Boyd stood, gathering her backpack. She wondered how long she would have to walk with them to start the movement again. She stepped in their direction, falling into place between them. The record started again, and the lantern swung in the woman’s clawlike hand.
A sense of breathing, of heart beating: everything coming back to life. The earth made round and whole. The light glancing over the stone: tick, tock, tick, tock. The long, slow exhale of the night. Boyd walked two, three steps between them—tinkling, tinkling, ice breaking on a lake’s surface—and their ghost engines revved and here they all went, a procession across the countryside, lit by the lurching light.
A few steps—one, two, three—and she stepped to the side to let Caleb’s father pass. She thought he would continue into the night, following the woman’s siren song, and for a moment he did.
He tinkled on, his gaze forward, his feet moving but not moving, and she thought she would return to the rock and rest for a while, until she felt the hand on her shoulder again. She thought they probably had three more enactments of this drama before dawn, at which time, Boyd assumed, the couple would disappear and she would continue her search for Isaac, though she imagined she’d be pretty tired. She had been close, she thought, to Isaac when night had fallen, but she could not say how far or in what direction he lay now.
The tinkling—now, for Boyd, the background noise of the deep night—so ubiquitous that it had become texture. When it stopped, she thought that they had gone. But no. The man was still there to her left.
And now his head swiveled to face hers, making eye contact for the first time in hours.
She stepped back, swallowing, exposed and unprepared to be acknowledged. A fear lodged deep in her chest: here she was, set loose in the world, unarmed and vulnerable. Here was the world, neither good nor evil, coming for her.
Eye contact—two, three seconds—and Boyd was so frightened that tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. She could not read his expression in the dark and felt nothing from him emotionally.
He said, “Go back. This way is not for you.” A new track on that vinyl record, one she wasn’t supposed to see, and she understood that if she followed them, the night would never end. He turned away, tinkling, moving forward, gliding again, but not quite slipping neatly back into the groove in which he was supposed to travel. “It’s almost too late for you.”
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here
The Stories Are Many, and They Don’t All Agree
If we start to tell the story of the Lost San Saba Mine, a good place to start is with Coronado’s Children, a book written almost a hundred years ago, in 1930, by J. Frank Dobie and subtitled Tales of Lost Mines and Buried Treasures of the Southwest:
Sometimes the name of the fabled source of wealth is Los Almagres; sometimes Las Amarillas; again, La Mina de las Iguanas, or Lizard Mine, from the fact that the ore is said to have been found in chunks called iguanas (lizards); oftener the name is simply the Lost San Saba Mine or the Lost Bowie Mine. In seeking it, generations of men have disemboweled mountains, drained lakes, and turned rivers out of their courses. It has been found—and lost—in many places under many conditions. It is here; it is there; it is nowhere. Generally it is silver; sometimes it is gold. Sometimes it is in a cave; sometimes in water; again on top of a mountain. Now it is not a mine at all but an immense storage of bullion. It changes its place like will-o’-the-wisp and it has more shapes than Jupiter assumed in playing lover.
Only the land that hides it does not change. Except that it is brushier, groomed down in a few places by little fields, and cut across by fences, it is today essentially as the Spaniards found it. A soil that cannot be plowed under keeps its traditions—and its secrets. Wherever the mine may be, however it may appear, it has lured, it lures, and it will lure men on. It is bright Glamour, and it is dark and thwarting Fate.
1:30 A.M.
Lucy Maud, having gone up and down the road a few times, thought that they were getting nowhere. “Y’all,” she told the two men riding with her, “we’re going to have to get out of the car.”
In the back seat, Allen shifted. “I’ve only got about an hour left on this thing. And I don’t move fast these days.”
She looked at him in the rearview mirror. “How many people are out there right now? Three?” She gestured to the open window. “And Boyd’s somewhere out there, too. Sitting in this car and driving up and down this road feels like it’s doing something. But it’s not.”
Kevin, called into the appearance of action, spoke up. “What’s out here? Could they have ended up at someone’s house?”
