by Paul Monette
He started scrambling right away. He didn’t take the time to look for a donkey path or a set of steps cut in the side of the hill. He’d had enough of roads and plotted courses, anyway. Straight up was the only route he had any use for now. The ground kept sliding away when he stepped, so to keep his speed, he had to grab hold of plants and do it on all fours. He didn’t even mind the noise he made. There was such a rustle and scurry of creatures in the bushes around him, trying to get out of his way, that he needed to feel he was clearing the way ahead as he went. He didn’t want to face down any wild animals, even if here it was only rats. Or snakes. He flinched in spite of himself, remembering what the ranch had done to Peter. But he figured what the hell, it couldn’t happen twice, and pushed ahead and didn’t listen anymore. After so much wandering, in fact, he liked this part. He dug in with the toes of his Bally shoes and felt the sweat work up on his chest and forehead. His breath came faster. He wouldn’t have cared if he’d had to climb all the way up and over. With every foot he gained, he seemed to get closer and closer to what they’d all gone through. His rage and emptiness went somewhere. He didn’t suffer Rita’s swing from mood to mood because his own complaint was typically no mood at all. But now all the blanks were filling up. The business of fate disappeared. When he was alive like this, he scorned it as a game for cowards.
He stood up to see where he’d got to. The light was more to the left than he’d figured, but he was almost level with it already and saw the top of an opening wide as a double door. The dark was falling fast, and the pale yellow light was more distinct. He wondered whether he would have spotted it right away from the top of the hill if he’d come at night. Probably. Why didn’t Sam screen it, he wondered, and then he understood. Sam wasn’t hiding yet. He’d banked on it that they wouldn’t send out the police till Nick had talked to him, and he wanted Nick to find his way when he told him on the phone where to come. Nick didn’t think he was expected yet. He and Hey had made a lucky guess. “Underground” was a clue, all right, but to Nick on the slope of the empty hill, it didn’t seem as if Sam had dropped it consciously after all. And if the MG wasn’t there at the end of the road, Sam might be away making the call to Crook House. Which meant, Nick concluded shrewdly, that Peter was all alone in the place where the light was coming from.
There seemed to be a level space in front of the mine entrance, and then it dropped off sheerly ten or twelve feet. Nick was able to move laterally with ease until he was directly below it. The climb up the face of the rock was a little more tricky. How in God’s name, he wondered, had they ever expected to get the gold down? A chute of some kind, maybe. His right foot slipped out of a crevice, and he dangled a bit. There was a wrenching in the muscle of one thigh. He kicked off the shoe, and then, regaining the crevice, held out the other shoe and shook it till it fell. How did they get the miners up here? He slung one knee over the top and tried to pull himself up until he thought his head would explode. He couldn’t do it. He was going to fall. And then it was over, and he was lying on his stomach on the edge of a wide bare ledge.
His face was in the dirt. He coughed and gagged, but in a way he wasn’t sorry to begin by kissing the ground. And when he lifted his head and looked across at the opening, he was startled at how far he could see. There was a ghostly corridor, lined at intervals with candles, and it went in a long way and slightly down before it seemed to turn. Even at best, he’d expected little more than a space to huddle in amid a tangle of broken beams. He’d assumed the rest of what there used to be was all caved in. But it was so intact that it looked as if a troop of miners might come marching out, four abreast. The scale of the operation cowed him, and he suddenly felt dwarfed and exposed. He leapt to his feet and rushed to take cover. Flattened himself on the wall to the left of the entrance. Then he had to crouch and massage the soles of his stockinged feet, teeth clamped against the stinging from the rocks he’d run across. He cursed the loss of his shoes. Whatever he did from here on in, he wouldn’t be doing fast.
