Lover in the Rough

by Lowell, Elizabeth

  For the first few minutes Reba struggled with the heavy, unfamiliar tool. The last time she’d used anything remotely like a shovel, it had been in a kindergarten sandbox. On the other hand, gymnastics built coordination as well as stamina. Before long she had established a rhythm that allowed her to handle the shovel with a minimum of wasted effort. She hadn’t a quarter of Chance’s muscle, but she had a gymnast’s appreciation of leverage that allowed her to get the most out of the strength she did have.

  Even so, it wasn’t long before her muscles began to ache from the unusual exercise. She ignored it, knowing from her past gymnastics experience that physical discomfort didn’t mean the end of the world. When her muscles began to tremble and cramp and refuse to work, then she would rest. Until that point she would work as hard as she could.

  By the time Reba looked at her watch, her shoulder muscles had settled into a steady burning that she knew would eventually lead to cramps. She was surprised to discover that more than an hour had passed since the cave-in. She leaned on her shovel as she wiped her face on the sleeve of her flannel shirt. For a moment she was tempted to shed her shirt as Chance already had done. In the end, she settled for rolling up the sleeves, unbuttoning all but two buttons, and tying the shirttails in a knot just under her breasts.

  “Drink some water.”

  Chance’s voice startled Reba. She looked up. He hadn’t stopped swinging the pick. He hadn’t paused at all except to heave aside stones that were too heavy for her to shovel out of the way.

  “What about you?” she asked, watching the rippling power of his body as he buried the point of the pick deep in the wall. Sweat tangled in his hair, threw back glints of light like crystal drops, gleamed and followed the line of muscles down his body. He was extraordinary in his movements, his presence, his determination and grace, as elemental and male as the Tiger God.

  “In a bit,” said Chance. “I know my limits.”

  Silently, Reba wondered if he had any. Even though he was kneeling in order to reach into the crawl space he was digging, Chance seemed to tower above her, filling the room with his tireless strength. She pulled the canteen off her belt and drank sparingly, knowing the dangers of filling her stomach with water and then going back to hard work. She replaced the canteen, stretched burning muscles, and picked up the shovel again.

  After the second hour she stopped looking at her watch. Time was measured shovelful by shovelful, seconds punctuated by the ring of steel on stone, minutes by the grating fall of rubble out of Chance’s narrow tunnel, hours by the fatigue pooling like a grey sandy tide in her body. She became an automaton, seeing only the rubble that had to be moved, hearing only her own breath, aware of nothing beyond the flat cone of her helmet light.

  Suddenly, strong hands gripped Reba’s shoulders, rubbing out knots and cramps that had become as much a part of her as the blisters forming beneath her gloves. Chance’s breath moved coolly across her hot cheek.

  “I’ve been in a lot of mines with a lot of men,” he said quietly as he stood behind her, soothing her knotted shoulders with his hands. “I couldn’t ask for a better partner than you. Where did you learn to be so brave?”

  Reba took a ragged breath and leaned against him. “I’m screaming inside,” she admitted.

  His hands hesitated. His helmet rubbed against hers as he kissed her shoulder. “So am I.” With a gentle squeeze he released her. “Rest. There isn’t enough room anymore for both of us to work. If you get cold, use my shirt.”

  “Cold?” she said in disbelief.

  “Lean against that granite wall for a few minutes and tell me how hot you are.” Chance turned away, then paused. “If it wouldn’t bother you too much, you might turn out your light while you sit. But if you’d rather keep it on, do.”

  Reba hesitated, then reached for the battery pack on the back of her belt. Chance wouldn’t have asked unless he thought it necessary. Her light clicked off.

  Black closed around her.

  “You don’t have to, chaton,” he said softly.

  “I know.”

  Chance touched her face and murmured something in the fluid, unknown language she had heard no one but him use. Though she didn’t understand the words, she was comforted.

