Down the Throat of the Mountain

by Jennifer Erickson

  Rudy said, "I tell you the place I'd dig if I was you. I’ll take you up there tomorrow and show you."

  "Not this again," mumbled the saloon keeper.

  Rudy whispered, "Them Indians says it's a cave of riches beyond anything you can imagine, but they don't mine it on account of their gods will get mad."

  "Well, I don't believe in no Indian gods."

  "Me neither. It's ripe for the pickin', boys."

  "Don't know what the hell he’s talking about," the saloon keeper said.

  "Were I talking to you?" Rudy roared. "No. I were not."

  The next morning, they bargained with the saloon keeper for a pickaxe and a pound of flour. Two days later, Rudy and the Johnson boys stood, puffing, at the edge of an aspen grove, where every turning leaf looked like a golden coin and they rattled gently in the breeze. On the trees hung strips of red cloth and moccasins. A stream trickled down from the snow-dusted summits, and at the edge of this glade, which seemed to fairly sparkle with possibilities and the fearsome power of their future, was a crumbling limestone cliff.

  At the base of the cliff, the three boys crawled through a slot and emerged into a cave. By the light of a candle, they saw a tiny, rock lined pool strewn with arrows and knives, beads and feathers. A knee-high stump of white rock rose from the middle of the pool.

  A voice in Paul's head seemed to call, "This is your future," but it also whispered, "This will be your undoing." He glanced at his brother, who had frozen in place, his face inscrutable.

  "Did you hear something?"

  "Nobody said nothin', right?"

  "I ain't heard nothin'," said Rudy.

  As winter set in, they widened the mouth of the cave, dug up the floor, hacked out the stump of rock and dragged it into the daylight. It sparkled but it wasn't gold. They traded it for a rusted shovel.

  The boys dug and hacked, planned and speculated. They never did find any gold. No golden Indian idols, no placer deposits, no promising quartz veins. Nothing.

  Rudy moved into the cave. He said it was more comfortable than their leaky log lean-to. The brothers tried it for awhile. Strange things happened, things they didn't discuss, as though speaking them aloud would make them more real. Time ran forward and backward. Sometimes when Paul woke up, he couldn't sort out his dreams from reality. Before too long, the brothers moved back to the lean-to. Out there, their heads felt clearer. Rudy refused to leave the cave, and increasingly talked of things they didn't understand (or want to): the past, the future, as though it were all one, and furthermore flexible. As though a thing could simultaneously happen and not happen. As though the past could be changed.

  They ran out of money, ran out of food.

  Rudy ranted in the cave and periodically tossed a bucket of rock on the tailings pile, frozen in the winter snow. The brothers avoided each other's eye, left a little marmot or porcupine meat at the mouth of the cave whenever they got some, dug desultory holes here and there. Never found a thing but rock and more rock.

  Deep in the longest night of the winter, the ranting stopped. Paul and Edward waited until light, then crept to the cave opening, peered into the shadows and then into each other's gaunt faces.

  Rudy was dead, facedown in the dirt. Paul thought they should eat him. Edward thought they might catch whatever sickness he'd had. In the end, they ate him because they were hungry and the world didn't make sense any more anyway.

  Come spring, three dark-skinned men in soft deer hide leggings walked into camp, bent to peek into the lean-to where the two brothers huddled, confused and gaunt with hunger.

  "Waaa!" one of them shouted, then laughed as the brothers fled into the bush. Paul thought they might be the spirits Rudy had ranted about, come to take back their cave. Edward convinced him they were Indians. The brothers hid behind a tree and watched the three men duck into the cave, which still contained some of Rudy's bones.

  The Indians picked up Paul and Edward's pickaxe, discussed it among themselves. One of them crawled into the sagging lean-to and chucked out a wool blanket and a precious hunk of flint. Paul tried to restrain Edward by the tail of his shirt, but Edward leapt from his hiding place and yelled at them to get the hell away from his stuff. He aimed their Walker Colt, pulled the trigger, and it exploded in his hand, blowing off half his face. That was the last thing Edward ever did. He dropped dead, which seemed to surprise the Indians as much as it did Paul. And, of course, it must have surprised Edward, too.

