A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar

by Daniel Pyne

  She looked dead. Lovely, pale, and dead.

  Grant, skiing down the loose rock from above, cried out to his brother; he was so reckless in his descent down the hardscrabble of discarded ore, he tumbled past where Lee cradled Rayna and more or less face-planted in a thicket of juniper. Oblivious, Lee looked at Rayna in desolation, angled his head to her chest, listening for her breathing. Or a heartbeat. He pushed the hair off her face. She seemed almost translucent. On the verge of disappearing.

  “Lee,” Grant called out to him from the bottom of the tailings. Lee’s focus was Rayna. “We’re out,” he said to her softly. “We’re out, Rayna. We’re saved.”

  “Lee.” Grant clawed his from of the underbrush.

  Lee bent over her and put his mouth over hers.

  “We’re out.”

  Grant found his feet again. Looking upslope for a moment, what he saw in front of him was, he thought, a fucking fairy tale: a sleeping princess and the prince whose kiss will awaken her. Then it was just Rayna, coughing up brackish water, jerking, pulling away, pulling away from Lee, and turning on her side as his mouth-to-mouth revived her.

  “Oh God,” she gasped.

  Lee cradled her head in his lap. Grant scrambled up behind them, on his hands and knees, out of breath. Lee threw an arm around him.

  “Hey, bro.”

  “Hey.”

  “All that practice.”

  Grant nodded. “Whalie. And Darcy,” he added, just to show Lee he knew.

  “Physics is overrated,” Lee said. “Brothers, not so much. Thanks for getting us out of there.”

  There was an ease to Lee that Grant couldn’t reconcile with what they’d just been through. It spun him around; he felt small and vulnerable. Eight years old. “There’s no gold in the mine.” Grant just blurted it out. “No gold except what I put in there with the shotgun from the storage unit. I salted the rock, man. I melted down some of Mom’s old jewelry and shredded it up and jammed it into some 20-gauge cartridges. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to fuck this all up. I’m sorry,” Grant said. “I was just tired of listening to everyone make fun of you, and feeling that kind of sorry for you that comes mostly from feeling superior, and pretending to pity you, so I thought if I just salted the rock with—”

  “I don’t care,” Lee said. And he meant it.

  “Well, the Slocumbs will care.” Grant thumbed sudden tears out of his eyes, determined not to break down and cry in front of his brother. Lee didn’t seem to notice.

  “Slocumbs? The Slocumbs, yeah, will do their own independent assay and maybe it’ll show no gold, just like all the other assays that’ve ever been made on this mine, and then maybe they’ll suspect I may have defrauded them, spiked my own results to cut a richer deal, and, yeah, okay, will probably want to really kill me this time, but . . . ”

  “But?”

  Rayna moaned and shivered and Lee’s attention never left her. Her eyes were closed and her mouth fixed in a straight line.

  “I mean, gee Lee, wow, it’s great that you’ve got it all so worked out,” Grant was saying. “But—”

  “But if I offer to buy it back,” Lee thought out loud, “get this: They’ll be convinced I’m scamming them again, and, Q.E.D., that I know something they don’t . . . which, I do, by the way . . . but . . . never mind . . . ” he stared at Rayna, “and . . . and the end result will be they’ll just keep the mine and work it and, who knows, worst case, they might, you know, actually find some gold.” He shook his head. “No.”

  “No?”

  “No, I wouldn’t like that.”

  “Lee, there is no gold.”

  Lee looked at Grant, and something in the look told Grant that Lee was using a higher math. “They can’t have the mine, Grant. Ever. Promise me.”

  “There is no gold,” Grant said again, but less sure of it now.

  “Promise me.”

  Rayna, from another planet, said, “I’m freezing.” Her face was dusted with a weird glitter and there was a high blush in her cheeks and her dazed eyes were shining. Lee tried to pick her up and stand, but he couldn’t do either. He was too exhausted. “You’ve got to carry her,” he told his brother.

  Grant took Rayna in his arms and stood up. Lee rose stiffly and looked into the dun sky.