He peered around the corner into the light, and there wasn’t a sound or a sign of life except for the candles. He walked in a few paces and looked one over. New. Burnt down to five or six inches and set in a holder cut out of a protruding tooth of rock. But he began to see that everything about this place was finished and sculpted and worked. Between the first and second candle, a niche was carved out, though the saint who’d filled it had vanished. The wall of the corridor was amazingly smooth, almost as if they’d gone to the trouble to sand it down and buff it. It was once painted as well, Nick could tell from the patches and flakes of blue. Even the timbers that braced it were carved in a simple scroll, with here and there a more fully modeled figure, something like a smiling fish. Wouldn’t Rita love it here? he thought. But he couldn’t pause to imagine how fine it must have been. He had to dart along and get to the end and rescue Peter. Still, he didn’t miss much from the corners of his eyes, and a picture grew in his head that it was more like a church than a mine shaft. He might have been walking toward a ruined altar in a country overrun by pagans.
Nick was a real civilian in church, and he hardly ever was in one, so he didn’t feel the slightest tingle in the knees. But he had to admit it was superhuman and vaguely threatening. It made him wonder, as he came to the end and glanced back along the empty niches, how many places there were like this. Rita, given her taste in books, in some real way wasn’t fazed by there being a secret room in Crook House. The way she saw it, in the sky-high price range, every house of a certain character and size was bound to have one. But Nick expected money to be spent entirely on the surface. If it turned out people were forever digging holes and hollowing out little mission churches and one-man museums, then the very earth under his feet wasn’t solid. He couldn’t get over how small it made him feel, even as he rushed on through and tried not to notice. And he felt big, for instance, in all the cavernous homes of Beverly Hills. He didn’t mean small in the sense of man and God. His soul was a harder nut to crack than that. But where did people come by these lifetime projects? Where did they find the time?
The wall at the end had once been inlaid with mosaic, but most of it had fallen off. Only an arm and an angel’s wing were visible still. And at either side of this wall were the openings into tunnels, into what must be the mine proper. The one on the right was impassable, clogged with rubble and dark. The one on the left was candle-lit. Nick ducked to enter it, and immediately had to climb down stairs in the stone. When he got to the passage at the bottom, it was almost as narrow as he was, and the air was hot and smoky. He hated it so much he couldn’t move for a bit. But then up ahead he heard music, and he made himself go forward. Not the music of the spheres or the waters in the earth. Disco. AM radio.
The floor of the big chamber, as smooth as if they’d paved it, had gone easy on his feet, but here it was like walking on knifeblades again. He had to brace his hands against the wall, just so he could hobble along. Please, he thought, let Peter be able to leave under his own steam. Because Nick, though he’d brought Hey out from under the hill, couldn’t carry a man ten feet like this. The tunnel he was in kept turning so much that he lost the feel of how far he was going or where he was now with relation to where it began. Deeper and deeper was all he was sure of. And he knew they’d have to get all the way out to get away. If they met Sam coming in the other direction, they were both sunk. Just now he wanted more than anything to shout Peter’s name, but he waited. He couldn’t stand to wait, and yet he was too scared of what it would mean if Peter didn’t answer. In all this time he hadn’t lost control. Since the moment Rita threw him over into the sand, he hadn’t messed it up getting visions of worse coming to worst. But now he was going to see for real. Let him just be all right, he’d said to himself all along, but now he was saying it over and over so fast it slurred, and he felt like screaming. Please, please, please, he begged of no one in particular, as if the way were far too complicated now for anything to be all right.
He ne
arly tumbled head over heels into the cavern. The last turn was so sharp, the light so raw with smoke, that he found himself hanging again on an edge before he saw a thing. It was his hands gripping the walls that held him up. He was looking down into a deep basin, thirty or forty feet across, the floor ten feet below him. Here the light was from kerosene lamps, and the glow from the walls was steadier and clearer than candles. He could even breathe again, anchoring himself in a wide open space that didn’t threaten to swallow him whole. In its way, this room was as lovely and strange as the chapel back at the surface. Rich with gravity and uncut matter, it was serious like the center of the earth. All content and no form.
