A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar

by Daniel Pyne

  “Doug?”

  Doug, oblivious: “That’s where most of your trouble is, first hundred-or-so feet—”

  “Doug. Get out of—”

  “Your short-statured Welshman, see, displacing a proportionately smaller quantity of rock—”

  “—out of the—”

  The whole wall of dirt burst on them, followed by a concussive surge of bright orange water, rock, and mire.

  “—trench.”

  Lee leapt out of the backhoed gash, then reached back and grabbed Doug by the back of his shirt as the cascade of water coursed past him. Doug was knocked off his feet, and Lee couldn’t hold him; the shirt ripped and Doug was swept cartwheeling and squealing like a javelina across the ragged apron of the mine tailings, and then he disappeared over the edge of a newly created waterfall.

  “Doug!”

  There was no response. And for a guilty moment Lee imagined a Doug-free dig.

  Lee scrambled to the edge of the apron and did a controlled slide down the tailings beside the cascading mustard-colored water, shredding the seat of his pants, and finding Doug stuck, wedged into a broken ore trough, gasping for air. Lee dragged the big man to dry land. CPR was out of the question because Doug was already vomiting up a mustard bilge, but Lee obliged to flip Doug onto his back, and with his hands on either side of Doug’s belly, pumped the water out until the coughing became dry heaves, and Doug’s arms began to flop around and he moaned pitifully.

  “What. You all right?”

  Doug just lay there for a moment, blinking up, insensate, at Lee. Then suddenly his legs twisted, and he flipped onto his belly and began crawling back up the slope.

  “Doug?”

  Lee scrambled after his big fat quantum entanglement. At the top of the tailings, Doug stopped, hands to either side of his shoulders, elbows angled, like a bullfrog about to leap. Doug went still, wondering at a dark square that had seemingly been cut in the mountain with a sharp knife, the sides perfectly parallel, water continuing to drain out in surges like a bottle tipped over and emptying.

  Lee and Doug just stared, amazed.

  Meanwhile, down-mountain, on the main street of Basso Profundo, an enormous, rectilinear, chrome-and-ebony Cadillac CTS belonging to the township’s only elected official pimp-cruised up the road at a parade gait of about five miles an hour. Rayna was out behind her store, ostensibly emptying garbage but actually smoking a furtive cigarette that she was planning to later tell herself was the last one she would smoke, ever, and she was about to stub it out and raise an arm and wave to the driver of the Caddy, when she heard a peculiar rushing sound coming down through the trees. She had only time enough to process that it was similar to but not the same sound an eddy of wind might make when it coursed through the conifer forest, and then there it was: a tsunami of liquid yellow-orange that splashed hard into the back of her building and curled back and nearly swept her off her feet and surged right through the open back door, through the storeroom, out into the store proper, surging, swirling around long enough to sweep away most of the lower shelf items before bursting out the front door where a sturdy, short-statured woman in blue jeans and Dale Evans boots, Mayor Barbara O’Brien, was climbing out from behind the wheel of her Caddy. The orange mine water came spouting out the General Store and nearly washed her right back into the front seat and filled the entire passenger compartment to the middle of the wraparound dashboard, instantly staining the ivory leatherette upholstery and premium carpets a pumpkin color that would prove to be permanent. Water crested the rear quarter-panel and sheeted across the trunk, found its way insidiously through the undercarriage, flooded the trunk, and ruined almost seven hundred dollars’ worth of Amway products her Platinum upline IBO and sponsor had, just that morning, sort of shamed her into ordering. Soaked to the skin, Mayor Barb gripped the steering wheel and grimly watched as the unholy river curled downhill into the forest again, carrying corn chips, flip-flops, saltwater taffy, cereal boxes, and other sundry General Store merchandise with it to God Only Knows Where.

  Up at the freshly reopened Blue Lark Mine, Doug Deere was on hands and knees, crouching on high ground above the washed-out trench in which a reduced stream of Day-Glo yellow hell-water was still drooling from the mouth of the mine. Doug aimed an uncertain flashlight back into the darkness, and his hand began to tremble.

