A Desert in Bloom, page 11
He still missed the desert, missed the distant sunsets and the stony quiet of the surrounding mountains. There was wild land around Grass Valley, not the same as his roughneck wilderness, but wild nonetheless, with plenty of buck deer, bear and even the occasional mountain lion.
His father found steady work at a Roseville auto dealership, making good money. He’d built quite a reputation as the best mechanic within a hundred miles of Sacramento. Even the Highway Patrol heard about him and were sending their cruisers to be supercharged.
Davey was glad for his family - they all seemed happy here. But it wasn’t the same as his wild Arizona.
Sometimes, he and Wanda would sit out on the porch and listen to the night birds, just to see if they could hear the same ones that used to call in Wellton. Wanda was the only one who seemed to care as much as he did about leaving their little town. She was still a desert rat inside, yearning for the sand and the cactus and the quiet that was so complete you could hear your own heartbeat.
But like her big sisters, Wanda was learning to like boys. There were plenty of them, too, what with three girls courting age in the Bailey household. Grandpa Cox practically lived by his parlor window at night, watching the porch swing next door to make sure that all was well with the young maidens. Consequently, Davey did all his courting out by the rock quarry, in an old Model A that his father had rebuilt for him, as did any other boy who knew about the close proximity and volcanic temperament of his mother’s father.
That Model A was going to be his ticket out of here. That’s why he’d signed up to work in the mines. If he stuck it out long enough, he could make his own grubstake and take off for the desert. He’d been back a couple of times already, once last summer on the freights, and once with Uncle Irvon the summer before that.
His mother was beside herself when he told her he’d decided to quit school. For Davey there was no way around it; he could make a man’s wages in the mines, and hell, he was all of sixteen now and could make decisions for himself. She laughed when he told her that, and said to try that thought out on his father. Needless to say, she was right.
“Don’t be in such a hurry to grow up, son.” His father had put his book down and leaned forward in his chair. “It ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.” There was quiet concern in his dad’s voice. “Ask yourself - do I have good reason for what I'm about to do?”
“I want to make my own way, Dad.” He’d seen how his father had struggled, all the sacrifices he’d made for so many years. It was high time he helped out. There were plenty of good reasons. One of them he didn’t mention - the girl he’d met last summer in the packing sheds, the same one he’d like to find again someday.
In the dark of the drift, he savored the sound of her guitar and the smell of almonds in her hair. The Imperial Valley would be his first stop on the way back to Wellton.
Lost in his imagination, he lost the grip on his pickaxe, too, sending it careening off the side of the drift and into his forehead. The resulting howl echoed through the mains, followed by a long stream of curses, more at his own carelessness than the growing lump across his forehead.
“If a cheap tongue could move rock, we’d hire out for sailors, n’est-ce pas?”
There was no need to see the dark face at the bottom of the drift. He would recognize that rough French accent anywhere.
“Blackie, you’d never get them past the six-hundred mark.” Davey wiped the pooling blood from his brow. “They’d figure they was bound for Hell.”
“And they might be at that.” Blackie reached for his kerchief and ran it across his broad neck. “Slide down out of there and let’s have a look at you.”
“No need, I slipped a stroke, that’s all.”
“I don’t recall asking, Monsieur Bailey.”
Davey scraped the last few cobbles out from behind him and into the chute. He slid down the slight incline and onto the floor of the main tunnel. No sense arguing. Blackie Verdonne was a powderman, and short of the shift foreman, straw boss. Blackie placed the charges and supervised the drilling, making sure each blast sent down just enough rock for the next mucking crew, but not enough to collapse the drift. He was used to having his way.
As Davey’s feet touched solid rock, he felt a strong hand grasp his jaw.
“Stand still and shut up. That’s a nasty little gash you’ve got there.”
