The Blue Blazes (5 page)

“Never seen one,” Mookie says. “But I’ll keep my eyes out.”

“I could feel it, yo. Thing was like a… hole in space with a pair of eyes. Like it wanted to suck me up, vacuum-style. I hid behind some busted-ass boulders. Thing that got me was, the gobbos followed behind like it was leading them somewhere.”

“Gobbos don’t like to be led.”

“Damn straight.”

It’s strange. Still, could’ve been a trick of the eyes. Easy to lose your way down here, think you’re seeing something you’re not. Especially the deeper you go. You leave the Shallows and wander around the Tangle for a few days, every shadow jumps out at you, every glint of light on wet stone is a pair of eyes, every underground river has shapes swimming beneath the milky waters. Once Mookie was down here and he swore he saw his wife – er, ex-wife – Jess. That’s how this place is: it makes you see crazy shit.

Mookie tells Four-Top to keep an ear to the ground for anything. Another “reaper-cloak” sighting, any hints of Death’s Head, whatever.

Then, tired, Mookie ascends back up out of the Underworld. He’s got boltholes and doorways everywhere, some everybody knows about, others only for him. This one takes him up through a shattered piece of old sewer where the bricks are the color of old blood. It dumps him out into the basement of an Irish bar – McGlinchey’s – on the Lower East Side.

It’s night. The city’s lighting up with night time traffic. Streaks of brake lights. Bleary headlights. Honking. A whiff of perfume. Club kids shuttling past.

Mookie’s tired. And hungry again.

Tomorrow, it continues. For tonight, home.

 

Mookie sits at the bar. Sipping a Yuengling, eating some blood sausage. The TV’s on: some bullshit sports game. Mookie doesn’t give a shit about any kind of sports and usually he’d change the channel, watch an old WWII movie on AMC or maybe pop on the Food Network and see what they’re cooking up. But now he’s zoning out.

The day bugs him like a hangnail. He can’t quit tugging on it. The Boss with his cancer. The man, Candlefly and what was surely a Snakeface associate. Casimir’s request. Four-Top spotting that black shadowy thing.

And over all of it, his daughter. Nora. Looking down like he’s trapped in the belly of a big iron cauldron and she’s the witch stirring the soup. Standing here just last night. She’d known the Boss was sick. Said something big was coming. Then she poisoned him.

For months he thought she’d quieted down. Gone dark. Maybe even gone home. Not that he’d bothered to check. Now she’s back. Messing with him again. Messing with his life, his work. With the Organization.

On the bar top, his phone. He knows he should pick it up. Call his ex-wife, Jess. Tell her about Nora. They could talk. He could check in. Maybe she doesn’t hate him anymore. Or maybe the hate has quieted, like a campfire gone to gray ash.

He pulls out an old picture from behind the bar. Pops out the thumbtack that kept it hanging there. The photo’s faded. Fraying on the edges. A Polaroid. Little blurry. Twenty years ago, wasn’t it? Coney Island. Bleary carnival lights in the background. Mookie smiling. (When was the last time he smiled?) Looking thinner, too. His arms had shape – biceps under white T-sleeves like a mountain range under a blanket of snow. Now they’re just big hams. He’s still strong but… well.

And Jess – goddamn, so beautiful. She always reminded him of autumn. Lips painted like the leaves fallen off a red maple. Hair the color of apple cider. Freckles like the flecks of cinnamon floating in the mug. He grunts. Reaches over, tacks the picture back.

Looks at the phone.

Call her.
 

 

5

 

The Sandhogs. Local 147. The unsung architects of New York City’s past, present, and future. The men of that union are the ones that go hundreds of feet below the city and they dig. They dug all the water tunnels. They dug all the subway tunnels. They sank the caissons for the Brooklyn Bridge. For a long time they owned the underground. That is, of course, until they opened a hole to hell in 1976. That happened at the start of the biggest Sandhog project yet: Water Tunnel #3, a tunnel 800 feet below the surface of Manhattan that would run 60 miles upstate to pull water from a new reservoir. They’d never gone deeper. They had no idea what waited for them there, but they would soon find out what horrors lurked beneath the schist.

– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

 

He’s got one option left before he heads off to see Smiley: the Sandhogs.

Come morning it’s back into the city. He slings his satchel over a beefy shoulder. Throws some loose provisions in there: some jerky, couple bottles of water, bandages, some other odds and ends. Then it’s off to the dig site.

See, in the middle of Lower Manhattan sits a big fucking hole.

It’s as wide as the base of the Chrysler Building. Not nearly as deep – not this one, anyway. This one’s maybe four stories down, with a series of branching tunnels leading off it. It’s a hub. A hub to bring the diggers to various jobsites – the new water tunnel (#3), the new tunnel opening the 7 line of the subway, and other smaller projects.

All around the hole is a massive worksite. Forklifts rumbling. Shipping containers clanging. Wire bails and fuel tanks and thousands of bags of concrete.

He never worked this site, but he worked others just like it. Smells of churned dirt and blown stone, of grease and exhaust and oil. And sweat. Above it all, the vinegar stink of sweat. Sometimes it’s hot down in the dark, sometimes it’s cold, but with all the gear the Sandhogs have to wear – the galoshes, the slickers, the overalls, the hardhats, the masks – you can’t help but sweat.

I don’t belong here
. That’s the thought that keeps going through Mookie’s head, tumbling over and over again like a rock bouncing down a mountain.

He used to belong here. Thirty years ago. When he was a young buck, just out of high school (more like just
failed
out of high school). Working his father’s crew. His grampop up in the work trailer, pushing a broom, shoving a mop, missing his left leg at the knee and hobbling around on a leg the guys made for him, a heavy-ass limb made out of a wooden salad bowl, some leather straps from an old hospital gurney, and a length of rebar.

Grampop was tough as they came. Like the beef jerky in Mookie’s bag. No fat, no gristle, just dehydrated muscle and hard leather.

Not to say his father wasn’t tough, too. Pop was built like an oil drum. Lower teeth missing from when a rock popped up, dislodged by a hammering jack-leg, smacked Pop right in the mouth. Tongue swollen for weeks. It earned him a new nickname: Rocky.

Pop was a fire-plug of a man, but even he was afraid of Grampop.

Grampop would hear about something you did on a job and he’d thump you with a mop-handle and dress you down in front of all the guys – and he was a quick wit, his tongue a loose and lashing cable. Mookie remembered him calling Pop a “thick-necked buffalo with a brain like a shit-bucket”. One time Mookie wasn’t paying attention in the tunnels and put a ladder down on loose scree – the ladder came falling on top of him, cracked him in the head, gave him a concussion. Grampop said, “You’re dumber than a truck full of broken toilets, slower than cold molasses, lazier than a car-struck cat, and uglier than the inside of a donkey’s asshole.” All the men brayed with laughter as Mookie stood there, his face a mask of dried blood from where the ladder had hit him, and that made Mookie mad – he suddenly took a swing at his father’s father. The old man ducked the fist like a bum sidestepping a slow-moving train.

Then he fired a knee up into Mookie’s balls.

He followed it up with, “You got a hard head, Mikey. Hard as diamond, but nowhere near as pretty.” Then he shoved Mookie back into the lockers.

More laughs. Haw, haw, haw. Assholes.

And it’s those laughs Mookie hears when he steps into the work office – really, a trailer, but a trailer that probably hasn’t moved in ten years. Up on cinderblocks. The side of the trailer facing the hole is caked with dust, the rime of blasted rock.

Inside are the Sandhogs – some about to go on shift, some about to go off, others who are new to Local 147 and hoping to get some work for the day. Mookie walks on the dirt-smeared linoleum, past rows of lockers marked with masking-tape labels showing nicknames like “Weasel”
and “Little Blue”
and “Mudcrab”.

He steps into the main area – guys sitting on benches, guys playing cards around a little side table – and eyes turn to him. They’re all hard-asses. You can’t be a Sandhog – one of the best-paid and most dangerous union jobs in the whole goddamn country – and not be a hard-ass, because candy-asses either get pounded to silt (and quit) or turn hard as stone (and stay on the job). So, these hard-asses know another hard-ass when they see one.