  The Indians argued about what to do with Paul. They must have decided not to kill him, because they sat him down and lectured him, half in English, half in gibberish. Something about how the place allowed one's spirit to fly, and the danger of one's spirit getting lost, never returning. They also told him to put back everything that had been removed from the cave, or there would be consequences.

  Paul told them to take their savage-asses packing.

  And then a thing happened that Paul had seen before in his imagination in several different ways. But this was the present, and it only happened the one way, probably.

  A stranger appeared, another white man, at the top of the cliff behind the Indians. The stranger put his finger to his lips, crept to the edge of the cliff, loaded his musket, took aim. Thunder echoed in the valley. Paul heard the ball whistle past. The Indians spun around, shot off a volley of arrows. The stranger loaded again. Paul covered his head with his arms, cowered and hoped for the best. The second thunder never came. The Indians melted away.

  For a long time, Paul stayed still. He pretended that Edward was still alive, that everything could be okay. When he started to shiver, he realized that he couldn't sit there forever.

  "We had a good adventure, didn't we?" he comforted his dead brother, trying not to look at his mangled face as he laid him out and covered him with their best wool blanket. "At least we got to see the world."

  Then Paul remembered the savior he had almost, but not quite, expected. He found him on a faint game trail just above the cliff, fallen over on his side, gripping an arrow shaft protruding from his chest and crying. Paul knew there was nothing he could do to help, so he poked around in the bushes until he found a lichen-covered slab of rock. It took all of his strength to pry it from the frozen ground. Paul removed the man's hat, put it on his own head, then lifted the rock and slammed it into the other man's face. He had to do it twice.

  The man's boots were in decent shape. His musket was even older than Paul's revolver, but it worked and there was some powder. Paul took that as well. Then he went through the man's filthy pockets and found a stick of rotting jerky and a handkerchief full of gold.

  He had known that this claim would bring him gold, somehow. Right there, he christened his mine the Long Shot Lode. When he made his way back to the nearest settlement a week later, he deemed it best not to mention the source of his fortune in gold. After all, he did find it on his claim, and it was nobody's business how it had gotten there.

  Chapter 4

  The year was 1862. Just before noon on a fine spring day, Charlotte and Zeke finished their solemn vows and ran, laughing, out of the minister's house. They hopped onto the cart that Zeke had filched from his uncle, and bumped out of town, pulled by two infuriatingly slow oxen. It was important to get across the Missouri river before Charlotte's parents caught up to them.

  Zeke loved her! Forever! He'd promised in front of a minister! She glowed with the glamour of it all...at first. But the trail to Denver took weeks and weeks. There was dust and mud. Biting flies. Wind whistled in her ears until she thought she'd go crazy. The romance of fleeing across the prairie wore thin. Their bacon rotted. Zeke mauled her every night. She was sore and sticky between her legs.

  Graves marked the trail. Garbage. Dead horses. Once, even, a piano. That was sadder than the graves for her. At the end of each day, Charlotte was too exhausted to sleep.

  By late summer, the oxen sagged and stumbled. The grass was gone and the oxen were walking skeletons. Charlotte and Zeke poked and yelled to make
them go faster.

  They turned loose the weaker ox. Left it splay-footed and panting in the sun, next to an iron cooking pot and Charlotte's trunk of clothes. Charlotte kept turning to look until it disappeared over the horizon, weeping for the poor ox, and for her beautiful but impractical brown velvet dress, folded so carefully into that heavy trunk.

  They arrived in Denver penniless. The flour was almost gone. Zeke had promised streets paved with gold. But no, if the streets were paved with anything at all, it was shit, trampled into the dust. It was the saddest, most desolate place Charlotte had ever seen. She longed for home, for her mother, but she knew she could never go back. Mother had said fifteen was too young to marry. Mother had warned her about Zeke, and Charlotte had laughed in her face.

  Zeke disappeared into a saloon. Charlotte sat on the cart in the dusty road for the whole afternoon, waiting for him. Of course, girls weren't permitted in saloons. The ox collapsed to its knees, too tired to twitch away the flies.

