Death Pans Out

by Ashna Graves

  Despite the separate entry doors there was just a single room, the café portion consisting of three tables against the wall. Neva slid onto a stool.

  “Hot enough for you?” the proprietor said affably and put the magazine under the counter.

  “Almost.”

  “Can I pull you a tall cold one?”

  Neva glanced down the bar at the other customer’s glass, which was half full of beer. “Sure,” she said. It wasn’t yet noon but if the local custom was to drink beer she would drink beer.

  Her neighbor stared at a rapid-fire news program, his shoulders hunched, his face impassive. Clearly just come from heavy labor of some kind, he still wore the grime of the job on his skin and clothes. His hands cupping the glass mug were so thickened, calloused, and stained they looked more like tools than parts of a human body.

  “Where you headed?” the barman said, taking a white towel from his back pocket.

  “I’m here for the summer, up at Billie Creek Mine.”

  The customer turned his head to observe Neva.

  “You prospecting?” said the bartender.

  “I hadn’t planned to. I’m just staying in the cabin, enjoying a bit of quiet time. It used to belong to my Uncle Matthew Burt. I guess he was known as Burtie out here.”

  The barman didn’t react visibly but the other man made a wordless sound of surprise, then reached for his glass and drained its contents in one quick toss, as though about to leave in a hurry.

  “Not the one that disappeared?” said the barman. “Well, I’m damned. I never knew him, that was before I bought this place, but it was Tony here that found his rifle. I do remember hearing that. Wasn’t that right, Tony?”

  The man nodded and said in a gravelly bass that seemed disconnected from his wiry body, “That’s right, Al.”

  “I’m Jeneva Leopold. Burtie was my mother’s brother.”

  “Al Fleck,” the barman said and offered his hand. “This here’s Tony. Tony Briggs. Tell the lady about finding that rifle, Tony.”

  Only two stools stood between Neva and Tony Briggs, but his eyes as he considered what to say seemed to regard her from a great distance.

  “Did you know my uncle?” she said after a lengthy silence.

  “Everybody knew him.”

  “Where did you find the rifle?”

  “I didn’t find it.”

  Puzzled, she waited while he took a cigarette from a pack of Camels lying on the bar, lit it, drew deeply, and looked at his glass. Skipper had mentioned a missing rifle, but said nothing about it being found. At last she prompted, “Is the rifle still around?”

  “It’s yours if you want it. By rights it’s yours.” Another pull on the cigarette, and then words came out with the smoke. “It was on my back porch. That’s where it was, on my back porch. Can you figure it? I never could figure it. It’s yours, just say the word.”

  “Thank you, but I don’t want it, really. I have no use for a rifle. How did it end up on your porch, do you think?”

  Looking squarely into her face he said with sudden passion, “I can’t even make a goddamn living for my family anymore. You understand what I mean? I’m okay this month, I’m working a private job over by Lookout Rock, big stuff, you can do what you want like we always did before, not this low-impact bullshit the Forest Service makes you do, like we’re criminals that want to destroy the forest. It’s not public forest anymore, it’s a goddamn country, the Forest Service’s own country. My tax dollars pay for the locks and gates they’re putting on roads I went on since I was born. You know what I mean? Do you work for the Forest Service?”

  “I work for a newspaper.”

  “You writing about logging?”

  “I’m not writing anything. I’m on vacation.”

  “I never had a vacation in my life except layoffs. But then I never wanted one, all I want’s work. If ranching still paid I’d keep on ranching, but I had to go to logging and now that’s going tits up, too. Those people in Washington believe anything. If they believe spotted owls and frogs are more important than people they’ll believe the moon’s made of green cheese. Hell, maybe it is for all I know.”

  Abruptly, he laughed, a cavernous, unhitched kind of laugh that made Al chuckle along as though to anchor the wild sound. “It must be tough,” Neva said, feeling phony. She had voted for every environmental measure that ever came her way.

  “A lot of people have it bad,” Tony said, evidently relieved by his tirade. “Miners, for one.”

