Chase (2 page)

H
is cheek itched.

He raised his head—tried to raise his head. Stuck to the floor.

Floor? Ground.

He opened his eyes and saw only darkness, something dim and white at a level with his face.

Was he blind? Or was it night? Or—what? He heard nothing, just a faint ringing in his ears. He wasn't at Murray's, then. Always noise there, even if it was just snoring.

He tried again, and his cheek peeled away from whatever he lay on, with a sticky, jammy sensation. His head
swam. He wanted to lay it back down, but what was that stuff? He pushed more upright—

Something wrong with his arm. Left arm. Wouldn't push. Felt like an interruption halfway down. Going to hurt soon. In the center of his head, a spinning blankness. He might vomit, or faint.

Where was he?

He remembered running. Man on a horse—what man? Couldn't picture him—

Because he'd never seen him. Voice at the gate—that was all, and he'd fled uphill through the brambles. Not smart, with all the holes—

Holes. He looked up, way up, and there was sky, a small blue patch of it rimmed with blackberry leaves.

His stomach whirled. He braced his good hand on the rock floor, and slowly, because quick movement hurt his head, looked down again.

The white thing—he stared at it a long time, while the lattice shape of it slowly became apparent. Knowing crept from the corners of his mind.

He was in the Dog Hole.

Engelbreit was dead, and he'd been running, and he'd fallen into the Dog Hole.

The countryside for miles around was riddled with
holes—abandoned shafts, wildcat bores. Men went hunting in pairs, so if one fell in, the other could maybe get him out.

This hole up in the briars was well known. A couple of years ago, picking berries, Phin had heard whimpering, looked in, and seen a dog. The mule boys were just knocking off for the day. He'd found Jimmy Lundy, who scrounged a rope, and they argued about who should go down. In the end it was Phin. Jimmy was stronger and should be on top to anchor.

Phin had hated the dark closing around him, the smell of rock and root. A long drop; he remembered that, remembered knowing with every slither and catch down the rope that the dog must be hurt badly.

It lay on its side. He poured a little water from Jimmy's bottle into his cupped hand and offered it. The dog lapped twice. Then, before Phin could touch it, find out what was hurt, it stretched its legs and stopped moving.

They'd left it there, after some shouting. “What good's a dead dog?” Jimmy said finally, ending the argument. They could only bury it, and it was buried deep already. Now so was Phin.

A wave rose from the soles of his feet through every bone and muscle. It emerged a whisper: “Help.”

He took a breath to really shout and a thought came, clear and distinct as someone else's voice.

Don't.

He eased the breath out. That's right. Don't panic. Panic got him into this mess; a bad situation, but he could make it worse. Someone was hunting him. If he shouted, it might be that person who heard.

His swimming head slowly settled. Distantly, his body ached. He wondered how badly he was hurt, and patted himself over with his right hand.

Lump on the left forearm, big through his shirt. He only touched it lightly. If it was broken, he didn't want to know. Break or bruise, it left his hand numb. His arm ached from wrist to shoulder.

His face was sticky down the right side. That was blood, from a gash above his hairline. How long had it taken for his own blood to dry and stick him to the floor?

The fingers of his right hand stung. A nail was torn. He must have hit the side of the hole, maybe grabbed the edge. Slowed his fall. That must be why he wasn't dead.

Yet.

He couldn't keep that thought back, but the wild clamor of fear didn't reawaken. He drew a long breath, one
that seemed to fill him with something more than air. Keeping his eyes on the scrap of sky, he pushed his feet against the ground, slid his back up and up the wall of the Dog Hole until he was standing.

He didn't vomit. Good. A little dizzy, but that passed after a moment. He turned to the unseen wall and felt along it with his good hand. It was rough and crumbly, with embedded stones, and holes where other stones had fallen out, leaving little crevices. One sloping socket was big enough for a handhold.

Now find another.

His left arm told him it couldn't reach up. Not over his head.

Marking the location of the first handhold in his mind, Phin reluctantly let go of it. A bit farther over he found a small crack where fingers could cling. He grasped his left wrist, and lifted the hand up, up—

Oh it hurt
.

Tears released hot down his cold face. His breath came in sobs. With his right hand he jammed the fingers of his left into the little crack. The cold gravel felt distant—

Above him a horse's shod hoof struck stone.

Phin pressed his face to the wall of the Dog Hole and stood unmoving. His breath stopped, and his tears did,
too. It was dark down here. In dark clothes, under dark hair, he should be invisible.

The wall he'd thought he couldn't see blackened perceptibly. Someone had shadowed the hole, was looking in.