Davey looked down at the Frenchman’s face. The bright yellow fire of burning carbide gas dotted his eyes. Blackie was one of the few old-timers who still used a carbide lamp, preferring its milky glow to the steadier beam of the new battery lights. He was a small man, smaller than Davey, but broad, and hard as the drifts he worked in. Davey felt his chin was set in steel as Blackie worked his head from side to side.
“How many?” Blackie’s hand slid in front of the glow, his fingers spread wide apart. Davey’s head was throbbing; he struggled to get a focus, counting quickly up to five and then six. He wasn’t willing to let the Frenchman know he’d lost sight of his own senses.
“Five,” Davey mumbled under his breath. He tried to slip his jaw free and square his head.
“Six.” Blackie released his head with a twist. Free of his grasp, Davey fell sideways against an ore car. “This one, she cuts down on the lucky guess.” Blackie held a single stick of dynamite between his second and third fingers. He slipped it back in his pack. “Don’t make me wait for a mucker, lad.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s more like it.” Blackie turned and headed for the main shaft. “Stow your gear and come with me.”
Davey did as he was told and followed the powderman to the main. He waited as Blackie signaled for a skip. The steel car came to a stop at their station landing, and Davey got in beside him. He wondered if his small show of independence would cost him his job. As the bells sounded for their ascent, he decided not to care, if petty men and cheap tricks were the fashion down below. The steep drop took him by surprise. His head began to spin; he expected the car to rise and not fall. He swayed as the skip came to rest at the thousand-foot level.
“Steady, now.” Blackie lifted the boy from the car with one arm. He gathered him by the torso, moving quickly down the main tunnel. “That little slip was worse than you thought.”
The powderman was right. His stomach was still uneasy and they were well off the car. The bells for the lift weren’t coming from the shaft but inside his head and he started to say something but the words came out like gurgles, because he’d never been to the thousand foot level before and didn’t realize it was so much colder down here, since his legs were numb and his battery must be down and then there was just the darkness.
Fresh from the smith, the bull steel was sharp and cut with every stroke. He could feel its hot breath on the downswing of the jacks, their hammers striking cadence like heartbeats. Stone chips stung his eyes and salt tears filled his mouth, his tongue dry leather in the sun. He could hear the pistons in the pumps, warm air above for cold water below. There were no lamps in this drift, just the ring of the bits as they crushed black rock into dust, filling his lungs to send him scrambling for the surface. He was crawling now, scratching his way up the side of the shaft towards the beckoning light and clear air.
“Feeling any better?” A distant voice slid in between the pounding at his temples, a blurry silhouette across the pulsing light above. He was out of the drift, but the jacks were still working.
“Nasty cut, that.”
His hand moved automatically to his forehead, the feel of skin replaced by the woven texture of gauze. He caught a whiff of sulfa and drifted with the smell.
“Don’t try to get up.” The silhouette was speaking, words dripped like moisture from the walls. “What’s your name, son?”
He knew only one thing: he was in a small room. He’d never been there before.
“Where am I?” The room was cut from stone, full of wooden boxes and pieces of string. He felt light, unencumbered.
“Powder room.” The silhouette had a face, dark but friendly. It bent down close to look at him. “Remember your name yet?”
A weight like water descended, carrying his name. He floated to the surface. Blackie was there. “Blackie.”
“C’est moi, c’est la vérité.” A toothy smile appeared within the fog. “True, that’s me. You’re Davey Bailey, in case that’s slipped you.”
“I... guess it did.” Davey’s hands felt heavy. He pressed his fingers against his eyes. “Got any water? I’m dry.”
Blackie moved to one of the powder cases and lifted the lid. “This won’t put a fire out, but it might help your headache.”
The liquid burnt the back of his throat, did a cartwheel in his gullet and landed like a stone in his belly. Davey fought the urge to retch and sat bolt upright. His eyes sprang open.
“Good French brandy, that.” Blackie smiled as he brought the oval-shaped bottle to his lips. “Purely medicinal.” The stained cork squeaked like a noisy rat as it slid home. “I keep her with the powder, away from prying eyes.”
The lurch in his belly was replaced by a spreading warmth.
