Red Helmet (7 page)

“Hitchhiking in this day and age? Aren't you afraid?”

Young Henry stopped and scratched his head. “Not unless I stand in the middle of the road. Them coal trucks will surely run over you.” Then, whistling, he kicked an acorn down the driveway.

“Opie lives,” Song said, shaking her head, then went inside the house and headed for the kitchen. More wine, that was the ticket.

I
T WAS
,
ACCORDING
to the glowing clock on the bedside table, nearly three in the morning before Cable climbed in bed beside her. She reached out and touched his arm, then walked her fingers onto his chest.

“I'm awfully tired, honey,” he said, “and the alarm clock is going to go off in two hours.”

She withdrew her hand. “You're going back to work?”

“Got to,” he yawned. “Big mess to clean up.”

“What happened?”

“It would take too much energy to explain it to you,” he said, then rolled over on his side. Song stared at the high moonlit ceiling and listened to her husband breathe. She was still listening when she fell asleep. When she woke and felt for him, he was gone.

Six

C
able had been taught by his parents, Wire and Jensey Jordan, all the things a West Virginia boy needed to know for a good life: how not to get lost in the woods, how to drive a truck, and how to treat other people with respect, no matter how low or shiftless they might be. He'd learned to say “sir” to every adult male, and “ma'am” to every adult female. He was taught to protect the weak and not be intimidated by bullies. He was taught to be kind to defenseless creatures, as long as they weren't in season, and even then to respect game animals and aim for the heart so they wouldn't suffer. He'd also been taught the names of the trees and the plants that adorned the surrounding mountains and told that they were all part of God's blessings on the good people of West Virginia, which, despite the biased news accounts, was a wonderful place to live. With all that good teaching under his belt, not to mention his native intelligence and vigor, Cable had made his parents proud by being a good student and a tenacious, if not overly talented, football player on a team that had nearly won the state championship his senior year in high school.

His father had operated a continuous mining machine, a giant crablike machine that used spinning steel teeth to tear coal from the ancient underground seams. As a boy, Cable had been proud of what his father did and was intrigued by his stories of what it was like below. When he was fourteen years old, Cable begged his dad to take him inside, so he could see for himself. Wire consulted the mine superintendent, a man by the name of Carpenter Fillmore, and Mr. Fillmore said sure, let the boy have a look. The following Saturday, a day when only a few miners were working, down Cable went with his father into the earth.

From the first moments in the mine, Cable loved everything about it. He loved the great machines going about the business of cutting and loading coal, and he loved the complexity he saw in the ventilation plans required to channel air throughout the mine. The subtleties of mining had a strange pull on his intellect. When he came out that day, he said to his beaming father, “I want to mine coal.” When Mr. Fillmore came out of his office to inquire how the visit had gone, Cable pointed to the mine superintendent's white helmet, and said, “I want to wear your hat someday.” Mr. Fillmore laughed, and so did Wire. But Cable didn't laugh. He was serious. The best way to wear a white helmet, Mr. Fillmore told him, was to become a mining engineer. This became Cable's ambition.

A few months before Cable graduated from high school, his father stopped his continuous miner and walked to the front of it, “inby” as it was called, which meant he was beneath an unsupported roof. He had broken the first safety rule of the mine. Wire was usually the most careful of men and no one ever knew why he'd broken the rule. When he leaned over to inspect the teeth on the cutters, the roof fell on top of him. He was still alive when they brought him out, but he didn't stay that way long.

The church was crowded to overflowing at his funeral. The preacher of that day intoned, “We have lost a great man in a town filled with great men, they who dig the wealth of the nation. God knows them as His special people, for they are devout in the faith. It is not important how he died. What is important is how he
lived
.” The preacher was the father of the preacher who now presided over Highcoal's church. There was a continuity in Highcoal. Preachers were part of it, and so was Cable.

After Wire's funeral, the people sang the old-timey songs of faith and healing, and the church bell tolled the passing of another miner, and then the men of Highcoal got up and went back to work
in the mine. The preacher went inside his church to continue his work of spreading the gospel, the women went home to their work of raising their children, and the teachers stood up in front of their classrooms and did their work too. It was the way of the place, as it had always been, and so Cable thought it should always be.