“Phe-e-e-ew!” Half voice, half whistle; a man admitting he was scared or otherwise impressed. The horse stamped and snorted. Perhaps it had warned him of the hole. Perhaps he'd tried to force it on, and been unable. Horses sensed things humans didn't—

The wall brightened again. A few crumbles of dirt pattered on Phin's head. After a bit the hoof sound came again, turning, going away.

Phin waited a long time before moving. He hadn't heard the horse coming. How did he know it was really gone?

And who could be hunting him on horseback? Mahoney, the constable, was a miner, and miners didn't ride in Bittsville. They walked.

It had been quiet a long time now. Time to try again.

His left hand still clung, numbly, to the crack. Phin groped his way back to the first handhold, clawed his fingers firmly into it.

Now—walk his feet up. Hang there. Find new handholds, walk again. Simple.

Except only his right hand held, and that for just a
moment. Then it, too, slipped out of its shallow niche and he fell on his back on the floor beside the dog bones.

He lay there half stunned, wanting to scream for the unknown horseman to come back, get him out—kill him, even, as long as it was out under the sky. This wouldn't work. He'd never—

No.

Sit up.

Was this his cap, this soft thing under his hand?

Yes. How fortunate. Everything was going to be all right. Finding his cap was a sign of that. He settled it on his head. It hurt where he'd cut himself, but the extra warmth felt good.

He stood up. He stepped to the wall again. With his right hand, he began to feel his way along. He'd go all the way around the hole like this. He'd assess the whole surface. He'd find better handholds, make his left hand work, climb up. He had to, so he would.

Blindly he began, and blindly he went on. The surface of the hole was fairly uniform. It had a couple of bulges—or maybe just one, he started to worry. Maybe he'd been around once already and was starting again. Hard to tell when all he could see was the little sky above and the blur of dog bones.

A bulge again. This was at least the third time. Despair flooded him, and he dropped his forehead against the out-cropping. After all his mother had done to keep him out of the mine, he was going to die underground—

Pebbles rained down on his back.

“Ssss!”

Phin didn't move.

“Phin! You down there?”

He knew that voice! He stepped back, looked up, and saw a round head against the blue. “Jimmy?”

J
immy sagged back, shaking his head. “‘Out the back window,' they said, and ‘Dog Hole,' said I. But I didn't believe it!
Mikkeleen
wouldn't fall in the Dog Hole!”

Phin didn't say anything. He couldn't. The world above was real again, and fear was real, too.

“How bad you hurt?” Jimmy asked. “Can you climb a rope?”

Phin swallowed. “I…don't think so.”

“I can't haul you up,” Jimmy said. “It's a dead drop.”

“Ladder?”

Jimmy ignored him. “If I knot it? Could you climb a rope with knots?”

It sounded impossible. “I think so.”

“I'll get one,” Jimmy scrambled to his feet, then leaned down again with a sardonic grin. “Don't go anywhere!”

Phin sagged against the wall. Jimmy. Of course. He couldn't get himself out. Jimmy Lundy could. Wasn't that how it had always been?

They'd been inseparable until age seven, when Jimmy went into the breaker. Phin had waited for his own lunch pail, waited to go to work. When it didn't happen, he asked.

“I need your help here,” his mother said. It took him years to see that she was lying.

She wanted him to read to her. Work went easier, she said, with something to think of besides coal-grimed shirts. The books were hard, but she helped him understand what the sentences meant.

“Whoso would be a man must be a noncomformist.” That was from “Self Reliance,” by Emerson. Phin's father had come to America because of this essay, and had courted his mother by reading it to her. “Whoso” meant whoever, she told him. “Would”: wants to be. “A man” was a person grown large, deep, subtle, and strong in character. “Nonconformist”: true to yourself, no matter what other people think.

“Are you a man?” Phin asked his mother. She laughed, rare in those years.

“You know, Phin, I believe I am! But don't tell anyone.”

He could see her up to her elbows in water, listening as he read. An Irish washerwoman wasn't supposed to read at all, let alone read Emerson. But Mary Chase was free; born that way, kept that way through her own determination. Somebody—who was it?—said about her, “When Mary came to America, she thought it was all for her.”

No wonder she defeated Phin—kept him reading, hauling wood and water, while Jimmy graduated to the mine, opening a certain door for ore carts, otherwise watching that it stayed closed, and making up songs to keep himself awake.

Johnny O'Connor became a door boy, too. One day he sang himself to sleep. A cart rumbled into the door, and it flew back and smashed him. It was the kind of thing that happened.

But Jimmy Lundy passed unscathed from door boy to mule boy. Fifteen now, he belonged to a swaggering group of young mine workers. They fought among themselves, swore continually, told jokes Phin didn't understand and stories he could understand but not picture. He'd never been below the surface to see for himself.

He argued with his mother. She'd kept him out of everything exciting and important, and she was so thin these days, so tired. Shouldn't he go to work now, earn money to help out? She could find some girl to read to her.