Blackie pulled a tin ladle from a hanging bucket; he bent down to bring a dipperful of water to the boy’s lips. “Now, drink this. Slow and easy.”
“Thanks.” The cool water quenched the heat in the back of his throat. Davey swallowed hard, then swilled and spat.
“Not two hours in a man’s house and you foul the floor.” The powderman tossed the ladle back in the fire bucket. “You’ll get no calls from Neal Street with those manners.”
Davey pictured the burly Frenchman in a Neal Street parlor. The mine owners and their fancy ladies lived high on the ridge in Nevada City - the miners down below in Grass Valley. He flashed a grin. “We Baileys are working folk from Union Hill. Don’t think we’ll ever see the insides of Nevada City.” The throbbing in his forehead brought him back to the moment.
“Thanks, Blackie.”
“Think nothing of it, mon ami.” Blackie opened his lunch pail and took out a small round tin. “I let the cave rats nursemaid you most of the time.”
Davey glanced around the room in reflex. He saw no rats, and no sign of how long he’d been there. Down below, there’s a numbing sameness to the day; no change in the light and no clocks to watch, only the passing of the bells to tell the hour. He’d worked graveyard ever since he signed up, 7pm to 6am - that way he could still finish high school. It was the best deal he could strike with his father. He wondered how the day shift stood the lack of sunlight in their lives. “How long was I out?”
“Like I said, two - three hours.” Blackie slipped a key into the wire band around the crimson tin, and with a cock of his wrist, peeled the top. “Hungry?” Blackie peeled out a tiny fish; the oil on the little anchovy glistened, first on the fish, then on a corner of Blackie’s beard.
Davey’s stomach rebelled at the thought. “No thanks.”
“I would have taken you topsides, but I had a big string to set.” The shiny fish continued to disappear, one after another. “Un bang grandé.”
It was quiet in the stone room. Davey could hear the grinding of small bony scales. He fought down a wave of nausea and pulled himself upright, leaning cautiously against a wooden timber to steady the tilting floor. “I better get back in the drift before I’m missed.”
“Missed? Merde, you’re long past your shift.” Blackie dropped the empty tin into his lunch pail. “Besides, that lazy fool never comes below on a Sunday. He’s halfway to Sacramento by now.”
Blackie was right. The shift boss was a choirmaster for the Methodist Church in Dixon. He always left early on Saturday nights. Davey didn’t like him and he didn’t like Davey, but there’d be no trouble about it today.
“You think you can walk?”
“Yeah. My head hurts a little, but probably no worse than it should.” Davey examined his surroundings for the first time.
He was in a small room, barely ten by ten, reinforced with heavy timbers, and stacked to the ceiling with powder cases and round cans of fuse. He’d never seen so much dynamite in one place, even back when his dad and Benny Gibbs hauled nitroglycerine.
Blackie twisted the top off a waterproof can and spun a line of dark grey cord onto the floor. With a single motion, he looped the fuse and cut it, spinning it onto his shoulder like a lariat. As he moved towards the door, the Frenchman paused, stroking his black beard. He considered the young mucker carefully. “Allons-y. I will show you something no man has ever seen.”
Davey wondered at the invitation, then stepped gingerly to the door of the chamber. He steadied himself on the large bars that crossed the threshold. They were heavy and smooth; dark brown metal coated green with vergris.
“Copper,” Blackie said. “Can’t make a spark. No iron, no steel inside of here.”
Davey shuddered at the thought of a stray spark, then remembered Benny Gibbs once more. He would tell his dad how he got the bump on his head, but not where he had spent the morning.
“Catch.” Blackie tossed him a lump of clay, about the size of a tobacco pouch. It was heavier than it looked and surprised him, slipping from his hands despite a desperate attempt to keep it. The black clay fell to the stone floor with a dull thud, and Blackie scooped it up, grinning. He placed it gently in Davey’s hands. “It’s only punk, mon chér. No worry about that stuff.”
