“So, Leona, what’s the drill with you and this George Edwards?” he drawled. “Because I have to tell you my intentions toward you aren’t strictly honorable, ma’am.”
She tipped back her head and laughed, a musical peal that brought an answering smile to Jackson’s lips. “I’d have been very disappointed if they were.”
“And you and Edwards?” In spite of the jolt of delight here answer gave him, he was well aware that she hadn’t answered his question.
“Friends. Long-time, close friends.”
He lifted up his eyebrow. “Can’t be that long a time. Seems to me you’re a considerable bit younger than Mr. Edwards.”
She nodded. “He’s fifty-two, I’m twenty-four,” she said without a trace of coyness.
Jackson was momentarily taken aback. He’d thought, by her sophisticated manner more than anything else, that she was older.
“And you’re just friends?”
She raised an eyebrow and gave him a level look. “That’s what I said, isn’t it?”
He should have left it at that, because whatever else there was between her and Edwards wasn’t a damn bit of his business. But already an intensity crackled between them, incredible because Jackson hadn’t even touched more than the palm of her hand.
Yet something primitive and male and possessive in him drove him to ask. “You sleepin’ with him, Leona?” He was taking a big chance here. She could get huffy and kick his ass right out the door, exactly what he deserved.
Instead, a slow smile curved her lips and her long eyelashes dropped halfway down her eyes. She shook her head from side to side. “No, Mr. Nosey Zalco,” she purred in that lazy, sexy voice. “I’m considering sleeping with you though why I should I don’t know, rude as you are.”
His relief was so intense he didn’t move for a long moment, but then he did and she was in his arms.
A Distant Echo: Chapter Seventeen
It was the fourth week of May. Tom had been in Frank exactly a month, and he had the sick and certain feeling that some vindictive, powerful god had taken an active dislike to him.
The construction job had ended abruptly, and he had tramped the entire town searching for work and had failed to find any. Penniless, he had no choice but to accept when word had come of an opening at the mine.
This morning, with his canvas lunch bag and tin water bottle over his shoulder, Tom joined the quiet, sleepy cluster of men beginning to assemble on the main street.
They were the early-morning shift at the coalmine, and it was still black dark an hour before dawn. The air was cold and crisp; it would be hours yet before the sun cleared the top of the Turtle. Tom and his fellow workers wouldn’t see it; by the time their shift ended, the sun would have slipped back behind the mountain.
Ironically, his few weeks of underground mining years before had qualified as experience, and today would mark the end of his first week as a pick and shovel laborer underground.
Tom had to draw deep on steely reserves to quell the disgust and horror that threatened to overcome him each time he faced the fact that at least for the foreseeable future, he was an underground coal miner again, with the sure and certain knowledge that in less than a year, the mine would be buried beneath tons of rock, trapping men inside its depths.
When the crew were all accounted for, the foreman Smiley Williams, led the way across the bridge that spanned the Crowsnest River and up the gentle slope to the mine entrance. Smiley was a sandy-haired veteran miner from Wales.
At the office near the entrance, Tom handed the small brass disc, called a check, to the lamp man. It bore his payroll number and was hung on a large board with the others from his shift. The checks were an indication of how many men were underground, and their identities. If an accident occurred inside the mine, the checks were a way of knowing how many men were either safe, or trapped, or dead.
In exchange for the check, Tom was issued a kerosene lamp, which he hung on the front of his belt. Some of the men, working in places where odorless methane gas was a danger, were also issued live canaries in cages. The canaries chirped and sang, but they were highly susceptible to the deadly gas. If the bird suddenly fell over, the miners ran pell-mell for clean air, snatching the cage as they went.
Tom had learned that many of the softhearted miners, inordinately fond of their little birds, carried turkey basters of clean outside air in their back pockets and successfully resuscitated their canaries.
