by T. M. Catron
“Guess he’ll have to find his own way to the mine, then.”
Alice shot Ray a look. Had Jimmy quit because of what happened last night?
Ray ignored her and motioned for Loggins to go. Everyone was silent for the next thirty minutes. Most of the men smoked and swigged coffee from large metal thermoses. Alice didn’t have a thermos because she didn’t have a way to make coffee at the shack. She always had to wait and get a cup at the work site.
Tobacco smoke fogged up the windows. Alice wanted to put one down for some fresh air, but she knew better; she’d only get teased about it later. Instead, she leaned her head back against the vinyl seat and closed her eyes.
She sat quietly for the rest of the trip, her eyes closed but her mind turning. After thinking about it all night, Alice had decided that Jimmy may have been trying to scare her, running through the field with a sheet or a blanket. Although that explanation didn’t quite fit when she remembered how big the smoke had been—much bigger than a blanket or sheet. And how had Jimmy managed to disturb the corn in so many places at once? Did he have buddies with him?
Maybe he’d wanted to do more than just scare her. Ray seemed to think he did. What did her uncle know that she didn’t? She shivered. Tonight, when she got home, she was going to have a look at that cornfield; Jimmy must have made a mess of it.
Jimmy still hadn’t shown up at noon when they took their break. Ray shook his head and mumbled something about a sorry good-for-nothing.
“You’re with Loggins the rest of the afternoon,” he told Alice. “It’s time you learned how to help the operator, anyway.”
Loggins frowned at the news but didn’t argue with Ray. Unlike Jimmy, he could show some sense when it suited him. Loggins showed Alice which lever controlled what on the continuous miner and instructed her on how to watch it crunch through the coal. If any kind of problem developed, they’d shut it down.
Alice didn’t dare take her eyes off the machine when it started up. If she made a mistake, she’d never hear the end of it. It ground down on the coal in a swirl of dust and water.
They worked for several hours without incident. Then without warning, the sound of the miner changed from grinding to whining. Loggins looked down at his controller, adjusting the knobs. Then a great cracking sound split the air.
“Watch it!” Ray said from somewhere behind.
Something big whizzed by Alice’s ear. She ducked down out of the line of fire.
Loggins shut it down, and the teeth rotated to a stop. Dust slowly settled to the floor.
“What happened?” she asked.
Loggins cursed. “Broke two teeth. What d’ya think of that, Boss?”
Ray walked over to look at the machine. “I think that’s a normal thing to happen on a continuous miner,” he said pointedly. He looked at the wall in front of the machine, then shouted, “Step back!”
It was the kind of command a miner obeyed at once.
Alice and Loggins backed toward the other side of the machine. Ray followed right after them, pulling a sensor off his belt and holding it up to test the air for toxic gas.
Alice held her breath—an automatic response that wouldn’t help if they’d already been exposed. She glanced at Loggins. He seemed to be doing the same thing.
Ray got on his hands and knees with the sensor down around the wall. Then he climbed up again. “All clear,” he announced.
Alice let out her breath. Loggins did, too. They moved forward to the coal face where Ray was fixated on something. When they reached him, they saw what had his attention.
A three-foot-wide hole, tall as a man, had opened up in the earth.
“Is it a chasm?” Alice asked.
“Don’t think so. It widens past the coal.”
“Are we at the end of the seam?”
“Can’t be.”
Ray squeezed between the continuous miner and the wall, putting his head in. “Well, I’ll be,” he said after a minute.
“What?” asked Loggins, who had moved behind Ray.
“Another tunnel.”
“Part of the old mine? I always said those maps weren’t right.”
Ray got out of the way for Loggins to look. “It’s not part of the seam. The tunnel is stone, not coal.”
Loggins took a look then came back around the miner. He reached up and wiggled his hard hat, like he was trying to scratch an itch underneath it. “So . . .”
Ray shrugged.
“What?” Alice asked. “What is it?”