  Wild-eyed men swarmed the road, liquor on their breath. They eddied around the cart, leering at Charlotte. This was worse, much worse than the land of bones they'd travelled to get here.

  There was not another girl or woman to be seen.

  Charlotte sat straighter, murmured soothing words to the bony ox, refused to meet the men's eyes. She had to urinate so badly, it was like a hot coal in her belly.

  Finally, finally, when she felt stretched so taught that she might just--ping!-- fly apart, Zeke leaned out of the canvas flap.

  Charlotte sighed with relief.

  Zeke stepped the rest of the way out. She tried to form her lips into a smile of greeting. His face was strangely slack.

  A man in a filthy white vest followed Charlotte's husband. Zeke pointed at Charlotte. The other man nodded.

  "Charlotte, get off the box," said Zeke, and his words seemed too round and full for his mouth.

  After sitting rigid so long, she shook as she clambered down.

  The man in the vest gestured and another man took the ox by the reins and led him away.

  Charlotte reached for her husband. "What's going on?"

  "None of yer business," mumbled Zeke. His breath smelled of drink. Was he drunk? Her Zeke? He had some weaknesses, as she'd discovered in the last couple of months, but this was new.

  "You sold the ox?"

  "It was either him or you."

  Her cheeks flamed.

  "But you're more valuable," he said.

  She told herself: he is trying to say that he loves me. It's not what it sounds like.

  She nodded stiffly and hung her head so that her grimy bonnet hid her face.

  The money from the sale of the ox and cart was gone. Zeke had gambled it away. What could she say? He was her husband, and the financial decisions were his.

  From Denver City, they walked weary, dusty miles to a small settlement, and from there up a narrow canyon. What were a few more days after the months they'd travelled already?

  On the trail, although the men were rough, they were sweet in their own way. They pressed lumps of dirty bread and dull yellow gold into her palms.

  "If you get tired of him," they would say, "come see me." Or, "This is no place for a lady. See that he takes care of you."

  Zeke was sullen even though she shared her gifts with him.

  Such a long way from Missouri, this shadowy place. She was used to open sky, cropland and pasture. As they gained altitude, snow came down the mountainsides to meet them. Her feet ached on the river crossings and her ladies' boots slipped on the icy trail. A man like a gnarled tree with more gap than tooth produced a pair of thick woolen stockings from his burro's pack and pulled them on over Charlotte's little boots. After that, she was much more sure-footed, and although she never saw the man again, she always remembered him fondly.

  They arrived at a grubby tent city which surrounded a saloon. Actually, the sign said: "wisky". It sat at the base of a rocky slope at the confluence of two muddy streams, and the sunshine never crested the canyon walls during all the day. Men crouched along the stream, shoveling river gravel into wooden rockers and sluices, looking for nuggets of gold.

  Zeke disappeared into the saloon. Charlotte sagged, shivery, onto a nearby boulder, too tired to wonder what might happen next.

  The locals watched her the way you might gaze at a little bird, singing in a tree. Except in this place there were no birds and no trees. Just stumps.

  An enormous mongrel with matted black fur walked straight up and rested its head on her knee. She stroked him behind his ears.

  Periodically, gunfire sounded from the direction of the saloon. The first couple of times, Charlotte flinched, and as she coaxed her heartbeat down from a gallop, she cocked her ears to listen for cries of agony or despair, fear or anger, but there was always just laughter and hubbub. The shooting continued, with a long enough interval between each shot to persuade her that maybe it was the last.

  Until the last shot. The mongrel looked up. Then, she distinctly heard someone say, "Oh, hell! You stupid..."

  She turned to the log and canvas saloon, as though she could see through the walls. The laughter had died. The hubbub stopped bubbling. The men around her seemed to hold their breath. Another shot punctuated the silence.

  Long minutes passed.

  No one moved.

  Then a wizened little fellow with a belt wrapped twice around his waist slipped through the canvas door flap, half-turned his head Charlotte's direction, then ambled Charlotte's way, like he didn't like where his feet were taking him. The dog leaned on Charlotte's leg with enough weight to pinion her in place.

