CHAPTER 48
Ghan rubbed his shoulder, stiff from lying on hard ground. Seems age comes to the bones first, he realized—thickens the bone marrow and hardens the joints like they’re aching for oil. Blood turns to gelatin; skin dries and cracks and spots; hair falls out. He slid his tongue along his gums. Teeth mostly gone except for a few tombstones lining the bottom. Eyes and ears age, too, making the world wavy and distant. Cold feels colder; heat feels hotter—between the two lie the ache and the weariness.
Ghan fixed his wooden leg, grabbed his lunch—half a loaf of bread and a can of sardines. He left the tent, hobbled with the rest of the ants toward the rising sun and the descending pit. Today was good-bye to the light and down to the dark, back to where he belonged, to the place deep in the basement that hid him from the pretty world upstairs.
With each step, the ground vibrated and sent shock waves up his good leg and rattled his wooden one. Iron cars bumped and shoved along the line; pistons and steel hammers pounded from the smelter. The air choked with oil and ore—the stink of the inner earth fighting against clean oxygen. Ghan passed enormous woodpiles of eucalyptus: dead trees, torn and ravaged, waiting for their turn in the pit or pyre. He looked back at his footprints. The camp was far away now. A great fear crept up his spine, one vertebra at a time.
“Name?”
Ghan was at the dark entrance of the shaft. The checker held pen to clipboard. “Name!” he shouted again.
Ghan wanted to go back. “Ghan.”
“Lower in!”
He wanted to turn away from the noise, the smell, the gaping black hole—run to the light, to his tiny canvas tent. But his legs moved forward, stepped into the cold iron skip. Another miner shared the shuttle. The man’s skin more green than white, swarthy, probably Romanian. And the green man watched Ghan with black eyes, stared through him, his brows set so low as to be wicked. Ghan turned his head, but the miner’s eyes were still on him, shifted to the crippled leg and turned blacker. Ghan knew the look. No miner wanted to be reminded of the dangers that lurked underground.
“Send ’er down!”
The skip lurched in less than an instant, shoved Ghan’s stomach to his throat and stretched his lips away from his clenched teeth. They plunged into solid black; the miner inches away from him disappeared with a switch. The skip rattled and bounced and cursed and sped. A thrust of cold, damp air drove over his flesh, followed by the stinking humidity of trapped, heated bodies and lamps. In a matter of seconds, which could have been hours, the skip stopped and they were more than a mile underground.
Miners flowed out of the carts. Ghan settled his insides and pulled himself out last. It would look bad to dawdle. It would be worse to vomit and he swallowed the bile back, gagged. The men who had turned to ants now turned to moths as they walked in a straight line toward the carbide lamps down the shaft. The timber-latticed ceilings, like upside-down railroad tracks, were low and the men stooped as they walked. The sound of picking and digging hid somewhere beyond the halo of light.
The walls, floors and ceilings were thick with oil—moving oil. Ghan’s jaws began to shake. He had forgotten about the cockroaches. Hard wings tap-danced across each other as the bugs crawled over every inch of space; a wet crunching emanated under the men’s boots. The rats, fat as cats from the roaches, scurried between the men’s feet. Only their pale tails showed in the light like giant, flicking earthworms.
A cockroach fell from the ceiling onto Ghan’s shoulder, then scurried across his face before he could smack it away. The vomit burned his throat again. The mine was Hell as sure as any existed. His limbs quivered. He didn’t know how he had ever done this work before—felt like it had been another life, another man living it.
The men crawled through a hole and emerged in the work zone, the picking now deafening between enclosed walls. The roaches and rats were gone. The lights blinded after the former darkness and couldn’t be looked at directly. The foreman directed the miners to their stations and their tools. Then he saw Ghan. “Whoa! Whot the ’ell yeh doin’ down here, mate?” The foreman was an old man, spoke with concern, not anger. “Think yer in the wrong place.”
Ghan was in the wrong place. He was in Hell. “I can work,” Ghan answered.
“Guess they don’t care who they send down here anymore.” The voice held a long sadness, an apathy to it. He scratched his head with black sooty fingers. “Take the stoop over there. Yeh can sit while yeh pick.”
“Don’t need to sit,” said Ghan gruffly.
The foreman pointed hard at the area. “Yeh’ll sit if I tell yeh to sit!” But then his voice softened. “Ain’t pity. Sometimes a fella earns a seat. By the looks of it, yeh’ve put in yer time in the pit, paid yer dues.” He handed a pick to another miner just arrived from the skip. “Just take the seat, yeh stubborn bastard.”