As soon as Cable graduated from high school, he joined the army. Many boys and girls of Highcoal joined the military services. It just seemed the right thing to do, considering all the blessings their country had given them. Their parents had taught them that. Cable went into the infantry and fought against Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War. He did not kill any enemy soldiers, but he and his buddies captured quite a few. His prisoners knelt before him and kissed his hand while he told them they were going to be fine, that they were going to live, that they had nothing to worry about. The Iraqis naturally trusted him, as most people did.

Cable served out his enlistment, then went home. With the money he'd saved, and with the help of the G.I. Bill, he enrolled in West Virginia University's mining engineering school. When he graduated, he went to work for Atlas Energy, Inc., because they owned the Highcoal mine and it was still his ambition to wear the superintendent's white helmet. It wasn't long before he had the job.

This morning Cable was at the working face of one of the sections of his coal mine, a place where he had always been the happiest. But he was not happy, not with his worries about production, and certainly not after the events of the morning at the Cardinal Hotel. With barely two hours of sleep, he had slipped out of the house without disturbing Song, then swung by the Cardinal for breakfast. The old boarding house was a lovely neo-Georgian, two-story stone and brick structure with a wide front porch, a cozy parlor, and a huge dining room that had once served hundreds of miners old Mr. Fillmore had brought in from Poland, Italy, Hungary, Russia, and Ireland. Abandoned by the company in the 1970s, the building became Rhonda's when she bought it with the insurance money after her husband was killed. She extensively remodeled it, filled it with tasteful antiques, and made it her own. She was a good hostess and a great cook.

Cable entered the Cardinal, hungry for some of her special apple pancakes, and turned into the dining room just as George “Bashful” Puckett was holding forth on a most interesting subject: Cable's New York wife who, according to Bashful, was “full up with herself, snotty, and a pure little witch.”

Cable and Bashful had been at odds for months. Bashful owned a well drilling company and worked under a contract from Atlas Energy headquarters, which meant he was outside Cable's purview. Since Atlas owned the mineral rights nearly everywhere in the county, Bashful had made a nuisance of himself by drilling on private property without asking permission of the owners. Cable had to field most of the complaints, though he could do little or nothing about it. Bashful seemed to enjoy the trouble he caused. He was a balding little man with a blonde moustache who fancied himself God's gift to women. He also had a big mouth. Cable walked up behind him just as he crowed, “Goes to figger Cable'd end up with some kind of little Chinese witch for a wife.” This was followed by a choking sound because Cable had just plucked him out of his chair by his neck.

“Apologize!” Cable demanded, and then Rhonda had run in from the kitchen to break it up, and it had gone downhill from there.

Things were no better now that he was at work. Standing beside him, if standing was the word for being bent under a slab of dense rock, Bossman Carlisle eyed his superintendent, sensing Cable's unhappiness. He shifted the bulging tobacco chaw in his cheek.

“Six West is running good coal today, Cable.”

Cable cut his eyes toward Bossman. “I guess you heard about me and Bashful.”

Bossman shifted his chaw to his other cheek, then spat into the gob. “Yeah. I heard something about that.”

“Best I can tell, he's not the only one who's been talking dirt about my wife.”

Bossman pretended to be studying the men putting up a ventilation curtain, then said, “Sorry, Cable. I guess I opened my big mouth when I shouldn't have.”

“I've never liked the way gossip gets going around here,” Cable growled. “Turns out Rhonda added her two potatoes in the pot too. I got on Bashful's case about it, but he was only repeating what others had said—and it started with you!”

Bossman's helmet light rocked up and down. “You're right, Cable. I had no call to say anything about your wife.”

Cable made no reply, lest his anger make him say something he didn't really mean. He depended on Bossman, and he knew the man was sorry for telling the story of how Song had gotten upset about her blamed mussed-up blouse. Bossman probably only told his wife, but women talked and so did men in Highcoal, and it didn't take long before everybody knew everybody else's business.

