The Deep Dark (29 page)

Wilkinson thought they should conserve the light.

“Let's try it without the motor,” he said.

A miner's lamp is his most important link to survival. While shaft stations and underground shops throughout a mine are illuminated, often the beam from a cap lamp is the only thing between men and total darkness. Total darkness wasn't the same as night with eyes closed tight. A man holding a hand in front of his face in total darkness wouldn't know where it was, even when it was his own outstretched hand. A failed lamp meant it was time to sit and wait for help. Walking was suicide.

Flory shut off the headlight, and Wilkinson switched off his lamp. The world instantly went entirely black. Nothing can prepare a man for total darkness, how it rattles the mind to be blind when you know you can see. The darkness cinched tight around their necks and pressed against their chests. Their eyes spun in their sockets, searching for a pinprick of light, or even a shadow, to suggest a variation in the darkness. Their world had been immersed in a great, oppressive nothingness.

It bothered Flory more than Wilkinson, perhaps because he had no cap lamp to reach for if panic seized him. The mine felt suddenly claustrophobic, closing in on him in a way that made him feel the whole thing was crushing him in suffocating darkness.

“Jesus, this could be bad,” he said, in an understatement typical of him.

Both men had heard stories of miners who had been trapped without working lamps. Some had started crawling, feeling their way along the ribs, trying to reach the curve that would lead them to some light. Throughout the Coeur d'Alenes there were tales of miners who had come across the mummified remains of hapless men whose carbide lamps had long ago fizzled to nothing, and who had crawled on their stomachs feeling for a way out, but their fingers had found nothing.

A half hour elapsed, and Wilkinson decided they'd had enough of the experiment.

“We got light now. Might as well use it while we got it.”

He turned on his lamp, and Flory went to the motor.

E
VENING,
M
AY
2
Sunshine Parking Lot

N
OBODY WAS SAYING IT, BUT AS DARKNESS DESCENDED ON THE
mountainsides around the mine—its lights a beacon like never before—it was becoming increasingly unlikely that first aid would be needed. Sunshine employees cut burlap yardage into seven-foot sections to cradle and insulate the injured from the cold floor of the drift. As a precaution in the event a helmet crewman was injured, a first-aid station was set up in the old Jewell Shaft. The night's subfreezing temperature left the intermittent puddles in the parking lot shellacked with ice. People stood in groups linked by proximity that easily indicated who belonged together. Many had Red Cross–issued blankets wrapped around windbreakers and hooded sweatshirts. Some shivered despite the woolly wrapping. A young man and woman kept a perch on the ledge below the safety sign. The man wore cowboy boots, and his sideburns touched his jawline. The woman wore bell-bottoms with a faded checkered pattern. Hot vapors from her coffee curled around wan features. She might have been pretty ten hours before. Now she looked lost, her eyes hollow from the late hour.

Frances Wilkinson prayed in the parking lot. The smudge pots had turned her naturally curly brown hair—which she'd painstakingly straightened—to gunk. Her hands were ice cold, but she didn't care. Things were bad, but she wasn't sure just how bad. She prayed Tom would be safe, that he and Ron were together, looking out for each other.
Tom will be all right.
When a Red Cross worker offered her a name tag, she declined.

“I don't need one,” she said. “My husband is going to walk out alive.”

Later, Belle Flory went looking again for her son's young wife. When she found her, she pulled a bottle of sedatives from her purse.

“You might commit suicide,” she said, giving her a single capsule.

Myrna was distraught, but she wasn't about to kill herself. She was sure her husband was alive. Even at eighteen, Myrna knew what love was, and how devotion could frequently be paired with gratitude. Ron had saved her in some ways, taking her from unwed motherhood to a complete family; he was a father to Tiger. He'd given her a fresh start.

Myrna swallowed the sedative and settled her thin frame into the backseat of her mother-in-law's car. She surrendered to the sleep that her body, though stoked with caffeine, needed as much as air.

