A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar

by Daniel Pyne

  “Lee, what is it?”

  Moving from mine to world was a kind of rebirth every time Lee experienced it. The womb of darkness. The distant square of daylight that grew and grew to an unimaginable brilliance, the sound of the wind, voices, engines, stray movement—all resurrected, all for that one moment of emerging into the world brand new again. This time was different. This was Bizarro Blue Lark, some crazy alternative universe in which Doug was screaming through the deep drone of the backhoe’s overcranked engine, and Barb was screaming something unintelligible from the other side of the claim, and, as Lee emerged, the huge, serrated backhoe shovel blade swung violently past, just missing his head, clipped the front edge of the mine opening, and knocked the timbers loose. Dirt and rock cascaded down around Lee. He skated to keep his balance.

  Doug stood on the edge of the leaching pond, mouth gaped, a life-sized garden gnome watching as Mayor Barb, hunkered defensively into an upright armadillo ball, tried to ward off the blows of a short board gripped in the fat hand of a mean motherfucker with a buzz cut and patchy sunburn. Mayor Barb reeled, spin-staggering, dazed, and retching, to the edge of the tailings where a second man in a backward baseball cap just extended his arms and flattened his hands and shoved her off into the void.

  The men didn’t seem to have any interest in Doug.

  The backhoe thundered past Lee, blocking his view of the leaching pond assault and revealing, beyond it, a third interloper carrying two red plastic gas cans toward the mine, but Lee had already clambered up onto his backhoe, and now he stood on the running board trying to yank open the door or smash the plastic window, anything, to get inside the cab and stop the fourth man, who was driving. The cab door swung out unexpectedly, sweeping Lee off the step, followed directly by the driver, in camo pants and steel-toed boots, who, while the backhoe kept going, unmanned, launched himself at Lee like some kind of professional wrestler.

  Now, while it may be true that force is mass times acceleration, and the driver was both bigger than Lee and moving toward him at a rate equivalent to the acceleration of his jump plus the speed of the backhoe plus a gravitational factor as he fell toward the earth—or ground—where Lee had sprawled, it is also true that the tabletop formed by the Blue Lark Mine excavation was largely paved with sharp chunks of rock and tailings, and this surface, though adequate for walking and working while wearing suitable footwear, was wholly inappropriate for gymnastic wrestling maneuvers such as the Atomic Drop, the Gorilla Press Slam, the Emerald Flowsion, or, on this particular occasion, a variation on the Simple Frog Splash, popularized by Art “Love Machine” Barr in the early 1990s, in which the attacker, after leaping, stretches out to a horizontal position, and then brings his feet and hands inward and outward before landing on his intended target in a belly-flop. The drawback of any wrestling move, of course, is that it typically requires the cooperation of the target. Lee, not particularly a fan of La Luche (or Luche Libre, which was what his father called it), nor of full contact sports in general, rolled away from the incoming driver, and consequently the man face-planted on the rocks with correspondingly unfortunate results. This was opportune because Barb’s attacker, confident she wasn’t coming back up the slag anytime soon, had turned his attention to Lee and, as Lee tried to get up, came powering into him and began to swing wildly.

  Rayna, exiting the mine as the man with the gas cans walked past her, saw Lee under attack, Doug frozen with a look of shamefaced horror, no sign of Barbara, and the last of the backhoe as it careened off the far edge of the mine tailings and plunged downward, flipping, rolling, crashing thunderously into the trees. Rayna picked up a two-by-four, moved to where Lee was getting mauled, and hit the aggressor as hard as she could across the back. He reeled up, throwing his arms out, yelling in pain, turning, catching her broadside, and knocking her onto the ground.

  “What do you want?” Rayna shouted at him. “What do you want?”

  The guy in the backward cap joined the free-for-all on Lee and Rayna, and it quickly became a rout. The belly-flopping luchador was up on his feet but merely a woozy spectator as Rayna went down again and didn’t get up. They were all breathing hard. Eventually Lee fell next to her, bloodied and beaten. The assailants kicked at him a few more times, halfheartedly, exhausted, and then their associate came sprinting out of the mine and shouted something and there was a weird sucking sound and the air stiffened and boils of smoke and flames came vomiting violently out of the mine shaft.

