by Daniel Pyne
“Whoa. Don’t paint yourself into a corner, yet.” Beachum pulled Lee aside, his airy smile evaporating. “Lee, now I know you think I may hold a grudge against you,” he said rapidly, “but I want you to know, I’m not like other people, I don’t consider you accountable for your brother’s crimes.”
Lee wondered: What other people?
The Slocumbs were staring at them. Well, staring hard at Lee. Beachum turned ever so slightly, so his back was to the twins.
“Maybe now’s not a good time,” Saul Slocumb observed.
“And,” Beachum continued at a pace, “quite bluntly, this development, this opportunity, this small gift of serendipity is, I believe, the very stroke of luck that can help you get back on track. You know what I mean? A man-made whole. I think you should hear them out.”
Lee looked blankly at him. Then past him at the Slocumbs, who just continued to stare back, smoldering. “You want a piece of this action, Stan?”
Beachum, to his credit, didn’t blink and shot back, low and intense, “You bet your ass.” And then even lower, “I can swim with these sharks for you, Lee. I can. I can kill ’em and grill ’em.”
“Is that a murse?” he asked Beachum, about the satchel that hung somewhat rakishly off Beachum’s shoulder.
“No. It’s what I carry my tablet in.”
“Like Moses?”
“iPad,” Beachum said.
“Oh. Same concept. You carry it everywhere?”
“It’s got some kind of G,” Beachum explained.
A raucous thump turned them all around.
“Hey!”
The Fire Marshal, Earl, held his extinguisher at arm’s length while sparks showered down behind him and the kids fled, screaming with laughter as the Roman candle one of them had stuck in the deep back pocket of Earl’s cargo shorts thumped out more pink and yellow balls of sparks that arced out crazily across the lake.
“Help!” Earl dropped the silver cannister and ran slipsliding up onto the muddy bank. “Criminy! Little bastards!”
Beachum sloshed into the lake water, fished for the extinguisher, found it, and ran back to shore with it aimed at Earl’s double-wide backside. “Stand clear!”
“NOO!” Earl screamed as the caustic flame suppressant chemicals bit into him. “Stan—STOP!”
Paul Slocumb stepped over and shoved Beachum’s aim off. Foam dusted the water roiling in the wake of the kids’ retreat. Saul casually plucked the offending firework out of Earl’s pocket and sidearmed it out into the lake where it spit a couple more feeble sparkballs and died with a whistling sizzle.
Earl was apoplectic. “What the hell? What the hell? What the hell?”
Lee saw his chance and ran away with the kids into the inky shadows of the golf course.
Beachum’s voice chased him: “Lee?”
Lee ran uphill. Away from the Slocumbs, from Beachum, from Lorraine. Away from the hot coals of the grill and the cold algae waters of the lake; the soaked legs of his jeans stuck to his calves, and he ran, and he ran, stumbling through the high cut of a rough, then plummeting and nearly falling into a dark greenside bunker, running across the sand, up the other side, running, pushing hard, out of breath, running, struggling, up a steeper slope, up the last few strides to the top of a hill where eternity opened up in front of him in the form of billions of cold white stars and galaxies, the bright sprawl of the Milky Way, framed by sawtooth mountains on all sides, and, through a broken gap to the east, the millions more soft, warm lights of Denver. Lee stood there, breathless, bent over, his hands on his knees, his heart pounding. He could hear the band still playing (badly), and Beachum calling his name, and the sharp outbursts of laughter, and the closing of doors and crunching of tires as cars left the parking lot, and the murmur of voices, and the distant whistle and fizzle and pop of the fireworks, and he remembered when he and Grant and his parents would come to past Fourth of July barbecues with his mom’s deviled eggs and his dad’s brown Sherman cigarettes, and the softball game, and the flashlight tag, and the air thick with pollen, and the burned hot dogs, and the sickly-sweet tropical fruit drink from a rented fast food franchise dispenser, and the Eskimo Pies, and the girls, and the girls Grant claimed he felt up behind the storm shelter at the tenth tee, and the hush of the conifers, and the innocence, the certainty that life would unfold, that all mysteries would be revealed, and the future was scary in a good way, infinite, impossible, unknowable like all those stars and all those lights that had always been there and would always be there, promising, and your parents didn’t die, and your marriage lasted, and your brother never went to jail, and what you found in the darkness of a forgotten mine shaft would be priceless and inextractable and never negotiable because the magic of the dusk and the dreams and the skyrockets mattered.
