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“Dunno, Aym,” Olson said, going red in anticipation. Though he was married with several children, Aym’s jokes still embarrassed him.
“Because the depositor loses interest as soon as he withdraws.”
“Yeah, that’s a good one,” Olson said, going even redder.
A cat kept her company in the cubicle. It was cautious of me at first and hid under the prep table she used for sandwiches. The cat’s name was Crumb.
“Crumb used to be good with the rats and mice, but he’s too old and fat now,” Aym explained the first time I saw her outside the van. I had started early that day in order to leave early for my lunch, which I’d grown to look forward to more and more since earning my commissary privileges. She was changing propane tanks for her grill by touch. It was hard not to be impressed; she performed the action without wasting a
step or reach. “I have to lay down traps where I hear chewing. Sometime’s he’ll eat one of the bodies in the trap—acts like he’s doing me a big favor—but he’d rather have sandwich meat or canned tuna. Crumb, you lazy bugger, stiffen up and meet this big whatever-you-are.”
“Golden One,” I supplied.
She returned to the van and took up a knife, slicing the meat and vegetables for the sandwich I had ordered and carefully brushing her knife across a damp towel that smelled faintly of chlorine. She replaced it on a magnetic strip located from memory.
“Sharp knife dangerous,” I said.
“Don’t I know it,” she agreed.
Her face made strange expressions as she worked, piling the ingredients on the bread. Her face seemed now eager, now shocked. It was a bit unsettling at first, but you grew used to it.
“Here you are, Old Hickory.” She handed me the sandwich. I ate it using my pick-rake (I had just been at the face) as an improvised seat, propping the handle’s end in the nook and sitting on the metal. It was extraordinary—the sandwich, not the improvised seat.
“Thank you,” I said. “So good.” I had thought that the Kurian Order did away with the blind in the same manner as they did with the crippled and difficult cognitive defects.
No wonder so many of the men picked up their lunches here.
“How long you in mine?” I asked.
“Six years in this one. Before, I was in another. I worked a phone, taking messages and handling shift schedules. I can read a little if I hold it real close to my eyes. This is better. I’m my own boss. I have the wire between me and the men. Up in the office I always had the feeling my boss was looking down my blouse or up my skirt.”
“Yes, boss always watch,” I said. “Eyes no good?”
“Eyes no good. Since I was eight. Bus accident.”
I wondered if she was an informant of the Kurian Order. David Valentine once told me that the Kurians tended to put informant women in working with large groups of men. Maybe she wasn’t as blind as she claimed, just fuzzy-visioned. But what would she have to spy on down here? There weren’t enough workers on any one shift to count as a threat, even if they improvised weapons out of their gear, and they certainly didn’t have access to sensitive sights deep in the earth.
“My life no good,” I said, deciding to probe. “Stuck in dark and dust in hair.”
“You’re one smart Grog,” she said. With an effort, she kept her eyes pointed at the air blowing out of my nostrils. “But that sandwich won’t be enough. I had to do a platter for the shift office staff this morning. Want the leftovers to take back?”
“You have gratitude from me,” I said. I crooked my pick in the corner of my arm and helped myself to boiled bread, cheese, and dried ersatz fruit.
• • •
Number Four deserved its reputation as one of the worst in all of Coal Country. The ore was in thin seams that made it difficult to extract and of an average grade. I thought most of the miners were doing marginally useful make-work, paying for their small wages and third-hand, improvised equipment, electricity, and not much else. In a differently run Kurian Zone, most of these men would have been on a collection van. Whatever else you wanted to say about the Maynes version of the Kurian Order, they weren’t particularly bloodthirsty.
Each mine face had one power drill. The rest of the five or so workers (once two were assigned to fire and support the drill) at the face did what they could not to attract the eye of the supervisor.
My fellow workers at Number Four could best be described with the palliative word “oddballs.” Their former employers would probably use worse phrases. They’d been transferred from other mines or businesses or camps where they’d been irritants, and Number Four was the Kurian Order’s way of coating that irritant into a black pearl.
This, of course, raised the question of whether the locals considered me an oddball as well. But of course they did. To them I was a stranger of a foreign species, and bad luck seemed to follow me. It was strange that they didn’t trade me off to another Kurian Zone or sell me to a bounty hunter or something equally painless to the system that found me a piece of grit in its oil. But again, the Maynes filter didn’t strain as fine as most.
One shift foreman, the one who gave me my blue chip, Bleecher, disliked the underground’s cold and had developed a strange diet in response. He ate beans and spicy sauce at breakfast, lunch, and dinner (he carried his own supply) and claimed that his constant farting served as a gaseous form of climate control, heating his jumpsuit, which he’d waxed into tin cloth. I was of the opinion that all the paraffin in his clothes simply did a better job of trapping body heat, but even in the oily air underground, you knew when you were coming up on a team with Bleecher in it.
He always silenced idle chatter. Even if we were hard at work with shovels, exchanging a few words, he’d slap his yellow leather work gloves across his palm to attract our attention, then issue an emphatic order to work our backs, not our mouths.
It shut most of us up, except for Raymond “Rage” Jones, of course. Rage was a bit of a sea lawyer, as they used to say on the Gulf Coast in the Coastal Marines. He wasn’t afraid to speak against the Kurian Order, which made him a rare character. He hated lice and bedbugs and ticks, to the point where he kept himself completely shaved, head to toe. He believed I was riddled with parasitic insects. He gave me a wide path whenever we passed, and he always rubbed himself down with turpentine or kerosene upon leaving a shift. I wished I could have told him the story of Hoffman Price, the man who survived years in the wilderness by supporting as many parasites on his body as possible to camouflage the natural human aura the Reapers read. Better a small bloodsucker on your skin than a big one on your throat.
