An Eye for Gold

by Sarah Andrews

  “Gold is not money,” MacCallum said. “It is the currency of last resort. Come the revolution, or the plague, or whatever disaster, it’s that last thing that everyone can recognize as having value.”

  “And it always has value?”

  “Hell, no. If things break down far enough, it’s a dead weight. Shotgun shells will be worth more.” He yawned. “But I don’t think that’s going to happen. We’re all too adaptable. Our technology has evolved too far. We like our refrigerators too much, and our VCR’s. And even plagues leave a few people alive. Besides, gold is just chump change next to the money that flies around electronically these days.” I heard him shifting around in the dark like a dog who was getting comfortable before a nap.

  My voice barely escaping my lips, I said, “You aren’t going to sleep, are you?”

  “I think I’d better. I’ll need my strength later.”

  In half a minute, I heard the sound of his breathing grow rougher as it eased into a gentle snore. MacCallum, the mouse who trusted, was asleep in his burrow.

  But I was not a mouse. Not yet.

  I tried to remember the story of the jumping mouse. I had read the story quickly one night during my travels west. The mouse symbolized the direction of Introspection on the medicine wheel. Jumping mouse searched and searched for die mountain, so he could climb up and see the world, but on his journey, he encountered two great beasts who were ill. Only the eye of a mouse could heal them. He gave one eye to each. So when he reached the goal of the mountain top, he could not see. He lay trembling in fear, waiting for eagle to come down and eat him.

  I now trembled like the mouse, and was as blind.

  How had the story ended? Jumping mouse had awoken, and found that he was eagle. What had Peggy told me, that day at the airport? I struggled to remember, to calm myself, to focus. Eagle was the east, Illumination.

  I sat in the total, featureless darkness, my hand on Virgil’s pulse. He was still alive, but not by much. My leg coursed with pain. My body ached in a thousand places, not the least improved by the hard edges of the rock on which I leaned. My lungs felt full of lead.

  I began to wonder about the quality of the air. It was growing hotter, and very, very close. I waited, trying not to think, trying to ignore the fear that waited like a jackal at the edge of my mind.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to pretend that the absence of light was only because they were shut.

  Closed. Could I open them?

  If there was no illumination outside my eyes, then I would look inward.

  Like a lost shred of sanity, I heard Ray’s voice deep inside my ears, Your heart is like a fire

  I longed to feel him near me. In the darkness, I let my heart rise like an unseen sun and search for him. I willed it with all my soul.

  Slowly, a brightness of light that eyes do not see radiated through my body. As tears flowed out between the closed lids of my eyes, I told Ray wordlessly that I was alive, and that I loved him. I told him about my strange new friend, MacCallum, and smiled about the love my friend had for his wife, and his wife had for him. I asked him if it could be the same for us. I strained to listen.

  The minutes ratcheted by.

  I opened my eyes. All was still darkness, and the only sound was my heart beating.

  THE SOUNDS STARTED almost like the breath of the earth it-self, felt more than heard. Then they grew louder than the pulse that still surged through my ears, and the gentle snoring that now came from one side of me, and the dry, shallow panting that came from the other. “Don! Wake up!” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “I hear them.”

  The sounds grew louder and louder. I prayed silently that the vibrations of the machinery would not knock that knife of rock down onto us.

  I reached my hand into my jeans pocket and held the brass tag and thought of Ray.

  I heard voices.

  “Don!” I whispered.

  I heard them call names. “Virgil!” they called. “MacCallum!”

  The miners did not call my name. That meant that they did not know that I was down here. And that in turn meant that Kyle had gotten away. For an instant, I wanted to stay exactly where I was, in the darkness, where he couldn’t see me.

  I had become the mouse.

  MacCallum was standing up, turning on his light, calling back to them, telling them about the loose slab. They acknowledged, and we heard the sounds move to the left to dodge around it.

  “We’ll shoot some gunnite in,” someone hollered.

  “Too slow!” MacCallum shouted back. “Virgil’s not good. We’ve got to get him out, fast!” He turned to me. “Are you still getting a pulse?” he asked.

