An Eye for Gold

by Sarah Andrews

  “I suppose so,” I said dryly, certain that I did not want to be around while something as toxic as mercury was being distilled through the process of boiling it in a cauldron.

  Kyle caught my sarcasm and gave me a come-hither wink.

  “And a lot of gold was left behind in the tailings,” John said, deep into his art now. “Sometimes ten or twenty percent, and you couldn’t even have gone after a microscopic deposit like we’re mining here. But then like I said, in the last hundred years cyanization was developed. It’s revolutionized gold milling. There are operations out there that just buy up historic mines and all they do is heap-leach the tailings. No excavation at all. Hell, I knew a guy in college who did a one-man miniature heap-leach one summer. He laid out a couple tons of tailings on a sheet of plastic and set a lawn sprinkler going over it spraying it with cyanide solution. He caught the runoff downhill in a fifty-five-gallon drum of carbon, and at the end of the summer, he picked up the drum and had it processed. Made himself a tidy profit.”

  I shuddered at the thought of a cyanide sprinkler left going unattended, and wondered if I’d quite heard him right over the noise. “Where does the process go next?” I asked, urging John and Kyle to move back toward the building. I had had enough of hanging over the tanks.

  John led us back along the catwalk, striding comfortably, king of his realm. He led us along a trail of piping marked with yellow labels with black letters and arrows showing flow directions. They said things like PREGNANT SOLUTION and BARREN SOLUTION. It brought back to mind Gretchen MacCallum’s suggestion that men who worked in mining envied the creative powers of women. I decided that the incessant ear-blasting rumbling of the mill was beginning to purée my mind. Or maybe it was the ammonia-like odor that pervaded the air around us. “By the way, what’s that chemical smell?” I asked.

  John turned, surprised. “You shouldn’t be smelling anything,” he said. “I don’t smell anything.” He looked at Kyle.

  Kyle shrugged his shoulders. “It’s a gal thing,” he said. “They have noses like bloodhounds.”

  John shrugged his shoulders, too, then pointed out one more stack of equipment, this one a tangle of pipes running in and out “We pull the oxygen back out in this vacuum tower,” he said. “Then it goes on through here, and we kill the cyanide.”

  “Kill it?” I asked. “What’s that mean in terms of chemistry?” John had erected a magnificent mill, and clearly ran it with an iron hand towards efficiency, but it was beginning to occur to me that there were differences between metallurgists and chemists.

  John looked at me and blinked. “We add zinc.”

  “So the gold combines with the cyanide, and then the zinc replaces the gold,” I said.

  John shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah. You need the oxygen to get the gold to grab onto the cyanide, and when you add the zinc . . .” He was beginning to look annoyed at my ignorance. This was as simple as pie to him, just a big metallurgy set to be set up well, kept clean, and run efficiently. “Then the gold solution goes on to the filter room.” He pointed up through the ceiling to a place where the pipes disappeared again. “But you can’t go there.”

  John led Kyle and me back up through a series of hallways to a control room in which sat a fat man in a white suit who was watching an array of computer and closed-circuit TV screens. “This is where we track everything. In this monitor, you can see into the filter presses, those long cylinders. They’re filled with diatomaceous earth. We shoot in the pregnant solution. The gold and silver come out in the filter, and the barren solution returns to the tanks. Then we take the filter pack down to the furnaces.” He led us down one more level and into a small room that was presided over by uniformed guards with side arms.

  John stepped up to a thick glass window and pointed through into the inner room. I stepped up next to him, grateful that at least in this room, the thundering rumble of die machinery was muffled down to a dull roar, and I could hear myself think.

  The glass was at least an inch thick and shot through with woven steel wire. Through it I could see a blast furnace and a row of thick iron cauldrons in the shape of split logs about two feet long, and a couple of larger ones in the shape of an inverted Hershey’s kiss.

  The blast furnace was running. A pool of liquid inside it glowed with unimaginable heat. “We’re just in time,” John said, smiling into the glass.

