Night; pit; memory
"I'll go with you," says J, his eyes firmly on the plate a'rice and vegetables in front a'him.
"It's fine."
He shrugs, still without lookin at me; I know what he's thinkin, but gettin inta that now is a waste a'time. If we want ta keep sellin powder we've got ta enter the mines, and I don't need him or anyone else ta hold my hand while I do it.
"Leave me some a'that food alright?" I say. "I don't want ta have ta order again when I get back."
"No promises."
I grunt a response and leave the apartment. The street is empty, and a thin layer a'snow covers the sidewalk. A group a'kids are out on the lawn in front a'2nd block. One a'them, a stick in his hand, bends down ta poke at a dead bird he's uncovered in the snow. I think a'whoever's out there paintin rings, but this bird still has its head, and there's no sign a'blood.
"It's a crow," says one a'the boys.
"Fuck you," says another. The one with the stick is silent, his eyes shaded under heavy bangs.
I cross the street, approachin the old buildin from the back. It stands before me, tall and drab against the black backdrop a'the northern hills. Nothin's changed, not the lines a'tar smeared over the cracks in the walls, the rusted pipes, or the silent, empty balconies. Every time I come here it's the same thing: I could make this trip blindfolded and never miss a step, the memory a'my years here like a thing cut from stone.
Pullin the doors open, I enter the hallway. There's a sharp tang a'disinfectant in the air, and the stretch a'carpet where the stain had been is bleached a dull beige. From somewhere comes the familiar sound a'shoutin, and I waste no time passin down the short flight a'stairs ta the boiler room.
The darkness inside is thick enough ta taste; I breathe it in, allowin it ta settle in my lungs until I've had enough and I reach inta my pocket for the flashlight; everythin is just as it should be, the concrete walls and dusty pipes, the boiler in the corner like the dried-out husk of a dead insect. I pass behind it and through the hole ta the chamber on the opposite side. I make a careful sweep a'the light over the ground, but it's obvious that no one's been in here, only two sets a'boot prints – mine and J's – visible on the dusty floor. Keepin the angle a'the light low, I cross the room ta the far door. Soon enough, the passage begins ta widen until it finally merges with the first a'the active tunnels.
Everythin outside the range a'the flashlight's thin beam remains a deep, untouchable black. I listen ta the sound a'my breath and the fall a'my boots on the rock floor, my ears finely tuned ta the silence. After a time I grow aware a'the faint gurgle a'water, and as always my thoughts turn ta the pit.
When I was a kid I figured it had ta be the place where my father died.
The memory exists outside of him: he was 12 when it happened and by now he remembers it as if it happened to someone else.
On that day this other boy was on a class trip to the capital. He has very little memory of this, the only clear detail remaining to him the mammoth glass and steel façade of the Natural History museum. If asked, he wouldn't be able to say what he'd seen there, dinosaurs perhaps, or the mummified remains of ancient kings. The specifics of the place are gone. All that's left are the broad strokes, the impression of a trip to a museum and a day spent outside the town.
He does recall that it was hot, and that on the way back, the bus, crammed with over-tired 7th graders, was stifling. Even with the windows open, sweat beaded on his forehead and dripped along the length of his back: a bus full of sweating, tired children, noisy and laughing, unable to sit still.
When they returned to school the boy got off the bus along with everyone else. Waiting for him in the parking lot was his mother, and beside her was a man the boy had never seen before. He was tall, with powerful shoulders and a thick, graying moustache. Both of them were both dressed in black, and the man was wearing sunglasses. The boy thought his mother must have been crying; her eyes were red, and the skin around them was puffy and raw. The man's face was all but lifeless, as if it was nothing more than a thin, plastic mask.
The boy's mother knelt in front of him and put a hand on his shoulder. She said she had some bad news. Her lips were trembling. The boy asked who the man was, and she told him he was a friend of his father's. The man nodded silently. His head was tilted in the boy's direction, but he might have been looking anywhere. It was impossible to tell behind his glasses.
What is it? asked the boy. He couldn't hear himself speaking; he felt that he was standing behind a plate of glass. A bead of sweat slipped between his shoulder blades, remorseless.
There was an accident at the mines, his mother said. Your father fell and – she turned her head away. The man who was his father's friend put his hand on her shoulder. The boy wanted to slap it away.
On the way back to their apartment they took the man's car, a long, black thing that smelled of tobacco and old leather. At home the kitchen and living room were crammed with relatives and friends of the family, miners mostly, all of them wearing cheap, dark suits. They talked in hushed voices, like they were at a theatre, or as if they were being watched. Someone was serving snacks. Most of the men were drinking, and several of the women.
