Darkscope

by J. Carson Black

  “That’s very nice of her.” Chelsea was surprised, considering how Sydney felt about her move.

  After Uncle Bob left, Chelsea unpacked her clothes and put them away. There seemed to be little point in opening the bigger boxes until the living room was painted. Chips couldn’t be persuaded to come down from the windowsill. He sat with his white paws neatly tucked underneath him, blinking himself to sleep.

  Restless on her own, Chelsea went for a walk, wandering back down Tombstone Canyon to Main Street. She paused at the empty Woolworth’s building and peered through a crack in the boarded-up entrance. It reminded her of the Woolworth’s in the small New York town she’d lived in as a child, while her father was pursuing his mining-engineering degree. Narrow floorboards, a high ceiling of stamped tin squares, the spot above the door where the ceiling fan used to be. It brought back memories of shopping trips to town with her mother. Afterward they would stop at the drugstore for a root beer float at the soda fountain. Those sunny afternoons had filled her with delight; the fan blades above turning sluggishly, the heavy soda glass cupped between her small hands, wonderfully cold. Leslie McCord used to wear a red coat with black braid down the front and a matching pillbox hat. She had been so lovely, her nature sunny and buoyant.

  She’ll always be like that, Chelsea thought. She’ll never grow old or unhappy. That possibility had been eradicated in the space of a few moments on a mountain in Colorado. Edward and Leslie McCord had been on their way back from a skiing trip to Vail. Their plane had been off course.

  The wreckage was scattered over two miles of rugged terrain.

  Although the wound was old, Chelsea often experienced deep sadness, as if it had happened yesterday. The realization that they would never be a family again, never share the wonderful times that families enjoyed, returned like a nightmare.

  Now these memories closed in on Chelsea. The death of her parents, the unhappy aftermath when she felt like an intruder in her sister’s home . . .

  Uncle Bob had tried to explain why he couldn’t take her in. “It wouldn’t look right,” Bob had said. “I’m a bachelor, and you’re growing into quite a young lady.”

  How could he explain social mores to a love-starved child? How could he explain that she was better off in a home with a married couple—and worse, a couple who resented her presence—than with the person who loved her most?

  Chelsea was suddenly aware of the heat radiating from the deep, blue sky. She could feel it on top of her head and shoulders, as if she were under a broiler.

  Moving to Arizona in the summer was a crazy thing to do. Chelsea shaded her eyes against the glare and stared at the crooked, narrow streets and Italianate Victorian buildings. Again she was aware that the street scene could just as easily have been from the 1880s—if you didn’t count the cars parked at the curb.

  Sixty miles to the north, Bob McCord slowed his Mercedes at the underpass, negotiated the turn, and accelerated onto Interstate 10 toward Tucson. He checked his watch. One-fifteen. He’d better move it if he wanted to get to that press conference . . . He set the cruise control at sixty-five. That was ten miles over the speed limit, but people were passing him right and left. He just hoped his luck would hold. It wouldn’t do for the future governor of Arizona to get caught for speeding.

  His stomach ached. At first he’d attributed it to nerves about the announcement, but he was no stranger to public speaking, and the stage fright that plagued so many of his colleagues never bothered him. This fear was raw, visceral, like a bundle of colored wires, all gnarled and twisted nerve endings.

  Perhaps he was afraid for Chelsea. Jason had a history of instability, and he could be vicious. He had always reminded Bob of a little boy who, when given a present that didn’t meet his expectations, would stomp it to pieces. Jason didn’t really love Chelsea, but Bob knew Jason considered her his property . . . along with her money. Compounding the danger, if all reports were true, the nasty little megalomaniac had one hell of a cocaine habit. From a logical standpoint, it made sense that Chelsea should move here. But something . . . “What the—”

  A coyote bounded onto the freeway. Bob touched the brake lightly and darted a glance in the rearview mirror before steering into the right lane. Damn nuisance!

  He had expected the coyote to go on into the left lane and then cross the median, but the animal stopped in the exact center of the highway a few hundred feet ahead. Bob slowed the car. No one behind him. He could stop in time . . .

