Still Mine (20 page)

“Go on!” Jared says to the dog. Timber stands there, expectant, his tail wagging. A dog much like his owner, Clare thinks, friendly only until his fangs must be bared. The truck starts with a long rumble. In the driver’s seat Jared’s shirt shows his form, his broad shoulders, and it stuns Clare that she danced with him on Saturday, pinned herself up against him shamelessly, and that Malcolm was watching as she did.

“Do you go to the mine a lot?” Clare asks.

“Once a year. To honor it.”

“Honor what?”

“Five years ago today.”

“The accident?”

“No. The accident was weeks earlier. Five years ago today I got pulled out alive.”

“So you come here alone?”

“The first anniversary there was a ceremony,” Jared says. “The whole town was there. The second year it was just me. It’s been just me ever since.”

“Sara brought me up to the mine the other day,” Clare says.

“I heard about that. Charlie’s keeping an eye on you.”

“It’s easy to guess what he’s doing there.”

“Reclaiming the family grave?” Jared says.

“If he’s cooking drugs, shouldn’t he at least try to hide it?”

“There’s no one to hide from. Everyone’s afraid of him.”

“Are you afraid of him?” Clare asks.

Jared taps on the steering wheel, thinking. “Charlie’s loyal,” he says. “He’s got a strange way of showing it, but he is. He’s loyal to his people. I swear he thinks he’s keeping the town afloat. That he’s being benevolent. Giving people what they want. Whatever they need to dull the pain.”

“He gave me a pill to try yesterday. Something he cooked up. A prototype, he said.”

“Did you take it?”

“No.”

“Good. It’d put you through the roof.”

When they reach the gate, Jared jumps out to unlock it and pull it open. As they drive down the switchbacks, Clare detects a change in Jared’s breathing. A slowing. A wave of nausea hits her, the quiet of this place, the ache in her shoulder. Jared parks. He climbs out of the truck and wanders alongside the larger building, waving at her to join him. There is a ringing in Clare’s ears. She jogs to catch up.

“You look pale,” Jared says.

“I’m not feeling great.”

“Are you afraid of me?”

“You keep asking me that. Like I should be.”

“I didn’t kill my wife,” Jared says.

“Every husband says that.”

“For some stupid reason I need you to believe me.”

“I’m not sure I do,” Clare says. Again, coy.

Jared laughs. “You’re here. That says something. You came with me.”

“I did,” Clare says. “Maybe that was my mistake.”

They’ve walked beyond the large building to where a fence squares the perimeter of a smaller structure with steel doors. D
ANGER
, the sign beyond the fence reads. M
INE
S
HAFT
. Jared points just beyond it to a manhole covered and bolted shut.

“We popped out right there,” he says. “Eighteen of us. Five years ago today.”

“Do you remember much of it?” Clare says.

Jared eyes her. “What do you want to know?”

“Why are you alive?”

“Because I got lucky,” Jared says. “It was a toss-up. Heads or tails. I made the right call.”

“And Charlie’s family didn’t?”

“Guys thought they could get out. Your instinct is to get out.”

“So what happened?”

Jared shakes his head. “We heard the blast and everything shook,” he says. “You have nightmares about it and then one day, it happens. I followed the guy in front of me out of our tunnel. All I could see was this line of headlamps. My father-in-law was the foreman. Wilfred. He was trying to radio up top, but he couldn’t get through. He was doing this mad head count. By who’s missing we figured the first explosion must have been in the third tunnel. Fifteen guys died right there. And then there was this standoff between Wilf and Russ Merritt, Charlie’s dad. Wilfred was yelling at us to get in the chamber. Wilfred was technically in charge, but Russ had two of his boys there and his chest was puffed out. He said we should climb the shaft, get the hell out of Dodge. Or if the shaft was blocked off, then we’d make our way to the egress.”

“What’s the egress?”

“An escape tunnel that runs out the side of the mountain. For emergencies.”

“Didn’t Wilfred see the logic in trying to get out?”

“He knew the deal. The tunnels are gonna fill with methane, he said. It’ll blow again. He ordered us into the chamber. It’ll hold us all for thirty days, he said. Four days of reserve oxygen. I’m thinking, Thirty days of
what
?”

“But you stayed.”

“Wilf and Russ were yelling at each other, and you could see the group parting like the Red Sea, forty-some men split right down the middle. I was picturing popping out and trying to explain to my new wife why her father was stuck deep in the mine.”

