Rust on the Rungs

Arana stepped down onto the first rung of shaft four.

The iron knee brace bit into his raw flesh just behind the fibula. A dry pinch, the kind that doesn't bleed right away but leaves a purple ring against the bone when a man unbuckles his straps at night. He climbed down slowly, probing the emptiness with the tip of his boot smeared in heavy clay. Each rattle of the rusted clamp against the bars of the vertical ladder woke a hollow echo in the flue of shaft four, where the stale air smelled of stagnant urine and that rancid sheep tallow they smeared on the zinc weights so the acidic moisture wouldn't eat them away in two weeks. No one had cleaned the general drainage gutters in months. Dead water rotted at the bottom of the vault, thick as tripe broth, while a viscous trickle of whitish grout slipped from the masonry joints and fell in heavy drops onto the lapels of his black cloth coat.

The trouble was that his left leg wouldn't bend right. Let's say his femur had healed crooked after the collapse in the lower galleries of '88, and ever since he had to swing his hip outward with every step, feeling for the iron blindly like someone rummaging at the bottom of a trunk with a broken stick. In his inner pocket he carried three crumpled receipts from the siding diner, a box of red phosphorus matches ruined by sweat, and four ten-cent coins that clinked like old tin against his tin tobacco pouch. None of that was any use sixty meters underground. But a man doesn't empty his pockets before going down a blind shaft; he goes down with what he has on him and trusts he'll make it back up before the lime starts burning his groin.

Two meters higher up, Isidro Lafuente was wheezing with a hoarse rattle in his throat.

"Got any loose tobacco?" Isidro asked. His voice came down muffled by the hot vapor rising from his lungs.

"In my pocket. It's soaked."

"Give it to me anyway. It dries out on my palate."

"Put your feet where I'm stepping and shut up," Arana said. "If you miss your step, you're going to eat the bottom of the pit and I'm going right behind you."

Isidro didn't answer.

The thing was, Isidro always needed to chew on something to keep from thinking about the sixty meters of basalt hanging over his head. He was a broad-shouldered man with slumping shoulders and knuckles crusted over from picking at live rock, the kind who smell like rancid butter even after washing up at the village washbasin on Sundays. Arana heard the boy stop halfway up the ladder to scratch the back of his neck with the back of his heavy work-glove. A scrape of skin against rough wool. From some hidden crack in the black stone came the low, steady hiss of alkaline gas escaping through the fissures of wet basalt like the torn bellows of a forge, a blind snort that gave no light but left the throat raspy, with an aftertaste of bitter ash.

Arana felt for the next rung with his heel. The iron was slick with grease. He stopped for a second, breathed deep, and pulled a crushed cigarette butt from his vest; he smelled it, made sure it tasted of tobacco rotted by moisture, and tucked it away again without lighting it.

Outside, in the switching yard, someone cranked the engine of a truck that coughed twice before stalling.

Upon reaching the level four landing, the ore cage was jammed against the pine stops. Balbina Cuesta was waiting for them there.

She was standing, leaning against a stack of ties oozing superheated pitch. She wore an ash-gray dust coat with cuffs stained in iron rust and a carbide lamp hanging from her raw-leather pocket. She didn't seem cold or in a hurry; that is, she didn't give the impression of a woman who had spent three quarters of an hour breathing the caustic dust of a gallery without a secondary fan. Tucked under her arm was a file with black oilcloth covers, chewed at the corners by the lime grout, and she was nibbling on the tip of a copying pencil with her gaze fixed on the shaft.

"You two climb down like old women," Balbina said, pulling the pencil from between her teeth with a dry flick. "Management isn't going to sign off if level six doesn't have its report filed before ten."

"The ladder has four loose rungs between two and three," Arana said, letting himself drop onto a rotting wooden bench to loosen the buckle of his knee brace. "If I climb any faster I'll snap my spine, and if I kill myself down here, you'll be the one validating the levels with your finger."

