Lauren was thirty-two that winter. She had been born at St. James Hospital and baptized at St. Mary's in Walkerville, and she had gone to Butte Central and married Gordie Sefcik at twenty-one in the same church, with her father in a borrowed suit walking her down the aisle and breathing like a man walking uphill, which was the con, though nobody said so that day. Her father had been a timberman at the Kelley for twenty-six years. He had died in 1979 at fifty-eight in the back bedroom of the house on Caledonia Street, with an oxygen bottle beside the bed and the Kelley headframe standing black against the sky out the window, where he could see it. She had been holding his hand. He had been looking at the headframe. She had never been sure which one he was saying goodbye to.
She and Gordie lived in that house now, with their daughter Mandy, who was nine and in the fourth grade at Emerson and was going to be a veterinarian, or possibly a figure skater, depending on the day. It was a narrow two-story frame house with asbestos siding the color of weak mustard, on a street so steep that in January the city sometimes just put sawhorses at the top and bottom and let it be. Her father had bought it in 1952 for forty-one hundred dollars. In October, when she and Gordie had finally sat down at the kitchen table and said the thing out loud, they had called a man at a real estate office on Harrison Avenue, and the man had come out and walked through the rooms with his hands in his pockets and said, very kindly, that he could list it at fifteen-five, and that he would be honest with them, there were eleven hundred houses for sale in Butte-Silver Bow right now and he did not know where the buyers were going to come from.
The thing they had said out loud at the kitchen table was Gillette.
Gordie had a cousin who ran a dragline at the Black Thunder mine down in the Powder River Basin, south of Gillette, Wyoming, where the coal lay in seams eighty feet thick under the sagebrush and the trains went out full a mile and a half long, day and night. His cousin said they were hiring. He said a man who could run a 2800 shovel could run anything they had, and they paid fourteen an hour, and you could get a doublewide on a lot in Gillette for about what you'd get for a house in Butte, if you could get anything for a house in Butte. Gordie had an interview at the mine office on the third of January. He'd drive down on the second. If it went right, he'd start in February, and Lauren and Mandy would come down when school let out in June, or sooner, if they could swing it.
Lauren said all the right things. She said Gillette sounded fine, a growing town, good for Mandy. She kept a Folgers can on the top shelf of the pantry, behind the Christmas cookie tins, and every night she came home from the Gallus Frame and emptied her apron pocket into it, the quarters and dimes and the occasional dollar bill, and on Sundays she counted it and wrote the total in pencil on a strip of masking tape on the lid and crossed out last week's. Moving money, they called it. Three hundred and eighty-six dollars and forty cents, as of the eleventh of December. She did all of this without complaint, carefully and steadily, the way she did everything, and she did not tell Gordie, or her mother in Anaconda, or anybody, that some nights she lay awake at two in the morning listening to the furnace come on and go off and thought that if she had to leave Butte she would die of it, she would just quietly die, like a plant you pull up and set on the porch.
It was a stupid thing to feel. She knew it was stupid. Butte was a hole in the ground with a town around it, and the hole was filling up with poison water, and her father had died of it, and her grandfather before him, and half the men she'd grown up with were going to Gillette or Elko, or to the bar at the M&M at ten in the morning. There was nothing to stay for.
But she had never lived anywhere else. That was the trouble. She did not know how.
Gordie, meanwhile, was working. Not much of a job, but more than most had. A man named Stu Brennock had a business out of a garage on Front Street called Brennock Property Services, and what it mostly did, in the winter of 1983, was close up houses. The banks were taking them back by the dozen, from men who had stopped making payments in July and August and September, and when a bank took a house back in Butte in December, somebody had to go in before the pipes froze and burst and turned the asset into a ruin. Somebody had to shut off the water, blow out the lines, pour pink RV antifreeze into the toilets and traps, and put a new lock on the door. Winterizing, Stu called it. Gordie called it closing the eyes. He did six or seven a week, for five dollars an hour cash. Sometimes there were dishes still in the sink and children's drawings on the refrigerator, and those nights he sat in the truck in front of the house a long time before he came in.
"Got a big one next week," he said, on the night of the fourteenth, at supper. Lauren had brought home a pan of Stevo's leftover pasties, and they were eating them with ketchup, the way her father had, which Gordie's mother considered a crime against God. "The Carrigan Rooms, up on Galena. You know it? Old miners' rooming house. Four floors."
"I know it," Lauren said. Everybody knew it. It was a tall narrow brick building on West Galena, a block below Main, with CARRIGAN ROOMS — BY THE DAY OR WEEK — CLEAN — QUIET painted in fading white letters four feet high on the side wall, so that you could read it from halfway down the Hill. Single men had lived in it, mostly, for seventy years. Miners without families. Men from Cornwall and County Cork and Croatia and the Iron Range, who had come out to Butte at eighteen to go underground and had never married and had grown old in a room twelve feet by ten with a sink and a radiator and a window on the alley.