They don’t recognize his face, though. And he doesn’t recognize them, either. These are younger guys, mostly. He sees a couple veterans in the back: some old ratty strip of rope with his hard hat still on standing next to a doughy three-chinned dumpling of a man with a Santa’s beard and a pair of industrial-grade eyeglasses too big for his already big head.

Mookie maybe recognizes Santa, though doesn’t remember his name.

It’s the two old vets who stand and wave him toward the back. As it should be. The young guys are faster, tougher, but they’re not the alpha dogs in an operation like this. The old hats, they’re the ones who know what’s up; you piss them off, they’ll leave you down there, floundering in the dark with your dick in your hand.

The shriveled length of rope whistles through busted teeth. “You need something, big fella?” The Santa Claus motherfucker just eyes him up.

Mookie nods. “Looking for Davey Morgan.”

“Davey Morgan?” Skinny Rope lifts a furry eyebrow. “He’s on site.”

“Then I need to go on site.”

“He’s in the tunnels. Way down.”

“Then I need to go way down.”

“He’s not available. Sorry, big fella. Now scram the fuck out of here.”

Mookie feels agitated. And suddenly angry. Half-afraid that Grampop’s ghost is going to come up out of nowhere and whack him on the back of the head with a loaded dustpan, tell him he’s “more useless than pair of tits on a lawnmower”.

It’s then that Santa speaks up. “You’re the Pearl boy.”

A turn of the worm inside Mookie’s heart.

Mookie gives him a look like,
Yeah, so
?

“I remember you. Hard not to. Geez. You’re built like a stack of boulders. I knew your dad a bit. Good Hog. Knew his way around a concrete mix.”

Skinny Rope lifts the other eyebrow. “Pearl. You mean Brosie Pearl?”

“Nah,” Santa says, waving a hand that Mookie can see has the crinkly flesh of a burn scar all up the back of it. “Ambrose was the old man. I’m talking about Henry. The son. Rocky, we called him. And that makes you…” He snaps his crusty fingers. “Little Mikey.”

“Mookie. I go by Mookie these days.”

“Right. Right. You worked with Davey Morgan down there.”

“Uh-huh.”

Santa leans in. “I remember it right, you bailed on us. Left the union.”

“I had other things to do.”

“I bet you did. I bet you did.” The way Santa is sizing him up, he knows. “You were with Davey, that means you were with the 147½. That right?”

“That’s right.” The 147-and-a-half: the union inside the union, a cabal of Sandhogs who know what’s down there and who serve as the first line of defense between the city above and Hell below. They don’t usually run afoul of the Organization, but it happens – the Organization wants the resources the Deep Downstairs has to offer, but the Sandhogs think all of it should stay corked up and kept from the light. “What of it?”

Mookie doesn’t bother answering.

“So then you know Davey’s busy. And you know that there’s no way I’m letting a quitter like you down in the dark on our territory. Davey’s not your business. OK? His business is not your business. So, go home, Little Mikey. Go back to your
other
friends.”

He knows. He knows who Mookie works for. Santa Claus knows that he’s been naughty, not nice. Skinny Rope doesn’t know elf-piss from egg-nog: he’s following the conversation the way one does when the other speakers are talking a different language. But not Santa. Santa sees all.

Mookie growls. He’s not fond of being told “no”.

“Ease off the stick, Cochise,” Santa says. “You’re a big ape used to throwing your weight around, and I don’t doubt you could punch my fat old head into next week. But you got a whole trailer of mean sonofabitches behind you, and worse, this site is watched by Homeland Security. We got big projects going on. Important projects. Not to mention an unholy hell’s load of dynamite down there. You go knocking guys around here and they’ll throw your ass in an unlabeled hole for the rest of your years. That what you want?”

Homeland Security? Jesus. Things have really changed since 9/11.

Mookie just shakes his head.