N
IGHT,
M
AY
2

Woodland Park

W
AVA
B
EEHNER UNDERSTOOD THAT A NUMBER OF
S
UNSHINE
miners were in serious trouble, but thankfully, Don wasn't a miner. His silence, she reasoned, was because he was helping with the rescue. That was the explanation of why he hadn't come home, why he hadn't even called. She told the children everything would be fine in the morning. When the youngest, Matthew, drifted into slumber, he thought he'd see his dad at the breakfast table. His dad was the center of their family.

Don Beehner held on to every nickel and saw no need to spend money on anything he could get for free. Sometimes he took his sons to the mine yard to scavenge timbers for their woodstove. In the summer it was huckleberries that brought sons and daughters into the Idaho mountains with their father. He kept a close grip on household funds. When the family prepared its weekly shopping list, he held veto power. When his wife and kids wanted a telephone, he balked, so Wava took a job cleaning the bowling alley to pay for one herself. Daughter Nora considered her dad tighter than bark on a tree. Any extras, like bikes, were purchased with Gold Strike trading stamps. Beehner's tightwad tendencies came from the usual place. Living in Lead, South Dakota, his dad had been a miner and a boozer, a combination that ensured instability and lean times.

Because he'd been poor and didn't want that for his family, Don Beehner always moonlighted. In the mid- to late 1960s, when Beehner was a motorman, he had Wava and the kids making ammonium nitrate for her uncle's explosives company in Wallace, Trojan Powder. Trojan supplied mines with blasting agents it manufactured from fertilizer. The Beehners worked afternoons and weekends in a string of old semi trailers set up to produce the explosives. It paid well, but it was very dangerous. Once, eight-year-old Matt got his hand caught in an auger and lost an index finger.

Around 1970, Beehner came up with his latest and best moneymaking idea yet. That was when he leased the historic Wallace Hotel, above the Wallace Corner where he tended bar five nights a week. The Corner was a schizophrenic place—a bar and soda fountain with a sort of convenience store housed in an obviously out-of-plumb 1890s brick building. On one side was a rack of car and porno magazines. One miner bought every skin magazine a man could flip through for a one-handed read—more than $100 each month. Beehner knew every face that came into the place. He knew whose check was good and who'd ask to carry a tab a bit longer.

Wava didn't want to leave Woodland Park to live in the hotel, but the kids thought it was cool to live downtown, and she didn't have much of a say in anything. The parents took the office bedroom, the girls had a room assigned to them, and the two boys slept in whichever rooms weren't being used that night. Matt liked it. What he didn't like—and neither did his mother—was all the work they had to do. People constantly told Wava they adored her husband, and how much fun he was to be around. Living in the shadow of a man whom others adore is seldom easy. There was even a time, about a year before the fire, when Wava Beehner felt physically exhausted and emotionally abandoned. She not only managed the hotel books, but she also had to fix all the niggling problems that went with running the place. Don got to stand around, pour drinks, and be charming. Wava felt she needed to take a stand. Accompanied only by Matt, then eleven, she went on strike and returned to the little green house in Woodland Park.

A month later, Don Beehner did a little soul-searching and reunited his family.

“I'm glad you're back,” he said. “But you've been living with me long enough to know I'm not going to apologize. We'll just change things,” he said.

It was the only time Wava stood up to him. And if it was the only time she ever won a battle, it had been the right one to win. They'd never been happier.

10:50
P.M.,
M
AY
2
Silver Summit Portal, Osburn

L
UCKY
F
RIDAY
'
S
A
RT
B
ROWN, THE
S
OUTH
A
FRICAN WHO
'
D
BEEN
golfing that afternoon, arrived at the Silver Summit portal with his helmet crew. Brown was ready to get going toward 10-Shaft to reach the Sunshine men. His team finished setting up its fresh-air base and was ready to roll, but the green light wasn't coming from the rescue command center. Two hours later, Brown's frustration turned to anger.
Why the fuck aren't Chase and Walkup giving us the signal to get down below to get the men out? Every minute counts.
As Brown viewed it, if there were guys down below, as he knew there had to be, then what needed to be done had to be accomplished in minutes and hours, not days. He could feel the urgency of the situation deep in his bones, but not a word had come from Sunshine's side.