“You makin’ out okay, Tom?” Smiley was beside him as they entered the mineshaft. In Tom’s mind, the one slight consolation about this mine was that it was worked by the room and pillar system at near-ground level, so there was no need to drop hundreds of feet in a cage to reach the coal-face.
“Fine, Smiley. And you?”
“Can’t complain. When a man’s get a good steady job, a strong back, and a stout roof over ‘is head, ‘ee’s a lucky man.” It was Smiley’s standard answer. “I’m putting you on steady with Augusto Rossi and Joe Pesuko, lad. They’re Eyeties, good men to work with. They don’t talk the language so good, but who does, hereabouts? Young Percy Adams was their partner till yesterday, but he quit. Said they were working fools, and he couldn’t keep up with ‘em. Lazy, was our Percy. But you’re not, you’ll do fine.”
His lamp lit, Tom walked rapidly along the uneven surface of the main tunnel to reach the chamber where Smiley had indicated he and his partners would be working. Within moments, sunlight and fresh air might never have existed.
The interior of the mine was both familiar and horrifying to Tom, like a recurring nightmare that had surfaced years after he’d believed it gone forever. The ceiling near the entrance was seven or eight feet, shored-up at regular intervals by immense wooden beams, but the side tunnels were often so low a man had to walk bent double, and walking was something a miner did a lot of. These mine owners had never heard of traveling time. Tom was paid only for the number of cars he managed to fill each day. A miner walked in and out on his own time.
Water dripped onto Tom’s head and shoulders from the roof and trickled incessantly down the walls. An endless stream ran alongside the tracks where pit ponies hauled coal cars along the rails to the surface, one sturdy little beast for every five loaded cars. Most of them were blind from having spent their lives in the underground darkness.
It was that darkness that Tom hated the most. Palpable and thick, it hovered at the edges of his feeble light and seemed to weigh him down with its density. Without the foul-smelling kerosene mine lamp, he, too, would be totally blind.
Outside, the air had been frosty, but here in the bowels of the mountain the temperature was always constant. The seasoned miners liked it, cool in summer, warmer in winter. Many worked year-round shirtless, sweat and greasy coal dust mingling on their brawny chests, never completely washed away.
By the end of his shift, Tom’s eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and fingernails would all be rimmed with the oily-tasting grit, and he’d reek of kerosene from his lantern.
“Ciao,” a gruff voice greeted him when he finally reached his destination. “I am Augusto Rossi.”
Tom’s lamp revealed a burly man with a huge handlebar moustache, twinkling dark eyes, and a wide, white grin. “You are Tomas, huh? Smiley, he say you are coming.” He stuck out a hand, hard as iron, and shook Tom’s with great enthusiasm. Another man materialized out of the blackness, and Augusto clapped him on the shoulder. “This my good friend, Joe Petsuko. Torro, we call him. He is strong like a bull.”
Again Tom’s hand was shaken, and another set of white teeth flashed. Joe was short, but his muscles bulged like a wrestler’s.
The three of them climbed up the wooden ladder to reach the workings at the coal-face. Within a short distance of one another, they began hacking at the coal seam with picks, breaking away chunks and sending them down the chute into the waiting coal cars below.
The Italians were cheerful and noisy, breaking into song at frequent intervals, calling back and forth in their na
tive language. The drudgery was interrupted only by Torro casually warning the others to move away because he was setting a small dynamite blast to loosen the seam of coal.
Long before the dust had settled, Tom’s partners were back at work. He joined them, although visions of black lung danced in his head as the insidious dust entered his chest with every indrawn breath. He thought of Virgil; Zelda had confided to him what the doctor had told her about her father’s lungs.
At noon, they took a short lunch break. Joe and Torro did their best to include him in their conversation, asking about his wife and family. Tom explained that he was single, boarding with the Ralstons. Both Joe and Torro knew Virgil and they clucked their tongues and shook their heads at the news of his illness.
“The mine, she gets us all in the end, one way or the other,” they agreed with fatalistic aplomb.
