As I was telling you earlier, about when I was working on the tunnel crew one summer while I was in college, tunnel workers are hard drinkers. A professional tunneler, I don’t know when he sleeps. Digging and drinking is what they live for.

There are tunneler bars. Although I’ve drunk in them myself, the idea still strikes me as odd, since tunnelers are such an itinerant group, moving from job to job, digging a subway tunnel in this town, a freeway tunnel in that town. But somehow they always manage to find a bar where filthy dirty men are tolerated, and they always congregate there.

Not that there are ever alot of tunnelers around at any one time. Most people never notice them; maybe most people never go into those bars.

So I was in this tunneler bar in the Fremont area, this was a long time ago, twenty five years ago or so, in the shadow of this big freeway bridge over a canal. It was really a biker bar but there was never any trouble I know of, the tunnelers all sat at a couple tables and a booth over in one corner by the jukebox. I don’t remember what music was played. I would imagine heavy metal – some sort of heavy metal, whatever big guys with beards and leather clothes usually listen to.

I was supposed to meet some friends that night for a few beers somewhere else, but Ed had dragged me along with him, don’t ask me why. Ed was the head tunneler, when we tunneled he worked at the front of the crew. He was a short guy who shaved his head, although he was covered with fine black hair everywhere else. He looked like that British actor, Bob Hoskins, except for his hands. He had hands that didn’t fit his body. They reminded me of hubcaps, that big, and just as hairy as his thick forearms, and with fingernails like black claws. He never shook my hand and I was glad.

I don’t know why he took me along. Maybe he thought no other tunnelers would be there that night and didn’t want to drink alone. Normally the professional guys on the crew ignored the local helpers, unless they were calling us punks. You were a tunneler or a punk.

While he was up in front, digging with his pick and his shovel, sometimes dislodging a rock with those bare hands, I and my fellow punks were in back shoveling dirt and stones into our wheelbarrows and carting the debris to the mouth of the tunnel, where it was loaded into trucks.

So Ed was like, “let’s get a drink, punk.” And I was like, “sure, Ed.” Cause, bottom line, Ed was definitely more interesting than any friends I had who’d stayed in town that summer. And then I was like, “shit, a biker bar.” Although I didn’t say that out loud.

It was quiet, a Tuesday or a Wednesday and not very late yet. We got a couple pitchers right away and sat in the corner. Boxing was on television. I had my back to the set but could sort of keep track of the action by watching the reflections in Ed’s eyes.

“Tell me about yourself,” he said. I did. It didn’t take me very long. I didn’t have much of a life story yet, although he seemed to listen to my story about dating the millionaire sisters.

I asked him how he got into tunneling. He said it was a family thing.

“You should have seen my father.” Dirt fell off some part of him onto the table. He paused to brush it onto the floor. “He was the real tunneler in the family.”

The more he drank, the harder it was to watch the boxing reflected in his eyes. Either that was because his eyes were, physically, growing less reflective (which I assumed then), or I was drinking too and that was affecting my perception (which I believe now).

“I never knew my dad, just the stories my mother told me. He didn’t run off, if that’s what you’re thinking. He was a hero. He was in Nebraska someplace digging a rescue shaft into a collapsed mine. You can imagine the time pressure they were under. They were digging twenty-four hours a day non-stop. They didn’t have fancy machinery back then like we do now. This job we’re on here, you know, the picks and shovels and pneumatic drills – that’s because we’re doing this drainage tunnel under that fancy residential neighborhood. Normally we’d use a big drill. Back in my father’s day, though, it was stinky loud diesel generators running the drills, it was men going deaf in there with no ear protection, yelling all the time, breathing the fumes, trying to get to the miners inside.”

Ed’s pitcher was empty, and he reached over to take mine. I sort of slid it over to him, and his thick arm touched mine. I shivered as his hair brushed across my skin. It was so, so soft. It looked bristly, thick and black, but it was like silk or velour or something.

“It was unstable geology which is why they couldn’t go in with any bigger rigs,” he went on. “That’s also why the other tunnel collapsed in the first place. When they got close, they had to turn off the carbide lights they wore to reduce the danger of explosion. I told you my father was blind, didn’t I?”

“No, you didn’t mention it. He was blind?”

“Yeah, another accident. He worked by feel mostly. It was pretty cramped in the places he worked, that wasn’t a big problem for him. So anyway he worked just as well in the dark as he did in the light. He was up in front of the crew digging when the tunnel fell in. Some of the guys who got out say he saved them by propping up the ceiling long enough for them to get out.”

“I’m sorry, Ed.”

“Well, they never found him. They cleaned it out, you know, finished the tunnel to get to the miners inside, some actually were saved too, but they never found him. Mom says they told her that mine was his grave.”

He got a weird look. “But I think he tunneled out.”

“But then…” I started.

“I don’t think he abandoned us, though. I think being crushed like that would change you, is all. Digging out through rock with your bare hands, being buried, you know. It would change the way you think about things. He’s still tunneling somewhere.”

“And you are too.” I realized that’s what Ed was doing up at the front of the crew all the time, hoping to find his old man. Clawing ancient smooth river stones out of the gravel with those hands, one by one.

He probably still is, stupid fucker.