The Gold Diggers

by Paul Monette

  “You?” Sam bellowed. “You’re not hurting, Goddamn it. Don’t you see I’m taking care of you?” He groped to tell Nick how easy he had it. “All your little pals are safe, aren’t they? The worst that can happen to you is you might have to hire new help. A month from now, all it’ll be is a caper. You won’t even have to have your clothes dry-cleaned. Secretly, you’ll be glad it happened. Because it’s kicks.”

  “You think it’s so simple. What about how I feel about you?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I mean I care,” he said, but casting his eyes down, as if it made him blush. If he hears what a lie it is, Nick thought, he’ll shoot for sure.

  “Okay,” Sam said. “Strip.” And Nick was so caught up in appearing sincere, he let it go by. By the time it took and he looked up, Sam had his pants down to his knees. He hopped on one foot while he pulled the other free. He was hard as a rock in a couple of seconds. “I want to do it,” he said, “with the fuse lit.”

  Nick protested, “Sam, I can’t.” He had no room to maneuver. If he came across repelled by the mere idea, Sam would see how far he’d gone away. The scene had suddenly loosened up and called Nick back. If only he could think, he thought, but he faced a naked boy who wouldn’t wait. The vanishing fuse had speeded up the time unbearably. Where it hammered Nick’s head and scrambled his brain, it seemed to stroke and fondle Sam till it made him at once wild and serene. Though Nick could feel his clothes begin to crawl with a cold sweat, this was his only chance, and he knew it.

  “You slay me, baby,” Sam replied with unexpected mildness. “You act as if I didn’t have the gun. Whatever I want is what we do. I can make you fuck, you know.” He was moving around again. His cock swung heavily, taut with blood, and he waved the gun as if it were an outer-space device that let him breathe in an airless room. And though he’d shed his shoes along with his pants, he pranced around without the pain that blistered and bruised Nick’s feet. “I let your friend Peter go,” he said. “You owe me one. So do it.”

  What the hell? Nick went ahead and did it, mostly to gain the time. His fingers went to his shirt to work at the buttons, and he was startled to find his tie in the way. Overdressed again, he thought ruefully. Meanwhile, Sam seemed to relish being naked in the cavern, fucking or not. As he went from spot to spot, he didn’t dance so much as appear about to rise in the air. The music had long since gone into his bones. It was the fuse he took his rhythm from. He was so in tune he could hear it though Nick was deaf to it. He threw his head back and marveled at the dome he lived beneath. In the yellow light, his skin was gold against the tawny stone of the walls. Stacking his clothes on the dead TV, Nick had the oddest sense that Sam had grown so accustomed now to the life underground that he’d gladly give up the skin of the earth. As if he couldn’t take the daylight anymore. And Nick had never thought the same of Rita, though he’d witnessed her version of the same intoxication whenever she went into Varda’s room.

  Nick had never taken off his clothes more chastely than he did right here. He’d never felt before such a horror of being naked. But he didn’t want to die with nothing of his own close around him, even though he knew it didn’t matter, not if he was going to be blown into little pieces. Once naked, he could feel all over his body the pressure of how it would go, the blowup and then the cave-in, as if he’d be conscious the whole time it was happening. He wasn’t giving up. He meant to get out of here alive. But all the miseries of fate still had their hooks in him, even if he didn’t any longer count himself a believer. He’d come to the conviction only today that fate was the worst kind of lie, because it was romantic. The whirlwind that had lately descended on Crook House taught him how even everyday things were locked in a drama, a fight to the death, merely by being human. But it wasn’t easy to stick to those convictions in an abandoned mine, all of whose ghosts could speak the sacraments in Latin. Destiny seemed to shimmer from the walls like the light that stirred the stones into curtains.

  He had an urge to cover his genitals with his hands. He stood there shyly beside the painting and hoped for the carnal proposal to pass. Sam seemed to have forgotten him, anyway. Caught in his slow, subliminal dance, Sam had gone off with his own thoughts, looking as if he could wander forever in that one space and always find it new. Nick just watched him a moment. Maybe the damned get to like their little cells in Hell, he thought. He could see Sam was just as glad as Rusty Varda not to be going to Heaven. Yet Sam was more of a boy here than he seemed on the street, where he had to act hard and chew on a stalk of grass. Nick had always been aware of him calculating his time, never quite there but only driving through, in transit to a place where no one could follow. And this was it. Sam wouldn’t need sex anymore, Nick thought, because he didn’t need carfare. Without a dream place of his own to strive for, now that the ranch didn’t work, Nick envied Sam his having arrived here. As Nick saw it, he’d gone beyond the daily life of the heart, to a higher plane.

