Under Ground
One day at work, Pat told Carl that soon, he was going to have surgery, and that Carl would be the lone miner operator until he returned to work. John Cooper decided that Lou would be the miner helper during Pat’s absence. Carl thought that Lou had likely talked to John quite a bit about his desires to be a miner operator.
Pat said that he’d be out for a couple of weeks, recovering from the surgery.
Carl, of course, wanted to know what the problem was for which Pat would be having surgery, and Pat seemed reluctant to talk about it. Carl thought it must not be anything too serious, so he’d jokingly ask Pat each day about why he needed the surgery.
During lunch in the dinner-hole one day, as the date of his surgery was nearing, Pat spilled the beans to the whole crew. He was going to be circumcised at thirty five years of age. Carl was dumbfounded. The other guys likely were as well, but Carl couldn’t understand why a guy would do such a thing; especially an older guy like Pat.
Carl had no idea that grown men could even have that done, and he had thought that they only circumcised babies before hearing Pat’s revelation. He didn’t even want to think about having it done as an adult.
Some of the more childish guys at the mine, including those from other crews who had heard the news, made up silly “jokes” about it. Roland Gutkowski, the shuttle car operator, was getting lots of laughs over the questions he’d ask Pat, and the “advice” he’d give him, such as when he told Pat to “tell the doctor to not take too much off, or the wife might not like it.”
Carl was getting increasingly good at operating the miner, and Pat had let him finish up the last two blocks, to set up the falls, since he needed that experience most of all. He did very well in getting almost all of the blocks chewed up, and leaving minimal posts in key spots while knocking the others down before backing the continuous miner out of harm's way.
Lou was doing okay handling the cable, but at the slightest delay of a shuttle car returning to be loaded, he’d walk up and try to start a conversation with Carl, all the while, huffing, puffing and pausing while trying to initiate small talk. Carl tried to act nice, like he didn’t mind having a conversation, but it was getting to him.
For one thing, whatever Lou would bring up, it wasn’t interesting enough for Carl to want to discuss or to learn anything more about. He’d sit there, just nodding or shaking his head and not really listening to Lou. Both knew that each disliked the other, so Lou’s conversation attempts were awkward at best.
Carl got to know the utility guy, Doug, better, and they discovered that they lived pretty close to each other, so they started to carpool to work. Whoever wasn’t driving would park their car at a restaurant that both of them frequented, and whose owner gave permission for their use of a parking space.
Whenever they worked the midnight shift, they’d eat breakfast at the restaurant every morning after work.
Doug had a really sweet Plymouth Road Runner that had a special, translucent-like paint job. He told Carl that it was a really expensive paint, and some friend of his had gotten him a discount on it. Doug wasn’t married, and the car was his real true love at the time.
Doug, who worked with Lou every shift, (when Lou wasn’t the substitute miner helper), thought of Lou pretty much the same way Carl, and likely the rest of the crew, did. The good thing was, Carl was too new himself to be teaching another employee how to operate the continuous miner, especially in a retreat section. Lou would only handle the cable.
The two weeks Pat was off and Carl was operating the miner himself, turned out to be good for Carl’s confidence that he could do the job and do it safely. He was now a fully trained continuous miner operator, and as soon as he got assigned to a crew he’d get top-rate pay.
When Pat returned, Carl asked him how he was feeling, and if he was still hurting. Pat said he was still having some discomfort, so Carl told him to just go ahead and run the machine each shift until he was feeling better, knowing it would be hard for Pat to be moving the heavy cable around.
After a few days, Pat said he felt better and that he was good to go. He and Carl then resumed splitting the shift, operating the continuous miner.
Pat seemed to Carl to be different in some way. Where they were presently working, it was wet, muddy, and pretty messy. Handling the cable without getting messy oneself was hard to do.
A couple of times when Carl was operating the miner and needed to back up, when he turned to look behind him, Pat was nowhere to be seen. Carl got off the machine and moved the cable himself, then got back on the machine and backed up some more, got off and moved the cable again, and repeated until he'd backed up far enough.
He thought that Pat might have still had some pain or he’d had to use the “bathroom” or something, but when Pat came back it looked like nothing had happened to him. He looked fine. Carl was glad that apparently nothing was wrong.
He accepted that it must have been a drink of water or a bathroom break that Pat needed, and decided to let it go at that. It wasn’t the end though. The next thing Carl noticed, was that Pat’s demeanor seemed to have done a one-eighty. He suddenly wasn’t the same, nice guy that he’d been.
Pat’s behavior became noticeably different to most everyone on the crew, and no one understood what was going on with him. Whatever was bothering him, it was also causing the crew to waste time and less coal was being mined.
Under Ground © free-reign 2020
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Sources for images used in this post:
(Public Domain photos are from Wikimedia Commons)