Origin of the Brunists (5 page)

Collins steps into it. “Now, stop it, boys! Somebody's gonna get hurt! Please! In the name of Jesus Christ, I ask you to stop!”

But there is too big a sweat up. Collins gets elbowed aside. “Okay, Bill!” grunts Castiglione, “she's looking at you—
ram the tucker in!”
Lawson, pale, almost white under the coal dust with hurt and rage, seizes the air hose.

“Hold it!”
Oxford Clemens slams his way past the four or five guys in the way, his bare blade flashing in the wavery light of the dull bulbs and gleaming headlamps. “Bill, baby, you make one move with that there hose and I'll dig me a hole in your fat belly so deep they kin dump six loads in there!” Lawson freezes, stares icily at the knife less than two feet from his face. Clemens' hand is tense, controlled, inches forward as though hungry to perform. “Okay, you ladies have got your wad off, now git your fat fairy asses off'n my buddy before I gotta dock me a few balls.”

Castiglione and Strelchuk let go their grip, Strelchuk grinning and brushing himself off, but Castiglione stands half crouching, facing Clemens. “You think you're pretty fucking smart, Ferd, with that blade,” says Castiglione, edging toward him.

Young Rosselli stands, pulls his pants up, buckles his belt. He moves over behind Castiglione.

Clemens smiles. “Jist regulatin' the odds, fatso. Anytime you wanna go it alone—”

“Hey! What the fuck is going on here?”
It is Angelo Moroni. All turn toward him except Clemens, who takes a sideways step to get the faceboss in the corner of his eye, while keeping his gaze locked warily on Lawson and Castiglione. There is a general relaxation. Moroni glances at the knife, at Rosselli, at Lawson, sizing things up. He has been in the mines for twenty-seven years. “Gimme that blade, Ferd,” he says quietly.

Clemens flicks it shut, drops it in his own pocket, turns his back. “C'mon, Rosselli,” he says, and puts his hand on the boy's shoulder to lead him south, toward the fifteenth.

“Better get your face doctored, Bill,” Moroni is heard saying, and somebody lets a grumbling curse.

Well, shit, Oxford thinks, Moroni is right. He's got to get out of the mines. He's not the kind of guy to break his back down here. Better get out as soon as he can, time is running out on him, and if he doesn't make the move quick, he never will. Figures maybe he ought to get him a car one way or another and go out East or out West and take Dinah, and anybody ask him his name, goddamn it, he'll tell them it's Bill or Jack or Danny.

He and Rosselli turn right out of New Main South into the fifteenth crosscut, then right again down the fifth north air course. At the sixth east stub entry, Rosselli sees the other men and starts to turn in, but Clemens nods: “C'mon.”

They angle left a few feet, then right, huddle up behind a pillar of coal. A cutter lies like a long-dead animal up near the abandoned face. Falls betray a slow squeeze. It is 7:32. At the gym, the game has probably begun. Clemens' fingers itch for the tip. He leans back on the pillar, pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket. Rosselli grins. “Gee, Ox, I wanna thank you for helping me out back there. I was in a bad spot, and, well, shit, I—”

Clemens shrugs it off, offers the pack to Rosselli. “Light up and fergit about it, buddy.”

Rosselli hesitates, looks around, his headlamp slicing through the unfamiliar blackness, bringing timbers and tunnels and strange equipment into momentary view. He accepts a cigarette, fits it in his mouth. His lips are puffy, cracked, and there is blood, crusted with black dust, on his chin and right cheek. The mine is silent except for the distant scrape of machinery and voices, and what seems to be a sound nearby somewhat like that of bees.

There was light and

post drill leaped smashed the

turned over whole goddamn car kicking

felt it in his ears, grabbed his bucket, and turned from the face, but then the second

“Hank! Hank Harlowe! I cain't see nothin'! Hank?”

Vince Bonali knew what it was and knew they had to get out. He told Duncan to keep the boys from jumping the gun and went for the phone in

saw it coming and crouched but it

“Wet a rag there! Git it on your face!”

seemed like it bounced right off the

Red Baxter's crew had hardly begun loading the first car when the power went off. Supposed the ventilator fan had stopped working, because the phone

“Jesus! Jesus! Help me! Oh dear God!”

came to still holding the shovel but his

looked like a locomotive coming

One of the firebosses was telling the night mine manager a story about a nun who sat on a crucifix, when the phone rang. “Wait a minute,” laughed the night mine manager, reaching for the phone, “I got a new one Lou Jones was telling about—Hello? Yeah, speaking.”

