A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar

by Daniel Pyne

  Smoking made her think of Lee.

  The cigarettes made her think of Grant.

  Did she dream Grant? His midday visit, the shotgun and the shells? She knew she hadn’t. She wished she had, but she hadn’t.

  Shit.

  NINETEEN

  A couple of Doug’s hairier friends, Vick and Steve, soul patch and mutton chops respectively, were already sawing timbers on the far end of the tailings when Lee and Grant hiked up to the mine. Some glorious sunshine beat down on the Argentine Pass from a cornflower-blue, cloudless sky, taking the edge off the high-altitude chill. Grant made a dry comment about a crisis of facial hair that Lee didn’t quite hear over the power saw.

  Earlier that same morning, Lee had padded, sleepy, from his bedroom into the bathroom and had the shower turned on before he saw what could only have been muddy ochre footprints on the floor tiles, but they were there for only a moment before the water washed them away. The bathroom floor was unsullied; the carpet in the hallway showed nothing. Lee pushed open the door to Grant’s room, found Grant awake, out of bed, standing, yawning, scratching his groin, and sniffing through a pile of clothing for a clean shirt. He looked up at Lee without focus.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey,” Lee said.

  For a moment they had just stood there, looking at each other, then Lee padded back down the hallway again to take his shower.

  Now Doug came out of the mine in his mud-slick waders, mud the selfsame color as the muddy footprints from the shower, yellow-ochre-incandescent-shit-viscous mud that Lee had seen so much of now it was burned into the back of his eyes. And maybe in the shower, on the tiles, when it wasn’t there.

  “I didn’t tell them. I didn’t,” Doug said.

  Lee remarked that if that was true, how did Doug even know that Lee would be wondering if he had told anyone anything since the only way Doug could have known Lee spoke with the Slocumbs after graduation was if Doug had talked to them himself, earlier, and sent them in Lee’s direction?

  “I don’t know from any Slocumbs,” Doug insisted. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  It went on like this for a while: Lee dogging Doug and trying to engage him in a disputation while Doug pretended that he had something really, really crucial to get done outside the mine that consisted mostly of walking away from Lee while the mud on his waders dried and flaked off and the hairy friends sawed.

  Grant’s eyes ached and his head pounded. It wasn’t a hangover. He hadn’t been drinking. He’d tried the pressure points already. No luck.

  “Well if you didn’t tell them,” Lee was saying, “who did?”

  “But as long as they’re interested in buying us out,” Doug wondered aloud, as if just coming to the idea, “I don’t see why we can’t have a sit-down meeting of all the shareholders and—”

  “No.”

  “I’m going down to get some aspirin,” Grant said.

  “Do you know who the Slocumbs are?” Doug asked.

  Lee saw no purchase in pointing out that Doug had claimed he didn’t.

  “I’m going down to get some aspirin,” Grant repeated.

  Lee wasn’t listening. Doug started edging away from him again. “Major, major players on the world mining scene,” Doug alleged. “No individual actually finds gold in the modern age. You stake claims, you find a junior—a smaller exploration outfit—and sell them options to raise penny stock funds to chase the promise, and then when they get lucky, they turn around and sell to a major who has the resources to go in and get the lode. This happens to be a golden, if you’ll pardon the pun, opportunity to cut out the middleman, Lee. By which I mean the junior.”

  “There’s a world mining scene?”

  “You can’t mess with these guys.”

  Grant skated loose tailings back down into the trees, his course set for Rayna’s General Store, to get his head cured.

  “What about Creede? What about the triumph of the individual and—”

  Doug cut him short: “Creede woulda been all over this, and you know it. Smart money’s all in the royalties and the stock options.”

  “Doug. It’s my land.”

  “Oh, now you’re gonna get technical on me.”

  “No. I paid for it. I pay for all the equipment.”

  “There’s other kinds of investment. Sweat equity.”

  “What you have is a share of the potential mineral rights, if we, personally, find anything. Ten percent of a wish and a prayer. If I sell the land—” Then Lee backtracked. “Never mind, I’m not interested in majors or juniors or anybody else.”

