Sister Mine

by Tawni O'Dell

LIB: No, firedamp has no smell.

  I didn’t know at first. I just knew it was something we weren’t supposed to be smelling. The first thing I did was walk over to the mine phone and call Andy and Sam, who were still fixing the broken shuttle car. I explained the situation and told them to get out. I figured better safe than sorry.

  RAY: Lib saved our lives by doing that.

  LIB: I didn’t save our lives. The rescue crew saved our lives.

  JIMMY: Because he made that call, Andy and Sam got out. They were able to tell the rescue crews our exact location.

  DUSTY: We all started to smell it.

  RAY: It kind of smelled like rubber burning, but it was so faint it was hard to tell.

  LIB: I left them and started checking out the machinery. Then I started checking the dozens of cables all over the floor. Then I saw it, or at least I thought I saw it. I couldn’t be sure. From underneath one of the pieces of duct tape we use to patch cables, I thought I saw a wisp of smoke.

  I turned around and screamed, “Get the fuck out! Get the fuck out now!”(silence)

  INTERVIEWER: What’s the next thing you remember?

  DUSTY: I never heard the explosion. I heard this loud, whistling wind that picked me up and carried me along, bashing me against the walls. I felt like I was burning up and I could feel all these pieces of coal hitting me in the face. Then all of a sudden the noise stopped all at once. It kind of reminded me of the way people stop clapping at a concert. When the noise stopped, the wind stopped, too, and dropped me.

  RAY: I saw this blue flame streak past me, followed by millions of little glittering stars. I guess they were coal dust lit on fire. It was the bluest blue I’ve ever seen. I can’t even describe it. It was beautiful. The whole thing was pretty like fireworks except I couldn’t enjoy it since I was pretty sure I was dead.

  E.J.: I got thrown around, too. And dropped. Pretty much the way Dusty described it. The light on my helmet stayed lit, but it didn’t help me to see once I stopped moving. The beam couldn’t cut through the twister of coal dust.

  RAY: That’s what it was like. A twister.

  E.J.: The lamp only lit up the haze from the inside like car headlights in a bad fog. I turned it off. I felt better in the dark than I did in the middle of all these glowing gray swirls. I knew it was gas and dust and all of it was poisonous and combustible. I didn’t want to see it. I could move better in the dark.

  INTERVIEWER: Were any of you together when you came to?

  RAY: Not at first.

  DUSTY: It takes a couple minutes to realize what happened. Then you panic. I raised my hand up and hit rock and realized the ceiling was only a foot or two from my face. I started to lose it. I thought I’d been buried alive. The gas was real bad but I was able to get my rescuer on my face. Then I just started screaming. Screaming into a gas mask. How stupid is that? It’s like being an astronaut who’s been ejected from his rocket in deep space and I’m just floating around out there in all that black shit. All alone. I’m dead. I’m dead but I’m not dead yet. I just got to lie here and wait to die. Wait to suffocate. I’m gonna suffocate.

  (silence)

  DUSTY: I was gonna suffocate.

  E.J.: Hey, it’s okay.

  (murmured assurances)

  E.J.: I think Dusty had it worse than any of us. He really thought he’d been buried alive at first. I had some space. Once the wind died down and stopped stirring up the coal dust, I could see around me. I was in the room where we’d all finally end up.

  INTERVIEWER: What kind of space are we talking about?

  E.J.: About ten by fifteen feet. Four feet high.

  INTERVIEWER: That’s not much space.

  E.J.: I was thankful for it. Believe me. I looked around and found

  Ray. He was buried up to his neck in coal. At first I thought I only found his head.

  DUSTY: I did only find Jimmy’s head.

  (laughter)

  INTERVIEWER: Well, you must have found the rest of him eventually…

  DUSTY: Once I calmed down I decided to see how bad things were. It turned out there was solid rock all around me except there was an opening to my right. Not much bigger than a garbage can lid. I turned over and crawled into it. It started to get a little wider.

