Two-Gun & Sun (14 page)

We landed on the bottom with a jerk, and stumbled out.

In all my years of living in a valley ringed by mines, I had never ventured below ground. I saw the pitheads from a distance, from the roads that led to our house on the lake surrounded by orchard trees. I could only imagine what it was like inside a mine. I had pictured a big cave, like one big room inside a rock. Not this.

Fanning out from the bottom were several narrow rooms or tunnels. I could barely see down any, the filthy fog that spilled out tossed back the beams of our lantern light. Running from one was a conveyor belt with streams of coal, rows of sharp eyes staring at me. The rattle and shriek of the belt was deafening. Silver touched my elbow, then motioned with a hand and I followed him through another narrow room, perhaps an old tunnel as it was quieter.

I would get lost without a guide. Every space diverged into more, some so cramped, we squeezed through, and I was thankful to have kept on my coveralls. Others had ceilings so high and walls so wide I wanted to hold out my arms and spin. Such relief. Had the tunnels looped back on themselves? At one point there were tracks below our feet again and we pressed to the walls as carts of black boulders rumbled past. Sometimes I saw men, half-dressed in the stifling heat, their bare chests blackened and shiny with sweat.

One dug a finger against his mouth to lift a corner of his mask, causing the hose to slither out to the side. Careful missy, he hissed.

I stumbled anyway, and wondered if the rubble at my feet had been purposely thrown there just now, the pick that swung into the air aimed not close enough to hurt me, but close enough to stir the hair on my forehead. Now I understood why they hated me. What hell this place was, and yet they were afraid of losing it, of me with my notebook and pencil doing something to cause it.

I couldn't recognize any from the group that had spat on me, not with masks hiding their faces, though any miners outside the range of our tour likely didn't wear them. This was just for show.

In another large room I tapped Silver's arm and called through my mask, What if there's an explosion? How would you get them out?

We're on the edge of the ocean, he shouted. If there's an explosion, this whole space would flood.

My spine stiffened to attention. I might be able to swim my way out of a disaster, but doubted that most of these land-bound men could do more than dog-paddle, and I said, Tell me about that.

I began scribbling but soon stopped. I was quickly filling this second notebook, and for what? His words disappointed. No one would try rescuing the miners. The drägerman's job, at least this drägerman's job, would become one of fishing out bodies.

Then why this drill?

He said, What else would you have us do?

Where is the owner, then? I'd like to talk to him.

Drummond? Not here. Seldom here. Lives down the coast. Only comes here for special occasions.

Such as a mining disaster. I slapped the pages closed and moved to the side to watch the crew and the lowering of ladders and ropes and other false shows of rescue.

I noticed movement, then, down a side room. A rat? A man, hiding? I pocketed my book and unhooked a lantern. I would investigate while Silver continued conducting his drill.

Several steps into the side room I spied a girl or woman, greasy blonde tresses below the snorkel, in a baggy dress meant for a much larger woman, the cloth coarse as burlap and stained with coal dust, bent over a bench of earth. Retching? Surely not—not in that mask. I stepped forward, all the way around the bend of the side tunnel, and saw too late the girl's bare flank and a chain that looped around her waist and between her legs, slapping rhythmically.

The girl's skirts had been hiked to her hips and a man was clamped onto the back of her, forcing the chain to the side, his trousers at his ankles. His grubby hand gripped an exposed, white breast, squeezing in time as he pumped into her. The girl made an ugly sound in her mask. I squawked into mine and yanked it off. Startled, the man pulled away from the girl, his rubber hose swinging out into the air, twin to the monstrous one below, a circus elephant's trunk, descending on command of my squawk. He bent to his ankles, exposing another hideous view, and hauled up his pants.

The girl curled her lip at me and said, What ya lookin' at? Want more?

Then she leaned back against the bench of dirt, grabbed her hem in both fists and lifted her dress to her neck.

Silver rushed up behind me, mask dangling around his neck, bawling threats that he'd shoot the both of them if he had his gun. I thought he would, too, and I wouldn't have minded so much this time. He pulled the leather belt from his own soldier's trousers and bound the wrists of the offender. The dirty deputy appeared out of the gloom to assist.