  “You don’t have to shout.”

  “I’m not shouting.”

  “And who helped you find the mine? And who helped you dig the entrance out?”

  “I acknowledge that, Doug.”

  “And who got his friends from the molybdenum mine to come up here and help us timber?” Doug shouted, gesturing toward Vick and Steve, who had stopped sawing and fired up a fatty to watch the argument unfold. “And who got the mine helmets? And who knew about tommyknockers, and the Welshman, and the Coblynau?”

  “I bought the mine helmets.” Lee frowned. “Coblynau?”

  “Mine gnomes,” Doug explained. “Butt-ugly gnomes in little mine uniforms. They’re about yay-high,” he said, chopping just under his knees. “The Welsh think they haunt mines and quarries, working real hard, all day and night, but never finishing. They might even be the cause of rockslides.”

  “Never finishing what?”

  “Yeah,” Doug said, veering back into the mine. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  Lee chased him, ducking his helmet under the first header. The front tunnel was lit by a string of fat white Christmas tree lights connected to the gasoline generator that dully flatulated outside. Somewhere, deeper in the mine, Mayor Barb was tap tap tapping away at the rock, and tossing fragments into a metal bucket. At the intersection of the main tunnel and its tributaries, Doug stopped retreating and turned, the light blazing from his helmet hitting Lee full on so he had to shade his eyes.

  “No doubt a lawyer’d have something to say about your—your—your so-called definition of ownership!” Doug hissed.

  “I don’t think so. You want to ask one?”

  “No. I’m just offering that a legal opinion might have you whistling a different tune.”

  Lee sighed. “All right. What do you think is fair?”

  “Let’s take a vote.”

  “I’m the majority shareholder. I’d win.”

  “Majority of what?!”

  “Exactly.”

  There was a confused pause as Doug caught up with himself and seemed worried that he’d jumped to Lee’s side of the argument.

  “I’m not selling the mine,” Lee said again.

  “Look . . . ” Doug regrouped. “How about let’s just . . . get a goddamn assay done then. Value the ore. And find out what the what is.”

  Lee said fine, and asked, since Doug seemed to be the expert on the subject, where in Denver they could take a sample to be tested. Doug backpedaled, offering that the assay might be kind of expensive, but Lee said he’d pay for it.

  “Since it’s my mine,” Lee added.

  Doug pulled a well-worn plat map out of his back pocket and spread it on the crude workbench they’d built in the crossing on the other side of the flooded downshaft. “We should take samples from four or five different potential deposit areas.” He pointed them out: “How about here and here. Here. Here . . . ”

  Barb came out of the darkness, helmet ablaze, lugging a pail full of rock fragments.

  “And here,” she said. She dropped the pail and went back into the shadows. The voices of Doug and Lee rattled through the rocky passageways and fractured into a kind of geological patois. Her helmet light swept the deep recesses of a crevice. Tiny bits of something yellow glistened.

  She sighed.

  Remembering the fool’s gold, she wondered if it was worth the effort to climb up into tha
t gap and get one more sample.

  Rayna was ringing up picnic items for some day-trippers and their children when the doorbell jingled and Grant strolled in. His coyote eyes met hers and stuck; he stood awkwardly in the main aisle, watching and waiting until the tourists ambled out the door.

  “I just wanted to make sure,” he said, “to be clear about, or, more to the point that you understand why even if I wanted to, I couldn’t do anything . . . with you . . . because, well, you know. Lee saw you first.”

  Rayna didn’t say anything for a moment.

  “And I have a headache,” Grant added.

  “First. You mean like ‘first dibs’?” Rayna asked him. “Like I’m a big fat cat’s-eye marble or something?”

  “No—no—listen—”

  “How’d those shells work out?”

  “Fine. I don’t know. Ask Lee.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Look, Rayna—”

  “Prime piece of steak,” she said, returning to her previous thought.

  “All right. Okay. Let me just—you got any Naproxin?”

  “I’m not. I’m not a marble, Grant. Or meat.”

  “The other day—”

  “I’m not a trophy you win at the end of the race. Or let your brother win, for that matter, because you’re trying to prove that you’ve got, I don’t know, what? Character? Integrity? A modicum of restraint? Do either of us believe that?”