  Then I felt something soft brush against my hand, and I freaked. All I could think of was mine rats. I’d never seen one myself but my granddad used to tell stories of him and the other miners and how they used to feed them. I thought, what if I’ve stumbled on a nest of them? What if they were going to swarm on top of me and eat me alive?

  (silence)

  DUSTY: Then I thought, what if I’d just touched the leg of a gigantic spider?

  (laughter)

  DUSTY: Who knows what all lives down there? Just because we’ve never seen one doesn’t mean they can’t exist. Maybe they sleep for hundreds of years but the explosion could have woken one up.

  (more laughter then it begins to subside)

  DUSTY: I couldn’t stand the tension so I stuck my hand out and touched it again and I realized it was hair. It was a head. Then I started thinking about all the stories I’d ever heard about mine explosions. Men in pieces. Heads and arms and feet blown everywhere.

  So I reached out again, and I closed my eyes. I remember doing that. I closed my eyes even though I’m in the darkest place in the world where you can’t see anything. And I grabbed the hair and yanked with all my might.

  (he starts to laugh)

  DUSTY: And the head says…

  (he laughs harder, the others join in)

  DUSTY: “What are you trying to do, man? Rip my head off my shoulders?”

  And I said, “Jimmy it’s you. Are you all right?”

  And he said, “Fuck, no.”

  (laughter)

  DUSTY: It turned out Jimmy was pinned beneath one of the bolters. And it was wedged beneath a pile of coal. It took awhile to get him free.

  JIMMY: This is where I leave the narrative, gentlemen.

  I don’t remember anything after Dusty here tried to rip my head off my shoulders, although they’ve told me that I drifted in and out of consciousness. I guess that’s the mind’s way of dealing with an injury like this so you can maintain your sanity if you survive. I don’t remember anything.

  E.J.: His leg was bad. We weren’t sure he was going to make it. He was burning up with fever by the end.

  RAY: You could smell the gangrene.

  DUSTY: The only one of us who could look at his leg was Lib, since he’d been in Vietnam.

  LIB: It was crushed. The bones were shattered. They pierced the skin in a couple places. His calf was laid open. You could see all the muscles and tendons.

  (silence)

  INTERVIEWER: How did you all end up reunited?

  DUSTY: I kept going through the tunnel to see if it led anywhere and it came out into the room where E.J. was. He was digging Ray out of some coal.

  INTERVIEWER: What was going through your mind, Ray?

  RAY: When I came to, I was sure I was dead. I couldn’t feel or move any part of my body. I knew my eyes were open, but I couldn’t see anything. There was this heavy, paralyzing weight on top of me, but I couldn’t say I was in pain.

  At first, I kind of felt relief. I thought, so I’m dead. That’s that. It wasn’t so bad to die.

  But I was hoping for heaven. I mean, I don’t go to church like I should but I think I’m a fairly decent person. I try to be nice to everybody and I take care of my family. I don’t steal or kill or covet other men’s wives.

  JIMMY: Just their daughters.

  (laughter)

  RAY: I thought I might have a shot at heaven. But if this was death then maybe this means there’s no heaven. This is it. Nothingness. But my brain’s still working. I’m still me. I can think. I have all my memories. But I have no senses. I can’t move, I can’t see, I can’t hear or smell or taste. I’m like one of those brains in a horror movie that a mad scientist’s keeping alive in a dish. And I’m sup
posed to do this for all eternity. I was really starting to panic. Then I heard E.J. talking to me. And I knew I wasn’t dead.

  INTERVIEWER: Where was the boss during all this?

  E.J.: Napping.

  (laughter)

  E.J.: We hadn’t found Lib yet. While we were digging out Ray, I’d have to stop every once in awhile because I’d feel sick from the gas. I found this puddle of water and I’d put my head down near it to breathe. There’s usually fresh air near water.