Where have you been? Silver asked him.

His reply was a grunt. Then he leered at me.

Silver led me away by the elbow.

All the way back along the tunnels I was seeing the girl's pink nipple fouled by those black fingers, the animal sounds, not a stitch under the baggy garment, as though she expected to be clamped onto like that, as though she were ready and willing. Yet the sight of her flesh when she hiked up that sack was hardly attractive or provocative. Grimed and shapeless, it had hung like a filthy slip inside that dress.

The problem with women in the mine, Silver explained.

I thought there weren't any. That they were bad luck.

We're more modern than that, he said.

I laughed a harsh, rude laugh. But he didn't seem to notice.

Every time we turn around, he said, it's the same thing. We put those chains around their middles to lower them down the narrow shafts, but even in them they find a way. Dressing in leggings makes no difference. I saw one with the flap up so she could do her business and some old bastard found his way in there, 'scuse my language.

She was attacked?

Not that one. Not this one, either.

They work so hard, I said. I'm surprised anyone has—

Time for it? he answered. There's always dodgers. Look at those two—during a safety drill! I wouldn't be surprised if money changed hands, but they'd deny it.

She's with child, I said. She looked it, anyway.

Yes. Well. You can see why.

The man stumbled past, the deputy prodding him along with a billy club. The girl shuffled a step behind him. The back of her dress was wet and smelled vile.

I had come here to tour the mine and study its operations. What I had seen just now was a dark bit of business, but how to write it up for a newspaper? It would require careful wording.

These thoughts consumed me as I returned home, crossing the black dirt between the pithead and it, climbing the two steps to my back door, and I only half-saw what looked to be another bundle of newspapers on my doormat. I bent to pick it up and smelled it and saw it at once, a fish, its snout warped, its skin blistered, draped across my door mat like a putrid offering from an alley cat. I reeled back, spun around to see who was watching. Not a soul, though the grey land curled brown about the edges under my hot glare.

That dirty goddamned deputy—who else? That's what he was doing when he disappeared from the tour. I grabbed the only thing I could find, a broken wooden broom handle that had been tossed beside the step. With it, I stabbed the fish and lifted it from my door mat, then flung it as far as I could, back toward the pithead.

At the first hint of day I crept downstairs and opened the back door partway, then all the way. No fish. I squinted into the grey. Maybe the pigs had found it. I hoped my printer hadn't come by again, and seen it. At least my insistence on joining the rescue drill had taken the sheriff and deputies out of the shop. I wondered if Vincent knew I had done that for him, so that he could escape in safety. Was there any other way to compensate for my lapse in judgment? I had spent a sleepless night contemplating other apologies, a raise in his pay, a retraction in the next issue, a promise to do better next time. All insufficient.

Word was out, and the town would be watching.

The calendar over the sink taunted me as I edged past. Every other morning I had greeted the advancing dates excitedly, or nervously, but today I had to realize that I was nearing the halfway point of the month, and while I had produced a newssheet, none of it had gone as I had hoped.

I gripped the sides of the sink and bent my knees until I was squatting on my haunches, forehead pressed against the cool, stone lip, genuflecting to the awesome weight of my own misery. I was tired, just plain worn out from trying. A shipment of paper and ink was about to arrive and I had no money to pay for it. I couldn't afford to give Vincent what I already owed him in wages, let alone a raise to compensate for my blunder.

I lifted my head, staring at the number 13 and the seventeen days left in the month. I needed more money. Morris and his crumpled bills had not been much help. I needed to go to the bank to ask for more. I had not met the banker in person. The deal had been made by letter with no inkling as to the condition of the press. Any reasonable banker would understand if I put it to him the right way. I pushed myself to my feet and made my way to the stairs. I would have to leave my coveralls aside to put on a dress. I had just the wretched thing in my closet from Uncle's funeral.