  The men ran down the road. No more than three minutes had passed.

  Doug was missing.

  Barb was upside down on the steep slope of the tailings, arms turtling, scraped raw, trying to get herself righted.

  At the crest of the mine road was a big blue pickup truck with a dusty logo of a graphic mountain crested by a cartoon crown and the word EMPIRE in B-movie script just below it. Three men were already in the cab, backing down the road, turning around while the backward cap guy sat behind the wheel of Lee’s Jeep, the door swinging open, jacking the transmission into neutral and popping the emergency brake. The Jeep started rolling backward. The man leapt out, chased the pickup, and dove into the bed of the truck as it followed the Jeep downhill. Finally, the Jeep bounced over the huge road ruts, picked up speed, continued straight where the road bent, jumped the embankment, smashed through the aspen for a hundred yards, and then, almost in slow motion, just tipped over.

  The blue pickup drifted around one hairpin corner, tires spinning, catching, throwing it into the next curve, and it sped thus down the mountain, the whine of its engine audible long after Lee and Rayna saw the last of it.

  Wild, agitated cloud structures were ripping and re-forming above the ragged peaks of the Divide, playing havoc with the sun. Lee got to his feet, unsteady, his face swollen and smeared with blood, the mine timbers burning behind him, spitting flames and acrid smoke as if from the mouth of some dying dragon. He knelt next to Rayna, and his heart was pounding, and his hands stung as he brushed the grit off her face and helped her up.

  Evergreen Volunteer Fire Department trucks surrounded Lee’s house as Grant’s Camaro slowed on the road and nosed awkwardly into the shoulder short of where two police cars were parked, parallel, across the pavement. Then Grant was out of the car and walking, unable to fathom what he was seeing: The house was on fire. Crisscrossing streams of water from the trucks blasted the flames, gilded by dusklight. Lee’s giant suppository garden was slick with the sheen of overspray.

  “That’s far enough, son!” Earl, the imperious Fire Marshal, by day merely a Walmart optician, but here, truly a god, Grant thought. Earl intercepted Grant before he could get too close. The optician wore a fireman’s coat of his own design with epaulettes, suggesting a third world general or a character from Fahrenheit 451. And safety glasses.

  “Where’s Lee?”

  “House is empty. We been calling him, no answer. What can I tell you? I’m so sorry.”

  Wind caught the mist from the surging water and made rainbows in the dying light. Grant just stared.

  “Blue flames suggest an accelerant.”

  “Blue what?”

  “Some fool lit the darn house on fire,” Earl said. “Betcha anything.”

  Barb’s eyes darted wildly about, a fish in too little water, lids held open and unblinking by tiny metal Clockwork Orange retractors as the Summit County Emergency room resident used saline and a delicate swab to coax debris out before he stitched up the laceration that stretched from the bridge of the Mayor’s nose to the end of what was, earlier in the day, her eyebrow. Barb’s face was a swollen mass, and IV tubes snaked from bruised arms calicoed with bandages to bags on bedside hangers. She tugged on the thin cotton blanket covering her, and exposed her feet and their ochre-mud-stained socks. A crewcut sheriff’s deputy with problem acne questioned her when the resident sat back:

  “Did they say anything at all?”

  “No.”

  “Names, any identifying, peculiar comments?”

&nbs
p; “No.”

  “And you didn’t recognize them?”

  “No.”

  The Deputy took careful notes.

  “Do you have any idea why they—”

  “No.”

  Rayna, on a gurney directly across from the Mayor, was lying flat but was not seriously hurt. Just tired. Her hands folded on her stomach, her eyes open, aimed emptily at the ceiling tiles.