  “Yes. Get that light back on. Let’s brace some rocks around Virgil. If something rolls, it’ll at least stop the small ones from hitting him.”

  The light switched on, blinding me. All was a bloody orange for a minute as my eyes adjusted. MacCallum bent and loosened the tourniquet for a while, then tightened it again, and began to stack stones one on top of another.

  Minutes trickled by, like life’s blood flowing out of us. MacCallum shone his light up into the pile of rocks, toward the sounds. And suddenly, a second, brighter light came back toward us. We were going to live.

  40

  STEPHEN GILES STRODE DOWN THE CONCOURSE AT San Francisco International Airport, his ticket held tightly in his sweating hand, every cell in his body taut with anticipation. This is it, at last—thank God I thought to ask the post-master to check that other mailbox to see if the envelope had been switched! The world could rot in hell; he, Stephen Giles, could not have stood the infamy of being a tawdry public servant another instant! He was shedding that skin, and all the years of shabbiness, if only for this one week, and he might—he would—meet refined persons of power and position at the resort, and they would take him as one of their own, find a place for him, and finish his transformation into the person he was always meant to be—

  A man stepped out of the crowd. “Stephen Giles?” he said.

  Stephen smiled. Had they sent a welcoming party?

  “You are under arrest for conspiracy to commit fraud,” the man said, as he snapped handcuffs around Stephen’s wrists, spoiling the crisp starch in his perfectly-pressed shirt. “You have the right to remain silent. You have the right—”

  Stephen did not hear the rest of what the man said. His ears rushed with his pulse. He was drowning under a thousand screaming voices of rage and despair.

  SHIRLEY COOK STROKED the soft fur of the cat who lay across her lap. It purred. Its subtle sounds were more pleasant to her than what she had just heard on her new radio. There had been an accident at the Gloriana Mine. One man was dead, another in critical condition. A third man and a woman were being treated for minor injuries in Winnemucca. “It’s a strange life, kitty,” she told the animal sadly.

  The cat purred. Shirley stroked its fur.

  LAUREL DIETZ STOOD beside the big leather swivel chair be-hind Chittenden’s desk in his office at Granville Resources’ corporate headquarters. Chittenden was gone, she knew that, even though the rest were still running around like rats, wondering where he had gone with his blessed company jet. He was in Switzerland, or Panama, or the Cayman Islands, one of those nifty places where men like him went to dine on the nuts they had squirreled away.

  No, nuts and squirrels was the wrong image. Chittenden was a modern-day example of that more romantic human animal, the pirate. He robbed from die rich and . . . stuck it in his pockets.

  A weight sat on Laurel’s heart. It was not that she stood in moral judgement of him. Not she. What pressed against her chest this morning was the knowledge that she had, once again, fetched up against a dead end. She had wanted to sit in this chair one day, to claw her way up through the company and supplant Chittenden through her own cunning, not be left high and dry by his.

  She riffled through her mental file cabinet for a moment, wondering if she had missed a sign along the way, or dodged
left when she should have gone right. And for just an instant she wondered if, on the long flight up from Nevada, she should have sat up front in the second pilot’s seat next to Chittenden and put a hand on the upper part of his thigh. But no, she knew the answer to that one. The outcome would have been the same. And she wanted to sit in the chair of power, not wait behind it.

  Right now, that chair was empty, literally, and it stood before her, beckoning. She could sit in it, if only for a moment. No one would know, or care

  She moved toward it, put a hand on its arm to turn it toward her, a sense of near-sexual ecstasy rising in her loins—

  The door opened behind her. “What are you doing?” scolded the executive secretary. “And who do you drink you are, anyway, coming into Mr. Chittenden’s office like this?”

  Laurel let go of the chair and stared at it. Another time, she told it. The night is young.