  “It’s not all the government’s fault,” said Al. “I used to log before I got into the restaurant racket, and a lot of those guys cheated, they lied on their sick leave and got workers’ comp when they shouldn’t have. How can a small operator afford it? So they get fancier equipment to do the job with only a couple of loggers, which means less accident insurance as well as a smaller payroll. Logging isn’t what it used to be. Nothing is what it used to be. Of course, some things are better.” He looked at the TV with a thoughtful frown. “Off hand I can’t think of any. Can I fill that up?”

  Tony Briggs pushed his glass toward Neva’s. “It’s on me.”

  Neva had neglected Rule One for drinking when you don’t want to: nurse it. Her appetite for a second beer was even less than for the first, but to refuse could ruin her chance of drawing Briggs into conversation about her uncle. “Did you grow up here?” Her attempt at an easy conversational tone sounded false in her own ears, but Tony didn’t appear to notice or care.

  “Who says I grew up? Listen, your uncle was a good man. Give you the shirt off his back. What happened was a goddamn shame.”

  “What did happen?”

  “It’s been a lot of years. What took you so long to get out here if you’re so interested? I didn’t know he had any family.”

  “I didn’t get a chance to know my uncle. He and my mother had some kind of falling out so we didn’t see him much. I didn’t come here specifically to find out about him, I just needed to get away somewhere quiet. But now I’m here I’ve become really curious. He’d be about eighty, I think.”

  Briggs nodded, drank, trailed smoke, and was silent.

  “Do you think he died at the mine?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “There don’t seem to be a whole lot of possibilities. Either he died or just walked away and disappeared. He might even be alive somewhere, but I find that hard to believe after so many years.”

  “Mining’s a hard life, a real hard life. A lot of these guys work a job to support their mine. Go figure.”

  “As far as I know my uncle didn’t do anything except mine. He must have been successful. I mean, he must have found gold.”

  “I knew it.” Tony’s tone was triumphant and his expression as he looked at her was not flattering. Sliding stiffly off the stool, he said, “It always comes around to money, doesn’t it? Well, you might as well quit looking and go on back where you came from. There’s no stash of gold hid out there at Billie Creek and there never was.”

  When he was gone, Al Fleck shook his head. “Don’t mind Tony. He’s our official, bonafide, gold-medal sourpuss. If they were all like that I’d sell out and move back to Medford.”

  ***

  Neva managed to get away without finishing the second beer, but even so the warm drive back up the Dry River Valley seemed long, and by the time she reached the Sufferin’ Smith Mine in the lower end of Billie Creek Canyon she was fighting to keep her eyes open. There had been no sign of Gene Holland on her way out, but now a pickup truck was parked beside the first of the two small cabins. This she took to be the house. A second building, a little larger but of the same casual construction, stood about thirty feet upstream. This must be the laboratory. Beyond it in a patch of sun a man sat on a kitchen chair with a washtub at his feet. His elbows were on his knees and his hands supported a shallow, bowl-shaped pan that he was examining with such focused care that he appeared not to notice Neva as she left her car on the road and crossed a plank laid over
the creek.

  She was just a few feet away, wondering if he might be deaf, when he looked up, said, “Grab a seat,” and nodded toward some log rounds lying next to the laboratory shack. She rolled one close to the washtub, set it upright and sat down.

  “I’m Jeneva Leopold from up at Billie Creek Mine,” she said, observing him with puzzled curiosity. Skipper’s glowing account of Holland’s experience and knowledge of mining had led her to expect a grizzled old fellow as wiry as the sagebrush, his thin beard stained with tobacco juice. The real Gene Holland suggested a scientist engaged in absorbing fieldwork. Looking through tinted rimless glasses, he studied the contents of the shallow pan, then tipped and rotated it and looked again.

  “I’m just cleaning up a bit of material,” he said in a low and pleasant voice. He glanced up at her over the top of his glasses, then focused again on the pan, tilting it so she could see that it held about two cups of water and a handful of fine black sand. He swirled the contents and let some of the water run into the washtub, which was half full of liquid mud.