For a long moment, Jared is silent.

“Once the door was sealed, that was it,” he continues. “Wilf called it a submarine. You can’t open the hatch underwater. You have to wait until someone comes to get you. The group split clear in half. Mikey was gone. Mike Gorman, Sara’s guy. He went with Russ. I remember thinking, I hope he’s right. I hope he gets out and meets that baby of his.”

“And he never did,” Clare says.

“Mike was this really good guy, you know? The rare kind, salt of the earth. I pictured him up there, leading the charge. I told myself he’d made it for sure. That he was up there trying to rescue us.”

“That’s what people do,” Clare says. “We tell ourselves what we need to hear.”

“In there, especially. Eighteen of us like sardines in that chamber. I was the youngest by ten years. Wilf found the control panel and made us sit down along a wall. He told us, ‘Once that chamber hatch is closed, it cannot be reopened. Get it?’ He repeated that over and over, like he had some sixth sense. He sealed us in, turned on the oxygen, the fans, these overhead lights. It was like the inside of a jet engine. Wilf kept telling us not to worry, he was up there like a teacher, describing this goddamn rescue chamber and how it all worked, how we were all gonna be just fine. But when he sat down you could see the fear in his eyes. Like he knew it was fifty-fifty if we were lucky. The guy next to me was an oldie. ‘Six more shifts and I retire,’ this guy kept saying to me. Wilfred sat down between us. He said nothing but he kept patting me on the back. Trying to be fatherly. Wouldn’t look me in the eye. Then, boom. Everyone screams bloody murder. The lights go out and come back on.”

“Another blast?”

“He knew it. Wilf knew it. Methane buildup. Trapped gas is like water. It looks for a way out. Up the shaft. Probably caught a flame. The lights were flickering and all the guys were freaking out. But Wilf was calm. You could see his look. Doing the math on the time between blasts. Maybe twenty minutes. He knew it would take thirty to climb the shaft ladder if you’re fit, twenty to walk the egress if the path is clear. On a good day. He said to us, ‘I’m sure they made it.’ The guy next to me wanted to be assured. ‘You think so?’ This old man, he said that fifty times in five minutes. ‘You think they made it out?’ What was I supposed to say? How do I know?”

“Why is Wilfred the bad guy in this story?” Clare asks. “He did everything right, didn’t he?”

“No one blamed Wilf for the split. But some people said the blast was his fault in the first place. He failed to perform the right safety checks. That’s how Charlie won his case in court. The jury found Wilfred negligent.”

“Even so,” Clare says. “If they’d followed his orders they’d still be alive.”

“Right. But it wasn’t the split that caused the war.” Jared fixes his eyes on the shaft door. “It was the banging.”

“What banging?”

“A few minutes after the second blast, we heard this knocking. Wilf cupped his ear against the hatch. He said, ‘There’s methane out there. If we open it, we all die.’ We couldn’t hear actual voices, but the knocking got really loud. Pounding. We knew there were guys on the other side. The guys with time enough to turn back before the second blast hit. Maybe one, maybe all seventeen are behind the door. We knew they had their gas masks, but those things don’t last long. Five minutes, maybe. The old-timer ordered Wilfred to open the hatch. He stood up and yelled ‘Those are our men!’ or some righteous crap like that. Wilfred was calm. He held his ground by the door. ‘We can’t open it,’ he said. Over and over. ‘If we open it, we all die.’ People can say what they want about Wilf. But he owned it. He didn’t open that chamber door. Guys in the chamber were weeping, pressing their hands to their ears, begging it to stop. You knew the guys on the other side were suffocating, choking, wondering why the hell we weren’t letting them in, and you knew one of those guys was probably your friend. Maybe one of them was Mikey. Some part of me was screaming it. Why weren’t we opening the goddamn door?”

“You took Wilfred’s side,” Clare says, edging closer to Jared along the fence.

“I guess I did,” Jared says. “There was no clarity. No rhyme or reason. Wilf just seemed so sure. The whole time, he owned it. He stood at the door. I’m trying to play the deputy. ‘Wilf’s right,’ I’m saying. ‘Do we
all
die?’ Then the banging was fading and the old-timer started really losing it. ‘Your men! Your men!’ he’s yelling at Wilf. We had to hold him back. It took eight minutes for the banging to stop outright.”