  But now Sam turned abruptly back to him—and still erect, as if after all he’d only been biding his time while Nick got ready for bed. Nick cursed himself again for getting lost in other people’s heads. He’d wasted another half minute staring at Sam like a movie. Much as he used to when they first met. If it turned out to be half the rest of his life as well, he knew it was his own damned fault.

  “I thought you loved me,” Sam said tartly, coming close and looking down between Nick’s legs.

  “Please stop the fuse.”

  “Is that all it is?” Sam asked, but closer still, so close his cock made contact on Nick’s abdomen. Though it might have been a gun, since it made Nick freeze. “No wonder we made a lousy couple. We get turned on by different trips.”

  “Please, Sam.”

  “After we make it. I’ll go put it out as soon as we’ve both come.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Relax,” he said, and he brought up his arms around Nick’s shoulders and drew him close. “We have all the time in the world. Just think of something else, and your cock will take care of itself. Tell me about your grandparents.”

  “What about them?” Nick asked brokenly, hardly able to speak for all his confusion. But he wasn’t sorry to be in somebody’s arms, even Sam’s. He was so exhausted that he didn’t feel angry and didn’t feel scared. He couldn’t keep up the high-pitched feelings any longer. Some part of the gun in Sam’s right hand touched cold along his shoulder blade, but even that was more curious than horrible. Maybe he’d gotten used to the upside-down of events, the succession of opposites. But he wasn’t numb. He felt as if he’d never be able to say exactly what he felt, but he felt it so intensely, it was all he could do to just stand up and hold this boy whom he’d loved and hated too much. Nothing is ever finished, he thought.

  “Tell about them digging gold—”

  “I can’t,” he said. He meant he couldn’t take in another thing.

  “—on Sunday afternoons.” And his voice got so plain Nick hardly knew it. “I see them going down these dried-up rivers back in the canyons. They pan the dirt, and they crack open stones, but all the time they’re talking. Maybe it’s the only time they spend alone together. And they don’t expect to strike it rich. All they want to do is stay alive and do the same thing every Sunday.”

  “How do you know it was like that?” Nick replied, following suit and ridding his voice of inflection. He thought: The only way we know to keep from getting sentimental is not to sound that way. He pulled his head away, off Sam’s shoulder, but he let their naked bodies stay together. Though he still didn’t want to fuck, he had to admit he was calming down. Right now he was conscious of feeling neither love nor hate. It wouldn’t last. Now was only a fraction of time, split like a hair. But Sam was right. His grandparents went on their Sunday outings just like he said. Or more precisely, Nick had always imagined it himself in just that way. The sepia photographs handed down to him were stubbornly noncommittal. Two fat people in denim and homespun, squinting out beneath broad-brimm
ed hats. You could hardly tell who was a woman. Around them, the dry unpromising hills held nothing secret.

  “Now, the priests were a whole other thing,” Sam said, looking away from Nick, it seemed, so he could concentrate on the thread of his story. Nick had never heard him talk so much, unless it was fucktalk. And he held Nick now more tightly than he ever had in bed. He’s afraid I’ll laugh, Nick thought. “They were just like us, Nick. They had to hit gold or go out of their minds. They wouldn’t take no for an answer.” But stranger than anything he said just now was his cock, which began to relax, even as the tension in his grip increased. Nick’s shoulders buckled beneath the crush. But it wasn’t so bad that he couldn’t stand it, so he rode it out. He was altogether a mass of aches and pains that he had to endure because there was no other way. And he was sure that, on the other side of this wonderful connection Sam was trying to share, the whole thing would start its winding down. This was the limit of the danger now. “They had this idea for a church,” he said, “bigger than all the temples they found in the Andes. Covered in gold. If they had to, they’d dig till they got to China to find it. Right?”

  “Sure,” Nick agreed, though he hadn’t a clue where it might be going. The priests in Peru were not the same as the ones in the LA mission. He knew that much back in grammar school. So why was Sam mixing them up? Nick didn’t have a fantasy for untold wealth. He was much more interested in being rich. He never longed, like Sam and Rita, for the three-sixty view and the total immersion.

