With the detective, Ron had walked through Sims’ house, a restored turn-of-the-century Victorian gingerbread with no closets. Posters covered the living room walls, all children. Except for the kitchen, blocked with yellow crime-scene tape and the outline of Sims’ body on the floor, the rooms were meticulously tidy. Magazines on the coffee table were fanned out perfectly, the same half-inch overlap on each. On Sims’ dresser in the bedroom, a line of brass padlocks stood like sentinels in a military row. They were the only decoration. Ron wondered what could make a man like Sims. Couldn’t love have saved him? Love, pure love, might have kept Sims from hating, just as pure love would find his son. The police didn’t love Levi enough to find him.
The detective shook his head. “If he hadn’t shot himself, we could ask him. But he did. We’ve had crews up and down the area. If your son were there, we would have found him. He might have lasted a week without food. Only a couple days without water. It’s been a month. Sims buried his victims. I’m sorry to have to say it this way, but I’d guess your boy is in a shallow grave.”
Ron gripped the arms of the chair to keep from leaping at the man. “There’s bonds between a father and his son. I’d know if he had died.”
“The department can arrange counseling, if you request it,” the detective said.
“You’re not a father, are you?” Ron looked past the detective. Black and white photographs hung on the wall behind him: men standing before a wagon, holding shovels and lunch boxes; a long shot of Central City down main street when it was still dirt; the front of a school, forty or fifty children sitting on the steps, their severe looking teacher standing behind them with her arms crossed.
Ron touched the hard edge of the plastic building brick sitting on the dashboard and thought about the kids in the school a hundred years ago no different than his own boy, all dead by now for sure, and Levi who might not be. Razor-edged stars filled the sky through his windshield. The air had cooled, caressing his face through the open windows. This far up the rutted road he couldn’t hear traffic from the highway or crowd noise from the casinos that filled Central City. He canted his head to hear better. Something clicked repetitively in the distance, maybe a night bird or a locust. He wondered if locusts lived this high. For a long time he rested his finger on the brick and listened. The night vibrated with its own muttering. Unidentifiable sounds that he guessed might be the breeze sliding over rocks and through the scrubby grasses. A high squeak that might be a bat. He couldn’t tell. The mountain was perfectly black and the cloudless sky danced with stars that provided no illumination.
He turned on the ceiling light to read the map. If someone saw him from a distance, he thought, he’d look like a time traveler in his craft, light glowing through the windows, unattached to the Earth.
Eventually he turned the light out and fell asleep sitting up, his head pillowed on a jacket against the door, windows still open so he could hear if Levi should call.
Charles slipped out of the cabin before dawn, the eastern sky just barely lighter than the west. The wind came up the valley, and in it he could hear the stamp mills thrumming as they crushed ore.
He trudged up the switch-back trail toward the mine, his hands heavy, his head heavy. Had any child the boy met lived? There weren’t that many children in the camps. The school in Nevadaville had 150 students last year, he’d heard, but there were 10,000 miners in the district. Central City had a small school and so did Blackhawk. Charles had never sent the boy, but he was supposed to go in the fall. The town was growing. More families came in every day. They were building churches.
At the top of the hill, he paused. From here in the pre-sunrise grimness, most of the town was visible in purples and blues. He couldn’t find his own cabin though. Then, he gasped. A black aura like a cloud hid it from him, and for a moment it seemed as if it grew tentacles that flowed down the dirt roads, over the wooden sidewalks, sniffing at each door. The wind rippled the cloud’s top, then blew in his face, carrying the smell of a crypt and the fevered dampness from the Laughlin cabin.
Charles shook his head. There was his cabin! There was no black cloud. He held his hands over his pounding heart. Am I going mad? A hallucination! But the question echoed hollowly. This was not madness. He’d seen the cloud as a vision, a sign. He backed up the trail, afraid to take his gaze away from the cabin.
When a man’s dog goes wild, he shoots him. It’s his responsibility. What was his responsibility as a father of a monster?
When Charles worked the mine that day, he stuffed his pockets with candles, and he kept one lit no matter where he was. The shadows beyond the weak candlelight were like the shadow creeping from his own house.