“That’s . . . that’s hell,” Clare says.

Jared looks down to his feet. “No one said a thing after that. The old-timer just slumped down and buried his face in his hands. I think about him sometimes, that old-timer. He had eight grandkids. He never spoke a word of it after we got out. No interviews, nothing. He died of a heart attack a few weeks after the rescue.”

“Jesus,” Clare says.

“Traumatized, I guess.”

“And you were down there for a month?” Clare asks.

“Twenty-four days. The first night was actually hell. Guys huddled and crying. Then on the second day the radio buzzed to life, and they started calling to us from the surface, and right as the oxygen was getting low in the chamber they broke through with an air shaft and found a way to pump out the methane and pump fresh air in. Even the old-timer sprang back to life. No one told us anything about the other guys, so we start thinking, Maybe they made it? We weren’t asking. But we knew. I was picturing Mikey alive and well. I had to keep myself from falling apart, but I knew.”

“How did you survive for that long?”

“That’s what the chamber is for. Like a spaceship. There were water rations and dried food, and eventually they got stuff down to us, this high-protein liquid diet that tasted like shit. Every mine rescue crew east of the Pacific was up there trying to get us out. It was all over the news. They brought in equipment from around the world to drill the rescue shaft. They made a show of letting the dads in the group talk to their kids over the radio. Wilfred was on his game, keeping tabs on everyone. I’d wake up and he’d be the only one awake, keeping watch. Then the rescue shaft was a go and you knew your odds still weren’t great. Still a million variables. We knew it would take each guy nearly an hour to get winched up. Wilfred would be the last to climb it.”

“And you?”

“Second to last.”

Clare has some memory of this scene, the news images of men being plucked from a narrow hole lit by a floodlight, a ticker across the bottom of the TV screen flashing the miners’ names as they emerged one by one, bearded and dazed. It strikes her as strange, the revisionism, the way the memory cements itself more urgently now that she knows one of them was Jared Fowles.

“Everyone went crazy when Wilfred finally came up,” Jared says. “Louise and Shayna were there. It was the main event. A family reunited. But Wilfred was having none of it. He refused all interviews. Batted away the cameras. Like the hero just drained out of him as soon as he hit the surface.”

“He lost thirty men,” Clare says.

“Thirty-two,” Jared says. “Even Charlie was there. Putting a face to the dead miners. He didn’t hate Wilfred yet. Didn’t have the full story.”

Clare and Jared both turn and lean against the fence, facing out. Clare points to the cinder-block building.

“What’s that place?”

“Used to be the mess hall,” Jared says.

“Were you friends with Charlie back then?”

“We’ve always been friends. Even after I married his girl.”

“Shayna was his girl?”

“Shayna was everyone’s girl.”

“So Charlie loved her but hated Wilfred,” Clare says.

“There’s a picture of Charlie and Wilfred shaking hands right after we got out. For a while it was okay. No bad blood. Then Charlie started hearing from the guys who’d been below. The mine company began questioning Wilfred’s safety checks, looking for someone to blame. People said the captain should have gone down with the ship. You know what? That’s what Wilfred tried to do. He tried to go down with the ship. That’s what Charlie doesn’t get. His father and his brothers are dead because they tried to abandon the ship. They jumped overboard and drowned.”

“Everything gets foggy in the aftermath,” Clare says. “It’s hard to blame the dead for anything.”

“You know what?” Jared says, his shoulder against Clare’s. “That’s the first time I’ve told the story in years. After the news cameras left, no one ever asked.” He taps at his temple. “Clearly it’s all still there.”

“Did they ever find out who was banging?”

“Three bodies. Take a guess.”

“The Merritts.”

“Russ and his two boys. The retrieval crew found them piled up outside the chamber. Theirs were the only bodies they recovered. Everyone else was ash. Charlie’s been on a rampage ever since.”

The sun peeks out of the clouds, warming Clare’s face. She closes her eyes, her stomach roiling. Has she eaten anything today? Jared faces the fence. He grips the links and scales it, landing with a thud on the other side.

“Where are you going?” Clare asks. “Come back.”

Jared’s back is to her, the chain-link fence between them. He approaches the steel door of the mine shaft and easily pries it open, only black beyond it.

“Charlie took an industrial saw to the door last year,” he says. “Opened it back up. He traps animals and throws them down the shaft.”