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“Thank you for ride,” I said.
“Hey, that lock cost me four dollars!”
A trio of men holding their ID cards and travel tickets waited at the bus kiosk. An impressive mound of garbage lay in the ravine between the former garage and motel, waiting for the end of days or the next convict-scooper garbage train, whichever would come first.
Leaving so soon? someone had scrawled in permanent marker on the wall of the shelter. Lucky bastard, someone else had added in a different hand of slightly smaller letters.
I noticed that one part of the roof of the hotel had a blue plastic sheet covering a hole, held down by what looked like some old manholes.
“Be a minute, fellas,” the driver said. He took me to a little corner office of the garage with coal-dusted windows that looked out at the motel. A flower box with a surprisingly robust set of yellow flowers next to the door added
a cheerful note to the general sense of quiet entropy.
“Got a new worker for you, Murphy,” the driver said. “A Grog. Taller and hairier than most.”
A man the general shape and specific color of a fireplug extracted a cigar plug from his mouth and set it carefully on a stained corner of his aluminum desk. He’d been gripping it dead center in his mouth, like a baby’s pacifier.
A fleshy girl with eyeglasses rather creatively laced with wire peeked through the doorway of the office’s back room. “Hoo-boys, he’ll go through the groceries,” she said.
“Fuck me,” Murphy said. “How many times do I have to tell ’em, Grogs are more trouble than they’re worth.”
“This one’s smart,” the driver said. “He talks. Anyway, he’s your problem now. I’m due back northeast.”
“Look, you want to get along in your lodgings, helps to grease old uncle Murphy. Cat-piss ‘grease,’ you ape?”
“Grease. Like for cook?” I asked. It still astonishes me, how little evidence the Coal Country apparatchiks needed to think me a half-wit. Even the Gray Ones are clever within the limits of their own tribal civilization, and frequently fought more numerous and better-equipped professional armies to a standstill. If primitive means not being able to lie to yourself properly about the world you live in, then I suppose I am a primitive.
“It does help me pay the market tab. Grease. Yeah, you give me some of what you make; I give you nice things. Good old American business relationship. Understand?”
“Like nice things, honey-buns.”
“He called you ‘honey-buns,’” the office help laughed. She had a fruity smell about her that reminded me of some chewing gum I’d had at Xanadu.
“Never heard a stoop talk so good,” Murphy said. “’Most good as us.”
The workers were housed on a campus of buildings that can best be described as tenement quality. The main building was an old, two-story motel. Everyone ate at the cafeteria, an old family restaurant that now ran twenty-four hours—more or less—to accommodate the shifts at the mine.
I’ve overnighted in swamps that were cleaner. The infestation of biting bugs and cockroaches had to be experienced; words aren’t sufficient. It smelled of clogged toilets and kerosene, and even the ceilings were grimy.
The coal dust was to blame. The miners had showers at Number Four, but they ran only water, cold straight from the well, so only a few bathed there. The rest waited to get home to clean up. But during the wait for the next availability of hot water in the rickety system, they distributed a good deal of black grit.
So their washrooms were filthy with coal dust. With the washrooms black as sin, no one felt it necessary to keep the kitchen spotless, so grease and dropped food accumulated in the omnipresent black dust, attracting vermin. With the rats and cockroaches roaming the kitchen, what was the point of keeping bed linens fresh?
They put me in a clapboard warren of rooms without even a sink or cooking stove.
“Spacious, this. You’ll need it,” the “housing facilitator” told me.
They found two metal-framed single beds and pushed them together, then tied them with wire. A mattress of shredded couch cushions sewn into heavy canvas did not quite cover the bed’s suspension, which bowed into a hammock shape if I did not sleep with my torso uncomfortably across the bar in the center.
I had to take water from a floor tap designed for a hose just outside my “window”—blessed I am to have such long arms—or thread through the partitions to the other side of the building to use a sink. For bathing we filled five-gallon plastic buckets, the sort of thing you see holding potatoes in restaurants, and washed with a rag, then rinsed with another bucketful. But at least it was warm enough to work up a lather.
It’s a minor point of interest to architectural and social historians, but there was really no need for this kind of housing. The chaos of 2022 and the ravies virus depopulated most parts of North America (distance saved a few communities). There were houses ready to be restored and used, waiting behind old and weathered Condemned as Unsafe Property notices. The Kurian Order, given its way, preferred that humans lived in community groups, the larger the better, in fact, so there were more eyes watching and ears listening.
“You start at Number Four in the morning. Just follow the other men out and up the road. It’s only a mile and a half to the mine, and you’ll have fine weather for your first day’s walk, looks like.”
• • •
It was a bright, still morning promising a hot fall day. The workers all left near dawn for their walk. Some kissed wives and children good-bye; most carried plastic coolers filled with their lunches. Their work clothes were mostly dungaree; helmets, gloves, goggles, and hearing gear dangled from their belts. I thought it was strange that the mine didn’t provide protective gear. But then not every man carried each item, so perhaps they were custom bits superior to what the mine offered.