  “Oh man. Oh boy. I see gold. Lee? I see gold! Holy Toledo, Lee, I can see the gold! Can you see it? I swear, I can see it! Where’s the helmets? Oh, sweet gold, I see it everywhere.”

  “We can’t go in yet,” Lee said, as he pulled on rubber boots. Doug looked at him as if he’d lost his mind.

  “Not until we’ve shored up the opening,” Lee said.

  “What?”

  “C’mon. You know we’ve got to keep all this loose rock from crashing down and covering the entrance, Doug. Then we’ve got to check the original timbers for rot and foundation-creep, so that the whole nine yards doesn’t cave in on us once we’re inside it. We’ve got to muck out this sediment. Dig a trench for the water to drain—”

  “No! No!” Doug shrieked like a petulant third grader. “There’s gold in there, Lee! We go in! We get it! We bring it out! Happily ever after!”

  “Nobody goes into my mine ’til it’s safe,” Lee said.

  Doug just shook his head. “Don’t be a dick.”

  “You’re not going in my mine until it’s safe, Doug.”

  “Look. A) it’s not just your mine. Partner. And B) try to stop me.”

  Doug rose to his feet and hopped down into the trench with a big splash, slipped, and was deposited rudely in the soughing muck, hands and arms disappearing to the elbows and his legs stuck fast by suction. Again, Lee briefly considered the moral and legal complications that would arise if he just left Doug glued down there, and how long would it take a man of Doug’s considerable size to suffer from lack of food and water, though it was more likely he’d die of exposure, but at least Lee wouldn’t have to listen to any more stories.

  “Darn it,” Doug was saying, depressed. “I could use a little help here.”

  “Gentlemen?!” A woman’s voice barked at them from across the hardpan, and Lee turned and squinted and then shaded his eyes to find Basso Profundo Mayor Barbara on horseback at the edge of the claim, a big, silver town marshal’s badge resplendent on her chest, twin Remington rifles holstered on either side of her saddle, and a sidearm strapped to one leg. On the big mare she looked small, her eyes black, her hair salted grey, her latte skin stretched thin by a couple of modest, cut-rate face-lifts; there was a distant trace of Arapaho in the square of her shoulders and the cut of her nose, but the rest was garden gnome and lukewarm Guinness. She didn’t look much amused by Doug’s pratfall; the orange cast of her still-wet jeans gave Lee his first clue as to her purpose. “Are either of you aware of the Environmental Protection Agency’s penalty for the unlawful release of mining effluent?”

  Doug stood, his hands uprooted and sluicing mud like a creature in a Swamp Thing movie.

  “I am, but it’s his mine,” Doug said.

  “Are you a sheriff?” Lee found himself asking. The badge was that phony-looking.

  “I’m marshal and mayor and postmistress of Basso Profundo Township, and you’re up to your buttocks in EPA violations,” the mayor told him. “There’s a thousand gallons of toxic waste pouring down my main street, Mr. . . . ”

  “Garrison,” Doug said helpfully. “Lee. G-A-double R-I . . . ”

  “Shut up,” Barb told him. She wasn’t a completely hardheaded woman, but when confronted with problems, she preferred a heuristic process and the fat one was harshing her mellow.

  “Look,” Lee explained, “I’m sorry, really. We were trying to find the opening of the mine, and it just blew out like a, I don’t know, geyser or something. Doug here nearly drowned.”

  The Mayor looked speculatively at Doug.

  “You ever hear of Nicholas Creede?” Doug asked.

  Lee thought: Oh Jesus.


  “Son of a farmer, enlistee at sixteen in the Cavalry of George Armstrong Custer as a Quartermaster’s protégé, then an Army Scout—”

  “Um, Doug? Time out. Maybe the Mayor doesn’t want to . . . ”