  In the far corner, slumped in a chair, Lee drank water from a paper cup. His shirt was off and his chest was wrapped and taped and both his hands bandaged from the wrist to the first knuckle of his fingers. He watched Rayna, Mayor Barb, the doctors, the staff. He felt nothing. He closed his eyes and imagined a bone-white fiberglass fishing trawler slicing through the crest of a huge wave, then free-falling into the trough of foam-whisked, green-grey seawater, its propeller screws keening. The boat shuddered when it hit the surface, the rigging shivering, and its stern twisting violently starboard; on the flying bridge, Lee gripped the tiller and spun it as water washed over him, another huge wave looming in front of his little ship like a mountainside, except this mountain was moving into him, and the trawler was picked up by the ocean swell, rising, vertical on the wave, impossibly vertical and likely to fall away backward, but then the sea moved through the boat, dark water parting as the prow cut a passageway, and then the boat was on the other side, planing, exploding through the crest of the wave and starting to surf down onto a rocky decline, near Argentine Pass, free-falling down the steep slope, over rocks that punched into the fiberglass and split the hull, screws turning meaninglessly in the air, beam planing, skidding, shredding, scraping bottom on the mountainside and starting to come apart, the glass ripping, splitting, folding in on itself, fragments of teak superstructure flying everywhere, and on the bridge Lee steered, expressionless, riding out the impossible disintegration of his craft with a crazy élan, as if he expected nothing less than this and could, somehow, still avert it and—

  “Mr. Garrison?”

  His ribs ached. Lee blinked open his eyes to the emergency room nurse looking down at him through square, sensible eyeglasses, curiously.

  “You have a telephone call,” the nurse said.

  There was an ancient pay phone out in the lobby, and the receiver lay on the little shelf where a phone book had once been bolted. Lee answered and said his name and asked who was calling and listened for a long time to the cold, reasoned proposal being offered on the other end of the line with the same dead expression he’d had on the bridge of his imagined trawler.

  If they’d wanted to kill me, they would have, he thought.

  “How many men were there, ma’am?” The Deputy was asking Barb.

  “Six, seven. Hell, I don’t know.”

  Rayna, sitting up, watching Lee through the glass windows of the automatic doorway into the ER, met his gaze as he listened attentively to his caller. The nurse pulled the curtain around Barb’s station, cutting off Lee’s sightline to Rayna. Triple beams of the surgical lights burned through the milky drapery like St. Elmo’s fire.

  Headlights slowly came forward, slowly defined themselves, and slowly allowed the darkness to ease back in around them; ghostly shapes resolved into the buildings on Main Street in Basso Profundo, and the headlights from Barb’s Cadillac turned finally into her driveway and came to rest in two angry pools on the aluminum siding of her house.

  Rayna got out from the driver’s side of the Caddy and hurried around to help the Mayor, who hadn’t spoken since the Deputy had finished questioning her in the ER. Footsteps on gravel told of someone coming up the road from Rayna’s store, a lean figure, a man.

  Grant.

  “Rayna, where’s Lee?” And when he got close enough to see them: “Jesus, what—?”

  “We got bushwhacked.” Mayor Barb spat something reddish through the light to the ground. Rayna kept her moving, supporting the older woman, walking her into the house.

  “The mine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Lee got a call at the hospital and left without saying where he was going,” Rayna said. “Where have you been?”

  “Somebody torched the house,” Grant told her. The words sounded absurd. “Our house. Lee’s house, somebody—Jesus, what—” and he looked to Mayor Barb again, and then at Rayna, unable to concentrate on anything. “Was Lee at the mine with you?”

  “He was,” Rayna said.

  “Where’s Lee?” Barb asked, suddenly aware that Lee wasn’t with them now.

  “You were at the mine?” Grant asked Rayna.

  Rayna asked him again: “Where were you?”

  Grant closed the door behind them. Barb’s house was crowded, filled with a compendium of strange objects, collections, unused Amway products still in their shipping boxes—Nutrilite, Dish Drops, and eSpring bottled water. There were slender, carefully considered aisles to walk down, and everything felt disciplined, curated: butterflies pinned in antique glass display boxes, several dozen taxidermied grey squirrels mounted on polished marble bases, a clothing rack hung with fancy leather fringe vests, and the dining room table covered with freshly bleached cow skulls, numbered and dated on tiny tags tied to the desiccated horns with colored yarn.

  And dreamcatchers. They hung from the ceiling and window casings, were tacked to the doorway headers, leaving barely enough room to pass, hundreds of willow hoops and teardrops woven with geometric spiderwebs of yarn or string, or sinew or nettle, in the older ones; some of them were so dry and desiccated that the surviving feathers hung like melancholy from the beaded dangles.