“Can’t say. Could be an underground spring that’s all dried up.”
Alice walked over to the hole. She held onto the wall, peeking her head through. Her light showed dark, smooth stone in every direction. It was just a cave.
And yet it wasn’t. The walls were straight and smooth. They met above, arching into a roof ten feet overhead. The floor dropped off at the edge of the coal, the cave floor a foot below the floor of the mine.
She looked to the left, then to the right. The tunnel was ten feet wide, ten feet tall, and long. She couldn’t see an end in either direction.
“One thing’s for sure,” Ray was saying, “we’re going to have to completely redraw all these dad-blame maps. Maybe have to inspect the entire mine.”
“But where’d it come from, Boss?”
Alice pulled away from the hole. “Isn’t it just a cave?”
“You ever seen a cave that straight,” Loggins said, “with walls like that? A machine dug that out, girl.”
Alice had only ever been to one cave, the Lost World Caverns down in Greenbrier County. Loggins was right: it didn’t look like that cave at all.
“What kind of machine, do you think?” Ray asked.
“The government has all kinds a things for diggin’ tunnels and such.”
“Why?”
“To keep ahead a the Soviets, of course.”
Ray snorted. “But why’s it here?”
Loggins shrugged, as if coming up with a good explanation for his theory was too much work.
“Call the other guys,” Ray said. “Better tell ’em what’s going on.”
“What’re you gonna do?” Alice asked.
Ray straightened his lamp as Loggins got on the radio. “See how far that tunnel goes. Need to know so we can maneuver around it.”
“I’ll go with you.”
Ray waved her away. “Nah. Loggins and I won’t be long. You wait here in case we need you.”
Alice thought about arguing with him. But she didn’t. She was thinking of Daddy though. How he’d never come back.
Maybe Ray was, too. He nodded to her, then he and Loggins grabbed flashlights and entered the tunnel. Their voices bounced off the walls at first, then gradually faded.
Alice grabbed her canteen off her belt and took a swig. Then she looked at all the coal slung around the miner. Every pound of coal helped them reach their quota, especially on a day filled with delays. She picked up a shovel and began scooping up the mess and putting it in the coal car, a low, wide vehicle for taking the coal to the conveyor. The coal wasn’t going to shovel itself. And she needed something to do.
The cleanup took her twenty minutes. It would have taken her ten if she hadn’t kept checking the hole for Ray and Loggins. She paced around the miner, looking for any pieces she may have missed. When she didn’t find any, she settled for sitting in the car’s small driver’s seat, facing the hole.
Except for normal creaking and groaning, the mine was quiet. Alice fidgeted, cracking her knuckles and tapping her foot against the metal floor of the car. But when the sound pinged off the surrounding walls, she stopped.
They’d been gone too long. Something wasn’t right. She got up to peek inside again. The tunnel looked the same as before. Smooth walls, perfectly shaped. It couldn’t be a cave; she saw that now. Alice swooped her light up the walls, over the ceiling, then back down to the floor. It was smooth, too, and dry. No dirt except where the miner had slung coal dust inside when it had broken thro
ugh.
Alice stepped down into the tunnel. Ray and Loggins had gone to the right. She turned left. A quick look, then she’d jump back into the mine. Ray would never know.
One step, then another. Alice kept her light on the floor, afraid of tumbling off into a dark chasm. But the floor remained smooth until twenty paces in where the tunnel narrowed into a hole going down. She held onto the wall, shining her light down into the tunnel.
Smooth floor changed to rough stone. The steep tunnel would fit a grown man, but walking down it was unthinkable. Climbing would be more appropriate. And one slip would cause the climber to fall into who-knows-what. Alice shivered in the cool air coming up from the bottom. If there was a bottom.
Voices. Four beams of light bounced off the walls at the other end of the tunnel. Ray and Loggins were returning. Alice switched off her headlamp and allowed the lights shining from the mine to guide her back to the entrance. She slipped up into the mine just as she heard Ray say:
“Can’t believe it. Biggest dang cave I’ve ever seen.”
