Chapter Eight
They Won't Even Know It

*John Eastenes stands outside the cage door on the surface of the 
Columbine, and pushes the plunger on the blasting machine. He 
feels the ground convulse beneath his feet as the dynamite blasts 
open a coal seam hundreds of feet below them. He looks over at 
Ortega, who nods, and Eastenes pulls the blasting machine's 
plunger back up. Then he removes the wires from the nodes on the 
front. Ortega, standing with Rudy the mule, pulls the straps tight 
on the mule's supply sack.*

*The blasting machine sends an electric current down to a set of 
blasting caps, small bombs that plug holes in the walls of the 
coal room. The holes are stuffed with dynamite. They'll load the 
dislodged coal into a cart, and bring it back to the surface. It 
was simple enough, but the trick was doing it and living to tell 
the tale.*

*Eastenes and Ortega hear the sharp hiss of the steam hoists fade 
away as the cage descends. Their eyes moisten as the air becomes 
thick with coal dust. Eastenes coughs into his shoulder. The cage 
slams to a halt, and the door opens onto thick clouds of smoke.*

*The dynamite explosion knocked the coal out of the walls, and 
kicked up hundreds of pounds of dust. Eastenes wheezes and shuts 
his eyes. He can feel the dust burrowing into his lungs, into 
every pore. Eastenes and Ortega are blinded by the dust, led only 
by the tail of the mule. Eastenes tries to remember the words of 
the old hymn, the one that got them through that walk across the 
plains. The words fly away before he can catch them in his 
thoughts. All he can think about is how much coal must be in his 
lungs after all these years in the mines. He started working down 
here when he was ten years old.*

*They feel the pressure change, and know the tunnel has opened up 
into the coal room. Eastenes trips over a lump of coal. The ground 
is piled high with them. Groping in the dark, the two men pat each 
other on the back. They'll make good money on this seam. Visions 
of glistening-white turkey meat make their mouths water. It's at 
that very moment the failed charge goes off in their faces.*

*The blast throws Eastenes into a corner of the room. His head 
slams against the wall, ears ringing, face streaming blood. One of 
the blasting caps must have failed to explode on time. Ortega was 
closest to the blast, dead for sure. Eastenes hears the last few 
drops of life drain from the mule into a warm pool on the rock 
floor. The Bohemian's mind is nothing but an operating manual now: 
crawl back to the cage, ring the alarm...*

*It's too late. Eastenes can see light in the pitch-black room, 
the last cinders of the blasting cap kissing a few molecules of 
coal dust. The entire tunnel is full of coal dust, giving off* 
fire-damph*, methane. Eastenes may as well be standing in a 
bathtub of gasoline.*

*The air comes alive in twisting vortices of red and yellow. The 
flames are voracious, sucking the oxygen from Eastenes' lungs 
before he can scream. The tongues of fire surge up before him, 
igniting the clothes on his back. He finds his last cheekful of 
air, screaming out into the night--*

And Eastenes sees it *is* night, back in his bed in Lafayette.

Eastenes blinks away the sweat pouring down his face, choked up on 
the pain of his heart pounding in his chest. He unclenches his 
hands, letting go of a now-crumpled Sears-Roebuck catalog, the one 
he fell asleep reading. His wife Bertha lies next to him, still 
fast asleep. Bertha has become the talk of the town for her soups. 
She drives around the coal field, serving her soup at relief 
lines. Even in this time of need, people have been willing to buy 
her recipe. They've earned enough money to buy their daughter 
Dorothy a new dress.

Eastenes is thankful to have meet the strange companions he now 
calls friends: Bell, Ortega, Jacques, and Spanudakhis. If he's 
being honest with himself, he isn't sure he'd let any of their 
children marry his, and he's pretty sure they feel the same way. 
Such is life in an immigrant town. What Eastenes knows for sure, 
though, is that they'd had his back through the whole strike. 
Whatever might come between them, this strike held the miners 
together. They all believed in those things Flaming Mamie had 
talked about. 

Outside the window, a dog barks, a cat screeches, and the 
streetlights of Lafayette go out.

At that very moment, out at the Columbine Mine, Captain Louis 
Scherf is watching a large box truck begin climbing the hill. It's 
the new shipment he's been waiting for. The truck stops inside the 
gate. Workers open the back. The floodlight on top of the mine 
tipple passes over the truck, revealing the skeletal figures 
stepping out. 

When Scherf looks up from the truck, he sees the streetlights over 
in Lafayette are gone, leaving a black hole in the landscape. 

"Look at that, men," says Scherf to his Rangers. "The power 
outages have begun. I bet they ran out of coal at the plant. The 
reserves are drying up. That's what these Wobbly scoundrels want 
for us: a world of darkness. Tomorrow is the beginning of the end 
for the Wobblies, men, and they won't even know it.

Back in Lafayette, the cats and dogs seem to have ended their war 
for the night. In the few minutes of quiet before the streetlights 
come back on, Eastenes feels his heartbeat return to normal, and 
falls asleep.

The next morning, a few blocks from Eastenes' house, an inspector 
from Western Light & Electric leans his ladder against a utility 
pole. He reaches up between the high-voltage lines. His rubber 
gloves grab hold of the cause of last night's power outage. He 
pulls it free, and drops the charred remains of an electrocuted 
cat into the rubbish bin.