Soon, they lapsed into Italian, and Tom chewed and swallowed the egg sandwiches Zelda had packed, methodically discarding the small black portion his fingers touched, watching the rats claim it almost before it settled.
He still had four hours and thirty-five minutes to spend in Hades today.
“So how’s school going, Eli?”
Mindful of his promise to Virgil that he’d do his best to talk to the boy, Tom was helping clean out the stables that Saturday evening.
Brilliant opener to a real conversation, Chapman, he chided himself, using the shovel to scrape away the last of the muck.
Eli shrugged. “All right, I guess.” He sluiced a bucket of water over the boards. “Did you have to go to school when you were young, Tom? Dad didn’t have to. He got to go to work when he was only nine. How old were you when you started working?”
“I was fifteen. I had no choice in the matter. My stepfather didn’t believe much in education.”
“Were you ever lucky.” Eli hefted the wheelbarrow of dirty straw and wheeled it out to the compost. When he came back in, he remarked, “They take you in the mines when you’re fifteen, and I’m nearly sixteen already.” He shot Tom a conspiratorial look. “Don’t let on to Zel, but I already been working up there some, mostly in the stables taking care of the pit ponies.”
“Oh, yeah? I thought you were still delivering groceries after school,” Tom said.
Eli shook his head. “I quit that dumb job a couple weeks ago. I can make more up at the mine. I got a chance to work every afternoon if I want on the picking table.”
The picking table, Tom knew, was a shaking and constantly moving platform where the shale was hand-picked from the coal. The job was mind deadening, standing over a conveyor belt hour after hour as the lumps passed by slowly.
He carefully masked the alarm he felt. “You want that job, Eli? It’s pretty boring.”
“Yeah, I want it.” His response was fervent. “It’s only a starter job. Pretty soon I’ll get a chance to go underground same as you and earn big money.”
Tom thought of the pitifully small paycheck he’d draw at the end of the week and wondered how in hell he could make the boy understand that the mine was the last place he should be considering.
“Why not stay in school awhile longer? You might get to like it better as you go along.”
“I hate it.” Eli’s voice was vehement. “I hate every single minute.”
Tom understood, because he felt exactly that way about the mine. But he was hopelessly out of his depth when it came to giving advice. “Maybe you oughta talk to your sister about it.”
Eli snorted. “You ever try to tell her somethin’ she don’t want to hear?”
Tom remembered trying to tell her about where he was from, and he felt a swift pang of sympathy.
“I need to make money, Tom. See, I asked the doctor about my Dad,” Eli said in a subdued tone. “Zel won’t give me the straight facts. She thinks I’m still a little kid.” There was frustration and anger in his voice now. “Doc Malcolmson says my dad shouldn’t go back to work at all for at least a couple more weeks, till he gets over this bad spell with his chest. But Dad told me he’s starting back next Monday, come hell or high water. I know it’s because there’s no money in the house.” Eli shook his head. “We need what I could make real bad, but when I try to talk to Zel about it, she won’t even listen.”
He shot a sideways glance at Tom. “Maybe you could sort of just mention it to her, not about going underground or anything, just about me working after school on the picking tables?”
Alarm bells went off in Tom’s head. He was getting involved in family affairs, and he didn’t want to, “That’s not such a hot idea, Eli. You oughta tell her yourself.”
“Ah, it’s hopeless even to try. All I said to her once was that Jackson never went to university and he made out just fine, and she went insane. But she likes you a whole lot more than she liked Jackson. She’d listen if you told her you didn’t get any fancy university education, either. She’d see that you turned out all right without it, right, Tom?”
Wrong, wrong, wrong, Tom wanted to say.
Damn it all. Living with the Ralstons got more complicated by the day, bringing up issues that never seemed to have an easy solution. This one with Eli, for example. He understood all too well how the boy felt. Tom wished to God he could ease the financial strain on the family. And he knew how adamant Zelda was about the boy’s education. She was right, too. Being a miner sure as hell wasn’t what Eli should aim for, but it was the job Virgil had done all his life, and Eli worshipped his father.