Cable turned his attention to the face. The spinning teeth of the continuous miner ground into an ebony layer, violently ripping the coal from where it had peacefully lain undisturbed for over three hundred million years. It was similar to the machine that Cable's father had operated but bigger and more powerful. Shuttle cars trundled in behind the monster digger to receive a load of the ancient treasure, then raced to dump it on a conveyor belt to be carried out of the mine. When the continuous miner backed out, the roof bolt crew moved in to brace the newly exposed roof, using a powerful hydraulic drill to pierce the roof in several strategic places, then inserting slender anchors with retaining plates called roof bolts. Working with the camaraderie and skill of a NASCAR pit crew, they backed out as the continuous miner roared into the seam to rip and tear it anew. It was the choreography of the working face, and Cable thought it as beautiful a thing as there was on the earth.

Cable raised his voice over the machinery. “It's a good section, Bossman. Real good. Give Vietnam my compliments.”

Charles “Vietnam” Petroski was the foreman of the section. A miner for over thirty years, he'd passed his foreman's exam only a few months previously and was now proudly wearing his new white helmet, the mark of a mine supervisor. Almost as if he sensed Cable's comment, Vietnam looked up from where he'd been helping to hang a ventilation curtain and flashed his light across to the two watching bosses. They flashed their lights back.

“Vietnam's a good foreman, Cable, and he's got good men. But if one of them gets sick, his section's pretty much out of business. I got nobody to fill in.”

“I know that,” Cable replied. “I'm working on it.”

“I'm just telling you.” Bossman shrugged.

Cable
was
working on it, but without much success. He couldn't find any miners to hire. Coal was suddenly in demand across the world because of rising oil prices coupled with the rapid multiplication of steel mills in China and India. Orders for fuel coal and metallurgical coal had poured in, quickly exceeding the capacity of the coal industry in the United States. The coal from southern West Virginia was especially suitable for making steel, resulting in hot competition between the local coal companies to hire the few veteran miners around. Hiring and training new miners was the answer, but there weren't enough applicants. It didn't matter that the starting salary averaged over fifty thousand dollars. Today's miner's kids and grandkids, raised on iPods and computer games, just weren't interested. For the few who were, the drop-out rate was high because of unexpected claustrophobia or an aversion to what they quickly realized was hard and dangerous work. The small number who stuck it out were, as the Marines put it, the few and the proud. But mostly the few.

Cable withdrew a gas monitor from the holster on his belt and held it near the roof. The digital readout told him that the explosive methane gas seeping out of the coal was at a safe level, the oxygen content was normal, and carbon monoxide, the stealthy murderer of coal miners, was undetectable. As a final check, he licked his fingers and held them up within an inch of the stone roof. When they quickly cooled, he knew the air was moving along according to his plan. Satisfied, he turned to leave.

“Keep them safe, Bossman.”

“I'll
do my best, Cable,” Bossman said, his grin wet from his chaw. He added, “I'm awful sorry I started the gossip about your wife.”

Cable gripped his mine foreman's shoulder. “Forget it,” he said. “When you get to know her, you'll see she's a great girl.”

“She's a good lookin' one, that's for sure,” Bossman said.

Cable nodded agreement, then walked away, bent beneath the roof, until he reached a small battery-powered car called a jeep. He energized the low-slung boxy vehicle and aimed it along the track toward the main line. Wooden support headers passed overhead and the rails clicked below. It was two and a half miles back to the manlift and then a short walk to his office where a mound of paperwork, including the latest MSHA inspection results, awaited him.

Em-Sha,
as everyone in the industry called the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, was all-powerful. It could shut down a mine or levy a stiff fine for a thousand and one different violations, big and small. Although many mine superintendents and owners resented the agency, Cable wasn't among them, even when he thought they were a little heavy-handed. Paying a fine was a way to keep everybody on their toes. Being shut down, however, was another matter. As competitive as it had become in the past year, closing even for a day could prove disastrous, especially since the Highcoal mine was already having difficulty meeting its orders.