  We watched the white-hot pool with fascination, and even the guards stepped up to the glass, a row of kids watching the candy maker mix the wondrous goody. Presently, men in padded heat-reflective suits stepped forward and tipped the furnace, pouring first into the Hershey’s-kiss-shaped cauldrons.

  “That’s the slag from the diatomaceous earth,” said John, with satisfaction. “When it cools, we ship it off to a refinery, as there’s some gold and silver in it. Not much, but enough that the refinery will pay to have it”

  The men in the suits now moved the heavy half log cauldrons into place and again poured, filling them one at a time. An incandescent liquid rolled into each of them, and immediately began to cool.

  “That’s the gold?” I asked.

  “Yes, those are the doré. Gold and silver, mixed,” he said, his voice rich with satisfaction.

  “How do you ship them?” asked Kyle, speaking for the first time in half an hour.

  John eyed Kyle. “Don’t get any ideas, smart guy.”

  Kyle laughed weakly, the omega dog once again showing his belly. I was getting kind of sick of his act. Here he was trying to impress me, a kid his daughter’s age, if he had one. For the first time, it occurred to me to look at the third finger of Kyle’s left hand, to see just how brazen he was being. No ring. Which of course proved nothing, but I was willing to bet that if he’d been married, he wasn’t anymore.

  John drew my attention back. “From here, the dorés go to a refinery, where the gold is extracted through chlorination. Chlorine is bubbled through the molten gold. That converts the silver and any base metals to the chlorides, which float to the surface. Then they do electrolysis, using the crude gold as the anode. The cathode is pure gold. They take it to four nines—ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent pure—unless it’s going to the electronics business. Then, they take it to five.”

  “Why is it so useful in the electronics industry?” I asked.

  “Because it is the most noble metal,” he answered, still talking more like a medieval alchemist in a robe than a chemist. He smiled, and spread his hands, palms up. “It’s gold.”

  BACK IN THE office building, I asked to use the rest room, and was shown to a door that led into a large, tiled room full of lockers, showers, toilets, and sinks. I presumed this was where any women miners changed to go underground and where they showered when they came off shift. I marveled that there were any women going underground at this mine: Historically, miners had considered women bad luck.

  As I busied myself in the toilet booth, I heard the outer door open and footsteps patter across the tiles. When I stepped out, I craned my neck around the row of lockers to see what a female miner looked like, expecting to see someone who looked pretty tough. What I saw was a petite, delicate-looking blonde with enormous blue eyes. She looked pretty clean to me, and wore blue jeans and a nice blouse, not a miner’s coverall. She was emptying things out of her locker and stuffing them into a day pack. She glanced briefly at me, but offered me no glint of personal connection. She turned her attention back to her work.

  “Are you a miner?” I asked.

  She glanced up at me again, as if to make sure a person really stood near her talking to her. “No,” she said.

  “Geologist? Engineer?”

  She withdrew a hard hat and a mineral hammer, and stuffed them into her pack, beginning to hum to herself, ignoring me.

  “You work underground here?”

  Again, she did not reply. She did not make further eye contact I did not exist I got a really cold feeling about her. Heft.

  Down the hall, I found Kyle talking to an
other man whom I guessed to be another geologist “No shit” the man was saying, as I came up behind Kyle. “Virgil called Chittenden and told him what Laurel had been doing and wham, he said to send her right away, and bring that map and don’t forget the data. If I heard right, she’s not just going to Reno, she’s on her way to corporate headquarters!”

  Kyle’s usual Who me? tone of voice had drawn taut “You say she has a map? I mean shit, where’d she get MacCallum’s map? I couldn’t even find it!”

  “She made it,” the man said. “Went back out there and found enough of MacCallum’s tags that she could reconstruct his pattern. And somehow she cracked his code and got the assays and made her own map. That’s one neat piece of computer hacking. I tell you, I knew she was smart, but that’s downright scary.”

  Kyle’s agitation hardened into rage. ‘The wheedling little twat! What she think she’s doing?”