But Nick wasn’t conscious of any of it. Peter was lying below him, untouched and fast asleep, and finally he was free to fall apart. How did he know it was sleep and nothing worse? Simply this: Peter sleeping was his longest-standing definition of nothing wrong. He just knew. When at last he called Peter’s name, it fell over into a sob. And once he’d begun, he couldn’t stop crying.
He never did know how he stumbled down the splintering slope of rock to get to him. “Peter, Peter,” he said with delight, as if he’d figured out the missing piece of a wonderful puzzle. But the feeling wasn’t mutual. Peter woke in terror when he heard his name echoing over the stone behind the music. Nick was still only halfway down. He felt his way numbly with his feet and couldn’t see through the blur of his tears. And Peter waved one hand and hissed, “Wait!” He might as well have answered back and called Nick’s name himself, completing the duet. It was certainly too late for waiting. He stood up and held out his arms to this reunion, though to him it seemed the saddest thing in the world that they were together again. Now Nick clung to him and wept on his shoulder. Peter had no choice. He held Nick just as tight and comforted his most unfounded fears, all the while not knowing how to tell him hope was lost. And he stared up at Sam as if to say “You win,” but he summoned up enough disdain to cut the resignation. As if to add: “He’s mine. No matter what you do, you can’t have this. You only thought you had it.”
“Hurry,” Nick said brokenly, “we have to run.” But he said it in a way that was oddly formal. He seemed to know, perhaps from the force of Peter’s arms, how still they stood, that they weren’t going anywhere yet. And as he became aware of the music again and placed the source of it just above their heads, telling them Why not dance, it snapped abruptly off.
“You think that’s why I lit all those candles, Nick? So you can run?”
Nick pulled away from Peter, feeling clumsy as a kid. A little ashamed to be watched in the arms of another man. Scared to look at Peter because of Sam, because Sam was all Nick’s fault. And then, just as suddenly, old instead of young—because he knew Sam thought of him and Peter as a pair of aging queens. He didn’t answer right away. He looked up and saw him first, sitting high on a ledge with a doorway behind. His shirt was off, and he glistened with sweat. The gun was slack in his hand. Even now, Nick saw, the heat of sex was the only thing real about Sam, though they couldn’t be farther removed from a bedroom. No wonder desire was the simplest way to think of him. Even now.
“We can run if we want,” he said slowly, trying to soften the sting of defiance, “because you’ve got to get away. You just lost your place to hide. Cops may be dumb, but how far behind me can they be?”
Sam gave a short laugh and then spoke fast: “You found me because I let you, baby, and you know it.” Let’s get on with it, he seemed to say. And to back that up, he threw himself off the ledge and skidded down the angle of the wall as if he were a surfer riding on a wave. In a moment he was close enough to touch them. “By my calculations,” he said, “you’re twenty minutes late. So don’t think anything you do is any big deal. I know every fucking thing in your head.”
Then he started to walk in a circle around them. They couldn’t keep his face in focus, and they didn’t dare move. So Nick began to take in the litter that lay about in the domed and egg-shaped room. Piles of Sam’s clothes. A half-dozen pairs of boots in a line. An unplugged television set. He’d lived with Peter too long in a house devoted to clutter to really believe these things could be all of Sam’s worldly goods. But anyone could see that Sam must have been here time and time again. The Rembrandt, propped against a boulder ten feet away, hadn’t ended up in neutral territory after all. It wasn’t as if they’d met in a field or out on a strip of deserted beach, where they were all on equal footing. They were clearly on Sam’s ground.
“You thought I came up here with you to suck your dick,” Sam said in a mocking voice. “All I was looking for was a place to take Varda’s money. And you know what? You handed it to me as easy as anything else I wanted.” He stopped his circling to stare in Nick’s eyes a moment, and he seemed in some way unable to place him any longer. Nick looked too much like the dozens of people Sam saw only once. “This mine isn’t yours, you know, because you didn’t find it. You didn’t even believe it was here.”
“You want it?” Nick asked dryly. “You can have it.”
“Just like this painting isn’t yours,” Sam went on, dropping back and giving a tap to the gilded frame with the barrel of the gun, “because Varda would have given it to me. I would have had it all.”