He wouldn’t sell the mine.
Lee couldn’t sell the mine, especially now that it had been ruined.
On the morning of July 5, Grant emerged from the wilderness of his dreamless sleep to discover that Whistle Stop waitresses are better imagined than unwrapped, and the stupid dull ache of desire that had chased him from bar to bar to the Hide-a-Way Motel, room 16, complimentary continental breakfast, was not assuaged. If he thought he could fuck Lorraine out of his system, he was wrong, and subsequently the added entanglement of a dewy-eyed small-town gal and her pear-perfect ass had proved cold harbor for his ever-growing miscellany of regret. He stumbled into the bathroom and drowned himself under a shower that stunk of motel soap, pipe rust, and propane until it started to run cold.
The previous afternoon, among the families, friends, and incarcerated in the visiting area at the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility in Cañon City, Grant had sought counsel with his former cellmate, Bronco, a scruffy Jamaican whose gentle eyes belied consecutive life sentences for killing the two Gunnison cowboys responsible for raping his sister when Bronco was seventeen. Bronco’s sister, Bobbi, Colorado College summa cum laude tragically gaff-hooked on vodka and pharmaceutical cocaine, was a willing witness for the prosecution and never spoke to her brother again.
“Gonna tell him the truth?” Bronco had wondered about Lee after Grant told him all that had happened. The outside world, for Bronco, was a long-running entertainment that didn’t require him arguing with other convicts to get the opportunity to enjoy. But, like any melodrama, its banality ultimately disappointed him. Grant slid a cigarette pack across the table, and Bronco split the cellophane seal.
“What would you do?” Grant asked.
“Lie. But I’m a good liar.”
“You’ve never lied to me.”
“See?” Bronco shook out a slender cigarette. Smelled it. Then peeled the paper wrapping off what turned out to be a stick of yellow bubble gum. “Yo. This is the shit,” he said.
“I don’t get it,” Grant said, frustrated. “Lee should be happy. He should be out-of-his-mind happy.”
“Uh-huh. Let’s see. You fucked his wife. Back in the day. Now you fucked with his girlfriend. You fucked with his mine. And you ain’t been out of the Big House but sixty days, brother. Yeah, I bet he’s giddy.”
Grant pointed out that Rayna wasn’t technically Lee’s girlfriend, and, besides, nothing had happened there. Bronco considered the disclaimer. “And,” Grant added, “Lee doesn’t know I did the rest.”
“Right. Man, you are so bad at it.”
“What?”
“Lying.”
“I’m not lying.”
“Who you lying to? That’s my immediate question. Me, him, or your own self?” Bronco blew a bubble. Grant closed his eyes, put his head in his hands.
“I just want to . . . do something for him.”
“Yeah. Or to him. Uh-huh. Lemme know how that turns out.” Bronco said, “The difference between you and me is I enjoyed capping those rapist motherfuckers, and you go crazy with the poor decision-making but then get all tore-up guilty when it don’t work out, which it never does, by the way, because, like I said, the decision-making is
poor right up top, so. What do you expect?”
“I don’t know what I expect.”
“Well, whatever it is, man, do not tell him the truth.”
“About which?”
“Take your pick. Me, I’ve been having these thoughts,” Bronco said. “Angels and shit.”
“What?” This was how conversations with Bronco generally played out.
“Nothing.” Bronco blew another bubble.
“Some kind of religious thing?”
“Nah. It’s just, you know.”
They sat for a while in silence. They’d been cellmates for twenty months, and the silences just grew out of habit. Bronco would never be released from jail, would never meet Lee, would never have his chance at a one-night stand with a Whistle Stop waitress who, for one moment, during the night, had allowed herself to believe that Grant was her white knight and the man she would marry. By the cold light of a street lamp, cast through the slit-gap in the curtain, Grant had seen the softness in her eyes when she squeaked “I love you” so quietly that she could later deny it if she needed to, and then her eyes closed and her head angled back and the bed frame complained and her hands flexed, and lightly traced, with the stiff heel of her palms, the narrow crease of his back as she dreamed of a dream.