  Shiny green eyes stared into his. He felt a shock, as if the eyes were familiar somehow. Weren’t coyotes’ eyes brown?

  At the last possible moment, the coyote bolted for the verge. Shaken, Bob looked into the rearview mirror. The coyote had gotten across the other two lanes safely and was loping up the far hill.

  Maybe it’s some kind of a sign. An omen, something to do with his gubernatorial campaign. Maybe he had just gotten the blessing of the animals.

  But he didn’t really think so.

  Four

  Chelsea had to climb steep flights of cement steps in order to reach the uppermost houses on Bisbee’s hills. Her exploration resulted in searing lungs and aching legs, but she saw some incredible scenery.

  Once-proud brick homes shared ground with rusted tin shacks; adobe dwellings slumped roofless and windowless under voracious armies of wild fennel and copal trees, which grew like weeds in the area. Wildflowers grew out of sheer rock faces and cracks in the cement retaining walls that held up whole sections of sliding hillside. According to Uncle Bob, the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s had done most of the shoring up of Bisbee, putting in the high walls to keep houses from falling into the street.

  Chelsea followed the highway out to the Lavendar Pit Viewpoint, marveling at the enormous open pit mine. The steeply rising terraces were indeed tinged with lavender, but according to the loudspeaker (“Push Button for Lavendar Pit Narration”), the excavation was named for a high-ranking official of Phelps Dodge Company.

  Perched at the edge of the excavation, the few straggling buildings of Bisbee’s sister town, Lowell, appeared forlorn and lost, seemingly on a precipice to hell. The rest of the town had been devoured by the mining company thirty years ago.

  Chelsea tried to picture Lowell as her great-uncle had described it. Frame houses, peach trees, lots of birds. Nothing was left now but concentric circles of waste rock and earth.

  Bisbee. Two sides of a coin. Starkly beautiful, yet sullied, flawed. A monument to man’s ability to destroy. Standing under a glaring sun and gazing at the plundered earth, loneliness washed over her. What had she done? She had left her friends, her home—everything she knew—to come to this long-dead mining town in the middle of nowhere. And for what? To see if she could discover how good an artist she really was? Or to run away?

  On the way back home Chelsea stopped at the Circle K in Tombstone Canyon, bought a Coke, and headed for the shade of a nearby cottonwood tree. She lifted her hair and rested the icy can against her neck. Jeez, it was hot.

  Chelsea transferred the cool can to her flaming cheeks. Rivulets of perspiration trickled down each tanned leg. The backs of her calves throbbed painfully. Although Chelsea ran every day, she wasn’t used to walking up and down hills.

  Across the street, the roof of Chelsea’s house was barely visible through the trees. It didn’t look too bad from here. Smooth and green—

  A crooked line of lightning twisted out of the blue sky, connecting with the roof. Her roof!

  Heart thumping, she bolted forward—and stopped almost immediately. The roof met the sky neatly, a clean line of green against deep blue. She looked up. The sky arched above her like a bolt of royal-blue cloth, cloudless. How could there be lightning?

  Perhaps she’d seen sunlight on metal and construed it as lightning. A car door opening maybe, the handle catching the sun.

  Chelsea closed her eyes. She was sure she had seen it. A thin, twisted wire, brilliantly white, connecting the sky to the roof of her house
.

  But the house looked the same; the sky remained impassively blue; and no clouds loomed anywhere. She must have imagined it.

  She crossed the road and climbed Higgins Hill toward home.

  Mr. Chips emerged from the bedroom demanding dinner. Afterward, he wanted to go out.

  “No, you don’t, buster,” she told him. “It’s the sandbox for you until you get used to this place.” She took him to her room and set him on the bed. She sat beside him, stroking the soft, ticked fur until he purred forgiveness. After humoring Chelsea for a minute or two, he returned to his place on the windowsill.

  Chelsea found herself thinking of her friends in San Diego, the few who had remained after she’d married Jason. All of them thought she was crazy to move here. “You’re rich,” her best friend Tina had told her. “Why don’t you just tour Europe or something until the divorce is final? If I were as rich as you, I would be on my way to the south of France so fast your head would spin.”