  MORGAN SHUMWAY STOOD inert in the doorway of his bed-room as the men continued to search his closet. His entire body felt remote, as if it belonged to someone else. The men were bagging up his shoes now, but he had cleaned them, hadn’t he? Could they find something on them, even after the scrubbing and reconditioning to which he had submitted them, something that could connect him with that mountain in Nevada and the remains of that hideous man he had left there? And he’d burned the clothes he had worn at the lake shore, and washed every stitch of clothing he had worn during that hellish drive with that stinking corpse. No, he was certain, they would not find a trace. They could spin nothing on him.

  Now a man was removing his hat, his precious creamy-white Stetson hat, from the closet. What is he doing with my hat? A hat can tell them nothing! Good God, the bastard’s smiling! Shumway’s bowels began to churn.

  The tall FBI agent with the salt-and-pepper hair was moving toward him with a smile that was quickly spreading into a grin, carrying the Stetson with hands gloved to prevent contaminating evidence. He said, “We’ll be taking this hat, too, Mr. Shumway. It’s the one thing people forget to wash. They put their clothes through the laundry, they go over their shoes with a hose and a scrub brush, but they forget about their hats.” He carefully tipped the hat over and looked inside, up around the hat band. “You get to sweating, as you’re coming down the mountain after dumping a body in a mine shaft. And even more so after the man who’s waiting to take you away nearly mows down an old man on a lonesome road, and he panics and runs up behind the old fellow and whacks him on his fragile head so he’ll forget. You see the tally of your crimes growing. Murder, accessory to murder . . . yes, you get to sweating. You take your hat off for a moment and mop your brow. Then you put the hat back on, and everything that was on your hands is now on this sweat band, right here.”

  Morgan Shumway stared helplessly into the hat, knowing that it had become a jail cell. Then he glanced up at the FBI agent to see if the man was only calling his bluff. To his horror, the man now stared at him like he was climbing straight in through his eyes.

  41

  MY TRUCK THREW A ROD ON THE ROAD BETWEEN the Gloriana Mine and Winnemucca and now waited by the roadside to be hauled away for scrap. Tom was driving it. I was in an ambulance, and Virgil Davis floated somewhere in the sky, hurried by helicopter to the hospital in Reno, his grasp on life too frail to survive the long, jarring ride by road. It seemed that the world was falling to pieces.

  Tom had stopped briefly at the hospital before having Faye fly him back to Salt Lake City. He squeezed my hand as I lay in the emergency room waiting to be X-rayed. “They found a body under the rubble as they were digging you out, Em. It was crushed beyond recognition. Any guesses who it was?”

  “Kyle Christie.” The room seemed to spin. “I saw him just before the rock fell.”

  Tom winced, and squeezed my hand again. After a while, he said, “Broken leg. Bruised from head to toe. Exhaustion.” His eyes ran with tears that did not quite spill over. “They’re going to keep you here at least tonight, for observation.”

  “Observation,” I repeated foolishly. In my drug-induced haze, the word had near-mystical importance to me. “Important to see clearly.”

  “This isn’t what I meant to have happen,” he said.

  “Silly me. I learn the hard way.”

  “Let me teach you. Please.”

  Warm tears welled up underneath my eyelids.

  “You’ll need a new truck,” he said. “So you’ll need a job. There’s always a place for a scrappy little nut case like you at the FBI.”

  I laughed hollowly. “Institutions. One’s like another. I may as well become a Mormon.”

  “Think about it,” Tom said. He touched my cheek gently.

  As the light of late afternoon reached in through the windows, the nurses moved me into a room. I lay in a haze, trying not to think.

  Just before the end of visiting hours, a woman appeared. She never introduced herself, but I knew who she was. She had the black hair, the broad nose, the short forehead, and the high, wide cheekbones of the Northern Paiute tribe, and she carried herself with the inward quiet of the mystic.

  She nodded to me. When I nodded hack, she came to the edge of my bed and smoothed the air over my face and body with a brush of eagle feathers. Then she said, “You’ll feel better tomorrow. I will wait for you at Double Springs. It’s in the Black Rock Desert, along a trail made by your people.”

  I tried to tell her that my truck was dead, and that worse yet, my leg hurt so badly that I didn’t think I could drive for who knew how long, but she said, “There is always a way to go where you are going,” and left. Only then did I realize that the pain in my leg and my heart had lessened.