  When his light vanished into the crawl space, sending back little more than a pale shadow of brilliance, Reba put her head on her knees and closed her eyes. At least that way she didn’t expect to be able to see anything. She took several long breaths, coaxing her body into relaxation, knowing that there was nothing else she could do at the moment. Chance needed the shovel now, because the tunnel he was digging was too small to swing a pick in.

  After a few minutes she turned on her light, got up and positioned herself so that she could see into the tunnel where Chance was working. He had all but disappeared into the opening, lying on his side, the eyelets of his boots gleaming in the backwash of light. She turned off her light and fastened her eyes on Chance, allowing herself to think only of his power and determination as he lay on his side and battered his way into the mountain inch by inch, using only the power of his shoulders and the shovel’s steel edge.

  Her own muscles quivered with weakness now that she was no longer working. She ignored the sensations, knowing that they would pass. From time to time she stretched in a series of careful exercises, flexing sore muscles, hoping to keep herself from getting too stiff. Chance had been right. It was cold sitting on the China Queen’s unforgiving floor.

  A hoarse shout brought Reba to her feet. She stumbled toward the tunnel, fumbling for the switch on her belt. She went down on her hands and knees beside him, straining into the small space.

  “Chance! Are you all right?”

  “Getting better by the second,” he said. “I broke through into some kind of tunnel.”

  Relief washed over Reba in a wave of weakness, making her glad she was already on her hands and knees. She waited, barely breathing, while Chance enlarged the opening.

  Within a few minutes it was clear how close they had come to missing the new tunnel entirely. The floor of Chance’s tunnel intersected the ceiling of the other tunnel at an acute angle. If Chance’s tunnel had been dug a few inches higher or to the right, he never would have intersected the second tunnel at all.

  Reba looked at the opening, visualized the three-dimensional geometries involved and shuddered. She hadn’t realized just how much of a gamble digging the tunnel had been. If this had represented the least amount of risk, Chance must have known that digging through the cave-in would have been all but impossible. She was glad she hadn’t known that at the time. It had been comforting to believe that if this didn’t work there was a second chance waiting.

  “What’s wrong?” said Chance, shining his light toward her. “You should be smiling.”

  “I just realized how bad the odds really were.”

  Teeth gleamed whitely beneath a dusty black moustache. “Miracles always have bad odds, but they happen just the same.” Long fingers curled under her chin. “Smile for me, my woman.”

  She smiled and laughed and ignored the tears sliding down her dirty cheeks onto his hand.

  “It’s going to be a squeeze,” said Chance, measuring the flattened, lozenge-shaped opening. He stuck his head through and swept the helmet light over as much of the new tunnel as he could.

  Reba sensed the sudden tension that coursed through him. She started to ask what was wrong, then kept silent. Chance pushed himself backwards until his head was out of the opening.

  “Feet first will be best,” he said, his voice neutral. “I’ll go in first. You hand all the equipment down to me, then come through yourself. Take off your tool belt. It will just get in the way.”

  Numbly, Reba retreated from the tunnel to follow his instructions. While he levered himself feet first through the tunnel and then the hole, she gathered up everything that they had left along the edges of the cave-in. She pushed the equipment in front of her as she wriggled through the narrow escape tunnel
to the even smaller opening at the end.

  Chance’s hands appeared in the opening, startling her. She put equipment at his fingertips, watched it vanish piece by piece until it was gone. Her belt was the last thing to disappear. She began to turn around in the tunnel so that she could exit feet first. Only the flexibility of a gymnast permitted her to accomplish the reversal.

  “Ready?” asked Chance, his headlight appearing in the opening just as she finished reversing her position. He made a sound of astonishment. “I’d have sworn nothing bigger than a cat could have turned around in that tunnel.”

  Reba rolled over onto her stomach and began wriggling backwards without answering. She felt Chance’s strong hands close around her ankles, then her calves, then her thighs as he helped her move. When she was dangling half in and half out of the crawlspace, he lifted her carefully into the tunnel he had discovered. He put her on her feet, but didn’t let go of her. She turned slowly, taking in her surroundings.