“You think it’s a cave, then?”
“What else would it be?”
They climbed back into the mine.
“What’d you find?” Alice asked.
Ray took a swig of water from his canteen, then another, which he spat out onto the floor. “Huge cave down the tunnel a ways. We’re gonna have to remap the whole mine.”
He stalked off toward the mine entrance.
Loggins regarded Alice with undisguised contempt. “Like I always said, nothing good ever come from having a woman in the mine,” he said quietly. Then he followed after Ray.
Alice turned to look one more time at the gaping hole in the coal, then hurried after them.
***
As soon as she got home that evening, Alice rushed out into the field to look at the damage Jimmy must have done. Up and down the field, stalks were broken and bent, like a giant had stomped them on his way down from the mountain. But the soil looked untouched, with no footprints scattered about. Jimmy had been wearing shoes the night before, she was pretty sure.
So maybe he hadn’t been in the cornfield, then.
What had?
Alice shivered despite the warmth of the evening. She showered and changed, but the thought of sitting alone and listening for the corn stalks to rustle again made her stomach do funny flips. So she put on her dress and walked down the lane in the twilight, taking her flashlight in case she was out longer than she meant to be.
Halfway to town, she saw Charlie walking her direction.
“Hey,” he called.
They met in the middle of the road. A barbed-wire fence lined one side where an old black cow grazed the weeds that grew around the posts. It raised its head to look at them, chewing the grass that hung out the corners of its mouth.
“I was coming to see if you wanted to go for a walk,” Charlie said, smiling. “Guess you did.”
His smile reached all the way to his eyes. Alice had always liked Charlie’s eyes—eyes that were blue as the summer sky. And with his easy smile and good manners, he looked so charming she almost forgot he’d spoken.
“You were?” she asked when she found her voice.
He put his hands in his pockets and shuffled a foot around on the asphalt, kicking a pebble into a pothole five feet away. “Yeah. You’ve been kind of scarce lately.”
“Oh.”
“That all you’re going to say? Aren’t we friends, Alice?”
“Yes, we’re friends.” Alice watched the cow instead of Charlie. It finished its mouthful, swallowed, then looked away to resume its dinner. Alice looked back at him.
“So are we gonna walk?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat and offered her his arm.
Alice hesitated. He’d never done that before, even though they’d been on loads of walks together. Charlie sensed her indecision and his shoulders sagged, but he continued to hold his elbow out. He looked so sweet and courageous and handsome that Alice almost turned and ran back home. He was leaving, and he’d probably never come back. She wouldn’t if she was him.
But the last thing Alice wanted to do was disappoint Charlie, or ruin his last days in Springwater. So with warm cheeks, she took his arm, and they walked down the road toward town.
“Where are you going for Basic?” she asked.
“Fort Lee.”
“Where’s that?”
“Near Richmond. Close enough I can come home when I’m on leave.”
“Oh!”
“What?”
Maybe Alice would see him again after all. Then she stamped out the thought. He wouldn’t be back, no matter what he said. He’d find another life, one that didn’t include her. “Ummm . . . Nothing.”
Charlie shot her a look out of the corner of his eye. Then he stopped walking and turned to face her. “Did you think I wasn’t coming back?”
She shrugged and gave him a half-smile.
“I’m coming back,” he said with conviction. “How could I not come back?”
Alice wanted to believe him. Really she did. But she couldn’t see the point in pretending. “You ain’t comin’ back, Charlie. No one who leaves Springwater ever does. It’s not the kind of place you come back to.”
“I wouldn’t be coming back for Springwater,” he said, staring at her.
The words hung in the air between them. Alice’s stomach did a funny flip again, not unlike it did earlier when she was afraid of being alone. But she wasn’t afraid of Charlie; she was afraid of his leaving, no matter what he said.
“I better get home,” she said, smiling to hide her thoughts.
“Okay.”