  While I was doing it this one time, I noticed this shiny object against one of the walls. I crawled closer and I realized it was a hole and there was a light coming from the other side. I looked through it and saw it was a miner’s hardhat, still lit.

  I couldn’t see Lib but we hoped he’d be over there, because if he was we would get to him.

  I noticed a long crumpled piece of metal jutting out of the wall. It turned out to be a mangled part of the scoop. So I figured maybe it wasn’t a solid wall but some loose coal covering the scoop.

  RAY: We dug through. It was slow going. We didn’t have any tools. Our self-rescuers had stopped working, so we were at the mercy of the damp.

  E.J.: We’d been hoping for two things: to find Lib and to find a passage that might be able to lead to a tunnel we recognized.

  The area was a dead end, a pocket formed behind the wreckage of the scoop. But we found Lib.

  RAY: He was in bad shape but we were able to wake him up pretty easily. We brought him back with us and we were all together.

  INTERVIEWER: What’s going through your minds at this point? Surely by now you’re scared.

  RAY: We’ve been scared all along but not terrified.

  E.J.: The terror doesn’t set in at first. Not as long as you’ve got something to keep you busy. Like digging.

  LIB: We had four helmets between the five of us, three with working lamps. The batteries were beginning to run low and the light was already flickering on and off. We turned them off to conserve power, because once they went out, that was it. We knew we wouldn’t ever see again unless we got out.

  E.J.: The thirst was the worst thing. We’d been sweating like pigs from the gas and from the digging.

  DUSTY: I was really cold. I couldn’t stop my teeth from chattering.

  RAY: Plus we couldn’t breathe. That’s the other thing. You have to remember. We were struggling for each breath.

  E.J.: We’d all heard the stories. We all knew about miners who’d survived for a week or more without starving to death or dying of dehydration, but we knew we wouldn’t have that kind of time. There was no ventilation where we were.

  LIB: We had no idea what was going on above us. We didn’t know if anyone knew we were trapped yet. If Andy and Sam got out alive. If a rescue was under way.

  Dusty asked me, “What do we do now?” I said, “We wait.”

  INTERVIEWER: So what’s going through your minds when you accept that all you can do is wait? Did you put your fate in God’s hands?

  LIB: We all did our fair share of praying. No doubt about it. But for me, I felt more like we were putting our fate in the hands of men. Specifically the miners and engineers up top who weren’t going to give up until they got us out.

  (silence)

  DUSTY: I remember us lying there on the rocks and E.J. said, “Man, I’d do anything for a cigarette right now.”

  LIB: And Ray said, “You gotta quit, E.J. Those things’ll kill you.”

  (laughter)

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I’VE SLEPT FOR HOURS. I blink in amazement at the time displayed on my cell phone. Normally, I can never sleep during the day. I check my messages. I missed two calls for jobs that I slept through and one call from Pamela Jameson.

  She answers her cell on the first ring.

  “Jamie has cancelled our dinner for tonight.”

  Relief rushes through me. Shannon’s alive and well enough to make a phone call, but that still tells me nothing about the baby.

  “When did you talk to her?”

  “A couple of hours ago. She says there’s no reason for us to meet. She’s already come to her decision. She says we can have the baby for one hundred thousand dollars. The figure is non-negotiable.”

  “Wow. What are you going to do?”

  “Pay it, of course.”

  “Wow,” I say again. “And your husband is cool with this?”

  “My husband wants a child as badly as I do,” she answers me with an edge creeping into her voice.

  “No offense. It’s just a lot of money.”

  “The money is a problem, but it’s not the biggest problem. She’s made some requests of me that are making me nervous.”

  I get up off the couch and walk into my bedroom, where I check my reflection in the mirror on my dresser. My head is feeling a little better, my stomach, too. The cut above my eye is not so glaring now. I examine the bruising. It’s on the far side of my face so I can cover most of it with my hair.

  “Such as?”