  “Hey, calm down, man!” the other man said, holding up his hands in surpise. “She’s a nice kid.”

  Kyle’s voice kept rising. “A map and a bunch of exploration assays aren’t going to tell you anything!”

  The other man gave Kyle a derisive laugh. “Maybe she’s got the eye MacCallum has.”

  Kyle turned then and saw me. His eyes were huge and hot with anger. The transformation from the floppy puppy he had been showing me was startling. He looked at me like I was part of the wall, then turned back to the other man. “Nobody has his eye for gold,” he barked. “Nobody!”

  An eye for gold. On any other day, the allusion would have struck me as romantic, but I had just gone through a mill with a metallurgist who talked like the lineal descendant of a Medieval alchemist so it sounded almost normal. But Kyle’s public discharge of anger was even stranger. It was as if the omega dog had gotten rabies. But was his anger borne of loyalty to MacCallum or fear for his own position? The whole metaphor of the wolf pack ran quickly away with me, and I wondered if this omega realized that he’d been following not the alpha wolf, but a lone wolf who needed to be by himself. And I had to admonish myself that I did not know what being a lone wolf meant to MacCallum. It might mean something very different than it does to me

  The women’s room door opened behind me and I heard a pattering of feet moving down the hall away from us. Kyle turned and watched over my shoulders, the veins beginning to stand out in his face. He pushed past me, and I turned, too, and saw him hurry after the petite woman I had seen emptying her locker. So this is Laurel Dietz, I decided. She’s going to see Chittenden, the jovial Englishman who presented himself to Tom Latimer at the Reno airport the day we first arrived. As I watched Kyle storm after her and slam a door behind them, I decided it might be about time to leave.

  30

  LAUREL DIETZ BENT TO PULL THE ZIP DRIVE FROM her computer and shoved it unceremoniously into her pack. Her notes followed, and then personal items: a mechanical pencil a college professor had given her, the inscribed map weight she had received as an award. She did not know exactly what Chittenden had in mind by hurrying her off to corporate headquarters, but she was confident that it was for-ward progress in her overall plan. In fact it was a forward leap. Perhaps she would vault right over the stint as chief project geologist she had envisioned and go straight to exploration manager. But she would be coy when she got to corporate headquarters, bide her time, play it cool, as always.

  Kyle burst through the door and crashed it shut behind him. “What the fuck you selling?’* he demanded, his voice low but hot with anger.

  Laurel kept her mind on her task. She heard Kyle’s words, but they were as unimportant to her as static coming over a radio. The Kyles that rattled around the universe were so simple for her to deal with that she barely noticed them. Her computer was up now, so she leaned over the mouse pad, highlighted half a dozen files, and moved the mouse across the screen to the trash can icon and clicked on it. When the screen asked her if she was sure she wanted to delete the files, she clicked yes, and they began to fly across the screen.

  “What the fuck you erasing?” Kyle spat.

  Laurel continued to behave as if Kyle were not there. After a lifetime of dealing with men like him, she had learned that presenting no response to their aggressions usually confused them into quieting down. She began to stick more personal materials into her pack. Unfortunately, a few of them were right under Kyle’s nose.

  “Listen, sister,” Kyle hissed, “you selling something to management, you got to let me in on it! I went out there and got that data with MacCallum. Mel You don’t just go grabbing it!”

  ‘Those data,” Laurel said, keeping her voice soft and chirpy, like a bird’s. He was a wimp trying to be a bully, and bullies were in fact noisy cowards. He was not letting go as quickly as she had thought, but she knew that if she pushed him up against his own stupidity, he would show everybody within earshot what a total jackass he was, everyone would sympathize with her, and he would be one more minor obstacle out of her way.

  Kyle blustered, “What?”

  Tighten further, Laurel thought automatically. “ ‘Data’ is plural. The singular is ‘datum.’ So it’s ‘those data,’ not ‘that data.’ “ She straightened up, came around the corner of the desk toward the last few items which she had stored on a nearby shelf, walking right past Kyle.

