All The Way Down

Chapter 1

I met Dean Elliott at the quarry the day after my brother died. Dean cleared off a chair for me in his cramped office and got me a cup of coffee. We looked at each other across Dean’s desk, which was piled a foot deep with computer printouts.

"I’m so damn sorry about your brother," Dean said.

"Thanks."

"If there’s anything I can do."

I took a sip of my coffee and thought about it. Then I put the Styrofoam coffee cup on top of one of the stacks of printouts.

"I’d like to see where the accident happened," I said.

Dean said "I can arrange that." He got up from behind his desk, and I followed him out of the office. He was taller and wider than me, built like a heavyweight fighter except for the roll of fat around his waistline. We stopped at his secretary’s desk on the way out. He introduced me to her and told her that he was going to take me over to the pit for a while. She hadn’t been at her desk when Dean took me back to his office, so we hadn’t met. She had cinnamon-colored skin and dark brown hair that fell to the middle of her back. The phone rang, and she picked it up, nodding at Dean to let him know that she understood. Then she glanced at me before looking away.

"Come on," Dean said. "Let’s go." We went down a long aisle of beige-colored cubicles and out through a side door of the administration building. Stepping outside into the heat felt like leaning into a fireplace to put another log on the fire, but I guess Dean was used to it. He shuffled down the sidewalk quickly, rocking from side to side on his cowboy boots. I unbuttoned the top buttons on my shirt and tried to keep up.

We reached the entrance to one of the huge corrugated tin buildings that border the south edge of the quarry. The building’s open doors were three stories tall and hung on rollers so they could be slid out of the way. Just inside the doors, two shirtless mechanics had pulled the blade off a road grader and one of the men was yelling about the hydraulics being shot. "This here’s the doghouse," Dean said. "It’s where we do the maintenance work on the machinery. Brick’s truck is in there, too. What’s left of it, I mean."

I told him I wanted to see Brick’s truck. He nodded, and we went through the doorway into the shade. Giant electric fans mounted high on the walls pumped stale air to the outside, but they didn’t seem to help much. The smell of gasoline and diesel exhaust was thick, and it was nearly as hot inside as out. We followed a set of foot-deep ruts that ran the length of the hangar. It looked like something with huge claws had been dragged across the earth, ripping up the hardened soil. As we walked, Dean pulled a cigar from his shirt pocket and lit it. We went past a dozen earth movers, dump trucks, and road-watering trucks. When we reached the far end of the building, the ruts ended at a big, lime-green dump truck. Dean nodded at it before spitting a piece of tobacco at the ground.

"That’s the one," he said.

The driver’s cab was caved in, the dumping bed was flattened, and the front end was mashed in like a bulldog’s face. There were burn marks from a cutting torch around the empty door frame, and the front fenders were blackened from fire. Spider-webbed glass from the windshield lay across the hood in a hump.

"That’s a two hundred thousand dollar truck," Dean said. "But it doesn’t stop drivers from making mistakes. You don’t pay attention and they’ll kill ya."

I looked up into the cab and thought about what it must have been like for Brick when he realized he’d gone over the edge into the quarry pit. Maybe it was the heat, or Dean’s foul-smelling cigar, but I felt sick at my stomach. I told Dean I’d seen enough. He grunted, and we went back past all the heavy equipment and out into the brilliant sunshine.

We followed the sidewalk to the road where the earth movers and dump trucks accessed the quarry pit. The road was easily wide enough to handle two of the dump trucks abreast, and its surface was packed hard and smooth from traffic. We walked several hundred yards along the road in silence, with Dean still smoking his cigar and scuffing his boot heels against the dirt. The noise from the machinery in the pit grew louder as we reached the place where the road connected with the edge of the pit before descending. The sheer size of the hole stunned me. It looked like it was half a mile across and probably a thousand feet deep.

"God," I said. "It’s huge."

"Big, ain’t it?"

I stared into the pit, watching the trucks snake their way up and down the road that lead to the bottom of the quarry. Dean waited patiently, puffing on his cigar. Far below us, a pair of trucks passed each other on the road. The lane at the edge was used for up traffic, the lane against the quarry wall for the trip down.

"Was Brick on his way up or down?" I asked.

"Down."

"So his truck wasn’t carrying anything, right?"

"That’s right."

"Road seems plenty wide."

"Yessir, it does," Dean agreed, chewing the words around his cigar.

"So Brick drove clear across the inside lane before going over the edge?"

"Sure looks that way."

"Where did the truck go over?"

"Pretty damn much straight down from where we stand," Dean said. He used the wet end of his cigar to point past our feet at an outcropping about 500 feet down the sloping pit wall. "Truck stopped yonder," Dean continued. "Almost went all the way down." Then he heaved a sigh and flicked the cigar into the void. I watched it tumble and smoke and spark until I couldn’t see it any more.