If Sims had locked Levi in a mine, it would have to have several qualities, Ron thought as he shouldered his pack. Pine lining the mountain top glowed in the morning light, but the sun wouldn’t touch the valley’s bottom for another hour. Ron checked his map and began the long hike up the old road. It had to be both close enough for him to get to, but far enough off the beaten track that it was unlikely anyone would find it. It had to be far enough back that even if Levi screamed for help, no one would hear him. There would be food and water. The question was, how much food and water? Sims wouldn’t have planned on leaving Levi with over a month’s supply.
Each step up the road felt like the ticking of an immense clock counting down. How much time was left? Was Levi even now crouched against a locked gate, light leaking around the edges, on the brink of death by thirst or starvation? If he ran out of water, might there be water in the mine itself that he had been drinking to keep himself alive? Ron thought about Tom Sawyer, not the hijinks of the little boy, but the awful image of Injun Joe trapped in McDougal’s cave. After Ron’s dad had read him that part, Ron had nightmares for months about eating bats while trying to carve through a thick wooden door with a broken knife.
Ron quickened his pace, his calves burning, keeping his eyes open for evidence of tunnels not on his map. He’d followed dozens of faint trails to dead end mines in the last ten days, peered down scores of open shafts, rattled the locks on handfuls of metal gates, always looking for a sign, always listening for Levi’s voice. He crossed from the valley’s shadow into the sunlight, and even this early in the morning the rays heated his shirt. It would be a hot one today.
The road ended at the tumbled remains of a small mill. Busted beams pointed skyward, a skirt of rotten wood at their feet. Ron rested for a moment, his hand against a gray post. Splinters flaked onto his skin. Behind the ruin a narrow path vanished over a ridge. Weeds grew into the twin grooves that were too narrow for an automobile. He imagined steel-rimmed wagon wheels and a cart of ore making its way down the road behind a team of horses. Time seemed irrelevant here. It could be 1880 again, or 2080; the mountains wouldn’t know the difference. But he wasn’t timeless, and the clock counted; every minute passed was another minute that Levi suffered alone. Could an eight-year-old die of fright? What if he believed his daddy had forgotten him? Ron whimpered at the thought.
His photocopied map called this the Sunderson Mill. Above it were several mines: West Yellow Dog, New Baltimore, and Crossroad. Ron spread the map over his knee. Small Xs indicating digs crowded the gulch. There could be ventilation shafts, drainage tunnels, powder storage crypts, false starts, dead ends and full-bore excavations that needed checking.
It would take all day.
“Come with me, boy,” said Charles, his hands shaking. It had taken him several minutes to push open the cabin door. He couldn’t shake the impression of the cloud he’d seen around his house in the morning. It seemed to hover still, insubstantial, but present just the same. The sun shone mutedly through it, and the air felt cooler than it did ten feet away.
“It won’t work,” said the boy. He sat on the edge of his bed, his dark hair disheveled, his gaze steady and challenging.
Charles swallowed hard. “What won’t work?”
“What you are planning.” The boy came toward him
, across the cabin’s single room.
Charles backed away into the sunlight, gripping the hammer hanging from his belt. The weight of his satchel tugged at his shoulder. For a second he envisioned beating the boy down where he stood, before he could get away. He forced his fingers from the hammer.
“We are taking a walk.”
“I know.” The boy strode past him and up the road out of town.
Charles watched him, his breath caught in his throat. Suddenly the air seemed to clear, and the sun pressed against him. Had it always been this way around the boy? Had he been in a daze from the moment the child was born?
It was as if the boy followed a trail traced for him in the dirt. He walked in the road’s middle, barely giving way when a wagon came toward him. The horse’s nostrils flared at his smell.
Charles caught up to him when they turned onto the Sunderson Mill Road. The mines above it had gone bad the year before, and the mill was closed.
“The mountains hold things, Papa.” The boy’s hands hung straight at his side, as if he were standing at attention, not hiking a steep road.
He had no words to say to him. Am I the monster? thought Charles. The boy’s mother wouldn’t want this. Have I done something to deserve a curse? Every step hurt. Part of him wanted to run away. He could do it: leave the boy on the road, catch the new train out of town, and be in Denver before anyone knew. His family lived back east.