  “There’s no gold in there, Lee.” But now Grant had lost all certainty in his voice. Lee wasn’t ignoring him; he knew something Grant didn’t.

  “It’s snowing,” Lee said and smiled slightly.

  Sure enough, the rain had turned to soft, wet snowflakes. And the mountain fell silent. The trees in still life. Even the water pouring from the mine had calmed to a fluttering trickle. Lee started walking away.

  “Wow,” Lee was saying, all conversational now, as if they were coming back from a picnic. “Holy moly. Colorado. When was the last time it snowed in the middle of summer?”

  “When was the last time it didn’t? Um, Lee?”

  “Let’s go.”

  Grant shifted Rayna’s weight. “Lee, there’s something else I’ve got to tell you—”

  Without turning Lee said, “I don’t think so.”

  “Lee.” Grant wanted it all out. All of it. Lee deserved to know what his brother was, what he’d been, what he’d done. What he should have admitted to a long time ago.

  “We have to get Rayna out of this weather,” Lee said stubbornly, and kept going.

  “Will you just stop and listen to me? I’ve got to say this.” Lee did stop; he turned, looked back at his brother, and shook his head: “No. No, you don’t. Grant, I’m tired,” he said. “Let’s just go,” Lee said, but didn’t move. “Listen. Listen to me,” he said. “You’re gonna buy the mine back from the Slocumbs, but at a discount. You. After I’m long gone, and they’re convinced I’ve cheated them, you’ll take the money from Mom and Dad’s trust and buy it back, okay? They won’t want it because—we just went through this—they’ll have decided there’s no gold in it because of how I’ve cheated them. You’ll say you’re buying it back because you feel guilty about your big brother the fraud. You want to make things right. And they’ll understand that because they’re from Wyoming. They’ll admire it. They’ll think it’s something you got from being in prison.

  “Or, if you don’t want to tap the trust, you can use some of the fire insurance money from our house.”

  “Why would I want to do that, Lee?”

  “For me. You’d do it for me.”

  They stared at each other, and Grant understood that Lee knew everything.

  Everything.

  “Where will you be?” Grant asked.

  “Gone.”

  “Where?”

  “Gone. Don’t ask.”

  They stared at each other, and Grant understood what his brother meant.

  “What about the traitorous Doug Deere?”

  Lee made a vague, dismissive gesture. “Nothing. He’s his own punishment,” Lee said.

  “Can we go dry out somewhere?” Rayna asked, woozy. Her voice was small and dry and weak. “Now.” She sneezed. “Please?”

  Lee brushed frosted hair away from her eyes again. “Yes,” he said. “We’re almost there.”

  “How was my timing?” Grant asked his brother as they hurried down the muddy road. “I’m just curious.”

  “Not bad,” Lee admitted. “You good with her?”

  “Don’t worry,” Grant said. “I’m just doing the carrying; she’s all yours.”

  “We were about half a Mississippi early, though,” Lee observed. Much later, above the General Store, as the summer snow flurried outside, in Rayna’s bedroom because the bathroom itself was too small for it there was a big old porcelain clawfoot tub filled with soapsuds and bath oil and steaming water, and Rayna was in it. Her body ached, and her ears continued to ring. She took a cigarette from a freshly opened pack of Kools. Ignored the warning. Tore one in half. She lit the shorter half and smoked, floating in deep, hot, fragrant water, eyes closed.

  Much later, headlights
cut through the storefront windows of a doc-in-a-box emergency clinic north of Idaho Springs, revealing the lacy swirl of snow in two parallel beams. Men came stomping in from outside, brothers, young, white, respectable. The younger one, glasses and a Rockies cap, smiled at Jenny Simms, the nurse practitioner behind the front desk. It was a great smile.

  “My brother here wants to give some blood,” she would remember the dreamy one saying. The older one, unsmiling, tired, his face presenting some odd bruises and abrasions Jenny would have cleaned up, if he asked, his hands filthy when he pulled off his coat, just nodded. She never got a really good look at him.

  Jenny led them back into an examining room and told the donor brother to lie on the examination table, and she quickly had him hooked up, tube snaking from his arm to a plastic pouch filling with blood. The younger man sat in a plastic chair across the room, holding his brother’s coat, friendly.