One after another they approached the boy and told him how sorry they were. One of his uncles took him aside and explained that the boy was the man in the house now, and that he had to act like it. The boy didn't know what this meant. Everything that was said to him that day confused him; people talked about his father in the past tense, saying that he fell, and that he was gone, but no one told him that he was dead. The boy wasn't sure if they were just being careful with their words or if they didn't know.
Hours later J arrived at the apartment. The boy didn't know why he was there. He guessed his mother must have called him, but he couldn't picture her doing it. She didn't like J.
It shouldn't have happened said J, and his face, always so easy-going, was horribly changed, almost feverish, and this open show of emotion from his friend was worse for the boy than his own grief, which was a hollow, directionless thing, fluctuating wildly between helplessness and irrational anger.
It's OK, he said without knowing why; it was the first thing that came into his head, but it seemed to be enough. J nodded, and they spent the rest of the night playing video games, saying nothing, or at least nothing the boy would remember later.
He woke up the next day and discovered that his loss and anger were still there. He found he was surprised by this, as if they should have been gone already, and the boy realized that this was how it would be from now on. He wanted someone to blame for his loss, but his mother and everyone else assured him that there was nothing that could have been done any differently, that it was no one's fault. They repeated those words like a mantra, but the fact was that none of them could say what had actually happened. One of his father's friends talked about a faulty safety harness, while a woman who seemed to know his mother mentioned a ledge crumbling, rocks giving out at a spot that had been used for years without any problems. One man, a retired miner with a bent back and hands spotted with lonely, spidery hairs, simply said that the pit took him, and in time that was how the boy would come to see it, that his father had been taken by the pit.
The pit where his father fell grew in the boy's imagination, until at last it became a living thing; it took his father, swallowed him, reached out and grabbed him. The pit was like a dark stain on the boy's thoughts, an empty, gaping mouth, hungry and gloating, and it was the only place he had to direct his anger.
Time passed, and while things never went back to normal, they eventually fell into a kind of rhythm. The boy went to school, met his friends, came home and ate dinner. He spent more and more time with J, and his mother no longer said anything about it. One night, about two months after it happened, the two boys were playing hide and seek with a group of kids from their tenement. During one round, J hid in the boiler room. The door was supposedly locked, but as he told it later, he'd managed to get his hands
on a key by sneaking into the maintenance office while the janitor was smoking.
A perfect hiding place is a wonderful thing, but sitting alone in a dark room is trying work; growing bored, J poked his head into every corner of the room, and at length he discovered the hole that led to the mines. For as long as a day J believed that he could keep this secret to himself, but the pressure of his own silence finally got the better of him, and the following day he confessed what he'd found to the boy. That night they went in together, each of them carrying a flash light, their chests tight with excitement.
Crawling through the hole was like leaving the world behind. The dark and the quiet, and the seemingly endless passages of the mines were a hidden kingdom, a lost world. Entering it, something inside the boy began to unravel, a knot that he'd carried inside him ever since his father disappeared, and reaching the pit was the culmination of this: here, the boy knew, he'd found what he'd been looking for.
Every day he'd asked himself why it had to happen, what possible meaning there could be in something so random, and he'd finally gotten his answer: his father had been lost so that the boy could find him. He smiled at his conclusion, too young to understand that there are many things in the world that happen for no good reason at all.
Twice a week he went with J into the mines. If it had been up to him the boy would have gone more often, but he wasn't ready to go alone and twice was all that J would agree to. For J, the mines quickly lost their appeal. Nothing happened there. There were no secrets to uncover, none of the things he'd been hoping to find, sticks of dynamite, or bones, crates of gold stored in some long forgotten passage. There was only the dust and the dark and the deep, restive quiet of the mines at night, and at last he simply refused to go.
There's no point, he announced, you're not going to find him. Your father's dead.
It was the first time anyone had said the words out loud.
I know he is, answered the boy.
He went back only once after that, on his own, taking one of his father's rings that his mother had given him after the funeral. He went as far as the pit, standing at the edge and shining his flashlight into the hole, hoping to see some trace of the bottom, but all that greeted him was the sound of the water far below, and the movement of soft, invisible currents of air. He held out the ring and let it go, watching as it slipped, too quickly, into nothing.
And now, walking past the pit in search of Art's locker and the powder inside it, he doesn't stop or slow down, and he doesn't think of his father.
Why should he? It was all so long ago, and in another life.