“You’re right,” Grant had said, finally, in the visiting room. “I’ve got to tell him, don’t I?”
“You what?” Bronco frowned.
“Sometimes the truth is a lie,” Grant thought aloud.
Bronco looked down at him, frowning.
“And sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference,” Grant concluded.
“Ai’ight” was Bronco’s final word on the subject.
Allie was pounding on the bathroom door and calling out to Grant that she had to pee something fierce. The door was unlocked, but Grant didn’t tell her. He shut off the shower and pushed the vinyl curtain back and rubbed himself with a scratchy motel towel.
“Come on come on come on come on.”
Grant opened the door and the waitress shoved through and fell on the toilet and voided herself in a grateful torrent, and suddenly it was way more intimacy than Grant cared to experience with any woman, or almost any woman, he conceded to himself reluctantly, so he went out into the room and started pulling on his clothes.
“What are you doing?”
Grant told her that he had to drive back today, and he watched the subtle shift in her shoulders and the cant of her head, like a slow-motion slap to the face, and her eyes darkened, and her mouth tightened. Grant knew it like he knew himself and could guess what came next.
“I can come with you. I got all this vacation time saved up.” The toilet flushed and she was in the doorway, naked, pink, and hoping. Grant thought, I’m an asshole. And the moment passed.
Allie picked up his towel and started to wrap and rewrap it around herself, getting self-conscious. There was color in her cheeks as if she was blushing. Or ashamed.
“I was too easy. Damn.”
“No.”
“Damn! Dammit!” She brushed the tears out of her eyes. “I was. I am,” she said. “I’m not crying,” she told him. “Oh hell,” she sighed and dropped the towel. “Shit. I’m taking a shower. Did you use all the hot water?”
“I did,” Grant admitted.
“Fuck you.”
“Yeah,” Grant said, melancholy.
TWENTY-THREE
The heavens were streaked with nervous gestures of mares’ tails. The forest below the mine stood ragged and black-green in the flat light, lifeless, brooding, and ill-omened. Doug reclined, propped against the grill of his Subaru, arms folded, self-satisfied, and immovable, and watched as Mayor Barb took mud-stained boots and overalls from her saddlebag to put them on.
“It’s stupid. We don’t have the manpower, facility, technology, or know-how to take the gold from this mine,” Doug was telling her.
“I did some figuring, Mr. Pessimist,” Barb shot back at him. “If the assay says out of every metric ton of rock we can yield gold worth a hundred grand, I got a half-ton pickup. One truckload and we’re taking home about sixteen large each.”
“Large?”
“Thousand. Dollars,” she said. “Sixteen thousand dollars. For crying out loud, Doug, don’t you watch TV?”
“Do you know how tough that is? To hardrock mine and move a half ton of ore?”
“There’s a ‘can’ in every ‘can’t.’”
“We sell to the cowboy Talibanis,” Doug insisted. “Negotiate a hefty royalty. Let them do the hard part and pay us for the privilege to do it.”
“Ho. If you don’t pull your weight, round man, why should you get anything?”
“Fine, equal work for equal pay. Go there. How come Lee gets to decide what our cut’s going to be?”
“Didn’t he put up all the money?” Rayna interjected. She’d come hiking up from the access road, and they only noticed her now. She was breathing hard. And still smoking. They watched her, suspicious, as she took one last drag on the cigarette and then flicked it into the leeching pond, where it hissed, flared, and died.
“You are not an impartial jury,” Doug decided.
“Lee in his office?”
“Utterly,” Mayor Barb said.
Rayna walked into the mine shaft and became a silhouette, the overhead string of lights rocking back and forth above her as Doug and the Mayor continued their complaints outside.
“Listen to me. Almost all of the great gold strikes played out and left their owners penniless. Tabor, Brown, Creede, and Jackson. Gregory, Russell, Wee Bobby Womack, and W. S. Stratton. Why why why?” Doug said petulantly. “Why do you think?”
“Crazy wives.”