  The new tunnel was surprisingly large, six feet high and nearly that wide. A feeling of abandonment and time overlaid everything. Each motion of her feet stirred a thin, powdery layer of dust.

  “I expected something smaller,” she said at last.

  “So did I,” he said flatly.

  She turned, caught by something seething just beneath his control. “Tell me,” she whispered.

  “It’s an abandoned tunnel.”

  Reba waited, not understanding.

  “The tunnel is blocked at both ends,” said Chance quietly. “It doesn’t go anywhere at all.”

  Nine

  Reba looked at Chance’s eyes, narrow shimmers of silver in the darkness of his face. “Where do we dig?” she asked simply.

  His eyes closed briefly. She felt his fingertips trace the line of her lips, her cheeks, her eyes as though he were blind and had to use touch to see her. “So brave …” he said, kissing her with a gentleness that made tears burn behind her eyes.

  He bent, brought up her tool belt and fastened it around her hips. He was wearing his shirt and tool belt again. He shrugged the shotgun and rucksack into place, wrapped his left hand around the pick and shovel, and took her hand in his right. Without a word, he led her into the tunnel.

  “What’s behind us?” she asked.

  “Two meters of tunnel and a granite wall.”

  “Ahead?”

  “A cave-in.”

  Her steps faltered. “The same one?”

  “An old one.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “The only dust in the air is what we’ve stirred up with our feet.”

  The further they walked, the more ragged the tunnel became. Dirt and rocks were piled at random, as though men had simply turned over their wheelbarrows and walked out. The width of the tunnel varied from six feet to less than half that. The walls were dark, unmixed with glints of quartz or mica. The pegmatite vein had eluded her ancestors in this tunnel, only to be discovered years later and a few feet further to her right.

  “Is this similar to what we crawled through to get into the big room?” she asked.

  “Same stratum,” he agreed. “You have a good eye. I’ll make a miner out of you yet.” He squeezed her hand gently.

  “Why did they make the tunnel so big here and so small a few feet over?”

  “Different miners,” said Chance laconically. “Whoever dug this was an optimist. He was so sure of a strike he dug a tunnel big enough to drive a wagon through. He didn’t know much about mining though.”

  “Why?”

  “The bigger the hole the bigger the chance of a cave-in. Look around you. This tunnel started crumbling as soon as it was dug.”

  Reba realized that the piles of dirt and rock scattered through the tunnel were the result of minor cave-ins. The tunnel was slowly dissolving back into the earth.

  “There was a hell of a cave-in here,” said Chance.

  Reba looked from side to side and saw only more dirt. “How can you tell?”

  “Look up.”

  She tilted her head back and saw a large, ragged hole in the ceiling. The shape was roughly that of a pyramid. She shuddered and began to walk faster.

  “Don’t hurry,” he said. “This is the safest place in the whole bloody Queen. What’s going to fall already has.”

  The tunnel angled off to the right and ended in a ragged rubble wall. Chance let go of her hand and approached the cave-in. He studied it for a few minutes, then climbed up as far as he could and began poking hard at the top with the shovel handle. The handle went in for one-third of its length. Chance yanked it out, reversed it and began shoveling.

  Reba watched the sudden flurries of dirt skate down the sides of the pile, wondering what Chance was doing. After a few minutes she realized that he was gradually disappearing into the top of the rubble pile. Suddenly he slithered out of the passage he had dug and turned his light toward her.

  “Stand back.”

  She backed up several paces. The pick, rucksack, shotgun, and his tool belt slithered down the side of the cave-in. He went back to digging. After a few minutes the only sign of his presence was a glimmer of light and the sound of dirt sliding down to the tunnel floor. She timed the intervals, retrieved his belt and tools, and retreated again. Just lifting the pick had sent hot needles of protest up her arms and shoulders; she couldn’t imagine how Chance had the strength or stamina to keep digging.

  “Reba, can you hear me?”

  Chance’s voice was distorted, sounding far away and weak.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m past the cave-in. I’m going farther up the tunnel for a few minutes. Wait where you are.”