  In the morning, the first rosy light of a brand new day traced the ceiling in my room as I lay trying not to panic as the painkillers and sedatives wore off. The past, present, and future all met in the cracks between the ceiling tiles, while beneath my back, the earth seemed to lurch on its axis. In my shattered, hypersensitive state, I fancied I could feel the restless energy of her crustal plates heaving and sliding beneath me, rending in new places to let the hot breath of her interior hiss new deposits of brilliant gold into her hidden caverns, an image both beautiful and terrifying.

  At nine, Faye poked her nose inside my doorway. “I have someone with me who wants to see you,” she said. “You need me to comb your hair? You look a mess.”

  I was just opening my mouth to ask who in hell could merit my combing my hair when Ray sidled through the doorway. He looked embarrassed. Faye made herself scarce. He came around to the side of my bed, bent, and kissed me softly on the lips. As he straightened up, a mischievous smile played across his face.

  I smiled back. “I guess this is the only way you get to see me in bed,” I said.

  A wider smile and a flick of one eyebrow was all the answer I got.

  “Want to go into the desert with me?” I asked. “There’s this place called the Black Rock.”

  Ray took my hand and gave it a squeeze. Then he turned toward the doorway and loudly cleared his throat.

  Faye stuck her face around the door frame again.

  “Can you land that thing on a dry lake bed?” Ray asked.

  Faye’s eyes lit up. “Sure.”

  FAYE BROUGHT THE Cheyenne down gently as a feather on the impossibly flat surface of the Black Rock Desert, in the arm that runs between the Black Rock Range and the Calico Hills, and taxied to within a few hundred feet of the place where four-wheel-drive vehicle tracks led off into the hillocks of sand that surrounded the shoreline. She shut down the engines, and I got out and hobbled around on the cracked, white silty surface of the vanished lake while she and Ray chocked the wheels. The lake bed ran for thirty miles straight to the south, widening out between the tall ridges of the mountain ranges. Far away, I could see lines of dust that marked the trajectories of the crazy four-wheelers who were out there playing silly buggers in the heat. Beyond them, the sail of a land yacht slewed crazily across die terrain.

  My companions shoulder
ed the camping gear we had assembled from my poor old truck and Faye’s baggage bay, and I came along behind them, shuffling along on my crutches. I had to rest many times, but oddly, the pain diminishing rather than growing.

  We found Double Springs in due course. We came first upon a campsite set up by a group of college students out of Reno who said they were studying the Emigrant Trail. They had state-of-the-art tents, a propane stove, and lightweight aluminum camp chairs set up beside their brand new four-wheel-drive vehicle. We told them we were looking for a woman in a beat-up Toyota. “Oh, she’s over there on the other side of the springs,” they said. “Beyond that tussock.”

  When she saw us approaching, Hermione nodded gravely and came out from under the tarp she had strung to a bush from one side of her car. “Don’t go too near,” she said, as Faye bent to look into the two big barrel-shaped holes in the sand that formed the pools of the springs. “It’s hot. Your people used to cook beans in there.”

  “What did your people cook there?” I asked, lowering my exhausted body onto the ground.

  She pointed at a lidded pot that sat simmering in the water. “Fish stew,” she said.

  Great stands of desert brush grew near the springs, and I could see the twin ruts of the ancient wagon trains, now crisscrossed by the crazy meanderings of Jeeps and Ford Explorers. After Ray and Faye had settled our gear and I had rested, and as the day began to cool into evening, Hermione took me down this road toward the south, away from the others, and seated me on a low rise in the crumbling soil. She said nothing, but sang for a while and burned a bundle of herbs, then arranged rocks around me, four of them, set at the cardinal points of the compass.

  She sat inside the stones with me for a long while, her eyes closed, deep in meditation. Then she looked at me and said, “You are ready to open your eyes and see clearly. You must first recognize that sight has always been with you. It is not strange or evil; it is only what you were born with. It is time to trust in it”