“No. No. Greed? Also no. Ambition. Pigheaded ambition,” Doug said. “They wanted to do it all themselves.”
Their catfight was finally drowned out by the sloshing of Rayna’s boots through the intractable diarrhetic muck. She pushed down the Welsh tunnel, crouched, then the mine shaft opened up, and Rayna could straighten her back, and, at the main intersection, she found Lee. He was sitting on a rusty, ancient stool, hunched over an improvised workbench a few feet from the glassy gape of water that filled the submerged downshaft. Lee flipped through a yachting magazine and pretended he hadn’t noticed Rayna’s arrival, determined not to be the butt of one more pathetic joke as invented by Grant.
“Ahoy,” she said.
Lee didn’t react. He ripped out a half-page ad for a seagoing fishing trawler and punched it onto an exposed nail in the beam in front of his head. A couple of other boat ads were already pegged there, curling as stray overhead drips of drainage and the ever-present humidity of the mine leached into them.
“Spending your jackpot already?”
She moved around him, skirting the edge of the watery square, and Lee swiveled and braced her waist protectively. “Careful, that shaft goes down eighty feet.” Then he realized he was holding her, and he let go as if she was radioactive.
“I’d float,” Rayna said, the steadiness of his hands lingering on her hips.
“You’d float.”
“It’s full of water, Lee. If I fell in, I’d float. I’d swim to the edge and climb out. Not that I don’t appreciate your concern.”
Lee stared at her, feeling a little foolish. He couldn’t sustain any anger toward her. It came and went; he didn’t know why. They committed to an uncomfortable pause and studied the boat advertisement.
“Trawler?”
“They’re very dependable, even in rough seas.”
“I’ll smoke,” Rayna said, “if that’s all right.”
“You decided not to quit?”
Rayna dug out her new cigarettes, Kools, and a translucent blue lighter she had taken from the card display next to her cash register.
“I have a new theory,” she explained. “So basically I’ve been chipping, okay? Parsing my cigarettes and, well, telling myself that each one is the last one, which only makes each one that much more incredi
ble. The last one! And then, after: remorse. And the memory of that last one. And, I don’t know, the yearning. And then, why not? Quit. Grieve. Yearn. Again. It’s bullshit. So. Now I’m just going to smoke myself sick, and maybe I’ll get it out of my system.”
“I didn’t want a gold mine,” Lee said. “I just wanted a mine that might have gold in it.”
Rayna lit her cigarette. The smoke curled through the dim mine light and hung in sheets like torn ghosts and made their eyes water. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.
“And I never smoked,” Lee added after a while, sounding almost regretful about it.
“Of course you didn’t.” Rayna exhaled a visible sigh. “You’re a nice guy, Lee. A little in the clouds, but a nice guy.”
Lee observed coolly that quite possibly she wouldn’t know a nice guy if she fell over one. Rayna replied that, in fact, she had.
“You,” she said. “I had my heart set on you.”
Lee’s anger flared again; he cut her off quickly, “Right, yeah, you know what? A nice guy is somebody to whom people feel comfortable saying, ’You’re a nice guy, Lee, now excuse me while I go over here and have sex with the donkey.’ And that’s just plain arrogant.”
Rayna took a couple of thoughtful pulls on her cigarette—full-time smoking already beginning to annoy her—and measured her response. It was important to her to get it right. She was sorry for what Lee thought had occurred with Grant, but she was not willing to surrender with no quarter.
“No,” she said, “a nice guy is a man who can say ‘I love you’ and sort of mean it. Or a guy who might even say, ‘I respect you,’ and believe it. Or, ‘What do you think, Rayna?’”
There followed a silence that they both expected. And out of it, shouting, distant, arose outside. Doug and Mayor Barb.
“I don’t want to know what you think,” Lee said without conviction and less than truthfully.
“Nothing happened,” Rayna told him. And in spite of everything he’d known to be true from his long, tangled, and ineluctable journey to this moment, he believed her.
The overhead lights flickered. The shouting, which they’d both just assumed was more Doug and Barb argument, had taken on a quality of panic. There was the rumble of an engine that Lee recognized as his backhoe. Nobody but Lee had keys to the backhoe. He stood up from the stool, frowning, and began running out of the mine.