Miller - Down Dont Bother Me

For LMC

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS and its surrounding environs have a specific geography, of course, but you wont necessarily find an honest depiction of it in this book. Any apparent errors in the placement or relationships of its many towns should be chalked up to the whim of the author.

Envys a coal comes hissing hot from hell.

P HILIP J AMES B AILEY

I d been demoted and was shoveling slide-back and minding my own business when they found Dwayne Mayss body in a pile of gob. This was up in Coulterville at a coal mine called Knight Hawk, last of the great old Randolph County mines and one of the few remaining great collieries in the Illinois downstate. A young guy called Ham Bodyyou guess whytripped over Mays in the dark and went down, headfirst and hard, into a Sandvik dual-boom roof bolter and a half an hour or so worth of what Im sure were uneasy dreams. When Ham Body finally came to, he raised the alarm and soon a great and calamitous ruckus was spreading its way through the work area: Ham Body to Plodder, Plodder to Bunny, Bunny to a guy called Neil (despite that his name wasnt Neil), and from there outward until Insane Wayne called it up to the surface with his characteristic restraint. Miners are dramatic sorts, you see, and sometimes the difference between a coal mine and an opera house seems not very much. Adding to it, this was shortly after that bad union business in Wolf Creek, where in the heat of a picket somebody (Neil, maybe) got his asshole in a knot and threatened to strangle a local reporter. When they discovered that Dwayne Mays had a mini-recorder wrapped round his neck and a notepad stuffed in his mouth, someone said, Well, they got one. And then the cops came.

Itll sound heartless, maybe, but I didnt dwell on it overmuch or stay to catch the show. Like with most days, I had plenty on my mind. I was raising a daughter basically on my own and there were mountains of bills to pay and trouble to stay out of. The bills never ebbed, and trouble was everywhere and mostly the same, but the daughter was always changing and keeping me on my toes. Mostly, though, I never wanted to hang around the mine longer than necessary. The Knight Hawk paid okay, I guess, but the work bit the big one and I hated it like poison. Coal mining is terrible work generally, but the Knight Hawk had driven the union out twenty years earlier and the mine had gone from a reasonably decent place to make a living to like something out of a nightmare. The leash was off, and as long as everyone met their load requirements, they were free to do all kinds of malevolent and stupid shit down there. There wasnt anybody left to spank their behinds or say boo. The result was a kind of industrial slapstick. Hands were lopped off wrists, bodies fried by electrical currents. Heads were crushed like melons under falling rock. A couple years back, I had the misfortune of seeing a miner killed by his own trench digger. The rigs cable got hung up in a trolley-wire gap, and this guywe called him Putzyclimbed down to move his nip across the gap and restart the digger. And restart it he did, but he was standing in front of it now, and the machine lurched forward suddenly and ran him over and cut off his leg. Thats coal mine work these days.

Shoveling slide-back is maybe the worst job in the mine, but Id mouthed off once or twice too often to one of the less-forgiving shift bosses and lost my roof bolter. Slide-back is what they give you when they want you to quit. Its a punishment.

The Knight Hawk was whats called a longwall mine, and in a longwall mine what you have is basically a giant shearing machine that bites apart the coal seam and sends the pieces up a conveyor belt into daylight. Problem is, as the coal is traveling up, water is rushing down from the surfacewater is almost always rushing into a coal mine from some placeand it washes the coal off the belt and into the empty space beneath the system. Your job, when youre shoveling slide-back, is to scoop out that wet muck and throw it back on the belt. At which point, it comes down again. Its a little like being one of those characters in Hades from Greek myth, but without the fun or glamour.

I shoveled out my shift until the cops and bosses came through and hustled us from the work area. The cop in charge was a big guy with graying hair and... soft eyes, I guess youd say. I dont know how else to describe them. The rest of him didnt look so soft, but he was a rural cop and that was to be expected. He took my name and asked what Id seen, which was nothing, really, and then he let me go. I went out and rode the thousand feet to the surface and hurried across the colliery to the shower house. You had to hurry or you ended up waiting in a line that stretched to China and back. I hung my pit clothes on the meat hook above the stall and turned on the stream. Id made it just in time, and in another moment there was a line out the door of miners waiting with their towels and pumice soaps and shakers of Comet. Once coal mine grit gets in you, it doesnt come out easy. You have to fight it, but eventually the grit wins.

Nobody that day was too interested in grit. There was a corpse in the coal mine, so they wanted to talk about that, and so they did. They were buzzing. It was almost like Christmas, but with murder. Mays, someone said his name was. Dwayne Mays, a journalist. Id never heard of him. I finished my shower and got out of the way for the next guy. I dressed and went out to my bike and rode south to meet my daughter and Peggy.

I was working the day shift then, but my trip home through rural southern Illinois was across country distances, and by the time I roared down Shake-a-Rag Road the sun was smearing its lazy self across the line of foothills to the west. The sky darkened and the first stars bit through the sky like broken silver teeth. The air turned cool and the restless late-autumn stir calmed to a distant rustle. Its a poetic kind of country, Little Egypt, and it makes you think like that.

I lived way out in a place called Indian Vale. Probably no Indians ever lived there, so who exactly it was named after was a mystery and subject of frequent speculation between my daughter, Anci, and me. Influenced by some recent movies, Anci said it was probably pirates.

Pirates? I said. But theres no ocean.

So?

So pirates need an ocean. Otherwise, whats it all for?

Lost pirates then.

I said more likely it was backwoods gangsters or shine smugglers. Anci said I lacked imagination. She added that Id have made a terrible pirate, which as an insult felt like overkill to me. Whatever the case, the only anyone living there now was Anci and me and a couple of house cats, Morris and Anthony. The house was my fathers, or had been once upon a timea raised-ranch dwelling roughly the size of a large hatbox, situated off a lonely county road where our only neighbors were a den of foxes in a patch of mockernut hickories and Johnson grass and, farther distant, a big truck farm up the hill west of the valley.

As I pulled in the drive, I could just make out the inmigrante working beneath the lights to bring in the last of the spinach harvest before the promise of an early snow turned into more than just promise. As I climbed off the bike and walked up the lane, the phone buzzed in my pocket. I thought maybe it was Anci or Peggy calling to check in on me, as they sometimes did, but the little screen said Matthew Luster, a name I didnt recognize. I dont know technology, really, so how it knew his name was something of a mystery, but not an interesting one, to me anyway. I was tired from work, and that evening in a particular hurry, so I just turned off the cell and put it away. Probably it was a wrong number. Or a creditor. Still, something worryingly familiar tickled at the back of my brain.