  “I want to watch Letterman,” the Mayor said.

  Rayna asked if Barb wanted to watch the show in her bedroom or out in the living room, though Rayna couldn’t seem to locate a television in the latter room’s vast menagerie of miscellany.

  “I was in Denver,” Grant said. “I got a job.”

  “I need to watch Letterman.”

  Rayna asked Grant if he could see a TV anywhere.

  “I said I got a job.”

  “Television’s in the bedroom,” Barb advised them. “I’m feeling kind of whirly,” she added, pale.

  A voice called out from the dark bedroom doorway: “I’m in here.”

  Doug. He waxed half-moon into the light of the living room, his face a mask of wounded ignominy. He said: “Well, I’m sorry.”

  For what? Grant wondered, but then Rayna was on Doug with a fueled rage, hitting him with her arms and fists and screaming, “You asshole. You asshole.” Grant, completely confused now, intervened, pulled her away, and she turned on him and caught him twice with roundhouse smacks before he could grab her wrists and pin them and walk her back against an unsteady tower of Popular Mechanics from the mid-seventies. “Rayna, stop.”

  “I’m sorry,” Doug kept repeating. He was so sorry.

  “He set us up,” Rayna said. “How much did they offer you, Doug? You get your thirty pieces of silver?”

  “It’s a gold mine,” Doug said. “I just wanted my share.”

  Now Grant was catching up with what had happened. Rayna struggled to get out of his grasp, but without a lot of conviction, and Grant held her still. He watched the fat man’s chest heave as Doug struggled with what was left of his self-respect.

  “You may judge me,” Doug declared, voice quaking. “You may think I’m a worthless piece of shit, but I never intended for anyone to get hurt, and I only wanted what I thought was my fair share. Listen: Between that time he was run out of the town of Creede and the day he packed his kit for Skagway in the Alaska Territory, Jefferson Randolph ‘Soapy’ Smith took one more shot at a mining claim in Tarryall, down in South Park, with his longtime accomplice and friend, the Reverend Thomas Uzzel of Denver. Now many considered Soapy a no-good bunko swindler, but the fact of it is he was largely misunderstood; the man was a romantic, a philanthropist, a Renaissance man, a dreamer whose marvelous imagination often just put him at odds with popular notions of legality and ethical behavior. And U
zzel tried to screw him.”

  “Letterman,” Barb reminded them. She pushed past Doug and into her bedroom. A light came on.

  “Jefferson Smith died alone and penniless,” Doug told them, racing through it. “He was shot by a man with whom he’d had an argument over the outcome of a day’s adventure in Skagway. But when Soapy was run out of Tarryall by the Reverend and a cabal of miners who had staked more claims than they could work, Soapy and some other misjudged unfortunates settled a new town, and they called it Fairplay, a place where every man would have an equal chance to stake a claim. And as you know, Fairplay stuck, and thrived, and remains today, while Tarryall is not even dust on the shoulder of Highway 9. So you can draw your own conclusion.”

  Barb made a noise in her bedroom. The bedsprings sighed. “Creede can kiss my chapped butt,” she barked.

  “Not the man, the town,” Doug protested.

  “Go,” Grant told Doug.

  “All I’m saying, people have their reasons,” Doug insisted. “Soapy Smith wasn’t a bad person. I’m not a bad person.”

  “No,” Grant agreed, “you’re a piece of shit. Go.”

  “And I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t say that again.”

  “Well I don’t have my car,” Doug pointed out as a reason he might be lingering. “Lee took it,” he complained.

  “Go, before I change my mind,” Grant said.

  Doug blinked. He gauged whether Grant, after changing his mind, would be real trouble for him and, yes, Doug decided, Grant would.

  So Doug left. The screen door shuddered when it whapped shut behind him, and the front door didn’t catch so the wind blew in, cold. Grant stayed pressed against Rayna, just in case, but there was no softness in her and no heat. For a while they could hear Doug’s heavy scuffing footsteps growing distant on the road. Grant relaxed his grip on Rayna’s wrists and stepped back. And her tears came freely. And Grant didn’t try to stop them, or take her in his arms, because she was his brother’s girl.