Davey let out the breath that was stuck in his throat.
“Here’s what you worry about.” The bearded man opened his hand and rolled his index finger gently over three shiny caps. They were small, about an inch long, with a tiny spike protruding from each end. “Fulminate of mercury. Just a little heat or a little bump...” his eyes widened, “and boom.”
The gleaming caps bounced in Blackie’s palm and Davey winced.
Blackie carefully folded the blasting caps into his kerchief and pressed them into his breast pocket. The powderman pulled a thick latch over the bars on the wooden door and padlocked them with a heavy brass Yale. “Now comes the fun part, Davey.” The Frenchman nodded his way and turned to go. “Bring your hot potato along, and we’ll put it to good use.”
The young mucker followed Blackie Verdonne into the shaft, fingering his lump of clay in the gloomy silence.
“She’s got an oily feel when she’s fresh.” Blackie tilted the fuse into his lamplight and slit the rough end of the dynamite with his knife. “Never use a dry stick, all the nitro’s been boiled off. She’ll blow you straight to hell, tout de suite.”
Davey listened closely to the Frenchman. He’d been fascinated by explosives ever since he’d met Benny Gibbs years before; Davey had tried to learn what he could about the magic powder then, but his father would have none of it. “That stuff doesn’t care how smart you are, or how tough. It’ll kill you all the same.” Turned out his dad was right where Benny was concerned. Still, Dave had heard the same speech about fast cars and whiskey - seems like a lot of things that make life more interesting also make it shorter.
“Hand me that punk.” Davey gave the clay ball to the powderman and Blackie peeled it into three sections, rolled a brass cap and a fuse into each and pressed them, one at a time, into three separate holes in the rock face. “You don’t have to cap every hole, just enough to set off the other ones. If your powder’s fresh, everything blows.”
The stone face was dotted with deep punctures, each one filled with dynamite. On the way in, Blackie had told him how he’d drilled all of those holes alone, on account of this being some kind of special project for the big bosses. Davey figured he was being greased for another practical joke until he noticed the subtle differences in the shaft. Unlike others in the mine, there were no drifts moving out on the sides, only the one long incline that took them from the thousand-foot level to an isolated dead end. It was unwired and unlit, the only dark main in the Idaho-Maryland.
They had followed a single compressed air line up the shaft, stapled into the rock every twenty feet. Blackie said that a regular crew took the work this far; the Frenchman had been told to clear the last ten feet on his own. It was possible; Davey had seen Blackie hoist one of the heavy pneumatic drills all by himself, with no tripod, and muscle it two-foot deep for a blasting hole. He wondered how long the powderman had been working at the fifty-odd holes in the rock face before them.
“Here’s where the young don’t get any older.” Blackie’s tone brought Davey back to the present. “Splicing and timing.” The powderman twirled three separate fuses into one, letting them converge for a hands length before he cut off the excess. “Let them run together too long and the heat cuts them apart - too short and they won’t stay lit.”
“Follow me.” Blackie started back down the incline, looping fuse off his shoulder onto the floor as he walked. “That happens, and the next shift comes in on top of twenty sticks, just waiting under a ton of rock.” Blackie looked his way and lifted a brow.
“First mucker finds the blasting cap wins a prize.”
Davey had heard the story before - an entire crew blown away by the single swing of a pickaxe. Whatever remained was sent to the stamp mills, the blood crushed out with the ore.
The flare strike of a kitchen match lit the walls of the drift, its sudden glow casting long shadows against the stone. Blackie lit the stub of a fat cigar and drew deep until the tip shone red. He touched the ember to the end of the fuse. Like an angry snake, the grey cord hissed and spun, a thin, red line spitting smoke as it ran behind them toward the rock face above.
“Better get moving.” Blackie lifted his pack and sauntered down the main, puffing casually on his short cheroot. Davey kept pace beside him, resisting the urge to break into a jog, but mindful that his feet were moving quicker and quicker despite himself.
