The Underdwelling Read Free

his lungs didn’t seem to want to pull in air. In a rushing moment of panic, he thought maybe the cable had snapped and they were plunging to their deaths. Fifty men crammed in a cage would make one ugly splat 2500 feet down. But the cable was fine. The car rode down and down, sometimes smoothly and sometimes with unpleasant snaps and jerks, plunging into the blackness. The only lights were from the car itself and Boyd watched the rock walls of the shaft speed by. The car dropped some men off at Level #2 and some at #4, #3 was abandoned, but most disembarked at #5.
    They filed out and assembled over near the bell shack. Boyd noticed with unease the huge red cross on the wall, the stretchers stacked up like cordwood. Lots of safety signs were strung up with cute little sayings on them like, WATCH YOUR STEP, IT COULD BE YOUR LAST. There was an electronic display which listed the number of accidents this month. Only two, thus far.
    Corey called out the assignments and the men grumbled.
    Boyd just stood there with his lunch bucket. Level #5 stretched out in both directions as far as the eye could see. There were tunnels snaking off it from all over the place, airshafts running through the ceiling and floor with hoses and lines running through them. The air was thick and damp and hard to breathe at first. Although Boyd had never been claustrophobic, he was very aware of the mountain of rock overhead. Michigan was sitting right on top of them and anytime it decided to move, some of them wouldn’t be coming back up.
    All in all, it made his palms sweat and his heart race.
    And that was Boyd’s introduction to the underground.

 
     
     
    4
    Maki led him away through a serpentine maze of tunnels, this way, then that, and Boyd knew there was no way in hell he’d ever find his way out on his own. There were lights set into the tunnel ceiling every twenty feet or so, but they did little to cancel the gloom. It was just the two of them and everything echoed. Water dripped and shadows crawled, things scurried in the darkness and bats flew around. Maki didn’t pay any of it any attention. They passed a massive hoist shaft and stopped at a ladder road, which was essentially a cribbed shaft with a ladder set into its face for climbing from the main level to the various sublevels. He went down first and Boyd followed. It was maybe twenty feet down. When they touched bottom, everything was so silent their voices echoed like rolling thunder.
    The sublevel they were on was maybe big enough for three men to walk abreast in, but no more. There was a set of little railroad tracks on the floor that, Maki explained, were used by the tram that hauled cars filled with ore to the main shafts where it was brought up to the Pit. In the Pit, the ore was loaded by those big mining shovels onto massive dump trucks for the ride up to the surface. The ore was then dumped only to be loaded again by mining shovels into railroad hopper cars that took it up to the refinery to be processed into taconite pellets. Its ultimate destination were ore freighters that took it through the Great Lakes to steel mills in Gary and Toledo, Cleveland and Buffalo, all points east.
    “You got all that, cookie?” Maki said. “There’s gonna be a test later.”
    “I got it.”
    “I knew you would, ‘cause yer a bright fucking boy, ain’t you?”
    There were a couple loose cars on the tracks, red from ore dust like everything else. In the process of ferrying the ore down the tracks, lots of it spilled off to the sides. And that was Boyd’s job. Cleaning up the spilled ore. It was no better and no worse than working the rockpile topside. He pushed the cars along and scrambled around on his hands and knees tossing chunks of ore into them. The whole while, of course, Maki leaned up against the wall or sat on a shelf of rock, bitching at him.
    “Let’s put some muscle into it, cookie,” he’d say. “C’mon, use yer back, you fucking pussy. I ain’t got all