Another part denied that anything was wrong. Charles thought, what if I’m insane? My boy is strange, for sure, but he’s not evil. What child growing in the mountains with a dead mother and a father who worked the mines wouldn’t mature differently?
And a third part wanted to fall on the boy like a bear and rend him, bloody bone from bloody bone.
“Keep going,” Charles said when the boy slowed at the mill. The windows were already broken and its door hung askew.
“Don’t you love me, Papa?” he said. The boy looked at him sardonically. “A Papa should love his son.”
The trail climbed as quickly as stairs for a hundred yards, while the afternoon sun touched the mountaintop before them. Charles choked on the words, “Of course, I love you.” And he knew that he did. He loved him even as he wanted to kill him, even as he was afraid. Was this right? He thought of sick children sweating in their fevers, dead children. “They’ll burn, Papa,” the boy had said.
At the ridge’s top, the trail flattened and split. Winding to the right, it led to West Yellow Dog, a fifty-foot drift that started with a yard-wide vein of quartz and wire gold but petered into low-grade ore that wasn’t worth the cost of the powder to extract it. The middle trail ended at the New Baltimore, a failed attempt to find West Yellow Dog’s wire gold by coming at it laterally. Charles had worked the New Baltimore for six months before the owners shut it down.
He’d never been in the Crossroad on the left trail, but, as the hard rock Cornishman who told him about it said, “The claim was snakebit from the beginning.” The rumor was that the first prospector had been drilling into the rock to set a charge, and when he hit the drill for the last time, it disappeared into the rock. There was a tunnel already there. A silly story, but the claim didn’t pay out, and there had been accidents.
They took the turn to the left, around a granite wall, out of the sun and into the stone bowl that held the mine. Rock surrounded them on three sides, like a small arena. The sound of Charles’ hard-soled boots echoed. At the far side, a metal gate held closed by a clasp lock marked the mine’s entrance.
“You’re going to be staying here, boy.” Charles removed a chisel from his satchel, set its edge against the lock, raised the hammer, then paused. Always he judged before he struck. Was the chisel set correctly? Would the hammer do its job? There could never be a strike without the pause for judgement, where a mistake could be saved. The metal’s sharp report reverberated off the rocks. Another blow broke it, then Charles pulled the door open; it screeched against the stiffness in its hinges. He’d never seen a mine entrance like the Crossroad’s. The floor looked worn smooth, as if thousands of feet had marched on it through the years. How had the miners done that?
“Don’t you love me, Papa?” the boy said again.
Charles didn’t look at him. From his satchel he removed a blanket, candles, a small bundle of food and a water bottle. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“You must not be my Papa.” He didn’t sound insincere this time. “My Papa loves me. He’ll find me, my Papa.”
“Just get in!”
Charles could barely see the new lock he put on the door through the tears.
Behind the iron gate, he heard the boy move, a large sound, as if what stirred in the tunnel had suddenly grown huge. He fell back. Impossibly, the door stirred in its iron frame, and for a second Charles thought the inch-thick bolts might pull from the rock. He scuttled away. Even at the edge of the granite arena, when Charles looked at the mine entrance, he could hear the boy behind the gate, breathing loud, his heart throbbing. The sky grew dark and the air thick. A noxious cloud seeped around the door’s edges, filled the stone chamber, its tendrils crawling on the floor toward Charles. The boy said, his voice full of old mining timbers and cold, wet stone a thousand feet deep, “Papa?”
Charles fled.
West Yellow Dog had been dynamited. All that remained of its entrance was twisted ore cart track. Ron searched the cliff base to both sides. A niche three hundred yards to the right might have been where they stored powder, but it was only ten feet deep and didn’t have a door. Below the mine, partially hidden behind scrubby pine growing between the rocks, he found a small tunnel barely tall enough for him to enter on his hands and knees, but twigs and dirt blocked the way a few feet in and it smelled of marmot. Ron sat on his haunches outside the hole and closed his eyes against the sun.
He’d know if Levi had died, wouldn’t he? A father and son had a bond, he’d told the detective.