Click, whir. “Nothing. Nobody lives out here. It’s miserable on this road. Damn near close to a desert. All rock and scrub trees.”
“Then where the hell could they have gone?” She felt on the verge of some outburst, not quite panic, but absolute frustration that she didn’t know what to do or how to fix this.
“I guess it’s possible that they ran into Ruben King,” Allen said after a minute. “They might all be together right now.”
“At the mine shaft?” When Lucy Maud said it, Allen Potivar kicked the back of her seat.
Kevin caught the kick and started paying more attention.
Allen sighed and then, having released too much oxygen, took quick breaths through his cannula nosepiece. “See, this is why I didn’t want to tell anybody.”
“Tell anybody what?” Kevin blinked at him, all innocence. She knew that face. You can trust me, that face said.
Lucy Maud hit the steering wheel. “What am I supposed to say about Ruben’s whereabouts? You just said they might be together.”
“I don’t want anybody else knowing about it.” In the back seat, Allen crossed his arms across his chest. She thought he might be pouting.
“In case you didn’t know,” she said, knowing very well that he didn’t, “Kevin is a classics professor. He’s been on a few archaeological digs in his time.”
“Ah, yes,” Kevin said, putting on a professor’s voice. “Quite a few. All over the Mediterranean world, actually, though I’m not an archaeologist. The most interesting one was on Thera, a Greek island many believe might be Atlantis, and where the project was excavating an archaic site—”
“Kevin”—she put a hand on his knee—“give it a rest.” She left her hand there and looked at Allen in the rearview mirror. “Kevin’s not after your money.”
Allen squinted at her, his expression asking her to please give him a break. “It’d be just as bad to have a bunch of professors out here poking around.” After a minute he added, “It’s not artifacts. It’s silver.” He shook his head, disgusted with himself that he’d said that much.
She took off her seat belt. “Silver?” She put one hand on Kevin’s headrest, turning to look at Allen. “But Maximilian’s treasure is supposed to be gold.”
“You don’t think there’s silver, too?”
“And isn’t it supposed to be in barrels? Is the stuff you found in barrels?”
Another exasperated sigh and then the sharp intakes of breath. “You know you can’t believe everything you hear.” He said can’t “cain’t,” the way her aunt Fern did.
“I know I believe we’re getting out of this car.” She turned off the engine and opened the door.
“I only got an hour left on this thing,” Allen said again.
“Well, we better hurry.” Kevin wasn’t moving. “You coming?”
He jumped and unsnapped his seat belt. “Oh, you want me to come this time?”
“Yes.” Otherwise he’d be another soul adrift in this mist. She turned back to Allen. “Once you take us to Ruben, you can head back.” She thought for a minute and added, “As long as I think we can find our way back.” It hadn’t yet occurred to her that she might become one of the lost people, but this new thought made her nervous. She wondered again if Lou had found Aunt Fern, if they were now together.
She thought about leaving her car door open so Lou
and Fern would see the light if they stumbled this way. But no, a raccoon or a possum might crawl into the car seeking dinner or refuge. Then she thought about just leaving the dome light on, but she didn’t do this either. She knew, even if they were only gone half an hour, that if she left the light on, she’d return to a dead battery, to a car stuck in the night. She hoped that if Fern and Lou came this way, they would stay at the car and wait for Lucy Maud and Kevin, and she left a note under the windshield wiper, hoping that they would see it. She didn’t want them found and then lost again.
Allen Potivar led the way slowly, taking measured breaths and carrying his oxygen generator like a lunch box. “We’re still going out here without a damn flashlight,” he said, “making the same mistake twice.”
Kevin ran back for the flashlight from the glove compartment.
But the flashlight was no match for the night, illuminating a tiny fraction of their path, and she could see Allen getting frustrated by Kevin’s unsteady hand with it. If this were a movie, they’d all be carrying torches, a column of fire lighting their way, but this was no movie and she was skeptical about those movie torches anyway. She took the flashlight from Kevin and handed it to Allen. “Thanks,” she told Kevin, as if that had been his plan with the flashlight all along.