  “It came out of the blue. I don’t know what’s going on with him.”

  “It’s a very selfless thing to do,” Jenny said, all business.

  “That’s him all right.”

  Jenny had handed the cute one a clipboard and pen, to fill out the donor forms, but he just held the pen and watched the pouch fill.

  “I’ll need one of you to fill that out,” Jenny reminded him.

  “Does he get orange juice or something?”

  “Absolutely,” Jenny said.

  Then, that smile again. “How about me? Do I get some?”

  Jenny flirted. “Show me a vein,” she said.

  She never heard them leave. In the storeroom, with the noise from the condenser fan and the big refrigerator door opening, closing, the bite of the o.j. carton as she tugged the plastic seal open, set out two paper cups on the counter, and filled them to the brim, she never heard the brothers leave the clinic.

  She smoothed her dress, checked her reflection in the glass-front cabinet, and took an extra moment to refresh her lip gloss. She fluffed her hair inconclusively. She walked back into the examining room, but her patient and his brother were gone. Along with the pouch of blood. It was, Jenny decided later, all such weirdness.

  Only Grant was at the front door when Lorraine opened it, and she was surprised how she was momentarily disappointed. Grant didn’t say anything about Lee, but she understood, when he didn’t, that there was nothing she needed to be worried about, and when he stomped the slush off his feet and stepped inside, and he touched the back of her leg as he brushed past her, her heart skipped, and she knew that her marriage was over.

  “You got any orange juice?” Grant asked, without looking at her. “I’ve got this craving.”

  “Want to see your kid?” She said it softly, almost tenderly, which, for Lorraine, was almost unprecedented.

  Time stopped. Grant stayed, motionless, paralyzed, looking up the staircase toward the bedrooms. Lorraine pointed out, again, that Grant hadn’t even asked what her name was. And then she told him: “Sam.”

  “It’s a good name for a boy,” Grant said. Caught himself: her. Right. A girl. He had a daughter.

  “It’s your middle name,” Lorraine said.

  “I know what my middle name is, Lorraine. Samuel, not Samantha,” he argued somewhat pointlessly. Lorraine just waited, smiling, far away until he sorted through his hurricane of emotions, and finally he admitted, low, “I can’t look at her now. I’m sorry.”

  Lorraine walked back into the house, leaving Grant to close the front door himself.

  Beachum held court in the kitchen. He was practically giddy.

  “I owned them. I was the grandmaster flash of mercantila. Lord of lulz. You shoulda seen me. See, truly, the beautiful part of capitalism, and the free-market system, left unfettered to do its glorious thing, is its ability to bring together disparate, even highly antagonistic elements—”

  “How much coffee have you had today?” Grant asked him.

  “—and achieve,” Beachum rattled onward, unfazed by the interruption, “and achieve a kind of harmony that would be impossible under any other auspice. The invisible hand! I mean, heck: you, me, our difficult past. Lee’s mistaken hostility toward me for, what? I say: Cupid’s capricious aim, in re me and Lorraine. The Slocumb Brothers’ alleged acts of violence. Doug Deere’s perfidy. These things all pale when compared with the prospect of getting some serious green stuff.”

  Grant couldn’t follow any of it. “Where is the money?” he asked while Lorraine, working at the sink, kept shooting significant smoky looks at him, and he appeared just about ready to flee at any instant.

  Beachum was oblivious. He said, “They promised they’ll put it in Lee’s bank tomorrow morning before they go inspect the mine. We’re taking the helio-copter, can you beat that? Lee was totally right about them.

  “Oh, and. My commission is payable upon closing. You might remind your brother it’s contractual. Not that I don’t, you know, trust him.”

  “They’re going to inspect the mine in this snow?” Lorraine wondered.

  “Well, Lorraine, honey, it’s just a flyover, but they’re pretty darn anxious for Lee to give them some general idea where the gold is, because what with aerial magnetic-resonance surveys and so forth, these boys have got it down to a science.”

  Grant said, “I’ll bet.”