“But what would you do with it?You got a gallery to hang it all in?” Now he knew Sam had nowhere else to run if all he could talk about was how it might have gone. For Nick, who stood so close to Peter that they touched now and then, there wasn’t anything scary here at all except the gun. And what he wanted in exchange for being unafraid was to taunt Sam till he cried uncle. “Maybe you ought to live right here and put it all up around the rocks.”
Sam cut him off: “I do live here.” He turned aside and got busy looking for something in a carton full of junk. “I sleep up there on that ledge. I got a battery tapedeck. And a clock and a flashlight.”
“It sounds real plush,” Nick said. More and more, he said whatever he wanted. This was the part where he counted on not getting shot. “Maybe they’ll let you serve out your term down here. If they give you a little pick, you might tap into a vein the size of Fort Knox and make us all rich.”
“Just so you know what I mean,” Sam said, preoccupied with his digging as if he hadn’t heard. He pulled out a screwdriver and held it up to the painting like a pointer. He might have been about to give a lecture. But he dug it into the paint, ripping it down along Rembrandt’s cheek, smiling coldly all the while. The painting crackled, and chips flew off. The right eye was practically gone. Nick heard Peter make a low, low groan, and his own stomach lifted and turned over as if he’d just seen somebody die. It would take a month to fix it right. Even then it wouldn’t be perfect again.
“I decide about Varda’s things,” Sam said. He didn’t look away, even when he flipped the screwdriver and caught it so he gripped it like a dagger. He jabbed it right through the canvas. And again, and again. Nick and Peter looked away. There wasn’t the least trace of reproach on Rembrandt’s face. He gazed at the world as patiently out of one eye as he had out of two, searching for something more than an honest man. But they felt they’d failed him all the same.
“Why don’t you just say what you want?” Nick said. He still wasn’t scared, but he started feeling sad again, the way he had when he’d sat alone with Peter’s keys. As if he’d stared down into the pit of all the irrevocable things that could happen, any one of which was enough to kill.
“Money,” said Sam flippantly, “the same as everyone else.”
“How much?” Nick asked, preparing himself at last to go through the established forms of the negotiation. It didn’t matter how much, of course. He’d get whatever it was. But Sam must have followed the train of thought his own way, because he laughed as if Nick had told him a dirty joke. He dropped the screwdriver, and it clattered on the stone. He was bored with being a vandal.
“All the money in the world,” he said, “is what I’ve got coming to me. Varda would have given me everything he had, except
we ran out of time.”
“Is that so? Then tell me, why did you kill him?” Things he couldn’t say before, during all the time he loved him, he found the words for now. He got louder and louder. “Maybe he refused to put it in writing. Is that when the time ran out?” He didn’t expect any answer, and he was ready to follow it up with an angry little speech about who owned what. But Sam ran up and raised the gun and whipped him hard across the face. Just once, and then he resumed his pacing. Nick’s mouth went sweet with blood from a tooth that cut into his cheek. He held the side of his face and turned to Peter. But if he expected a kiss to make it better, he’d barked up the wrong tree.
Peter said grimly, “Stop acting so goddam smart. He’ll tell you if you’ll just shut up.”
And Nick was so shocked that the pain did stop, or at least he didn’t seem to have room for it anymore. He’d been heated up since he first saw Sam, and he hadn’t even noticed Peter standing so silent. If he’d thought about it, he probably would have said he was fighting a battle for both their sakes. Now he saw what Peter saw. Somehow, he’d gotten turned around, and he’d started to have a lover’s quarrel with Sam. Not to do with love, of course, but how would Peter know? Nick was letting fly with a cheating husband’s noises of annoyance: How dare you try to wreck my home, you bitch. Terrible things had been happening all day long in Crook House. Parallel lines had crossed like fences in an earthquake. And what was Nick doing? Getting mad because he couldn’t stand it that he’d thrown his love away for weeks on something as vile as this.