They left the road and cut across open country, and when the flashlight’s beam fell on the ground, she saw the distinctive needles of pine trees, though she knew of no pines in this area. They were thick, swollen with rain, all pointing more or less in the same direction, washed by floodwaters and come to rest on this limestone floor. The air was thick, rich with velvet moisture. It would be a lake summer; they hadn’t had one in years. Last year, Lake Travis had been at 31 percent of capacity, and what water had been left had pooled in the bottom, stagnant.
When they’d gone one hundred yards, Lucy Maud knew that she’d need Allen to find the way back to the road. She guessed she could turn around and walk in the opposite direction and hope, but nothing looked remarkable to her. They were on no clear path, and nothing indicated direction. The only thing keeping Lucy Maud and Kevin from being swallowed by the night was grumpy, territorial Allen Potivar, clicking and whirring in front of them. She wanted to talk to him, to ask him questions, but she could tell he was struggling to breathe.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here
The Floods That Year Were Devastating
That year, the highways became rivers, and twenty-five hundred vehicles were left behind, a parking lot slowly sinking as the water rose, the clearest sign of apocalypse yet. In the countryside for weeks after, the vultures circled the river banks, pecking the eyes of the giant carp that had been caught in barbed wire when the rivers crested the fences.
Steve Thuber, the mayor of Wimberley, told CNN how unprecedented the rise of the Blanco River had been: “In 1929,” he said, “we had a thirty-three-and-a-half foot surge come through. That was the highest on record. This one topped out at forty-four and a half feet before we lost communications with the gauge.” Everywhere, records were broken, the collected highs and lows of a century discarded in a matter of days.
1:45 A.M.
The first rain after so long without gives everything a different smell. It had been raining for two days now, but Allen Potivar’s hill had been so sere before, it was as if this gravel, this inch or so of topsoil, were seeing rain, even now, for the first time, and the smell—the smell was of deep moss and algae, of secret life underneath the surface.
Lucy Maud thought about Ruben King, trying to remember anything about the man. That was unfair. There was plenty to remark upon. He was into history, for one; if he were walking with them now, he’d be able to tell her what had happened in this spot, whether it had been held by Comanche or Apache, whether Spain had set up a mission here, or how the Anglos had come into this country. When Boyd had been in school, she’d been quite taken with Ruben King; it was how she’d met Isaac. Texas history had been fascinating to Boyd, and Lucy Maud remembered that Boyd had borrowed so many books from Ruben: Roy Bedichek, John Graves, J. Frank Dobie. Lucy Maud, who had grown up in a little town outside San Antonio, had been shocked by Boyd’s interest in the subject; to Lucy Maud, Jim Bowie was as distant and hard to imagine as George Washington or Benjamin Franklin. For Lucy Maud, the subject was academic: the books said this happened at this place on this day. But Boyd felt the presence of a real person who had been in the world and was now not. Boyd saw a chain of cause and effect that extended down to her—somebody did something so something happened so something else happened—and she knew, too, that she was both cause and effect. This long view of place had been something Ruben King had tapped into.
This image Lucy Maud had of Ruben aligned with the vision she held of so many other people in the Texas Hill Country. She knew he’d gone to UT in the late eighties, too old to be a real hippie, but following in those footsteps nevertheless. She imagined him as a student, eating the whole-wheat deep dish at Conans Pizza or a Greek salad at Miltos, wearing Birkenstocks while everybody else was wearing Keds, a joint tucked into his shirt pocket for in between classes. He could never have been anything but what he was, had made the kind of life he’d hoped for all along. She was not this person, but she had to admit she understood it; something in this sky and air, this low mix of tree and stone, was enough.
Why had he never remarried after divorcing Isaac’s mother? She could not remember if she’d ever known the story and could only recall brief flashes of the woman: very blond with a round face and a heavy body.
