Bully-Boy's Christmas Dinner

FICTION Bully-Boy's Christmas Dinner Carl Jarrell Mightydog saw a light coming down the entry so he knew something was up. He had been building a bradish-that is, a cinder block wall between two pillars of coal used to guide the air flow in the complex ventilation schema of the mine. The top row was now higher than his chest and the blocks were getting hard to throw. Every time he hoisted another block, he muttered "Amontillado Fortunato, Amontillado!" He had built a hundred of these walls in his eleven years as an underground miner, and he had always thought of that Poe story. There were a couple of guys on this shift that deserved to be walled up and forgotten, he thought. He knew some evil fuckers around here; maybe it was the water. Sometimes he felt it might be a good idea to wall himself up-just fuck the world. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his gloved hand, threw another block up to the top row, and scooted it in line. Dog wondered what Amontillado was like and thought how good his breakfast gallon of Stroh's would be after the shift. Since there was another four feet of blocks to stack for the bradish in this high seam-he would have to use a step ladder to finish it-he hoped another job, a different job, was coming his way with the light. Mightydog turned and shined his own light at the approaching miner's face. He was right; it was the hoot-owl boss, Stinkbug, and he wasn't coming just to socialize. One of the nice things about working for this outfit was that nearly everyone had a pseudonym-though Mightydog was the only one there who could have defined pseudonym. And Mightydog didn'tjust leave the various monikers alone. The Dog always sought to modify, to improve, on the names that God and fate had assigned his coworkers . He called Stickweed "Stinkbug," Pee Wee was "Wee Wee," and the boltman they called Dido was obviously "Dildo." There had been a short, fat, little prick of a boss at another mine called Roundman; the Dog had hung "Roundmouth" on him and it had Carl Jarrell grew up in Charleston, West Virginia, and spent three years in Europe in the military. Back in West Virginia, he is the second oldest member ofa law school class. 41 stuck. Soon, the entire population of Mill's Run, West Virginia, was calling him that. This pleased the Dog mightily. Stickweed/Stinkbug "flagged" Mightydog with his light, and said, "Hey Dog, I need you to go outside and pick up a boom-jack for number two buggy. They're sending one in from Pineville and it should be out there around four-thirty." The Dog pulled his right glove off with his left hand and held it, reached into his shirt and pulled out a pack of Marlboros and a lighter, sucked a smoke from the pack, put the pack back in his shirt pocket, and lit the cigarette. "Okay, Stink," Mightydog said, walking toward the boss. Stinkbug was a pretty decent guy, so Goldenboy would eventually fire him and hire a corrupt, lazy, and stupid scumbag in his place. "Need anything else?" "You could bring in a couple of cases of water. But don't fuck around. We need that jack so we can get it on for the day shift." Mightydog turned his back on the bradish and headed down the entry for the end of the track and the mantrip. He never looked back; the bradish was history. Someone else could finish, if not-fuck it, forget it. It was a mile, at least, to the end of the track; farther than either the state or the federal law allowed. But, what the hell, 'go with the flow and they pay me by the hour/ Dog thought as he walked and smoked. He'd rather walk than throw the cinder blocks up over his head to finish that bradish. Dog got to the mantrip, finished his cigarette (a second one since he had talked with Stinkbug), snuffed it out...