  “What I’m trying to say is that what was going on the other day at the house is my brother really likes you and he was warning me off. So. Which, by the way, I think you should be flattered by. Because he’s fucking picky. Not that it means anything if you’re not equally interested.”

  Rayna just stared at him coolly.

  “He just, he doesn’t always make those things clear,” Grant said, elaborating. “But—anyway, it’s because of that, that I can’t—you know—”

  Rayna rolled her eyes. “No. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Hook up.”

  “‘Hook up.’ Gee. Where’d you learn all the hip ’tween lingua franca, boyfriend, reading Twilight back in the Big House?”

  Grant’s mind balked. “Fuck you,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, harder than he wanted to.

  “Oh.” Rayna held her ground. Unfazed.

  Grant tried sulking. It didn’t play. Rayna’s eyes drilled into him. “And you’re telling me this why?” The room tilted, and Grant almost reached out to steady himself. He felt his pulse in his head. They just studied each other and time had no reference suddenly. A second, a minute, an hour, it was all the same. Nothing.

  “Never mind.”

  “I know all about Marion Gilroy.”

  Grant affected innocence.

  “You are not a nice guy,” she added then, quieter.

  “No, I’m not,” Grant agreed.

  “Could you, um, button your shirt all the way up? It’s kind of distracting,” Rayna said then. Grant looked—sure enough, his shirt was open at the neck down to the middle of his chest like some kind of Vegas lounge lizard. He tried to fix it and discovered two buttons were gone.

  “No buttons,” he said unnecessarily.

  “No shit,” Rayna said. “I’ll sew them back on for you.”

  “What?”

  Rayna was already walking to the front door. Her legs scissored, her hips rocked. Jesus, Grant thought.

  “We’ve got buttons,” she said. “We’ve got needles, we’ve got thread. It won’t take but a minute.” She flipped the YES, WE’RE OPEN sign over, so it read SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED. Then she turned back to Grant. “There.”

  Up in the mine, Doug carefully stripped a chunk of rock off the side of the wall and dropped it in his metal bucket. “Pearl de Vere,” Doug called out.

  “What are you on about?” Barb shot back from a darkness her helmet light momentarily cleaved.

  “Beloved soiled dove of Cripple Creek, grand madame of the Old Homestead house of ill-repute. Favorite flaxen-haired flesh-toy of the miner millionaires from Poverty Gulch. Many a good man has been ruined on the silky shores of woman.”

  Barb’s voice barked at him to stow it.

  Deeper in the mine, Lee stared at his own reflection in the bottomless water of the submerged downshaft. His headlight glinted off something, bright and gold. He leaned closer. A shotgun shell casing rested on a timber about four feet down, distorted by the clear water. Curious, Lee found a length of wire, straightened it, and plunged it into the shaft, fishing.

  “Pearl eventually betrothed herself to one C. B. Flynn, a hardworking and prosperous mill owner, but the fire of ’86 burned them out, and some pious Baptists blamed it on the Old Homestead,” Doug waxed. “Flynn hired out to Monterrey, Mexico, where he contracted cholera and died, but Pearl had never given up on the oldest profession, so she relaunched her sexual services enterprise with great success, prancing nearly naked in French silks down Main Street every morning in an open carriage pulled by a team of fine ebony horses. Children were made to shield their eyes when Pearl rode past.”

  Barb’s irritated response was inaudible.

  Tiny particles of grit swirled in the sallow beam of Lee’s helmet light as he fished for the shell. Refracted by the water, the wire missed twice, then dislodged it, and Lee slipped the wire’s end delicately into the spent hollow to lift it up and out. But as he pulled, the water resisted and the wire bowed, the shell slipped off and tumbled away, down where his light finally couldn’t penetrate the darkness.

  “There are those who insist that abstinence is the proper course of action for a miner until he’s made his strike. I’m just saying. The mountains are littered with stillborn reminders of promiscuous wildcatting,” Doug concluded.