“Then let’s just cut this short and say goodbye. Goodbye, Mikey Pearl.”

“Mookie.”

“Whatever, kid. Get outta here.”

 

Kid
. The old lump of bearded fat called him “kid”. Mookie’s a couple years shy of his fiftieth birthday, and even still, some senior citizen Sandhog calling him “kid” gets under his skin, lays eggs there, eggs that hatch and whose larvae burrow deep.

The ghost of Grampop is somewhere here, laughing at him.

He can still get down there. Into the tunnel. Mookie’s always got a bolthole and long ago he made sure to carve himself a couple doors into the length of the tunnel – doors that’ll one day need to be sealed up before the gates open and the water comes rushing in, but that’s three years off, easy.

It’s just a long fucking walk. He was hoping to circumvent the trip. He’s tired.

But, what else is he gonna do?

Once more, descent awaits.

 

It’s eight or nine hours of crawling around through too-tight tunnels and ducking his stubbly dome underneath jagged rock that Mookie finally comes to one of his bolthole doors. It’s hidden. It has to be – elsewise any goblin or cult freak or amateur explorer could find it. This one behind a crumpled old refrigerator (the Shallows of the Underworld end up as home to lots of junk and trash, the debris of a humanity that doesn’t care where its waste goes long as it’s out of sight). Mookie has to hunker down, shimmy the fridge out, then squeeze through.

Then, twenty feet down, a big rectangle of schist. Which he cut through using a gas-powered cut-off saw about four years ago.

Mookie steps into the tunnel. He turns off his flashlight – the space is well-lit and his eyes take a moment to adjust.

The tunnel’s big enough to drive a tractor trailer through. It’s cool in here. Up above, strings of sodium lights hang. Everything in a yellow glow, like morning light through a windshield smeared with tree pollen.

Here, the distant sound of the city. The
gung-gung-gung
of subway trains. The rumble-and-hiss of steam somewhere behind and above the rock. The white noise of a million machines and devices: cars, trucks, boats, cranes, drills, all forming a meaningless mumbling hum. Mookie finds it all oddly comforting.

This isn’t the Water Tunnel proper. That’s further down – he’s got boltholes that’ll take him right into the tunnel, but getting there would take him another half-a-day’s walk and right now there’s just no need.

It isn’t long before he gets to another hole, this one ringed by lights. Bundles of cables and pipes disappear down over the craggy lip and into the pit. The pit sits ringed by a metal handrail. Mookie steps up. Looks down.

Down, down, way the fuck down.

The skyscrapers in the city above do as their name suggests: they are physical objects that scrape the sky.

This is the opposite. This is negative space, a carved out channel of rock and stone that’s over four hundred million years old – it doesn’t scrape the sky, but like a needle plunged too deep, it perforates the membrane between this world and the next. Or, it did, when they first dug it out. Now it’s walled off, fortified in ways not easily seen or understood.

But Mookie remembers this shaft.

This isn’t how a lot of the Sandhogs get to the Tunnel #3 dig now – no, there’s a much bigger hole down in Battery Park, a straight shot eight hundred feet into the earth where they can drop trucks and where just a few years ago they lowered a mammoth tunnel boring machine, “The Mole”. That beast, a 450-ton driller, meant to do a lot of the dirty work of making the tunnels, work that once necessitated tons of dynamite and guys who knew how to make the right blasting plans so as not to bring half the city down on their heads. Dangerous work – one of the Sandhog mottos is “a man a mile”. Because for every mile of tunnel they dig, another man dies.

This way’s easier for Mook.

The way down the shaft: a blue cage. Meant to hold five men, but Sandhogs cram ten or twelve guys in there, easy. Still. Mookie steps in and it’s cramped. A feeling of claustrophobia tightens around him like a fist: part of it’s the cage, but part of it’s the fact that a whole city is above his head. Like he’s Atlas holding up the Earth on those big-ass shoulders. Once upon a time that feeling comforted him the same way that feeling a belly full of good food comforted him. But time hasn’t been kind to his nerves.

Mookie punches the button. The motor grinds. The cable thrums.