He offered his arm again, and this time Alice took it without thinking. They walked back in silence. Charlie’s arm was comforting. Alice leaned into it, as if by keeping him close she’d always remember this quiet moment before he went away.
The road was dark by the time they returned to the top of her lane.
“You okay from here?” Charlie asked.
“I’m okay from anywhere.”
“What does that mean?”
She laughed. “Don’t know. Just popped into my mind, I guess.”
He laughed with her, then said, “I love that about you.”
Alice was glad for the darkness because she didn’t want him to see her blush this time. “Well, ’night,” she said.
She switched on her flashlight, turning to go down the lane.
“Hey,” he said.
“Yeah?”
Charlie took a deep breath.
Then let it out.
“Goodnight, Alice.”
Chapter 5
THE NEXT DAY, AFRAID OF losing any more time, the crew moved the miner to another section away from the hole. Company engineers came in to look at the new cave. Alice watched them walk in and out all day while she shoveled coal onto the conveyor.
She was working a little slower today, mainly because she kept replaying her conversation with Charlie in her head. He wants to come back. Whether he did or not, knowing Charlie planned on it was enough to make her stomach flip-flop again. With a grin, she decided it wasn’t a bad feeling.
Mid-morning, Alice propped her shovel against a wall and stretched, twisting in place to relieve her aching back. After two months of working in the mine, she’d hoped she’d feel less pain as she got stronger. But ten weeks later, the backaches and sore muscles started about nine in the morning and usually continued until well into the night. Alice would go to sleep sore and wake up stiff. Moving around in the mornings helped, but the relief was always temporary, the pain returning after a few hours’ work.
“Havin’ a tough time, Alice?”
The man’s voice made Alice jump for her shovel. Expecting a tongue-lashing for taking a break, she cringed and looked around. A sheriff’s deputy, Marvin Coolidge, stood next to the pillar behind her. She hadn’t heard his approach over the sound of the conveyor.
; Alice swallowed hard. Had he come to take her out of the mine? Had someone finally complained to the sheriff? Working here wasn’t illegal. Lying on her work forms was. Had the company finally caught on that her name wasn’t “Al?”
“I’m doin’ alright, Mr. Coolidge.” Alice squirmed under his gaze. She shouldn’t be worried. The deputy had known her father after all. But then, her father had known everybody in Springwater. “Can . . . can I help you, deputy?”
Coolidge pushed his broad-brimmed hat back from his face. His graying hair peeked out beneath it. “Was hoping you could help me. Jimmy’s missing.”
“I know. Hasn’t shown up for work in two days.”
“Know anything about that?”
“No, sir. Why would I?”
Coolidge ignored her question and looked down at her shovel. “This is man’s work, Alice. Your father’d die all over again if he saw his baby girl working down here, covered in coal dust and looking like one of the boys.”
Alice took a deep breath. Coolidge had no idea what her Daddy would’ve thought. She thought about hitting him with her shovel, too. But he wasn’t Jimmy. Instead, she looked at her feet so he wouldn’t see the anger in her eyes.
Coolidge took the gesture as a sign of agreement. “Get out of here, get you a woman’s job.”
And he stalked off.
Throughout the day, the deputy questioned the entire crew about Jimmy. No one had seen him after he’d been drinking with all of them at the bar two nights ago. Jimmy’s mother had fixed him dinner, then he went for a walk and hadn’t come back.
Far as Alice knew, she and Ray were the last people to see Jimmy that night. Had Ray told that to the deputy? She wanted to ask Ray about it, but he was busy all day, more so than usual. His eyebrows stayed knitted together in a permanent frown. Still, she watched him, waiting for the right moment.
At quitting time, she found her chance.
“Mr. Loggins, you seen Ray?” she asked as he passed her.
Loggins jerked his head back down the mine, in the direction of the new hole. The engineers had been there all day, with nothing to report. They’d left a few minutes earlier, saying they had some calls to make to Charleston.
