The Deep Dark by Gregg Olsen Page A

and noxious lead smelter. Flory, a big man with a gate-jaw and a goatee, filled his water jug with ice from the bar’s icemaker before catching a ride with his partner Tom Wilkinson. Over in Woodland Park, outside of Wallace, mine sanitation nipper Don Beehner picked up three Sunshine miners in his red-and-white Volkswagen bus. Buz Bruhn’s Mullan carpool pulled over to give a lift to a Sunshine miner hitching to work on the highway to Big Creek. Though it was only Tuesday morning, day-shift silver miners had already discussed what they would be doing on the weekend—or even
that
day, instead of working.
    Wilkinson, Flory, and the others changed from their street clothes to their diggers in Sunshine’s dry house, usually called just “the dry,” an enormous building of lockers, urinals, toilets, and communal showers. Wet boots, diggers, and towels were suspended on hooks and raised up to the ceiling by chains and pulleys, making for a kind of hanging garden of miner’s gear, drying in the breeze of a forced-air furnace. Each shift was bookended in the dry. It was the place where the men lightened the prospects of the day ahead, or blew off steam from a disappointing dig that had yielded fewer muck-car loads than expected. An average blast typically dumped thirty to forty tons of ore and rock to be hauled out; anything less was a frustrating money loser. More so than any other place outside of the bars, the men’s dry was the place where miners could get to know each other. Snippets of life echoed through the mammoth room. Sometimes there were fistfights and angry altercations. A few times, things were revealed that no one expected. A man who had custody of two preschoolers worked a shift opposite his father, the kids’ grandfather. Every day the dad brought the kids into the dry. They’d sit and wait under the hangers while the shift diggered up. Then their grandfather would come out of the mine, shower, change, and take them home. This routine went on for quite some time. One searing summer day, a cager asked the kids if they wanted to cool off in the shower.
    One immediately peeled off his clothes and started running around, laughing and having the time of his life. The younger kid thought that it looked like fun, too. In a split second there were two kids laughing in the shower, which was fine, except for one thing.
    The smaller of the two was a girl.
    Men around the shower towers grabbed washcloths and frantically tried to cover up. All those months of men wearing nothing but shower shoes playing grab-ass flashed through the mind of the man who’d made the offer.
Who knew that tot was a girl? And she’s been running around here?
    Wilkinson’s best buddy, Johnny Davis, was among the men in the dry getting ready to go underground on May 2, his twenty-eighth birthday. Davis was local through and through. He’d graduated from Mullan High School, enlisted in the Army, and, like so many of his classmates, returned to the district and the mines. He’d started as a weekend smelter helper at Bunker Hill and had done a small stint for Hecla mines before coming to Sunshine in November 1967.
    Wilkinson tried to cajole his pal into skipping work. If Davis said yes, Wilkinson was sure Flory would probably give in, too.
    â€œYou ought to dump shift. Let’s go get drunk,” Wilkinson persisted. “It’s your birthday, man.”
    Davis was tempted, and it seemed that he was going to say yes from under his thick mustache, but ultimately family obligations won out. He was married and had a kid of his own and two stepchildren.
    â€œNah,” he said, “can’t do it.”
    Wilkinson was only mildly disappointed. He’d figured they’d catch up for a few beers after shift.
    W HATEVER MEN OF THE DISTRICT TOLD OUTSIDERS WAS THEIR reason for going mining, Ron Flory’s reasons were twofold. Yeah, the money was good, but he loved it even more because