  “Now let me ask you something. Who got the gold? The Sunday diggers or the priests?”

  “Neither one,” Nick answered. He wondered why it suddenly seemed twice as sad. Almost no one got the gold, no matter how patient, how pure of heart.

  “Can you believe it?” Sam said softly, shaking his head, looking farther and farther off. “That’s why I’m so scared.”

  But now there was no time. It was over, and they didn’t even know it. Nick could see one whole side of the room beyond Sam’s naked shoulder. Sam had a view of the other half. And Nick just happened to be glancing up at the way he’d come in because, no matter what else, he had to keep an eye on the way out. He was so thrown by what Sam had just said that he froze like a deer, as if to decide which way to fly. The moment paused on a knife’s edge, flush with the moment when Rita’s head emerged out of the tunnel. And if Nick hadn’t been quite so still to begin with, Sam might never have felt him startle—like a quiver in the region of his heart. But Nick saw Rita, dressed as if for cocktails, and took in who it was, and already Sam was whirling round.

  The gun described a perfect half circle, and he shot two shots without taking aim. The bullets hit the face of the rock at either side of Rita’s head as if it were all in fun, like a Wild West show. But Sam hadn’t meant to miss. His arm was out, straight as an assassin’s. Except for the gun, he could have been an athlete stripped for the games. He might have just let fly a javelin in a Roman circus. The noise went on and on like a wind, and none of them heard the disco beat again. Without even trying, he could have picked Rita off with the third shot. She stood as stunned as a bird, looking as if the shots had woken her up. But he froze for a moment of his own when he saw who it was, and by then Nick was ready to strike.

  He swung one elbow and thumped Sam hard in the middle of the back. He would have hurt him more with almost any sort of punch, but all he wanted to do was throw him. And it worked like a dose of hypnosis. The shooting arm went rubbery, his head snapped forward, and his torso seemed to lose its muscle. He was thrown for only a couple of seconds, but it gave Nick time to follow up. He hooked his foot around one of Sam’s ankles and shoved him forward. Sam went down, crash, flat on his face, as if he was too startled to break his own fall. And at last the gun flew from his hand and clattered away out of reach.

  Nick wouldn’t even have stopped to fetch it if it hadn’t landed right in his path as he sprang toward the wall. He bent and scooped it up. Then he caught at the little crevices in the wall as if he’d been up and down it for years. He was sprawled on the ledge before he knew it, looking more or less up Rita’s dress. His feet were screaming.

  “Run!” he cried out roughly, and she turned and went without saying a word—like someone a sick man sends away when there’s nothing to do. He realized he wanted to go out alone. To not be surrounded right now by the best of friends. The flash of adrenaline that got the tables turned and left Nick high on the ledge had dropped. He looked down at Sam, who was doubled up and groaning, his face in his hands. The rocks in the floor had razored him up. He wasn’t hurt bad, but he was hurting. He looked a mess. And Nick would have given anything to go back down. He was sorrier now than he thought he could bear.

  But it was over. He stumbled into the tunnel and scalded along on the shreds of his feet. The candles were down to the nubs, the air thick as tear gas. He had to go fast or choke. It certainly wasn’t the fear that Sam would follow. Nick knew how completely he’d tripped him. Sam would stay curled up like a child until he’d adjusted to his bloodied knees and elbows. Then perhaps he’d cry, this boy without scars. He wouldn’t be ready to start out on his own for five or ten minutes, and then he’d escape and go out of their lives, the grin wiped off his face for good. It made Nick mad with grief, who’d done all he could till now to keep Sam young. But in the end, he knew, he had no choice. He came to the final turn in the tunnel without the strength to feel relieved. He crawled up the steps to the chapel, blind with bitter tears, as if determined to refuse the world that could now go on as before. Rita stood mutely at the top of the stairs, and he thought he would tell her the worst, that it broke his heart to have it over with. He’d gone too far to come back whole. Nothing would ever surprise him again.

  It was then that the dynamite blew.

  The noise was like a muffled cannon roaring in a fog. The walls, before they started falling down, shook off a kind of glitter that filled the air. Nick sailed up the rest of the stairs like Peter Pan. Rita sat down hard on the floor. Time stood still for the last time. Nick forgot about the fuse, just as Sam had said he would, and Sam had misjudged the fuse by nearly half an hour. So in a way they were both right. They’d told each other the truth.