  Kyle stepped in front of her. She saw his hands rise, and in the next instant felt his hands close around her throat, felt her feet leave the floor as he yanked her viciously upwards. For a split second, she closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, she had once again reached to the very bottom of her soul and found the coldness that had always waited there to serve her at moments like this. Don’t look into his eyes, she reminded herself, as the first symptoms of oxygen starvation began to thin her brain. Don’t let him confuse you. Forcing herself to forget what was happening to her neck and head, she reached her hands down to Kyle’s crotch, took hold of his testicles, and squeezed with everything she had, then gave them the formidable and satisfying twist she had learned so long ago.

  Kyle dropped her and staggered back against the wall, holding his crotch. His face went pale and he began to emit the most absurd gurgling sound. So he was just like the rest after all, Laurel decided, as the ringing in her ears diminished and her sight returned. And like the others, the stupid bastard will blame it all on me.

  And that meant that it was time to go.

  Laurel adjusted the bandana that was knotted about her neck, covering the red marks she knew would be forming. It was a thin armor, but in one way or another, always seemed to serve. With increased speed, she grabbed the Brunton compass and mineral hammer off the shelf and stowed them in the side pouches of her pack. Then, without another thought toward Kyle, she walked out the door.

  31

  I WAS STILL CONSIDERING THE IDEA OF MOVING down the hallway toward the room Kyle had followed Laurel Dietz into, so I could perhaps make out what he was shouting, when the door opened and she came back out. Her face seemed oddly mottled. She pattered down the hall to the back door that led off toward the mill and passed through it. I could hear a vehicle start up and the gravel crunch as she drove away.

  I knew better than to be there when Kyle came out. I turned and hurried in the opposite direction. I took a jog to the left down the catacombs of hallways that led through the building, hoping I was nearing the guard’s station and the door that would lead out to my truck.

  I heard Virgil Davis’s voice and followed it, my confidence growing. His office had been close to the guard station. His door was ajar. I heard him roar, “Dead, you say? Oh, shit!”

  I threw on the brakes and stopped just outside his door, glancing over my shoulder to make certain that Kyle wasn’t behind me.

  No voice answered Virgil’s. That meant he was on the phone. He squeaked nervously this way and that in his swivel chair as he listened to the caller, then said, “Well, yeah, I was wondering where in the hell Rodriguez was, but no, I haven’t seen him since . . . let me think . . . it was d
ays ago. The morning after Pat Gilmore wrecked her truck, we had a meeting at The Griddle in Winnemucca. I saw him there, I’m sure of it. You don’t think—” He listened again, then roared, “You found him where? Drove it into a mineshaft? Are you kidding? That asshole never drove that pretty-boy piece of shit an inch off the road. Sheriff, this is not good. Someone’s fucking with us, you hear me? I mean, when John and I found Pat there was no reason to think it was anything but an accident but now—” He listened. “No, like we told you before, her truck had flipped and she was hanging out the door. Yes, it was open, which is damned lucky or we’d have had a devil of a time getting her out of there. The whole cab was crushed! No, like I said, the brush just next to the truck had caught fire, and you know how fast that stuff can get going! Did I. . . . How the hell do I know how the fire started? You come across a crash, you see fire, you act, man!”

  By this time, I had eased up closer so I could see in through the gap left between the half-opened door and the jamb. Virgil had his back to me and did not see me.

  Laurel’s red Chevy Blazer rounded the building and came past Virgil’s window. Virgil leaned forward and waved. She waved back, a cheery smile fixed to her lips. His head turned, following her motion, and I could see him now in profile. His eyes filled with sudden longing.

  He spoke again into the phone. “What? No, like I told you, we did not see anyone else on the road. It was just at dusk, remember? And I would have seen the headlights if anyone else had been out there Running without headlights? I suppose so, but what kind of an idiot—” He stopped short, listened for a while. “Of course. Yes, I see what you’re saying. No, I’ll keep everyone here. You come ahead.”