the mine, and his wife, and their retarded child. This child was just a vegetable, Cornelius said; all it did was gibber away in a sort of pen in a corner of the living room and mess its pants. It was about six or seven years old, and that was all it would ever do. Cornelius said he believed that if anybody had a child like that they had a right to get rid of it. He said that was what he would do. No question about it. There were a lot of ways you could do it and never get caught, and he bet that was what a lot of people did. He and Brenda had a terrible fight about this. But all the time they were arguing and fighting Brenda suspected that this was not something Cornelius would really do. It was something he had to say he would do. To her. To her, he had to insist that he would do it. And this actually made her angrier at him than she would have been if she believed he was entirely and brutally sincere. He wanted her to argue with him about this. He wanted her protest, her horror, and why was that? Men wanted you to make a fuss, about disposing of vegetable babies or taking drugs or driving a car like a bat out of hell, and why was that? So they could haveyour marshmallow sissy goodness to preen against, with their hard showoff badness? So that they finally could give in to you, growling, and not have to be so bad and reckless anymore? Whatever it was, you got sick of it.
In the mine accident, Cornelius could have been crushed to death. He was working the night shift when it happened. In the great walls of rock salt an undercut is made, then there are holes drilled for explosives, and the charges are fitted in; an explosion goes off every night at five minutes to midnight. The huge slice of salt slides loose, to be started on its journey to the surface. Cornelius was lifted up in a cage on the end of the arm of the scaler. He was to break off the loose material on the roof and fix in the bolts that held it for the explosion. Something went wrong with the hydraulic controls he was operating—he stalled, tried for a little power and got a surge that lifted him, so that he saw the rock ceiling closing down on him like a lid. He ducked, the cage halted, a rocky outcrop struck him in the back.
He had worked in the mine for seven years before that and hardly ever spoke to Brenda about what it was like. Now he tells her. It’s a world of its own, he says—caverns and pillars, miles out under the lake. If you get in a passage where there are no machines to light the gray walls, the salt-dusty air, and you turn your headlamp off, you can find out what real darkness is like, the darkness people on the surface of the earth never get to see. The machines stay down there forever. Some are assembled down there, taken down in parts; all are repaired there; and finally they’re ransacked for usable parts, then piled into a dead-end passage that is sealed up—a tomb for these underground machines. They make a ferocious noise all the time they’re working; the noise of the machines and the ventilating fans cuts out any human voice. And now there’s a new machine that can do what Cornelius went up in the cage to do. It can do it by itself, without a man.
Brenda doesn’t know if he misses being down there. He sayshe doesn’t. He says he just can’t look at the surface of the water without seeing all that underneath, which nobody who hasn’t seen it could imagine.
Neil and Brenda drive along under the trees, where suddenly you could hardly feel the wind at all.
“Also, I did take some money,” Neil says. “I got forty dollars, which, compared to what some guys got, was just nothing. I swear that’s all, forty dollars. I never got any more.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“I wasn’t looking to confess it,” he says. “I just wanted to talk about it. Then what pisses me off is I lied anyway.”
Now that she can hear his voice better, she notices that it’s nearly as flat and tired as her own. She sees his hands on the
In the mine accident, Cornelius could have been crushed to death. He was working the night shift when it happened. In the great walls of rock salt an undercut is made, then there are holes drilled for explosives, and the charges are fitted in; an explosion goes off every night at five minutes to midnight. The huge slice of salt slides loose, to be started on its journey to the surface. Cornelius was lifted up in a cage on the end of the arm of the scaler. He was to break off the loose material on the roof and fix in the bolts that held it for the explosion. Something went wrong with the hydraulic controls he was operating—he stalled, tried for a little power and got a surge that lifted him, so that he saw the rock ceiling closing down on him like a lid. He ducked, the cage halted, a rocky outcrop struck him in the back.
He had worked in the mine for seven years before that and hardly ever spoke to Brenda about what it was like. Now he tells her. It’s a world of its own, he says—caverns and pillars, miles out under the lake. If you get in a passage where there are no machines to light the gray walls, the salt-dusty air, and you turn your headlamp off, you can find out what real darkness is like, the darkness people on the surface of the earth never get to see. The machines stay down there forever. Some are assembled down there, taken down in parts; all are repaired there; and finally they’re ransacked for usable parts, then piled into a dead-end passage that is sealed up—a tomb for these underground machines. They make a ferocious noise all the time they’re working; the noise of the machines and the ventilating fans cuts out any human voice. And now there’s a new machine that can do what Cornelius went up in the cage to do. It can do it by itself, without a man.
Brenda doesn’t know if he misses being down there. He sayshe doesn’t. He says he just can’t look at the surface of the water without seeing all that underneath, which nobody who hasn’t seen it could imagine.
Neil and Brenda drive along under the trees, where suddenly you could hardly feel the wind at all.
“Also, I did take some money,” Neil says. “I got forty dollars, which, compared to what some guys got, was just nothing. I swear that’s all, forty dollars. I never got any more.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“I wasn’t looking to confess it,” he says. “I just wanted to talk about it. Then what pisses me off is I lied anyway.”
Now that she can hear his voice better, she notices that it’s nearly as flat and tired as her own. She sees his hands on the
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