  Undaunted, for the next half hour Doug Deere rambled about the too many close shaves with hostile Indians to recount, and how the man could have written several books about his western adventures if he’d taken the time, but how instead he’d caught gold fever and invested eight hard years with no women, hardtack, and a pickax in search of the precious yellow metal before striking the Bonanza Mine north of Central City and making his first pile. “Twenty thousand dollars in one year,” Doug said. “Creede turned to silver mining in Leadville and tripled that. It was find after find, crisscrossing the Rockies: Columbia City, Nevadaville, Beaver City, Tincup, St. Elmo, Rockdale, Winfield, Latchaw, Nederland, Ouray, Silverton, Georgetown, Midland, Ward, Fourmile, and Free Gold Hill. He fell in with a prostitute from Naches, bought her cheetah fur serapes and whalebone tea sets and midget ponies that lived indoors, built a house the size of the governor’s mansion, and then had the whore disappeared by some specialists when she became addicted to laudanum because who needs to live with that noise? His income in 1892 was a thousand dollars a day, and it was said that at one point he hired a man simply to walk in front of him spraying sweet-scented waters so that Creede wouldn’t have to smell the vagaries of Victorian sanitation practices.”

  When, however, finally the fat man was finished, Lee had a headache, but Barb’s eyes were dreamy and round, her mouth slack, and her horse impatient underneath her. Doug shoved his hands in his pockets and tilted his head like a televangelist about to set his liturgical hook.

  “Cut to the chase? It’s a gold mine, your honor, and we were anxious to get to it,” Doug said.

  Mayor Barbara shifted in her saddle. You could almost see the thought bubble: Gold mine?

  “Well,” Doug wound up, “yeah, you know, lot of the original documentation says it was worked for silver, but these old rascals, they used to lie about—”

  “I know,” the mayor said, cutting him off.

  Lee read her face. There was in it something he’d seen in Doug’s, at the county records office, when the possibility of a gold mine first arose there: a shift of posture, the slight, soft-jawed confounding, eyes losing some of their near-focus, then finally narrowing, distracted, as if the world were falling away. It was a lucid dream, a promise, a prayer. That gold mine quale.

  In quantum terms? Here was another system. Lee knew that different previously isolated, noninteracting systems occupy different phase spaces. And when a new system (Mayor Barb) entangled itself with the environment (the gold mine), the dimensionality of, or volume available to, the new and more complicated but possibly less litigious “joint state vector” (Lee, Doug, Barb, and the mine) increased enormously. Or, to put it more simply (as he would for any of his high school honors physics students who might be interested in pursuing quantum theory in their spare time): Each environmental degree of freedom contributed an extra dimension.

  The endeavor expands.

  Lee sighed.

  “Hey, I’ve got an extra helmet in the trunk, if you’d like to join us,” Lee said to the discomposed marshal, mayor, and postmistress. “We were just about to go in.”

  SEVEN

  FROM THE DESK OF

  303-PYramid 4-4031 STANLEY BEACHUM, ESQ WWW.BEACHUM.COM

  Office of the State Court Administrator

  Division of Probation Services

  101 W. Colfax Ave., Suite 500

  Denver, Colorado 80202

  To Whom It May Concern:

  In the matter of the recently completed probation review and early release of Mr. Grant Garrison, who had been serving a five-year sentence for aggravated assault in the Territorial Prison at Cañon City, I wish to direct my extreme disappointment and utter disbelief to those charged with evaluating the record of the aforementioned probationer.

  What have you done?

  Are you out of your collective minds? Did you read the court record? Or did you choose to ignore it in some, I don’t know, puddle-headed belief that releasing an unrepentant criminal into the public arena will result in anything less than further misbehavior? Gentlemen (and women), need I remind you I was the victim of Mr. Garrison’s violent, unprovoked attack? Let me take you back for a moment to the night in question, a clear night, sweet summer dawning, the patio of a local, open-air bistro here in Evergreen. As I meticulously recalled for you in my letter of dissent, I was enjoying an evening of rare bonhomie—to wit, a congenial meal with some friends—when Mr. Garrison intruded, rudely confronted me, berated me for imaginary insults, threatened my companions (who included a close friend and associate of Colorado Governor Vukovich, as I mentioned in my account of it, and who will, I am sorry to say for your sakes, surely be reporting, anecdotally, to the Governor on the next occasion of their meeting), pulled me out of my chair, and, a celebrated pugilist, proceeded to strike at me with his bare fists repeatedly, holding me up so he’d have better leverage, flattening my nose, concussing my brain, fracturing the left supraorbital foramen, my jaw, and shattering my left eardrum, rendering me forever hearing-impaired on that side.