The voice from the tenth east shop stretched up pinched and attenuated and leaked out into his ear a copper whine: “Ain't no power down here, and they's a lotta dust. Seems like the air ain't movin'. Can you check the—?”

“Okay, okay. Hang on.” The night mine manager leaned up from his desk and then again the phone

Mike Strelchuk had just clapped his buddy old Bill Lawson on the shoulders, reminding him it was just a gag, forget it, but Bill was hopping sore and swore he'd even it up with Rosselli and that goddamn hillbilly. Bill had walked over toward where the green light marked the first-aid gear, the gash on his cheek looking pretty mean, and Strelchuk had turned into fourteenth west. He had bumped into old Ely Collins, the holy-roller preacher lately given to seeing white birds winging around down here, and together they'd got right of way into the working area. At the stub entry they had come on Collins' useless buddy Giovanni Bruno, leaning up next to a pillar mindlessly scratching his ass. “Christ, go play with yourself somewheres else! We got work to do!” Mike had shouted, and had just taken a grip on Bruno's elbow to jostle him along when all of a sudden it felt like his ears would burst, but he didn't hear a thing. He still had a grip on Bruno's bony elbow when the second one hit—hard. Floor seemed to heave, threw him off his feet, top crashed down, chunk batted off his helmet, face bit into the cinders. Still had ahold on something and he cried, “Bruno! Hey—you okay?” But Bruno didn't answer. Strelchuk was scared maybe he had yanked the guy's elbow off … or maybe what he held was now just a piece of a dead man. He switched his light back on, didn't know how it got switched off, maybe it wasn't on before, and aimed it down on Bruno. His goddamn face was white as the Virgin's behind with feathery black streaks on his cheekbones, but his eyes were open and blinking—his mouth gaped, but nothing came out. Strelchuk hauled him to his feet, though they both had to crouch because the roof was down aslant. It was hotter and smokier than the griddles of hell.

A ritual buzzer alerts the young athletes on the West Condon court and strikes a blurred roar from the two confronting masses of spectators. In a body, all stand. The mute patterns of run-pass-leap-thrust dissolve, congealing into two tight knots on either extremity of the court, each governed by a taut-faced dark-suited hierarch. Six young novices in black, breasts ablaze with the mark of their confession, discipline the brute roars into pulsing chants with soft loops of arm and skirt, while, at their backs, five acolytes of the invading persuasion pressed immodestly into sleek diabolic red, rattle talismans with red and white paper tails, seeking to neutralize the efficacy of the West Condon locomotive. Young peddlers circulate, selling condiments indiscriminately to all. A light oil of warm-up perspiration anoints the shoulders of the ten athletes chosen as they explode out of their respective rings to confront each other. Some of them cross themselves, some clap and cry oaths, others tweak their genitals.

Eddie Wilson didn't know what it was hit him. He still couldn't think. He was overseas again and the earth was alive with powder going off and he was scared to die. Then he thought it was a plain fall. Pain was a small hot stab behind him, but he knew it was worse because he couldn't move. Couldn't even move a finger. He tried to cry out. Couldn't make a sound. Did the others know what had happened to him? Where was his buddy Tommy? Didn't they care? He felt as though he had shrunk, now sat bunched inside his skull. He wanted his wife Betty. He opened his eyes. His lamp arrowed a cloudy ray out into the darkness—
the lights were out!

Bonali had told them to stay put when he went for the phone, but with the power gone and the vent system off, air scorching with suspended dust that could flame up any second, the need for action grabbed at them. Duncan, left in charge, couldn't hold it back, and they started to break away. Brevnik, choking with terror and screaming “It's coming!” was the first to go, and Georgie Lucci followed on his heels. Pooch Minicucci couldn't find his buddy Cravens and raced after Brevnik and Lucci, thinking he was getting left behind. “Lee! Lee!” he cried, and ran head on into a timber. He scrambled, screaming, to his feet, not knowing who or what was trying to kill him, sending Brevnik and Lucci off on a dead panicked run, and Lee Cravens, thinking Minicucci was hurt, went chasing after. By the time he had caught up with him, Lucci and Brevnik were gone. Back in fourteenth west, Duncan shouted but no one listened. He wanted to run too, but he stood in a swirl of beaconed dust as though rooted and shouted until his lungs ached.