  “Are you panning?”

  “That’s correct.” Holland’s cheeks were ruddy above a trimmed brown beard, his skull was visibly round under a buzz cut, and he wore a faded green T-shirt, baggy khaki shorts, and tennis shoes without socks. A greasy rag hung out of his shorts pocket. A knapsack next to his chair gaped open to show a water bottle, a lime green plastic sun visor, and a sheaf of rolled papers.

  “I thought gold panning was done in creeks or rivers,” she said, and stifled a yawn.

  “True enough in some places, but we don’t have enough water around here to count on, plus it’s easier to pan in the comfort of home, so to speak.”

  “Do you mine here year-round?”

  “Too cold. I spend winters down in Nevada. I have a mine down there, too. It’s just as hopeless as this one.”

  Taking the comment as a joke, like downplaying a personal talent or skill, Neva laughed. She wanted to ask him what kind of take it was reasonable to expect in a week, but it was too much like asking the amount of his paycheck. He remained focused on the contents of the pan, which he continued to swirl without seeming to progress in any way she could recognize, the black sand remaining at about the same level and no gold appearing. Faced with his bent head, she felt heavy with beer and the unmoving heat of early afternoon. The creek murmured, cicadas buzzed, her eyelids sank irresistibly, and to get a conversation going seemed suddenly like hard work. All she wanted was to be back at the cabin reading Ethan’s letters on the porch with a good cup of coffee to undo the beer. She would tackle Gene Holland another day.

  She stood up, brushing wood chips off her shorts. “I drank two beers at Angus just to be polite and now I can’t keep my eyes open. All I’m good for is a nap.”

  Holland stopped agitating the pan, and after a moment of reflection, said, “Thanks for stopping by.”

  “I hear you know all there is to know about Billie Creek,” she said, roused somewhat by his apparent lack of interest in whether she stayed or went. “I’d planned to cross-examine you about local history but I guess it has to wait. I’d appreciate it particularly if you could tell me about my uncle, Matthew Burt.”

  Holland’s nod was slow and thoughtful. Before replying he explored the black sand with one finger. “Your uncle. Yes, I see. Another time would be better. I’m in kind of a hurry to get through that lot.” He nodded at a nearby bucket that was half full of sandy gravel. “It’s kind of surprising to find out he had any family.”

  “Bernice Pangle down at the post office said the same thing, but you know, it’s just as surprising for me to find people out here who knew him. I’d never heard of anyone connected with his life other than Orson. Why don’t you come up to the house some evening? I generally walk during the day. I could have a meal ready in short order if you don’t mind it canned or dried.”

  “I just might do that one of these evenings.”

  ***

  Settled on the porch with coffee, Neva read Ethan’s letters, which were predictably brief but amusing, and affectionate enough to restore her spirits after the mildly disconcerting trip to Angus. She particularly enjoyed the final lines of the second letter: “I know I said not to spend the summer writing to me, but I didn’t think you would just disappear into the desert. You know what I realized? This is the longest I’ve ever gone without talking to you or email or anything and it’s a little weird. I’m not saying you should rush off to the nearest phone—are there phones anywhere out there?—but a few lines scratched on a rock would be nice. It doesn’t even have to be gold.”

  He was right. Never before since his birth had they been out of touch for more than two or three days, though this hadn’t felt to her like a two-week silence because she had added a paragraph or more to her own letter every day. As she prepared for a quick, late walk, she tried to picture him reading the letter in his cramped apartment, but her thoughts weren’t ready to linger in that outside world, not even for Ethan. She left the cabin as the sun was dropping toward the western edge of the canyon. It was too late to aim for the high country, but there was plenty of daylight left to return to the leaning cabin where she had found the tobacco can. There might be other interesting things there that she hadn’t noticed the first time, and now that she knew the function of the can it was worth another look. Sunlight slanting in from the west brought out apricot tones in the ponderosa trunks, and made strong shadows that gave the woods and rocks extra three-dimensionality. This was her favorite time of day, when light thickened and deepened in color. Easily falling into her trail stride, she covered the two miles to the ruin in what seemed like no time. As she approached the tobacco can she saw that the lid was open even though, fastidious about leaving things as she found them, she had made a point of closing it.