  Even though they respected her work, a lot of her friends and colleagues thought that teaching was merely a hobby for her. There was always that unspoken expectation that sooner or later the heiress would get tired of being treated like your everyday grunt.

  Chelsea’s face flamed as she remembered Dr. Capin pushing the magazine across his desk, his eyes bright with triumph. Eyes that seemed to say, See? This is what I expected from someone like you, a . . .

  Rich bitch. Dr. Capin had never taken her seriously as an art teacher or as an artist. He’d made it clear he had been against hiring her from the beginning, but had been overruled . . .

  On the windowsill. Mr. Chips growled, his eyes fixed on something in the yard.

  Chelsea peered out the window and saw a shape on the shaded steps near the garage. It took a moment for the shape to materialize into dark hair, a blouse, a skirt.

  The woman again. She must live around here, maybe higher up on the hill. Uncle Bob had already warned Chelsea that the people of Bisbee lived practically on top of each other, and the steps down alongside the McCord property were public domain.

  Chelsea turned her attention to Mr. Chips. His fur stood out all over.

  “It’s all right. It’s only—”

  Ears flat against his head, Mr. Chips hissed and leaped off the sill, bolting under the bed.

  Chelsea looked back at the garage. The woman was gone.

  After several minutes of trying to coax the cat out from under the bed, she gave up.

  “Suit yourself,” she told him.

  She walked into the living room, aware of the sound of her shoes on the floorboards. A hollow, empty sound. Loneliness threatened to choke her.

  Why am I here?

  Chelsea looked out the bay window.

  The garage, which Uncle Bob said had been converted to a guest room, dreamed in the sun across the yard of purple flowers. Chelsea decided to take a look at the stucco shack; it might be a good place for her studio.

  The yard smelled of spring, clean and fresh. Chelsea pushed open the wooden door; it screeched across the cement floor. The room stood empty, redolent of adobe and dust. Although small in area, the garage was well ventilated and had ample natural light. A door at the back opened onto a screened porch, similar to the one on the house, but much smaller. In the corner, the elements had broken through, and the floor was littered with leaves and dust. A steamer trunk pressed up against the warped mesh. Ruined by rain, the fabric on top had shredded like cardboard to expose rusted metal. Chelsea lifted the stiff hasp with effort.

  The trunk contained women’s clothing, very old and damaged by water stains, as well as several framed oval portraits from the turn of the century. The smells of dust, age, and mildew mingled into a heady concoction. Chelsea breathed through her mouth.

  Toward the bottom of the trunk lay a satin-covered photo album and a box camera.

  Chelsea picked up the album and opened it carefully. The flyleaf bore the name “Sean Barrie” in faded ink. She recognized photographs of the Bisbee deportation of 1917, when the mining companies of Bisbee, Warren, and Lowell had banded together to remove striking miners and Wobbly union agitators from town. Men in white armbands, carrying rifles, herded long lines of strikers toward the boxcars, which would carry them out of the state. Women in shirtwaists and dark skirts stood watching from the foreground. The day looked hot, the hills barren except for a few stunted shrubs. The pictures were blurry. White, spidery script ran across the bottom of most of them. One said, “Bisbee Deportation, Warren Ballpark.” Another said simply, “Our Dad” next to a circled head in the crowd.

  Dust motes snowed down in the golden light.

  Chelsea recalled her great-grandfather’s inglorious participation in the deportation. Lucas McCord, then a young man with a fledgling company, had sat in his car near Sacramento Hill, calmly eating a picnic lunch as he watched the human herd wind past him. Chelsea remembered seeing the photograph in a family album. It certainly didn’t seem to concern him that some families had been torn apart for all time.

  The strikers had been left on a siding in the New Mexico heat for several days. Dumped in the middle of nowhere. They’d been threatened with death if they returned to Bisbee.

  She wondered about the unfortunate man in the picture, the man labeled “Our Dad.” Did he ever see his family again?

  The last picture was of a baby in a crocheted blanket. It said, “Kathleen. Born July 3, 1917.” Nine days before the Wobblies had been rounded up and shipped out to New Mexico.

