratifying vision of testifying against him in court – This man, Your Honor, is responsible for three murders, not to mention embezzling on a massive scale. And he duped my best friend. And framed her for his crimes. I resolutely shoved that fantasy away. Stick with what you know. What do you know?

Arch was stamping on something. My fingers fumbled upward: a grate. No, it was a landing. I slid my body through the opening and felt around the edges of the landing with my hands and feet. Arch was already moving upward on another ladder, and I groped for the sides of these new metal steps, working hard to avoid the hole I’d just come through. Then I started upward again.

I breathed in the fiery carbon dioxide. Think about Tony, I ordered myself When you get out, what are you going to do to Tony? But my lungs screamed with pain. The mouthpiece was so hot I could feel blisters forming. I would never get used to inhaling carbon dioxide, I thought. And how long did I think I would have to become accustomed to this gas, anyway? What had the general said? An hour? If the carbon monoxide in the smoke was not too concentrated – two hours? How far up did we still have to go? Yes – the mountain sloped back, and with any luck we would come out eventually on the grass and rocks of the steep hill, well above the mine. But how many feet would that be? Forty? A hundred? Two hundred? And how long would that take? Would our air supply last long enough for us to reach safety?

We arrived at what must have been our fourth landing. I wondered if Marla had shot Tony. Or vice versa. There had only been two shots. Albert’s body, Jake scrambling away, the explosion, being trapped. It was all too much. I started up a fresh set of ladder rungs, hearing Arch’s steps above my head. We’re not going to make it, I thought as I breathed in the boiling-hot, acidic gas from the respirator. Oh, Tom, I’m so sorry. I’m such an idiot. I didn’t mean to get us buried alive. Tears stung and I cursed them, too. Damn it, Goldy. Think of Arch and go up a rung, then another, reflect back on what you really know about Royce. Why would he stay here for three days? Why wouldn’t he have left the country right away? Because… because he was waiting. He was waiting for something or someone. Someone who could give him something. What? What did he need? Escape. Escape, the same as what you want now… .

Arch paused. He was stamping around on one of the landings, but this one seemed to be bigger than the previous ones. And was some distant gray light seeping down, entering the landing, or was it a hallucination? Arch swept his light upward to a metal grate. On one side of the grate was a fan, but it was not revolving. The electricity which moved it had probably been, knocked out by the blast.

“Let me try to open it,” I said, since I was taller than Arch. I pulled off the nose clip. Oh, blessed, blessed air. It was smoky, but it contained sweet, sweet oxygen. I panted voraciously. I was a starved person, wolfing! down air like the first food in a week.

“Move, move,” I ordered the grate, and shoved hard at it. It didn’t budge. “Could you point your lamp to the edge?” I asked Arch.

He did so, and I saw a lock like the type used on a fence gate. It appeared rusted shut. I heard – clear and close as a bell – Jake’s mournful howl. Clenching my despised self-rescuer with all the force I had left, I swung at the lock. It made a hideous grinding sound before clanging away from the locked position. I stepped up two rungs of the ladder leading to the grate and desperately, with every ounce of strength I’d gained from hefting food trays, heaved my body against it. The grate screeched open. I wriggled through, onto a passageway that led horizontally to the side of the mountain. I held my hand out to Arch. His smiling face made my heart sing.

We ran down the sloping passageway. And then we were in the open, on grass, between rocks, looking out at the sky. The misty air smelled like heaven.

“Look, Mom!” Arch called excitedly. He was pointing down. There were the sheds, there was the Jeep, there were Marla and General Bo, puzzling over a map. And there, tethered to the general, with the spare leash, twirling awkwardly because he had caught the smell of his master on the breeze, lifting his nose to the air, and howling joyfully, was Jake.

21

After we had scrambled down the mountain above the Eurydice, after we had all hugged and confirmed that we were okay, after we had marveled at the fall of huge rocks caused by the explosion, after Jake had licked the bloody scratches on Arch’s face at least a hundred times – after all that, we got the bad news.

“He got away,” the general reported, disconsolate. “Royce. I saw him. I was thirty feet away from him… .” He gestured with the hand that clasped Jake’s spare leash, and sighed.

Marla’s spangled sweat suit was smeared with mud. So was her face. “I tried to shoot him. The son of a bitch. I missed twice. Then he just pushed me down, into the mud.” She shook her head, disgusted almost beyond speech. But Marla was never beyond speech. “I wish to hell I had killed him.”

“But… where did he go?” I was incredulous, and felt a whiff of fear. Who knew what more he was capable of? I scanned the sheds and the road below. But the shabby storehouses still looked deserted, as did the wide ribbon of mud that led away from the mine and down to Idaho Springs. “I’m still not clear on exactly what happened. How do you know he’s not still around?”