Tom forked fresh hay into the stall. He hated messes like this. He’d spent most of his adult life avoiding them, but living with the Ralstons seemed to shove him into one right after the other.
“Please, please, will you have a word with Zel for me, Tom?” Eli was mixing a handful of oats into the horse’s feed, and he looked up at Tom with abject pleading on his freckled young face.
Tom cursed under his breath and compromised. “If you do your best in school, no more skipping out, I’ll try to get Zelda to agree to this job after school at the picking tables.”
“Hooray. Thanks, Tom.” Eli’s grin revealed teeth still too big for his mouth.
“And I have your word about not dodging school?”
The boy grimaced, but he nodded. “If I get on the picking tables, I can work Saturdays. That’ll help.”
Eli went off to feed the chickens, and Tom climbed into the loft to fork down more hay. He’d slept here just weeks before. Now, it was the place where he and Zelda came to make love when the rest of the household was sleeping, the place where they’d be together just a few short hours from now.
The thought of her in his arms brought a deep, burning ache of pure desire. Zelda had taken to lovemaking with all the zest and enthusiasm of her exuberant nature. In his arms, she was passionate and free and inventive, a wild and totally natural lover, and Tom found it impossible to get her out of his mind when he was away from her.
But it wasn’t only their lovemaking that he enjoyed.
Zelda was insatiably curious, and now that she had accepted the facts of his background, she had wanted to know everything he could tell her about the future. She had quizzed him until he was exhausted about politics, video cameras, cell phones, birth control, education, social programs, women’s rights. She had wanted to know about movies and the way they were made, books that had been written in his era, the kind of jobs women held. She had asked about family life and how it had changed between her time and his, highly annoyed with him when he had admitted, honest if slightly ashamed, that because of the lifestyle he’d led, there was little he could tell her about families.
Then she got on women’s fashions, and he had been at least able to invent what he wasn’t all that certain about. He had enjoyed the combination of horror and fascination on her face when he had described bikini bathing suits and miniskirts and panty hose and thong workout gear.
Feeling wicked, he’d gone into detail over all the improvements in women’s lingerie, which turned out to be a big mistake because it h
ad brought on a lengthy inquisition about how he’d come to be on such familiar terms with such intimate items.
She exasperated and totally frustrated him at times because she had a decided opinion on everything, and just as Eli had said, there was no changing her mind once she made it up. She was both stubborn and single-minded.
She made him laugh, but she also made him think, which made her different from any other woman he’d known.
He’d almost forgotten that she also had one hell of a temper, but he was reminded when she unleashed it on him several hours after his conversation with Eli.
They’d made love in the loft, hot, greedy, violent. She’d discovered she liked being on top, and she’d ridden him with delicious abandon before collapsing boneless on his chest.
“Oh, that was wonderful. Do you think anyone hears us, Tom?”
He grinned into the darkness. He’d developed a habit of clamping either his hand or his mouth over her lips to muffle her cries. She asked the same question each time, and he gave the same answer.
“Not a soul. We hardly made a sound.”
“I’d be mortified if Dad or Eli heard.”
“They’re both sound asleep.” But the mention of Eli’s name reminded Tom of his promise to the boy. Surely this was as good a time as any to make good on it.
“Eli mentioned he has a chance at a job on the picking tables at the mine,” he began in a conversational tone.
Her whole body stiffened. “I hope you told him that any such thing is absolutely out of the question. I won’t have him anywhere near that mine.”
He wrapped his arms a bit tighter around her, stroking her back and trying hard to find the right words. “It’s just after school, Zel. He can make a lot more than he ever did delivering groceries. He wants the job pretty bad. I told him I’d talk to you about it.”
Now and Forever: Time Travel Romance Superbundle Page 79