She straightened from her washboard. Her arms were red and her hands redder, and on her face was an expression he didn't understand, then or now.

“I don't want you getting used to it,” she said. “When you're grown you can decide, but you're not grown yet, Phin.”

He could have proved her wrong. He could have gone to the mine and taken what work was offered. He didn't because he half understood. She'd moved to Murray's for his sake, and while she didn't mind what people said, she didn't go there because she liked it. If Phin went into the mine, her sacrifice would be for nothing.

So it was Murray's he got used to, the world of drink and gambling, late nights and open secrets. That and the stable, clean and quiet, smelling peacefully of horses. It kept him busy enough that he saw Jimmy only in passing; Jimmy always part of a crowd.

Now Phin realized, staring at the dark wall of the Dog Hole, that he didn't know where Jimmy's loyalties lay. At Murray's he'd watched, eavesdropped, tried to
put together the puzzle: who was a union man, who AOH? Who was a Sleeper? Who combined both, or all three? Fascinating, treacherous currents, and he'd watched the surface. Jimmy swam them. Sweat popped out on Phin's brow. Who might Jimmy be talking to, right this minute?

The Sleepers didn't take boys, he was pretty sure; not even mule boys. But Jimmy should be back by now. Shouldn't he be back—

“Tell me when this hits the floor.” Jimmy was there again, paying a fat rope down the side of the hole yard by yard.

Every ugly thought of betrayal left Phin instantly. He waited for the rope. “Got it.”

“Here's more. The knots'll make it shorter. Holler when you've got ten or twelve extra feet.”

There were fifteen extra feet when Phin called up again. The rope was big around as a beer glass. Knots took up more of a thick rope, didn't they? It was the kind of thing Engelbreit would—

No. Don't think about Engelbreit.

Jimmy hauled the rope up. Phin heard low-voiced swearing. It would be hard knotting such a long rope, especially if you wanted to work fast.

Not as hard as it was going to be to climb it.

Phin massaged his left arm. It wasn't broken, but the hand had no strength. He could barely close it, let alone squeeze.

After a few minutes the rope came down again, knot by lumpy knot. Jimmy looked over the edge. “Got it? Let me get set, then. When I twitch, you come ahead.”

Get set how? There was no tree up there to wrap the rope around, not even a good-sized rock. How would Jimmy do it? What would he brace against?

Don't think about that. He had his own job to do.

The rope twitched. Phin reached up with his right hand and got a firm grip. With his left forearm, he pinned the rope against his body. He stepped on the first knot—

It wasn't as simple as stepping. His boots slipped and fumbled, and he clamped the rope with his knees, pinched it between the arches of his feet, his whole body gripping it desperately. He drew himself up; one inchworm length, one knot.

The rope wobbled alarmingly. He could fall now and be all right, but for every foot he climbed, the fall would get worse—

“Hurry!” Jimmy's voice reached him in an oddly flattened way. There was no choice. Phin took a deep breath and started up.

Reach. Pin. Worm his feet up, grip the knot, and push. Reach. Pin. Worm and push. Reach, pin…

His arches began to ache. His knees felt raw. His arm muscles shook.

Worst of all was the reach, that moment when only his weak left arm hugging the rope kept him from falling. Or maybe the worst was bumping the side of the hole, or the way the rope shuddered and swayed. He didn't look down, did his best not to think. Just count the knots. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.

The light got broader and nearer and finally blazed in his eyes, half blinding him. The rope disappeared over the edge of the hole at an angle. Phin reached. His left foot slipped off the knot and kicked the side, setting loose a shower of small stones. They pattered far below. His right hand closed on the unseen rope, and Jimmy said, “That's the boy. Up and at 'em!”

Phin pushed off the last knot, throwing himself over the edge of the hole, scrabbling with toes and knees and elbows.

Sun on his shoulders, a blur of bushes, packed earth under him, and Jimmy twenty feet away braced against a small rock, straining at the rope, a look of horror on his face.

Wasn't he going to make it? Phin scrambled forward and sprawled on his stomach. Jimmy fell back. The rope flew in the air and dived snakelike down the hole, but Jimmy rolled up and over and after it. He caught the tail just in time and turned toward Phin, staring, gradually going green in the face.

“What?” Phin touched his cheek. It was stiff, crusty with dried blood. “I didn't do it,” he said quickly.

Jimmy tried to smile. “Right,” he said, and swallowed. “‘Phin Chase shoot a man?' I said. ‘Next you'll be tellin' me'—ugh!”

He sat down abruptly and put his head between his knees. His hand fumbled inside his shirt, and a moment later he brought out a water flask, untied his bandanna.

“Cripes, Phin, will you wash your face?”