  “She says she won’t go back to New York. I don’t blame her for that. She shouldn’t be traveling, which means she’s going to have the baby here. She says she’s going to have it tomorrow.”

  “How does she know that?”

  “She doesn’t. She can’t. Her due date isn’t for four more days but she insists it will be tomorrow. She won’t let me be involved, but she expects me to stay here until the baby is born. Then she says she’ll contact me. She wants to have the adoption handled here. She won’t go back to New York for any reason.”

  “What if the baby’s late? You could be hanging out at the Holiday Inn for awhile.”

  I open my closet door and start looking for something more fitting for a meeting with Cam Jack. Something funereal but with a lot of boob and leg action going on so he won’t be able to concentrate.

  It’s been a long time since I’ve conversed with him, but I doubt he’s changed much in that area. I doubt he’s changed much in any area.

  “She wants to be paid in cash,” Pamela tells me.

  “Cash? Are you kidding me? She wants you to give her a hundred grand in bills? You don’t find this a little suspicious?”

  “It’s unorthodox.”

  “Unorthodox? I’ll say. How do these deals usually go down?”

  “They’re not deals, and they don’t go down.”

  “How are the mothers usually paid?”

  “By check or wire transfer, of course. Through a lawyer.”

  “Whose lawyer?”

  “In this case, our lawyer is handling it.”

  “Does Jamie have a lawyer?”

  “No.”

  I choose a plain, long-sleeved black dress, tasteful except for the plunging neckline and the thigh-high hemline.

  “Do you mind if I ask how you found her?”

  “There are certain discreet ways of advertising for this type of situation.”

  “Unwed Mother Weekly?”

  “I don’t appreciate your humor.”

  “So she basically answered an ad?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So she came to you. No one told you about her?”

  “No.”

  “You told me you provided her with an apartment.”

  “A lovely loft apartment. Six thousand a month.”

  I’m struck temporarily speechless by the amount of money she just mentioned.

  “Whose name was the lease under?” I’m finally able to ask.

  “Hers.”

  “You didn’t rent an apartment and let her live there?”

  “No.”

  “How did you pay her?”

  “Deposits into her bank account.”

  “An account under the name of Jamie Ruddock?”

  “Yes. It’s all legitimate. I’ve seen her driver’s license.”

  “Fake ID. Big deal. Basically, you don’t know if the money you gave her for the apartment and for food and baby things and incidentals actually went to pay for those thing
s?”

  “If they didn’t, how did she get them? Who was paying for them?”

  I give her a moment to think it over while I pull on a pair of black lace-top stockings and zip up a pair of black faux leather boots with a four-inch stiletto heel.

  “You think this other couple she mentioned…?” she says slowly.

  “I think she’s been playing you like a fiddle. I think she’s been letting this other couple support her, and she’s been keeping the money you gave her. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s going to try and get both of you to pay for a baby only one of you is going to get.”

  I don’t tell her that I also happen to know there might even be a third couple involved who’s employed a thug to make sure they get the baby.

  “And I’m willing to bet the couple that’s not going to get the baby is the one who’s going to pay her in cash.”

  “But surely she has to realize I’m not going to hand her a suitcase full of money without having the baby and legal adoption papers in hand first.”

  “No, I don’t think she does. I think she thinks she has you right where she wants you, and you’ll do anything she says and take any risk no matter how stupid. What if she calls you and tells you she’s had the baby? Come and see your beautiful new baby, but only if you bring a hundred grand in cash with you. You say no. She doesn’t care. Her swindle didn’t work, but she hasn’t lost anything. She has another couple lined up to adopt. And she already managed to cheat tens of thousands of dollars out of you while she was pregnant. If you say yes, I guarantee she’ll take the money and the baby and run. Either way she has no intention of giving you this baby.”

  “What can I do?”

  I hear the first serious note of panic in her voice.

  “Walk away.”

  “Walk away? After all I’ve been through? After all we’ve already spent on her? After all the time I’ve spent planning on this baby?”