  In her stub of a slant-shaft, Mayor Barb braced herself in the crevice she was mining, boots slipping on slick rock, gloved hands clutching at outcroppings, her hammer banging wildly from her belt.

  Rayna squinted cross-eyed as she threaded a needle and Grant looked to sit on a flat spot atop some wooden crates in the back room of the General Store, but Rayna snapped at him without looking up: “Not there. That’s dynamite.”

  “Jesus. Don’t you have to have a license for that?”

  “Technically? You do, yes. To make it, to sell it, to have it.”

  “And a special place for it. I mean . . . ”

  “What?” The needle caught light as it slid down the thread.

  “Dynamite.”

  “It’s the Wild West, Grant. Outlaws get shotguns, girls store TNT. Sit.”

  So Grant sat on a big can of roofing tar, and Rayna dragged another one right in front of him. Her legs got between his, her pink naked knees pressed together and lightly brushing against the insides of his thigh denim.

  “Why don’t I just take off the shirt?” Grant asked.

  Rayna smiled, distant. “Oh, no, that’s why we’re putting the button on it. So it doesn’t fall off,” she said. She leaned into him, positioned the button, and began to sew it. The top of her head declined inches from Grant’s chin, mouth, lips. Her hair smelled like surrender.

  “Don’t . . . move,” she said.

  In her slant-shaft, Mayor Barb’s hammer and chisel hacked hard at the crease in the rock. A chunk fell loose, and she just managed to catch it and put it in the canvas pouch around her waist.

  In the darkness, Doug sang—screamed, really—the theme song from the movie The Man Who Would Be King.

  “Duh DUHHHHH da duh duh duh duh DA DA DA!”

  In the mine, deeper, shrouded, like an astronaut at the edge of space, Lee crouched, low, near the soughing mud, running his hand over a series of dull yellow, metallic smudges in a hollow at the dead end of another stub shaft.

  “Duh dee da da da dee da duh da da DAAAAHHHH!”

  With his fingernail, Lee flicked a couple of gilded flakes into the palm of his hand. They didn’t seem to be too friendly with the mountain rock. Just visiting.
>
  He studied them, his breathing shallow, the light from his helmet jittery with doubt.

  “Conversely, if he didn’t have an interest in you,” Grant was rambling, and he never rambled; it was as if some alt-Grant had leapt into his body. He was inside, looking out, but not in control of anything: his body, his mind, his mouth, and rambling on about this and that, like, well, like, okay, Lee’s virtues, Lee’s lofty intentions, Lee’s gentleman to Grant’s . . . hmm, well, what?

  “Who?” Rayna was already nearly finished sewing the second button on his shirt. Intent. Committed to the task. And Grant began to mistrust his read of the whole situation. Double—no—triple-thinking it. What did she want?

  “Who? Lee.” Lee.

  “Oh. Lee.” She leaned in and bit off the thread. “Lee isn’t here. I thought that was your strategy.”

  She sat up, and came face-to-face with Grant, her hazel eyes locked on his.

  “This is, this is why I’m saying,” he was stammering, and he never stammered, “you know, if you weren’t, if you weren’t, well, interested in him . . . ”

  “Am I making you uncomfortable or something?” Rayna asked.

  “Yes, you are.”

  “Good. That makes me feel pretty.” She buttoned his shirt up. “There.”

  “You are pretty,” Grant said, a little insincerely, but, rattled now, he had to ask, “Rayna, are you interested in my brother? Or is this going in another direction?”

  Rayna’s hand was steady as she traced lightly down from the first button she fixed, to the next one, feeling the fabric. “Your brother,” she repeated hollowly. “You say it in a way that makes me understand your love for him, without even having to question it, without having to know anything more about you. Was he a good brother? Did he share his toys, did he torture you when your parents went out to play bridge, were you always trying to measure up to him, was he the better student, did he protect you from bullies? You love him,” Rayna observed drily, “but you came here to fuck me, Grant. In fact, you’ve taken it as a personal challenge that I didn’t peel off my panties the first time you showed your face, which, by the way, the old me was mightily tempted to go ahead and do, and, believe me, has presented the new me with a personal challenge of an equal and opposite nature.