Balbina clicked her tongue without looking at him. She adjusted her lamp's reflector with her thumbnail.

"You're the clerk, Arana. I just take note of the progress."

"My leg feels like a green log and my papers are soaked."

"Well, dry them with your sleeve and sign."

Fine.

Arana pulled the record book from his bakelite portfolio. The onion-skin paper was bloated from condensation, brittle at the edges like an old communion wafer, and a white crust of chalk dust had formed in his cuticles, itching like a nettle sting. He passed his thumb over the relief of the official seal. The paper offered barely any resistance; it dissolved into damp filaments beneath his fingertip. Twenty-eight years signing off on voids teach you that lies weigh nothing on onion-skin paper, but they crush the femurs of anyone who climbs down to look for them. He remembered an older inspector from Linares who wore patent leather boots and prided himself on his impeccable calligraphy in the boundary books; he ended up with his sternum flattened against an oak beam because he vouched that a cracked face was solid stone simply because the ink hadn't run in the dispatch report. If the rock wanted to come down, the signatures on the paper—

Isidro sat down on a bale of moldy esparto grass, pulled out a pocketknife with a splintered handle, and began to scrape the hardened tallow off the zinc plumb line. He peeled off thin, almost transparent strips that fell to the floor without making a sound.

"Is it much farther to the bottom?" Isidro asked without raising his eyes from the knife.

"Twenty meters of blind shaft," Balbina said. "Provided you don't take it into your head to pass out from the gas."

"Nothin' passes me out," the boy muttered. "What I've got is my stomach stuck to my backbone."

Arana said nothing. He buckled the iron strap again, tightening the buckle to the very last hole so the splint wouldn't wobble. The metal bit into his shin through his soaked trousers. It hurt on purpose, but it was a familiar, dull pain, like the throb of decayed teeth when winter sets in.

On the upper crossbeam, a rat darted through the timbers with a short squeak and disappeared down the vent.

The final stretch toward level six was a narrow tube where the draft died out in a blind pit.

They descended blindly down rungs coated in a slippery crust of gray silt. Caustic grout dripped down the shoring partitions, leaving white trails that looked like melted tallow over the basalt. Arana's right foot slipped on the fourteenth crossbar. The rusted iron of the knee brace struck a harsh blow against the rung, a metallic clack that traveled up his hip like an electric shock. He hung by his arms for three seconds, clenching his teeth until his jaw cracked in his temples. Sweat ran down his forehead, thick and salty, dragging chalk dust all the way into his eyes.

Step by step. The freezing metal. The raw palms.

Isidro hit bottom first. The soles of his boots splashed into a whitish mud that covered his ankles. He struck his carbide lamp's lighter; the flint's spark threw a bluish flash, and the flame illuminated the level six ledge, a narrow gallery where the master beams groaned under a dead weight pressing down from above.

Arana dropped into the mud with a grunt. As he rested his bad leg on the rotting planking, the bakelite inkwell in his vest's outer pocket collided with the sharp edge of a rock and burst with a dull snap. The purple paste stained his trouser leg instantly; the bruised violet halo of the copying pencil began to dissolve in the grayish mud of the ledge, spreading into thick branches that looked like swollen veins in the limestone muck.

"Goddamn the inkwell," Arana muttered, rubbing his stained fingers against his chest.

Nothing.

Isidro paid no attention to the ink. He had raised the lamp toward the advancing face, and the flame trembled in the dead air from the depths. Three meters from the ladder, the oak shoring was bowed outward, overcome by a belly of stone that threatened to snap the timbers right at the knots. But what Isidro illuminated with his trembling hand was not loose rock. Right in the center of the master crossbeam, where the official marks prohibiting entry into the fault zones should have been, the wood appeared peeled in clean cuts: Arana's rubber stamps had been scraped off with a knife to camouflage the clandestine advance of the barite galleries.