Lucy Maud remembered picking Boyd up at Isaac’s house once—Boyd must have been twelve or thirteen—and Ruben and his then wife—Melissa, maybe?—had been on the front porch playing “Uncle John’s Band,” both of them with acoustic guitars, though Lucy Maud could plainly see in the few seconds that elapsed before they stopped playing that Ruben was better at it, more natural with the guitar on his lap, his fingers more adept at picking out the bridge. Melissa’s voice had been too high, but she had been enthusiastic in an endearing way. Boyd had heard Lucy Maud’s car and had come out of the house, and Ruben and Melissa had turned toward her with such looks on their faces that Lucy Maud had felt a surprising pang of jealousy. How long ago had Melissa left? It occurred to Lucy Maud that she never asked Isaac about his family.
They had slowed to a crawl, Allen struggling with the flashlight, the oxygen generator, and breathing in general. She did not know how much farther they had to go, so she caught up to him, took the flashlight, and led him to a group of limestone boulders. They sat for a few minutes, the click and whir blending in with the sounds of the late-night insects, and after a while, Lucy Maud discovered that she could see better without the flashlight, her eyes having adjusted to the dim, so she switched it off.
Kevin was the first to speak. “Can you imagine being out here like this one hundred years ago?”
This was so close to what Lucy Maud had been thinking that she straightened in surprise.
Allen tried to answer, gasping between words. “Guess I’d’ve died a long time ago.”
Lucy Maud tried to cheer him up. “Hey, we all would have. If we made it through childbirth. No antibiotics.”
“But some people made it,” Kevin said. “You hear all of these old stories about people, sometimes eighty or ninety, being taken off their land and put in nursing homes. Seems like I knew three or four people that happened to in the late seventies and early eighties.”
“How horrible.” Lucy Maud didn’t know why she thought it was horrible; this felt like a knee-jerk reaction. If she thought about it objectively, a nursing home was probably better than living out on some road like this, all by yourself.
“You better shoot me first,” Allen said. Lucy Maud thought he was probably close enough to eighty for this conversation to make him uncomfortable.
Now that the flashlight had been shut off, the moon was starting to be enough, and in some ways, it illuminated more. She could see the shine of sc
alp underneath Kevin’s hair, something she would never have noticed in full daylight. Well, they were getting old, weren’t they? For the past decade, she had felt older than him—though the opposite was true—and now he was catching up to her. She found some satisfaction in this: maybe the grad student would notice. The grad student was in her midtwenties, closer to Boyd’s age than to Lucy Maud’s, and would surely notice her fifty-year-old boyfriend aging.
Kevin, unaware that Lucy Maud was sizing him up, continued, “Can you imagine the pioneers who stopped here and said, ‘This is as good a place as any’?”
“What I don’t understand is that all the old stories said there was a rock that looked like a castle and two hills that formed a window,” Allen said. “There’s nothing like that out here.”
She looked around. There were hills, but they didn’t see anything in the dark that looked like a castle. She also wasn’t as familiar with Nameless Road as he was. “How much longer you got?”
He glanced down at the condenser. “I can’t see the gauge. But, oh, about forty-five minutes or so. I’ll have to turn around in about fifteen. Y’all don’t want me to die out here, do you?”
She nodded, taking in the information, not answering him. No, she didn’t want him to die. “How much farther do you think we’ve got?”
He sighed. “I think we’ve got further than fifteen minutes.” He stood. “Especially if I keep sitting here.” He moved slowly forward, and they followed him. “I’m coming from a different direction this time you know. I’m not coming from my house. The road’s not quite the same.” She wanted to tell him to be quiet, to save the oxygen, but she didn’t. “I found it two days ago. I saw smoke coming from my backcountry. Thought I had a squatter. Followed the smoke to a burned cedar brake. This was just before it started to rain.” He was gasping now, his head and hands shaking with the effort. “But the damn thing was—no squatters, no fire. A cedar brake had been burned—there was a scorched spot and burned branches and a pile of ashes—but when I got to the spot, the smoke disappeared. But you could tell the place had burned. Just it seemed like a long time ago. Everything was cold.” He rested his hands on his knees, his head hanging. “And then I saw that hole in the ground.”
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here Page 18