  "Well..." said the little fellow. "Well...we was shootin' rats, and it seems ol' Slim mistake him for one, an' it seems he has gone to his maker." He snatched the battered hat off his head as an afterthought. "You'll be relieved to know, I'z sure, that we dain't let 'im suffer."

  "Who?"

  "You is the wife of that curly-head boy, ain't you?"

  Then a funny thing happened to Charlotte. A tiny ray of sunshine reached all the way down into the bottom of that canyon and she swore she felt its warmth on the top of her head. That was before she slid to the ground.

  A few yards uphill, they folded Zeke's body into a shallow pit and piled rocks on top. They coaxed Charlotte up there with soft words, nudged a stool against the backs of her knees so that she collapsed onto it.

  "Aye, but I walk to the Valley of Death, uh, but fear no evil. My ashes turn to dust. May he rest in peace," said the little man with the double-wrapped belt. He looked up. "Anybody got anything?"

  "Amen," said one of the other men.

  "Amen," they echoed.

  She awoke the next morning in a heap of pine boughs, covered by a buffalo robe, in the corner of a dirt-floored cabin. She flicked aside the blanket partitioning her from the rest of the room. In the light of glowing coals in the fire pit she could pick out the shadowy lumps of several men on the floor.

  Maybe she should have felt frightened. She should have been sad. But all she felt was grateful.

  Charlotte rose and tiptoed between the men, stepped outside to relieve herself before the men woke up.

  She paused as an owl hooted, "HOO-hoo-hoo," and watched a tinge of purple lighten the sky to the east, in the black vee of the canyon walls. It was surprisingly warm. The air smelled of wood smoke and pine.

  As Charlotte turned back toward the cabin, a shadow separated itself from the general darkness and moved toward her. She stifled a squeak of alarm.

  "I didn't mean to startle you, Miss...Ma'am. Could we have a word?"

  Charlotte paused, fingering the buttons at her neck.

  He continued, "I know that this might seem a bit quick, since your husband just passed yesterday but I've been thinking...You'll need a man to watch out for you. I need a wife, and I'd be proud to have you. Mighty proud."

  "But I don't even know your name."

  "I'm McCoy."

  Ah. Her host. Owner of the log cab
in, the stool and the buffalo robe. She remembered a tall man, less filthy that the others, who had tried so hard to make her comfortable. She supposed she did owe him and he really might make a decent husband. Certainly no worse than the one she'd arrived with. "I'm sorry, McCoy, I just couldn't see you clearly."

  "You don't have to decide right now," he said.

  That was her first proposal. By mid-morning, she was hiding in the back of McCoy's cabin and the entire population of the valley milled about outside. McCoy stood at the door, revolver in hand.

  "Give us a look, McCoy."

  "You're holdin' out on us and it ain't fair."

  "Let the lady decide for herself who she'll marry."

  Charlotte was both frightened and flattered. If the men back home in Missouri had gotten this worked up over her, she might not have run away with worthless Zeke, who got himself mistaken for a rat.

  "Let her come out and talk to us or we'll shoot ye', by God!"

  McCoy slipped in the door and said, "Miss Charlotte, Ma'am, I think they're serious."

  Charlotte had come to the same conclusion. Plus, she wanted to get a look at her choices. Perhaps she could do better. Perhaps a rich man, well-dressed. This time she wouldn't just take the first fast-talker who came her way.

  So she stepped behind her curtain and re-braided her hair, spit into her handkerchief and scrubbed her face, breathed iron into her spine and asked for the stool.

  She perched herself just outside McCoy's door, arranged her muddy skirts around her as the men fell silent. "Each gentleman may speak two sentences to me," she whispered.

  McCoy repeated her stipulation in a booming voice that echoed off the canyon walls. "And no touching!"

  The men pushed and wrestled for the privilege of speaking to Charlotte. The first few squandered their words with introductions and how-do-you-do's. After that, her suitors got more creative. Some tried jokes. Others used compliments. It was all a blur, until Paul.