Upstairs I washed, and then I stepped into its black folds. The only mirror was inside the closet door. It was three-quarter length, cutting me off from the knees down, and mottled and rusted at that. I dragged a chair over and climbed up to get a patchy view of my ankles. Just as I thought, no ankles. The thing dragged about my heels like something John's wife might wear. I needed to look modern, capable, a businesswoman deserving of a loan. I got down and dug through my sewing kit for pins as well as needle and thread. I don't know what I did with the scissors. I pulled out a good length of thread and bit it off. On the chair again, balancing, I folded up the hem, pinned it in place, and basted sections around me, yarding the skirt up to my chin to do so. Later, I'd have Meena do a proper hemming. For now, I left the needle and thread where it was, woven into a thick part of the hem, for emergency repairs should the whole works come tumbling down.

As I pinned up my hair I drank my tea and practised what I would say to the bank manager: Good day, Mr. Mooney. How are you? If you would be so kind, because of unforeseen costs, unforeseen by both of us, I would like to arrange an extension of the deadline, or a further advance of funds, perhaps both. I took a large bite from a chunk of pan-fried bread, swallowed more tea, thought again, and rearranged the words.

I dragged out my bicycle from the back shed, wrenched my skirts aside and climbed onto the seat. Hot with the effort, I rode past the pigs, and entered the bank just a minute past ten o'clock, ready to state my case.

Not entirely sure this is proper, Mr. Mooney said to me.

His name must have drawn the man into this line of work, though it was pronounced moo, like the sound a cow makes. When he was a little boy the other boys must have teased him about that.

I settled into a chair across from the expanse of his polished oak desk.

Approving an extension or an increase without your father's approval, he added. Hmmm.

He adjusted his glasses the whole while, smiling at me with his pointed teeth.

I bristled, reminding him that neither title nor will mentioned my father's name as part-owner or even co-signer. He was the executor of the will, the distributor of the estate, nothing more.

He likely delighted in the task, too, his chance at last to see me gone. I recalled a time not long ago when Uncle was visiting and I came into the front room. He was wearing a grey suit that matched his grey hair, a plump, pleasant man seated in a chair by the window, my father standing next to him, sharp-faced, pipe plucked from his mouth. Here she is, Father said, my unmarried daughter. I marched out and Uncle came after me, but not before I heard him say to my father, Was that necessary? And when he joined me on the veranda, the sun fading from the sky, he put an arm around me and said, It isn't easy, loving someone from another world. That took courage. Takes even more courage to say you'd rather be alone than marry someone you don't love. What a pair we are. You and your courage. Me, married to the business. I'd said, At least a business can't marry someone else. He'd laughed and put his fist to my chin and gave a light push, his way of saying I was a fighter.

The seeds of my inheritance must have been sown just then.

Now I leaned across the oak desk and, as planned, pointed out to Mooney that surely the production of newssheets was evidence that a full newspaper would soon follow.

Yes, he said, but you're spending the money on them that could have gone toward your first edition. No wonder you have run out.

The machine, I countered, and explained its neglected condition.

Perhaps I drew out the oo sound in his name for a beat or two longer than was polite. And I smiled thinly.

Eventually, he relented, and I got my funds. Why not? It meant more money for the bank. There would be no extension, though. Two more weeks, he reminded me, as if I needed reminding. Two weeks and three days, to be exact.

I slammed the bank door as I left and huffed down the steps, turned sharply toward the grey shrubs in the back where I'd stashed the bicycle. I was certain he didn't want me to succeed, wanted to stick to the impossible deadline of one month so that he could sell the paper to the first taker and still get more money out of me. I was marching in a halo, all a-glow with fury.

I should have been wearing the lavender-grey. This was the wrong sort of skirt for riding, but I hiked the hem to my knees and launched myself onto the bike, again, silently daring anyone to comment. I had a need to bolt, away from the bank, the avenue, the dark skies, the whining motorcycles, the curious people. I rode past them all.

From the corner of my eye I saw a figure dart. A flap of a long riding coat. I braked and wobbled to a stop, turned half around on the seat, the bike handles awkward in my twisted grip. No one, after all. Maybe I was seeing things, but I didn't think so. It was almost as though the figure was trying to avoid me. Morris, whose inability to come through with the funds had forced me into that unsavory trip to the bank. But no, Morris dressed in white. I swung the bike around and pedalled in the same direction the figure had moved, out of town.