  She swallowed the fear and protests sticking in her throat and said evenly, “I’ll wait.” Then, despite herself she added, “Three minutes.”

  She thought she heard him laugh but couldn’t be sure. She shoved up her dirty sleeve and watched the second hand crawl from mark to mark. One hundred and eleven seconds later she heard Chance coming back over the top of the cave-in toward her. She looked up, saying nothing, almost afraid to ask what he’d found.

  “I don’t know yet,” he said, answering the question she hadn’t asked. “There’s another cave-in about eighty meters farther along.”

  Silently Reba took off her tool belt and prepared to follow Chance up and over the rubble pile. When she got to the top she realized that, unlike the cave-in she had just experienced, this one hadn’t filled the tunnel quite to the ceiling. There was just enough space to wriggle through, once Chance had evened out the top. She handed the equipment down to him, then slid down into his arms. He held her against his chest, wrapping her in warmth and his sharp male scent in the moment before he let her go.

  The light from Chance’s helmet slowly roamed over the tunnel. “This was a real bitch of a tunnel to dig.”

  Chance’s light stopped on a few beams that had been set into the tunnel floor like fat fenceposts placed so close together that a man would have a hard time pushing between them. Other beams were laid on their sides behind the vertical row, making a wall to hold back the crumbling side of the tunnel. The beams were old, warped, dry. The wood was still dark, however, for it had never known the sun’s bleaching.

  The tunnel inclined at an even rate. The angle wasn’t steep enough to be awkward for a man with a wheelbarrow. As Reba and Chance walked they found other crude wooden dams built to restrain the Queen’s restless earth. Some of the beams had given way, releasing tongues of rubble across the tunnel floor. Other beams were slowly being overwhelmed, one handful of grit at a time. It was as though the tunnel were alive, but inhabited a different time scale entirely, one where human life was little more than a vibration passing through the earth.

  One of the areas that had been shored seemed to particularly interest Chance. He studied the wall and beams for a long time, moving his light over the crumbling rock stratum of the wall so slowly that it was as though he were trying to read fine print. Reba stared, but all she could see
was that the stratum was like a ragged, diagonal stripe through the earth. On either side the strata were darker, heavier, obviously more stable.

  Finally Chance turned back to Reba. She waited, but he said nothing. Together they followed the tunnel as it bent off to the left, climbed steeply and terminated in a boulder-strewn heap.

  “Dynamited,” said Chance, looking at the angular fragments.

  “How can you tell?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve used my share of dynamite. Never like this, though.”

  “Like what?”

  “To close down a mine.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Chance bent down and picked up a piece of granite. Even after all the decades in darkness, the stain of formerly living lichen was clear.

  “This came from the surface,” he said, pointing to the lichen. “And look at the color of the granite itself. It’s been weathered by sun and rain and wind.” He stared at the heaped shards of rock packed together with dark earth. The sun was out there somewhere, but in which direction? And how could he shift those massive granite slabs? “So near and yet so bloody far,” he said.

  Chance swore for a moment with a soft violence that was all the more chilling for its restraint. After another long look, he turned and went back down the tunnel the way they had come, taking Reba with him. She walked slowly, understanding that she was turning her back on sunlight somewhere beyond that last fall of rocks.

  “I’ll bet he gave up on the Queen in 1908, when the Empress Dowager of China died and the market for pink tourmaline collapsed,” said Chance calmly, as though the moment of his rage had never occurred. “Christ, how he must have hated this mine.”

  “Who?”

  “The man who lit a match and blew the Queen’s entrance to hell and gone.”

  Neither of them said anything more until Chance stopped once again in front of the part of the tunnel wall that had fascinated him before. He took off his gloves and ran his fingertips delicately over the wall just above the shoring. Reba waited quietly, too numb to question what he was doing. The thought of sunlight so close almost overwhelmed her control, so she didn’t think about sunlight anymore, concentrating instead on Chance.