Within his view, visible only because the sun cast long shadows, several foundations rose from the grass in the clearing below the slope. There must have been a small community here, or they might have been part of the mining operation. At the Gilpin County Courthouse, Ron had looked at pictures of the town from the 1880s, and beside them were modern shots taken from the same spot. The buildings changed. Trees changed. But the rocks and mountains stayed the same. He trembled. To the mountain, time didn’t exist; all times were interchangable. He glanced at his watch. To a little boy dying in a mine, every second stretched like skin on fire.
He pushed himself upright.
The New Baltimore had a park service gate on it. Ron slowed as he approached. Covered in dust, the remains of a broken lock lay on the ground. He rubbed the scratches in the metal. No rust. Someone had been here this summer.
“Levi!” His voice sounded hollow and out of place.
The gate gave reluctantly, its base dragging over the rock as he pulled it open. Moisture seeped from the walls a few feet in. Resting one hand on the black-slime ceiling just above his head, he shone his flashlight on indistinct footprints on the muddy floor. Back in the depths, a watery plink-plink-plink broke the silence. The tunnel split. To the right, a pile of rock and broken timbers blocked the way. To the left, the passage sloped downward for another twenty feet before ending at a pool of water. The footprints led here. Ron played the quivering light across the surface, penetrating to the bottom. Rocks. More timber. Metal so heavily rusted he couldn’t tell what its original shape had been. No wrapped bundle. No horror-story patch of white that resolved itself into a face.
He released a pent-up breath. Why had someone broken into the mine? Turning, he studied the walls and ceiling. A slippery, unhealthy looking fungus covered the surfaces, and the stagnant air smelled rotted and mildewed. Near the ceiling to the left of the pool, a patch of rock peered through the growth, as if it had been brushed clean, and above it, a crack wider than his fist swallowed the light. Ron reached in, touched plastic. He found four bags in the crack, abo
ut a pound each. A whiff of the first one showed he’d uncovered someone’s stash.
Ron left the bags on the floor. Ten minutes wasted.
According to his map, all that remained was the Crossroad. It took a half hour of backtracking across the gulch’s east side before he found a faint trail that led to a gap around a rock wall.
He spotted the lock on the door on the other side of the stone arena as soon as he rounded the corner, a brand new, brass padlock, like the row of them on top of Sims’ dresser. He ran without thinking about it. Old metal door, not park service. Ron ripped off his backpack, fumbled for the bolt cutter, gripped the handles and squeezed. The lock snapped.
Was now the moment when he would know? Ron had dreamed of finding Levi in a thousand ways. Bad dreams, in some, where Levi was dead. Either dead over a month, or even worse, dead a few days. He’d be starved or dead from thirst or exposure. In some dreams he was alive but sick, damaged from exposure or the time alone. In one dream Levi didn’t know him, his mind gone. What could be worse than an eight-year-old driven insane by abuse and fear? In that dream, Ron loved his son back to sanity. No evil could be so bad that love could not change it to something good.
Ron tore the lock from the hasp, jammed his fingertips into the gap between the door and the frame. Pulled.
In the good dreams, Levi waited. “Daddy!” he would cry. He always called Ron “Daddy,” like it was a blessing.
The door swung open.
Charles didn’t even try to get to sleep. Sitting at the table in his cabin, the tiny slice of moon providing the only light again, he thought about the locked gate and the boy behind it. His intention was to never return.
He thought, what’s the greater evil? Every time he closed his eyes, he saw dead children, a fingerprint on their foreheads; he also saw the boy at the Crossroad, staring at a candle, maybe, or sleeping. What kind of dreams would a bringer of death like him have? But Charles was evil too. The boy, no matter what else he was, was his son. A father should take care of his own. One time when Charles was young he locked a storage shed on his father’s farm. A week later his father sent him to fetch some tools. The storage shed stank, a solid wall of putridness rolling out when Charles opened the door. A cat had been locked in, its mouth gaping open, dry as dust, the stomach burst. If he had known, wouldn’t it have been merciful to have killed the cat a week earlier?
The Radio Magician and Other Stories Page 27