  The can still held a small stone, but it was the wrong one. Instead of obsidian, there was now a rough yellow pebble that she pulled out with one finger. She’d never seen raw gold before but knew immediately that this was a nugget. Dull yellow, about the size of a pea, it was irregular in shape, even lacy, as though it had once been a soft string of gold that was dropped in a heap and then hardened.

  Cupping the bit of precious metal in her hand she scanned the darkening woods. Who had exchanged the obsidian for gold since she was here two days ago? Her earlier sense that the cabin was haunted came back in a rush, but rather than hurry away she turned to face the ruin. Ghosts don’t put rocks in cans. If she let herself be senselessly frightened by one site in the canyon, the uneasiness might spread and then what would become of her summer?

  She moved to the center of the clearing where the light was better, and studied the little rock. Was this dirty yellow mineral really the cause of gold fever, of land rushes, claim jumps, even murders? Had her uncle really spent a lifetime pursuing such dull rocks? She shook her head. The pebble would not have caught her eye in a streambed. Other stones were prettier, the deep reds and turquoises, even the peachy orange of certain quartz appealed to her more than this oddly fake-looking gold. It stirred no avarice. What would it be worth? Very little, obviously, or it would not have been left in the can—by Skipper Dooley as a joke? Of course. He had driven up the creek after she told him about the tobacco can.

  A few moments of hunting about turned up an ornamental hinge that had fallen off the old hutch in the cabin. She washed it in the creek, dried it on her shirt and pushed it into the tobacco can along with the nugget, then carefully closed the fragile lid.

  Chapter Seven

  Stars were showing when Skipper came bouncing down the road on the quad with Cayuse sitting tall on the seat behind him. He pulled into the dooryard where Neva sat on the chopping block drinking mint tea and looking at the blue-black sky.

  “Hey, Walkie-Talkie,” he boomed. Cayuse jumped down and ran to Neva.

  “Walkie-Talkie?” Neva laid a tentative hand on the dog’s head.

  Skipper half sat against the quad seat and folded his arms across
his chest. “You walk like a champ and talk like a champ, and there you have it. It’s a compliment, in case you’re wondering. Somebody was out here looking for you today.”

  “No one knows I’m here.”

  “Well, this Forest Service squimp was in no doubt about it.”

  “Did he say why he wanted to see me?”

  “Not a clue, but you can bet it’s bad news. He said he’d be back tomorrow. If I was you I’d take a long walk, starting at sun-up. What you don’t know, they can’t get you for.”

  “I’m sure there’s no problem, Skipper.”

  “Don’t count on it.”

  “They probably just have to keep tabs on people staying in the national forest. Could you eat some beans and rice?”

  “I ate at Sumpter, and anyway Cayuse and me are pretty tired. I like to hit the sack by dark when I’m out here. I sleep like I’m dead. And that’s an interesting thing—how come nobody wants to die but there’s nothing better than sleeping like you’re dead? Answer me that one.”

  ***

  All the following day Neva waited around the cabin for the ranger to return. She split wood, cleaned the lamp chimneys, wrote a letter to Ethan as well as an extra long entry in her journal, watched birds, read, heated water on the wood stove and washed her hair outside in the galvanized laundry tub. At last, restless and satisfied that he wouldn’t show up today, she left the cabin in late afternoon following the trail along the main branch of the creek. When she reached the point where it crossed Billie Creek Road, the sun had already dropped below the ridge, throwing the canyon bottom into shadow. Rather than return through the woods, she turned left down the road. The distance was longer in miles because the road followed the contours of the canyon’s sloping wall, but it would be lighter up here, with views of the other side of the canyon and the distant ridges to the south of the Dry River.