  It wasn’t just one explosion, in fact, but one right after another, as if the mine and the mountain had only needed a push to pull the world to bits on their own. Nick and Rita, side by side on the floor, were sprayed with pebbles and then with stones. The light was gone. But Nick was as stubborn as ever. He thought of Sam until the roof was coming down in boulders. He wouldn’t go back down, but he stared in the direction of the tunnel opening, waiting for Sam to be safe. He couldn’t be dead, or else what was the point of the pain Nick had given him? Dying wasn’t required.

  Rita had to take his hand and drag him up and lead him away through the thickening dust and acid smoke. They came out on the ledge at the mouth of the mine, where the dark was light compared with the dark inside. Then the ledge broke off. They slid down with it as if it were an elevator, fifteen or twenty feet. Then even the noise and dust were behind them. The only thing left was the cold night air, and it stung all over, as if he’d landed on a planet where the air could kill. And he knew as he slumped against Rita, blacking out into a third dark deeper than the mine and the night, that everything else would be good as new, but he’d never be warm again.

  10

  Oh, you look all right, Rita said to herself, peering around at all the Ritas in the three-way mirror. She could hardly help but look all right, since if she squinted she could check out in the flesh page 191 of the April Vogue. The little nothing of a peach silk dress was two hundred eighty dollars at Magnin’s and she hadn’t even been able to wear it the night before to Peter’s opening, which was far too fancy for afternoon clothes. And anyway, since two-eighty wouldn’t have bought the sleeves of the things that turned up at a show on Rodeo Drive, Rita had sensibly given up any thought of trying to compete. She’d thrown on her old faithful, white over green. She st
eered clear of mirrors and faded neatly into the woodwork. But she didn’t really mind. It was Peter’s night last night, though he hadn’t wanted a bit of it. They’d practically had to tie him into his tux to get him to go. Rita would have begged off herself, but Nick couldn’t go because he couldn’t stand up for more than half an hour at a time, even now. Rita went so Peter would have a body to leave with. She was glad to do it. She stood apart while they clustered about him. She toted up the “SOLD” stickers every time they were slapped on a frame. In two hours, eight paintings came to forty-four thousand. She took the littlest sips of champagne and thought about today and the peach silk dress. Because today was all hers.

  Well, of course it was their day, too, Peter’s and Nick’s and Hey’s. They’d all be right there with her. But somebody had to do the talking, and Rita was whom they chose, four to nothing. She slipped on a pair of pumps and balled up the clothes she’d just taken off. Then she took a look around, to make sure there were no stray slippers or panty hose lying about. But there were only pots and pots of orchids—everywhere. Hanging off the walls and tiered on a couple of stone benches Peter brought up from the shop. She wondered when she’d agreed to orchids in the closet. Lighted by a row of pin spots in the ceiling, they were a perfect fragment of inaccessible forest, dusky and foreign, just as Peter promised. But this morning they also seemed a trifle overdone to Rita. Peter said if you didn’t give the art press a little swank at every turn, they’d be bored before you got them where you wanted them. That, and keep their drinks full to the brim. This was the Old Masters division of the art press. They were used to dealing with the sort of rich who made the simply rich crazy with envy.

  So her bedroom, because it was the pressroom, was also the bar. She agreed with Peter that it made it more of a drama to bring them in here right away. Brief them first in Frances Dean’s room. Shut them in and lock the windows while they sat and wondered what came next. And then the orchids and then the treasure. Before they were done, they wouldn’t settle for anything short of headlines. Rita gave it the once-over, counting the ashtrays as she passed on through, shuffling the highball glasses around as if she were racking billiard balls. Peter had done it up like a VIP lounge at the UN. Beige and wool upholstery and Audubon prints. Only the bed was tarted up some—French linen sheets, Star of Bethlehem quilt, as if who would ever want to get up—because Rita would start with the story of Frances Dean, the sleeping beauty, to put them all in the mood. She’d spent the last few nights herself on the opium bed in the living room, to keep out of Peter’s way. Now that they were going public, she couldn’t any longer cling to a notion as individual as her own room. She was only an overnight guest again. She realized without any rancor, in fact, that after today she’d have to be finding a place to move to. Crook House was finished with her.