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The work at the face itself was not bad. It was divided into three phases: blasting, breaking, and shoveling, with resets of machinery in between as the coal face advanced and the ceiling was shored up with timber or old scaffolding.
The blasting provided enough excitement for a lifetime, for one time in twenty the blasting cap or wiring failed and one of the demolition men had to crawl forward and reset the mulish explosives. Not a month went by when there wasn’t an injury or a death.
You could lose yourself in the monotony of breaking and shoveling. During resets we all worked like mad, for during a reset no coal appeared, and no coal meant no food and reductions in off days when visits to town were arranged.
Work always seemed to speed up at the end of the month in a rush to overfulfill the quota. There was some grumbling, but nothing that led me to believe a revolt, so soon to come, was brewing.
• • •
The highlight in most everyone’s day was Aym—Amiable Fise, our “canteen girl.”
She was the reward given to “Those Who Work.” If your shift foreman labeled you as a “Prime Worker,” your only benefit was commissary privileges. It meant you had the option of buying your lunch and getting a hot meal made fresh rather than bringing one. The price was quite reasonable, usually twenty dollars or about a half hour’s work—for most. I found myself eating sixty-dollar lunches, mostly because Aym’s food was better than that available down in the dormitory, so her commissary became half my food consumption (for the rest, I paid a small premium to have the wife of one of the workers take the bus to the market stalls for me and fill my simple list). Aym also sold a few necessities: bottles of aspirin and muscle rub, tobacco, gambling tickets for some of the Georgia Control’s attractive-sounding cash-prize lotteries, and of course the inevitable range of Kurian Zone aphrodisiacs and fertility enhancers.
I first met her when a miner named Raymond Jones introduced me. He and I were often teamed together by our foreman. He was a wiry shaved-bald man with a very low boiling point who fulminated against either the incompetence of the mine office or his own foul fate for placing him in a hole to work out his remaining years. “Rage,” as he was known, needed my help dragging some oxyacetylene tanks that should have been put on wheels. We passed her largish, engineless lunch truck up on blocks and surrounded by a plain, garden-variety security fence stretching from mine floor to ceiling. It stood just past the elevator and lighted shift office. Coal-dusted lawn furniture, no two pieces matching, made an unattended café just outside the window where workers spoke to her and paid for their orders.
Raymond Jones had a blue poker chip with a casino logo hologram on it. Shoved in his ID pocket, it designated him as one allowed to use the commissary.
“Wait a sec,” Jones said. “Hey, Aym, customer.”
A petite woman’s face lighted by unflattering fluorescents appeared at the window. She wore dark sunglasses with oversized lenses and gilded bows that made me think of movie starlets in the old gossip magazines. A smile nearly as wide as the glasses gleamed under her flour-dusted nose.
In her thirties, she was blind (or nearly so; I never learned if she had any vision), and she was the one sunny spot for us in all that dark. No one would call her a beauty, especially not with fryer grease on her face and her hair hidden under a net cap, but no one seemed to mind looking at her as they killed a break. I thought she had a good jawline and nose. I don’t hold with physiognomy revealing character, but something about the set of her mouth and cheek muscles made me think the big smile was a frequent visitor.
“I hear someone big behind you, Rage, but he steps soft,” she said. “Something weird about his feet.”
“It’s the Grog. Heard of him?”
“Someone said there was a big, really furry one here. Even talks. I thought they were talking about Pelloponensis.”
“I think he’s got a rung on Pellers on the old evolutionary ladder. Cleans his ass more often, anyway. Say hi, Hickory.”
I resisted the impulse to say “Hi, Hickory,” and growled out a “Good morning.”
“Wow. That’s some voice box,” she said. “I felt that in my back teeth.”
“That’s what she said,” Rage said.
He was the only one who laughed.
“You want a drink or something, Hickory? It’s on the Number Four Canteen.”
I stepped up to the window. “Milk? Choco-milk? Root beer?”
“Really? I don’t have much call for that, but I’ve got some chocolate syrup, or what passes for it around here. Give me a sec.”
She felt around in one of the refrigerators and came up with a big brown squeeze bottle and proceeded to make me a chocolate milk. Her workplace was filled with gear, leaving her a zone for movement about the size of a walk-in freezer. She moved about it elegantly; vision didn’t make much of a difference for a person who spent her days in something with the square footage of a dog run.
“Enjoy,” she said, handing it out the window. I did.
In my first month working at Number Four, I found that once I was down in the mine, the time passed in a blur. Before I knew it, the fall had grown cold and the farmers were setting up roadside stands. Not that I had much opportunity to visit them, or money, as I was still in the process of buying custom safety equipment from a Maynes subsidiary to fit my frame.
Still, I won my blue casino chip to wear in the ID pocket with six weeks of hard work. My fellow miners presented me with an oversized bottle of shampoo—I had a tough time getting the coal dust out of my fur—at the informal ceremony where the foreman handed me my chit. I began to visit Aym daily, as did many others. A female voice, even a thin-throated human one, was a wonderful contrast to the blast and bustle of the coal face, especially when it came with a smile. I may have fallen a little in love with her. I suspect I was not the only one.
• • •
She could be as sweet as the real sugar she put in the coffee—the source was a mystery, but rumor had it she had a highly placed boyfriend in the Maynes organization—or as foul mouthed as a Mississippi bargeman. She had a memory for humor based on reproductive desire and always had a new joke or two at the ready.
“Olson, why’s a woman exactly like an investment account with the Church?” she asked my first friend while we stood in line for coffee and a doughnut in the morning.