All Strelchuk could see was smoke. “Bruno!” he cried, “we gotta make a run for it, man!” But he heard some voice back of him and he hollered out, “Who is it?” There was topcoal and rock down everywhere, timbers smashed like matchsticks and rails twisted up, power gone, a roiling scummy dark—and then he saw old Joe Castiglione with a piece of timber stove clean through him and Tuck Filbert smack up against the roof, his head upsidedown staring down at him, his eyes open, and blood dribbling out his big square jaw.
“My God! who is it?”
Strelchuk screamed, the goddamn smoke clawing his lungs to shreds.

“Here,” a wretched thin whisper said. “Collins.”

And there he was, the poor goddamn bastard, his right leg pinned between the floor and a dislodged timber. “Preach! Jesus, man, you—but don't worry none! We'll get you out okay!” he cried. “It's me, Strelchuk, buddy! We'll make it!” But God Almighty, he didn't know what he was going to do. Collins' whole leg must have been no more than a quarter-inch thick from the knee down. Terror gripped Strelchuk and made him shake.

Thrust up by a whistle burst, lifted by the taut jack of forced silence, the ball leans over its zenith, sinks briefly, then springs from a finger's jar toward the Tucker City basket, into the hands of a black-jerseyed West Condoner. A roar. A bounce. A pass. Gyrating patterns as fingers trace spiraling fences around the black-trunked bodies. Drive. Retreat. Pass. Jump. Shot.

Parked in an unlit corner of the lot outside the West Condon High School auditorium, the two received the Word:

They had switched the radio on to keep up with the ball game, underway not a hundred yards distant, but, waiting for the old coils to warm, had become distracted and failed to tune it in. Instead, American evangelist messages of love, death, and chiliasm, transmitted through the nose all the way over from Randolph Junction, leaked into the old Dodge and dribbled recklessly over their young Italian-Catholic lust. It reached their indrawn senses, now rendered in five ways tactile, as curtains of alien irrelevance, permissive because it constrained in the wrong inflections; the glow of the radio was a distant worm that warmed them….

Their bodies formed a convoluted “X,” the figure of a Greek
psi
, he seated, boy's unchastised legs pushed forward under the dash, she curled across his lap and facing him. By thrust and retreat, they advanced their investigations: the circuit established by their mouths, his hand prowled into the rustle of her skirt and petticoat, while her hand rubbed and clawed his neck, proxy for the stalk wedged against her underhip; parting to breathe, they fell motionless, only their eyes pursuing the game, keeping it alive. Yet, though their hands and mouths pressed forward, toppling old resistances, dispersing ancestral phantoms, they had no clear idea of what the next inch would bring. If Angela Bonali's defloration was to be the consummation, neither of them guessed it.

For a long time, the smoke was so thick Eddie Wilson saw nothing else in the beam of his headlamp. He prayed into the radiant cloud for deliverance from despair. He tried to think of Brother Ely assuring him of his soul's state of grace. He should have told Ferd Clemens he could use the dog. He didn't mean to hunt this weekend. He prayed that he be saved from greed and covetousness. Then, slowly, grotesquely, a crushed human shape emerged on the floor at the ray's end: Tommy Catter, his buddy, staring at him from under an overturned pit car. Tommy's lamp was shattered. Eddie prayed that Tommy's sins be forgiven and prayed for his own salvation, and, hoping only to see his wife Betty once more, closed his eyes.

Strelchuk had thrust all his weight onto the timber that pinned Ely Collins' leg, but there was no budging it. That idiot Bruno was in a state of shock and no good to him at all, and Strelchuk cursed him. Then somebody coughed, deep thick old man's cough, not like Bruno, and Strelchuk spun: saw two headlamps wavering through the smoke! “Hey! Who is it? Strelchuk here! Who's there?” Jesus, he was damn near screaming!