  It seemed as if only a few minutes had gone by, but already the sun was slipping behind the mountains. For some reason, Chelsea didn’t like the thought of being on the porch after the sun went down. She straightened up and put the album back in the trunk. The movement dislodged the camera, balanced on top of a rolled-up piece of cloth. It toppled to the bottom with a thump.

  She reached down to pick it up. As her fingernails brushed the air above the pebbly surface, she felt a warm, tingling sensation in her fingertips.

  “Fingers must’ve gone to sleep,” Chelsea muttered, and shook her hand a couple of times.

  She reached down again, suppressing her initial reluctance to touch the filthy thing. Probably had the dust of ages on it.

  Holding the camera, Chelsea wrinkled her nose at the smell of dust and another odor, very faint. She couldn’t place it, except that it was not pleasant. The black box felt oily to the touch, as if dust had mixed with the sweat of long-departed fingers to cause a sticky residue.

  Chelsea squinted at the circle stamped into the back of the camera. EASTMAN KODAK CO., and in the center, USE FILM NO. 116. The film window showed there was film in the camera. A Brownie, probably. Interesting. It was kind of a neat old relic. She wondered if it still worked.

  On the front of the Brownie, at the bottom, someone had scratched his initials into the juteboard. S. B. Sean Barrie, the owner of the album?

  Chelsea returned the camera to its resting place and closed the trunk lid.

  The sky above the Mule Mountains was a gentle gradation of peach to turquoise. Chelsea pulled one of the metal chairs into the center of the yard and sat facing the rooftops below. From this vantage point, she could see the glow in the sky over downtown Bisbee.

  Her mind turned to the infant. Was Kathleen the daughter of the man in the other picture? It seemed likely. What had happened to that baby, what kind of life had she led? What was the album doing here in a house owned by the McCords? Maybe the miner’s family had left the trunk here. She would ask around town. Possibly they were still living in Bisbee and would want it back.

  A breeze rippled across the yard, blowing tall grass around Chelsea’s legs. Somewhere a cricket tuned up. Rock music pulsed on the wind, blown up from Brewery Gulch.

  Abruptly, Chelsea felt as if she had been here before. In this chair, watching the night sky. Maybe because she was a McCord and Bisbee’s history was inextricably linked with her own. Could there be such a tie between a person and a place? Could s
he have some sort of shared experience with Bisbee because of the blood that ran in her veins?

  It was a pretty wild theory, she had to admit. Spooky, too. Deliciously spooky. Like this creaky, old, ghost town . . .

  A woman’s laughter fluttered down like confetti on the breeze, coming from the street above.

  Five

  Bisbee, named for a man who never saw her, is ranked along steep hills of mineral-rich earth like a ragtag chorus on risers.

  In the gap between two of these hills, several roads converge: the long-limbed arc of US 80, cutting down from the hillside; Main Street; Brewery Gulch; Naco Road; and OK Street.

  In 1911, when Lucas McCord first arrived in Bisbee, US 80 didn’t exist. He came by rail. He came to a booming Arizona copper camp, the largest metropolis in the territory. He came to naked hills and filthy, narrow streets, to new buildings already dark from the black coal smoke that hung in the air above the depot. It would be a long time before the land became beautiful again, before white oak grew back on the hills and sycamores and cottonwood trees once more followed the underground springs. This was how it must have looked when a scout with the Sixth Cavalry, who’d been tracking a band of renegade Apaches, found instead what would become one of the richest copper deposits the world had ever known.

  By the turn of the century, most of the area had been bought up by Copper Queen Consolidated, the Calumet and Arizona Mining Company, and the independent Shattuck Company. But there was still land to be had. So it was that the heir to the McCord and Selby Mining Exploration and Development Company stepped off the El Paso and Southwestern train that hot July afternoon, glimpsing for the first time the inhospitable country which would be his home until he died. He had been sent by his father to oversee a small claim on the southern slope of the Mule Mountains above the San Pedro Valley.

  Lucas stood on the platform of the railroad station, looking out of place in his eastern clothes. The impeccably tailored suit, handsome vest, and Panama hat might have made him a comic figure if it had not been for the expression in his eyes. Lucas McCord sized up Bisbee as a prize-fighter would, looking for his opponent’s weaknesses without showing any of his own.