  “Man oh man, what a day, what a windfall. Hot damn! Oh, and get this, they gave him a coat. Gave us both coats.” He hustled out of the kitchen on a mission, as Grant threw his “Why?” at Beachum’s back.

  Lorraine turned from the dishes she was pretending to wash, started to say something to Grant, but Beachum was already hurrying back in carrying an enormous arctic coat with a fur-lined hood.

  “I guess they get special weather reports from the CIA or Interpol or someplace, and they even knew this freak norther was coming. Can you beat that?”

  “No, I can’t,” Grant said, and he avoided looking at Lorraine. He took the coat from Beachum and walked out without another word.

  Much later, the Evergreen High School wood shop trembled with the angry scream of the band saw, at which Lee, stripped down to his T-shirt, was making a series of straight cuts in strips of thin plywood. He lifted his goggles and inspected his work. Then he took it across to a bench where, using a power drill, he swiftly attached tiny hinges to one of a puzzle of plywood pieces laid out in the shape of two snowshoes.

  When he finished with this, he picked the shoe up and tested the hinges for sturdiness and finally, for his own edification, folded the hinged piece of shoe up like origami into a small, storable square.

  It fit perfectly into the briefcase opened on the adjacent bench, and then Lee started to hinge the other one.

  Much later, in her bedroom over the General Store, Rayna slept fitfully, restless, tossed on the seas of her dreams. She was trapped. She was dying. She was dead. Her hands fluttered, her eyes flickered open, and she stared for one desolate moment blindly at the ceiling, scared, even though she was sure now she was alive. She turned her head to one side and found Lee, turtled in a huge fur-lined coat, sitting in the easy chair in the corner shadows, facing the bed. He had what looked like her parachute in his lap, but that made no sense.

  The hood of the coat was pulled up over his head. She couldn’t see his eyes. But she smiled at him anyway, and the tenterhooks, or whatever it was, fell away from her and her expression eased and she relaxed and rolled away and closed her eyes and fell asleep.

  For only an instant. Or so it seemed. Then her eyes were open again, and she was rolling back to look at him and to ask him about her parachute, if that’s what it was, and then to say the thing she remembered she wanted to say to him, something sweet and important that she’d thought of, but the chair was empty and Lee was gone.

  Or had never been there.

  Outside, the snow had stopped, and the sky bled the first raw light of another day.

  STRIKE THE TENT

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  And then Lee, falling.

  Wind on his face
, roaring in his ears.

  The crimson slur of the whirlybird slicked away, above him, lost in the clouds.

  Tugging off a glove with his teeth. Wind banging at his clothes as, with the frozen fingers of one hand, he tried to work the zipper of his fur-hood coat.

  Falling.

  Below him, a ragged glimpse of forest. High steppe. Suddenly the zipper gave. Wind caught inside the coat, blew it up huge and tore it away from Lee’s body, down feathers exploding like snow flurries. Lee dropped so fast he might have been made of lead. The coat remained, soared on crosswinds, feather-down flaying everywhere, and then nowhere, a scrap of shapeless Gore-Tex gently somersaulting among the false winter clouds, for a long time.

  There was pandemonium in the cockpit of the Bell Longranger, everyone shouting at once, the Slocumbs more outraged by the seemingly personal insult of his rude departure than they were concerned about Lee’s fate, the pilot corkscrewing down into the cloud cover as if they might be able to catch up with Lee and pull him back aboard. Abruptly, the shouting ceased; there was silence, just the roar of the rotors and the flexing of steel and the drag and the soft percussion of the pilot’s gloves on the controls and instruments as the crimson helicopter hung in a white limbo, moisture beading on the cowl, slickering to either side. The sour stink of Beachum’s breakfast sluiced from the floor and made them all queasy.

  Hoary clouds furled, gave away nothing.

  No Lee.

  And when they finally dropped through the pannus and scud and saw below them the vast sprawling, snowy brown Colorado high plains, the Slocumbs, at least, understood the futility of their descent. Lee was gone. Their pilot rode his cyclic and trimmed the collective to zigzag over the scabrous terrain until the fuel ran low and they could tell themselves that they had made an effort to find him.