  I lost consciousness and woke up drugged and bandaged in the emergency room. I remained in the hospital for a week and still suffer aftereffects, including facial nerve damage and post-traumatic stress.

  This is a dangerous man who still has largely unexamined and unmitigated anger-management issues. Two years ago, a clever defense lawyer and a boyish demeanor deceived the court into issuing a lenient punishment for this horrific assault. You have been fooled by the false geniality of a sociopath; I now fear for my very life and limb.

  Cordially,

  Stan Beachum

  “Too direct?”

  Beachum searched his wife’s impassive face for some clue as to her true opinion of his letter; that she would tell him that it was fine was a given, but so was the certainty that what she told him and what she thought were usually entirely different things.

  “It’s fine,” she said.

  He waited.

  The baby teetered around the table, making motor noises and grabbing at anything solid for support. Beachum worried about the kid, fourteen months and still not really walking. That couldn’t be good. In the Beachum family, babies generally started walking at nine, ten months. Weaned. Talking. Reading at two wasn’t uncommon, especially for the girls, who tended toward precocious, according to his mother. This failure to perambulate could only mean that some sketchy, recessive genes from his wife’s protein pool had pushed to the front of the baby-building line, so to speak, and now God only knew what other developmental delays and intellectual compromises had been made in the construction of this one.

  “It’s brittle,” she added finally.

  “Brittle.” Beachum frowned. Brittle?

  “And whiny.” She picked up the kid and absently checked the diaper and then swung the baby around to face her.

  Beachum didn’t know which was worse, brittle or whiny.

  “And it makes you sound kind of cowardly, actually.”

  Beachum took the letter away from her and tucked it back into his iPad man bag.

  “I mean, rehabilitation, isn’t that the whole point of the correctional system, anyway?” his wife asked. “Correction. The successful return to polite society. And I would think they want people getting out early,” she said. “Saves taxpayer money, etcetera. You’re the big antigovernment, antitax guy.”

  “This is the man who crippled me.”

  “Mmmm. And you’re expecting the Nanny State to permanently disappear him for you?”

  Her tone was playful; she may have been gently teasing him, but Beachum still bit the inside of his mouth and felt the heat in his ears. These conversations never went anywhere productive and were generally better avoided.

  “I hope he knows enough not to come back here,”
Beachum moped.

  His wife got up suddenly and let the baby slip, stiff-legged, lightly to the floor with a squawk. From the sink, her back to Beachum, her hips cocked, she asked, “Why would he come back here?” The baby swayed rubbery on soft feet like a Steamboat Willie cartoon, stayed upright for a moment, then folded forward, assumed position, and crawled after her.

  “You hear about Lee’s gold mine?”

  She hadn’t, which surprised him. It seemed as if it was all any of his clients who knew Lee (from living in Evergreen, or because he’d taught their kids angles of momentum and how to change the oil in their cars) were talking about. Even in the rich, speculative tradition of Colorado fortune hunting, literally buying a gold mine felt, to the quick-kill, house-flipping, line-of-credit, bubble-chasing, credit, swap, default, and hedge crowd, unhinged.

  And yet . . .

  Down deep, they wondered if Lee was on to something.

  Because . . .

  Gold.

  Gold. The ur-investment. The ultimate hedge. Gold is the thing people turn to when the world starts to fall apart, despite its impracticality, its relative uselessness. Gold is the safe haven of crackpots and conspiracy theorists, the fallback position of free-market zealots, the mythological go-to manna that speculators and commodity traders worship because of its magical vulnerability to mania.

  They mocked Lee. And prayed that his was the fool’s errand.

  Because.

  If it wasn’t?

  They were the fools.

  They’d have missed out on a sure thing.

  And nothing, Beachum knew, galls the fortune hunter more than missing out on a sure thing.

  “He won’t come back here,” his wife seemed to decide, out of nowhere, about Grant, after Beachum had done the abridged explanation of her ex-husband Lee’s latest hijinks. “He’s too stubborn and too proud,” she said, meaning Grant. “And he never liked it here, anyway. He went to school back East,” she pointed out. “There’s nothing for him here except Lee, and over half the time those two want to kill each other.”