“Come on, let's get on with it,” he said. “Let's start establishing new fresh-air bases and get these men out of here.”

But the word from Sunshine was to hold off. Finally, hours after they'd loaded up a supply of USBM-procured breathing apparatus, cases and cases of cardoxide, O
₂
and CO indicators, and oxygen tanks for the miners trapped underground, the signal came.

“Go in.”

But after they'd sealed off a bulkhead on the Silver Summit side, deadly carbon monoxide readings hadn't abated. Neither had Brown's patience. Seal off the drift and move on had been the plan. But it wasn't working.

“Jesus,” he said, “if this stuff is coming up this raise, and we've sealed it off, it should clean this up.”

One of his team examined Sunshine's map and shook his head.

“Well,” Brown said, his voice muffled by the shield of his mask, “where the hell is it coming from?”

No one had a clue.

A half hour later the source was discovered—a raise omitted from the mine schematic was forcing more smoke and carbon monoxide into the Silver Summit drift.

With each small failure, precious moments elapsed. The maps were not only outdated, they were out of scale. Brown was frustrated and wasn't afraid to say so. He wondered why Sunshine management didn't get some men to help who knew the old workings of the mine. He immediately thought of Jim Bush. The Bush brothers practically ran the mine.

“If Bush were here,” Brown said in a cultured accent that belied his miner's getup, “he'd say, shit, there's an old raise that goes up here. Not on the map. It goes off to the left and the end.”

L
ATE EVENING,
M
AY
2
4800 Level, Safety Zone

F
LORY AND
W
ILKINSON HUNKERED DOWN AND
WATCHED THE
LIGHT
of the motor bear down on nothingness. Water trickled through the piss ditch, its flow thick and white, resembling glacial runoff. No voices, no rumbling of muck cars across grit-covered tracks or the pounding sound of the grizzlyman sending fractured chunks of muck down the timber-lined chute to fill a car. And yet it wasn't silent. The sound of air, a slow, overheated dog's panting, passed through the drift. Sometimes they could even hear or feel the subtle movement of rock as the earth relieved its pent-up pressure, shifting its innards and sending out a shudder.

Sitting there wouldn't get them out. They got up from their lagging to scout around the drift toward the borehole to see what, if anything could take them to the surface—either by their own efforts or by whatever the crew topside was doing to get them out. The walk was more than three thousand feet, but unlike the walk to the east and 10-Shaft, the air blew a little cooler on their sweaty and greasy faces. It felt right. It was the place to go for help. The other direction was smoky and lethal. Off to the side of the pocket by the borehole was a green canvas bag holding a field telephone, sitting there like a cherry on a dirt sundae. Flory grabbed it, only to find the line was quiet. He double-checked the cable. It looked good. It ran up from the phone up the borehole before disappearing.

“Hello?
Hello?”

He tried to call again, but nothing.

“Phone's no good,” Flory said.

The two looked up into the darkness, the light from Wilkinson's lamp barely making a difference. Flory grabbed the one-inch cable and tugged. He pulled harder, and it seemed solid. He suggested that they could climb up the cable and get to 3700.

Wilkinson thought it was about the dumbest idea he'd heard.

“You'll never make it,” he said. “You can't climb out one thousand feet on a cable.”

Flory yanked it again, testing the cable to see if it could bear his weight. Wilkinson reminded him that the borehole was full of loose rock.

Flory remained undeterred. “That's why I'll take a steel,” he said.

“What happens if we get up there a hundred feet and the cable breaks?”

Of course, Flory knew they'd die. At least where they stood in the muck on 4800 they had beaten the odds. They were the only ones alive on their level. Flory let go of the cable, and the pair returned to the pocket. Maybe they could make it to 10-Shaft—and, provided the smoke wasn't bad there, one or both could climb up the manway that ran alongside the service way, and the two compartments for cages. The manway had ladders.

Again, Wilkinson's cooler head prevailed. He remembered something about the last time the two of them had been there.